my wife is not as good of a cook as I am so I am the cook in my household. My mom is god tier in cooking.
my general tip for cooking:
“you can fix a little, but you can’t fix too much”
you can add flavor little by little and taste, if needs be, add more. But, if you over flavor to start off with, your dish is ruined for the most part.
anyone have any good recipes for making homemade sushi? I saw one a while back where it’s like eel plus rice plus 2 or 3 other things and i heard it was good, can’t seem to find it though.
I’m Vietnamese… PHO is something that isn’t learned over night. If you want to learn to make something simple with Lemon Grass…
I recommend Lemon Grass Chicken (In Vietnamese it’s called “Ga Xao Xa Ot”. This is how I make it! I followed the recipe and it was a lot easier than how my aunt taught me (she makes it realy good but I don’t feel like slavin 43983 hours in the kitchen).
2 lbs of chicken
1 large onion
Salt to taste
1 tbs ground chillies
1 tbs granulated sugar
1 cup water
4 garlic cloves
3 tbs vegetable oil
2 tbs minched lemon grass
4 tbs Nuoc Mam (Vietnamese fish sauce)
1 tbs caramel sauce
To prepare:
Rinse chicken and dry well
Cut into small pieces
Peel garlic and slice finely
Cut onion into halves lengthwise and then cut lengthwise into 1/2 inch strips
Heat oil in large frying pan over medium heat
Add a pinch of salt, garlic and onion
Fry over medium heat until onion becomes translucent
Add lemon grass and chili
Fry 1 to 2 minutes until fragrant. Add chicken and cook until lightly browned
Add fish sauce, sugar and caramel sauce, mixing well
Add 1 cup water and cook 45 minutes or until chicken is tender
Stir occasionally and add more water if necessary
Serve hot with caramel sauce
To prepare caramel sauce:
Mix 1/2 c sugar with 4 tablespoons of water in heavy saucepan
Bring to a boil over medium heat and let boil until mixture changes colour
Turn heat down to low and heat until brown
Add 1/2 cup water to mixture
Stir until sugar is dissolved
Remove from heat and store in a jar in the refrigerator.
I like reading asian food and restaurant blogs…anybody else?
im interested in knowing some of these blogs
i hate lemon grass. :wasted:
me and the wife are craving for some Philly cheese steak. What kind of cheese ‘should’ I use: American or swiss? i know its easy to look it up at any web site, but maybe you guys have anything else to add to this simple, but very good sandwich.
the rest I know of:
-strips of steak
-onions
-green peppers
-a sub sandwich type bun
-garlic spread
I just moved out on my own and I need cooking tips so I can save money by not eating out all the time! :wasted:
What are some cheap/easy/basic meals to cook for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Spaghetti
Chili
Fried rice
Pizza
Bread (don’t underestimate)
come to think of it, I don’t have posted recipes for all those
Provolone. Cheez Whiz actually works pretty good in a pinch, as well. But if you can afford it, then don’t skimp on the cheese. Provolone all the way.
ok I have
-3lb of dethawed chicken boneless chicken breast
-hot n ready George Foreman grill
-a rack full of spices
discuss(tips,advice,etc)
all you need is salt and pepper and knowledge of how not to overcook proteins
Big Props to Green for making a far more detailed thread than I’ve ever done. Hope I could live up to the standards that he set out.
Perhaps we should make this thread in to a general foodie thread. Aside from kitchen recipes, make it about books, biographies, celebs, food in the news, workplace (I wonder how many cooks and chefs are on SRK now?) TV, radio, restaurant experiences and best of all stories in general.
Recent Non-Work Personal Experiences
Me I’m going to take the culinary program at VCC in Vancouver at the end of march. I’ve been listening to a podcast called “The Restaurant Guys” which has some common insight with most chefs and the food industry and just wonder if I’m getting into the right program. It’s a 1 year program, teaches everything the big culinary only schools do but at 1/3 the price. However many people say just go for an apprenticeship where it’s far more of a learning process. But I guess I’ll be going full bore on the first year anyways.
For food, found some great restaurants, although looking for more obviously. Was surprised as fuck to find a popular vegetarian venue that is opened 24 hours. I might have to go there someday instead of hitting up a Denny’s (which was atrocious down here). Also I ate the worst food in the fucking city at this place called Knight and Day. I had my doubts about going there upon an internet rating, but my brother recommended so I didn’t argue.
