Cooking! The RWED world of culinary delights. by AgentRouka

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Cooking! The RWED world of culinary delights.

POSTED BY: AGENTROUKA
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 08:25
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Sunday, March 10, 2013 9:13 AM

Inspired by Six's health-related thread, I hope to create a little conversation about how we all eat and why. Maybe share a recipe or two that we particularly recommend.

Do you cook? When did you start and how did you learn? Is there a specific cultural background for your cooking or a particular type of food you like?

What's your everyday cooking like? Hot meals for dinner? Cold meals? How long does it take you? Where do you eat?

I'm a big soup fan, and generally just genetically predisposed to German cuisine. Give me breaded meat and potatoes and I'll be a happy camper. But I'm also lazy, so my personal cooking tends to reflect qualities like "quick" or "easy" without much fuss or anything resembling elegance. I do like natural food flavors, which others might consider bland.

My five roommates and I all cook and eat together every evening, so there's a very traditional family dinner vibe that I love dearly. I credit it with my current healthy eating habits.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 10:53 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I definitively have celiac disease and am super salt-sensitive. For those two reasons I always cook my own food as a way to avoid problems.

We started learning to cook early. Our mom would show us how to dice onions or carrots or celery, or peel potatoes, or take chicken meat off the boiled bones, then set us to it. Now that I look back on it, I'm amazed she trusted us with the knives at such an early age. But we didn't learn recipes.

In addition, in a family of people with excellent noses, I have virtually no sense of smell (I can smell about 5 specific things like cigarette smoke and cadaverine at high levels, but not much else). The rest of the family could go to a restaurant and sniff and taste their way through the dishes to figure out what herbs, spices and other ingredients were in there, while I was left out of the experience. It was actually a family joke to ask me to smell something.

I did some pretty utilitarian cooking for years.

But I started seriously cooking specialty foods for myself when I found I had celiac disease. At the time though I was just putting together stuff I thought I 'should' eat, then wondering why I wasn't eating it. It took me a couple of years to cognate that if I didn't like it, it wasn't going to get eaten no matter how much I 'should'.

So I made a point of learning how to cook tasty (to me) and healthful food, with no salt or wheat, limited carbs, lots of vegetables, and lean protein. I actually imported food values from the USDA Nutrient Database http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ into a spreadsheet to try and keep my portions right. I've learned a number of good techniques like cooking ingredients separately to the right amount of done-ness then putting them together, and developed some tasty recipes along the way.

At this point my family actually LIKES my specialty cooking! which pleases me no end given that I always thought I'd fail at it due to anosmia - even my super-sniffer blood relatives think it's tasty.

HEY! I CAN cook!

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 2:00 PM

BYTEMITE

I cook. I tend to like desserts more than anything though. But now and then I browse the internet looking for recipe ideas, or consult some vegan cookbooks.

I like mushrooms, seeds, herbs, and fruit, so I usually like to use two or three of those. Made stuffed mushrooms with onions, minced garlic, chopped nuts, and more mushrooms a while back that were good. My sister in law makes a mean bow-tie pasta pesto.

For St. Patrick's Day, I'd like to point to a delicious spice cake I posted on my blog here once.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/blog.aspx?bid=8967

This year my parents want to try something with less sugar, so we'll be making a soda bread.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 2:24 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Okay, tempted into this thread. SPICE CAKE!!! One of my favorites, Byte, I will definitely give yours a try!

Tempted to speak up because my eating habits just changed more dramatically than any time in my life recently. Jim's retiring lost us our insurance, and once I learned about the donut hole (!!!) on meds, I dropped ALL of mine (except the thyroid one, which is cheap).

End result (which was started by what turned out to be a really nasty little virus, which I mistook for withdrawal from my meds): So far I've lost 25 lbs in less than two months. And still losing. Not even really trying.

Difference is: I started eating my main meal mid-day and dropped the two, three or sometimes FOUR desserts I ate by staying up late. Now I go to bed 9ish and get up 5ish and usually don't even WANT a dessert. Made three chocolate chip cookies night before last...didn't really enjoy them. And I'm a sweet-and-chocoHOLIC! I was eating sandwiches and fruit (and, as the season just began, a choke every night); now I'm cooking every couple of days for Jim and I, trying out new recipes of chicken and/or potatoes or casseroles. Choey has long told me that cutting out carbs does miracles, but I've so long been addicted to sourdough and sweets, I wouldn't even consider it.

