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User-Friendly posted:I recently moved into a kitchen that has severely limited my cooking space, and I need recipe recommendations. I currently only have 2 burners and a microwave, but no oven. If a large pot is on one of the burners, the other is completely unusable, so there's a size restriction as well. I'm increasingly tired of pasta and stir-fry, so I was wondering if there were any other, perhaps more complicated, dishes I should attempt? To clarify: 1. How many people are you cooking for? Just yourself? i.e what sort of quantities of food are we looking at. 2. What qualifies to your roomies as an "extreme amount of time"? How soon do they need their burners back? 15 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? Three hours? 3. How much refrigerator and freezer space do you have? Are you wanting to cook meals ahead and freeze/store them in Tupperware or freezer bags? 4. What are your food preferences? Allergies? Vegan? Things you will/will not eat (onions, mushrooms, shrimp, etc.)? 5. What is your food budget? Pick one. (A) Broke. (B) Everybody else. Because if you were (C) Filthy Rich you wouldn't be sharing burners with roomies. Generally speaking, the majority of normal everyday cooking doesn't require all four burners going all at once; you've been watching too many cooking shows where the host has to fit his meal into a 22-minute time slot. Assuming that you're cooking for one: Fried chicken, boiled/mashed potatoes, peas. Fry the chicken on a burner. Do it in a small enough frying pan that you can fit a small saucepan on the other burner. This will be cooking your potatoes. Cook the peas in the microwave. Or, cook the chicken first, set it aside, cook your potatoes. Expand this basic principle to basically anything you wanna eat. Sear the salmon/steak/burger patty/other kind of fish in the frying pan, cook the potatoes in a saucepan on the other burner, do the veg in the microwave. Veg does beautifully in microwaves. Make sure you mop out the microwave afterwards, it tends to generate a lot of wet. You can also cook in segments: While the potatoes are cooking on the back burner, cook the sauce for the fish in a small saucepan on the front burner, set it aside, then use the front burner for cooking the fish. It's not a question of "magic recipes for small kitchens", see, it's a question of deciding what ya wanna eat and then figuring out how to implement it. It's more logistics than cuisine. If your big pasta boiler is taking up the entire stove, then cook the pasta first, drain it, shock it with cold water, drain it again, and let it sit while you cook the rest of the meal. Also, get an electric rice cooker, they are awesome. Even the $20 models work fine. A convection toaster oven also has many possibilities far beyond TV dinners. They sell them at Target.
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Sep 20, 2011 14:10
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:20 |
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User-Friendly posted:I'd normally just be cooking for me, and I'll eat pretty much anything. Unfortunately, I'm closer to "broke" than anything else. Also, the fridge is ridiculously crowded. There's ten of us sharing this kitchen, so it's more or less a constant struggle to find space in there. The reason I mentioned time restriction was on the scale of hours, avoiding making soups and similar projects. Okay, so, no stock. Welp, somebody who's broke and eats pretty much anything could do worse than investigate Indian food as mentioned above. Since fuel is at a premium on the Indian subcontinent, most Indian food tends to cook fast and is mostly a matter of assembly of ingredients, rather than of "using all the burners simultaneously to cook a lot of stuff". The vegan thread has a lot of good, interesting, different Indian recipes in it. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3413016 I am a personal fan of Manjula's cooking style. http://www.youtube.com/user/Manjulaskitchen Also of Maangchi, which is Korean. http://www.youtube.com/user/Maangchi Dunno what kind of Chinese stir-fry you've been doing, but there's more to it than beef and broccoli. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3401971 I would also browse the GWS Wiki, see what I felt like eating. Not all of it requires reducing a sauce for 5 hours. http://www.goonswithspoons.com/Welcome_to_Goons_With_Spoons
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Sep 20, 2011 17:20
