What's cooking? part 4

are u sure they aren't pebbles

maybe your heat is too high?

I have had trouble with hard beans in the past, but my lentil experience is limited.

Another favorite JP technique: salmon baked in a v. low oven:

Preparation
Heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Oil the platter you will use for cooking and serving the salmon with the canola oil.

Arrange the salmon on the platter and sprinkle it with 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper.

Turn the salmon over and sprinkle it with the remaining 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper.

Bake for 40 to 45 minutes [Q note: this is only for a big ole fillet; I do ~25 minutes for a standard size serving of ~5 oz], until the salmon is barely cooked [Q note: fish will not change color much so it looks kind RAWR but it isn't. I figure it is done when it oozes some white coagulated stuff].

Oh hmm, I guess I always cook mine with the lid on, in a dutch oven or other heavy pot. I'm guessing the lid-off technique is the prob?

Unsplit and bigger lentils can take longer to cook - also salt and acids (like wine) can make them take longer to get tender. But more than an hour seems really extreme - probably the heat was too high.

Oh yes, the thing about the wine -- I might not add that till the end, ditto for vinegar. There's a reason you don't add vinegar to potato salad until AFTER the spuds are cooked through.

I know some kinds of lentils are harder and take longer to cook? I don't have any experience with the French ones/puy lentils/wahtever, but I understand they need more time. But not regular supermarket ones, no.

Yes I too have read salt makes them not soften up. But to be still completely crunchy after a whole hour seems pretty suprising! Lentils do need a fair amount of water tho. Like, several cups/pints of water.

i am making pork chops for the first time! roughly this, but i'm using top loin chop (boneless), and i sauteed the onion in smart balance light instead of butter. also just a little bit of panko because i have no bread/breadcrumbs. and i used dried cranberries instead of raisins. it is making my house smell like cookies.

i will sauté kale and bake some yam to go with.

Whats panko made out of anyway? I just assumed it was a fancy japanese type of breadcrumb.

xpost - man, i haven't had pork chops in years. dried cranberries sounds fantastic.

i've finally made it here because i can't share my evil foods on the nutrition nazi thread! this morning i made one of my top two loaves of no-knead bread ever (i try different flour combinations & rising times a lot), and ate it with plain yogurt for breakfast. then for lunch i used it to make a sandwich with cheese, cranberry sauce, and spinach that was excellent. then for dinner i ate ANOTHER piece of my bread w/hummus and made carrot ginger soup (more cream and less carrot than i prefer, had to add some celery to get the vegetable ratio up, but not worth another trip to the store). all in all a good cooking day but i'm finding it hard to keep up with leftovers lately.

it is a japanese bread crumb... just lighter/flakier and more susceptible to moisture. and made from wheat... but i'm trying to use up what i have.

yeah cranberries >>>>>>> raisins any day for me.
this was delicious. i overcooked the pork a little bc the timing was for a different cut (i did not cook as long as the recipe said to, but it was still a little too long).

and yeah, i need someone to cook for because the package came w/ 3 chops (3?? why not 2?) and now i have 2 more to eat this week and that is a lot of chop and it's frustrating bc i always want to cook something new every day.

Maybe turn the other 2 into a pork/hominy/green chile stew.

no i did them all as described above. i dunno i always do that. maybe i should start saving extra portions for other options!

would they freeze well uncooked maybe?

I usually buy a family pack of boneless porkchops, and separate them into little packets of two each and freeze. They don't take too long to thaw out, and we don't keep them more than a month or two, so I haven't noticed any change in texture. Mostly I pound them for various schnitzels, though.

So I picked a big sack of mustard greens from my parents' garden yesterday, washed and stemmed them this morning and put them on to cook for dinner tonight, and decided to try a Tep-style thing for lunch: mustard stems sauteed with garlic and a bit of onion, finished with red wine vinegar and sriracha, served over/alongside cheddar cheese grits. Verdict: flavor A, texture C-

Making some homemade mac & cheese...it's in the oven right now & I am praying it turns out nom.

