/qa/ - Questions & Answers

>>95721
Thai basil in pho is the single greatest thing of all time.

Pizza is one of those things I've never tried to make myself. It seems like so much work, and if you 'cheat' and get premade dough or sauce then what's the point?
Maybe one day...

>>104679
???

>>104679
>>104681
too green

6 eggrolls for dinner

Spent a lot of time making curry rice but now that it's done I'm not feeling hungry.

Brown rice
I've had a few varieties of it, including stuff imported from Japan and none of it really ingratiated itself with me. It seems like a natural 'filler' ingredient if the texture and taste is properly neutralized with pressure cooking and strong flavors. The purpose of brown rice is that it's more nutritious than white rice, right? I guess there's a "nutty" flavor, but do people go out of their way for that if it wasn't also known as rice type with nutritional value? I don't.

White rice
I definitely like it a lot more as it's good cheap flavorless and almost textureless filler. You can get a chicken breast, cut it up, and then for each fork of chicken you combine 1-2 forks of rice in your mouth at the same time. It's a great way to fill yourself up for cheap, as I'm sure most people know. One day I'd like to try making Japanese rice porridge since it's one of those things I see in games like Harvest Moon that seems very mysterious.
But, I like something more than these and it's...

Quinoa
Personally, I think quinoa is better than rice for most things that don't require rice's properties, or people with nostalgia if you grew up with it. I've talked about this stuff before in a thread here, and it's one of those "super foods" people talk about. I don't really trust the people that give names like "super foods" to stuff since it's really misleading and lends itself to marketing gimmicks, but I did some basic reading and it does seem to be quite nutritious. You can say "it's more nutritious than brown rice" and it's true, but I think brown rice still has some stuff that quinoa doesn't. However, the texture of quinoa is a lot better to me and I'm more likely to eat more of it without getting tired of it. It's very fluffy as it balloons into orbs filled with the liquid used to cook it.
Quinoa is the seed of a South American plant, and it's 4x as expensive as brown rice here in the US. I'm sure it's cheaper in South America and presumably more expensive on the other side of the world as it doesn't seem like anyone else on the planet is farming it in comparable amounts. That being said, 4x the price of something ridiculously cheap is still pretty good.

Couscous
I thought this stuff was raw seed like the others above, but it's basically flour and turns into something similar to pasta when cooked, just in a very tiny form. When I tried to use it as a basic side dish it did not turn out very well. This is definitely something meant to be used a certain way, but I haven't gone searching for any recipes for it.
Did you know semolina is processed from endosperm?

These little food items are really handy to serve as the bulk of a meal and I've found myself adding them to more and more things, like stews, to add more nutrition and raw weight. I wonder if I can add quinoa to scrambled eggs...

>>105896
That's interesting. I'm not sure how much the water thing has an effect for me personally, though. I think this is another strength of pressure cooking, because when I make quinoa or rice there isn't any free water left. Everything gets forcefully sucked inside.

Tonight's meal is pork ribs with assorted Italian herbs, onion flakes, and garlic. As an okazu I want to throw together some other stuff I need to get rid of such as potatos and frozen peas/carrots/corn. Might stick it in the oven on the rack under the meat an hour before the meat's ready, and in the meantime I'll watch Heidi girl of the alps, Inuyasha, Smile Precure, Hirogaru Sky Precure, and Millennium Actress. That's just while stuff's cooking... gotta queue up something to watch while I eat.

omg i tried some pizza from a real pizza oven and nothing else is allowed to be called a pizza now

i undercooked my lamb shoulder last week so after eating most of it over the week i just put it back in the oven with some potators for an hour

I think I'm going to try "making" yogurt. I saw a guide on a site dedicated to Instant Pot, but it's just boiling milk and then you add some greek yogurt as the "starter culture" and incubate it with the lid closed with the temperature up and wait almost half a day.
It'd be cool if I no longer had to buy yogurt from the store and could just maintain my own little culture in the fridge and remake it when needed with fresh milk.
Plain yogurt is pretty, uh, plain, though...

>>110720
You should try making sourdough breads too, I did it once without using any starter at all and just let the dough catching yeast from air.
The bread tasted like English muffins in texture but with sour taste.
Once you're getting living yeasts you can also make kvass with it.

