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About a year ago I made something new, and my wife likes it so much that now I end up making it more than once a week (I like it too, but I wouldn't make it quite that often for myself). I'm hoping other people have done this sort of thing, and can bring in their unusual inventive "staples", maybe from a "starting to make something but turning out not to have the ingredients part way through" approach, maybe trying to recreate something without knowing what it is, or whatever other constraint that might drive you to invent something unusual. With mine, it was this; I used to enjoy "Beanfeast" things when I lived in the UK. For those not familiar, those are some sort of horrible soy protein pack with flavoring and a couple of beans - they come in "mince", "bolognese" and some sort of spicy flavor. I used to have them as a form of "mince and tatties", a Scottish staple, being basically "cook some of that poo poo up and bung some canned potatoes in there." It's easy, and it's pretty tasty, but it's also quite nasty because gently caress texturized soy protein and MSG packs. So I decided to try to recreate the effect without any of the awful ingredients. My first thought was lentils and finely chopped mushrooms to get approximately the good part of the nutritional profile, and some 'meaty' flavor and texture. That's a pretty weak flavor so far, and salt is the flavor enhancer for the ages, and you know what's salty-tasting? Black olives. I've made faux-sausage before out of mostly olives and that worked out pretty well, so there's that. And onion, because everything loves an onion. That's basically it, in the first incarnation - twenty medium sized mushrooms, one medium-large onion, a can of olives, chop it all finely, sautee it briefly (I have the pan heating when I start chopping, then put the onion, then mushrooms, then olives, as they're chopped, so the onions get sauteed a fair bit more than the olives), add about a cup of dry red lentils, 2 to 2.5 cups of water, simmer for 15 minutes, bam, less poisonous beanfeast-clone. Chuck in a couple of cans of potatoes, or one big can, give it another five minutes for them to heat up, and you have a surprisingly delicious two-full-bowls-each meal for two. I sometimes throw a stock cube in too, but it doesn't really make that much difference. A bit of tasty hot-sauce goes well too. Defense of canned potatoes: it's traditional! Also convenient because cooking whole fresh potatoes for 20 minutes won't have them cooked through, so if you want to do it with fresh potatoes either it takes longer or you have to be using small potato chunks, which basically sucks all the joy out of the dish. It's not particularly good-looking, it looks basically just like real mince and tatties, which looks pretty gross, so here's a picture of that instead.  Now that I make it a lot, I've also taken to throwing in an arbitrary vegetable each time - it really doesn't matter what it is, it has no impact on the flavor, so it's like free nutrition and disposal of whatever's coming close to going off in the fridge. The only thing that's even been detectable so far is putting a whole fennel root in there, and that effect was pretty nice. I've chucked in a big wad of spinach, some zucchinis, kale, carrots, celery, it all just vanishes under the olivey mushroomy lentilly savoriness. For this reason I don't bother adding any herbs - there were some in the first batch, I'd completely forgotten about that until right now. Also sometimes I switch out the potatoes for beets. (Small sidetrack: I used a food processor for the chopping at first; it sucked at chopping mushrooms and at not uncontrollably turning things into a paste, then it finally died after ten years of service. When I went to replace it, for some reason I was tempted by this thing (a hand-cranked basic food processor), and it turns out it's loving awesome. I use it way more than I ever did the food processor because it's so much easier to set up and clean, where the food processor wouldn't be worth using for a smaller task, and it does a much better job of evenly fine-chopping mushrooms. But it's not so good at turning things into paste when that's actually the goal. Amazon reviewers all seem to think it's the poo poo too.) Quick response to the obvious question, "vegetarian" is why not just using actual mince. Anyway, back on track - does anyone else have some stupid recipe idea they decided to make that turned out to be addictively tasty/practical? Also feel free to instead describe times you tried to reproduce a dish or do something with limited/unfamiliar ingredients like this but it turned out loving awful. I made a soup from some dried "random wacky soup stuff" pack from a chinese shop, I put in eggplant where it called for meat, and it was atrociously bitter. I think the soup junk was most of it, but eggplant had only made it worse. I managed to bring it back up to "just about edible" by adding an apple. I have no idea what possessed me to think that was a good idea, but it turned out it was, so hooray! But I'd prefer success stories.
