what's cooking? part 5: 2017-2027

otoh the air fryer is extremely dumb

I’ve been mulling a pressure cooker. Winter is coming and I want to up my soup curry game and to get the chicken legs right you really need a pressure cooker. Instant pots are so massive, Stovetop seems the way to go for me, though as the stove has a constant temp setting.

(I did see some good small plug in pressure cookers in japan, which would complement the zojirushi rice cooker our friend left us went back to japan, so maybe that’s the way to go if a lot more expensive)

Rice cookers on the other hand are the divinely inspired work of the Lord.

oh yeah, love my rice cooker

I have an instant pot that I have barely used because I would need to put it in the step down transformer and am suspicious of that. The toaster oven did not want to work with it and so I may have prematurely given up. I would like to use it because in the summer it's sometimes too hot to want to cook with a stove/oven.

This was such a great gift. Friend, who was a visiting academic in my wife's department brought this one from Japan (because his wife packed him off with one) and he bequeathed it to us, along with a bunch of crockery and all his left over food when he went home. Its a really small one and will cook down to half a cup of rice, which is sometimes all you need.

Definitely, pressure cooking is a legit technique, in the aforementioned soup curry you can't get the chicken leg to that fall apart consistency without one, and it is such great time saver on things like beans.

XPOST

Need to have a fairly big transformer for some of these devices. I have been thinking of wiring in a couple of 100/110V sockets for Japanese/american gadgets.

i shipped everything from the US to the 220 v here so we have a bunch of transformers all over the place. I feel comfortable for, like my sewing machine and wine fridge. But the toaster oven kept tripping it. I kind of expected the instant pot would do the same.

making a huge batch of chili verde from Art Of Simple Cooking , 4 servings my ass! I like to throw in extra diced tomatoes and some flour to get that saucy goodness.

sorry that's Art of Simple FOOD, Vol. II

It’s all about the power rating. For a toaster oven you probably need 1500W and I might go all the way to 2000W for a bit of headroom.

We’ve got a great place here that sells transformers any size you want, so when I got one for my wife’s Technics decs it was a matter of reading the max draw, doubling and adding a little on for safety. I’d probably get a 3000W one for a double outlet and I feel like this might be my next little electrical DIY project.

ohhh, i don't think we did the double thing on the draw. it was a couple of years ago when we got them for the appliances here. I need to look at them all again tomorrow. Good to know. I've only blown out a stick vacuum because I spaced out and plugged it into an adaptor instead of the transformer.

otoh the air fryer is extremely dumb

why the hate for the humble air fryer?

I haven't got one, or the space for one, but I've been served some sublimely succulent chicken tikka cooked on one which is well beyond my capabilities, so I have a respect for it

i'm not sure what it does that you can't do with a hot oven and a roasting tin, particularly an oven with a convection fan.

it gets hotter quicker tho right, which gives you the ability to cook without oil? for south asian food it seems like an upgrade on an oven, half a step closer to the domestic tandoor i crave

Air fryers are extremely good, we would have one if not for the logistics (one of us is vegetarian, and there’s nowhere to put it). Rice cookers are also extremely good, but I once started a fight at a previous workplace over this between people who agreed with me and people who thought it wasn’t a “proper” way of cooking rice.

what is the proper way of cooking rice? A pot? I feel very un-asian when I cook rice in a pot because I gave away my rice cooker.

xpost ed, you are right. I just checked all my transformers and I max at 1000W.

Believe so! They considered rice cookers to be an East Asian thing and that rice should be done in a pan. I pointed out other half’s south Asian father used one, to no avail.

if one eats rice every day it's kind of stupid to not have a rice cooker.

I have cooked rice in a cast iron pot thick enough to retain heat for the last 10 years or so and it has been coming out v nicely imo, not sure what the benefit of a rice cooker wld be, def behind air fryer in the queue

You can just shunt rice into it and leave it be while you do other things. That’s a big benefit for those of us who frequently fuck up the rice/water ratio (me).

I dislike rice buuuuuut I eat enough sushi and poké that I should probably buy another rice cooker. Cooking it in a pot is very annoying even if it's only 1-2 times a week.

I've been kind of watching to see if they start making more rice cookers that make mochi.

our zojirushi makes rice so much better than we can do in a pot. I'm making fried rice tonight and ran the rice cooker earlier so that it'll have time to cool. since I soak rice before using it, it takes a while, but I mostly work from home so it's no big deal for me.

