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The " Honey I'm home and I'm bloody starving , what's for dinner " Thread.

Read the first line of the ingredients. It specifically says do not compromise on the sausages. Hot dog sausages is the ultimate compromise. It’s a totally different meal. If I put up a recipe for tournedos Rossini would you say using a thick hamburger pattie was the same as thickly sliced fillet medallion just because they were both discs?
 
Tonight’s (well, your time!) little exchange has got me thinking about this thread. There are clearly massively different levels of cooking ability in our little online group. Maybe those with more experience or skills can pass on useful little tips to save time and improve those with less confidence? Not necessarily recipes but just little helpful things that seem second nature when you know what you are doing but aren’t obvious when you think you can burn water?

I can start with a couple.

Rice. Boiling standard cooking time rice is a piece of piss by the absorption method. This doesn’t work for quick cook rice but the regular stuff.
Twice as much water in the pan as rice. Bring to the boil. Regularly stir to make sure the rice doesn’t stick. When the water is absorbed the rice should be perfectly done.

Dicing an onion. Quick but you need a sharp knife. Peel. Cut it in half going through the root. Lay one half flat on the board. Cut from the top 5mm slices but leave the root intact as you need that to hold on to. Now put your knife blade parallel with the board and make three or four slices through the onion again leaving the root untouched. Turn onion through ninety degrees and slice from the top again in 5mm strips. Instant dice. If you want to make flash brunoise tiny dice then you just reduce the distance between the cuts in all three chops. As long as the root is intact the onion should hold together and it’s easy.
 
I would add that with rice to make sure that you have a tight fitting lid to the pan. Once brought to the boil simmer with pan covered for 15 minutes and then remove from heat and leave civered for a further five minutes.
 
Paddingtonwolf said:
Tonight’s (well, your time!) little exchange has got me thinking about this thread. There are clearly massively different levels of cooking ability in our little online group. Maybe those with more experience or skills can pass on useful little tips to save time and improve those with less confidence? Not necessarily recipes but just little helpful things that seem second nature when you know what you are doing but aren’t obvious when you think you can burn water?

I can start with a couple.

Rice. Boiling standard cooking time rice is a piece of piss by the absorption method. This doesn’t work for quick cook rice but the regular stuff.
Twice as much water in the pan as rice. Bring to the boil. Regularly stir to make sure the rice doesn’t stick. When the water is absorbed the rice should be perfectly done.

Dicing an onion. Quick but you need a sharp knife. Peel. Cut it in half going through the root. Lay one half flat on the board. Cut from the top 5mm slices but leave the root intact as you need that to hold on to. Now put your knife blade parallel with the board and make three or four slices through the onion again leaving the root untouched. Turn onion through ninety degrees and slice from the top again in 5mm strips. Instant dice. If you want to make flash brunoise tiny dice then you just reduce the distance between the cuts in all three chops. As long as the root is intact the onion should hold together and it’s easy.
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I did cold prep in a restaurant when I was younger, pretty much the only transferable skill I’ve ever developed is the ability to chop/dice/whatever any vegetable or fruit without any thought. Couldn’t tell you how to do it, but put any in front of me and they get chopped very quickly.

Fucking hated that job.
 
My pet hate is carrot batons or julienne. The easy way of not peeling the carrot and cutting it to a rectangle to start just seems a bit wasteful so even though I know how I don’t do it.
 
Hot dog sausages are fucking rank, I wouldn’t give them to a dog.
 
I think you guys that can cook have an innate ability to see things that set you apart. A bit like the green-fingered gardeners.

I can look in the cupboard to do lunch and see a selection of ingredients and think… ‘not much there… a bit of cheese, bread, some erm, other stuff’. Cheese on toast it is then.

The wife would go to the same cupboard and 10 minutes later you’d be sitting down to a miracle that looked like it’d cost 15 quid from an artisan cafe.

I’m getting better to be fair and the Gousto has been very helpful in learning about flavours and things like cooking temperatures and timings, but it’s the flair and imagination that is really lacking. Not sure you can ever really teach that but I’ll keep trying!
 
When you have those lovely big cloves of garlic (not the shitty little things you get in a net from Tesco), say you're using 4 or 5 decent cloves, instead of cutting both ends off and trying to take off the flaky skin, just put them into a microwave for about 10 or 15 seconds, take them out - (careful they will be hot!!) and gently squeeze them between your finger and thumb, the naked clove will just slide straight out.
 
sycophantia said:
That's similar to one of my favs, I usually put a load of paprika in and add some chopped up chorizo. Also instead of pasta I'll add a can of cannellini beans sometimes.
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This sounds lovely (I love chorizo!) and is a good example of the lateral thinking I’m missing but would like to improve upon.

I cook like I’m assembling an ikea wardrobe and struggle when going even slightly off piste.

