Mine has more green bits floating around and I suspect my bowl is less expensive.
Having written some downer stuff today, I figured I’d put up a little food-blogging, inspired by this post by Sara at F-Words. Sara’s writing about some of the backlash against female chefs who’ve become famous, and how Nigella Lawson is getting dinged for being too “chatty”.
The women are “chatty” and embellish too much, while the men are direct and more efficient in their communication. Of course, they could have said that Lawson’s more casual style is easier to approach for non-chefs or people bored by plain recipes, but since being “chatty” is associated with female, it has to be a drawback.
I get the impression that since the target audience of cookbooks and cooking shows is women, books that encourage a free-form, experimental approach to cooking make people uncomfortable. Strict instructions for the ladies, please.
I like cooking, but I almost never use recipes as much besides inspiration. Becoming a vegetarian really freed me up, since most recipes are meat-based, you have to get creative. Tonight’s dinner is squash risotto, because a lot of squash from local farms was on sale at the store and I had some risotto on hand. I put the squash, some green onions, some garlic, a couple handfuls of fresh basil (I’ve got a basil TREE growing outside my apartment right now) and a tomatillo into the food processor, chopped that up, softened it on the stove some and mixed it with dry arborio rice. Add in enough veggie stock to cook the rice properly, put it on the stove for half an hour until the rice is cooked, and it’s really good. If I’d had some dry white wine to mix in on hand, it would have been even better, I think.
Anyway, that’s how I tend to cook. The upside is that it’s fun, but the downside is if you completely screw something up, you have to eat toast for dinner. The other downside is that you have to come up with important sounding names for your food, because, “I just threw all this shit together on the fly,” tends to scare people.
What’s your style? How much do you use recipes? Do you use your oven at all? Do people even bake much out in the internet lands?
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I tend to take recipes and use them once. If I generally like the outcome, I tweak it in future to better suit the contents of the kitchens i have access to (figuring out the best replacements for shortening, weird spices, or veggies I’m not into). If I don’t like it, I don’t make it again. I have some things I sort of created for myself during my years as a latchkey kid working with a kitchen lacking pre-prepared foods (did you know that barbeque sauce tastes GREAT on chicken and pasta?), and then a lot of changes I make to pre-prepared foods, such as adding lots of extra veggies to canned soups, adding toppings, spices, and sauces to frozen pizzas, or making really amazing breadsticks out of a can.
I love food magazines, cookbooks, food blogs, cooking shows, and use recipes fairly regularly. I almost never follow them to the letter, but if I rely too much on my own judgement, I’ll make basically the same dish every time I want to cook. I also follow recipes pretty closely in palates I don’t know well - Asian or African or generally non-European or non-American.
And as for baking, following recipes is usually a lot more important, since small changes in some key ingredients can have unpredictable results in the finished product. Once you get a feel for how those things work, it’s less critical, but I still get results I don’t expect from things I thought I knew how to handle.
I’m actually going to make some cranberry-pistachio oatmeal cookies this afternoon, with good ol’ Betty Crocker’s oatmeal cookie recipe and some of the butter replaced with applesauce. Yum.
I am roasting a chicken, based on a Nigella Lawson recipe/suggestion as we speak. I love love love her cookbooks because they’re a little free-form. Though they have recipes you can follow, they also impart lots of other info and variations so you can depart from them. For instance, her “recipe” for roast lemon chicken taught me that you should only roast it once it’s at room temperature, then only for an hour and fifteen mintutes. This little bit of information has saved me from a lifetime of overcooking chicken in every recipe I make.
I like to cook, and I like cookbook authors who really love food, and tell me enough that I can then branch out and experiment.
Oh, and if I have access to a wok, my cooking style is very definitely “put little chunks of uncooked chicken in wok, then add whatever sauces and veggies you can manage, then add pasta”
hmm, I apologize if I post this twice.
I am roasting a chicken, based on a Nigella Lawson recipe/suggestion as we speak. I love love love her cookbooks because they’re a little free-form. Though they have recipes you can follow, they also impart lots of other info and variations so you can depart from them. For instance, her “recipe” for roast lemon chicken taught me that you should only roast it once it’s at room temperature, then only for an hour and fifteen mintutes. This little bit of information has saved me from a lifetime of overcooking chicken in every recipe I make.
I like to cook, and I like cookbook authors who really love food, and tell me enough that I can then branch out and experiment.
My style is eclecttc and experimental, and I love to layer flavors. Soups and stews are my favorite things, and I tend to preserve them by canning them. On heavy-duty cooking weekends, I’ll come away with 3-4 dozen jars of soup. I developed a recipe for tomato-fennel soup by just smelling some spices and trying to figure out what to make around them.
I don’t tend to bake much. It’s less forgiving than cooking. But last year for x-mas, I made cookie packs for friends (20 dozen in 3 days). I’ve also become known for my chocolate mousse pie.
What the hell, here’s my tomato-fennel soup recipe (I was thinking about entering it into a contest or something some day, but it’s just too good not to share and I’ll never have the capital to open a restaurant or anything):
MAJeff’s Tomato-Fennel Soup
2-3 T vegetable oil
2 t ajwain seeds
1 t fennel seeds
1 t cumin seeds
1 t fenugreek seeds
1/4 t cayenne pepper
1 med onion, roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 square inch ginger, peeled and chopped
1 fennel bulb, roughly chopped
1/2 of a 6-oz can of tomato paste
6 c chicken stock (veggie stock will, of course, work, but it’ll give a slightly different flavor)
2-3 med tomatoes, roughly chopped
juice of 1 lime
———-
heat oil in stock/soup pot. Once hot, add seeds. Stir and cook for
about a minute, until seeds start to pop and release scent. Addd onion, garlic and
ginger. Sautee until onion is soft.
Add fennel, tomato past, and stock. Simmer for about 35 minutes.
Add tomatos. Simmer until fennel is soft, about 15-20 minutes.
Pass through a food mill or blender. Make sure you’ve got a puree
with a consistent texture.
Place back in stock pot. Bring to simmer and add juice of lime.
Simmer for about 10 minutes. Serve.
I’d suggest a semi-sweet German white wine.
I generally use recipes the first time I make something, similar to Esme. Then I experiment from the basic recipe in the future.
The exceptions on this are specific dishes from church cookbooks and such that I may not make very often but know that the basic recipe made an excellent dish.
But I also do the “throw shit together and see what happens” sometimes, especially for stir fry type dishes.
And I learned how to cook from my father and still do the fried chicken thing fairly frequently although I’ve switched from crisco/lard to canola oil. My concession to health I reckon.
Even when I follow a recipe close-ish, I tend to double the garlic and spice. I think that was my first brave departure, actually.
One example for me is I like a heavy meat sauce/spaghetti sauce. I like to start with the Newman’s Own Sockarooni if I can find it. I then brown 3/4 to a pound of ground sirloin, drain and mix with the sauce. One can of beer and maybe some minced garlic and a little more onion and a small can of mushroom bits and stems. Cook it on low for 3 to 4 hours until the sauce and meat are fully blended. Makes for a heavy meat sauce as I say but I like it and since I’m feeding myself…
Don’t bake, which is just as well, since it looks as tho I’m allergic to wheat.
I’m of the “put it on the stove until the smoke alarm buzzes” school, but turn out some mighty good soups and stews that way.
For instance, this weekend I’m turning out three to be frozen for the next weeks meals.
Sea food soup with chinese vegetables, italian chicken sausage with organic veggies, and on the stove now simmering (guess I should check it) grass-fed beef, yellow carrots squash and green bean stew with ginger.
All my own recipes of what I have I got in the freezer? variety, after learning over the years not too add too many ingredients, or too much seasoning, if I don’t want yucky muck.
I tend to be less adventuresome than I used to be now that I’m cooking for 2 kids as well as my wife (I do all the cooking in the house).
My pattern with cookbooks is that I try to follow the recipe pretty closely until I get a feel for the author and/or the cuisine. The first time I cooked Indian food from a veggie Indian cookbook, I followed the recipe to the letter. After a couple of times, I started to change ingredients and use my own judgment.
One characteristic of my cooking, which has gotten more pronounced as my home life has gotten more busy, is that I don’t have much patience for what I consider fussy cooking — basically, Julia Child-style French cooking. I am just not interested in the chemistry-set demands of custards and soufflés. I found a recipe for kibbeh (little Middle Eastern meatballs) that looked great, but the recipe called for cooking a filling with one set of flavorings and stuffing it into the raw, meat “shell” prepared with different flavorings before cooking the whole thing. I’m sure it would be delicious, but it just looked like too much work. So I just made the whole thing out of “shell” and it was delicious (wife and I loved it, kids were willing to eat it — success!).
I am devoted to Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks — the books are brilliantly written and the recipes are tremendous.
The “fussiest” thing I’ve ever cooked, I think, is a gallantine of chicken (that’s a whole bird, boned intact and stuffed) from one of Hazan’s cookbooks.
I’ve been baking bread for a little over a year, inspired by the NYT’s “no-knead bread” recipe. I’ve adapted the recipe (both ingredients and prep) and bake a loaf of it every weekend. I’ve also picked a few recipes from a sort of hippie-derived “Bake Your Own Bread” book from the early 1970s I have on the shelf for some reason.
Bread-baking is time-consuming, and it is possible to really screw up, but it’s still fun and you can do it with little kids.
I’m definitely a recipe follower — I’m too easily distracted and otherwise I forget what I’ve already put in and in what quantities. If I’ve made something a few times (like this chicken-black bean chili type thing that I like), then I’ll branch out a little, but I try not to mess with success.
