Tell us what you have cooked lately (that's interesting)

I love vegetables! Shush you!

I especially love, of late, cutting mushrooms super thick and using them as subs for meat. Sauteed, but not cooked to limp. So they still have that really great meaty quality. I get very good results this way in my red sauce from the vegetarians.

I’ve tried a few meat-sub sausages, but I can’t really groove on the texture. And the veg meatballs weird me out, partly because the first time I let them simmer too long. You just can’t cook them the way you do meat.

I wonder if big chunky mushrooms, browned just a bit, would work in a chicken pot pie to sub for chicken. Or would they add too much moisture.

-xtien

Thank you, @CraigM.

I particularly like that you brown the chicken a bit. I think that’s important.

I always include that step with the beef when I’m doing stroganoff and I think it pays off. All those little things the folks eating have no idea about but get the benefit in taste.

-xtien

My wife says she swaps out chicken for grilled mushrooms and garbanzos. I imagine another kind of bean would work too, like kidneys or northern beans.

And veg fake sausages are pretty universally awful I’ve found.

!!!

How. What!

-xtien

Adventure! The wife says the flavors are in the sauce not the chicken so it’s not a huge deal.

The beans need to be cooked first or just straight out of a can.

* I personally don’t favor the beans much.

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!

Mother F … that right there is where my problem was with chana masala. I think you may have mentioned that when you gave me tips before, but I guarantee you this was my issue, as I cooked them from dried. They had way too much bite.

Also, good googly moogly man. Dropping pics like that in this thread is dangerous. What are the fried pieces? Chicken or veg?

My ideal cooking style for chickpeas is basically stolen from Alton Brown’s Hummus for Real recipe, but I add two regular sized black teabags into the water with the chickpeas to stain them a lovely shade of purple-ish red. The long slow cook + baking soda results in perfectly tender chickpeas without obnoxious skins sloughing off and into whatever you add 'em to. Presumably this could be adapted to the pressure cooker for faster results, but I’m not sure if the baking soda has the time it needs to work in that environment.

Sorry dude, I thought we were here to talk about what we’ve cooked lately ;-)

First pic inexpertly shows the already fried chickeny bits that I’d made earlier on, plus most of the sauce ingredients (you can just barely make out the liquid-cornstarch-sugar mixture in the back), plus some frying rangoons. Next shot’s the sauce stuff coming up to a boil, and then last is, of course, the finished dish :)

We are. We are also here to talk about the fact I would like to eat everything in that picture. Hahaha!

I’m watching what I eat, so having suffered through a crappy bowl of oatmeal then seeing that pic. Damn. Now I want Chinese for lunch.

My kung pao went way up once I discovered the technique of velveting chicken.

Normally done in oil, serious eats presents a way to do it in water, which is way easier (unless you have a fryer that is easily used).

Yep, that cornstarch/eggwhite/shaoxing marinade technique is like fucking magic. I love cooking “takeout Chinese” (which I strongly suspect has little to do with actual Chinese) food thanks to that and a few other tips.

Totally stealing that technique.

Me too.

Until I went to Vietnam I never knew this was a thing and then I had pho for breakfast ( and bun bo hue!) so many times when I got home I was disapsointed none of the Vietnamese restaurants are even open for breakfast.

Thomas keller’s ad hoc at home has the best chicken pot pie recipe. I learned so much with his cookbook.

Me three.

I just wanted to thank @Fishbreath for his pizza dough recipe. I made some exactly as he specified, and used J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s New York style pizza sauce recipe to top it off. It came out amazingly well, and it was a fun activity to do with my almost 7 year-old daughter and her friend who was over for a playdate. Individual pizzas are always a hit!

Next time I’ll take pics. Sorry 😐 for not living up to the glory of this thread.

Thanks! I’m glad it turned out well. It’s true, it’s a really fun cookout-with-kids recipe.

Thanks for the sauce recipe, too. I’ve been looking for one to try next time I have company over.

My only advice on the sauce is to make it really well in advance. The recipe says it should reduce by half before it’s done, and that the process should take about an hour. I found it was more like two hours + before it thickened up nicely. But the taste was amazing. And the sauce prep itself is super simple, it’s just the waiting that was hard!