It's the meds aside from the change in diet and eating habits, I know. Psychotropics are famous for weight gain. I can say it now: I had just topped 218 and bought new pants 'cuz I couldn't fit even my "fat pants". Now I'm at 193 and will probably keep it up to get back to my "proper" 165 (remember, I'm six feet tall). It's GREAT!

I also have tons more energy, am not falling asleep half the day in the recliner, and we just joined an outrigger "paddling club", which I hope will help strengthen my back. The extra weight has been hard on my bod and especially my back, but I just didn't have the motivation to try and lose it...the virus taking off 10 in a couple of days, then dropping the meds continuing to take it off, has me geared up to actually WORK at getting back to where I should be. Nothing I planned or even anticipated...weird! Take that as a warning against taking psychotropic meds...all those years, I never knew...

I'm having a BALL with recipes; gave up cooking years ago because Jim has to eat every 4 hours and does low-fat, low-cholesterol mostly, and doesn't eat red meat. I was subsisting on hamburgers/chicken sandwiches, and now I'm experimenting...cooking again after all these years is FUN (despite it being damned hard to take the back pain of standing around the stove), and it's great not just slapping together a sandwich to get past "food" and onto dessert anymore. Wonder how long it will last?

There. I gave in to temptation. I blame the fact that I'm sitting here waiting for YouTube to upload some videos I'm offering in the thread about me and Anthony (among others, I might note) not having been around. HOPEFULLY once I've finished that post I won't be tempted again. But thanx for something to kill the time!

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:02 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Lots of cooking going on in the Kwicko household. My wife is working at an all-organic grocer's now, and she gets to bring home all sorts of goodies, from local avocadoes, garlic, bell, serrano, and jalapeño peppers, onions, shallots, cabbage, to meats and "artisan" cheeses and baked goods.

Since I'm between jobs at the moment, it's an adventure to see what I can make with the stuff she brings home. I tend to go to the store three or four times a week to fill in - Italian sausage and pasta to add to the goodies for a nice twice-baked three-cheese ziti, some chicken for a Chinese stir-fry with a twist of Mexican served over brown rice, chicken fajitas, a few tomatoes to add to a green salad, things like that.

I don't fry potatoes anymore - baked or roasted for me, usually roasted with some garlic-infused olive oil, sea salt, and fresh rosemary from the garden. Wednesday I did up a white cheese pizza with seasoned chicken breast and fresh jalapeño, garlic, basil, and spinach, with a light alfredo sauce and fresh mozzarella and provolone. It was pretty goddamned good, if I do say so myself.

Tomorrow I'll be doing stuffed peppers Mexican style (hamburger and chorizo mixed with brown rice, topped with refried black beans and feta cheese) with some fresh salsa and pico de gallo.

It sounds like we eat a lot of meat, but not really. Probably one meal a day will have meat in it, if that, and even then it's not much - we'll split a chicken breast, or split half a ham steak chopped into a chef salad, or have a couple slices of bacon on a BLT, stuff like that. If I make something with a pound of burger, it's going to be a big batch that will last a few meals - chili, taco meat, etc.

Tonight was pulled pork sandwiches with potato salad and applesauce. I went with tortilla chips and salsa, since I really can't stand potato salad. :)

I mostly learned to cook on my own. I can follow recipes, but really only use those for baking. I usually like to just take "traditional" recipes, comfort food, and give it a twist, or play with some of my old favorites. I'll be trying carnitas soon, just because I like it and have never tried making it.

"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero

"I was wrong" - Hero, 2012

Mitt Romney, introducing his running mate: "Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan!"

Rappy's response? "You're lying, gullible ( believing in some BS you heard on msnbc ) or hard of hearing."

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:05 PM

KWICKO

Oh, and I'll second Brenda's baked fish. I like baked catfish; if you do it right, you won't know the difference between it and fried, except for the fat content!

Baked catfish on crispy tacos is awesome. Expecially with an ice-cold Corona.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:07 PM

CANTTAKESKY

I love to cook too. Soups, casseroles, gourmet, desserts--I love it all. When I was in Peru, I used to make American meals to feed homesick peace corps volunteers. It was awesome.

Byte, I had forgotten FFF has blogs. Coolio. I should start something.

-----

Disobedience is not an issue if obedience is not the goal.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:12 PM

MAL4PREZ

I don't cook much. There are a few things I make, the foremost being a pasta sauce that started as an effort to make canned pasta sauce more interesting. After 10-15 years it has evolved into a thick caramelized onion/basil/sweet pepper/mushroom/tomato sauce that, I have to say, is really fucking good. I have a batch of it in my fridge right now.