My cooking guru is Alton Brown — he does a great explanation of not only how to do things, but why doing things a certain way works, and usually provides a couple of alternative ways of doing it once you understand the basic principle. Ever since I learned to start scrambled eggs on low until a few curds form and then turn the heat to high and remove them while they’re still damp, I’ve never had a rubbery egg.
Of course, I’m sure Alton Brown gets dinged for being “silly” and doing comedy sketches instead of, like, totally serious cooking that totally serious chefs are TOTALLY serious about.
And I can’t help liking Rachael Ray, even if her portions are far beyond what any human can eat at a sitting. She gets a lot of flak for being perky but, hey, that’s who she is. She’s also pretty funny about the hatred: when she heard that there was a RachaelRaySucks.com, her response was, “Well, what am I supposed to do, create Nu-uhYouSuck.com?”
I love baking, and am sloppy with measuring. Pies and even bread give you a lot of room to work with. I never keep track of spices and almost invariably double the vanilla.
I use my oven all the time because I think for a lot of things the microwave is unacceptable. I feel a twinge of guilt about the energy use, however, so I substitute the Foreman grill whenever possible. Or sometimes I’ll cook processed food halfway with the microwave and just let the oven finish it up. I’m also trying to rely more on the bread machine for the same reason, although it’s a bit of a learning curve to adjust regular bread recipes to the machine-I’ve been getting so many more disappointing results than when I do it the long way.
And I bake all the time. Muffins, bread, cookies, popovers everything. I am famous for my Guinness Chocolate Cake, which is somewhat stolen from Nigella.
I used to work at a bakery and I continue to bake at least once a week. Lots of flat breads, French and Italian loaves and pizza doughs. I think because of this I’m really anal about following recipes to the letter, as following dough recipes is pretty important if you want it to look at taste like bread. This and the fact that I worked as a sous chef where all ingredients had to be weighed out has caused me to be a stickler in the kitchen. If I have a problem with how a recipe turned out, I don’t try to tweak it, I go a look for a better recipe. That being the case, I usually have about ten cookbooks checked out from the library at any given time, from which I gather my collection of perfect recipes that I never ever mess around with.
mnemosyne,
Now I learned scrambled eggs differently. They were the very first thing I learned to cook at age 6 or 7. I have a small, #2 iron skillet like the one I learned on.
Turn the heat on high, drop a pat of butter into the skillet. As it melts and bubbles, pick up the skillet and run the butter up around the sides almost to the top (so that almost the entire inside has been greased). Pour the eggs (2 with some salt and pepper and a dash of milk beat together) into the skillet and using my fork, keep moving the eggs back and forth as they cook. I turn the heat off before the eggs are finished but I’ve never had any problems with them being rubbery at all.
I LOVE talking about cooking.
The “men want direct communication” thing is almost precisely counterbalanced by “men never ask for directions.
My spouse is the one who likes recipes and exact amounts, I’m the one who almost always improvises. Then again, she has the courage required to do a good sear, whereas I almost alway wimp out. We both read cookbooks regularly and drool over the recipes, and MFK Fisher (perhaps the apotheosis of “chatty” in cooking) is just about my favorite.
In practice, of course, we both improvise because when you’re throwing food on the table that bit about 5/16 teaspoon of gently toasted fenugreek just ain’t gonna happen. But last night worked out pretty well with rice noodles, chicken marinated in soy and whatsis, and snow peas and carrots, all cooked together at the last with enough chicken stock to keep the pot happy. Better than it had any right to be.
(Yeah, and reminds me to hope that the sourdough starter isn’t dead again…)
My cooking style is basically whatever is fast and easy- I stir fry a lot, and I often make pasta with different sauces or pestos. Or I use the crock-pot. Anything that I can put on in the morning, go to work, and come back to dinner is a good thing.
I vary on cooking, either I’m throwing whatever I have on hand into a stir fry, or I follow a favorite recipe from childhood. Most of my favorite cooking is done in the fall and winter.
Some things are sort of recipes, like meatloaf or chili, other things are more structured, like Chinese Walnut Chicken.
I love baking, especially in the fall. My apple pie is a mix of freeform and recipe, because I experiment with different varieties of apple and mixing them, plus coating the apples in the sugar-spice mixture before putting it in the crust works wonders!
The Guinness Chocolate Cake sounds fantastic!
Cast iron skillets ROCK! My dad got me a set of three at a farm sale for $10 and I love working with them.
Also love my cast iron grill pan did a filet of salmon with Penzey’s Vindaloo seasoning as a rub on it last week, and at it with chopped mango over the top and some spiced basmati rice.
Only thing I’ve baked was salmon which was prepared by rubbing salt & pepper, add some butter/olive oil, and on occasion, some wine. One attempted was to use vodka gifted to me from the super in the place of the wine which ended up imparting a strong alcoholic flavor to the salmon. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Like several other commenters, I tend to strictly follow recipes when I start….then experiment.
The few times I experimented without following the recipe closely first have all ended in disaster. Though not completely in the area of food…one example was when I mixed alcoholic drinks for a friend during the Christmas holiday season despite us both knowing I had no previous experience.
Result: Mixing vodka with eggnog is an atrociously bad idea.
My cooking bible is Julia’s “The Way to Cook.” Great for base recipes from which you can just run and play with. That and Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking. That little thing taught me so much about cooking with spices.
AS to this part:
I’m not completely convinced it’s about strict instructon for the ladies, as it is about the longer term issues of rationalization and standardization in Western society (Max Weber here we come). Ineed, that’s something that I’ve thought about looking at for future research, the history of cookbooks.
Part of why I question the emphasis is that even in those cookbooks geared toward “male cooking,” (grilling) have that same form of standardization. When I talk to folks who didn’t grow up with this standard form of cookbook about getting recipes they about how much of a particular ingredient, the answer is always, “Enough for four people” or some such.
I learned to cook from my great-grandmother, who was an old-school German woman - you threw stuff into a bowl, tasted as you went, paid attention to smells and kept tasting until you were satisfied.
I love to play with different cuisines - I have a HUGE collection of cookbooks for inspiration, but I rarely follow recipes to the letter.
I’ve done Blogathon for the past three years - the past two as cooking blogs. There are lots of fun recipes:
This year: http://ironchefmoo.blogspot.com
Last year: http://inthekitchenwithmoozie.blogspot.com
Bethynyc:
The cake is really just fantastic. The Guinness makes it a richer chocolate, without being too sicky sweet. Since I mostly stole the recipe from someone else, I feel the obligation to pass it on:
for the cake:
1 cup Guinness (drink the rest while baking)
1 stick unsalted butter
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter (for the pan)
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
2 cups superfine sugar (but you can just use regular white if you have to)
3/4 cup sour cream
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups flour
2 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
For the frosting:
Container (8 ox. I think?) of cream cheese
1 and 1/4 cups confectioners sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream.
preheat the oven to 350, and line and butter a 9 inch springform pan.
pour the Guinness into a pot- add butter and heat until the butter melts-then whisk in cocoa and sugar. Take off heat. Beat the sour cream, eggs and vanilla together and then add to the cocoa mixture. Whisk in the flour and baking soda. Pour into pan, bake for 45 minutes to an hour (when a knife comes out pretty clean). Let the cake cool in the pan on a cooling rack. (it’s a very moist cake so it will fall apart if you cool it outside the pan.
whip the cream cheese until it’s smooth, then shift in the confectioner’s sugar and beat them both together. Then add the cream and beat until it’s the right consistency. Then, you know, frost the top of the cake and lick the bowls.
It is just wonderful. Good for breakfast too. Which is why I’m a grown-up, so I can eat cake for breakfast.
My cooking style is very much quick and simple. I don’t have the equipment I’d like, and I can’t branch out to do some of the fancier stuff that I’d like to try, due to some budgetary constraints.
I depend very heavily on the cookbooks I have and I tend to follow them pretty much to the letter. Once I get a better handle on technique, I’ll vary it a bit. But I don’t feel ready for it now, and I don’t want to risk making foods I don’t like, especially since I rely a lot on leftovers.
Interesting point, Jeff. And the negative reactions to the change that Lawson and others are trying to create could just be basic reactionary stuff.
Sunburned, I don’t bake, but I may have to try that.
And, if I may say so, Nigella Lawson can chat all she likes.
That cake is going in the personal recipe book…but I’m waiting until the thread dies in case others post recipes so I can print the whole thread and cut ‘em out.
Here’s my chocolate mousse pie. I’ve started to make the jam/marnier sauce as a glaze over the top (def the day before) and use white chocolate shavings on top of it as well. The overall thing is one of those examples of taking a recipe and personalizing it.
Sunburned, I think I love you.
I almost invariably follow the recipes very closely, to the point where I started to wonder, “what’s the big deal with cooking? You just follow the instructions.” I get creative only after I’ve had a lot of experience with different recipes of the same dish (different kinds of chili, different kinds of seared tuna, etc.), and then I can get more creative, mostly because I’ll realize that I have only a subset of the ingredients needed for all those recipes but don’t have all of the ingredients necessary for any one of them.
Also, I have a high tolerance for routine and consistency, so this makes it easier for me to cook up the exact same dish over and over again in order to keep myself fed for the week.
This is a better explanation of what I was trying to articulate above. Particularly the point about not having quite all of the ingredients the recipe calls for.