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Vixenella posted:I'm making a cake for my Mother in Laws birthday on Saturday and wanted to try a new recipe. It calls for Root Beer flavouring but I can't find it anywhere, I have 2 places left to try but if I can't find it what should I use? A. I would not advise an experiment with adding alcohol to cake batter unless I knew more about what the recipe was. What recipe are you using? Baking is not like cooking; in cooking, you can tinker as you go and have a reasonable expectation that it'll come out okay. Baking, however, is more akin to firing rockets--you put all the carefully measured ingredients together, light a match, and keep your fingers crossed. The proportions of ingredients in cake batter are carefully calibrated to interact with each other in very specific, particular ways, and if you don't have much experience with baking cakes and with substituting things in cake batter, then it's really better, and safer, to stick with the recipe, rather than attempt to go off-road. B. I'm not sure how much of the artificial root beer flavoring that they use in candies would infuse into the vodka, and I'm not sure whether having artificial-root-beer-flavor-infused vodka is a Good Thing. I'm thinking it might taste more like cheap cough syrup, not a good ingredient to have. Also, the amount of actual root beer flavor in a teaspoon of root beer extract is a lot more than the amount of actual root beer flavor you'd eventually get from a teaspoon of vodka. In order to have a commensurate amount of actual root beer flavor, you'd have to have more vodka, which would mess up your liquids. C. I would personally never, not ever, make a cake using a new, untried recipe for my mother-in-law, especially for such an important occasion as a birthday. I would especially never, not EVER, take that new, untried recipe and tinker with it. No, she would get a standard cake that was by-the-book and according-to-the-recipe, because that way I'd have a reasonable guarantee that it wouldn't come out an inedible mess. Perhaps your MIL is a saint and would only be highly amused at collecting a hilarious anecdote if her daughter-in-law baked her an inedible mess of a birthday cake; if so, you are fortunate. D. If your intent is to make a root beer flavored cake, there are other recipes out there for that. Many of them put the crushed root beer candies on top, like sprinkles, on frosting. E. If you're absolutely determined to make the cake whose recipe you have there in your hand, you might be able to substitute any other flavoring or extract--vanilla, maple, peppermint, etc. It depends on the recipe. F. Googling around, I see that some Wal-Marts carry root beer extract. Check stores for availability. http://www.walmart.com/ip/Zatarain-s-Root-Beer-Extract-4-oz/10293256 Where are you? Fig Newton fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Sep 21, 2011 |
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Sep 21, 2011 19:49
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Casu Marzu posted:Do you know how vanilla extract is made? mediaphage posted:
Well, it wasn't clear from her post whether she was talking about using a teaspoon of the resultant vodka, or a cupful, or what. Asking about the alcohol "cooking off" made me wonder how much she was planning on using, hence my caution. I couldn't tell whether she was an experienced baker, or just somebody who got the recipe for the Root Beer Float Cake off the Internet and wanted to use 1-1/4 cups of vodka instead of the half-can of root beer. I'm not sure whether you can substitute vodka for the water 1-1 in a Betty Crocker cake mix.
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Sep 22, 2011 02:18
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Iron Chef Ricola posted:Who would freak out at someone who was adventurous and made a cake that turned out ridiculously in some way? Maybe my family just has Stockholm syndrome from consuming my food misadventures, but half the fun is doing something interesting. You don't want to have my sister-in-law, who would snigger behind my back literally until her dying day if I made her a cake, for any reason, that turned out less than perfect. "Wow, that Fig, she sure thought she could bake! And was it ever crappy!" My mother-in-law would be perfectly polite about the lapsed cake, but she'd make vaguely negative, passive-aggressive comments about my cake-baking skilz ever after, too. Yes, I am blessed by my in-laws, why do you ask? 
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Sep 22, 2011 02:22
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Fuzzy Pipe Wrench posted:Any ideas what to do with ~2.3 pounds of pork top loin? I've tried slow cooking it, and braising it, but both of those it didn't have enough fat content to remain moist. Oven baked with a heavy seasoning rub worked out nicely, but there was very little flavor penetration towards the center of the meat. Pork top loin (pork loin) is the premier "roast pork" cut of meat. You roast it. I wouldn't braise it or slow-cook it, it wastes all that potential delicious "roast pork"-ness. It'd be like putting 2 pounds of beef sirloin into the crockpot. There are lengthy and sometimes fevered discussions on the Internet as to what to rub on the outside of your pork loin before you roast it, and whether or not to marinate it. I'm not gonna go there. It's a personal decision. There are also equally passionate discussions as to what, if anything, to stuff it with. Ditto. You can also slice it up into 1/2" to 3/4" segments, like boneless pork chops, and then do whatever you usually do with boneless pork chops. But it seems a shame, when you've got this lovely pork roast waiting to be roasted. The leftovers go well, cubed, in stir-fry, sweet-n-sour pork, etc. But they have to be roast pork leftovers, otherwise they have no flavor.
