3361

3362

What? What? WHAT?!?

First of all, how can anybody hate dark meat. Especially you. You cook so many things that dark meat would go great with. Chicken thighs are my absolute favorite. Well, to be honest I probably like wings more, but chicken thighs! For cooking! How can you not like dark meat! Oh, Armando.

Next, my son is kind of the same way. He’s not crazy about the dark meat, and if I’m going to make him eat chicken, he’d prefer it be chicken breast rather than thigh. If I’m not roasting a whole chicken, I find that less is more when it comes to cooking up breasts. Just a little salt and pepper in the cast iron skillet. Four minutes a side and finished in the oven for about 10-12 minutes and they are great every time.

Stop it with all the lemon and onions and broth! And get over not liking dark meat, already! What’s wrong with you people? :)

-xtien

3363

My great and terrible secret, Christien:

I don’t terribly enjoy the taste of meat, full stop. Steak, burgers, chicken, pork, even fish for the most part–I’m usually onboard for all the stuff that comes with the meat. Crispy edges and butter and salt/pepper on the steak, tasty toppings and sauces on the burger, curry or jambalaya or whatever with the chicken, nitrates with the bacon (haha), and crunchy crusts or maki-roll stuffings with the fish. Mmmmm, that’s what I’m all about!

But the beautiful simplicity of meat itself? Meh, I could take it or leave it most of the time. I like the texture just fine, and usually the taste isn’t offensively bad (and is occasionally outright enjoyable!). . . but with gamier meats like duck, or rabbit, or (lol, yes even) dark chicken meat, it’s just a little too much.

That I continue to insist on eating so much damn meat is a constant source of heartbreak and confusion for my vegetarian/vegan friends who know this dark secret!

3364

I love this paragraph.

Truth be told I don’t eat that much meat. Dating someone who doesn’t eat any meat other than fish (with fins and scales), and having a kid who can’t stand the texture of it at all, means I have to figure out a lot of other ways to make food tasty. I love the occasional steak, as you can see above, and I prefer my jambalaya with chicken and two kinds of sausage, but on the whole I mainly eat vegetables, and my favorite family meal is artichokes.

So I get what you’re saying.

-xtien

3365

I try and sneak it where I can. I like meat well enough, but in truth I’d be perfectly happy only having it a few times a week. But my wife rebels whenever I don’t include meat on the menu, so I need to be mindful.

So while I’d be perfectly content to cut meat from many meals, I have to limit such experiments. Get too creative with my cooking, and I’d have a rebellion. So I prefer to push the envelope with adding unorthodox ingredients instead of subtracting meat. Eggplant Parmesan is one of the few dishes I can make without meat that my wife won’t complain about.

3366

I’d love to learn to cook with eggplant. I fear that ingredient far too much.

The worst meal I ever had, bar none, was when my mom tried a recipe she got from Richard Simmons called Eggplant Enchiladas when I was a kid. I’ve never really gotten over that.

I do like grilled eggplant now, though. I’m just weirdly afraid to cook with it because of all the prep I think it must need. I’d like to learn Eggplant Parmesan though.

-xtien

3367

So in the KFC thread you posted you don’t like bone in chicken, which blew my mind. Then you post you don’t like dark meat. Double blown.

I pretty much had the same reaction as Christien until you posted you just don’t like meat all that much. Humorously that cancels out the above and takes all the wind out of my righteous indignation at your opinions.

I am a meathead for sure, though I have been adding vegetarian dishes a lot in the past couple of years including a full on vegan thanksgiving. Sometimes its just better than the equivalent meat dish. Indian is one cuisine that doesn’t benefit all that terribly much from meat.

3368

Whoa.

-xtien

3369

Bones in meat are the devil’s work, so I am 100% with Armando on that. I don’t really notice the difference between different chicken or turkey meats, though, and certainly can’t get behind hating dark meat.

3370

I cheated and bought a Wellington from Native Foods Cafe since most of the family was out of town. So good. Made a great mushroom gravy and a ton of sides to go with it.

3371

I’ts really not all that bad, unless you get a big eggplant that has gone bitter around the seeds. I don’t use it much, but I’ve been doing so once a month recently. Eggplant Parmesan, the ratatouille, and baba ganoush have mostly been the limits of that.

3372

My gf definitely adds a limitation to my own cooking (at the very least, I need to keep her dietary preferences in mind for secondary options when I cook weird stuff for myself). She only really likes white meat chicken and turkey, fish/crab/shrimp and very lean cuts of pork (plus bacon and very overdone sausage patties). Balancing the need to keep her afloat on protein while not breaking the bank or getting “bored” of the same meats is a bit of a challenge sometimes! Given that she also dislikes things like “noticeable” onions, bell peppers, chunky tomatoes, broccoli (actually pretty much all bitter veg–she’s a bit of a supertaster, that one), tofu, etc., a lot of my recipes wind up getting modified–or split in two before offending ingredients are added!–to suit her.