I don’t cook every night, but when I do, I tend to be an improviser and I measure virtually nothing. I rarely follow recipes unless I’m cooking for someone else. My go-to dish has been pretty much constantly morphing over the last 10 years or so. First, it was a Thai curry, then it was a more traditional stir-fry, then it turned into a chicken cacciatore type thing. These days, it’s become corn chowder.
Baking is a little too time consuming for me to do it very often, but I’ll break out the KitchenAid every once in a while.
Right there with you on that one. Last night, I tried to get clever and wound up totally screwing up a light pasta toss (I thought it’d be interesting to mix in some chicken bouillon, but it turned out way too salty). It was just a quick butter/olive oil/garlic/herbs toss for some farfalle, so I was able to re-do it quickly, but it was still annoying.
Hey, has anyone out there tried the Joy of Cooking recipes for squirrel, bear, beaver tail, moose, or opossum? The opossum recipe involves capturing the critter alive and feeding it on bread and milk for 7-10 days before you kill, dress, and cook it.
Particular if the reaction is to being taught to measure throughout your whole life and then being tossed into not having that touchstone and feeling lost. Additionally, the practices of standard measurement has been institutionalized within the publishing industry, so there would be a resistance from publishers from “we don’t do it that way.”
I grew up with strict recipes. Even in Home Ec class in Jr. High we were taught to follow a recipe. (and every seventh-grader was required to take that class and learn how to cook. In eighth grade we got to make choices.) We never learned about specific ingredients and how we might use them, but on how to follow a recipe.
I’d rather learn techniques than measurement, and as has been mentioned, good baking is more dependent on measurement than good stovetop cooking.
And honestly, thinking about The Way to Cook and how it’s like, “here’s the technique, here are some ideas, here’s a base recipe….go play” makes me miss Julia.
Ah, the love…
Don’t just thank me, thank the “chatty” Lawson, it’s her basic recipe. I love talking recipes!
i’m still trying to learn to like foods besides classic all-american type stuff veggified with mock meat, and breakfast food. ive never been big on actual meals as i get full really easily and just eat little things all day, i like fresh fruit and i like yogurt and i like baking easy breads. my family never ate much ethnic food or veggies so i still have to develop a taste for the exotic, im picky about textures but im trying, slowly. i discovered i love fresh spinach.
baking is my love, especially vegan baking, as everything tastes fantastic but isnt nearly as awful for me. its amazing the frosting you can make with tofu. i like “vegan cupcakes take over the world” and “sinfully vegan” becos everything in both books is easy and delicious.
for cookware i love my cast iron skillets and i love my porceline (sp?) coated double boiler.
and i follow recipes to the letter, whenever i try to experiment no good ensues.
Ooh, Nigella has a wonderful flourless chocolate-orange cake in her Celebrations cookbook. You make it with ground up almonds, and it’s really rich without being overly sweet.
Amanda: dry white wine really rounds out the flavor of risotto. You can use other acids (lemon juice, vinegar) but nothing else does it like white wine.
As far as recipes v. improvisation, I tend to do the recipe a couple of times, forget the exact seasonings, and make it better. For me, cooking with recipes is sort of like learning scales in music: Once I know what’s going on, I can improvise much more successfully.
Most of the time I rely on the no-recipe throw-together version that I call “cooking”: pastas/rice dishes, stirfries, bean or other salads. My no recipe lasagne is great. On weekends, special occasions, or whenever the mood strikes otherwise, I really cook, which usually involves large, convoluted recipes with lots of mess-making. We’re veggie and eat vegan a lot, so I alter things to take out animal products, and i love Mollie Katzen’s books. I also bake a lot–well, not in the summer–and I rely on family recipes, mostly, although I’ve found some great vegan recipes that I use, as well.
My parents came to visit two weeks ago. We went to the Thai joint about a half block from where I live. It was their first time eating Thai food.
That;s one of the drawbacks to having grown up in rural Minnesota. I always joke about Minnesotans and their “allergy to flavor.” I grew up with that. Never had sushi, pho, pad thai, vindaloo, or any of that until my 30s. My own cooking has changed as I moved through various cuisines and have developed the ability to play. (One of my proudest days as a son was seeing olive oil in my parents kitchen–I made an impact!)
I still cook up a killer “comfort” beef stew (made with a nice beer and lots of thyme and served over mashed potatoes), and my experiementations with Jacques Pepin’s mushroom dressing for Thanksgiving has earned me a couple marriage proposals, but the best thing I ever learned was the use and variety of spices. Introducing my parents to Penzey’s has completely altered the way they cook.
Learning to cook, for me, required completely retraining my palate.
Cisslepants:
Good analogy.
As far as TV cooks go, I also like Giada di Laurentiis (and that’s only partly because she’s stunning). I’ve made several dishes off her show, and they’ve been universally good. The one thing about her that annoys me is how she exaggerates the pronunciation of Italian words. Far too pedantic for me.
Samp and Beans is a simple traditional African dish that’s wholesome and complete. It’s a comfort food for me, and it’s dead simple if you’re willing to be absurdly lazy. Herewith, Samp and Beans a la Togolosh:
1 Can of Black Beans
1 Can of Yellow Hominy
1 cube of stock (beef or veggie, doesn’t matter)
Dump beans and hominy and stock cube in a pot. Heat to a low simmer and stir while simmering until the beans lose all consistency and become a nondescript mush. Eat. Yum!
One word of warning: If you have been living on a low fiber diet chowing down on Samp and Beans will cleanse your colon in a dramatic and melodious fashion.
On baking:
The tricky thing about baking is that you can screw up by changing amounts a little — but you can also screw up by following to the letter. Adding dough really is a matter of feel, look and sound, to the extent that a lot of recipes give ranges for amounts of flour (note: I use volume for flour, not mass, which I know makes me a rank amateur. So sue me!).
Baking is absolutely a craft, which makes if very fun for me, but also a real challenge to learn from a book.
I used to use recipes, but I just wing it now. Like Amanda, I prefer tp buy the best-looking thing at the store and then cook something based on that. I’ve had some nice breakthroughs the past couple of years in my skills. I can tell when things are done by eye or touch now, so I don’t have to poke or cut into food to see if it’s done. My seasoning skills have improved considerably. I’ve taken some pretty nifty cooking lessons and have improved as a baker (my babkas are getting better all the time). This, ironically, coincides with a reduction both in the amount of animal flesh I eat and a reduction in the amount of cooked foods I eat. I’m having more raw fruits and vegetables. I’ll be a very fine cook and then give up all meat and cooked foods entirely.
you just made me feel so much better, i think that allergy to flavor might just apply to all parts of the rural midwest, as i’m from rural illinois and that was the best description i’ve ever heard. i figure someday i’ll fully enjoy ethnic foods and wine that doesn’t come in neon colors with a screw top.
I also grew up in Iowa, so yeah, the Midwestern thing is apt.
I always remember Marge Simpson at the Chili Cookoff–”Eight Spices? There must be some doubles. Or-eh-gah-no? What the…?”
One time, when the grandparents were visiting, I missed breakfast because I slept in. We had a bunch of herbs growing in the kitchen (parsley, oregano, basil), So I picked ‘em, chopped up some sun-dried tomatoes, and made myself a batch of scrambled eggs. My grandmother was disgusted that I would put that “green stuff” in eggs. She was less horrified when I made her taste it.
However, don’t completely diss screwcaps on wine. Some wineries are moving in that direction because of massive problems with cork rot. I’m not saying grab some Boone’s Farm, but I’ve had some nice wines come with screw caps (and rubber corks).
I learned how to cook from my mother (and her mother, and my father’s mother): partly at her elbow, partly from her cookbooks, because she was always trying new things. A couple years after my father retired, she basically quit cooking — she figured she’d done a lifetime’s worth, and no-one disagrees. She’s a *great* cook, though, and frankly I’m damn good myself.
The most important thing my mother taught me about cooking is how to read a cookbook. For instance:
The quality of the cookbook is inversely proportional to the number and quality of the photographs.
In other words: a few cruddy photos from the 50s=great cookbook. Line drawings, better yet. A full-page luscious color photo for each recipe=lousy cookbook. As a result, I like *none* of the current crop of cooking stars — their cookbooks are too flashy.
These days, I am mostly of the “put in enough, cook until it’s done, adjust seasonings” school, which frustrates me when I’m trying to write down a recipe for someone else.
I love reading cookbooks from various cuisines, because they’re great for ethnography — that’s why the old Time-Life cookbooks are so wonderful, even though the recipes aren’t all that good (see Mom’s Photo Rule). Judith Nathan’s Jewish cookbooks are another example.
Tonight’s meal featured:
Heirloom eggplant (var. Rosa Bianca, today), sliced pinky-thick
brush with minced garlic-e.v.olive oil, both sides
sprinkle with pepper-salt
roast at 400 deg. 15-20 min.
peel
cut into strips
mix with:
fresh sage & marjarom
dried thyme
balsamic vinegar
chopped capers
Result: yum. Eat with slices of fresh bread — tonight it was James Beard’s Dill-Cottage Cheese Bread, though there was some dried-out leftover no-knead bread, which I toasted with garlic-oil to make bruscetta.
I pretty much didn’t cook at all for most of my adult life. My ex-husband was the cook, a wonderful cook. He could make French bread that would sweep me off my feet. He also once criticized the way I was boiling water. Literally. So I kept my ass out of the kitchen.
The last few years, I’ve been venturing back in, trying to move beyond my one standby - pasta, pesto and any vegetable that can be steamed or sauteed. I’m not a very brave cook and usually follow recipes pretty closely, at least to start. I am getting bolder. I used to be afraid of cooking seafood, somehow convinced that I would give everyone food poisoning. Now I’ll throw shrimp into dishes with abandon.
