I'm cooking really badly at the moment

tasting as you go, crucial
Why don't I ever do this????

i dunno, you gotta do that!

I was reluctant to add too much salt in the potato leek soup because I spilt the water with chicken stock. I figure the stock had enough flavor?

I do all my veggie soups with straight stock! Tho the strength is a vague thing as I usually get lazy and use massel vegan "chicken" stock.

i'm always really shitty when it comes to timing things while cooking - like all the sautéed veggies will be mush by the time i finish the grains, etc

― clouds, Sunday, September 30, 2012 2:17 PM (Yesterday)

I do think getting all the parts of the meal to finish at once is the master-level indicator of home cooking. Everytime I do it right I feel like a flame juggler.

I have made **four** disappointingly bad meals in the past month (meals intended to last multiple days), and every time it was due to undersalting. It's like I never made "add more salt to things" my pasts' most successful New Years resolution. It's like I learned NOTHING.

my one weird trick for syncing meals--every sunday i make the same breakfast. eggs over easy, hash browns, bacon, toast, and tea. and every week i try to get better at getting everything on the plate fresh and hot at the same time. obv every new meal presents a different challenge but this forces me to think a lot about the process.

it is weird everyone here being so pro-salt. i love salt, it is my favourite food, & w/cooking - especially basic stuff, rice or w/e - i feel like you just have to add incrementally more until something ends up being delicious & salty. but i figured most people disagreed, or thought this was illicit, or thought you shouldn't go so crazy with the salt, or had alternative, more complicated strategies. the saltiness + the deliciousness of food is an arrow streaking directly & diagonally forwards on a graph, to me.

i really like the stage of needing to do a bunch of shit at once when cooking. like ideally if it's only for a couple of people, & the kitchen isn't too hot, but having to chop the fuck out of a pepper while being conscious of the rice having absorbed its water & being in danger of burning, hearing mustard seeds pop & having to draw water from the tap at maximum speed to boil a kettle - it is the feeling of being alive.

Last night I overcooked a really nice tuna steak -- it was very thick, and I pan-seared it a few minutes on each side then gave it a couple minutes the oven. Came out, was VERY red in the middle, let it sit a bit to continue cooking a little from its own heat, just let it sit a bit too long and it got completely overdone.

agh I feel your pain

I wonder if maybe tuna retains heat better than steak, or maybe just cooks faster? I've done that with steak before and never saw it go from red to completely cooked inside.

steak like beef?

tasting is 100% key to soup, la lechera otm...especially bc you're usually salting as you go, or towards the end. you may not need it, but you won't know unless you're tasting.

schlump otm -- I love having a few things on the go and moving from one to the other as I cook. the only time I hate it is when I'm cooking an unfamiliar recipe and it becomes a mad panic of doing all the things all at once and doing them all half-assed/too fast/badly. but when you're in your relaxed natural state of cooking it's the best feeling.

well, fish does cook faster than beef so I would expect that's why!

mmm now I want steak

xp

yeah i was gonna say...

also i basically always want steak, it's a bad way to be

Another thing I have been doing a lot lately -- creating huge amounts of smoke and setting off my alarm whenever I broil or sear. Maybe my range hood is just not that good.

i really like the stage of needing to do a bunch of shit at once when cooking. like ideally if it's only for a couple of people, & the kitchen isn't too hot, but having to chop the fuck out of a pepper while being conscious of the rice having absorbed its water & being in danger of burning, hearing mustard seeds pop & having to draw water from the tap at maximum speed to boil a kettle - it is the feeling of being alive.

ughhhhghgh why i hate cooking in one sentence.

+why it takes me three hours and i make 1-2 dishes max.

xxpost hurting I hear you on the smoke thing. Our kitchen doesn't have a range so I have to remember to open the windows, and/or put on the whole-house fan otherwise I set off the smoke alarm doing something cook sausages, lol

^^ Why we don't have a smoke alarm in our exhaust-fan-less kitchen.

we had to take the one out of the kitchen for that reason, but there's still one in the adjoining computer room that'll go off

I have definitely found that reducing the amount of oil/fat you cook with can help -- that's what smokes.

I like having a bunch of dishes going at once, but I try to have all the meez done for them before I start. Nothing like the OH SHIIIIII of getting to the last crucial moment when the sauce has reduced to the perfect consistency and realizing I hadn't chopped the finishing fresh herbs yet.

sausages are just a pain in the ass to cook without some smoke, because you want the browning and blehhh I mostly make Mr Veg to do them outside. we don't have them very often, thankfully

the few times I've had to do a high temperature oven roasting is just "BE READY WITH THE BROOMSTICK TO SWITCH OFF THE SMOKE DETECTOR IN 3 2 1"...ugh

I like having a bunch of dishes going at once, but I try to have all the meez done for them before I start. Nothing like the OH SHIIIIII of getting to the last crucial moment when the sauce has reduced to the perfect consistency and realizing I hadn't chopped the finishing fresh herbs yet.