Work Related Experiences
Started working at one of the 20 best businesses to work for in BC (not just restaurants …BUSINESS period) as a lowly fucking dishwasher. It didn’t matter because I needed something to pass the time before I start school in March and just filling in before I move into prep somewhere. My last job ended me in care of the entire preparation list for the kitchen (my first cooking job which was weird) not because I was a good worker but because everyone else above me quit. I’ll tell the story of my supervisor at another time, he was a total crack addict but hilarious. But it’s nice not to have all the responsibility.
New Year’s Eve was INSANE I spent it working but we were outside in the alley drinking champagne when midnight rolled over. The core exploded with cheers and whistles. Some creepy guy next door was taking pictures of us and we didn’t get out until 2:30am.
Foodie Books I’ve read
A great thing about my place at work is that they have a library of foodie books that you can borrow and learn from. Haven’t gotten a chance to look at them because I get off at 1:00am in the morning every night so I don’t have time to indulge. The last book I read was “Last Chance to Eat” by Gina Mallet which I bought on the sole reason that Bourdain was quoted for thinking the book was great. And it is great. Part biography, part essay, part history lesson, with a dash of recipes it’s certainly an eye opener to what food was in the past century and what it could be for the future. It sort of makes me sad and happy at the same time where we now have more access to varieties of food in any given history of time, yet denied some of the best of what the taste has to offer because of red-tape, homogenization and just mass demand.
Before that I was half heartedly reading The Nasty Bits by Bourdain which is alright, more of the same but some more personal stories. I guess he is somewhat of a one trick pony.
Internet Ramblings
Ran across these websites about food here. Tastespotting which is a user contributed and generated blog of other blog posts and recipes on the net. Very Magazine like presented, but I guess if anything gets anyone to cook that’ll be great. A huge find for me was the actual Ratatouille recipe used in the film or at least a version similar to it found here. Best yet that appealed to the artistic side of me was Foodpairing which uses the concept of colour wheels but only with food tastes. It’s fucking amazing because it simplifies the list of what herbs and flavours go together in a visual and easy to absorb presentation. Problem is that it doesn’t take into consideration the idea of contrasting flavours only complimentary ones.
Television
Sadly I don’t have food network anymore. Even worst Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA version sucks ass. Too much like it’s bigger brother Hell’s Kitchen, it really focuses too much on the success of the renovation of both menu, people and especially restaurant rather than actually addressing the real problems or at least showing the method of solving them. It’s go in go out, no conflict just sensationalism. To quote Ramsay, he looks like a right twat every time he comes out of the front door of the restaurant in order to talk to the camera and bitch about something. The UK version, he does swear from time to time, but it far less canned, far more personal and more importantly far more sincere in cutting right to the person’s own problems rather than brow beating them into submission.
OC
ORANGE CAT i LOVE YOU!!!
Where the hell have you been???
I found a pretty nice bread recipe for you all to try:
A recipe with an easier procedure with the same results is as follows:
No-knead bread
Time: About 30 minutes plus 16 to 20 hours? rising
Ingredients:
3 cups (430g) all-purpose or bread flour
1-1/2 cups spring or filtered lukewarm water (or optionally 1-1/8 cups water and 3/8 cups beer)
1 tablespoon white vinegar
Up to 1 teaspoon olive oil
teaspoon instant AKA RapidRise yeast
1-3/4 teaspoons kosher salt (or 1-1/2 teaspoons table salt)
In a large stainless steel bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add liquids and stir until blended (I used a stainless steel teaspoon); dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 16 hours, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Stir down the dough thoroughly with a spoon until the volume no longer decreases.
Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger. Note that there will be large air bubbles in the bread if it is baked as is; to reduce the number of large bubbles, simply degas the dough by “poking around” with a spoon.
At least a half-hour before dough is ready, set oven to 450 degrees. Put a 3- to 4-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) with its lid in the oven as it heats.
When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven, or slide it out very carefully on the rack. Remove lid, being careful where you put it, and drop the dough into pot (I had to scrape it out with a large metal spoon). Shake pot if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Slash if desired.
Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is browned. Cool on a rack to room temperature before slicing.
Yield: One 1-pound loaf.
I modified the recipe after I’ve had some time to play around with it. The inclusion of beer and white vinegar is from Cook’s Illustrated.
BTW, please use flour that’s fairly fresh. The first time I tried it, I used flour that was about 5 years old… Tasted and looked like shit.
Green I’mma going to try that out tomorrow. Getting low on bread anyways.
