Cooking

Everyone who has cooked with me has told me that I'm an awful person in the kitchen when things don't go my way. How do you guys keep calm after an accident?

Helped cook dinner tonight. I've often found it hard to get interested in cooking since there have been several times where I've just gotten micromanaged and/or excluded whenever I tried to help - but today it went well.

Dinner was some sesame beef noodles with spinach and scallions. It was great.

It looks good.

Tonight’s dinner was burritos with green chili. Green chili is a highly local dish found in southern Colorado and northernmost New Mexico.

It’s also been served to about a dozen folks in California while on vacation who have never had it or heard of it. Results have generally been positive.

How to make my Ma’s recipe is cook pork stew meat in a pot until done with some chopped onion. When the pork is done and the onion clear, add some flour to thicken then add tomatoes and green chiles of whatever spicy level you like and simmer for a good while. Serve it on burritos or mashed potatoes or even standalone like a stew or soup. Add some cheese or tomato or guacamole or sour cream among other things to smother the burrito and enjoy. If you add cheese, nuke it in the microwave until the cheese melts for best results.

That does sound quite good.

Why is Mexican food so addictively good?

Looked up multiple fried rice recipes each with their own tricks. Don’t know what order to cook everything in but as for ingredients, I’m keeping it simple.

Has anyone else here made fried rice before? Any tips?

Edited by ChicoTheParakeet on Oct 27th 2023 at 5:39:26 AM

^ Make the rice ahead of time and let it cool down and dry out completely before using it. Basically make a pot of it at lunch and let it cool down uncovered until when you use it at dinner.

I do it that way. Works much better than fresh rice. I’ve heard using day old rice is best.

Just made some sugar free banana bread~ It smells amazing so I can't wait to find out how it tastes!

Well, I found out peas make my mouth itchy so I’m boiling them and the carrots next time and let the moisture seep out.

Otherwise, my mom and I worked really well in the kitchen this time. No arguments. The result was delicious though the rice was too sticky. Then again, we added the rice right after the egg so it would coat more of it. It could have used more soy sauce too.

Believe it or not, I already (mostly) planned out what I’m going to have for dinner on the 28th of June, 2024. How does this sound?

• Steak marinated in Jamaican jerk sauce
• Should I have popcorn shrimp on the side?
• Hasselback potato
• Pan fried asparagus or corn on the cob?
• Strawberry milkshake mixed with alcohol
• Should I have dessert afterwards or would that be redundant since I’ll be having that shake?

What’s the occasion? I say it depends on how many people can make it.

It’s the anniversary of when I started publishing my books.

Were they cookbooks.

Regardless, congratulations.

No; these books.

Yes.

Prepare the rice ahead of time as I mention earlier. Just make a quick cup of white or brown rice and then leave it in the pot to cool and dry out.

I once made fried rice that had the too sticky problem until I learned to make it ahead of time.

Now to play the waiting game.

I made some skull-shaped chocolates today.

I actually remembered a way to temper chocolate that I was taught when I took a dessert-making course some years ago - Namely, that the instructor thought that chocolate tempering had been hyped up as so intimidating and difficult when, in his eyes, all you have to do is heat the chocolate to the highest temperature on the curve and then cool it down to working temperature right away rather than cooling it down and then heating it up again.

So, I gave it a shot…

And in comparison to other times when I’ve made chocolates, these ones came out of the molds all at once, perfectly, with one light tap on the workbench. They look great: The chocolate shrank as it should, they were shiny and had no streaks of white that I could see.

What a relief. That man was onto something, clearly. I just hope I don’t get hubris and screw up my next barch.

Sounds like fun. :)

Elaborate. What do you mean temperature curve? Heat it up to what? Cool it to what?

I’m completely baffled because desserts aren’t really knowledgeable to me.

For this year’s Halloween dinner, I had ribs, potato chips, a medley of pan fried vegetables, toast, homemade apple sauce, and beer with red food coloring, so that it looked like blood. ;) And for dessert, I had chocolate lava cake.

Here, let Alton Brown explain the science behind tempering chocolate, complete with some visual aid.

But, as a TL;DR: When you temper chocolate, you basically change the configuration of the crystals inside the chocolate. You do this in order to get chocolate that is shiny, doesn't melt in your hand and has a snap when you break it off or bite into it.

In order to do this, you heat the chocolate up to a certain temperature and cool it down to a certain temperature - This makes these crystals melt and then form new shapes when they come up to the surface of the chocolate. And tempered chocolate also shrinks a bit when it sets, so properly tempered chocolate should have no problems coming out of the molds.

If the tempering goes wrong, like if you heat the chocolate up or cool it down too much, the chocolate won't be glossy, might have streaks of white in it and might not come out of the molds properly once it's set.

And when I talk about temperature curves, I mean that different chocolates have different maximum, minimum and working temperatures, and this is determined by the amount of cocoa butter in the chocolate. Dark chocolate is generally more forgiving, because the highest temperature it can reach is somewhere between 45°C and 54°C, whereas milk and white is a bit more fickle since they're fattier - Milk's top temperature is between 42°C and 46°C and white's is between 40°C and 44°C. So, less of a room for error.

What's taught in a lot of places is that you first need to cool the chocolate down afterwards to the cooling temperature on the curve (Which is around 26°C - 29°C depending on the chocolate) and then heat it up to the working temperature (Between 29°C - 32°C, depending on the chocolate) before you can use it. (The lowest working temperatures are 29°C for dark, 28°C for milk and 27°C for white)

But the instructor on my course thought that the "cooling, then heating up again" step was unnecessary when you can cool the chocolate down to working temperature straight away. If it hardens afterwards before the chocolates are done, you just have to warm it up to working temperature again.

... Thanks for coming to my seminar.

Edited by MagmaTeaMerry on Oct 31st 2023 at 7:59:35 PM

Made cheesy meatloaf and mashed potatoes to get me through the week. The mashed potatoes didn’t quite turn out as smooth as I’d hoped, whether I didn’t boil the potatoes quite long enough or just needed to be more thorough mashing to make sure there weren’t any chunks left unmashed. Still tastes alright at least.

I never thought about meatloaf with cheese in it. It looks good, though. :)

Sorry about the potatoes, though.

For tonight’s dinner, I’m going to have tacos, with ground bison. This ought to be fun.