Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Miss Cat Ears]

box chicken broth tastes good on rice just a little bits

[Büge]

Sauce and carb cooking is a staple of poor peasant food.

I'd like to add that you should definitely include a protein of some kind. Chicken, fish, beans, nuts, whatever. All carbs will do is provide you with energy. Proteins are necessary for bodily upkeep.

[Shinra]

Sauce and carb cooking is a staple of poor peasant food.

I'd like to add that you should definitely include a protein of some kind. Chicken, fish, beans, nuts, whatever. All carbs will do is provide you with energy. Proteins are necessary for bodily upkeep.

I always thicken my curry with cashews. You can get them for really cheap at big lots. You can actually thicken a LOT of sauces with cashew, they don't do a lot to the flavor profile but the thickening performed is completely different from what you'd get with flour or corn starch.

Continue to turn vegetables.  People just don't care enough to do that shit anymore and it's so entirely worthwhile, especially for stuff like glazed vegetables.

Got a schlubby jug of Californian wine around?  One pot: season, flour, sear and set aside chicken, saute vegetables (save the potatoes and large dice parsnips), red wine, scrape scrape scrape, once the alcohol's cooked off cool the wine down in an ice bath.  Chicken and parsley (uh, probably not all of the parsley) in the wine in the fridge for a day.  Take it out, skim the fat off the top, put it in a pot with some water or chicken stock* to cover the chicken, cook covered in 325 degree oven for 2+ hours.  Chicken's tender?  Set it aside, keep it warm, strain and reduce the sauce.  In a perfect world you'd have pearl onions, mushrooms and maybe salt pork to cook in that sauce while it's reducing, but you're like the mayor of vegetable mountain already so no big.

Hooray, coq au vin.

For the parsnips, just incase you were unaware of the magic of glazed vegetables: put them in a pan with just enough water to cover and enough room for them to roll around on the bottom when they're near done.  A small amount of sugar, a hunk of butter.  Season it how you like, boil it down until the liquid is a nice glossy coating.  Don't boil it so hard the vegetables break apart and don't let the sugar caramelize toward the end.

* even when cookery books tell you you can use box chicken broth instead of water, you can't.  Try straight up drinking a cup of box chicken broth sometime.  Nasty shit.

I don't know where you get your boxed chicken broth, but I always use broth in my soups when I can't afford stock (which is often) and they always come out great. Stock makes a huge difference over broth when it's providing 90% of the flavor (like Risotto) but in a dish with lots of seasoning and different ingredients I'm really not convinced that it matters.

Obviously home made stock is always going to be noticeably better than broth, though.
 

[Büge]

I always thicken my curry with cashews. You can get them for really cheap at big lots. You can actually thicken a LOT of sauces with cashew, they don't do a lot to the flavor profile but the thickening performed is completely different from what you'd get with flour or corn starch.

Are we talking ground cashews or whole? Also, I'm assuming you mean raw cashews, which are soooo good...

Here, have a recipe!

1 and a half cup of pitted dates
2 cups raw cashews
some (dairy-free) milk

1. Soak the dates in hot water until soft.
2. Grind the cashews in a cuisinart until fine. Set aside half a cup.
3. Add the dates to the cashews and process until mixed. Add some milk to bind the mix.
4. Make the resulting paste into little balls and roll them in the cashews you set aside.
5. Chill the balls for an hour.
6. OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

[R^2]

Well yeah, we've been steadily eating our way through the stuff, or had been until the dog got into the fridge, helped himself to what he wanted, and left the door open for about five hours while everything inside spoiled.

I'm just saying that so far in school we've done a lot of classroom work that has little to do with actual cookery and a single lab class that has thus far covered... knife skills, emulsions, and roux. When it comes to actually cooking things I'm still on my own.

[Niku]

A root beer float
WITH GINGER ICE CREAM

[Shinra]

I always thicken my curry with cashews. You can get them for really cheap at big lots. You can actually thicken a LOT of sauces with cashew, they don't do a lot to the flavor profile but the thickening performed is completely different from what you'd get with flour or corn starch.

Are we talking ground cashews or whole? Also, I'm assuming you mean raw cashews, which are soooo good...

Here, have a recipe!

1 and a half cup of pitted dates
2 cups raw cashews
some (dairy-free) milk

1. Soak the dates in hot water until soft.
2. Grind the cashews in a cuisinart until fine. Set aside half a cup.
3. Add the dates to the cashews and process until mixed. Add some milk to bind the mix.
4. Make the resulting paste into little balls and roll them in the cashews you set aside.
5. Chill the balls for an hour.
6. OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

I've refined my curry into an almost commercial level product using some advice I picked up from an indian celebrity chef's channel on youtube. I take all my base ingredients aside from the stuff I want to be chunky and blend it in a commercial blender the in-laws bought on impulse. (An old Osterizer will work just as well, if you can find one made before the 70s) When I do this I throw the cashews in and blend until it's smooth and just a little airy.

After that I pour the curry back into the pot, add the chicken or lamb or beef (which I coated in yogurt and spices and seared prior) and whatever else I want in there (Cauliflower and/or Potato usually) and cook them together for about 30 minutes with the lid on. If I'm making butter chicken or tikka masala (or even vindaloo) I usually add about 2-3 tbsp of Ketchup. (more advice from indian celebrity chef) I prefer Ketchup to straight up sugar.

If I'm making something I want to have a specific texture, of course, I don't use the blender. This is the case with, say, Korma, where I mash up most of the ingredients and hand crush the spices and cashews for a more coarse texture. I got this idea from an indian cookbook. It's time consuming, which keeps the Korma from being a regular thing - strictly a birthdays and anniversaries dish - but the quality is hard to beat.

I stopped making curry for six months after my trip to Michigan, because noone in my family except my grandmother enjoyed my curry, and she couldn't eat it because the blood thinner she was on restricted her from eating garlic, ginger, onion or cauliflower. I'm beginning to get a taste for it again, it's one of the things I really enjoy cooking and eating, and everyone who lives here appreciates it at least.

[Shinra]

A root beer float
WITH GINGER ICE CREAM

Jesus, that sounds good. Where'd you get the ice cream?

[Niku]

It's a part of Haagen-Dasz's "Five" line of ice creams made with five ingredients only.  Milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and ginger.

[Shinra]

t sei and buge;

I use just standard snackin' cashews. The ones I've been using lately are salted, but that just means I use less salt in the seasoning. I'm guessing these are roasted? I don't know the difference between raw and not raw here, as I've never seen or had any specifically marketed as raw.

[Büge]

If you have any sort of bulk food store, you can probably find raw cashews there. I think they go better in most kinds of cooking, since they're not treated with oil or salt. Like you could soak them in water overnight and then make cashew cream.

[Shinra]

We have a ten pound bag of russets that is sadly going south, so today I made most of it into criss-cut fries. Froze most of it, but fried a few batches up and seasoned them with some lowry's.
 

[Mongrel]

Oh fuck, Lowry's, oh God yes... om nom nom.

[Shinra]

Since someone asked me, here's what I used to cut the taters:

[Miss Cat Ears]

Oh my god he cut them using nothing but his mind!

[Shinra]

??? The image was working for me, but I moved to another host just in case.

[Miss Cat Ears]

it works now and also I want one

[Büge]

Tell me you kept the skins on. There's nothing that ruins potatoes more than peeling them.

_{Well, apart from blight.}

[Mongrel]

Or feeding them to the Irish.

[Miss Cat Ears]

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee