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I recently went on a bit of a Thai kick at home. The gf loves this stuff, and a lot of it is pretty fun to make (I love curries and stir fries alike)! Mostly prepared by mashing up recipes and tips online until I got results I wanted, and I’ve made all of this stuff at least once before.


Thai Basil Fried Rice
Spicy marinated chicken tossed with Jasmine rice, fried egg, fresh veggies (onions, carrots, sugar snap peas, and red bell pepper), with Thai basil, green chilies, and garlic chives, all flavored with a garlic/shallot/Oyster sauce/Fish sauce base. Topped with a little cilantro, lime, and peanuts.


Panang Chicken Curry
Chicken sauteed with fresh veggies (chopped red potatoes, green beans, and carrots) in a sauce made from (storebought) panang curry paste, coconut milk, Fish sauce, palm sugar, and sliced Kaffir lime leaves. Served with fresh-made Jasmine rice and some cheapo frozen veggie “spring rolls” because hand-making spring rolls blows and my deep fryer needs a good scrubbing. . .


Pad Thai with Shrimp and Tofu
Small, sauteed shrimp and gently fried tofu slices with fresh veggies (bean sprouts, carrots, onions, sugar snap peas, and red bell peppers), with lots of garlic chives and red pepper flakes mixed in, along with rice noodles, all flavored with a garlic/shallot/tamarind/fish sauce/palm sugar base. Topped with a little lime, cilantro, and crushed peanuts.

All in all, with a modicum of overlapping ingredients, I was able to feed the gf and I varied, healthy (well, except for my portion sizes, haha) meals for the better part of a week!

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I’m putting this here instead of starting a new thread.

I finally found my waffle maker. It’s an older model. While it’s non-stick, it has a build up of stickiness that I can only assume is old oil. In the places that I searched, they make it clear that you should never grease a non-stick waffle maker. Because they build up this very sticky coating. So my questions.

Can I clean this stuff off and recondition my maker?

Is it worth the effort?

If I just waffle a few throw away things, like bread or even paper towels, would this help?

Or should I just buy a new one? This isn’t going to happen for a while due to money issues.

Thanks in advance.

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I’ve read both that said gunk is either polymerized oil (akin to the layer of tough, surprisingly non-stick stuff your cast iron’s supposed to build up) or just baked on additives/gunk from spray oil (e.g., accelerants). In either case, a good soak in a harsh, grease-cutting soap solution got the process started for me with my own nonstick stuff (the griddle and waffle iron plates of my Griddler). Scrubbing with baking soda-water paste also helped, but seemed like it was taking off some of the nonstick solution.

And really, that last is kinda the issue I eventually wound up with: the things that seemed to really power off the little bits and piece of baked-on oil/additives/whatever from my ignorant days of spray-oil-usage also seemed to be ripping the nonstick coating off. The stuck-on stuff didn’t appear to be burning more or adding an off flavor to my food, so I eventually just resolved to leave it be.

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Wait wait wait… so you’re not supposed to use any oil on a non-stick waffle maker?
Well shit.

Anyway, to get that stuff off, a toothbrush and soap works pretty well, but maybe not if you have a massive amount of it already.

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Are we still doing bandwidth shaming? Because good god, each of those frying pan pics was over 4 megabytes. Dialup flashbacks ahoy.

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I think spray oil specifically is the big no no from what I recall. But you’ll probably find half a dozen people for any side of the discussion online…

edit:

Probably the source of my spray oil fears

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Phone cameras are ridiculous these days. And I am on 100 mbps cable at home so it doesn’t really register. But you’re right, that’s a little much for, say, phone browsing. I will go back and edit those to linked thumbnails once I get home and can actually edit posts without deleting them.

Edit: All done. I’ll try and remember to do this when I post about the next round of cooking on the docket (Mac and Cheese being the first one this week).

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Yeah. Much as I like the automagical uploading of Discourse, I may just continue using Imgur’s linked thumbnail process, cuz my phone’s actual pictures are like 4-5mb apiece by default.

Kinda amazing, when you consider how shoddy they are. . .

On an unrelated note, this week is CHEESESTEAK EXPLOSION WEEK

Thinly sliced Ribeye steak, sliced bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms, a little salt and pepper, and good Provolone cheese on wheat buns (after a week of “white carb”-heavy rice-and-noodle dishes, I should probably mind my pre-diabetes for awhile).

It’s dead simple and fantastically delicious. Unfortunately, due to steak prices being absurd, it’s also close to $4.50/sandwich, which is realistically a little out of my ideal budget, but every so often you’ve just gotta splurge.

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Ok, so the problem is just using PAM? Is it safe to use something ELSE? I actually have some coconut oil PAM too… wonder if that will be a problem?

Seems like it needs something to grease it, right? I mean, non-stick isn’t so non-stick that nothing ever sticks to it, right?

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Most people in my cursory and occasional Googling on the subject agree it’s probably the additives in spray oil (propellants, soy lectithin, etc.) that are probably causing the issue, and I’ve seen a lot of people recommend against using any spray oil product on nonstick surfaces in general (if the method is really handy for you, consider just filling a mister bottle with pure oil).

Brushing on oil or melted butter for the waffle iron may be good, if you need it. I see some folks who say their waffles come off clean and pristine w/ no greasing at all, while others seem to regard that as abject madness.

