I'm cooking really badly at the moment

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couldn't really find a good thread for this, so here we go

please to help me remedy my guacamole from too much salt. i accidentally got a little overzealous in seasoning it and now i fear that overnight it's become too salty. i worry about adding more lime bc it's already quite limey... what else can i do? would stirring in a bit of plain yogurt help cut down the saltiness?

hmmm.... can you put a little more avocado in?

i used all of em!

maybe you're right, some yogurt might work! pretty harmless either way

Plain yogurt might help - I would drain it for a bit first, to make it more creamy. Definitely not more lime - I think citrus and salt play off each other, intensifying both. If you're serving with chips, get unsalted ones. Some deseeded chopped tomato or tomatillo might also help curb the salt.

true nuf i was thinking tomato.

yeah unfortunately i already bought the chips and they are salted. will try more tomato. i have some plain greek yogurt that may help.

moar hot pepper

i mean i'm actually really into salt so if you have guests like me they might be really into it :)

oh yeah, greek yogurt is nice and thick already, no need to drain. I think Tombot has a point - have you got fresh jalapenos or serranos to add? The extra heat will help balance the salt.

Other, non-traditional things that would definitely soak up the salt: mushrooms (sauted then blended/processored smooth with some oil if needed) or eggplant (peeled, diced, quickly boiled, well-drained and blended smooth). Both will mess with the color, probably too much.

i already put in 1/2 a fresh jalapeno... a little nervous about adding more but i bet it could handle a little bit.

(it was 2.5 avocados, btw so i am not sure about proper pepper amt)

That always varies so much, peppers are all so different depending on where they were grown etc. To keep the heat down, don't put in any of the seeds or the whitish membrane from around the seeds.

Also, the heat will develop over time, so I'd add the extra pepper close to when you want to serve it.

good tip!
yeah, my mother taught me early on: no seeds or membrane!

ummmm how long is too long to marinate chicken breasts with a lemon-based marinade? it's been at least 24 hours? are they going to be ridic?

what is wrong with my cooking lately?!?!?

Mmmmm, chicken ceviche ;)

24 hours is a while, but what can you do? They might be a bit lemony, but will be fine tasting, I'm sure - are you grilling them?

just cooking in a skillet i think

i forgot they were there.

Well, if they turn out to be too lemony to eat after you cook them, you could use them to make a base for soupa avgolemono.

My cooking has been all crap for a while now, but mostly it's because I am not doing it enough.

Nor am I starting up again just yet...

I should ask for recipes that require no tools or cooking whatsoever. Also, I should go buy a knife.

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?

- fry onions for longer
- include smoked paprika

?

Hm herbs usually do make a soup, esp a plain one like potato leek, but sometimes it just needs salt, I think!

I always figure that when something doesn't taste quite as good as I had hoped, it was because I was stingy with the salt or the fat. You can easily add more salt, but even adding a little butter probably wouldn't hurt either?

it could also be that your tastebuds have been so desensitized by processed/oversalted and over-flavored foods...

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

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?

Maybe black pepper? Or a little sour salt or lemon? Sometimes rich things need a bit of brightening up.

taste and salt, taste and salt

lemon also a good idea

Fresh herbs are nice but dried ones can be more flavorful or add depth.

taste and salt, taste and salt

― call all destroyer, Sunday, September 30, 2012 2:42 PM (40 seconds ago)

^^^ tasting as you go, crucial

xp -- yeah, I have a dried Italian herb blend that I get in Atlanta at Dekalb -- I really love it, put it in so many things.

