So I have this problem… I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.
THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.
So I’ll find a pan that makes me go “Oooh!” then I look for excuses to use it.
So it’s not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. “More time to make and clean up than eat? I’m not making it.” Cooking for OTHER people?
Chuck roast:
Shakshuka:
Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:
Beef roast:
Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:
Ableskievers:
Hello it’s me ur friend I’m coming over for dinner
Find a homeless shelter and cook for them? Idk, just an idea. Food looks amazing
Cooking at scale is a much, much bigger deal. Hard to maintain quality, both in terms of ingredients and end product.
There’s a good reason why school lunches are garbage. :(
Holy fuck that chuck roast looks good
It was really good, with bacon, veggies, braised in Malbec wine and Grand Marnier.
I found 2 recipes I couldn’t decide between so I just combined them. ;)
1 pack of bacon, diced and cooked in olive oil on medium high until the edges were brown, then removed.
In the same pan, 2 diced carrots, 2 diced celery stalks, 2 diced Walla Walla sweet onions. Cooked on medium high until carmaelized, then removed.
3.37 pound boneless chuck roast. Patted dry, heavily salted and peppered, seared on one side for 5 minutes, flipped and then seared on the other side for 5 minutes and removed.
Added back 1/2 cup Grand Marnier and 2 cups of Malbec Wine. Deglazed the pan scraping up all the brown bits.
Put the bacon back in, put the veggies back in, stirred until well distributed. Added bay leaves, thyme and rosemary, several cloves of minced garlic, topped with the meat.
Brought to a boil then placed in a pre-heated 325° oven for 3 hours.
After 3 hours, beef was to temp and easily shreddable. (Finally! A reason to use the meat claws!) Resting on stove top while I cook some pasta to go with it.
Pasta was super simple. Boiled water and salt, cooked a bag of egg noodles for 8 or 9 minutes. Drained, removed, then melted a stick of butter in the pot, added a small container of heavy cream, added rosemary and thyme, brought it to a simmer then popped the pasta back in and cooked a couple of minutes.
Ableskievers
Where are you from? I didn’t realize anyone outside Denmark or maybe some nordic countries made these. :)
From Oregon, but we have a large Scandinavian population here.
I fear you’re living too far away from me to say “I’ll come and eat that!”
Doing grilling lately so just follow the smoke. :)
woah
sweet takoyaki
Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.
Are you me? I keep doing that too
Beef Wellington
I recently tried my hand at a porc tenderloin Wellington, as a lower budget try out to see if I could make it.
It went surprisingly well and was really more delicious than I thought. So I think I’m ready to make a proper beef Wellington coming Xmas.
I make this for xmas sometimes. Definitely a labour of love.
Billionaire
Croissant
This, I love, LOVE croissants, and have basically baked and made every other thing I love that much at some point or another. Flattening a giant sheet of butter again and again into a dough sheet? Ain’t nobody got time for that
You fold and flatten it like 3-4 times, each takes like 5 minutes and then it goes back in the fridge for 45 minutes.so while it takes like 4-6 hours of time to make croissants from scratch (including proofing the dough etc.), it’s more like 1 hour of work. Really not as bad as people make it out to be.
effort wise I find it on par to making sourdough bread, what with all the stretching and folding of the dough dgring proofing.
and you can prepare them the day before and proof in the fridge, then bake the next morning. Actual fresh baked croissants in the morning are fucking amazing and well worth the work
I love homemade croissants, and make them, mostly because with sourdough starter in there the flavor is incredible but while I am a reasonably neat- handed person, you are understating the difficulty of laminated dough. It wants to tear, the dough and butter have to each be at the perfect magical temperature, can’t overwork it, dough is delicate and butter is tough. It’s fussy as fuck.
I mean, yes, i takes some practice. I was more commenting in terms of time+effort, which imo is not that much actual time spent doing stuff compared to e.g. just making regular sourdough bread. which also takes practice if you want nice big bubbles. In my experience, getting a pretty sourdough bread with high hydradation dough actually took more practice (in terms of handling the sticky dough) than getting good croissants.