I've done two experiments with making simple tomato sauce from fresh garden tomatoes and both failed. I think the main issue is that I need one of those food mill or other things to squeeze out all the juice and flesh but leave the seeds and other hard parts.
It's an annoying amount of work to boil water, make a shallow slice a tomato, place tomato in boiling water, take it out, place it in ice water, take it out, peel off the skin, slice off stem, and them optionally further process it to remove seeds (which I haven't done because it's already too much). Preparing fresh ingredients can be so much work, it's no wonder why people just buy this stuff in cans even if they have space outside.
Guess I'll look at food mills on amazon or something now, because this is disappointing

Looking at Amazon's selection of knives beacuse of the prime day sales (underwhelming) and this made me laugh:
https://www.amazon.com/Dalstrong-9CR18MOV-Kitchen-Digital-Included/dp/B0B3YZRNNB/

¥get some lamb shoulder
¥quarter some potatos
¥coat lamb shoulder and tots in some salt and spices and herbs
¥put some alum foil in some oven tray enough to fold over
¥cover bottom of oven tray with tots
¥put layer of some chopped onion and capsicum over
¥put lamb shoulder over
¥push some garlic into some holes cut into lamb shoulder
¥put layer of chopped onion and capsicum
¥fold alum foil over
¥put in some oven for 5 hours at 180 degrees NOT FAHRENHEIT
eat

>>110948
I WANT ONE! GIVE ME A KORURI PLUSH! I NEED IT! AAAAAAA

I made pad kra pao today.
I eat a lot of stir fries because they are so quick and easy to make, and delicious of course.

I'm the guy doing the garden stuff this year and I just did my third attempt at making tomato sauce.
First one was just with a bunch of random cherry and grape tomatoes and it was to see how the process works in regards to peeling and stuff.
Second batch was with some roma tomatoes, but not very many of them.
For both of the previous batches I did it by hand. You "blanch" the tomatoes by creating a shallow slice on each tomato and then putt them in hot bubbly water for a minute and then dunk them in ice water for another minute. It makes the tomato skin peel off and you messily tear it off each one. It's very tedious and really messy. Both of these sauces had a weird taste to them because I didn't de-core them which was a lot of extra work and I would end up discarding so much of them if I did it with my novice hands.

Well, I ordered a 'food mill' and I just made a third batch. With this all you need to do is blanch them in hot water to make them softer and then you just put them in this one and spin the handle around with a hand-cranked handle. This is the one I got and it seems to be of pretty good quality for the price: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000CFH1K
Pretty cool.
The sauce was... okay, I guess. It was a basic thing of just tomatoes, butter and big onion slices which you discard. I'm going to look up making a sauce that tastes more interesting, because this is a bit too plain for me even though I tend to like plain things. But, I think I'm going to keep this as a "base" (maybe with less butter) and put it bags to freeze. The serious people make homemade canned tomato sauce, but I don't really want to spend the money on that.
Well, maybe I should see how much it costs. I have too many tomatoes...

gonna do >>110948 again but with cauliflower in addition to the potatos. and maybe a bit of cheeses. wish I had a bigger baking dish

>>111296
>I have too many tomatoes...
what other tomato experiments did you try? did you watch that episode of hidamari sketch where the girls need to eat all the tomatos they grew in season 3? I hope you found a good use for all those moldy old tomators
>homemade canned tomato sauce
scared of botox

ate some bluefin tuna ootoro sashimi
the cut is super fancy and is even more soft and oily than any salmon i've eaten
it cost me $60/lb from where i bought it which is 2x price of the fancy organic salmon there but the taste is well worth it

God, Parmigiano-Reggiano is so good. It wasn't until a few years ago that I learned that there was a "real" type of Parmasan cheese and that all "Parmesan" I had until then than was generic garbage. People rightfully joke about "American cheese" (although it's good on burgers), but the knockoff version of this stuff is far more insulting. I can't go back to ever eating the garbage kind again.
I made some chicken alfredo using the Italian stuff and it's very tasty, although I cooked the chicken too long and it's a little dry and tough. Oh well, it's still really nice and cheesy.

>>112980
what about pecorino romano?

I have no clue what all these Italian cheeses are but they are good on tomato dishes. I think the one I am using is the real deal, it has a couple of Italian and EU certificates on the label.

I'm currently making "poor man's salmon", which is salted saithe soaked and marinated in water and liquid smoke and then put in oil. It doesn't taste anything like smoked salmon, but it's still good with some bread and butter.

I swear I'm not poor

>>113433
Seems good to me.
Well, I mean, I wouldn't eat it because I don't like bean sprouts, lima beans or mushrooms, but yeah.
Seems healthy.

I often eat a like a bum, not because I am poor but because I am too lazy to cook proper meals. Having a depressing meal of microwave barley porridge right now.

Made a mighty fine mutton red curry if I do say so myself.

>>113733
You need an internal thermometer thing. They're really cheap, even the digital ones. You find the biggest piece (slowest to cook) and pierce it into the thickest part of the meat and take the temperature. The meat has to hit a certain temperature for a certain amount of time to ensure maximum safety.
I would probably play it safe in your case and cook it too much, too.