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.

it's like i just learned a new language.

the language of heat

literally cooking is all salt and heat! (and acid and oil i guess)

one of my favorite exercises is the thai flavor wheel:

start w/ a pinch of chili, then taste a drop of lime, which cuts the oil, then a taste of salty to break down the acidity and further cut the oil, then sweet to bring out and balance the salty (not sure what sweet was, maybe a bit of palm sugar or coconut milk

then to make a curry you do the same thing in different order, to make soup you do a different order, to do salad you do a different order (salad iirc was garlic + salt + chili -> add lime -> add sugar -> add fish sauce (aromatic) finish)

so that's the originary vocabulary for thai cooking, i think every cuisine has an equivalent (french has oil or egg or cream, lemon or vinegar, onion and garlic, italians have different oils and vinegars)

i think cooking as a kind of math actually

You're not wrong. I think that's why I love it so.

See I dont, really! I wing everything with instinct. Tho I guess I do think about reactions and whatnot. So, chemistry rather than math for me.

you mean amounts or the temperatures and order in which you the parts of a curry or whatever?

i prob do things more instinctively too, but then i tend to loosely follow recipes and only really improvise when i'm sure.

I mean reactions and heat and stuff, its hard to explain. I know when something's brown enough/caramelized enough/soft enough/flavoursome enough somehow?

from looking and feeling

that's experience too

I think there are very generally sensory cue-driven people and precise science-driven people when it comes to cooking. I'm in the former camp, but I respect the latter if that approach works for them. You just have to figure out what works for you (ie experience).

hey i paid way more attention to / thought about how heat and salt work and made the best version of a dish (my own recipe) i've ever made last night. thank u late great and thread!

np, i tried to mash up three recipes, spilled a box of couscous all over the floor, dumped a pot of kale + cooking water all over the counter, and ended up with 2x as much dressing as i needed for kale and vegetables. yay me!

re: recipes i think the key is not so much precise amounts of spices and ingredients or certain amounts to the minute of cooking but more *the order of things* and the relative amount of time it looks for something to *be done*

you can only tell if a steak's done by look, smell, feel, etc, ditto toasting couscous

which i over toasted in my haste

cooking is just str8 up practice imo

and trying shit; like over the summer i made a terrible pork chop on the grill but tonight i made a rad pork chop in a skillet. like you gotta find what works for you.

yeah it took me a while to get the hang of grilling chicken breasts without carving them open to see if they're pink inside and now I am QUEEN OF ALL I SURVEY

and there are days where you just wing it and think you're gonna make something amazing that just really turns out like boiled garbage. circle of cuisine. new delicious dishes are born, they grow and change, others die slow deaths in yr stomach/trashcan/dogbowl

my best bad cooking effort: I tried to make sweet potato homefries and they burned all to fuck but they were still kind of edible and so mr veg and I sat at the dinner table eating forkfuls of these weird blackened chewy sweet potato worms and just looking at each other like 'WE WILL NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN'

chicken breasts are a national lie

boneless skinless = agreed

they have their uses

they are good ... for me to poop on

Dark meat all the way with skin and bones

if it quells your ire we buy breasts on the bone & I occasionally use them for boneless skinless cooking on a grill pam when it is too hot to use the oven

jeez u guys

i love dark meat too!

leave the skin on dammit, helps keep the precious poultry juices inside the meat

crispy salted chicken skin mmmmm or just peel it off before serving

the best is a whole chicken + a weeks leftover chicken

YOU ARE NOT THE CHICKEN BOSS OF ME

we regularly barbecue the chicken with the skin on

leaving the skin on a filleted breast is kind of pointless, surely - the juices are going to come out the cut side anyway

wait why did you filet the breast?

i guess for scallopini or whatever you take the skin off but i so rarely eat chicken filet

because I don't want to turn on the oven - it's hot as hades here already

I can cook the filets quickly and easily on the stove on a grill pan

and by filet I mean just take the breast off the bone, I don't mean like paper thin slices or anything crazy like that

if you grill pan w/ skin side down the juices will trap between the crisping skin and the meat, be sure to cover with a heavy lid to keep the juices steaming the chicken

you can kinda brown w/o cooking the inside with the skin down too

if I ever leave the skin on, I'll try that :P

:)

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?