I once saw a lemonade stand that said:

"HO-MADE" LEMONADE

and it's so hard for me not to type "ho-made" bcz that is now how I think that word, scare quotes and all. So epically wrong!

I'm going to retro hors d'oeuvre party tonight; what is a good idea to bring that can be served cold or lukewarm?

Thin sliced boiled ham spread with softened cream cheese, then rolled up and cut into pinwheels. Spear with frilly cocktail toothpick. Add chives or chopped scallion to the cream cheese as a variation.

Those, and rumaki (chicken liver + water chestnut wrapped w/ bacon, all pinned together w/ plain toothpick and broiled until bacon is cooked - these are served hot) were my mom's standards.

guy at seafood counter sold me on halibut cheeks today by saying they were like scallops. they kind of are, but more tender?

i pan seared and then did a saute of spinach and zucchini in white wine and lemon and garlic and herbs. mmm.

Tep posted about salmon cheeks on his blog the other week, like, he bought salmon heads, and got all the meat and eyes and things out - the cheek meat did look a bit scallopy!

my dad loves getting heads and grilling or smoking them.
these were meat only and nom.

weird what's-in-the-fridge meal of quinoa "salad" (red + white), tossed with generous olive oil, fresh marjoram, tiny bit of grated parm, black pepper, and tempeh bacon bits. topped with an egg fried in the left over 'bacon' oil

woulda been good with craisins i reckon

yesterday i made penne with crumbled (turkey) sausage, porcini mushrooms, tons of spinach, pepper flakes and mushroom juice + parm and it was quite tasty. surprisingly light for a dish containing pasta and sausage.

also orange cardamom cake. oh! and fancy lemonade with lavender-rosemary simple syrup.

question: do you guys keep track of what you make? sometimes i make something once and then completely forget about it even if it was delicious. i'm not too lazy to cook all the time, but i am too lazy to write all of it down. documentation is not my strong suit. how do you keep track of what you make?

^^^was having the same thoughts last night. i really need to start keeping recipe cards or something

two things:

1) i have a recipe folder where i keep stuff i print/rip from magazines. i also occasionally write stuff down on pieces of paper and shove them in there. that's how i remember how to make chili just how i like it and the proportions for my mix for hot avena that i spent an entire winter perfecting.

2) that doesn't solve the problem of night to night, what to make? what do you want? i dunno, what do you want? that shit. so i decided to try something new. every night i will take a picture of dinner on my iphone. (posh, i know) if it's special, i can scribble it down. (this will probably never happen) then, when i don't know what to get on my monday grocery shopping trip, i can get some ideas for what to make for the week by looking at the pictures.

this is day 2 of that btw, so i have hardly proved this plan successful.

Threads in ILCooking have been very useful to me for keeping track. Special stuff that needs recipes gets put on-line somewhere, Is That...Pie or one of our blogs. Modifications to standard recipes get written directly in the cookbook.

If I find a recipe online, I generally print it out and keep it in a folder that lives on my most-used-cookbooks shelf, next to the coupons folder and the takeout-menus folder.

yeah, i have one of those too. i also get a strange joy from hearing how other people organize their most mundane things.

my cooking ideas, when they exist and are accessible, are scattered all over the place. it's hard, for me at least, to remember that my tortilla soup was delicious and oh yeah, the recipe is over there.

i am hoping that centralizing it and using pictures will help me get the ideas i need to go shopping. i don't find that cooking itself requires a lot of reminding unless it's something i haven't made in a year (ie this ridiculously tasty orange cardamom cake) or a baked good (exact measurements are not a feature of much of anything else i tend to do).

i used to take pictures of only holiday or exceptional food, but now i think doing it every day will help me remember what i eat on a normal night vs a special night.

i made How Did You Make That precisely for this purpose. it accepts photos too. it works pretty well, i just have to remember to actually do it. you can click on your name to get all your recipes or search using keywords obv.

http://howdidyoumakethat.com

yeah, see i think i even joined the howdidyoumakethat facebook group, but then i promptly forgot about it :(

This is super nerdy but every day I add a line to a text file with what I ate for dinner, what cuisine it came from, side dishes, where I ate it (if not at home) etc. The file is structured so I can cram it into a database and write some sort of front end to give me visualizations if I want (and if I ever get the time, alas).

