Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

I find cooking relieves a lot of the stress of the working day

the EXACT opposite

no working day could ever reduce me to near-breakdowns the way attempting to cook does, every time, without fail

mmm...now i really want some pasta with peas and pesto. i am definitely getting hungry...

xxpost OTM

The smell of onions frying in butter is probably the supreme culinary scent.

i am definitely incapable of frying onions. chopping always goes wrong and then...i just HATE frying stuff. it makes me nervous. and frying pans are particularly grim to wash up.

this thread got amazing

Don't use a frying pan; use a high-sided saucepan. Stops splatter.

i choose using neither

wisconsin apparently has the highest COL in the united states

well typically when I'm doing the cooking, things are much cheaper. and yes I do admit that we do waste a lot of things by letting them go bad or not using the entire ingredient. just saying a lot of stuff cooked in our house really does involve like, over a dozen things

. E.g. we always keep some kind of fish on hand, with a few fillets in the freezer and maybe one in the fridge -- you have to remember to throw one into the fridge to defrost and then eat it within a couple days.

just defrost in the sink or a bowl of water! it'll take half an hour, prob less for a fish filet

this one time when i was pulling an all-nighter and there was no food in the house i did go slightly loopy and GIS pictures of food in the hope that i would somehow be able to download them into my mouth

i loved this

yeah you can defrost fish in the sink in like 10 mins

I do admit that we do waste a lot of things by letting them go bad or not using the entire ingredient.

this is seriously terrible and would make me dislike you in person

On Sunday I slowly roasted a shoulder of pork on top of a pair of fat bramley apples and some water, so the apples collapsed and the water steamed the meat moist. I used the collapsed apple mush to help make an apple and onion gravy. I also roasted parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, and make a sage and onion stuffing from scratch. An awesome afternoon. We had a guest so i was cookign for 3 people. I had enough roasted veg and stuffing leftover to do me a big pot for lunch on Monday.

A decent frying pan with a good surface takes about five (5) seconds to get clean. A cast-iron pan, marginally longer.

Salmon is a little more expensive than cod, right?

sorry to hear about your apples collapsing

Ha!

this is seriously terrible and would make me dislike you in person

good for you! i'm glad your life is so neat and organized that you can efficiently plan ahead and not waste anything. thank god I don't have to worry about meeting you in person!

einsturzende neuapfel

Faded - collapsing new apples
Watch them - collapsing
Jaded - collapsing new apples
Watch them - collapsing

On Sunday I slowly roasted a shoulder of pork on top of a pair of fat bramley apples and some water, so the apples collapsed and the water steamed the meat moist. I used the collapsed apple mush to help make an apple and onion gravy. I also roasted parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, and make a sage and onion stuffing from scratch.

i don't know what any of this means or how to do it, you may as well have written "on sunday i slowly roasted fairy dust on top of a cloud"

hahaha

doesn't it make you curious to learn what it means?? it sounds awesome!!

i feel guilty enough when i buy fruit and don't eat it in time before it rots, this would only happen on a larger scale if i bought other ingredients and therefore i don't

I'm not expecting you to know how to do it from that description, but I'm pretty sure I could write a step-by-step guide that you could follow. I won't though, unless you really want me to.

it sounds awesome for someone to do for me! (i am happy to wash up)

if i did it, it would not be awesome. i can guarantee that

isn't there another thread where you can brag about what you cooked

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=66

Not meant as a punchline. Just thought this thread needed to be annotated like a recipe.

I'm gonna ANNOTATE you like a RECIPE, punk

Don't collapse me.

cooking is a little like learning another language i think. you learn some rudiments and then comes a point where you just need to fling yourself off the edge and wing it, knowing you will make mistakes, not being afraid to make mistakes. knowing it will almost certainly be good enough. the deep skills come in with what DL mentioned about leftover improv. that is the moneysaver. when i buy a chicken i buy a really expensive chicken, but i get 2-3 meals out of it, and 2 pints of stock go in the freezer, every time. add a potato and some leeks to those and that's another 3 meals.

frogbs i have kids, so economizing is important to me, so that's a helpful motivation. i guess i also have a kind of morality about not wasting food. and i feel stupid when i waste money. but "neat and organized".... is not how anyone would really describe my life. it's maybe because of that that the kitchen is like one place where a TINY TINY bit of planning drastically improves my day and makes me feel good about myself.

the way i learned to cook was to just do a ton of simple recipes and follow them terrifiedly and slavishly. eventually you get good at them. eventually you learn why they are structured the way they are and what is actually 'going on' in the pot or whatever. like tracer said, it's like a language, where eventually you just start doing it on your own with some implicit knowledge of what will work or not.