Risotto in a box

>>113861
loli only liek cora

nevermind i found it
uhh don't have any sake though

I have never been too keen on Western sushi, or sushi in general, but I just had some Asian fusion sushi sandwiches for dinner and they were actually pretty all right.

Making some beef curry stuff. Not the spicy liquid stuff, but something more substantial. https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/pressure-cooker-beef-curry-japanese/
Instant Pot is once again showing its strength as the yellow onion/shallow mixture is somehting that normally takes like 8 hours to reduce over time, but pressure cooking reduces it to 20 minutes.

Does anyone else think shallots look really alien? Their bizarre purple flesh and multiple bulb head things look really unsettling to me. It's definitely not something I would look at in the wild and think "I bet we should cook with that".

BWEH!

Not making these (yet?), but this sounds really good: https://unboundwellness.com/instant-pot-bbq-stuffed-sweet-potatoes/
Sweet potatoes seem like they would go with barbecue really well.
I have no idea how to look for recipes other than googling "___ recipes" so I end up landing on a bunch of blog-like personal sites. I don't know why, but this seems to be one of the subjects/hobbies where the internet hasn't died and consoliated into reddit and discord.

>>115203
You could ask it to make a delicious recipe with doorknobs and battery acid and it would make it sound convincing. It doesn't "know" anything, just repeats patterns and will pick from them semi-randomly to assemble something that looks coherent, but isn't. The newer bots can pull from the internet with sources, but those are paid models and that's just internet searching that I enjoy doing myself (and which allows me to find related content). You definitely can't rely on it for recipes and I wouldn't want to do so either.
Cooking is a very nuanced thing and I'd want to hear why people enjoy the food they cook or give reasoning on why they use Ingredient A over Ingredient B. Explanations like "I cooked with ___ for 5 minutes, but it seems like 3 minutes is better after doing more testing" or "My daughter is picky about texture so I used __ as a substitute" means a lot more to me than a static ingredient list and directions.

Making lasagne with goat cheese.

>>113782
I've made granola a few times now with the same basic ingredients, but I've found that I like it a lot more if I use honey instead of maple syrup. The honey is slightly higher in calories, but the flavor is a lot better and I imagine if you use good quality honey it's also more nutritious. I ran out of vanilla so I made it a few times without it and really don't notice a difference; it might even taste better without it. Greek yogurt and it mixes well with it, like cereal and milk, so I think I've found a great lazy meal that lasts a long time and is actually healthy. I can even substitute stuff like different nuts or different dried fruits, so variety will keep me from getting sick of it as quickly.
I think now my plan is to buy granola ingredients in bulk, not only for the discount but so I don't need to go out as often since I could make it 1-2 meals each day. Too bad I can't really grow most of this stuff.

made wagyu shimeji udon goma miso nabe with dorayaki as side

>>115529
That's me and my opinion hasn't changed, although I've never had an expensive imported Japanese cooker to compare it with. One of the great things about doing it with a pressure cooker is that you can add stuff with it at the same time or cook it with broth and such, and that's even without using some layered system to separate the food inside. I can put in rice, broth and vegetables at the same time.
Maybe if I lived in a large house with a large kitchen I could fill it with specialized appliances, but I like the idea of using one tool for a lot of things instead of having a perhaps slightly superior experience by spending more money and then having 20 more devices strewn about.
I've come to prefer quinoa over rice as well so I don't cook with rice nearly as much. I do want to try making rice pudding eventually, maybe.

Two Kilogram Roast Leg Of Lamb With Garlic And Freshly Cut Rosemary!!

Made oyakodon.
Apparently you're supposed to use sake but it turned out pretty all right without it. Nothing amazing but an okay one pot lazy meal.

tried smoking a pork butt. turned out alright. used some sakura smoking chips i got in japan. the coals burned way faster than i expected so it didnt get smoked for as long as it should have. probably would have made an impact on the taste. i wont use kingsford briquettes next time.

i burned my pizza

didn't burn the pizza this time.

Do you eat burgers in the form of steaks instead of sandwiches?
I made a burger today to go with pasta

>>116260
i made the burger with 100% beef chuck, a salisbury steak has much lower requirements

>United States Department of Agriculture standards for processed, packaged "Salisbury steak" require a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if de-fatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others.

a good idea

>>117095
Extra Reisen

I bought coriander and the plant died just a few hours after I got home.

Made some chili with my homegrown onions and tomatoes as ingredients!
Yeah, I stopped growing them months ago, but I turned the tomatoes into paste and froze them and onions just keep well at room temperature. (Lots of other tomatoes were needed from the store as the base, though).
I love chili!