Not purposefully trying to be vague, but like a lot of “cooking wisdom,” esp. in the internet era, there’s lots of people proclaiming things and very few people providing much in the way of evidence.

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Eh, as someone from Philly, I think you’re going a bit too fancy there for being a cheesesteak… which is leading to the price being that high.
First, for the cheese… you gotta go with cheap-ass American cheese. (some go with whiz, but those people are heathens)
For the meat, I think it’d be more common to use something like top-round, and you really want it to be shaved rather than cut up like that. Hell, even garbage “steak-ums” can work for this. But I think the texture of having the meat shaved real thin is key.

For the bread, the ideal roll is an Amoroso roll, but outside the philly area you can’t really get that I don’t think. You want some bread that has a little crust, but where the bread is nice and chewy. There’s a reason why Amoroso rolls are so universal for sandwiches in philly, they’re ideal. And yet, I think they’re still not distributed beyond maybe a 50 mile radius from the city.

Be advised, being from philly, I’m kind of picky when it comes to cheesesteaks.

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Oh yeah, no doubt, it’s definitely an area where passions run high. The above sandwich was “good enough” for me and my primitive North Carolinian cheesesteak cravings ;)

I just don’t care for American cheese much, so Provolone works for me personally. Internet People were pretty divided on Top Round vs. Sirloin vs. Ribeye for the “proper steak,” so I went with the one that had a weight that was reasonable for me along to polish off over a couple-few days (gf won’t eat beef). And yeah, I only gave it about 2 hours worth of freezing time to get the texture firm enough to slice thinly, so I got nowhere near shaved (and I could tell, trust me). Still, it was reasonably thin, and even got some nice little crispy bits in the pan, so I can’t complain.

Bread, though? No hope out there. There’s a surprising dearth of really fabulous bakeries in the RDU area, near as I can tell. Especially if you want a proper sandwich roll.

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Kind of a non-sequester, but I am absolutely addicted to Schlotzsky’s bread, especially their sour dough. If you have one of those in your area, check them out. I drive from Ann Arbor to Toledo, to the closest one, every couple of months and just buy a bunch of their bread to bring back and freeze.

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Well, American cheese doesn’t really taste like much. It kind of tastes like milk in congealed form. But that’s also what makes it awesome for cheesesteaks, as it melts and then stays melty.

Oh, also, another thing I’d tend to recommend, is tons of black pepper.

The top round suggestion is mainly because top round is cheaper, and while normally tougher if it’s shaved thin it’s good.

After looking online, apparently you can actually get Amoroso rolls in other places. And I’ve heard from folks who have used the frozen rolls that they really do work fine. You can plug in your zip code into the bottom there and find some places. Hell, there seem to be some places down there near Raleigh that actually sell them.

Heh, or you can buy them through amazon, for like $65 for 2 dozen, which is absurd.

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For bread, I’d recommend searching out some Vietnamese Banh mi bread. Absolutely wonderful.

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A couple pages back I actually did banh mi sandwiches, and had no luck at all getting actual Vietnamese baguettes, though I’ve since learned of a possibility there…

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I apologize if I’ve posted about this one before, but I really like the way this batch looks. It’s my s’mores bar cookie things. Tomorrow my son’s D&D group goes on the last adventure for this season. It is becoming a tradition that on the last night of these adventures–they meet several times during the season–there’s a potluck celebration thing. Parents bring food and the kids goof off and play some One Night Ultimate Werewolf or whatever after wrapping up their quest.

So for the potluck I’m bringing this to go along with some twice-baked potato casserole (I posted a few months ago about that).

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-xtien

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I call the piece on the front-left side, with the big bubble of melty marshmallows.

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Mac and Cheese

So, this is the only mac and cheese recipe I’ve ever seen that skips making a bechamel sauce with flour and mixing cheese into that. Instead, you just cook the macaroni, put in about 12 ounces of grated cheese (I did cheddar, colby jack, and swiss), 4 tbsps of butter, and a half cup of milk or so along with any spices or other additives you want (I used a can of diced tomatoes with chilies, some hot sauce, and a tablespoon of dijon), stir that up until the cheese has melted (with the butter and milk it gets fairly saucy), and then pour the result into a baking pan, sprinkle parmesan and bread crumbs over the top, and broil for a few minutes. Twas yummy.

Pork Stroganoff

More traditionally made with beef, but pork was half the price and easier to find in the cut that was called for. Not incredibly photogenic but pretty good nonetheless. And while I didn’t picture them, I poured it across buttered egg noodles.

Italian-Style Couscous Helper

Ground turkey instead of ground beef, fennel seeds and red chili pepper flakes instead of cumin and cinnamon, chicken stock w/ white wine instead of orange juice. Sprinkled with parmesan and basil. Yummy.

Three-Stir Sausage Risotto

The base recipe calls for dried porcini mushrooms (more than I had ready to hand) and fancy kinds of mushrooms I wasn’t sure I could find, whereas sausage is easy. You cut up an onion, saute it in butter for a bit, put in a cup and a half of Arborio rice and mix it up with the onions and butter for a couple minutes, then add salt, pepper, and some white wine. Let the wine cook off, add some chicken stock, stir. let that cook off, add a lot of chicken stock, stir. Let that cook off, add one more big bump of chicken stock, stir. Let that cook off, add the sausage, done.

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Officially summer now, right?

Wife and daughter picked some blackberries, and we used most of them to make ice cream.

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The Pioneer Woman’s recipe