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Sep 22, 2011 02:40
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Iron Chef Ricola posted:Then stop cooking for them why the heck would you put up with that? Fortunately they now live in Michigan and I live in Illinois, so I rarely have to cook for them anymore. But the MIL comes through twice a year on her way back and forth to Florida, and then I make sure her son takes her out to a nice restaurant. The SIL, also living in Michigan, is morbidly obese and does not leave her house much. Thank you, God.
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Sep 22, 2011 02:58
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xarg posted:So my mother bought me a slow cooker from my birthday and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Her theory is that I can toss some stuff in it, go to class, then come home and eat a tasty dinner in an apartment that smells like food. Has anyone got any good resources or any good ideas for what to do? Pretty much my only requirement is that I have to make it from scratch so I can avoid putting salt in it, as I can't eat salt. Ruling out most cured meats. There was a slow-cooker thread a while ago but I can't find it, it may have been archived. Anyway, yeah, slow cookers. 1. Chicken. Put some cut up pieces of chicken in there. Put in some kind of liquid like chicken stock (this now comes in cans and paper boxes at Kroger, they also have a low-sodium option) (do NOT use bouillion cubes, they're full of sodium), or salsa, or marinara, whatever, but NOT simply water because it won't come out yummy, it will come out sad like Oliver Twist Orphanage Soup). Have enough liquid so that all the pieces of chicken are covered, but not so full that the lid won't go on without squirting liquid all over the counter. Add things like a peeled quartered onion, a peeled chunked carrot, a washed chunked stalk of celery. Make sure all ingredients are covered by liquid. Turn on High. Make sure it's actually heating up before you go away for the day. Go away for the day. Come home to yummy chicken stuff. 2. Pulled pork. Put in hunks of pork butt (it's actually the shoulder). Ask the man at the Kroger meat counter if you can't tell which one it is. Put in liquid--water this time, and only about half, because you're going to make the other half be your choice of BBQ sauce. Onion, carrot, celery optional. Cover, plug in, turn on, etc. When you come home, remove meat, let cool, pull apart with forks or clean fingers. Eat. 3. Beef. Put in pieces of beef stew meat (ideally a mix of chuck roast and round steak or arm roast) in about 1" chunks. Put in beef stock for your liquid (this also comes in cans and paper boxes at Kroger, also has a low-sodium option). Add onion, carrot, celery. Add one (1) bay leaf. Add a pinch of thyme, marjoram, and parsley if you have some. Add a spoonful of tomato paste or a small can of peeled whole tomatoes. Smush the tomatoes with your hands when you put them in there. Note: Everything past "put in beef stock" is kinda optional; without it, you'll get "plain blah cooked beef", with it you'll get "yummy cooked beef". It'll be even yummier if you brown the meat (read: "fry the meat in a frying pan until it's nice and steak-like brown") beforehand, but that's not "dump n run" slow cookery. Apply here for further instructions. Plug in, turn on, etc. When you get home, you'll need to fish around in there and remove the bay leaf, which is not edible. If you make your liquid half stock and half tomato juice, and put in a teaspoon of chili powder, plus some garlic, you get chili. With or without beans. Amounts are approximate depending on your palate. You can make your own beef and chicken stock, which would have the advantage of being sodium-free, but I dunno how ambitious you are. Apply here for further instructions. Fig Newton fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Sep 22, 2011 |
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Sep 22, 2011 15:11
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Iron Chef Ricola posted:Hello I understand that you are trying to give babby's first cooking advice but salsa chicken is an abomination. Salsa chicken is very tasty.  And yes, this IS the thread for Babby's First Cooking, so yeah. Crockpot salsa chicken. Goes in here. This is the place for it. It got dissed, lavishly, in the Slow Cooker thread, too. If ya wanna be a purist, you can make your own salsa and THEN dump it in the crockpot with the chicken. You should be thankful I didn't give him my recipe for Spaghetti Sauce Packet Pot Roast. 
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Sep 22, 2011 16:27
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:20 |
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Gourd of Taste posted:Seems a little silly to say 'it got dissed in the other place so I put it here because someone new to cooking won't know any better.' Casu Marzu posted:Especially with the same misinformation as last time, namely way too much liquid. Actually, I wasn't the one who posted it in the Slow Cooker thread--I didn't even post in that thread at all--but thanks for the feedback, nice to see that nothing's really changed here, "Whirled Peas" initiative notwithstanding. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 22, 2011 16:43
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