I don't make anything that falls into those categories. My cooking is pretty much all the kind of everyday non-recipe stuff that she advises doing instead.
Lately, I've been learning the art of the potato. Mostly baked with just butter and salt. Nature's perfect food.
I don't really have any one of those any more. The really nice meal these days is most of the time a complicated improvisation loosely based on something I ate once or a simple dish based on a high end expensive ingredient, e.g. good steak. That or time consuming traditional recipes, e.g. lasagna from scratch. Day to day dishes, yup, but there's a bunch of them. The oldest one is probably a provencal chicken stirfry with garlic and parsely: Chicken breasts chopped up into two bite sized chunks, coated with flour (with some corn meal ccasionally) salt pepper and sometimes other stuff, fried in lots of butter and olive oil with coarse chopped parsely, and garlic added right at then end. Carbonara is another one. My completely lazy meal is just pasta with butter and parmesan, maybe some herbs added in, or a bit of pork cutlet with a shallot butter, dried herb, wine, pan deglaze sauce. Panfried whole fish with fresh herbs and sliced garlic is also quick and easy. Then there's risottos.
Ummh, who are these people with one specific goto recipe and how old are they?. Last one I remember is something I came up with in college: deboned butt half lamb leg marinated in port, herbs and garlic, stuffed with a mix of soft but not fresh goat cheese and spinach, and larded with garlic and rosemary. Roasted and served with a fresh herb gratin dauphinois.
TKM +3 as John Cole would say. Cheap bordeaux has got to be the best value wine around.
Ummh, who are these people with one specific goto recipe and how old are they?
"the way he describes cooking reminds me of a number of my guy friends and boyfriends, especially during and right after college," she says.
I don't cook well enough to take pride in the ingredients or be proud of anything.
Ummh, who are these people with one specific goto recipe and how old are they
College-age or just a bit older, presumably, since that's what the post said they were.
I guess this thread is short enough that I don't have an excuse for not reading all the comments before posting.
(1) Parsley and garlic is good.
(2) I can imagine a lot of impressive pasta-based things, but each is either springy, autumnal, or wintry.
(3) I am currently making some buddha's hand citron marmalade.
(3) I am currently making some buddha's hand citron marmalade.
Want!
I just baked an orange and cinnamon cake.
I baked a pumpkin pie the other week. It wasn't very good, but I had a frozen pie crust and a can of pumpkin.
8.3
How does the flavor compare to other citrus? We don't get it regularly out here on the tundra and when we do it seems to expensive to experiment with, but it is intriguing.
she talks about the four categories of food that most people have in their repertoire
To nitpick, she's not talking about "most people", she's talking about "The typical guy in my cohort ".
Also, she gets it exactly right, a thousand times exactly right, with this: "but there's a difference between recipes and techniques, and its the latter that gets the cook through every day."
Finally, I am still shaking my head in wonderment at this statement by the otherwise highly respectable Neil the Ethical Werewolf:
Singapore is pretty close to the PoMo Polymath foodtopia, though everything shuts down at 11 PM or so. I've lived here more than a year, and I haven't even gotten the gas turned on so I can use the stove in my apartment. Very cheap good food and cheap very good food are abundant.Maybe he has an electric kettle and a microwave, perhaps even a rice cooker? Please??
I mean, I lived in a land of very cheap good food and cheap very good food for well nigh on six years, but the thought of never cooking anything? So depressing.
I haven't turned on the stove in my new apartment yet. I still have a ways to go before I get to a year, though.
(And yes, it's depressing. I'm working on rectifying it, though.)
I wish I could afford to never have to cook.
I wish I could afford to have a place where I get to decide on whether or not to turn on the stove.
I wish I could afford my rent next month.
Or rather, decide whether the stove should be operable or not.
Want!
How about I tell you I'll send you some and then never do?
How does the flavor compare to other citrus?
Dunno, it won't actually be done until tomorrow.
