If you’re making garbanzos/chickpeas/chanadal from scratch, always include a little baking soda in the baking liquid. The basic solution helps dissolve the skins! (Thanks, Alton)
I really enjoyed the pies discussion above. After some glorious pie crust fuckups, I am 100% on the storebought-or-nothing train for pie-making.
In fact, storytime!
Once, I decided I was gonna make chicken pasties, because I saw a recipe on Youtube and they sounded like an even better version of chicken pot pie (it’s basically just a CPP with like a 2:1 crust:filling ratio! YESSSS). So I dig around for a few recipes and mix and match and decide on one of those fancy modernist cuisine vodka pie crusts (the vodka wettens the dough enough to shape, but the alcohol doesn’t form gluten with the flour like pure water would, leading to a more tender crust).
Except somewhere along the lines after my food processor produced a sludge altogether like the world’s worst peanut butter when I tried to process cold butter and shortening into my flour, I managed to mix up tbsp and oz on my miniature measuring up (I normally use it for mixed drinks for the gf, and thus default to the oz side). Thus, instead of including the 8 tbsp of vodka recommended by the recipe, I wound up with 16. . .
. . . I tried dumping more flour and butter into it, but it was for naught, and I had to start from scratch, including a trip to the liquor store to get more vodka, since I’d used up all I had in the house on the last go around.
To add insult to injury, when all was said and done and the pasties were made (hideous, malformed lumps of crust that they were, due to being homemade), my gf and I learned that she apparently hates savory pies because her brain can’t get over the mental disconnect of having something savory come out of a shape that is “supposed” to be sweet!
Goddammit.
Here’s some stuff I cooked tonight :)
General Tso’s Chicken with steamed broccoli and rice, plus crab rangoons!