Recent Non-Work Personal Experiences
Nothing to report. Read the knife sharpening tutorial that Green posted and learned a LOT. There is a lot to absorb in and got lost in some of the lingo, but I’m pretty fucking stoked to use my Xmas Gift money to buy a knife set soon. Question is, I don’t know what or how many different knives I should get. Chef’s, paring and a meat knife obviously with a steel. Scissors I’mma going to go for as well but not necessarily from the same place I’m going to buy my knife set. Going to buy the one where the blades can be released so I could clean and sharpen if necessary. Going to bite the bullet and get Henckel knives since they are entry level higher end knives and of course ready to be abused at work. Going to have a nice little surprise to get something engraved on my chef’s knife. Totally think R U OK? On one side and “BUSTA WOLF!” on the other. I’m such a Goddamn geek.
Work Related Experiences
A crazy story from my previous job. Dishwashers were pretty hard to keep in a small town, especially when it was booming in the oil patch where you could make $25+/Hour for probably the same amount of effort, time and pain in dishwashing. It’s not so much the long hours as the being the last fucking person to close the restaurant after most people left. We had an army of kids who are pretty unreliable and worst yet…stupid as fucking bricks. Being kids and going to school, daytime dishwashing was a mess at best of times. What happened is that we ended up hiring a pregnant lady to be the daytime dishwasher. Which was probably the worst fucking idea in the history of the restaurant.
My supervisor at the time liked me because I just followed orders. It didn’t matter that I was starting out in the industry; apparently I was miles above some of the other guys he had to supervise at the time. Not a conflict of cooking ideals, but just being plain lazy. Our daytime dishwasher was also going to be partial prep-cook at the same time in which that’s when the shit started to fly. The funny thing is that she applied to be a server but seeing on her resume that she had prior kitchen experience, they put her in the back of the house. My supervisor hated her right off the bat. I don’t know if it was because it was a woman or because she just contradicted him at the wrong time which stuck in his head far too much that it should…but some of the things he said behind her back were the most horrible things I’ve ever heard any human being say to another human being in real life. He went so far to say "You know what man? I think she has AIDs…really I really do think she has AIDs. It’s like a vacuum just went into her mouth and just sucked her face in. And her teeth, total crack addict!" I politely shown my fake response of “really?” with him and kept on going with prep. Funny thing is that he was totally two-faced about it all. He argued with her maybe twice, (perhaps more when I wasn’t around) but when she was around sometimes he would initiate a group hug.
The most dirty and perhaps justifiable thing I saw him do was on her first or second day, after she left work; my supervisor went into the cooler only to find her handbag in there with some various food-items. Not particularly foodsafe or sanitary according to him and he basically blew a gasket. Being a bit hysterical he acted like he was stumbling around and let the handbag go on purpose to fall down to the floor. There was a glass drink in there and it basically soaked everything which the next day when she came in to look for her handbag, he just said it must’ve just fallen off the rack somehow…he found it like that.
Internet Ramblings
None.
Television/Movies
The Germans are pretty unfunny in their films. When No Reservations with Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart came out, I wanted to see it just because it’s about a restaurant. I knew it was going to be shit but I eventually found out it was yet another American adaptation of a foreign film. I watched the original movie; Mostly Martha/Bella Martha and it’s probably better than the US version. However it’s been a while since I saw a film so fucking dour where any attempt at humour or even romance is almost crushed by the serious tone of the film which by relation…almost makes said humour and romance seem far too serious for it’s own good. Overall it’s an alright film, probably more alright than the US version. However I must see the film Last Night, which apparently accurately portrays how it is in a restaurant.
Recipe Recommendation
Easy Ass Pizza Dough
Just a recipe for pizza dough that I’ve been using for the past few months from Delia’s How to Cook book series Book 2. To some degree it is a pain the in ass to make, but really…you’re saving money; you know what fucking ingredients you’re putting in and best of all it doesn’t taste like chewy cardboard that even pizza shells taste like. Try it out. The first real hurdle is doing it first. Remember cooking anything is like trying out some sort new activity. It’s frustrating at first because of the time you waste by reading, rereading and making sure things are correct. But with anything with practice, eventually you will get the hang of it and the “lie” of the prep-time will actually become true.
Ingredients
6oz (175g) plain white soft flour (extra flour for rolling).
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon easy blend dried yeast.
0.5 teaspoon of sugar
1 TABLEspoon olive oil
4 fl oz (120 ml) hand hot water.
Serves 2 (but for more voracious appetites double the batch, even quadruple…I’ll explain later)
Procedure
You could warm up the flour in the oven just to give the dough more of a headstart to rise, but I usually don’t. Sift the flour, salt, yeast and sugar into a bowl, create a small well in the middle and add the olive oil and water. Start mixing the dough with a large spoon and use your hands to bring it all together at the end. Add water accordingly if there are dry bits.