13 Amen on the techniques. Though following recipes is one way of learning them. But to all the parents here, teach your kids basic 'home ec' type techniques, including cooking ones. Doesn't mean they'll use them (I may know how to properly fold clothes but I'll keep the clean laundry in pile on the floor as often as not), but it'll make it a lot easier for them to do so if they have any inclination to do so.
15 So do I, it would mean I could afford so many more yummy ingredients for my cooking.
17 If NJ is anything like NYC it takes forever for them to go through the eviction process, trust me, I know.
I wish I could afford to never have to cook.
And now you understand why I didn't go to grad school.
22: I'm actually okay for next month. January's another story, but I should have some way of getting more money figured out by then. But yeah, I'm sure eviction is hard to do here.
Homemade pie crust can be frozen pie crust.
With regard to the "there's a big difference between recipes and techniques" line, I want to put in a good word for recipes. They seem so maligned these days, like the way everyone had so much contempt for the kid who only ever put his Legos together the way the instructions told him to. I get a sense that a lot of foodies think that real cooks don't use recipes, they play it by ear, do what they can with what they have where they are, and make each dish, to a greater or lesser degree, a foray into the unknown.
Recipes are useful! For one thing, it's basically impossible to make most baked goods without a recipe. How are you going to know how much sugar to put into the cake unless a cookbook (or your own memory) tells you? You can't tell by tasting the batter, and even if you could, it would be sort of too late to add more.
Of course it's good not to be hidebound, and to know that you can substitute (say) peanuts for cashews in a recipe to no ill effect. But chances are that the recipe (if it's a good one) called for cashews because their flavor is uniquely suited to the dish at hand. There are lots of very well-regarded cookbooks out there, and there's no sense in pretending that the man on the street can do better than The Joy of Cooking.
If the quoted article is concerned that people, especially young men, find it too much trouble, too bewildering, to cook every day, why does it recommend that they jettison recipes? Clueless young men need recipes most of all! If you don't know a whole lot about cooking, I can guarantee from personal experience that ninety percent of recipes are tastier than what you would make without a recipe.
Pumpkin pie, meh. Traditonal Thanksgiving dinner as reinterpreted by immigrant parents who felt they had to give one to their American kid: Roast duck; raw cranberry, walnut, apple, orange zest side plus pickled pears, poppy seed confection, borscht.
When did blog posts become articles, by the way?
When non-bloggers began to notice them.
I agree that recipes are a good way to learn how to cook, and even after you do they remain a nice source of new ideas and quick checks for stuff you don't know well. However, just occasionally following one isn't enough, you need to cook regularly for it to become an easy automatic process for those weeknight dinners when you have little energy. Or for that matter for elaborate ones based on something you ate once at a good restaurant.
31 Since the newspaper and magazine industry done and died.
Yeah, recipes are excellent for finding new and different flavor combinations, but as a guide to the mechanics of actually cooking food they mostly suck.
Depends on the cookbook. I use Joy (squirrel recipe edition) and Bittman for desert and baking stuff, areas where I have little learned intuition. It's not as good as experience but it's better than nothing.
When did blog posts become articles, by the way?
Gimme a break. I have the swine flu. Or something equally ass-kicking. Wasn't officially diagnosed.
as a guide to the mechanics of actually cooking food they mostly suck.
I don't agree with this. Many authors take the time to explain their techniques and discuss what each stage should look, sound, smell like. Sure, it's not as good as a cooking class, or one on one teaching time with a good cook, but it is still useful.
34: Well, yes and no. Nobody honestly thinks that a cookbook will be any help in learning, say, how to chop vegetables or fold egg whites. That's all just practice. But on the other hand, cookbooks can be invaluable if you want to know how to debone a chicken, or how long to cook squid, or how hot syrup has to be to qualify as "hard ball". But I learned all of these things from cookbooks, often as an element of the recipe I was following at the time.
Nobody is going to become a very good cook by mechanically following recipes once a month. The problem doesn't lie in the recipes though. The problem is just a lack of practice and care.