Last month, we got a smoking grill, and that’s my new place to play. We grilled a salmon to die for a while back. With some grilled peaches on the side. ‘Twas fabulous.
I’m afraid my cooking style is rather unscientific, and in a league somewhat below that of Julia Child.
It involves putting stuff in the microwave and blowing it up.
Her chicken in red wine with olives and cherry tomatoes is one of my all time favorite recipes. I can whip that sucker up on demand and will drive people crazy when I bring the leftovers to work.
I just moved into a new (TINY) studio apartment. The reason I live here is because it was the cheapest place I could find while living along. I hate my kitchen. First, electric stove, which is a travesty. Second, not enough room. It’s gonna be a rough year.
Just from personal experience, if you like cookbooks, try to find the church fundraiser type cookbooks from small towns. What you will find is all the go-to recipes including the short cuts folks use to create their personal masterpieces.
MAJeff, I love my two iron skillets. I have the small one plus a very well seasoned #10 that I have been using for 35 years. I rescued it from my folks pantry when I was setting up my first apartment and using it for fried chicken is how I know I’m settled into a new apartment.
Random here. And I’m a very low-class random as well, to be honest. Tonight, I took some leftover rice, fried it with some microwaved frozen veggies (peas, carrots, corn and green beans), with a splash of both soy sauce and a thick bottled stir-fry sauce I pick up, and put some garlic powder and paprika into that as well. Very tasty.
And thes. The worst part is naming your dishes. The second worst part is trying to repeat your successes. It’s fun but it has its downsides.
Here’s my contribution. GARLIC BREAD. Duh.
Butter.
Garlic Powder. Lots.
Parmesan Cheese. Yes, the stuff in a can. Tried fresh. Didn’t work.
Basil
Italian Seasoning
Mix it together, nuke it for 10 seconds to make it spreadable. Spread it on your bread of choice and bake until a dark golden brown (or even a bit darker).
Worst thing I did upon moving back to Boston was live with a roommate and allow him to use my cast iron, among other things. Broke my wine glasses, several coffee mugs, my gorgeous ceramic Asian soup spoons (a gift) and fucked with my cast iron. Never paid me a cent for anything.
Plus, he drank the 4/$10 wine and slugged it. I’m not a wine snob (can’t afford to be finianciall) but I will honestly say the stuff he drank is the stuff I dump down the sink.
These aren’t the only reasons, but I wish him nothing but ill. (part of that is also his refusal to put his dog on a leash when crossing six lanes of traffic–the dog is no more)
ABSOLUTELY! There’s a family recipe of ours (from one of my great aunts) for chocolate chip oatmeal cookies that is divine. They were part of my cookie basket gifts last year, and I had people telling me they hid them from everyone else in their house. Got it from their old church cookbook. There’s lots of stuff I won’t do, but those cookbooks are amazing hidden treasures. (I really should move my research from queer movements to food. Much more interesting and fun.)
MAJeff:
Sadly, my wife is not a fan of either a) cooked whole tomatoes (texture), or b) cooked wine or other alcohol (digestibility). Doesn’t mean I never cook these things, but I have to stretch her boundaries bit by bit. I’ll look up the recipe and see if I can find a good opportunity to spring it on the family.
My chicken standby from Marcella is her lemon chicken — the brilliant insight of which is to cook the chicken breast-side down for the first 30 minutes in the oven, which gets the juices to flow into the breasts and keep them from drying out.
If you cook that recipe, you can retain the liquid from the bottom of the pan, refrigerate it in tupperware, remove the fat (wonderful, lemon-scented schmaltz!), and then mix the lemony, concentrated-chicken gelatin into chicken salad.
MAJeff, I would love to see you combine your two loves- queer movements AND food. I can only imagine…
It’s in the Marcella Cucina book. Simple as hell, but stunning. Lots of rosemary, along with dried chilli flakes.
People make fun of my foodiness. There’s a really nice Afghan restaurant in Cambridge. Their roasted pumpkin is to die for. But their bucklawa actually made me cry. People know I can be a bit of a drama queen, so they think I’m overselling it. Then, when I bring them there, and they have it, their eyes tear up as well. The particular combination of pistacchio and cardamom they use….holy shit.
Well, I have used cooking to seduce men before…
One of the great things about growing up a Texan is you are trained to be a pepper belly. I’ve been eating enchiladas since my parents had to mash them up for me. Austin is a pro-spicy town: The popular foods are Tex-Mex, Cajun, BBQ, and various Asian cuisines, especially Thai and Vietnamese.
I love cooking threads in the liberal blogosphere. A crowd that has a lot of foodies of various interesting stripes.
My favorite cooking methods are:
Microwave - fast, easy
Crock pot & rice cooker - don’t have to stay in the kitchen
My neighbor is a raw foodist so she doesn’t cook at all. So her oven is just storage space. I use my oven sometimes, the stove more often, but I mostly like to order out or eat what my husband has cooked.
We’re vegan, so we eat a wide variety of foods and get creative in our cooking too. I will use recipes but I just can’t follow them exactly. I always change something. So does my husband. He doubles or triples the spices. He’s from New Orleans so he likes things really spicy.
Amanda,
The one saving grace for my mom’s cooking, prior to my intervention, was the four years we spent living in West Texas when Dad was in the Air Force. She took some cooking classes and learned how to make enchiladas and the like, and it also exposed us to some flavors we wouldn’t have gotten had we stayed in the Midwest for our whole lives. But those were a diversion from “regular” foods.
I still can’t make a chile relleno to save my life, which kills me. Just can’t keep the dough on the pepper.
I live off Korean ramen, since it’s fast and I seldom have time to cook. But when I do cook, I love the internets for recipes. I’ll have a surplus of something (usually tomatoes or eggplants) and Google recipes that use that something. Or I’ll have a craving. When I find something easy, like the wonderful five-spice curry recipe that my friend gave me, I’ll do variations. I’ve also got a nice recipe folder on my computer for things that have worked well.
I usually double the chili peppers and garlic, as I have an almost unlimited capacity for spice. And I like reading and writing chatty recipes; I like to know whether a measurement is approximate or exact, or what different things you can try.
Tonight’s culinary adventure was Gomen, Ethiopian collard greens, since we had collard greens on the roof garden that were starting to look sickly. I made my own niter kebbeh, which I thought was pretty cool.
I tend to not follow recipes all that much unless I’m baking. And even then, I’ll follow the recipe once and then tweak to my own personal taste. I absolutely love to cook, but I don’t do it as often as I’d like. I make a lot of improvised curries (Sri Lankan husband–his mom taught me and she is amazing), southern country food (biscuits, cornbread, stews, etc.), and Mediterranean style, mostly. Tonight was high heat roast chicken (butterfly whole chicken, brine for an hour, pat dry, put flavored butter under the skin, put sliced potatoes in the bottom of a broiler pan with salt and pepper, put the chicken on top, and roast at 500 degrees for 45 minutes–the chicken is delicious, and the potatoes soak up all the chickeny goodness and get all crisp and delicious–serve with salad and you have dinner), day before yesterday was a few curry dishes, and before that was a simple pasta toss with the fresh tomatoes and basil from my garden.
And I love to bake, but I don’t have much time for it these days. However, I still make all the birthday cakes in the family from scratch, cookies or some kind of quick bread on most weekends, and I always make my own pizza dough for homemade pizza. I also always do the Christmas cookies for gifts–usually several different kinds for at least 20 or so people over the course of a manic weekend in the middle of December every year.
Mnem, I have a serious crush on Alton Brown. But if you like his ‘food as science’ approach, read On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. It’s wonderful–he goes through all the chemistry, etc., involved in all sorts of fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, and various preparations of all of it. It’s kind of a food encyclopedia that’s surprisingly easy to read.
And just to make all you cast iron people out there jealous, I have my grandmother’s set of cast iron that she got as a wedding gift towards the end of the depression. There’s 70 years of seasoning on those pans and they’re slick as can be. I love them and I have forbidden everyone in my house from using them, ever since I caught the husband actually washing one with soap and scrub sponge.
I think the backlash against nigella in particular isn’t so much the style of cooking as the aims of her books. She spells it out in one of the introductions, in summary: The recipes are designed to get you heaps of patriarchy points for making really cool food, while involving the least labour/time so you can actually spend most of your dinner party talking to your guests rather than in the kitchen.
I just finished packing out the kitchen and setting up the temporary pantries in the dining room.
Ditto for many/most of my dishes. (apple pie dishes and spices are in a special box in my son’s closet - and I have three offers of oven space for apple pie baking time)
I have one cabinet left in the kitchen, and the plumber is coming in 1 1/2 weeks to pull the range and dishwasher.
NO FAIR!
(oh - Jeff - I love cast iron skillets, too. So THAT’S what was soooo heavy in one of those non-book boxes, eh?)
I bake. Oh, and HOW do I bake. Cakes. Pies. Cookies. Muffins. Sweet breads. I bake as stress relief, and because I like to come home to a treat. Though I will admit the time my flatmate and I baked 800 cookies in a week was a little excessive.
I learned to bake from recipes—as other people said, with baking, small changes can make a big difference in the outcome. But so can the weather, the quality of your ingredients, so who knows. Now I can judge most cookies, pie crusts, and pie fillings by eye, but cakes I still need to follow the recipe closely, as they are both more touchy and I make them less often.