And even the first couple of croissants turned out pretty good when i started. Not on par with bakery ones but still tasty. So it’s not like practice results need to go in the bin
Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh
Homemade flour tortillas are unbelievably good though. I don’t know what it is that makes them taste so different from storebought, but it makes all the difference.
I don’t have the tools or energy to make my own either though :/
It’s so hard to get a good texture too, to get a nice soft foldable one that is thin but tough enough not to rip is an art. My attempts, and I did give it a good damn few tries, were all sad failures and, well, I decided pre-packaged wraps/tortillas are worth the cost to save my sanity lol.
Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I’d ordered just for the task:
The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn’t want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.
Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.
There’s also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it’s also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.
Sourdough
Sourdough is super easy though! Probably barely an hour of actual hands-on time from start to finish with no-knead methods.
Saaaaame.
Do you like that? I had it once and, meh, I don’t think I would spend any amount of energy into doing that. It’s not that it was disgusting or anything like it, but it just, yeah, well… maybe it’s not for me.
All food is like that to me. I only cook because otherwise I’d die of starvation. I eat to live - food has always just been fuel for me. I don’t want to put any more effort into cooking than what is absolutely necessary. If money was not an issue, then personal chef would be the first person I’d hire. Hell, if it was possible I’d hire someone to eat it for me too.
I feel this so hard. If I could just have a pill that would properly supply my body with all the nutrients and sustenance it needs I would 100% do it and then just eat one or two actual meals a week for the flavours.
Papa reyeñas(sp?). They’re so good, it’s basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping
Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes…I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There’s also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes
I don’t enjoy cooking, but I’m pretty good at it when I want to be… But I have to want to be
Sort of like a deluxe, Peruvian version of Scottish cottage pie, no?
And… gotta love those thinly-sliced red onions (and for me, habanero slices) soaked in lime juice in the fridge, overnight. I used to use them as a topping on all kinds of meals before my stomach finally gave out, lol.
Yes and no… They’re very similar conceptually and ingredients wise, but the experience is very different. Frying the outside really firms it up like a French fry, and you get that flavor and texture all around. They also sometimes will add weird things like olives and raisins to it, which is still good, but I don’t particularly like those to start with so I might be biased
You’ve got the right idea of what it is, but you really have to experience it for yourself - a lot of South and Central American countries have their own versions that are very similar, so if you go to a Latino restaurant that isn’t Mexican or Peruvian chicken, you’ll probably be able to find it.
I’ve never tried adding jalapenos to the onion topping though… That sounds delicious. I might have to make that, it is a great topping and adding some heat to it sounds even better
Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.
Ditto puff pastry from scratch.
Traditional versions also contain ~50% butter by total pre-cooking weight. (Hello heart-health my old friend…)
Dunno about your area, but there’s some pretty awesome frozen puff pastry sold in thin-ish sheets at most stores around here. It bakes up quick and almost magically multi-layered, and I would not for a million years be able to tell it from scratch puff pastry from une belle boulangerie.
Yeah, frozen puff pastry is a go-to ingredient. You just won’t catch me making it by hand because as my grandmother used to say, bugger that for a game of soldiers.
I don’t really lack for motivation, I’ll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can’t logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I’ve checked,) and I just don’t have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I’ve made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I’ve helped butcher chickens, I’ve made beef Wellington, sushi, I’ve baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I’ve made ice cream, homemade pierogies.
Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.
If it helps, we’ve found cooking the noodles was unnecessary. It holds together better if you don’t.
I just soak the sheets in water whilst making the other elements then construct otherwise I’ve found sometimes you get crunchy lasagne.
That’s never happened to us. Could be our usual sauce is too wet.
Maybe I need more wetness ;p
Skillet lasagna is the answer you seek! Maybe.
And if you’re really feeling lazy, cook up some ravioli, put it in the skillet with the meat sauce, cover it with mozzarella, and throw it in the oven for a few minutes. Voila! Psuedo-lasagna
Beef Wellington.
I was thinking about making this to surprise ans impress my wife. Watched a video on how to make it and decided that there are easier ways to impress her.