38: Unless you're in the UK, in which case you will probably have ended up with a battered version of Delia's Complete Cookery Course, which helpfully assumes you have a base knowledge of 0 and will happily teach you how to boil an egg to perfection. Which is what beginners need, really. Then they can start to experiment: Boiled egg with toast!
well another problem with cookbooks is [herein i would like to insert a word a bit more abstract than but similar to just overlearning or overdetermined; something to denote too much confidence]. they make you think its hard to get flavors to go well together, when its sort of hard to make food taste bad, and when you do mess up a dish, its usually a technique problem. and cookbooks don't explain why certain techniques are needed, because the author doesn't know, and include massive amounts of barnaclization of voodoo correlations that cooks picked up because they believed them to be important.
i used to think some flavors 'go well' together, but really its just habit. two things don't go well together? they do in some other cuisine, and if you had it a few times, you'd like it too.
So, I think the real problem is: what sort of taste/knowlege is worth cultivating, and what is harmful?
the answer for me, is that moving out of fastfood mctaste is good, learning to make things with enough vegetables and without much sweetener, getting enough protein w/o high ghg foods, etc. not worth it - doing things authentically, 'appreciating' expensive wine, etc.
anyway, i read that post a few days ago, decided i was too late to post what i thought, and now i forget most of what i wanted to say. but its hard to forget my spite for recipe books.
anyway, if you have a girl in your apartment and are still working hard to get laid, wtf? i guess its better than a 'dinner date'
anyway. i think i'd be fun if someone were to write up a set of verbal tics for me to borrow. sort of how a recipe book SHOULD be. if you want to hold yourself out as an expert on mongolian cuisine, then explain what flavors you like together, and what techniques you favor.
Better than 1000 pages of recipes is:
"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."
others i like thinking of are cumin+chiles=mexican; cinnamon+olive oil=morrocan; saffron+apricots=persian, and coconut+citrus=thais. indian=everything but the kitchen sink.
oh i rmembered one thing i was going to say: the equivalent for 'mise en place' for everday cooking is streamlining your pans/preparation. ex: don't get out a pan to brown stuff and another to stew; do them in the same one. or cooking techniques like 'boil 10 gallons of water to cook a cup of pasta'. meh, you can use a tiny amount, the textural difference is minor and you save lots on time/gas.
i also dislike cookbooks for teaching how to make sugary junk food.
I like cookbooks. I have several hundred. But good cookbooks are much more than recipes (i.e. they talk about techniques, ingredients, texture, taste, smell, etc.). And I'm not against recipes either, I use them all the time, and did so a lot more when I was learning to cook. It's more a mindset or approach to thinking about cooking that I'm talking about.
For example, if I present an elaborate meal that took many hours to prepare and one of the guests, who I know doesn't cook much, says "Oh, you must give me the recipe!", it's pretty clear to me that they think the key to good cooking is recipes, and that if I just write down a list of ingredients and the cooking steps, they too can create the same meal. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
It would, if you were willing to have a really, really, really long recipe.
I can't believe you guys are dissing on recipes. Of COURSE the recipe isn't the final word, but jeez, how the hell are you supposed to start a new dish without some ideas for ingredients and steps.
When I'm setting out to make something I've never make before, I usually get out two or three cookbooks and compare their ideas. And then I usually wing it, to a degree or another, but the cookbooks are incredibly useful.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that I'm only a competent cook, if that.
I just tried half-assedly to find it, with no joy, BUT there was a review of a book (could have been 10 years ago) in the New York Times that claimed that England's cuisine was long ago considered by epicures the finest in Europe, but England was overtaken by France, and stayed overtook, because France developed and perfected the recipe as a genre.
I actually wish I could learn to use recipes a bit more, because we get in the situation where my wife will say, "Hey remember [delicious meal] from a few weeks ago? Make that again!" and I won't remember what I did.
I mean, I lived in a land of very cheap good food and cheap very good food for well nigh on six years, but the thought of never cooking anything? So depressing.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to get used to. I don't have much practice cooking, and haven't really bothered to work at it. The thought of cooking nice meals or whatever just doesn't really appeal.
(and yeah, the electric kettle is a real help)
50: See? That, apparently, is what happened to the English.
