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Can you cook?

Anathema-

By Anathema-
in The Shower

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legend

legend

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Posted

Sort of. I can't do anything that requires technique (my home made hollandaise sauce did not come out well!), but I've been doing pretty well with making up simple technique recipes and pairing the proper spices and herbs.

 

I guess most importantly, I like my own meals (so does my wife) and often more so than what you get at restaurants.

 

BTW, for my lunch simplest lunch hack I started doing: ditch the mayo. Instead, melt some butter in the microwave for 25 seconds, add spices, and pour over the meat of the sandwich.

 

You can get pretty creative with the spices you use, but I tend to use either curry powder (possible the best spice blend ever), or nutmeg + garlic. Sometimes adding lemon juice.

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SoberChef

SoberChef

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Posted

Tony Bourdain said it best ...

  • Have a good chefs knife & the knowledge on how to maintain it
  • Know how to roast a whole chicken
  • Understand how to prepare an omelette
  • Work on perfecting one "signature" dish of your own in which to be proud of

If you can do that, then you're on your way to understanding how to be a better home cook.

 

Thankfully I knew all those lessons by the time I was a teenager & have expanded upon my cooking knowledge far & wide in the years since.

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Anathema-

Anathema-

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Actually believe it or not if you're not already into cooking the best place to start is sauces. You can literally bake bland ass chicken breasts and mashed potatoes but you make a bomb-ass gravy (gravy is a sauce) then people will love it.

 

Here's a good place to start. You can buy pre-marinated meat, chicken/beef/vegetable stock (whatever you like), and some kind of starch/carb like rice or potatoes. And flour if you don't have it, this is your key to flavortown.

 

You probably have an instant pot. Cook the meat in that. If you don't just cook it to the instructions on the package. Like really don't kill yourself here just throw it in a pot with a little of the stock for a while and refill the stock when it gets low. Nothing crazy you just want the meat cooked with some liquid left over.

 

 

Take the meat out and look at the goodness you have left in the pot. You want to get a spoonful of flour ready, maybe a tablespoon if you care to measure. Turn up the heat and wait for the liquid to start bubbling (your instant pot probably has a sear function to turn on the heat), then add the flour and whisk. After a minute you'll recognize the gravy. If it's too thick dribble some of the stock in and keep whisking until it looks right.

 

Don't forget to make your rice or whatever, you should have started that already.

 

Pour the gravy over everything and eat. Done.

 

Congratulate yourself, you just made a sauce. Wait until you learn how to take those skills and make mac and cheese or sausage gravy.

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stepee

stepee

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No, and I don’t enjoy cooking so I have no desire to cook. People who enjoy cooking think it’s something that everyone has to learn to do, but they don’t realize that the actual action of cooking is not the same for everyone. It’s different doing something you enjoy vs doing a chore, for me it’s a chore, an obstacle in between me and food.

 

Not saying this thread is doing that, but just an observation I’ve had as I’ve gotten older that it’s one of those things where if you don’t like doing it, there isn’t as much reason to force yourself in 2022 to do it just because some of society shames you if you don’t. 

 

What I love lately is they have all these options now I'm that are in between say a tv dinner and a fresh cooked meal. The single pre-made but fresh dinners they have you can microwave or heat up. It’s really great if you are single, because even if I did like cooking, I definitely also do not like eating the same meal multiple days in a row. This lets you get fresh meals but you can get yourself a different one every day. It’s more expensive but I’m not sure how much more expensive it is than cooking for yourself if you aren’t eating a bunch of leftovers.

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Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

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I love cooking. I'm always trying out new recipes and have fun making up some random dishes based on whatever I happen to have lying around. Last thing I made were some muffin pizza things because a new restaurant opened in Boston and they didn't seem that hard to make.

 

Before that was some random chicken thigh thing. My grandmother randomly bought me a bottle of Adobo with bitter orange because it was, as she put it, "On sale and looked like a weird ingredient you would cook with". I coated the chicken with that, some powdered smoked jalapeno, and coconut flour for a light fry in coconut oil. Oh yeah, and some MSG because MSG is delicious and I was afraid of adding any more salt because adobo is salty as all hell. Served that with some coconut jasmine rice and some really random sauce I put together. It was like a halfway between sweet chili and al pastor marinade mixed with more of that bitter orange stuff. I think it was minced garlic, tomato paste, minced jalapenos, some chipotle to match the smoke on the chicken which I did removed before serving, coconut oil, coconut sugar, rice vinegar, more bitter orange adobo, tamari because regular soy sauce would have been too salty, and some water...oh and some corn starch slurry to thicken it up a bit. 

 

Like I said, some odd mix of sweet chili and al pastor. It worked, though. I'll probably try making the sauce again, but this time keep track of the ingredients so I can write an actual recipe down. I have one other friend in the real world who likes and we trade original recipes...well, now it's more just me feeding him recipes these days since he and everybody else I know subscribed to Hello Fresh.

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best3444

best3444

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Oddly enough, I love watching Gordon Ramsey on YouTube with his quick meal ideas while I'm eating my food. It just makes the food I'm eating taste so much better! :p

 

I have been watching the food network for years now and I understand quite a bit about cooking. I just never went beyond breakfast foods, burgers and steaks etc. I just don't enjoy cooking like stepee's post explained. 

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Nokra

Nokra

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I guess it depends on whose definition of "cook" one uses, but I think I can cook well enough. I can follow directions, have a decent sense for what would go together for improvisation, can handle basic techniques.... 

 

But I'm kind of in the same boat as @stepee, I think... I can, but I don't particularly enjoy it. I much prefer to just get eating over with and go back to other things I like more, so having to spend even half an hour making something is more annoying than enjoyable to me. 

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silentbob

silentbob

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I can sort of cook, but not fine chef crap. I love making Stir Fry with whatever veggies I have (usually onion, carrot, sugar snap peas and broccoli/cauliflower) I usually use beef or pork and will change up the sauce choice. I can bake a little but not much is ever done by me and my hands

 

 

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