The Joy of Cooking is my go-to baking handbook. I’ve got the ‘42, ‘78, and ‘06 editions, and between them, there’s a recipe for just about any baked good, up to and including chocolate potato cake. Except for my family’s sugar cookies, which come out of the Dayton Art Institute cookbook, circa 1975.
For regular day-to-day dinners, I generally make some variant on “Vegetables. Add flavor. Cook til done.” This ranges from chili to stir fry to pot pie to a variety of soups. The basic tenants are fresh and simple. I also like to make stuff that will keep for about a week, so I only have to cook every 5 or 6 days.
I once read somewhere that most families rotate through about six, maximum eight, dishes. So I’m working on perfecting a small number of meals. Like everyone else, I follow the recipe the first time (except more garlic and spices) and tweak from there. Sometimes I get similar recipes from a bunch of different sources to see what the essential elements are and what is a matter of style. I keep making it, so that I can perfect it, and it usually ends up straying pretty far from the original. I only really cook about once a week, and I expect leftovers to last me a week, filled in with quick meals. Currently on the stove is a tomato and red lentil dal with coconut milk. My other standards: mushroom and artichoke heart lasagna, chili, vaguely asian stirfry with a few different sauces, palak paneer. It must contain some kind of combination of vegetarian protein and vegetables. It must make large quantities. I must love it, and my husband must at least like it. I try a new recipe every few weeks to see if it qualifies for perfection and addition to the standards.
MAJeff, next time I am at Hellmand, I will try the baklawa. Usually I’m too full (of the incredible bread, pumpkin, eggplant, and spinach) for dessert.
My preferred cooking style is as close to original ingredients as possible. My real cooking style is whatever I have, whatever I can afford and how much time I have — oh, and whether I feel like doing a load of dishes or not.
I love home cooked food and baked and canned when I was a stay at home mom. Kids are grown and I’m off to the races as a business owner, no time but to romance nostalgic about putting up food and such.
In many instances in my adulthood I’ve gone without money for food, or facilities to cook with or both. I do not take basic food for granted and think that many in this country eat far too much and spend far too much on way too little valuable nutrition.
We also tend to think we need larger portions than we really do need.
I love to bake. I started baking when I was really young, which is kinda weird, since my mom certainly didn’t bake. I think that baking instilled an overly-cautious approach to recipe-improvisation, though, because when you’re baking a cake, you really can’t play around with most of the ingredients; they’re necessary for the chemistry of it. Mainly I bake cakes (especially chocolate cake, which is my favorite and specialty) muffins, brownies, sweetbreads, and crisps; I haven’t gotten around to pies or breads.
However, I too add about 3x the garlic called for in any savory recipe, and I’m experimenting more with not using any recipes.
Recipes are for inspiration, but I never let them dictate to me. Even with baking, I experiment constantly. Most of the time the results are great, other times…well, it’s fortunate that our chickens aren’t very demanding so long as it’s still edible *g* For most things I cook, I usually have a fairly defined taste experience in mind to start with, and if I don’t already know how to make it I look for a recipe that gets me closest and wing it from there. The only time that this approach gets me into trouble is if I’m trying to cook something specific I have in mind and finally get it perfect after a couple of attempts, then forget to write down exactly what I did so I can do it the same way next time.
I agree with you that vegetarian cooking really frees up the imagination. I also find it less demanding in that meat is harder to get right, although maybe that’s because I learnt to cook as a vego and then started eating meat again, so don’t feel as confident in that area. Most people I know are scared of vegetarian cooking…
[Apologies if this posts more than once, I’m having some trouble reading the anti-spam thingie]
Oh - and the only think about baking desserts that I don’t follow to the letter is TIME. I NEVER bake things as long as it calls for in the recipes, because it is ALWAYS too long. I check and check until it’s just the tiniest bit underdone, then I take it out of the oven and it finishes cooking in its own heat.
Does Nigella say that her recipes are aimed at *patriarchy* points, rather than the natural human instinct to love people who share good food? (I am serious about this being an instinct.)
These days what I cook is defined by what’s in season at the CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) Farm on the other side of the fields. It gives an old-fashioned approach to menu-planning (”what’ve we got a lot of?”) and we take the weather very personally, in a very traditional way.
One of the great things about growing up a Texan is you are trained to be a pepper belly.
Not necessarily. My cousin from Windom, TX(now in Quinlan, TX) isn’t much for spicy foods, she will eat what is mildly spicy but her husband ‘tones down’ his chili so that she can enjoy it, and she won’t eat anything that has jalapenos in it.
OTOH, Mother Avenger would cook great beef or shrimp curry, and everyone except my sister Nurse Avenger would love it.
From the Chinese side of the family, I learned to cook various dishes including what we called “Chinese Chicken Wings”, “Portuguese Mince”(a Eurasian version of Hamburger Helper), and sok, which is a rice porridge that takes two hours to cook.
The latter is 2.5 quarts of water,
1/4th cup of long-grain rice,
1 to 3 cups of chicken stock(or cubes of bullion),
some Chinese 5-spice powder,
and chicken, beef, or shrimp, as you like it.
I used to cook a version for Grandfather Monk where I would chop up chicken breast meat into small pieces and throw it in the last 10 minutes of cooking.
Deeeeeeeelish!
It’s also a great way to cook a leftover roast chicken carcass, the two hours ensures that the meat falls off the bone and get some ‘goodness’ out of the bones.
Illocano Avenger cooks lots of Filipino dishes including adobo and a veggi-pork stew called dinung-dung, which usually includes bitter melon and other Asian veggies.
I would recommend the above adobo recipe, except don’t crush the peppercorns, forget the water, use sugar cane vinegar, use 1.5 cups of soy sauce to 3/8ths cup of vinegar, don’t reduce the sauce and don’t saute the chicken.
A lot of times I’ll cook Chinese from package mixes, and then horrify IA by putting some crushed red pepper in my serving to ‘turn up the heat’, as I like things a bit hotter than she does.
I once cooked some “Spicy Orange Beef” from one such mix, and IA was a bit disappointed with the results, asking me, “This is spicy?”
I told her, “It is for white people, sweetheart.”
For that Chinese takeout taste, use Kimlan soy sauce. In my family, we buy Kikkoman by the gallon, which is used in many Chinese households, despite having a Japanese origin.
Like really moist roast chicken?
The secret is 2 hours at 300 degrees F.
On the Professor Avenger side of the family, I learned how to cook fried chicken, although IA is better at cooking the milk gravy using pan scrapings, stock from the organs, flour and milk.
I do the mashed potatoes, with a little milk and butter for flavor, using a whisk to mash the potatoes.
“Does Nigella say that her recipes are aimed at *patriarchy* points, rather than the natural human instinct to love people who share good food? (I am serious about this being an instinct.)”
No, not directly. But the books are ‘how to be a good hostess/ domestic goddess (ie live up to patriarchal expectations) without slaving’ .
Women are expected to be able to produce good food, and don’t get the kudos men do for producing equally good food - Nigella’s recipes are cheat sheets for living up to expectations, getting a chance to enjoy yourself and even impressing people.
I love food and I love cooking, but I’m not terribly good at it. It’s a little frustrating, actually, as I feel I’ve been stuck in “Beginner Mode” for a good year or two. Little by little it’s getting better though, as I figure out what ingredients I like, how different preparations change them, and basic rules such as never, ever get cinnamon in your eye. It’s an incremental process, I guess. And anyway, in my humble estimation, I now make pretty rad marinara sauce and taco rice, which is good as pasta and tacos* comprise about like 90% of my diet.
* Not at the same time.
I put things into the slow cooker, food comes out. It’s not always good food, but there’s usually a lot of it and it’s filling. If I could somehow program the slow cooker to shop for things and fill itself, turn itself on, and beep at me when it’s food that would be the ideal way to cook.
Hmm, let me see . . . my default cooking style is stir-fry/dumping cans in pots a la the samp recipe above/stewing assorted root veggies in cold weather. But that also tends to involve whatever’s ready in the garden or at the co-op (which has started up their own farm, very cool): this summer saw a lot of corn/pattypan squash/green bean stew-y things. Beyond that, generally I’ll start off with something interesting in season/on sale, or maybe some random inspiration, possibly glance at a couple of recipes, and improvise off that - which has led to some pretty good hits and sadly, quite a few spectacular misses. Today I was in a muffin mood for some reason, started playing around and came up with
a) pear-ginger-cardamon muffins -which are good enough that friends have been calling up saying they’ve heard about them from other friends, and could I save them some? and,
b) apple-oat-walnut muffins, which - well, I seem to have created something akin to Terry Pratchett’s dwarf bread: they’re astonishingly dense, probably quite nutritious, and I suspect even half of one could see you through a really strenuous hike or such, largely because the thought of having to eat it would be a remarkable motivator. Ah well.
Pear-ginger-cardamon muffins
2 ripe bartlett pears (or about a cup of pear strips)
(A few tbsp of sugar, to coat)
1/4 cup crystalized ginger, plus 2-3 tbsp or so extra for decoration
2 cups flour
1 tbsp baking power
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp (ground) cardamon
1 cup milk,
2/3 cup sugar
6 tbsp melted butter
2 (extra large) eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
Preheat over to 400. Grease muffin pan or put in little paper cups
Peel pears (I had one just-ripe and one almost-overripe), then just keep peeling (short strokes for little pieces) into a bowl, mix in enough sugar to coat, andlet stand, oh, 10 minutes or so. Add that 1/4 cup crystallized ginger, let stand a few minutes longer, and meanwhile:
mix together in a large bowl: flour, baking powder, salt, cardamon.
wisk together in smaller bowl: milk, sugar, melted butter, eggs, vaniila.