27: I'm going to argue that fresh pumpkin is better than canned for pie. It gives a much brighter and fuller pumpkin flavor. Baked pumpkin is too watery, but, once you puree it, you can either cook it down or, my preferred method, squeeze it/let it drain through a tea towel or double layer of cheese cloth. The squozen pumpkin retains it's fresh flavor and the liquid you squeeze out is delicious instant stock for soups or risottos. If don't enjoy doing this sort of thing then don't bother, canned is fine, but if you do then it can be fun and delicious.
Oh, also, it would need to be a sugar or pie pumpkin. Jack-o-lantern type pumpkins have almost no flavor at all.
49, 52: Didn't Cromwell just sort of smash anything enjoyable as some sort of Catholic plot?
Cheese pumpkins are good for roasting and pie-ing.
Nobody is going to become a very good cook by mechanically following recipes once a month.
They aren't? Damn!
55: I'm picturing one of those nut-covered cheese-balls like the people in Wisconsin have. Except shaped like a pumpkin instead of a ball.
Last night I drunkenly accepted a potluck dinner invitation for tonight, which means I actually have to sober up and make something to take over.
Satan has many pleasurable strategems to tempt one to a life of Romish harlotry.
CHEESE PUMPKIN FUCK THE WORLD
Butternut squash is also good for "pumpkin" recipes.
49: WWII sure didn't help either. You read descriptions of food from Edwardian England, they sound awesome. But after 10 years of rationing sugar, and almost 15 of rationing meat, not so much.
(Huh, looking at the Wikipedia article on rationing in the UK, it claims that carrot cake was repopularized during WWII in response to rationing. Who knew?)
Many authors take the time to explain their techniques and discuss what each stage should look, sound, smell like.
But what they don't do is *generalize*. Here's a good example:
# 1. In a skillet large enough to hold the chicken, heat butter or oil over medium heat for a minute or so. # 2. Add onions and a large pinch of salt and some pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until onions soften completely and begin to melt into a soft mass, about 20 minutes. # 3. Add 1 1/2 cups of wine and let it bubble away for a minute, then tuck chicken pieces among onions; sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Turn heat to low, and cover pan. # 4. Cook, turning chicken pieces once or twice, for 40 to 60 minutes, or until chicken is very tender (the meat on the drumsticks will begin to loosen from the bone). If dish appears to be drying out, add remaining wine.
What would be really useful there is the word "braise". That lets you know that there's a specific technique you're using, and that you can use that technique again with different ingredients.
On the other hand, books like the Joy of Cooking or Delia's Complete Cookery do cover that information, and so do many others, depending on how they're organized.
I'm with Jackm as usual -- what's with the hating on recipes? I'm only a fair cook in the 'putting dinner on the table in 45 minutes or less' sense, because I mostly don't, so I'm not really in practice for it. But following recipes is how you build up that sense of what flavors go with what, and what techniques to use. Most things I'm comfortable cooking improvisationally are things that started out as recipes and I just sort of wore the edges off of.
(We have a traditional leftover lamb recipe in my family referred to as 'Armenian Lamb'. Lots of slivered garlic started in olive oil, fry slivers of leftover lamb in it until kind of crispy, throw in sliced tomatoes and cook until saucy, and then put in an awful lot of parsley -- not as flavoring, it's a significant component of the dish by volume -- and some slivered green onions, cook until slightly wilted and serve over rice. I was looking through a cookbook of my mothers and found the (much more elaborate) recipe that's degenerated from. Turns out it was called "Turkish Lamb"; "Armenian Lamb" was on the facing page.)
Sliver sliver, sliver sliver sliver. Sliver. Sliver sliver.
Of course! The despicable Armenian Lamb killed the gentle Turkish Lamb.
68 Or silvered lamb. I once had gilded lamb chops in a fancy restaurant in Europe. It may have even added something to the texture.
And made me dyslexic! Is there no end to its infamy?
When I'm expected to cook, I get a recipe out of the no-cook pasta cookbook. It's not a selling point that it's no-cook for me, but everything in there turns out delicious if I robotically follow the instructions, and they're not too hard to execute. Except I usually put in extra cayenne pepper.
