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Hey I've been pretty hardcore into cooking recently. It's not just me though, but I have three picky as gently caress kids and a wife that can't eat anything due to AIP (she desperately wants the food I make that the kids won't touch but she can't do beans, dairy, soy, wheat, rice (seriously going on the restriction sucks balls but it super works)). (also my mother in law lives with us and often she eats vile prepackaged poo poo but sometimes I'll see she's eaten my pizza with my deranged and weirdly specific toppings and I'm so loving happy when she does. Sometimes her poor as balls brother shows up and he eats the poo poo out of my food and it makes my god drat day.) So I tend to have a lot of ingredients and have to balance making stuff before it goes and also that my wife can eat. Maybe there'll be some things that help you reconceptualize how you're going about food. Seasonings and flavors that last: * Kosher salt * Whole Pepper corns (best deal is at Costco) * Chinese wine from the Asian store * Soy sauce * Jarred garlic (gently caress chefs who say its garbage, it lasts forever) * Mustard * Curry mix from Asian store * Yeast, I want you to get into bread okay and you can just put a jar of it in the fridge. I got a brick that I'm working through over the course of a year and the kids love pizza * Sesame seeds, crunchy onions and dry stuff you can sprinkle over food to spruce it up * Vinegar - Probably get something awesome at an Asian store, but I use white vinegar because we get one giant rear end bottle to make cleaning products from and I take a bit at the start for cooking Seasonings - Garlic powder, onion powder, cinnamon, basil is probably the only other stuff you'll need Stuff that doesn't last forever but is fine seriously * Olive oil (I get a big jug, sits on my counter for a month, so a smaller one should be fine) * Salted Butter (salted butter lasts longer and the only difference is you tone down on salt) * Boxed Whole Milk from the dollar store if you want to get fancy in a recipe and then make some pudding * Flour * Sugar Hardy vegs * Canned tomatoes * Frozen Vegetables * One or two onions in your pantry, they're fine for a week and spruce up a meal or stirfry * Cabbage. This stuff rocks! gently caress LETTUCE! I chop this stuff up for coleslaw, stirfry and soup, even chopped up lasts two weeks and is fine, obviously do coleslaw first and use it for cooking after those first few days (coleslaw lasts tho if you use a bit of vinegar) * Carrots - I think these are good too, they last more than a week. Bake them if you don't like them raw, little olive oil and salt 425 for 25-30 minutes mwah Proteins * Bacon can sit for a bit * Frozen meat like thighs, I don't know I mostly do fresh and I'll cook it and consider the cooked stuff to last another week or so * Eggs last too, 2-3 weeks I think? These can go in anything besides being great as scrambled eggs * Cheese, I find that totally sealed good mozz lasts like a month and after opening at least 2 weeks. Hard cheese lasts a good long time naturally. Cheddar is like 2-3 weeks? Just for everything look at it, smell just a bit, all good? Then don't worry. My cast iron does everything and one of the things that helped me in the last year was getting a metal turner/spatula. The iron is pretty seasoned now but the metal turner does not scratch it, never did. The cast iron takes less care than you might be imagining. Scrape poo poo out, use soap to clean it and just dry it. Add a little bit of oil after washing if you need to, I usually do not. 1) Bread, use Babish's basic rear end pizza dough recipe of 500g flour, 16g salt, 375ml water, like 1-2 tsp yeast, mix it and once you can get it into a whole piece let it ferment overnight in the fridge. Bread is actually amazingly easy once you get the hang of it. Pizza dough should be roughly dry enough that after you've worked it you can pull it into a tight ball and its smooth and not sticky. Dough with more water gets the holes in it though like french bread. So if you make dough that holds together but you can slap it on a cast iron in a 450-500 degree oven it'll back into something great in a 10-12 minutes (keep an eye on it near the end!). You can take the above and make like 6 or 8 small pizzas (or four if you want those calories!). Why I bring it up is that you can put it into containers and freeze it or just put it in the fridge. The yeast works and the bread dough gets tastier over time, a week is a great amount of time! Take it out of the fridge, squish a bit and just slap in oven. Once you get used to it bread like this is very forgiving. >>> Pizza sauce, crack a can of tomatoes and puree with some salt, garlic powder, onion powder and basil. If you spoon this on the sauce as is it is New York style just don't put much and if you reduce it to like half its volume its every other style. >>> Cheese for pizza, if you can't get whole milk low moisture mozzarella just get whatever and add some onion powder, garlic powder and basil. I did this and the kids thought I'd baked the best Red Baron pizza ever. 2) Get good at make rouxs (flour and butter) and bechemels (add creme to the first), once you get the hang of this you can make meat and then use this concept to make a gravy and keep that flavor going. Put it over rice, put over the meat, dip the bread in it. Take leftover cheese and add it to the sauce 3) Make pudding. Adam Ragusea has this awesome instant pudding recipe where you take 2 cups milk (so if you want to use up that box) 4-5 teaspoons of corn starch and 2-3 tablespoons of sugar and dash salt (then cocoa powder or vanilla or whatever the hell you want to flavor it). Mix the starch and sugar together (then no clumps!) and add it to milk that's been heated up before boiling. Stir until it gets firm and put it in a bowl it's pudding. 4) Rice and Pasta are bases to put things on and in the cupboard they last forever. I like to cook the pasta, drain nearly all the water then add some salt, olive oil and butter to make an instant creamy sauce. I did this and used up some leftover pizza sauce last night and then some parmesan and I ate the whole thing while watching anime with my son. gently caress rice cookers, rinse the rice a little bit and its almost always 1 part rice to 2 parts water, put together heat to boil and then when it bubbles down to low for 15 minutes and it should be great (take the top off and stir it with a wooden spoon a few times, Gordon Ramsay won't catch you I swear) 5) Get good at stir fry. You get the stuff prepped, put stuff in first that needs to be warmed up or get toasty, then the cool thing to do is in the cast iron make a hole in the middle of the food and pour the soy sauce (and hot sauce and garlic) onto the pan and let it sizzle to get more flavor out of it. Push the food around, add a little bit of the Chinese wine to marry it all together and then make another oil, add oil and cook the eggs in there with some salt and pepper, stir them up a bit and then mix it together. If you get the ingredients too wet from the eggs its a mess. 6) Quick pickles. Use these in two weeks, but if you take cucumbers or red onions (or peppers or whatever bliss you want to follow) and you put in like 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water with some salt and a bit of sugar you get something really tasty that you can put on top of a lot of stuff to make it more exciting. That vinegar keeps things safe, but apparently vinegar is less acidic now because of ~~Capitalism~~ The overall goal is to like making food and eating it and then not wasting anything. If you get better at making food then you'll avoid wasting because you'll have more templates in mind on how to use ingredients. Tonight it took me 1 hour to make coleslaw, frozen orange chicken, bacon, scrambled eggs, rice and beans. For me all of that stuff just flowed in and out of each other, my kids had what they wanted and my wife had what she wanted (she wanted some of the onion soup I'd made the other day, I still have a bunch of chicken broth because I debone the chicken thighs because I'm cheap and make broth with the bones, tomorrow is cabbage soup that's as good as a restaurant). I have left overs I can do something with like I made the beans to go with the rice and some cheese for burritos that I can make and eat for several days. Our situations are different but I hope this helps a bit. Bonus recipe to consider: Doria. The Japanese take left over curry, mix it with rice and bake it with mozzarella cheese over the top and it loving rocks. PERFECT use of leftovers. Throw some slices of quick pickle on there and it's heaven.
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Nov 10, 2023 08:02
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 20:23 |
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