― Death Grits 2 (WmC), Monday, October 1, 2012 4:51 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it was pretty revelatory when i realized i needed to do ALL THE PREP first

yeah I'm kind of ocd about doing all of my meez. especially for long involved dishes

btw for the budget-minded, my knife-collecting father-in-law just got us a pair of nogent micro-serrated knives, which are holy shit the best inexpensive knives ever. They're very light weight and don't have the forged look/feel but they are SO sharp and apparently never need sharpening.

Now that I've inherited a dishwasher and I can just throw a bunch of empty small prep bowls in the top rack, I can look a big meal's worth of meez and say "nyah nyah"

Salt and acid (lemon, vinegar) will fix just about any blandness imo. Also something for subtle umami (couple of drops of Worcester or fish sauce, or some anchovy).

I lurve my prep bowls except they aren't big enough for piles of chopped veg so I use an extra dinner plate for groups of everything I'm going to add.

I know they say about "authentic" Italian food that the grandmas who make it don't even use cutting boards, they just cut things up over the bowl with a paring knife, but fuck it, I gotta be ready.

mr veg found these tiny little stainless steel plates? dishes? about the size of the palm of yr hand that are perfect for spice meez :D

http://www.surlatable.com/product/PRO-190188/Sur-La-Table-Sets-of-Five-Prep-Bowls

meez?

meal prep steez?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

'read more than I talk to people or watch tv' pronunciation curse strikes again

pretty sure my mom suffers from the same thing since she calls it her 'mice on place'

as do did I

Might start calling it my mice on plates, just because.

i don't usually call it anything
don't even think i've ever said it out loud, in fact!

I usually just refer to it as "prep" and resent it for taking longer than the actual cooking.

I learned the term from that first Bourdain article in the New Yorker, way back in prehistory or 2000, whichever came first.

I learned it from Bourdain too

I only say it online or to Mr Veg bc I think I sound cooler that way

*hangs head*

Today my potato leek soup was sort of bland and last night my made from scratch spaghetti sauce that I roasted tomatoes for was also sort of bland. I've been using salt while cooking, fresh herbs, and making everything from quality ingredients, where am I going wrong?

overcooking no doubt

I love saying it out loud. Meez. MEEEEEEZZZZZZ. Got my meez, gonna turn it into an omelette. Like the "makin' copies" guy from SNL.

sausages should be boiled in beer - you don't need to cook them that much over boiling so if you cover them on a skillet with just enough water to cover the point where the sausage touches the skillet (so like 1/4 cup or less), beer or anything not oil-based in the bottom of the skillet, and cover it, the steam temperature will be plenty to cook it, then sear with a super-hot grill pan for not very long with the window open, voila not too much smoke. depending on shape/size of grill pan you could do boath in the same pan when the boiling stuff has sizzled off into nothingness

also the thing about salt is that you don't just add it arbitrarily at certain parts of the cooking

you want to add salt when you want to tenderize meat, so for example in a soup stock you would cook with salt, but throw out the vegetables, because the salt destroys the cell walls of the vegetables

OTOH you want to do that to finished vegetables, so sea salt on top of your finished vegetables is important

my advice to learn how to use salt is to read good recipes and follow them precisely, and you'll get a a sense of when and how much salt to add

salt pulls juices out of vegetables, so if they're quite dry, like eggplant, you start with salt, but if they're wet, like tomatoes, don't add salt until the end

etc etc etc

sausages boiled in beer? that is almost as crazy as duck boiled in coke. definitely giving it a go.

if you know what;s good for that chicken

*eyeroll*

lol

Ive gone right off skinless breast meat for anything, in the old days I'd pan fry those fuckers and always wonder whyfore chewy. Now I do whole roasts, and if its stir fry or curry, thigh meat all the way. Im not a dark meat fan in the "eat the meat off the bones" sense when it comes to the whole bird. But thigh meat is best in stew situs. All that fat.

Breasts are good poached but I'm still working that one out.

how do you poach? i haven't done that yet.

except fish in an oven

Just slip a breast into water or stock (usually stock) with maybe some slivers of garlic and a bay leaf, then simmer gently for maybe 5 mins then let it sit covered in the liquid with the heat off, for another 10? Im never sure how long, i seeem to still overdo it and it goes tough.

covered, right?