I am totally not a cook. To call me inept in the kitchen is a massive understatement. But every once in a while, I see something that looks simple enough even for me. That’s how I ended up trying out Blue Apron, after hearing about it on NPR. With a discount on the first set of meals, I figured, why not give it a try? They do all the shopping and send the ingredients straight to you. Costs $60 for three 2-serving meals, which they ship to you weekly. Not the cheapest thing ever, but you’re basically paying for the convenience of them planning the menu and shopping for you.
The stuff arrived today and I cooked up the first meal, Southern-Style Grits with Shrimp. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t pretty decent. The instructions were nice and simple to follow, took me about an hour, though someone with a kitchen clue could have done it quicker. It made a ton of food, easily enough for four single servings (at least at my level of food ingestion) though it’s only advertised as two. I think I overdid the water for the grits a bit, they’re a bit runny even for grits, but otherwise it turned out great. Healthier than the processed stuff that I often end up falling back on for the sake of convenience. Think I’ll stick with it for a few weeks, see what else they have to offer.
Timex
3042
I think I overdid the water for the grits a bit, they’re a bit runny even for grits
For future reference, if this happens, just cook them longer and they will thicken up.
Alternatively (or additionally), add cheese.
Mmmmmm…cheese grits.
So some friends and I have taken up brewing as a hobby. I find it interesting. And it does involve cooking. So far most of the beer is still maturing, but the first batches have varied from horrible (honey porter) via mediocre (northern brown ale) to pretty ok (weissbier). I have a good feeling about the belgian triple and crazy christmas ales that are currently maturing.
Sorry for the rotation of the images.
Mashing in progress:
Beer cooking:
My sister measuring the hops for a vanilla porter:
Crazy christmas ale in fermenting tank:
Most of the first 12 batches all lined up to be divided up
Edit: Forgot to add the latest ones with our fancy labels:
Wow. That’s really cool, Jørn!
Thanks for sharing the pictures. I look forward to hearing about the final product.
-xtien
My wife bought me a mini-mash brew kit as a gift a while back, and while it was very interesting to do the whole thing from scratch, if I did it again, I’m pretty sure I’d just do an extract instead, at least until I got to the point I was selecting my own grains mixes.
It’s pretty cool though. You have a much larger setup than I was using.
Thanks.
The second and third batches were the first I had a hand in brewing, and while we are still novices, we were complete amateurs when we brewed those. We managed to only add half the malt for the weissbier so we had to have a prolonged mashing, which made it a bit bitter. We then managed to panic as the final amount was about 6 litres less than what we had calculated so one of the guys found that it could be fixed by boiling and cooling more water to make up the difference. Turned out we had misread the recipe and not internalized that boiling away some of the water is part of the complete point. So we managed to water down our own beer, resulting in a brown ale that tastes more like a watery pale ale. It is not bad, but it tastes a bit weak.
Hey, then you can sell it here in the States!
I’ve always been shy about trying home brewing because of the space demands, mainly. But also the smell and the sanitation needs. I found those intimidating.
-xtien
Our brewing started with the use of this book. Has a good section on all the steps and such. We’re lucky enough that we have occasional free reign in the apartment of one of the brewers. We cook in a set of 28 liter (7,5 US gallon or so) cooking pots, and it isn’t that smelly. Storage space is important, though.
For sanitation we use something called Starsan for the equipment, bottles and fermenting bins. It is not toxic and doesn’t require any excessive amounts of rinsing and such.
prolix
3050
Home brewing is incredibly easy and lots of fun. After all, beer only has four basic ingredients (water, grain, hops, yeast), so it’s hard to screw up. This is a great place to start.
This thread is funny, I’d say. I just made a not so delicious pizza! Well, it is my first time making a pizza and so I was not successful! But it tastes good, atleast for me. lol
ddtibbs
3052
Yay, more home brewing talk! Even more talk here.
Timex
3053
While doing the sous vide by guacamole experiment, I cooked up some MaPo Tofu that turned out really well.
Is that zucchini in the mapo tofu? Bizarre. It’s a pretty hugely variable dish though.
My own recipe for it is very, very basic, and can be thrown together in 10 mins or so: pork, tofu, garlic, bean sauce/hot bean sauce/ground chilies, soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions.
