what's cooking? part 5: 2017-2027

Haha! It takes a special kind of bean stan to appreciate something that has to cook for 7 hours and at the end it's still a bean. I appreciate that. I made chili with some of my RG yellow beans last week and it was good chili but didn't really showcase the beans. I'll have to go and think about what I've done and mend my ways for the next recipe.

Certainly the more non-bean stuff that's in a bean recipe, the harder it will be to appreciate any subtle bean differences and the harder it is to justify paying a higher price.

roll that beautiful bean footage!

I am excited about the following dried varieties in our pantry:

Peruvian yellow beans
red Salvadoran beans
Whipple beans, a rare heirloom

Made the lentil recipe that someone linked here ages ago: https://www.daringgourmet.com/misir-wat-ethiopian-spiced-red-lentils/

Don’t know why I don’t make it more often, I added carrots and diced yam with the garlic/tomato/berbere, and left out the additional salt, and it turned out great.

― JoeStork, Tuesday, September 7, 2021 10:31 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this may have been me, i have made this a bunch of times and love it. i think i will make it tonight, in fact. i also put sweet potatoes in it if i have them. i have an actual mesir wat recipe but this is easier.

actually making it now, i made some chicken stock today (no celery or carrots because i don't like how it makes it taste too vegetable-y when making things like this). i need to get more berbere and store it better. gets kind of oxidized and loses the nice berbere smell.

made the mozza at home lasagna, complete with bechamel, and enjoyed it. nancy has a dried arbol chile, bay leaves, and half of an onion in the butter/flour/milk while you make it. you take that stuff out later, but I think it results in an excellent flavor. wonder if it could win some anti-bechamels over. probably not.

i made mapo tofu last night, w/impossible beef

good stuff

yeah have made it successfully with beanfeast before, so a decent meat substitute would be perfect

Idk if I’m just late to the party or if this is a well kept secret but: placing a lil dish of water on the cutting board while you chop an onion prevents it from making your eyes water.

o really? i had to slice 6 onions the other day and used my child's swimming goggles as my eyes have been extra sensitive recently! not exactly comfortable but did the trick!

I can’t remember the science exactly but it’s something about the thing that causes the stinging is hydrophilic and your eyes are usually the closest source of water so if you place another water source closer to the onion, your eyes won’t be affected.

I tried it last night and not a single tear was shed!

hmm, might try that. yeah the source of the stinging is whatever substance in onions coming into contact with the water in your eyes and turning into acid

Are some people less disposed to onion tears? Cutting them rarely ever bothers me, and I don't do anything special. Maybe because I wear contact lenses?

yes, contact lenses help

I buy sweet onions (vidalia, peru, maui) over "storage" varieties pretty exclusively and never get the tears.

Contact lenses are absolutely protective. Whenever I cut onions in just glasses I am amazed at the difference.

Maybe this question is better on the Instant Pot thread, but apropos of the previous BEANS talk: if I have a full recipe for, say, chili but instead of canned, I use dried beans, would I just add all of the ingredients (veggies, other beans, etc.) and then set the pressure cooking to however long it'd take to cook the dried beans?

And as a followup, the beans I'd be cooking from dry in this recipe are supposed to disintegrate to thicken the chili, so I'd reckon that I'd need to add more pressure cooking time in addition to just cooking them?

Seems like that would result in overcooked veggies. I'd be inclined to cook the dry beans separately (maybe leaving them a bit al dente), then do the normal cooking with everything.

yeah i would absolutely cook them separately. the remaining ingredients are going to be mush if you pressure cook them for that long.

Got it, thanks!

yeah definitely cosigning the cook beans separately approach

Been cooking dried white beans with carrots, celery, onion, garlic, thyme, arbol, parm rind. Then take all but beans out. Add some cooked homemade italian sausage and kale. Good winter meal.

update: i am a bean cooking wizard since this thread set me straight

i have made at least three batches of EXCELLENT beans and found a local farm stand selling their dried beans for $2 a pound! 😃

whoa, that is not a lot of beans for beans

compared to fuckin $6 a pound for rumplstiltskin’s rancho gordo its a STEAL

update: i am a bean cooking wizard since this thread set me straight

i have made at least three batches of EXCELLENT beans and found a local farm stand selling their dried beans for $2 a pound! 😃

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, November 19, 2021 11:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Hurray! Beans4life.

I made red beans and rice last week with a bone in ham shank that was very good.

i bought mr veg an air fryer for christmas after my brother in law was talking them up at thanksgiving

we need another gadget like a hole in the head but we also eat at home like 95% of the time so hey, why not give it a whirl

i can see it being useful in summer when we dont want to use oven/stove

i got one as a prize for doing a good job at work (there were like 10 choices and most of them sucked) and it's ok. i have a tiny kitchen though so most of the time i forget it's in the basement and i just roast things anyway. it's so big!

They are too big. We were given one for free and use it for frozen fried foods for breakfast or the kids.

i still don’t know what an air fryer is

it is just a plastic convection oven

Going to controversially say that air fryers are good (I do not own one but would if more counter space)

the air fryer is too big and spaceship like to be kept on the counter. Got to store it under the stairs or in a shed until breakfast potato time.

Found out our oven is completely unreliable wrt temperature in early November. I immediately started getting hit with ads for the Anova Precision Oven (I own the Anova sous vide thing). It's a convection oven with very close temp control and steam. Proofs dough, does bagless sous vide, is an air fryer. Slightly larger than our microwave and I was able to squeeze a 15 lb turkey in there (which turned out better than ever imagined a turkey could). Haven't air fried anything yet, but all other functions are great. Fortunately I was able to make counter space for it, and will probably get rid of the toaster oven.

can you bake in it?

Oh yeah, baking works great, also roasting and all the usual oven-y things. I'm still working out how much faster it roasts with the convection going, it's a work in progress.

one thing you may want to try is adjusting temperature, not time. i usually go 25 degrees cooler with convection and plan for roughly the same time suggested.

Oh that sounds like a great approach, will do that tonight.

my regular oven has a convection setting but i've literally never used it and don't know what it's for lol

it also has random other stuff like '3D convection' 'pizza' etc. i use none of them.

Convection will allow you to cook at lower temp but will dry out food surfaces that aren't covered.

pizza setting makes everything pizza iirc, go nuts with that one

holy shit

My understanding of air fryers is that you can make your oven or toaster oven do the same thing by elevating the food off a tray and onto a rack so the air can move around it?? My oven is old, not convection, and the heat goes off and on so I haven’t used it for years. Our toaster oven has a “turbo” setting, no idea if that means convection though.

It might be like the turbo button computers used to have that either did nothing or made them go slower!

If there is no actual fan moving the air around inside the oven, the only convection currents will be near the walls unfortunately and the food will still rely on conduction and radiant to heat.

Duh why didn’t I think of that? I’m almost positive there’s no fan in there

Why is tomato paste in a tube suddenly so hard to find? I've gone to half a dozen supermarkets this past week and even the ones that used to carry it don't anymore.

because they want you to suffer through scooping out the contents of dumb tiny cans & freezing the lumps or just forgeting the half used can in the back of the fridge bc god forbid we ever have convenient packaging

aren't the tubes generally more concentrated than the canned stuff?

i dont think so?