But what they don't do is *generalize*.
Depends on the cookbook, I suppose, and how widely you're reading. (For example, I own and really enjoy All About Braising.) Bittman has never appeared to me to be very focused on technique - others are.
I can't believe you guys are dissing on recipes.
I'm with Jackm as usual -- what's with the hating on recipes?
Who has dissed/hated on recipes in this thread?
When I'm setting out to make something I've never make before, I usually get out two or three cookbooks and compare their ideas. And then I usually wing it, to a degree or another, but the cookbooks are incredibly useful.
Same here.
Oh, now look who's back-pedalling. Want some Haterade with your no-recipe policy, H/ter?
76: Josh in 34, Yoyo in 40, for two.
I'm going to hunt you down and then cook you according to a recipe, heebie.
78: 34 says most recipes suck as a guide to the mechanics of actually cooking food, but are excellent for finding new and different flavor combinations. Doesn't seem like hatred of recipes to me.
40 is too long and rambly to actually read, so I'll take your word for it.
Citron* marmalade update: I could probably have used more of the citron; as it was, I went a little easy on the zest-n-pith tentacles because the last time I made marmalade I had used too much. I am the teeniest tiniest bit concerned about the set. It is, however, a lovely straw-tawny color.
* and yuzu actually
Update update: I realized I could check the extra in the fridge. It has set to the level of: goop. Also, it is kind of too sweet. This calls for a do-over (or a reëvaluation of the whole idea).
82: If it's tawny, it goes with White Snake and sports cars.
Update update: I realized I could check the extra in the fridge. It has set to the level of: goop. Also, it is kind of too sweet
Sounds like it might be profitably redefined as citron sauce. Good with pancakes, Greek yogurt?
Greek Yogurt, you might also try it drizzled over ice cream.
That is how I profitably redefine all my not-quite-set endeavors!
I say crepes with goat cheese and citrus goop. Mmm.
There's a popular beverage (well, popular in my household) made of a scoop of citron-preserved-in-syrup and boiling water. Maybe your marmalade could be repurposed as such.
This reminds me that I've never tried the savory crepes at the new crepe place near where I work. I'd been meaning to.
Crêpes au citron! Sugar and butter---and lots of it---for me, hold the goat cheese. Oh god, I want to eat some right now.
My ex and I used to have buckwheat crepe nights, when we'd make and eat buckwheat crepes with, say, gruyere and a fried egg, until we were sick. (It doesn't take very many.)
I use recipes for triangulation, as JM describes in 46, if I use them at all, but I'm intrigued to try this one devised by Maura the other day.
93 is why people reproduce, isn't it?
Dyed corn kernels and ripped-up newspaper, apparently. I'll probably gussy it up a bit.
Search for "Resopie" brings several pages like this one. What is that, ROT???
That o is an a. And searching for "Resapie" turns up mostly pages to do with recipes, funnily enough, such as this one.
She's also been thinking about what we need in case of an emergency.
To the OP, I'd think that the bar for impressing a prospective mate with food would be generally considerably higher these days than merely having a short list of go-to dishes. Like actually knowing how to cook.
That's the worst diagram of female reproductive interiors I've ever seen.
Is the guillotine also for emergencies?
100: The fundus does look distended, but otherwise, you've got your ovaries, you've got your fallopian tubes, what more could you want?
101: Cleaning up the basement last week, I found that I still have a "Build Your Own Guillotine" model from my youth that I never got around to making. It's just paper, but maybe it'll tide the girls over while we save up for the real thing.
Also, I have uploaded Ezra Pound's letter to Santa from when he was six, just in case anyone hasn't seen it. It's in the flickr pool.
To the OP, I'd think that the bar for impressing a prospective mate with food would be generally considerably higher these days than merely having a short list of go-to dishes. Like actually knowing how to cook.
Again, we're talking "during and right after college" here.
Jesus, I love you for 93 and 99.
Truly, people think 69 is some kind of fancy thing, but they have no imaginations, I tell you what.
Are you complaining about sexual positions or about food slicing techniques?