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| # ? Feb 22, 2013 23:06 |
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| # ? May 26, 2013 01:17 |
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My Montel Williams pressure cooker came with a recipe to make chicken and pasta. It's basically just frozen chicken breasts, spiral noodles, and marinara sauce. It's the blandest thing ever. I threw in a massive pile of diced onions and garlic. My hands smell for days, and my body sweats out all the garlic. Even that was too tame, so now I thrown in these big sun dried tomatoes I get in a jar from Costco. Instead of just plain marinara, I also use various Classico brand flavored red sauces, and mix in some garlic alfredo sauce. It's delicious, but my apartment stinks and breath smell awful afterwards.
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| # ? Feb 23, 2013 01:18 |
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My mom used to make spanakopita triangles all the time when I was younger. I was home alone once and had the ingredients for it but couldn't be bothered to fold the triangles from the phyllo pastry, so I threw it over some pasta with roasted pine nuts, instead. I never bothered with triangles after that.
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| # ? Feb 23, 2013 01:42 |
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Wahad posted:My mom used to make spanakopita triangles all the time when I was younger. I was home alone once and had the ingredients for it but couldn't be bothered to fold the triangles from the phyllo pastry, so I threw it over some pasta with roasted pine nuts, instead. Okay, actual enchiladas might be 10% nicer, but if you're not having guests it's not worth 50% more effort for 10% nicer.
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| # ? Feb 23, 2013 05:47 |
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roomforthetuna posted:Oh yes, that reminds me of another one we do a lot - we call it "mexican lasagna". Basically you get all the ingredients of enchiladas but instead of arsing about with rolling them up and having to be concerned about them falling apart, just pour a thin layer of enchilada sauce, slap the corn tortillas on it, filling (onions, mushrooms, refried beans and tomatoes cooked in a pot first, for the vegetarian option), tortillas, sauce, cheese, repeat until you run out of ingredients. Bake. Splat it messily onto a plate, stick some lettuce and/or avocado lumps on top, tastes the same as enchiladas but for half the effort! I do the same thing with lasagne, but I use rotini pasta instead of lasagne noodles, the rest of the ingredients are the same. I call it lasagne bake.
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 03:21 |
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Oxphocker posted:I do the same thing with lasagne, but I use rotini pasta instead of lasagne noodles, the rest of the ingredients are the same. I call it lasagne bake.
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 03:43 |
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For a quick lunch or weekend breakfast, I make cream of wheat (or buckwheat, gluten-free) with sausage. A nice little frozen sausage patty, microwaved for under a minute, cut up, add half a chopped jalapeno if I have any. In the same bowl, add the cream of wheat and milk or water, salt, black pepper, crushed red pepper, garlic powder. Microwave it for a minute or two at a time, stirring until the texture is very thick and everything is delicious. Sometimes instead of sausage I'll throw an over-easy egg on top, or I'll make a cheesy version with milk, without sausage. To make any for dinner for more than just me, I do the same thing in a saucepan.
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 18:40 |
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| # ? May 26, 2013 01:17 |
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Breakfast Rice: Start with one serving of Jasmine Rice in the rice cooker, while that's cooking away you fry off 1 or 2 strips of bacon. When it's getting nice and crispy, you drain the bacon strips on paper towel and let cool while you fry an egg or two in the reserved grease. I like over medium best but it's really up to your preference. If you don't rush things along, the rice should finish just before the eggs, so in a bowl add the rice, crumble over with bacon and then top with the fried eggs. Finally in the remaining grease fry a small tomato in slices (garlic or green onion are good additions at this stage). Plop the last bits in the bowl and stir it all together in to a delicious slurry/porridge/thing. Add hot sauce to taste. I came up with the stuff one morning with a vicious hangover, and have converted basically everyone I know to making the stuff for breakfast. Cleanup is a breeze with only one pan and the rice cooker, and the rice works surprisingly well with the egg yolk (this is definitely best with runny yolks).
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| # ? Feb 24, 2013 22:46 |
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