Very much a convenience thing. My wife likes to eat rice every day and it’s so simple to throw in some rice a slice of konbu water and walk away. It’s getting to autumn here so I should do some takikomigohan with red beans/mushrooms/chestnuts etc.

Walking around a Japanese department store I often get slightly lustily over the ridiculous, and ridiculously expensive, earthenware and iron pot rice cookers that make rice ‘just like grandma used to’. The ridiculous bit is, of course if you do have a heavy iron pot (as ogmor does) it will retain enough heat to cook the rice and even make it crispy if you get the timing right.

i made double chocolate cookies under the guise of getting rid of the two almost used up containers of baking cocoa in the cabinet

i also bought lard today. went to a farm stand that had meat and i was trying to make decisions. "i know, i'll get lard!"

http://imgur.com/gallery/RmC41Ur

Chicken, marinated in harissa and celery seeds, smoked over hickory, served with sumac onions, laffa bread, and tehina.

Ok that sounds amazing but I need clarity
Tehina
Tahoni
Tahini

Same or different, if same how tf are we supposed to spell it??! I need a straight answer please

There's two factors iirc.

1. Different methods of transliteration from arabic

2. Pureed sesame seeds are tahini and a sauce made from pureed sesame seeds with the addition of lemon and garlic is tahina

Jim bringing the knowledge. I always thought of it as tahini, until I got the Zahav cookbook (highly recommended), which uses tehina throughout in the fashion Jim notes in #2 above.

Really anything goes I think.

It is July 4. We won't be having a picnic today, but I expect my wife and I will eat dinner outside on our back deck. The menu is hamburgers, baked beans, potato salad, blueberry-raspberry cobbler & vanilla ice cream. All homemade, except the ice cream. Just playing the hits today.

Nothing wrong with that! We're having take-out BBQ, so technically what's cooking" is nothing. Pulled pork, mac and cheese, baked beans, coleslaw. I should make something green to get a proper veg in, but probably won't.

last night i made ethiopian foods: red lentils, cabbage/carrot/potato stew, tomato salad. i used up all my homemade niter kibbeh! but i resolve to make more lentils and more berbere-flavored foods in general. i might just buy more niter kibbeh because i hate messing around with buttery cheesecloth.

I was hoping one of you could help me out here. I was going to make paila marina, a simple Chilean fish stew. This is the recipe I found:

http://chileanrecipes.blogspot.com/2011/10/paila-marina.html

What I can't figure out is where the liquid comes from. 1/2 cup of wine, sure, but that doesn't seem like it would provide much for the fish and shellfish to float in, would it?

you add water

broth will be plentifully flavored from the sautéed vegetables and seafood bits (and the wine)

although a quick google shows me different recipes calling for fish stock in place of water!

I would probably just add broth (prolly chicken, since it's open; I don't have shrimp or fish stock handy), but I was surprised broth isn't mentioned in the recipe. At what point do you think I add it, or does it matter?

i'd add it after the wine. badly written internet recipe! if you like the ingredients of this one just google for other ones to check when to add it.

i have a question though: it's quite a good mass of seafood and the shellfish will release liquid. can't quite tell how much is in there from the photo. why don't you see what it looks like after the wine? it might not be wrong.

actually looking back at the link josh posted and in the Spanish language instructions it does have a quarter liter of fish stock as an ingredient and mentions adding the stock at the same time as the wine

though yeah I would go for after the wine personally, letting the alcohol cook off first.

I've never actually seen this dish cooked though I have eaten it

Ah, thanks! I didn't even think to look at the Spanish instructions, but there it is. Yeah, it says to put in the broth and wine at the same time, but I think I'll do wine first and let it reduce/ flavor the ingredients before I put in the broth.

yeah that's what most people would do

Recipe turned out well, btw! Though predictably nobody in the family would eat it but me.

I made delicious pesto in the blender last night and then proceeded to eat what LOOKED like a reasonable serving of pasta but with how rich the pesto was, ended up making me feel like a giant sleepy brick, borderline ILL. It was so good though. I'm just going to spread the rest of it sparingly on, like, tortilla sandwiches.

JiC there is nothing in that recipe that doesn't sound COMPLETELY AWESOME. Was it hard to get all those different seafoods, or expensive? I feel like that would end up being a $40 bowl of soup!

We've been having a constant supply of pesto from the garden, a batch of sourdough, so the last four nights were pesto pizza with various squashes and tomatoes (also from the garden), life is amazing.

I think I'm going to order a mortar bc I could have used less olive oil if the blender had been willing to actually blend the non-liquid mass. It wouldn't fall back into the blade uh vortex until I added what was probably too much oil.