What's cooking? part 4

I have that on my iphone!

I have thought on & off for years about making the jump to veg status and I think I'm going to do it once I've worked through all the meaty BS in my fridge.

no, but i always look out for it in used book stores!

Are you talking about browning ground beef in straight ground beef form - not as burgers or meatballs or some other format? It's probably crowding the pan and steaming instead of having that liquid evaporate so everything can brown - you end up with all sorts of liquid in the pan. If you do it in batches it'll probably work better.

Peanut sauce with coconut milk is way better but I always feel vaguely dirty making it this way since coconut milk is so fatty. My usual formula is to fry a spoon of chili garlic paste in a little oil, then add peanut butter, soy, some brown sugar, and water with some lime juice at the end.

yeah but it's only a dipping sauce - there was a whole can of coconut milk in the thai curry i made the other night!

perhaps my problem is that while technically it's a dipping sauce but I could basically eat a bowl of it at any time

yeah i think the pan definitely is crowded... but the recipe said to put it in and brown all together... don't really know how this is possible, even if it was being done in a dutch oven. i think you need the liquids for the sauce... at any rate, i found that if i just left it there for a while it sort of browned but mostly just created browning on the bottom of the pan which was taken care of when i got to the 'add 2 cups of wine' part.

I realized this morning that I haven't cracked a cookbook in a long time. I've just been str8 winging it for months, which (I now realize) has led to me making the same things/using the same methods with different ingredients over and over and over because I don't feel like making decisions, doing specialty shopping, etc.

They're usually good things, but I feel like I haven't grown at all in a while. I wonder what I should try this spring?!

When I'm browning ground beef, I definitely drain off the fat/water after the meat browns. It dirties up my big strainer and a big bowl, but the result is so much better and less oily.

Per the lasagne sheets, do they not sell "fresh" pasta readymade in the US? Here you can buy stuff like pasta sheets (and fettcine etc) thats soft, fresh-style stuff, in refridgerated boxes.

And with ragu/bolognese, my italian ex's mama told me, that you brown all the meat and the secret is that when the water/fat wells up, you keep on simmering it til thats all gone - this takes some time! - then add the wine, and again wait til most of the liquids gone - then add the other liquids (tomatoes etc). Overall its sposed to take 2-3 hours.

Fresh pasta is pretty common, but usually long noodles and filled pastas like ravioli and tortelloni; not big sheets for lasagna.

that's basically what i did... but i think this came out too rich for my liking. if i make it again i'd probably use all lean meat and drain some of the fat off.
xpost

my mom gets fresh lasagna sheets from an italian import store somewhere

i also do not understand how smittenkitchen does all that in a tiny kitchen. mine is small and cluttered and i get so frustrated sometimes and everything i do appears to make a much bigger mess in a small space.

there is never enough kitchen space. when we moved into our current place, i was psyched for the slightly bigger kitchen, but it's still nowhere near enough. so i found one of those butcher block things, with pull-outs and there's STILL not enough space - in between the microwave, toaster, food processor, knife block, fruit bowl, there's not much room left for actual preparation of food!

are the recipes on that site good

on kittenmittons

I have only cooked in small kitchens and I just never put anything away

lol a recipe site named kittenmitten

i never put anything away either! i'm a disaster!

kittens can't cook

hahaha kittenmittons! i will have to tell my sister that one, she loves smitten kitchen and always sunny.

my food processor has to go back in the box and on top of a bookshelf in the other room (next to the rice cooker) because there's nowhere to put it away. which sucks because that means i can't just use the food processor whenever cause it's such a hassle. harbl, i feel you. earlier i was just trying to put some salad in bowls and i felt so cramped and i was dropping spinach leaves everywhere and getting so frustrated!!

i went butcher block shopping but most things were too deep for my kitchen. i ended up getting this with castors so i can move it to clean, etc. it allows me to store my pots and pans, at least.