There are some other meals I like to whip up now and then, but they aren't as healthy and since I hit 40 I find that weight goes on easier than it comes off. My personal midlife crisis: I'm insistent on fitting into my skinny jeans for as long as possible. So I don't make the yummy creamy clam chowder or the Mexican chili salad - with loads of cheese and sour cream - as often as I did a decade ago.

BTW, the latter recipe is from one of my mom's cookbooks that I learned to make early, early on. It involves sauteed garlic, onions and ground beef (or, better, skirt steak chopped into little chunks) cooked down with tomato sauce, tomato paste, chili, cumin, coriander, and a bit of sugar. Put some tortilla chips - preferably homemade - on a plate, add the chili, and pile on anything you like on nachos. Soooo good! The problem I have with this recipe is that mom's old non-politically correct book called it "wetbacks", because when you put the chili on the chips they get soggy. I am older and wiser enough to find this name unacceptable, but I was trained young and can't think of this meal as anything but "wetbacks." I have tried to find another name and failed. Dammit!

Anyway, I cook maybe once every two weeks. At the end of the work day, I'm interested in getting healthy food into my mouth as soon as possible with as little work as possible. So I love having that bowl of sauce (or homemade pesto - love it!) in the fridge to throw on some pasta.

I rely heavily on Trader Joe's frozen meals, like bim bim bap, tom yum soup, arugula pizza, and various indian dishes. Five minutes in a microwave or ten in the oven and I'm eating something flavorful with lots of vegetables, few calories, and it was cheap. Better - there are no dishes to be cleaned but a spoon or fork. So easy!

I admire people who have the energy to actually cook every day, but the frozen meals are a boon for me. Before I lived near Trader Joe's, I lived on chips and salsa and cream cheese. Yummy, but also not so good for an older body.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 5:19 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

So anyway, some of what people think is tasty:

pork and cabbage stew
ground pork, cabbage, onions, carrots, potatoes, some celery and - I kid you not - some caraway seed and a smidge of oregano - pork gravy is optional

tofu and cauliflower curry
cook and puree cauliflower, add curry spices of your choice, cube and bake tofu at 225 F till lightly browned, add to the curry puree

spicy marinara
no salt added tomato juice cooked down with your choice of herbs, cooked and drained ground beef, onions gently sauteed in olive oil, LOTS of cooked mushrooms (cooked to the point where they shrink to concentrate the flavor), LOTS of fresh ground black pepper (don't cook with it or it will get bitter), serve over quinoa cooked light and fluffy like rice

New Mexico style stew
since long green chillies are a pain (you really have to char and remove the skins or they get tough during cooking) I use green bell peppers cut in chunks gently sauteed with green serranos, add cooked chunks of beef and cooked cubed potatoes

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 5:22 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Mal4

If you like seafood and tomatoes - may I suggest TJ's boxed creamy tomato soup? Add some cooked fish and seafood, and (for most people) crackers, and it's an exceptionally tasty, nutritious and quick meal.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 5:50 PM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
So anyway, some of what people think is tasty:

pork and cabbage stew
ground pork, cabbage, onions, carrots, potatoes, some celery and - I kid you not - some caraway seed and a smidge of oregano - pork gravy is optional

Yup, we do that one, but with smoked kielbasa instead of ground pork. And the caraway seeds make the meal! Really good with some hearty dark rye or Jewish rye bread.

Quote:

New Mexico style stew
since long green chillies are a pain (you really have to char and remove the skins or they get tough during cooking) I use green bell peppers cut in chunks gently sauteed with green serranos, add cooked chunks of beef and cooked cubed potatoes

Austin goes crazy for Hatch green chiles when they come into season - the Central Market sets up a giant roasting drum, and you can buy the roasted by the pound. We do lots of green chile pork stew or chili, green chile enchiladas, green chile burgers...

The rest of the year, I'm usually using jalapeños - split 'em lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with a spoon and you'll remove about 95% of the heat from the pepper and serranos mixed with bell peppers; I prefer the yellow and red ones, and they've just come out with a purple one from Texas A&M University (they call it "Maroon" in honor of their school color, but it's the color of a purple onion).