Timex
3055
It IS zucchini. I first encountered it in a version that Ming Tsai makes that uses ground turkey. I’ve found the zucchini works well with the dish, as it doesn’t really modify the flavor much, but adds a slight texture variation
malkav11
3056
For the last few months at least I’ve been doing a slow cooker recipe or two each weekend and eating the fruits of my labor as leftovers over the ensuing week. And it’s all been from America’s Test Kitchen’s brilliant Slow Cooker Revolution series of cookbooks. I really appreciate their straightforward, easy recipes, the sensible grouping of ingredients, and the preamble that describes -why- they made some of the choices they did and what’s key to the success of the recipe (not to mention linked sidebars on how to do some of the less obvious bits like making foil slings and collars for your slow cooker and/or providing recipes for accompaniments), and although the recipes are a little more labor intensive than a lot of the other slow cooker recipes I’ve looked at, those recipes tended to produce bland and/or burnt results, whereas SCR recipes are routinely some of the most flavorful and delicious things I’ve ever eaten. Sometimes things you wouldn’t expect to work in a slow cooker, like macaroni and cheese (the best mac I’ve ever had), or “baked” ziti, say. Not being a proper chef like some of you, I’ve been largely admiring this thread from afar as I start to get more interested in cooking for myself, but I just made what’s probably my biggest departure from my dietary comfort zone yet and I figured I’d post about it.
That being the first SCR book’s “Thai-style Chicken Stew”. There’s a number of things in this that I’ve never touched before, like green curry paste, lemongrass (which I had some trouble finding) and fish sauce, and I only recently found a way to get minced/grated ginger that I’m willing to do (I’ve tried going straight from the fresh root and frankly, fuck that) - i.e. “The Ginger People” sell jars of the stuff on Amazon. (I’d get some from a local store, but nobody, not even my coop which loves ginger, stocks them.). Also, snow peas. Pretty sure I hate them. But on the other hand, that’s based on eating them as a youth, even into my teenage years, and I’ve recently discovered that actually, a lot of the stuff I loathed as a kid - to the point of involuntarily gagging - is pretty good or at least tolerable now. Like sweet potatoes. And I figure if it comes to it, they’re big and easy to fish out. What’s got me more concerned is the fish sauce. Not a big seafood fan (that’s definitely a current dislike, too), and wow, fish sauce smells TERRIBLE. The contrast between that and the yummy chicken-garlic-ginger-chile-onion smell of the main body of the stew was quite jarring. Mix in the lime juice and the curry paste and coconut milk and it’s just weird. The internet suggests fish sauce is a viable soy sauce alternative, though, and that the taste result isn’t fishy at all. So I’m a bit nervous, but I guess we’ll see! Unfortunately, it’s too late tonight to try it out, but then again, a lot of the stuff I’ve made was much better after a day or more in the fridge, since it gives the flavors a chance to mingle and deepen.
You cooked that stuff and you’re not going to eat it? MY GOD MAN. :)
This weekend my wife was out of town so I did frogmore stew. My kids love it. It doesn’t have any frogs in it.
I had it for lunch once in the cafeteria at work and I thought: I could do this! I am a old school non-cooking motherfucker, but even I can cook the frogmore stew. It’s got small red potatoes, a few ears of corn quartered, sausage sliced up into bite size pieces, and shrimp.
You get a pot of water big enough to hold it all, add about a quarter cup of Old Bay seasoning. When it gets to a nice boil, put the potatoes in for about 15 minutes. Then you put corn. In five minutes add then sausage, then five minutes later add the shrimp. When the shrimp is pink, you drain the juice (I like to keep some of it to splash over the stew) and then serve it with tongs.
I like to get a nice crusty bread to sop up the juice and a green salad. It’s also known as Low Country boil.
What’s got me more concerned is the fish sauce. Not a big seafood fan (that’s definitely a current dislike, too), and wow, fish sauce smells TERRIBLE. The contrast between that and the yummy chicken-garlic-ginger-chile-onion smell of the main body of the stew was quite jarring.
I think you’re crazy to have disliked snow peas and sweet potatoes, but even I think fish sauce smells terrible. But in Thai curry type dishes it works great, don’t worry.
The plan was to cook that and the pork and polenta bake I did on Monday earlier in the weekend, but my primary supermarket betrayed me by not stocking lemongrass or polenta. I confirmed that my coop had both, but it was ridiculously hot this weekend and the coop’s just far enough away that it’s a really sweaty walk in that kind of weather but it makes no sense to take the bus (and I have no car), so I was unable to muster the willpower to go until Monday, when it cooled down quite a bit. And unfortunately, the trouble with slow cooking is that it’s slow and midnight on a work day is not a great time to eat dinner.