I recently bought one of these, for my teeny tiny galley kitchen:

http://www.wishlist.com.au/images/Products/MK01/bamboozledsmall_L.jpg

I store all my plates and cups on the shelves and use the drawer as my spice "rack". Its helpe a lot.

I used to have that

im making some pasta with white beans and kale and a very small amount of leftover marinara sauce

my kitchen is just poorly designed - so much wasted space. i added a refurbished butcher block thing (picked it up at a junk yard for $25 bucks, it was totally wonky, but ytth fixed it all up and painted it and "antiqued" it for me <3), a half-height book shelf AND a full-height book shelf for more storage. and i still need more storage. i was looking at someone's brand-new-house pics on fb the other day, and while i found myself not actually caring that this person has an enormous flashy house, i was SO JEALOUS of the kitchen - huge island with double sink, enormous walk-in pantry. ugh.

that's how i feel about my parents' house and their kitchen (which was redone a year and change ago). at thanksgiving i could NOT get over how there were three people working simultaneously without stepping on each other.

i have been casually looking at houses to buy and i want a tiny rowhouse for myself but they all have kitchens no bigger than what i have now. i would want to just expand the entire first floor into a kitchen.

xp yes i want room to be able to teach ytth to cook! but there is literally NO room in my kitchen for 2 ppl.

harblz we are looking casually at houses too, and i've realised i don't really care how ugly or ill-designed the house is, as long as it has a big kitchen space, even if i have to add kitchen carts and shelves.

my ideal house would be a giant kitchen with a bed and a toilet in it

My kitchen is big enough, but it has two doors and a window off it, and is terribly, horribly, very badly laid out. I fantasize about remedying that but haha no way in a rental.

I wish there was a way to switch from having wet hands to having dry hands really easily

my kingdom for a bigger ktichen, with a dishwasher! layouts are so key, too. my kitchen in seattle was only a little bit bigger, but had way more cabinets and a lot more counter space. it just made more sense.

our last place was even worse in its layout - it had a sort of huge dining room opening up from the kitchen (in a 1 bdrm aptmt!?), that contained the oven and the fridge, which meant traipsing half way across the house to those two objects and back to the actual kitchen.

oh wow, that's ridiculous! my current kitchen has ONE wall outlet (aside from whatever the refrigerator's plugged into) and it's on the wall opposite my tiny counters, which is half the reason i had to buy the rolling cart/storage thing - otherwise i'd have nowhere to put anything that needed to be plugged in!

the teaching institute I worked at had some industrial kitchens for teaching cooking in, we cooked thanksgiving dinner in there once and it was nice have like 4 ovens to use

when my parents redid their kitchen and got double ovens i thought it was super silly and unnecessary...until thanksgiving!

my current kitchen has ONE wall outlet

looool my kitchen also has one and it's...below waist height on a wall that doesn't have a counter. Wtf is that??

when I bake cookies I think I want to have two ovens

I miss the open floor plan of our house in Redding so much. The kitchen, dining area and living room were open to each other, but separated by a low bar/countertop between the kitchen and dining area, and change in flooring/positioning of the sofa (dining area to living room). Would have been a fantastic socializing space if we'd had any friends there.

i would like to have double ovens and i would like an industrial-type gas range

This is my tiny kitchen: what you can see here, thats allll it is.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/20337_280495872756_726857756_3871479_7809886_n.jpg

where's the butcher block you mentioned upthread?

It wasnt in the pic at the time, but it would be just to the left, poking out of the botoom left corner(which is a wall).

So as u can imagine, Im bumping into everything :(

ahh, i wasn't sure what was on the left side and i was trying to figure out where it'd fit!

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7178/6933553641_a0e314534b.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7060/6933552945_12fccba0d7.jpg

excuse my dirty floor

first pic: butcher block, not visible is ytth's moutain bike behind it (hence the tool box in the wall)

second pic: note the head-protector taped to the cupboard corner