Tracer OTM.

Also after a while it's not really that hard to plan b/c you just get to know your eating habits and how much of something you will or won't finish.

Wait, what the fuck what thread did I just wake up in an hour later? Is it just really nice everywhere and no one feels like working?

xp to s1ocki yup. best thing i ever did was get 3-4 cheap cookbooks of like "easy weeknight dinner" recipes and make all the ones that seemed appealing. it gives you a great base for doing more complex stuff.

the rudiments are beyond me, i am terrified of making mistakes and also how do you learn to ENJOY this lengthy, time-consuming, incredibly stressful, hateful process, at the end of which you produce a mediocre and unappetising mess that's gone in 10 minutes and oh hi it's washing-up time?

compared to "heat soup up in 5 mins, pour into bowl, wash up bowl and spoon, fin"

i used to live wiht a guy who was really 'good at cooking' and used to 'freestyle' in the kitchen and 'throw things together' and would always interrupt and tell me how i should probably just throw some of X in there with Y. fuck off i like to cook like a robot and follow the recipe exactly! how it should be imo.

also something i realized i had to do early on was plan a couple days in advance, just have some general idea of what i'd be having for every meal so i had time to shop and prepare, instead of waiting till the last minute, getting too hungry to do anything, ordering a pizza and falling asleep on the couch

It's some kind of communist connection to the fruits of your labour, I suspect, lex. Seriously, if you're ever near Exeter, let me know, come round, I'll cook.

xp lex one way is to drink a beer or refill your glass of wine between the time when you're done eating and the time when you clean up.

the rudiments are beyond me, i am terrified of making mistakes and also how do you learn to ENJOY this lengthy, time-consuming, incredibly stressful, hateful process, at the end of which you produce a mediocre and unappetising mess that's gone in 10 minutes and oh hi it's washing-up time?

compared to "heat soup up in 5 mins, pour into bowl, wash up bowl and spoon, fin"

― lex pretend, Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:58 AM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lex the first time you make something a bit more ambitious and it is awesome, it's such a great feeling.

you need something to cook with to show you the ropes! if i lived where you lived i would volunteer!

the way i learned to cook was to just do a ton of simple recipes and follow them terrifiedly and slavishly. eventually you get good at them. eventually you learn why they are structured the way they are and what is actually 'going on' in the pot or whatever. like tracer said, it's like a language, where eventually you just start doing it on your own with some implicit knowledge of what will work or not.

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 10:56 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this.

the way i learned to cook was to just do a ton of simple recipes and follow them terrifiedly and slavishly

when i tried to do this, there was always one bit of the recipe that went wrong - an ingredient i couldn't find, a step i didn't understand or more usually a step that didn't HAPPEN like the recipe said it would happen. at which point i panicked and things went more and more wrong and this is where the nervous breakdowns come in

the rudiments are beyond me, i am terrified of making mistakes and also how do you learn to ENJOY this lengthy, time-consuming, incredibly stressful, hateful process, at the end of which you produce a mediocre and unappetising mess that's gone in 10 minutes and oh hi it's washing-up time?

compared to "heat soup up in 5 mins, pour into bowl, wash up bowl and spoon, fin"

― lex pretend, Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:58 AM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark'

bcuz some ppl enjoy eating food

make sure you look at the recipe in advance and visualize what you have to do. if there's a step/ingredient you don't understand, google it or ask a friend.

there are really few things worse than 8pm approaching and you know you don't have anything in the fridge and you haven't been paid yet and you're just like ohhhh GGGGOODDDD

i'm much better about planning now that i cook for 2. (almost) every sunday we pick out meals for the week and go shopping. then i know what i'm making and just have to pick what night to make each thing.

haha tpp my partner is the big improviser and i absolutely adore following recipes to. the. frickin. letter.. we have called a cease-fire and don't fuck with each other now, basically.