Knead the dough on a clean floured surface for about 3 minutes until it develops a bit of a sheen and blisters on the surface. It should feel springy and elastic. Leave the dough in a grease bowl with either a tea cloth or cling wrap over it in a warm place and wait one hour or when it doubles in size.
When it’s ready, you can knock/knead the dough into a nice ball which redistributes the air in the crust so it’s even throughout. Now if you followed my advice earlier about making a double or even triple batch; here’s where after kneading it, you can take the portion you want and portion off the rest and wrap it up in cling wrap and freeze it. So if you feel like having pizza on day, just take one piece of frozen dough out in the morning, put it into the fridge and it’ll be thawed out by the time you get home…ready for toppings and cooking. You’ll never have to order again.
Finally stretching the dough. I’m not a professional, but me personally I flatten the ball out a bit and then just pulling from the edges. This will already create a rised crust while making the middle thin so you have less to do for forming the edge. When it get’s large enough, you can use your fists and basically pass it back and forth from knuckle to knuckle, slightly pulling it each time to increase the diameter. The recipe says that it yields a 10" pizza, but the most I ever got was like a 8-9", once again it might be because did something wrong during the yeast part. I usually activate my yeast separately in a bowl of warm water with sugar.
Top it off with your toppings of choice, add a splash of olive oil if you want and bake on a tray or pizza tray at 450F until the middle is brown, the cheese is bubbling or about 15-20 minutes.
The only problem I found with this recipe so far is that when the toppings are done, the dough is still a bit limp. You will not be getting a crisp bottom crust unless you probably give the cooking pan a bit of oil to aid in crisping. Also for the recommended serving amount will make for a very very thin crush pizza for about 8" in diameter, I might have been using yeast that isn’t as potent anymore; it certainly isn’t a great crust, but it certainly isn’t chewy cardboard. I’d recommend doubling up on the recipe if you want to have an actual pizza that will fill you up rather than be a flatbread snack.
Toppings are whatever the fuck you want. Fresh is always good, but if you already put this much effort into the dough, then having something canned would be alright. I mean who the fuck wants to peel a pineapple? Main thing though is to keep the fucking toppings simple. Don’t overload it because there will be a LOT of water and therefore soggy pizza. Instead, when your dough is rising, slice up a few vegetables and give them a light fry in some oil and season before you put them onto the pizza. Raw is also alright if you want that extra crunch.
As for a multi-tasker and great flavour addition to the pizza, add on a few cloves of roasted garlic. For the recipe, it’s as follows:
Ingredients
-1-6 bulbs of garlic (the more the better but adjust for how often you use it)
-Olive Oil, enough to wet the top of the garlic
-Salt and Pepper to taste.
Procedure
Set oven to 400f degrees. Cut off the top of the garlic bulb so all of the garlic cloves are exposed. If you miss some that’s alright but it just makes extracting easier. Give it a small splash of olive oil, some salt and pepper and wrap in aluminum foil. Bake in the center of oven for 50 minutes - 1 hour. Check on it after 50 minutes and if it’s really soft and brown take it out before it burns, if not, cook longer.
If you’re stingy bastard like me, you’d use a fork or carefully a small knife to fish out the cloves. They should pop out with no problem. If you don’t care and just want it out; after they are cool or cold enough to handle without burning, just squeeze the bulb over a bowl and the cloves will squish out.
Lots of uses for roasted garlic. In this case just slather it on the pizza for added flavour. You can just eat it because it’s lost it’s heat and becomes incredibly sweet. Add it to your canned spaghetti sauce for more added flavour or your homemade tomato sauce. Spread in on bread just to eat it or add some diced tomatoes and basil to have bruscetta. Also spread it on crackers with a nice green herb like cilantro or parsley.
OC
I’ve work in fine dining restuarants as a line cook before. Most likely you’ll end up either high or drunk while work. A lot of drug use in the kitchen.
Not from what I can see at my job. They are clean cut as Christians, at least during work hours. Foul mouthed (as always) but not high. I hope not to run in a situation like that but whatever. It’ll eventually happen. You have any wonderful stories to relay to us lowly mortals?
OC
I’d like some different Kim Chi soup recipes please!! =) Oh and Korean pancake as well!
OC’s cooking posts are so beast that now my paltry contributions to the thread don’t seem worth typing up! :sad:
Good to see you back.