Mix in pear-ginger mixture, including any juice that’s oozed out.
Add bowl o’ wet stuff to bowl of dry stuff, and mix together. Fill up muffin cups, add a little diced crystallized ginger on top to decorate, and place pan in oven. Bake ’til a toothpick inserted into the middle of a muffin comes out clean, and (should be even a few minutes past that) they’re just barely starting to tan a little ’round the edges - perhaps 22 minutes-ish? (I’m riffing off the Joy of Cooking basic muffin recipe here - they do have some great stuff).
I’m definitely making MAJeff’s tomato-fennel soup. I never, ever would have thought of using ajwain & fennugreek: that’s awesome. (although after that, I might try a variation with lovage seeds instead . . . .)
I also want to share the joy of mashed potato/rutabaga - that is, cook more or less equal amounts of potato and rutabaga (depending on taste) and mash ‘em together, add butter, etc. Happy harvesty yellow and much more character. (Granted, you have to have a basic like of brassica-yness, or it will be kind of character you’d rather not run into, but hey . . . .)
“If I could somehow program the slow cooker to shop for things
Oh, but that’s half the fun!! I’ve been known to just hang out in the produce aisle happily looking at vegetables - my wife thinks I’m completely cracked (not saying she’s wrong, granted . . .)
And I’m off to bed, with the image of a slow cooking slowly navigating the supermaket aisles in my head : )
And let me add, in the muffin recipe, I’ve left out the bit where you dice the crystallized ginger into pretty small bits, so it’s 1/4 cup of diced crystallized ginger. Sorry.
I live in a coop with 8 other people. We don’t buy meat or fish with house funds. One of the girls is vegan and doesn’t eat wheat or beans, another is allergic to oats, chocolate, nuts, and Bragg’s, and another one can’t tolerate spice. We buy our food collectively (and since we have about $80 to spend per person per month), we have a preponderance of dry goods/bulk items and dumpstered veggies. So, my cooking tends to be more like Iron chef, where I look through the fridge and see what I have, then try to come up with an interesting dish from the combination. I have about 6 or 7 staple dishes I make (dal, veggie pulao, french onion soup, etc.), and so I choose one of those staple dishes based on available ingredients and then try to thnk of something that will compliment said dish. In the end, I wind up making a lot of Indian food (needs a few humble ingredients,mostly cheap ones), a lot of soups (they do well with improvisation and lack of ingredients), rice dishes (same), etc.
Sometimes I miss making an elaborate meal with a preset menu, but mostof the time I am grateful for the variety; I’m constantly challenged to try new things and I let the foods available dictate my choices.
Oh, and re: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World–that book is amazing! I’ve tried about 10 of the cupcake recipes and they’re all wonderful. I made the pistachio-rosewater and coconut cupcakes for my housemates wedding and they were all devoured hungrily. Yum.
I learned cooking from my mother’s Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. My desert island cookbook collection would be Betty, Joy of Cooking, Beard’s American Cookery, The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook, Putting Food By, and this bargain bin british cookbook that’s 30 years old, called “The Complete Oriental Cookbook,” with fabulous recipes, especially for Indian and Malaysian food.
If you’re trying something new, following recipes helps you make something like it is supposed to be. Pictures help let you know what it’s supposed to look like when it’s done.
Familiarity with cooking lets you adjust on the fly. For example, my current batch of dried thyme is unbelievably pungent, so I add about half what the recipe calls for. A lot of garlic in the stores for much of the year is unbelievably harsh — I either buy it at the farmers’ market or use dried.
Baking also rewards familiarity. Following the classic Toll House cookie recipe yields flat cookies that fry on the cookie sheet, so I add a lot more flour than the recipe calls for. In general, you have to have a feeling for how wet a particular dough should be, and add flour accordingly. My grandmother, who taught me how to make strudel, said you had to knead the dough till it was like a baby’s butt, and then you had to roll it out thin enough to read newsprint through. But most of the time she used filo, and so do I.
I’m definitely a recipe as inspiration cook, although I will look to check on proportions for things like spices. That said, I invariably add more ginger, cardemon or garam masala simply because I love, love, love them. I’ll also look at recipes to remind myself of the ingredient list as I have a very poor memory and am likely to forget. I’m pretty good at stews, curries, stir frys, pastas, less good at the classic meat and 3 veg combo.
The two things that people will actively ask me to cook and bring to their houses are my bread and butter pudding recipe and my tiramisu. Both are cases where I have taken 2 or 3 different versions and combined them to create my own. I also make very good risotto (all flavours - my Italian pork and fennel sausage risotto is pretty damn good). An Italian taught me that you never put them in the oven as then you lose the creamy texture. You need to stir them pretty constantly and gradually add the fluid (wine or stock or both) to get that ‘authentic’ risotto texture. Even so, I’ve had pretty good risotto out of the oven (although the texture is different).
If you are interested in a recipe book that concentrates on ingredients rather than dishes, you should check out Stephanie Alexander’s *The Cook’s Companion*. It’s an absolute joy to use. She talks about each ingredient (selection, varieties, cooking methods) and then gives fabulous recipes using that ingredient. It’s great for beginners as well as more experienced cooks.
I love cooking. I became a vegetarian at an early age in a meat obsessed family so I started cooking early on and got use to finding creative vegetarian solutions to recipes. As I got older my diet has changed more radically: I eat fish but still no other meat, no diary (allergies), no high fat/fried foods, no high-fructose corn syrup. All these limitations have actually made me a better and more creative cook. I borrow a lot from different cultures and make meals based around their traditions or fuse them together: Italian, Indian, Japanese, Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Spanish, Creole, Cajun, Jewish Eastern European and so on. I use recipes for inspiration, mostly to build up knowledge on different spice combinations, but rarely follow them completly.
I bake like crazy, and use a lot of Nigella’s recipes - rarely following them to the letter, but making substitutions depending on what I feel like or have in the cupboard. This weekend I made banana bread with sunflower seeds, and a few jars of quince glaze because there were some quinces on sale at the farmers’ market.
There are things about Nigella that I like to mock occasionally, but she writes a damn good cookbook. And I think it’s important that a sexy woman is seen eating on the telly from time to time.
I haven’t made it in a while (now that blueberry season is over I regret not remembering it sooner), but one of my favorite simple dessert recipes is one Nigella put in the New York Times about 3 years ago: her grandmother’s “Barbados cream.” Mix Greek or other whole-milk yogurt with cream, cover with a layer of brown sugar, cover and refrigerate 12-24 hours, and spoon over fruit/ other things. It tastes much more complex than it is.
Charlie and I cook and bake from scratch every day; we also raise our own veggies and herbs, which help alot. Freeze a fair amount of stuff. Our kids are both learning how to cook this year in school- elder as part of a semester long “home ec” class mandatory for all 7th grade students, and younger as part of her special ed (she’s autistic) schedule, which is great for her reading, comprehensive, social and hand/eye issues.
My great-grandmother was a widow with 9 children and many grandchildren at the end of the Depression. They had an established farm that the elder kids could manage, so she worked at summer camps in Maine as a cook and later had a small home-based business, baking pies, breads, muffins, cookies etc. I received a photocopy of her cookbook 20 years ago; about 80 pages with hundreds of recipes. That, “Fanny Farmer” and a few others are my staples- and I keep a few local take-out menus in the front of Gram’s notebook.
Anyone who had 10 kids, 23 grandkids, and over 50 great-grandkids would appreciate that SOME days ya need a break!
I bake - mostly in the winter, though; yeast bread and muffins, mostly, popovers sometimes, pies (using Jeffrey Steingarten’s crust method). Other cooking is mainly find something in the fridge and cook it. Last week we had a rather good thing with stir-fried green beans and a bit of hamburger and the meat off one chicken thigh, with chili/garlic paste, a bit of veg. stock, a ripe tomato chopped up. A ripe tomato added to stir-fry can be very nice. The thigh bone, with its residual meat (quite a bit as I’m not an expert an boning), went into a squash soup with three-quarters of a squash cooked in butter with a bit of onion and garlic, simmered until tender with a bay leaf, some sage, thyme, then put through a strainer (I don’t have a food mill) and finished with a tad of extra butter. The rest of the squash went into a veggie soup with one-and-a-half ears’ worth of leftover corn, half a bag of mixed veggies from the freezer, the rest of the onion, some garlic, the heels of two bunches of celery, two baby bok choy, tomatoes, beans and two small roasted pears. All our food is related to our other food.
Oh, could whoever had the NYT bread recipe/method post it? I meant to try it and lost it.
You might like some of these:
http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/recipes-blogged-sofar/
http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/recipes-blogged-sofar/
I posted this about an hour ago, so I apologize if it’s a duplicate but there seems to be a good chance that it was just lost in the ether.
I haven’t made it in a while (now that blueberry season is over I regret not remembering it sooner), but one of my favorite simple dessert recipes is one Nigella put in the New York Times about 3 years ago: her grandmother’s “Barbados cream.” Mix Greek or other whole-milk yogurt with cream, cover with a layer of brown sugar, cover and refrigerate 12-24 hours, and spoon over fruit/ other things. It tastes much more complex than it is.
I can do great Oodles of Noodles! Two packs of Cajun Chicken flavor, in a really heavy bowl so I can get it upstairs to the computer desk before the heat gets through the bowl sufficiently to burn my fingers.
