Cooking

big pot! frying oil! slotted spoon! cheesecloth to strain the oil and re-use (next time more fragrantly!)

Tiny flat! Fine mist of frying oil over everything!

Also the best felafel I know can be had for five pieces for £1 (“If you can wait two minutes we’ll give you fresh ones!”) at the Middle Eastern ship on my way home from the farmer’s market.

looking at online recipes the only ingredient mine have been missing is fresh dill and some recommend refrigerating the mix for at least an hour before cooking and add a little baking powder before rolling them.

oh god fresh dill. One of the greatest things ever. My kids hate potatoes (!?) so I haven't made any dill potato salad in a long time. fuck em though. It's that time of year.

How does anyone hate a potato! I need to dig into this, what are their views on chips and crisps?

One of them will tolerate them, the other refuses to countenance even a Walker's BBQ. It's astounding. The root of it (heh) as far as I can tell is a memory of eating a particularly 'floury' jacket potato once and finding the texture so disgusting that its memory has tainted everything potato-related since.

i have been making this lentil soup w fresh dill weekly for what feels like months -- i love it and never get sick of it!
https://myheartbeets.com/instant-pot-dill-lentil-soup/

as for falafel, when i have made it at home i have used a mix from a middle eastern bakery and baked it in the oven rather than deep frying. still tastes great! don't miss the frying or the oil.

I've gotten into regular shallow frying recently partly cos I like it and also for the quite weirdly ridic reason that when I do it in my carbon steel wok it seasons it beautifully for when I do stir fries/fried rice type scram!

might have to get some cheesecloth my habit of filtering the fat with a funnel and kitchen roll are often too messy.

made the bon apetit falafel and it went over much better than expected. Got rave reviews from my partner and 2 friends. Partner said 'take out quality' and then upgraded to 'best ever had' which is super rare.

we were on 2nd bottle of wine, though. That said, it is a good recipe. Made the zahav mujadara to eat with and an herby tahini sauce that was a hybrid of the bon apetit and zahav recipes.

made potato salad today with dill relish and fresh dill, used Yukon gold potatoes and managed not to overcook them

one cooking gadget i got recently that i highly recommend: a Dash egg cooker. Makes perfect hard boiled eggs way more easily and quickly than cooking them in a pot. Haven't tried the poach or soft-boil settings yet.

"Boils up to 12 eggs at a time"

not a recommended feature to test out if you have a prescription for lactulose solution!

sorry not being flippant, but don't understand how you can fuck up a perfect hard-boiled egg in a simple pan full of boiling water.

I would like to try the egg cooker.

I boil multiple eggs at once for convenience, starting with placing them in a pot in cold water, bringing it to a boil, then immediately covering the pot, taking it off the heat and letting them sit for 8-10 minutes. I like that the egg yolks are slightly soft and not gray around the edges, but it seems like at least one of the eggs splits during the heating process, which I am always confounded by.

also, sometimes the hard-boiled eggs are almost impossible to peel easily, I read somewhere that has to do with their freshness, but I've never found a remedy for that

you just cool them down for a few minutes in cold water, maybe with an occasional running cold tap. You only have problems peeling them if you do do it too soon imo

I will try that

finicky first world solutions! Sorry I'm not trying to be rude here and will shut up.

Use a pressure cooker (4 min high pressure) to hard cook eggs and even the fresh ones are easy to peel. That's how commercial hard cooked peeled eggs are done.

that sounds pretty definitive. I don't use pressure cookers at all and would be interested to hear more on what you can do with them.

I used to get up at 4.30 am every morn and make egg mayo and grilled bacon sandwiches to get me through my working day 10 years ago, seems like a different world to me now.

pressure cookers are so good, big rec as well if you like making curries

The Dash cooker steams them and they’re easy to peel. As Dan says, there’s all these steps that I can’t be bothered with, esp if I just want a couple of eggs.

had my first go with a pressure cooker earlier. Waiting on a supermarket delivery so there wasn't much to play with but did a sauce with some vine tomatoes that were left. Was very impressed with how rich + flavoursome the sauce was just after 20 mins of cooking. Going to have some fun with this.

It's like magic, it's crazy

It's crazy fun playing with the floating release valve when it's at full pressure as well!

i would suggest not doing that especially if there's a lot of liquid in there!

it makes really good chili that doesn't have to cook for a long time. i just basically throw in every single ingredient, stir, and cook it at high pressure for 10 min. i've even done it without breaking up the meat. i just broke it up after it was done, though it's probably better to saute it first and break it up, then dump the rest of the stuff in. it really is magic.

this lady has a bunch of great pressure cooker recipes https://twosleevers.com/cookingstyle/instant-pot/

Nice one, harbl thanks.