So, for instance, she won’t touch this week’s BBQ, nor the slaw or potato salad (hates mayo with a passion). Hence the chicken, roasted potatoes, and–tonight and tomorrow–cornbread and wild rice pilaf. I also tossed in a grilled turkey melt earlier this week, and she’ll make soup or boxed mac n cheese at some point to supplement. On weeks when I do something like, say, chili, I more or less buy a whole second set of groceries for her food!

I’ve mentioned before–I think actually just a little upthread from here!–that eggplant is one of my bugaboos. Even the Indian dishes I’ve added it to (e.g., baingan bartha) seemed like they’d have been better off without it. I’d love to be proven wrong someday about it, and will occasionally mess with it just to see if every other experience thus far had somehow been wrong.

I am glad that you are not here to berate me. Just as much as my continued meat-eating confounds my veggie friends, my continued neutrality toward MEATZ bugs my ultra carnivore companions!

Vegetarian and vegan cooking is, honestly, a lot of fun. I think meat’s a bit of a crutch in a lot of American cooking, whereas in Asian cuisine, it’s often just seen as another flavor component as much as a “main dish.” That I have a number of close vegetarian and vegan friends (and my own mom–who I LOVE cooking with when I go home!–doesn’t care for any meat at all except little bits of chicken or turkey) gives me a lot of opportunity to experiment with it, and I always enjoy it.

3373

I’d appreciate any recipes or tips on how to treat eggplant properly if you ever get the chance, @CraigM.

-xtien

3374

I don’t really have any, honestly. For example the ratatouille http://allrecipes.com/recipe/222006/disneys-ratatouille/
With only minor changes. Subtracted the peppers, added mushrooms and some white wine to the sauce.

No treatment of the eggplant at all. Same for the baba ganoush

So, I don’t know what to tell you. I wish I had some super secret to share. The only trick I’ve got is that I’ve always baked mine.

When I make the parm I do lightly salt and sweat it for about 30 minutes prior to cooking, though. Just slice and put on a baking sheet.

3375

That was my question, mainly. If you have to salt it or if that’s unnecessary. Isn’t there a term for that?

-xtien

3376

Sweating? And you don’t have to. When particularly lazy or pressed for time, I’ve opted not to, with no noticeable ill effect. In fact sweating it for too long is worse than not doing it at all.

And with any non parm dish I’ve never even done it, so it’s one of those things that I did at first because it was recommended, but I’m not really sold on the utility.

3377

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Ok, I’ve had some good octopus dishes out recently, so when the fishmonger offered me this chap for a fiver I went for it.

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

Clean, gut, remove beak, cut away eye bit/brain bit, empty out sac, turn it inside out, clean, remove membrane.

Put tentacles and sac in water, salt, red onions, rosemary, oregano and onions. Simmer with lid on about an hour.

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Here’s where I went wrong, I removed the skin from the sac and around top above tentacles, i then basted it oil and grilled for a good 10 mins+

See the white bits? basically the whole sac and the body of the tentacles?

Inedible rubber.

I could just about chew the tips of the tentacles down, i couldn’t even cut the sac or thick body with my dinner knife. The only nice bits were the suckers and skin I left.

Where I went wrong - I assumed when i had it out it was done in a grill/bbq oven, and the overly long blast i gave it under the grill is where i think what turned it inedible, or it could have been the stuff i added to the water? I should have read more on why it turns rubbery i think.

Funny enough the next day the dish i was trying to recreate was demonstrated up on the sunday monring tv cooking show by the same chef from where i ate it. He simmered the tentacles alone in I think just water for 45 mins, and then cut and fried a portion of the tentacles to caramelise, served it with a slice of ricotta mustia, leaves and on a bed of cannellini beans.

3378

Okay cool. Thanks, Craig.

My favorite eggplant of late, other than simply grilled, is at this little Thai place we used to go to. Huge chunks of it cooked just to the perfect tenderness. Allowing the last piece to go to your dining companion was a big deal.

I’d like to be able to cook it like that.

-xtien

3379

pwk, at the very least, what you crafted looks cool as all hell! Much respect for dismantling such an unusual creature, as well. I’m not even to the point where I can effortlessly divvy up a chicken, much less prep an octopus from scratch!

I know that with squid, at least, it must be very gently cooked, lest it get extremely rubbery. I recall some video–I think this one–where the chef basically said you need to sear it very briefly at high heat, or cook it for ages until it breaks back down–anywhere in between is just unpleasant.

No idea if octopus behaves the same, but that might be a good starting point, at least!

3380

Ive done squid quite a few times, and can do a passable salt and pepper squid, going for the quick method. Ive eaten slow cooked cuttlefish though done in a stew with pig trotters (Coentrada) fairly recently…

I read up on the various ways for octopus, some manually tenderise and bbq/grill or then slow cook, some do the slow cook in water, some in stock, I went for a method fairly near the top of google. I think it needs the slow cook though, octopus of size are old, unlike squid which grow to size in a year or so.