Unless, of course, the cat is parked on the computer desk, and I have to set the bowl down and remove said cat. By that time, the bowl is getting finger-burning warm.
Actually, I used to bake German chocolate cakes from scratch, years and years ago, but whenever I cook, I make an absolute mess in the kitchen. I had to make the bacon-like substance (as it is referred to at my house) yesterday (basically because I was bribed into doing so: if I wante any, I had to cook it). I wind up having to do the turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but those are easy, and I usually have to do pot roasts during cooler weather when my darling bride has to work; the individuality there is simply looking around the kitchen to see what is around that I can throw in the pot; if it’s edible, it’s fair game!
But it still gets back to a totally destroyed kitchen: if I cook, it looks like a bomb went off. Any powdered substances (like flour) wind up on the floor, if frying is involved (that bacon-like substance), grease pops on the stove and the floor, eggs get dropped, even rolls of paper towels somehow get unrolled all over the place. And I absolutely despise cleaning!
Heck, when we needed a new stove (had to be electric; we don’t have gas at our house), we both agreed that it had to be one of the smooth top models, just to make it easier to clean. I might not be the only one in the family who makes a mess while cooking; I just make the biggest messes!
Delurking to testify that there is no overstating how good this restaurant is. One of my best friends lives in Cambridgeport, and we went the last time I visited. I still think about that pumpkin all the time. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. My goal for the late fall/winter is to learn how to approximate it.
“I learned to cook from my great-grandmother, who was an old-school German woman - you threw stuff into a bowl, tasted as you went, paid attention to smells and kept tasting until you were satisfied.”
In my case, my grandma, a French-ancestried Southerner who married an Irish-ancestried man and learned much about cooking from the other (Italian) wives at the ranch where he worked, taught me the same thing.
If you aren’t sure about an ingredient, trust your sense of smell.
When I developed my garlic allergy, I found cumin, a spice I had previously not been experienced with, had just a ‘low’ enough note to take the place of it.
And as for baking, I started working a while back on microwave baking, and I started to realize the whole chemistry of baking wasn’t nearly as difficult as I was told. More leavening for oven, less for microwave. Thinnish batter for cake in over, thicker for cakes/muffins in microwave; either way, the fats are oils, and egg and water are the liquids. For cookies, thick dough with butter for fat. For bread, thick, yeast dough with little sugar or fat; liquids very flexible for a wide range of tastes. If the texture feels right, it will bake okay.
Oh, and I SUCK at following directions. I think I have ADD and it’s partly masked by having a very responsible outlook and INTJ personality. I’m really smart, but anything with detailed and precise instructions makes my eyes start to glaze over, my attention wander, and for me to feel frustrated, bored, and worried.
The long time standard end of week meal at my house is called “crisper roullette”. Whatever is in the crisper is shredded (if lettuce type)and tossed with cold meat (usually left over)/fish (we always have a few cans of tuna just for this) or chopped and cooked via steamer or wok and served with/over rice or pasta.
Lots of spices, both sweetish and savory.
Except for baking, we all mostly wing it. Recipes are great starts or insperations, but almost all have too much salt, fat and/or sugar when someone in the family is a cardiac patient and another is pre-diabetic.
I have a knack for resourceful “seat of the pants” cooking. Taking things that are available and composing impromptu dishes is my specialty.
I can quickly consult the pantry oracle or freezer oracle and pull out stuff to make a mixed dish. I have, in the past, favored “disposal at potluck” for excess stews/soups or dishes composed from yesterday’s leftovers.
A classic example: curry cous cous with mandarin orange sauce and chick peas. We had too much left over couscous, so I grabbed a can of mandarin oranges, added curry powder and some OJ, boiled it down to a sauce thickened with a little corn starch, and tossed it with the cous cous and a can of chick peas. I set the mess in a bowl and laid the oranges and some basil leaves around the perimiter.
A very popular potluck dish, not a morsel left, invented and composed in all of 20 minutes.
Another triumph was the accidental composition of “Death By Chocolate Lab Trifle”.
I made a “death by chocolate” cake: I made a chocolate cake mix per directions, poured the chocolate syrup/sweetened condensed milk mix on it, and set it on the patio to cool. I was making this for a party that evening.
Along comes the neighbor’s chocolate labrador retriever, who had somehow followed her nose in the freezing weather to find the cake cooling on the patio. She pushed off the heavy roasting pan cover, and nibbled at the side before we ran her off.
I had to go to the store anyway, so I picked up some whipping cream and brickle toffee bits. I took the damaged cake and removed the nibbled corner with a good wide margin to spare. I then cut the remaining goo-soaked cake into small chunks and chilled it.
Whipping the cream with some sugar to stiffen it (I set everything outside first to chill) and some vanilla to flavor it, I built a trifle by layering cake, toffee bits, whipped cream, cake, etc. I reserved some whipped cream and toffee for the top, and scrounged some marischino cherries from the refrigerator to give it festive color.
It isn’t just a dish - it’s a story!
I bake a fair bit, and have a fair-sized collection of recipes I fall back on.
I tend to be a creature of habit: when I find something I like, I’ll stick with it. So for example, when I want Beef Stew, I want the specific oven beef stew I grew up with, not just any stew. I’m not picky if it’s served to me, but if I’m going to make it, I’ll make it the way I want it.
So I follow the recipes pretty closely, and the tweaks I make to the recipe are usually pretty minor. I was kinda hoping that the Good Eats approach to understanding the reasons for the steps int he recipies would make me more creative in the kitchen, but so far, I haven’t really cut loose an experimented much.
Oh well, thanksgiving’s coming up.
I will follow any recipe once. Except I don’t often measure exact unless there’s a reason.
After that, if it needed extra spice, I’ll start adjusting the recipe. Often, I’ll stop measuring entirely and do it all by eye/taste.
I hardly ever bake bread-like things. But our oven does get a lot of use - we broil or bake most of our meats.
I don’t mind chatty cooking hosts. I do have a problem with overly perky ones. Anyone who uses more energy saying “hello” than I use to cook my entire meal needs to go run a few miles before talking to me.
A warning about the Guiness chocolate cake- If you taste the raw batter you will then proceed to eat WAY more raw batter than anyone should…
My cooking style is to follow recipes to a reasonable extent, although I’m quite comfortable making substitutions. And like Amanda, I almost always double the garlic and spices. (This is especially true with almost every Indian cookbook aimed at white people. You have to double the chiles just right off the top.) Experience has given me a good eye for measurements, so I rarely measure spices or oil.
With certain dishes — like tomato sauce and vegetarian chli — I don’t use a recipe. These are the ones where I improvise. They’re forgiving — unlike baking, where if you mis-measure something it won’t rise. And they’re also good places to play with new flavors.
I love to bake, but I follow baking recipes much more slavishly. I don’t get to bake very much because I don’t have anyone to eat it.
Currently I’m enjoying learning food science from Harold McGee (reading On Food and Cooking). Knowing the theory helps me improvise, because I have some thumb-rule understanding of what’s going on.
My boyfriend follows recipes much more carefully and measures everything. It’s just because he didn’t grow up cooking as much as I did, and doesn’t have the experience to improvise quite as much. There are a few dishes that he’s cooked many times, has no written recipe and measures nothing — like his pot roast, which is excellent.
I tend to follow recipes in spirit. Almost everything written down is fairly milquetoasty so I’m pretty liberal at interpreting recipes, especially when it comes to spicing. One thing I’ve learned from my personal fave celebrity chef - Tyler Florence (quite a chatty guy actually) - is to load the things with the called for spices…. 1 Tb of celery seed? That’s a handfull or two.
Baking I suck at so Jo does most of that… and she’s the Grill Queen, I tend to incinerate stuff on the grill while she has introduced me to the wonders of rare plus. Oh, and the Dutch Oven is the greatest cooking implement ever invented.
Here’s what I made last night (I’m on a rustic Itallian kick), it’s easy to vegitarianise by leaving out the sausage stage (or using veggie sausage):
Fagioli Alla Toscana (Tuscan Beans)
Prep:
Coarsly chop onions, celery and carrots at a 2:1:1 ratio. (~ 1 large red onion, 2 stalks cellery and 1 carrot; This is a “mirepoix”).
Open and drain 2 cans Great Northern Beans (Canellini are more true to the recipe’s origins but I love Great Northerns).
Uncase 1/2 Lb Italian sausage (the more fennel the better IMHO).
Crush 2 cloves of garlic.
In a dutch oven or other large skillet, brown sausage in olive oil and break up into small chunks.
When sausage is mostly cooked and has rendered a fair amount of fat add the mirepoix and cook until carrots are soft.
Add the garlic and spice with rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt and pepper.
Cook for another minute or two then add beans and simmer for at least 1/2 hour stirring occasionally and spicing to taste.
Serve in bowl with bread and parmesean cheese.
For vegitarian version especially, make sure and get GOOD olive oil (and more of it when cooking the mirepoix) as it will be a significant flavor in the finished product.
Sounds like “Stump the Cook” on Lynne Rosetto-Casper’s MPR program “The Splendid Table.” People call in with a random 5 ingredients in their fridge and she has to make a recpie out of them (but she always gets to use olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper)
The other thing I’ve found over the years is that a bit of presentation can make a big difference. Snow peas or carrots or peppers for color, shaping the rolls into crescents instead of just blopping them on the baking sheet, reserving the asparagus tips, stuff like that.
Samantha — have you tried asafoetida? Jains and other Indians use it as a substitute for garlic.
