Food and Food Culture

Fairly common actually. Sometimes it is just easier to find pastry than clay. Traditionalists however will insist that clay is the best.

Edit:

Another idea for chicken preparation: Beer Can Chicken. Take a chicken and get it ready like you would any other chicken. Gut it, clean it, and apply seasoning via a spice rub, injecting marinade, or brining. This is where the beer comes in. Take a can of beer, pop it open, and pour out about half of it. You may drink it if you wish though I'd recommend not drinking while cooking. Then insert the half full beer can into the chicken cavity. This holds the chicken upright while grilling or oven roasting. The beer steam helps make the chicken extra moist and tasty.

I'm not making this stuff up. Here's the Wikipedia page on it.

Edited by M84 on Aug 1st 2018 at 7:30:32 PM

I have done beer chicken and beer turkey before. Both worked out pretty well provided you find the right beer.

Cooking with beer is one of those odd things to learn which beer does well as flavor or even part of a sauce.

Cooking with alcoholic beverages is definitely something that takes a bit of practice. Beer, wine, even hard liquor like brandy...

Recently I've taken up a habit of deglazing with red wine when cooking, as often as possible. Wine certainly adds flavor if you do it right.

Edited by Millership on Aug 1st 2018 at 5:53:46 PM

White wine is also a great additive to many creme soups like shrimp or white asparagus, giving it a fruity sweetness with a slight sourness.

I certain use wine more for cooking than drinking. Adding wine to stews or even pasta sauce makes them so much more aromatic. Doesn't have to be fresh wine, just leftover wine from last week's dinner party will do.

Yep. No need to use fancy expensive wine for cooking purposes.

Regarding using alcohol in cooking, I guess it wouldn't be surprising if I said that one of the oft put ingredients of Russian ukha is vodka.

And as far as I know, alcohol is actually rarely used in Russian cuisine.

Edited by Millership on Aug 1st 2018 at 7:53:45 PM

Given that Russians are stereotyped as guzzling vodka in place of water, no it is not too shocking.

Dill also seems to be a recurring ingredient in Russian cuisine.

Edited by M84 on Aug 1st 2018 at 9:55:15 PM

Dill and parsley (not counting salt, pepper and mustard) are about the only things that are counted as seasoning in Russian cuisine. Probably due to the cold climate. I noticed that the warmer it is, the spicier the food gets.

And regarding common ingredients, there's this thing:

There are two dishes, that, despite allegedly being invented by a French chef became an important part of Russian culinary tradition: Veal Orloff and Boeuf Stroganoff. They are named after Counts Orlov and Stroganov, respectively, who commissioned the creation of the recipes to famous French chefs (now unknown). Despite being very different dishes, the former is essentially a variation of gratin and the latter is a kind of stew, they both have the exact same ingredients: onions, white mushrooms, beef, potatoes and white sauce (bechamel for Veal Orloff and smetana sauce for Boeuf Stroganoff).

So either Counts Orlov and Stroganov had very similar tastes, they were broke or they hired the same French chef.

Edited by Millership on Aug 1st 2018 at 8:56:35 PM

Interesting. Love stroganoff though.

How about Chili? Chili strikes as basically being a variation of soup or stew and know it exists in a wider sense than just the Southern reaches of the Americas.

Chili as we know it actually hails from Mexico and Texas. It may be one of the earliest examples of Tex-Mex cuisine.

I think it'd be relatively easy to find chili dishes anywhere there are chilis, beans, and meat in the region.

Chili is a surprisingly versatile dish. Anyone here ever try chocolate chili? You'd be surprised how well cocoa fits in to chili. I went to a chili cookoff festival thing once and tried it there.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2018 at 3:24:15 AM

I haven't tried it but I have heard of it. I can see unsweetened coco as an ingredient though.

Yeah, you definitely don't want sugar in it. I'm not suggesting you dunk a candy bar into the chili or something.

As for spice dishes...what do you prefer? Chili or curry dishes? I like chili just fine, but I love curry.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2018 at 3:36:29 AM

I think I prefer chili but every once in a while some curry is nice. Thai dishes tend to be one or other and a couple times I have seen both.

Ah the classic Thai coconut milk curry with chicken and rice. The Thai place near campus was a godsend during my college years.

Though I've gotta say I overall prefer Indian curries to others. And now I'm in the mood for some Indian food. Especially butter chicken.

Edited by M84 on Aug 19th 2018 at 3:44:13 AM

I think that's just a function of bio-diversity and energy. The higher temperatures and more consistent daylight hours as you get closer to the equator means that you get a greater variety of plants and a greater variety of ecological niches to compete over. Add humans to the mix and you get a much broader variety of plants to subject to the "I wonder how this tastes?" testing process.

Of course, cold climate is one of the (main) causes for low bio-diversity, but it's hardly the only one.

Does anyone eat foraged food? I have always been a bit reluctant in the past due to lack of knowledge as to what is safe and fear of pests etc. but recently I have been trying to expand what I eat so yesterday I made a lemon and blackberry Eton mess for dessert using wild blackberries I picked that morning. while probably not as sweet as I would have liked it was still very nice.

Personally I would avoid it unless I know the area where the plants grow very well. Enough to know whether or not there is any contamination concerns.

That's why I stuck to blackberries for my first attempt into foraging. Although I never ate them, my family have always picked wild blackberries for as long as I can remember so I know the most about them (don't pick them if they don't come off easily and don't pick any that grow below knee height). I also avoided picking the ones growing around the sewage farm for obvious reasons.

Any fruits or veggies you find should be carefully ID and then carefully washed. Always check for rot, pests, and parasites. Just like eating game animals you want to be careful to avoid the surprises. Be careful where you forage as well. Plants growing in a contaminated area can absorb environmental contaminations.

Yeah, the rules for foraging are relatively common sense but I would never go as far as my sister who has eaten roadkill pheasant and muntjac, as well as cooked rabbits and squirrels she caught in her garden and drowned in her water butt, but then she is a trained ecologist.

Edited by SebastianGray on Aug 26th 2018 at 4:46:32 PM

Wimberry picking was the big thing when I was a child. Although I did my share of blackberry picking, too. Mostly it was garden-raised and allotment raised food that I had.

Speaking of which, a friend of my mother's dumped a load of allotment veg on her because she had too much. There were so many tomatoes that my mother decided to make meatball sauce from scratch instead buying tinned tomatoes or passata and invite the whole family around.

Oh. My. God.

I have been cooking my tomato sauces from fresh tomatoes ever since.

I'm a trained ecologist, and I still wouldn't rush to eat roadkill unless I saw the kill event occur. I certainly wouldn't recommend it unless it happened right in front of you so you know exactly when it happened, how it happened, and what's happened to the carcass in the intervening time (that's partially because, in the UK, it's only legal to eat roadkill if the kill happened by accident, partially because the way the animal is killed will affect how much meat is salvageable, and partially because you do need to know what you're doing with the meat when you get it, especially if you're not sure how long it's been dead). I've eaten allotment-killed rabbit before now — not by choice, however. I can't stand rabbit meat.

By the the legal status of roadkill is an issue. Certain species need to be reported even if you do have the right to swipe the carcass. However, there have been cases of people luring deer onto roads in order to set up 'accidental' strikes.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 26th 2018 at 6:31:38 PM

Yeah. My dad grows tons of runner beans every year and they are far better than shop bought ones. One year he also managed to grow some chillies that were more than twice the size as the same type in the shops and just as hot, if not hotter.

I have never actually tried rabbit but I have always wondered what it tasted like.

I think my sister did see the roadkill happen in both the cases I know of.