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 5:52 PM

KWICKO

Still waiting to get a Trader Joe's here in Austin. It's supposed to be happening, but I've heard that for a while. I won't shop at Whole Foods; I despise everything about them.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 6:03 PM

BYTEMITE

Quote:
Take that as a warning against taking psychotropic meds...all those years, I never knew...

Oh god. Do I ever feel you. I put on 40 pounds of water weight on risperdol once, I was eleven, I still have the scars from where my skin stretched and tore. Like white tiger stripes from my hips to my knees.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 6:28 PM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

The Geezer household does a good bit of cooking.

Madame bakes most of our bread (whole wheat, French, and struan), except biscuits, cornbread, and crystal, which are mine to do. Also generally make our own pasta.

We tend to cook spaghetti sauce, chili, bean soups, butternut squash puree and the like in big batches to portion and freeze.

When the farmers markets are open we buy lots of fresh veggies like peppers, tomatoes, onions, and greens and make soups and veggie stews (with maybe a bit of chicken or ham in them).

Except for the baking we seldom use a recipe - tending to just throw stuff together based on what seems good at the time. Seems to work out pretty well.

We tend to eat light breakfasts most days, and have found that mixing 4 oz of flavored yogurt and maybe a quarter cup steel cut oats the night before, and letting it meld overnight, makes a nice healthy bite. Sometimes just popcorn (airpopped) for lunch, and a light snack (cheese and olives, maybe) around 3:00 so we're not too hungry for supper.

This is not to say that occasionally we don't get a good ribeye or bone-in porkchop and open a bottle of wine, but not every day. Some days it's fish or shrimp.

We've recently bought a few old and groaty cast iron skillets, and after some work with the angle grinder and sander, have found they're really great for everything from cornbread to searing fish and steak, once they're seasoned.

ETA: Oh, and Frank's hot sauce. A little bit goes in most everything we cook.

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 8:19 PM

MAL4PREZ

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Mal4

If you like seafood and tomatoes - may I suggest TJ's boxed creamy tomato soup? Add some cooked fish and seafood, and (for most people) crackers, and it's an exceptionally tasty, nutritious and quick meal.

I'm growing increasingly open to soup as a meal. I will look into this, though I'm not a big tomato soup fan. I can see that some shrimps and crackers thrown in there would be tasty.

Geezer; butternut squash: yummmm! Speaking of soup, I am a big fan of any kind of squash soup.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 11:45 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

One thing I've discovered how to make: hot chili oil. I'll provide instructions but first an important caveat.

You MUST use dried chilies - fresh chilies might have botulism spores and do contain water which is essential for botulism to sprout. If you cover up the chilies with oil you will exclude oxygen and give any spores there might be the perfect place to grow. Botulism is extremely toxic in very small amounts, and you will not see it, smell it, or taste it. The same is true of any fresh herb like garlic, or spice. Use only well dried herbs and spices, never fresh.

That said, there is a fantastic array of dried chilies on the internet. I always use habaneros in my chili oil and ground paprika for color, plus about 4 or 5 other varieties of dried chilies: ancho, New Mexico red, chipotle, smoked paprika, Hungarian, Thai etc. If you have an empty bottle with a small plastic restrictor on the end like an olive oil bottle for example - pry off the restrictor, clean and dry the bottle, roughly chop the dried chilies and stuff in the bottle till 3/4 full, pour in any powders you might want, and pour the oil of choice over the top, then replace the restrictor. Cap. Let sit for 2 weeks or so. It's wonderful.

You can get about three bottles out of one batch of chilies, just pour new oil over the chilies when it runs out.

My favorite is to cook quinoa to be light and fluffy, mix in lightly carmelized onions and lace the top of the mix with chili oil.

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Sunday, March 10, 2013 11:49 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

When time is not my enemy, I do love to cook. Often though its just a necessary chore.

Today, despite the relentless heat, I managed to make half way decent gnocchi and served it with pesto sauce. I love pesto with a passion, and like to make lots of different kinds, not just basil, pine nut, garlic variety (although that is what I did tonight). When my garden is in order, I'll use parsley that grows almost wild, with walnuts or almonds. Sometimes I'll blend it with fresh tomatoes and chillies, capers, anchovies or whatever tangy stuff I can find. Yum, it goes creamy when you add some starchy water from the cooked pasta.

For breakfast these days, I have either cooked oats (porridge), muesli with youghurt and soymilk, or a soymilk smoothy.

This is my recipe for a fab smoothy.