I’m another one who uses a recipe as a starting point, and then start tweaking to suit my taste or to accommodate whatever is in the house. Baking free-style requires a little understanding of the underlying chemistry (e.g., what makes something rise more/less, spread out more/less, be cakier/chewier, etc.) but once you get those basic concepts down it’s fun to experiment!
btw, who’s with me in rooting for Casey to win “Top Chef”?
Oh, I would SO love to see a woman take that top prize!
Could have been. I’m still unpacking and trying to find space for things.
If it’s too watery I add more flour or starch…if it’s too thick I add more water or milk…if it’s too watery I add more flour or starch…
I use recipes to get an idea of ingredients, ratios and cooking techniques but I don’t follow the recipe perfectly. I often make substitutions.
btw, who’s with me in rooting for Casey to win “Top Chef”?
While I think Casey has the best palate of the bunch, I just don’t think she has the training, and commiserate skills, to compete with Hung when it comes down to it.
(but she always gets to use olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper)
In my mind, that’s grand-scale cheating. That’ll make even used truck tires edible.
Nearly anything flavorful and brothy makes beans into a main dish. Around here I make this Italian endive thing where you saute onions and garlic and then add chopped endive till it goes all limp, then add broth and simmer for a while, add your cooked beans and simmer long enough for it to all thicken a bit. For the kids I do a second pot minus most of the endive.
My mother used to make a black bean soup that was thinner than your ordinary bean soup. You make a well-flavored broth the day before with beef bones and a ham hock or other ham leftover, then cook your black beans in that until done with, I think, onion and carrot and other stuff, then puree at the end. Lovely winter food.
I’m a woman, and I laugh heartily in the face of recipies. Recipes aren’t blueprints. They’re more like guestural drawings.
Being a vegan has turned me into the most creative cook among my friends. I eat a vastly more diverse diet than any of my omnivorous friends or relatives. I’ve been doing the vegan thing for ten years, and cooking like mad for two of those.
It’s worthwhile to use recipes for baked goods the first time you try it; you have to get the chemistry right. After that, you can wing it a little more.
Yesterday I made a pumpkin cheesecake (to honor the first day of autumn) and some homemade spicy soup (complete with homemade broth from the last two months’ carrot, onion, celery, and parsley scraps). Last week I threw together a delicious casserole with white rice, brown rice, wild rice, green beans, broccoli, and (eek!) fake cheese. Normally I don’t rely on substitute dairy products, but the cold weather lately has had me craving soft, salty fat.
1. Heat oven to 400
2. Put in generic boxed frozen “food”
3. Let thaw/cook for about 15-20 minutes
4. Devour results in under 5 minutes
5. Become depressed over lack of cooking ability
6. Wash the sadness down with tap water
7. Vow to be better cook
8. Chug water in middle of night to relieve heartburn
9. Wake up and spend 30 minutes battling constipation
10. Forget vows to be better cook
11. Read about people who can cook on Pandagon, restate vows, drown depression with more tap water
12. Revisit step 9
13. Forget vows again, restart at step 1.
I join the crowd here that uses recipes as inspiration. I cook and bake all the time, and I rarely follow a recipe exactly, and I frequently just make stuff up (which I call “inventing recipes” rather than “throwing shit together”).
The one exception is candy. I’ve been working on learning to make candy for over a year now (it’s slow going - that whole morning sickness/having an infant thing really messes up schedules) and I still follow those recipes exactly. Once I know what I’m doing, I’m sure I’ll get more creative.
I have a traumatic early memory. I was seven or eight, and I was in charge of making biscuits for dinner, and had been for a couple of years already. There had to be an adult in the kitchen, but I was the biscuit cook. My grandmother was visiting and she was my adult supervisor. I was mixing my biscuits and she noticed I only added half as much salt as the recipe called for and she yelled at me! She gave me a big lecture on how important it was to follow recipes exactly. She could have scarred me for life. Luckily, my parents assured me that cooking was personal and I could do whatever I wanted to recipes as long as the results were usually edible.
Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess was the start of my adult cooking career. I loved the idea of making food that looked and tasted like it took tremendous effort, but was really very easy. I also love the way she “chats” about the recipes and admits mistakes and admits to shortcuts and cheats. She seems very honest about cooking, and even if she isn’t, I appreciate the style.
ROFL. The on-air FoodTV chefs who have actually have recipes in our repertoire now are:
Alton Brown, who as someone else has mentioned, is beyond ‘chatty’, (several recipes, and more to our benefits, numerous techniques that have permeated other recipes), Giarda DeLaurentis, and Paula Deen, whose ENTIRE SCHTICK is “chatty”, y’all.
Seriously….have any of these people ever watched The Godmother : Julia Child???
As for our cooking style it’s: do the recipe once, per the recipe, then fix it.
Some of the recipes allegedly from the show have become largely unrecognizable by the time we’re done with them….
But hey, I’m a chemist by training, and chemists are, generally speaking, good cooks, knowing both the virtues of following a recipe, and the wisdom of modifying one to get what you want.
I bake! Chocolate chip banana nut bread. I go through a loaf a week - it is excellent heated up and slathered with butter, with breakfast. Or cold as a snack.
I also like roasting turkey, chicken, and beef, because roast meats are great for sandwiches, and if you cook up a big batch, you have leftovers for at least a week (including what gets stashed in the freezer).
I don’t use recipes much, except for ideas, and specifics on roasting, since I’m less comfortable winging it there than I am with stovetop cooking. Ye gods, though, I’m glad I haven’t choked on smoke, because too often when I’m cooking, I get distracted by the internets, and before I know it, the lovely onions are not carmelized, they are carbon
BruceJ, my husband and I are both chemists by training, but it took me quite a while to convince my husband that if he could follow a lab procedure, he could follow a recipe. He gets it now, but it took serious convincing!
I use recipes a lot. I’m not really ashamed or anything to say it. I definitely make my own food, but there’s also a comfort in using a recipe. You already know how it’s going to come out. While this may strip some of the excitement out of cooking for something, it’s alright with me. I can make corrections and changes, but I have a nice frame to work from.
I also use recipes because I bake. Baking is time-intensive, and that part I hate. I really don’t want to have to spend a lot of time re-doing something because I messed it up freestyling it. So, I use a recipe to make sure that I do all of the steps absolutely correctly and can spend my time living my life instead of slaving away, dusty with flour remaking a loaf of bread for the second time.
Use my oven to bake…
Only bake ww english muffins.
Do like the Minimalist and..
He’s a guy.
[Could be gay tho, I guess so the
boy/girl differential might be less.]
BruceJ, I absolutely adore Julia. Our PBS station doesn’t show her much anymore, but I pretty religiously watch when she’s on and I have almost all her cookbooks. She was the boss of American food, as far as I’m concerned.
When I was in grad school, my thesis advisor said more than once, “Any scientist who says she can’t cook hasn’t tried.” It really is either gather-the-reagents-and-follow-the-protocol or work-from-a-few-first-principles.
This was the wrong thread to read after having skipped lunch.
I am HUNGRY.
To add something other than drool to the conversation, (omg I want a piece of that Guinness chocolate cake RIGHT NOW) I’ve found a lot of interesting recipes on http://www.chow.com
I subscribe to “Cooking Light” magazine, which has lots of great recipes with lowered sodium and fat, but are still generally yummy.
My boyfriend grew up in a non-cooking household (unlike the household I grew up in) but loves good food. He’s just wonderfully jazzed about the whole home cooking thing. We’ve been having a lot of fun going through my back issues of foodie magazines and choosing recipes we’d like to try. We’ve worked out a deal that I cook and he does the dishes. This is a win-win for me, because I love cooking and loathe doing dishes. I’ve also taught him some very simple and very yummy recipes that he can cook on his own, for those nights I feel like taking a break from cooking.
Here’s a family favorite: Chinese chicken with lemon sauce. Vegetarians can replace the chicken with those soy chicken strips, which are actually pretty tasty, but need much less cooking time and won’t take the breading, so take that into consideration.
Chicken with Lemon Sauce
1 lb skinned, boned chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch strips
Marinade
1 tsp salt
4 tsp rice wine
2 tsp soy sauce
1 egg yolk
Freshly grated pepper
Lemon sauce
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup chicken broth
½ tsp salt
1 T cornstarch
1 tsp sesame oil
¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 1/2 a lemon)
Coating
6 T cornstarch
2 T all purpose flour
Mix marinade ingredients in a medium bowl and mix well. Cover and let stand 30 minutes.
Combine the ingredients of the lemon sauce in a separate bowl.
Mix together the flour and cornstarch for the chicken coating. After the chicken has been marinating for 30 minutes remove the pieces of chicken from the bowl and roll in coating ingredients. Discard extra coating.
Heat enough oil to cover chicken in a wok over medium high heat and then drop in the coated chicken strips. Cook until chicken pieces are golden brown and no longer pink on the inside. Remove from oil with a slotted spoon and discard all but 1 T of the remaining oil. Drain chicken pieces on a paper towel.
Put the wok back on medium high heat and add the lemon sauce ingredients after stirring (the sugar tends to settle). Cook sauce, stirring occasionally, until it thickens.
Once the sauce thickens, transfer chicken back into wok and toss to coat with sauce evenly. Serve over rice. Toasted sesame seeds and lemon slices are optional garnishes.
I follow recipes to the letter. I give this practice all the credit for my husband being willing to eat anything I have cooked.
In Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica there is a recipe for squash risotto. I have not made it myself because risotto has to be served on the spot.