I'm so annoyed it's taken me so long to get one. I used to think it would be expensive with loads of annoying removeable parts that are a pain in the arse to wash. Got a decent 5 l stovetop one for 25 quid and there is only one part including the lid!

I made this last night & goddamn it turned out so freaking good

https://nomnompaleo.com/instant-pot-vietnamese-pork-stew

(the site name gives me the cringe but she has great recipes! her slow cooker recipes are almost always reliably good too)

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VS0AAOSw4z5ftVQL/s-l140.jpg

got this silicone garlic peeler for two quid, and it's a game changer.

yes they’re great! i got one for Mr Veg a while back & he uses it all the time. I still like the old fashioned knife-bash myself mostly but theyre excellent when you need intact cloves

and some cloves are much harder to peel than others, sometimes you get those "miracle cloves" where the skin practically falls off with one little tap!

I always give them a good snack with a pestle. Job done!

lol I used to have a pebble that I pounded them with, which I saw someone on cooking youtube doing, but I gave it up when I kept splatting them!

JFC autocorrect is actively hostile to me rn

fair enough correct in the context tbf!

I have lamb and puff pastry and I'm thinking of making Borek but that recipe calls for filo dough. Can I make this work with puff pastry?
https://www.recipetineats.com/borek-turkish-spiced-lamb-filo-pastry/

YO someone just gave us a used Instant Pot and I am TOTALLY making that woman's butter chicken recipe, harbl!!! Tonight.

I've never used one of these so I may have questions later.

I wasn't actually crazy about the butter chicken recipe as is, but at one point I took that recipe, added more cumin and some coriander to the spices, pre-cooked them with onions before putting them in the pot, dumped in a bag of frozen spinach, and ended up with a pretty good though completely inauthentic chicken spinach curry thing.

You do have to make sure you have enough liquid in the pot with improvised recipes like that or it doesn't seal. Especially if you sauté anything in the pot before pouring everything else in, make sure you deglaze it really well and then listen/watch for it actually sealing up and starting to pressure cook. I've accidentally boiled chicken a couple of times bc the pot just kept cooking and not sealing.

I don't know what any of that means but I'll try!

The recipe I meant is from https://twosleevers.com/cookingstyle/instant-pot/ I was also thinking about a spinach component, though I can do that separately. I'm intrigued by the idea of cooking the rice in the pot at the same time, with something holding the rice bowl above the sauce. Was def planning to add some cardamom etc since we have all that stuff.

Yes, sorry, that was a really unclear post I just wrote.

The two sleevers butter chicken recipe is the first instant pot recipe I ever made. And I'm glad I made it! It didn't end up being my favorite recipe ever - I think it's just richer than I actually like - but it's a really good base for adding things to once you get more confident with the instant pot and are ready to improvise.

No it was fine! I just don't really understand how pressure cooking works, w/r/t what you said about it not sealing if there's not enough liquid?

i agree. the butter chicken is a little bland. you need to add stuff.

What I was trying to say is that the instant pot only works if you're making something with at least a quarter cup of liquid in it, ideally more, and if there's nothing stuck to the pot itself. When in doubt, pour in a little water or broth and stir to make sure nothing is stuck.

It will make a quiet roaring noise as it's getting up to pressure, and it will shoot out steam for a minute as it's getting ready to seal, and you'll wonder if it's supposed to be doing that, and then the noise and the steam will suddenly stop and it will lock down and start counting down the minutes. Mine occasionally does a thing where it fails to do that, and I end up with boiled chicken instead of pressure-cooked chicken, but that only happens when I'm trying variations on recipes and I've messed up.

Hahah that play-by-play is actually very helpful, ty.

That little metal thingie needs to have enough steam under it to push it all the way up and keep it there. It something gums up its movement, it can't seal, so make sure it moves freely before you put the lid on. Also, if it gets a little sideways, it can help to poke it with a chopstick or something long and narrow so you don't get burned, to kind of knock it straight.

yeah my old one used to sometimes fail to seal properly and boil off the water because i was covering the valve up a tiny bit so it couldn't pop up. new one is designed better.

I've just discovered cooked.wiki/ and hoo boy...

It takes out all the rambling and noise of a recipe webpage. Completely life changing.