Did have to laugh the other day though when cooking the Gousto for 2 - a voice from the other room shouts ‘My brother is coming over, chuck that bit of extra chicken in the fridge in and we’ll make it go three ways’.

Fuck me! Fell apart under pressure. I mean, that’s it, game over, the ratios are all over the place! How do you keep the flavours balanced at that point, what do you add, what temperature, don’t let it dry out, keep the sauce moist, etc etc. Good cooks will instinctively know what to do and make it look unbelievably easy but it’s frustratingly hard.

Definitely improving and it’s these things that bring you forward but it’s slow going. Not giving up yet!
 
Cooking to some point is trial and error, try stuff, if it doesn’t work fuck it. I remember when the girls’ mother finally fucked off I was stuck just binging frozen stuff in the oven or heating up stuff out of a tin (not hot dog sausages), but I wanted fresh stuff and decided to experiment. Loads worked out a treat but there were some shockers, either way it didn’t matter, we still ate.
Just practice when it doesn’t matter and hone your knowledge, there’s no pressure then and it doesn’t matter if you fuck it up.

I cooked a chilli the weekend from scratch with herb buttered rice and cheesy jalapeño nachos. Would never heave dreamt of it before but it was absolutely banging. And really easy. Everyone wants it again so it couldn’t have been bad!
 
I think mostly its if you enjoy it to a certain extent - if you don't like it then you probably won't put the effort in to get better
 
I've never been able to master cooking rice in a pan as I can never get the balance quite right between it being under cooked and then having a couple minutes extra on the hob and it turns into over cooked mush. I hate watching it too. If the meal i'm doing with it involves the oven then I'll cook the rice in their too and the results are far better and you don't need to watch it.
 
Yeah - I love to cook.

Think about certain ingredients that are like marriages. Lamb and Rosemary. I would add mint to that, but DW wouldn’t. The first two just go together perfectly.

Saw the back end of a cracking chorizo recipe on an ancient masterchef Oz episode over the weekend. Looked like you took the skin off the sausage chopped it and gently fried it before amalgamating it (and the pan juices as they are EPIC) with some crushed potatoes. Rolled them into balls a bit bigger than a squash ball. Let them cool then flour, egg wash and breadcrumb, and them deep fry so you have crunchy breadcrumb potato balls with a meaty paprika kick. Serve it with a romesco sauce and it would be a mean tapas dish.
 
Paddingtonwolf said:
Let them cool then flour, egg wash and breadcrumb, and them deep fry so you have crunchy breadcrumb potato balls with a meaty paprika kick. Serve it with a romesco sauce and it would be a mean tapas dish.
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I'm kind of the wrong shape now and at this stage of my life I doubt I'm ever gonna get much slimmer.
We don't have a deep fat fryer and if we did it would kill me.
We do modify lots of things because we do have a very good AIR FRYER though.
And Paddy will you stop dazzling us with your cheffy sauces?
Most of us on here won't know what a Romesco sauce was if we were neck deep in one.
And you did it a bit earlier too with a different one.
Though I do like reading your recipes...
 
Also - our Tour de France coverage has an element every day called Plat du Tour where a French Australian chef called Guillaume Brahimi (he is stellar by reputation and used to own the restaurant in the Sydney Opera House) cooks a dish from the region that the stage is going through. One he did on Friday was fucking superb.

Slice a couple of big potatoes into discs about 2mm thick. Pour some goose fat into a pan and layer half the potatoes into a flat layer and then sprinkle with grated cheese of your choice (I’m thinking a mix of torn up mozzarella and grated cheddar would be nice) and a load of chopped good quality ham (prosciutto would be good but not very French - he used bayonne ham I think.) Egg wash the edges and lay another layer of the potatoes on top. Let it cook nice and golden brown, flip it and do the other side and remove it like a tarte
tatin. (You put a plate face down into the pan on top of the potatoes and then turn the entire pan upside down supported by your hand on the back of the plate). Cut it into wedges and it’s like a potato toastie.
 
Romesco is a Spanish tomato based sauce. Tomatoes, garlic, pine nuts crushed, finely chopped red pepper and olive oil and thickened with fine breadcrumbs and heated up. Any other things I mention that you or anyone else queries - let me know.
 
The best onion rice ever. Very similar to Paddingtons with a couple of extra bits. Mrs HW taught me this when we first got married (20 years tomorrow!) and I have used it ever since.

Finely slice an onion. Pop it in a pan with some butter. Stir and heat for 2/3 minutes.
Add a cup of rice. Stir it so it gets covered by the butter and mixes in with the onion.
Add 2 cups of boiling water. Stir - put lid on pan. Do not remove lid during cooking.
Cook on medium heat for aprox 12/14 minutes.
Remove lid. Fork (Very important! Not spoon) the rice.
Simple and easy. Lovely!
 
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