I don't use that many recipes any more; I kind of feel like I'm "fluent" in cooking enough that I can make a pretty good number of dishes without needing a guide. But I still use recipes the first couple of times I make something new and interesting. I've got a couple of years worth of Cook's Illustrated magazines around and it's such a pain to find where recipes are that I grab each issues's overview from the web every other month and store them in text files that I can search for keywords - it tells me what issue number a particular recipe is so I can find it easily.

I have a binder full of recipes from other people and the internet to turn to, and if I just make up something I like, I figure it shouldn't be too hard to recreate. I do a lot of checking on various recipes to see how to generally do something and then winging it with the ingredients I have around, but I do actually follow recipes when I want to make something particular and good.

Yesterday I made a pasta casserole with eggplant and mushrooms, I'm hoping that and some spinach microwaved and mixed in will be lunch for much of the week(depends on how much the roommates like the leftovers, I guess). That was one of those easy things I don't actually use a recipe for, but it's not particularly fancy either, just cheap and filling. Such is my life though.

i never really use recipes but sometimes i control+f this thread, or do a search of my email because if it's something i've loved i've undoubtedly tried to push it on someone else. if i need inspiration sometimes i google "______ recipe" and then find something that looks reasonable and put my own twists on it or modify it to my likes/standards. also i track everything i eat so i guess if i really wanted i could browse through that history.

but wait a sec
for me this isn't about "recipes" -- i don't really need recipes either -- it's about deciding what to make and not forgetting about things i made in the past.

don't you guys ever have trouble making decisions about what to make for that week? i just get stuck sometimes, i guess.

basically i don't need recipes, i just need something to spark my memory.

i'm in a bad habit of doing lots of little shopping trips throughout the week because if i buy things in advance, i sometimes forget and they spoil. mostly i try to get inspired by whatever produce looks especially fresh or colorful and build something around it based on things i know i have in the fridge/cupboard or whatever else looks good. i'm pretty flexible. i guess if i had a family or less time, it'd be a lot harder. i definitely have a lot of standbys and i could probably stand to mix it up a little, though :(

see, that's my problem -- i have full time teaching job + a class on saturday, and while i don't have kids, i make breakfast/lunch/dinner for myself and my husband every day...i don't want cooking/food to take over my life so i want to be able to make a decision on monday when i do most of my shopping for meat/fish/most of the veg for the week. i can go to the produce market up the street after work, sure, but i just don't want to spend every free moment of my life doing this. i need to plan a little.

*note: monday is my day off and i do most of this stuff on monday to avoid weekend crowd/traffic.

anyway, i guess everyone just has to figure out individually what works and then do it. maybe my daily photo repository will be just what i needed.

yeah I don't use recipes per ae, but it would be nice to remember stuff I've made

I think a deck of photos of foods made would be great. Either for shuffling through for inspiration, or random close-eyes-pick-5 and that's dinners for the upcoming week.

Since I started buying groceries on-line and having them delivered, I plan much more and we are eating much better. Mr. Jaq does the dinner cooking 3 out of 5 weeknights, because he gets home way before I do. So I have to stock things he knows how to make and is interested in cooking. Then the other nights I either cook and we eat later than usual or I make something up with whatever meat I worked up over the weekend. I do spend a lot of my life cooking, esp. weekends when I bake, make stock, etc. Now that I'm not working at home and have a long commute, I'm glad to not be spending so much time shopping.

Made a beef & stilton pie tonight with handmade puff for the first time. Didn't quite puff as much as I would have liked, but think I should try the oven hotter.

this was really good and the leftovers are even better http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/nutrition/05recipehealth.html

Tonight I made a sweet potato garbanzo spinach tomato curry and
1) it was delicious and
2) I took a picture I did

BOUGHT YAMS 2day

ok this reminds me
did you get yams or sweet potatoes?

because the yams at my produce market are NOT sweet potatoes

they're like giant brown trunklike things