So I have this problem… I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.
THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.
So I’ll find a pan that makes me go “Oooh!” then I look for excuses to use it.
So it’s not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. “More time to make and clean up than eat? I’m not making it.” Cooking for OTHER people?
Chuck roast:
Shakshuka:
Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:
Beef roast:
Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:
Ableskievers:
Find a homeless shelter and cook for them? Idk, just an idea. Food looks amazing
Cooking at scale is a much, much bigger deal. Hard to maintain quality, both in terms of ingredients and end product.
There’s a good reason why school lunches are garbage. :(
Holy fuck that chuck roast looks good
It was really good, with bacon, veggies, braised in Malbec wine and Grand Marnier.
I found 2 recipes I couldn’t decide between so I just combined them. ;)
1 pack of bacon, diced and cooked in olive oil on medium high until the edges were brown, then removed.
In the same pan, 2 diced carrots, 2 diced celery stalks, 2 diced Walla Walla sweet onions. Cooked on medium high until carmaelized, then removed.
3.37 pound boneless chuck roast. Patted dry, heavily salted and peppered, seared on one side for 5 minutes, flipped and then seared on the other side for 5 minutes and removed.
Added back 1/2 cup Grand Marnier and 2 cups of Malbec Wine. Deglazed the pan scraping up all the brown bits.
Put the bacon back in, put the veggies back in, stirred until well distributed. Added bay leaves, thyme and rosemary, several cloves of minced garlic, topped with the meat.
Brought to a boil then placed in a pre-heated 325° oven for 3 hours.
After 3 hours, beef was to temp and easily shreddable. (Finally! A reason to use the meat claws!) Resting on stove top while I cook some pasta to go with it.
Pasta was super simple. Boiled water and salt, cooked a bag of egg noodles for 8 or 9 minutes. Drained, removed, then melted a stick of butter in the pot, added a small container of heavy cream, added rosemary and thyme, brought it to a simmer then popped the pasta back in and cooked a couple of minutes.
Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.
Are you me? I keep doing that too
Croissant
This, I love, LOVE croissants, and have basically baked and made every other thing I love that much at some point or another. Flattening a giant sheet of butter again and again into a dough sheet? Ain’t nobody got time for that
Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it’s just such a bother.
Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I’d ordered just for the task:
The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn’t want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.
Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.
There’s also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it’s also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.
Beef Wellington
I make this for xmas sometimes. Definitely a labour of love.
Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh
Homemade flour tortillas are unbelievably good though. I don’t know what it is that makes them taste so different from storebought, but it makes all the difference.
I don’t have the tools or energy to make my own either though :/
It’s so hard to get a good texture too, to get a nice soft foldable one that is thin but tough enough not to rip is an art. My attempts, and I did give it a good damn few tries, were all sad failures and, well, I decided pre-packaged wraps/tortillas are worth the cost to save my sanity lol.
Everything that has to be individually worked like that is a drag. Each one rolled out and cooked by itself. And it’s never one, right? The only time we do that is for a party so it’s at least two dozen.
Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.
Skillet lasagna is the answer you seek! Maybe.
And if you’re really feeling lazy, cook up some ravioli, put it in the skillet with the meat sauce, cover it with mozzarella, and throw it in the oven for a few minutes. Voila! Psuedo-lasagna
Sourdough
Sourdough is super easy though! Probably barely an hour of actual hands-on time from start to finish with no-knead methods.
But doesn’t the starter take like 3 weeks?
If you’re making a starter from nothing, yeah it would likely take a week or two. But it’s not difficult or very hands-on; you’re just combining water and flour for a couple minutes each day and waiting for yeast rng.
I have watched my very capable cook father fail many times in a row, with several methods, to successfully make a sourdough starter, or whatever it’s called.
Oh, I’ve never tried making the starter from nothing; mine is from a friend. It’s probably easier just to ask around.
My first one didn’t last, but my second try, made with regular all purpose flour from the grocery and tap water, has been going strong for over a decade now. I do ferment other stuff too. Wondering if he could seed it with starter from someone local, I’ve shared mine before and it helped people.
I’m listening. Have any recipe suggestions?
I’ve had good results with https://www.joshuaweissman.com/post/sourdough-bread (definitely watch the video).
If you have a stand mixer then follow this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAHA6OHxPs
My personal tips:
- Do the resting parts in your oven with the oven light turned on. That should provide a good warm space without having to heat a whole room.
- I find cutting the top with scissors (like in the second video) easier than using a razor
- If your dough doesn’t look like it’s getting big enough, let it rest/proof for longer; you’re probably more likely to accidentally under-proof your dough than over-proof while learning
- You can use any oven-safe pot + pan that fit together if you don’t have a dutch oven type of thing (check their rated temps though)
- You can use a tea towel/dish towel (just something not fluffy/fuzzy) in a bowl if you don’t have bannetons
- Your bread probably looks better photographed than irl (“the camera adds 10 pounds”, but to your bread)
Thanks! I’ll read through this and watch the videos tonight
Saaaaame.
Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.
It’s been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.
Billionaire
Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.
Ditto puff pastry from scratch.
Traditional versions also contain ~50% butter by total pre-cooking weight. (Hello heart-health my old friend…)
Dunno about your area, but there’s some pretty awesome frozen puff pastry sold in thin-ish sheets at most stores around here. It bakes up quick and almost magically multi-layered, and I would not for a million years be able to tell it from scratch puff pastry from une belle boulangerie.
Yeah, frozen puff pastry is a go-to ingredient. You just won’t catch me making it by hand because as my grandmother used to say, bugger that for a game of soldiers.
I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I’m pretty motivated to make food homemade.
Baklava is the one I’d like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.
I don’t really lack for motivation, I’ll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can’t logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I’ve checked,) and I just don’t have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I’ve made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I’ve helped butcher chickens, I’ve made beef Wellington, sushi, I’ve baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I’ve made ice cream, homemade pierogies.
Lamb Vindaloo.
God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas
I just made that this week and think I may agree with you, or at least I’d not try on a workday again. I didn’t have the right peppers and used dried ancho, jarred roasted red pepper and a little fresh red pepper and it came out really good, sorta new world /old world delicious fusion but my God, toasting, grinding, processing, tasting, resting the paste. Started in the morning and let it rest while I was at work. Also started sourdough naan in the morning & of course made a vegetable dish to go with the meat - everything was good but I was exhausted by the end of the day!
I’ve never even tried to make it, so you’ve done much more than I!
Its my favourite dish whenever I go out to eat… but I just couldn’t put aside the time, money or effort to make it…