One banana,
handfull of fresh berries, any variety
cup of soy milk
and then any of the following
a few teaspoons of muesli, chia seeds, LSA, psyllum husks, linseeds
handfull of ice

blitz the hell out of it and enjoy

My background is anglo irish and basically I find that food sucks. I am thankful for the other immigrants to this country, the Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians etc for making our cusines paletable.

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Monday, March 11, 2013 7:02 AM

FREMDFIRMA

PROJEKT SAFECAKE.

Okay, the recipe.
SAFECAKE: aka Gluten Free, Sugar Free Pound Cake.

You will need:
2 mixing bowls, 9 inch bread pan, oven.

Ingredients:
1 cup white rice flour.
1 cup sorghum flour.
1/4 cup corn starch.
2 tsp baking powder.
1 tsp xanthan gum.
1 cup (that's two sticks) unsalted butter.
1 cup equivalent of stevia/raw instead of sugar.
4 eggs.
2 tsp vanilla extract.

Start pre-heating oven to 350F
Grease bread pan, or if nonstick, apply cooking spray.

In first bowl, place butter and beat like you mean it - you can cheat a bit by heating the butter slightly but don't overdo it, just soften it, and seriously flail it good, you are shooting for a smooth creamy texture here.
Add in the stevia/raw and then *really* go to town on it, this is the key to getting a good mix so it's kind of important.
Add in the eggs, one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each.
Add the vanilla, and then just totally have at it for a while, then set aside.

In second bowl, add rice flour, sorghum flour, corn starch, baking powder and xanthan gum.
stir briskly with wire whisk until well blended.

Dump second bowl into first and mix some more - by now the contents of the first bowl will have cooled and thickened, so you'll really have to put some elbow grease into it, but keep at it till it's mixed quite thoroughly, it will be thick but don't let that put you off.

Now spoon the contents into the bread pan and smooth out, you can also vigorously shake bread pan to help this along - then place in oven and bake for approx 60 minutes, exact timing depends on oven however, and top of loaf should be just slightly darker than golden brown.

Remove from oven and cool in pan for 10 minutes, using a wire rack or oven burner is reccommended.
After 10 minutes remove loaf from pan and cool to room temperature, then serve and/or package.

====
QUICKSERVE PEPPER-CHICKEN.

You will need...

1 Skillet.
1 chicken breast.
1 bag of krogers "recipe beginnings 3-pepper & onion blend"
(or similar product)
1 tsp butter
1 tbsp water

Place skillet on burner and set to low heat, add butter, water.
Chop chicken breast into pieces and add to skillet, then advance heat to medium-high.
Stir as necessary to ensure even cooking and brown to satisfaction.
Reduce heat to medium and add 1/2 - 3/4 cup of pepper blend (depending on breast size).
Stir as necessary to ensure even cooking and distribute flavor.

Ready to serve when peppers are cooked through, and can be served on small bed of rice, or in bowl as a single - optional 1 tsp soy sauce if desired.

Enjoy.

-F

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Monday, March 11, 2013 2:30 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Sounds quite nice Frem, and super quick and easy.

OK - there were two really enthusiastic votes for squash soup. That is completely outside of my food repertoire. I have not even an imagination of a food reference for it. I'm hoping either or both of you will tell me what it is at its best, and, with any luck, how to make it. THANKS!

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Monday, March 11, 2013 4:14 PM

EBFIDDLER

I cook pretty much every day for a family meal. I make the kids' lunches almost every day, and on weekends I usually cook breakfast, even if it's just oatmeal.

I learned to cook in a basic way as a kid, first with baking, and later (as a teenager) with dinners. I started to learn to cook for real when I was a grad student, because suddenly there was no college meal plan and I didn't have money for eating out. After I left grad school, I cooked all the time when I wasn't on tour. When you're on the road touring, home-cooked food looks better and better, and I began to look forward to getting home from tour so I could cook. That's when I really learned to cook properly. I mostly learned from the weekly food section of the newspaper. Just followed directions and learned to cook all kinds of interesting things. Now I still get out the recipes, but I tend to use them as a basis for improvising, rather than following the directions exactly.

These days I do not tour nearly so much, so I cook just about every day. My husband and I figured out really early on in our marriage that we would eat much better if I cooked and he cleaned up, so that's still how we do it.

My taste in food is really eclectic, and there isn't a cuisine that I'm unwilling to try. Chicken Normande, Falafel, Tom Ka Gai, Miso Soup, Mattar Pilau, whatever.

I make a lot of soup, usually in great big vats, and freeze it. These are our "cans" of soup for nights when I don't feel like cooking. Lentil Soup is a perpetual favorite, as it's easy and doesn't take long, but I also make Chicken Soup, Split Pea Soup, Potato Leek Soup, Bean Soup, Vegetarian Minestrone, and Wild Irish Stew (also vegetarian), and basically any kind of soup I've ever seen a recipe for. The Tom Ka Gai (Thai coconut soup) and Miso Soup don't freeze well, so those are just fresh-made.

I used to eat a lot more vegetarian meals, or meals with a very small portion of meat spread across a lot of vegetables, but my husband's more of a meat-and-potatoes guy, so I find that I make more meat and, yes, potatoes, than I used to. I don't deep-fry anything; I roast or saute a lot instead, and grill in every season except winter. Someone else mentioned roasted potatoes with a little olive oil on them -- that's what we do for "french fries" in this house, and it's really very good. You can do it with sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, and carrots, and they all turn out pretty well that way.

Now that I cook so frequently, and have to cater somewhat to children's palates (one child is extremely picky and would eat chicken nuggets and nothing else if allowed to do so), alas I'm not so adventurous, and I'm much less eager to dive into the 5-hour cooking projects which used to be such fun when it was a contrast to road food while touring. These days I look for food that has minimal hands-on prep time. I don't care if it takes hours to cook, as long as I only have to chop for fifteen minutes and then I can walk away and let it bake or stew or whatever. I make a lot of marinades, and freeze portions of meat in marinades, so that when it's time to cook, it's very simple.

I've always enjoyed baking, and started making a lot of our own bread when one of my children had extreme difficulties with dairy foods. It was so hard to buy baked goods that did not contain a dairy product, that I started making most of our bread at that time. Now the child's dairy problem is not so severe, but I still bake bread pretty often.

My philosophy on dessert is not to eat any if I didn't make it, so there are only desserts around here if I make them. But I love dessert, and make everything from pies and cookies to ice cream. Just not every day. Or even every week. ;-) When I don't make dessert and the family starts clamoring, I open a jar of applesauce.

I'm also very into eating local foods and seasonal foods. During the summer and fall I go to the pick-your-own farm a LOT, and we get most of our fruits and vegetables from there. (In the winter I buy lettuce from California like everybody else.) I pick and freeze and can. My sister and I get together in October or November and make a year's supply of applesauce for both our households. I can peaches (never enough) and jam. I make fruit pies in season and freeze them to bake later. Cherry pie in January is awesome.

I'd like to grow my own food, but I live in a place where that's just not possible, except for some reason I can grow sage and oregano reasonably well. In the summer, we go to a very rural place for vacation, and part of the fun for me is prepping a caught-and-gathered meal -- like fish caught by our neighbor and wild blueberries and raspberries that I picked in the backcountry.

One thing that you don't find much of in our house is convenience foods, packaged foods, commercially pre-made food, heat-and-serve -- all those things contain too much salt and other ingredients whose main purpose is to preserve shelf life rather than provide nutrition.

Sounds lovely, huh? But since I do it almost every day, for years now, I'm experiencing some burn-out (of the cook, not the food), and I'm getting tired of cooking. But not enough to buy the pre-made packaged junk food.

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Monday, March 11, 2013 8:21 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

I adore eating but I loathe cooking. Fortunately for me I live in a household where the other people are amazing cooks, so that works well for me. I get overwhelmed extremely easily due to ye old executive functioning defecits, so multitasking is extremely challenging for me, and cooking is very multitaskish and very stressful with the hot things etc. I suck at it and I get anxious when I have to do it, unless someone is right there with me.

But again I love eating!!!!!!! Its one of my favorite activities!

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Tuesday, March 12, 2013 12:10 AM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Someone else mentioned roasted potatoes with a little olive oil on them -- that's what we do for "french fries" in this house, and it's really very good. You can do it with sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, and carrots, and they all turn out pretty well that way.

Ah, one of my winter favourites is to cook huge batch of roast veg, potato, carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, punpkins, mushrooms, onion, garlic, tomatoes,red pepper, zucchini. They all cook at different rates, so you have to add them at different times, but the result is a meal in itself. I roast them with fresh rosemary, sea salt and olive oil.

you can bake a bit of chicken, fish, or add some aoili or pesto. Toss in some spinach or rocket leaves, and you have a wonderful meal.

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