I've recently taken an interest in cooking, partially thanks to Tony exposing me to Budget Bytes and all the wonderful recipes contained therein.

BEHOLD!

Looks delicious as hell! Gimme!

You're the one putting corn in a chili!? All recipes I've ever seen has celery in it, but yeah, I probably use more than normal too, but I slow cook them with the onions until they're extremely tender (the onions get caramelized) and mix it in with the meat and the sauce, gives an amazing taste and texture to the sauce. So it's not like there's bits of celery floating around.. I know that texmex style chili is traditionally without beans, but I guess my take is more Mexican-inspired than Texas-style. But celery aside, one onion for more than two kilos of meat, and you don't even use the whole onion in the sauce? Shit. I guess I would use around 4-6 onions (depending on size) for one kilo of meat (though as said they get caramelized, so they reduce A LOT).

Baked fresh focaccia rolls with my pasta tonight. Fresh baked bread is *so* awesome.

Only chili with turkey and few beans is real.

I use bigass vidalia onions that are probably 4 times the volume of your average white onion. I also don't cook them down that much - wait until they clear and brown a little at the edges, but that's it. I like to have some sense of crunch left and I find that caramelized onions get lost flavor-wise in something like chili. I much prefer them on sandwiches, pizza, etc.

Yeah, I guess I use the same kind of onions, not the small white onions. I would think that simmering your chili for 10 hours would take the bite out of the onions though. And caramelized onions are indeed great on basically all the foods.

Made some kind of tex-mex bowl of taco flavored things.

made chili yesterday - as usual, turned out well, but a bit too spicy by itself. It's not going to melt your face or anything, but it's definitely hotter than most are used to. Just turkey, diced tomatoes, small red beans, kidney beans, one jalapeno, onions, garlic, and chili powder. Anything more complicated is unneeded!

I basically made entirely too much food for one meal, but hey. Shit's tasty.

Mmmmmmmm that looks tasty. Can I come over for dinner? I'll bring some good beer I promise!

Looks tasty as crick. Nice.

Made myself a simple sponge cake with vanilla cream and strawberries. Came out pretty damn well, but may have been a tad overcooked. The family still ate the thing so I'll count it as a win

Apparently I came home with a bunch of mates after a gig last night and cooked for 8 or 10 people while completely drunk/stoned....and apparently it was nice. Tuna in a cream/chilli sauce with pasta I'm told. I remember nothing of this.

Aside from that, recently I've done an eggplant and roast potato Aloo for my vegetarian GF, last night I did a greek lamb with salad, Tzatziki and Pitas. Tonight I'm recycling the leftover Chilli I had from the other night into Enchiladas.

What's that bun on the right?

tonight: Roast duck served with steamed rice, stir fried bok choy, capsicum & cashews. Sauce made with caramelized onions, 5 spice, chilli, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, rice wine, rice wine vinegar and 2 apples.

Verdict: amazing

Yet another pasta recipe. This one is probably my favorite so far -- sausage & pepper rigatoni! It's the perfect blend of mild spiciness and savory flavors, as well as being textural heaven. The pasta is nice and aldente, so its not -too- chewy, but still chewy enough to provide a balance to the tender sausage medallions and the crunchy pepper chunks.

Here's some fucking walnut ciabatta.


I doubled the amount of walnuts in the recipe because walnuts. The bread isn't nearly as fluffy as your average ciabatta, but that's okay, I like it that way.

Looking good! Are you gonna eat it plain or with something else? Would be good with cheese, mustard and pastrami or something.

I'm currently out of cheese so I only had some with the leftover spice-garlic-oil that I coated the top with, and some with horseradish-beet-spread (which is fantastic stuff, even if it sounds kinda lame). Tomorrow I'm gonna get some cheese though, probably goat.

Oh man... Okay, so, I made some noodles last night. They SUCKED.

But this morning I stir-fried them in a new sauce I made and they're now AMAZING. It seriously reminds me of Chinese pepper steak in terms of flavor. And the sauce makes it feel so much more substantial and stick-to-your ribs, I'm in heaven. Definitely saving this recipe.

Reviving this thread a bit to post my first thing I've created without a recipe. Or maybe its my own recipe, I don't know. All I know is that somehow I made a vegetarian dish taste like delicious Chinese take-out, while simultaneously also being hearty as fuck. It's actually just broccoli and mushrooms, can you believe that shit?

Muschrooms always need a little root/flower vegetable - otherwise it's mush! good call on the broccoli.

Right, fungi shouldn't be all crammed together. They need mush room.

Who has fresh baked soft pretzel bites in FOUR flavors? THIS GUY.

Crick! You're killing it lately! Didn't you say you never cooked for yourself earlier? You're doing awesome, and even more so if you've never made stuff for yourself!

You should really get into curries - easy to make, but colorful, fragrant, and last a long time in the fridge if you're cooking for one/two.

Yeah, I actually only started cooking maybe two months ago, but I guess I've been bitten pretty hard by the cooking bug. And the baking bug. It's just absurdly fun making new, interesting foods for myself that actually taste -really- good. I'm having a lot of fun, for sure! I made some curried chick peas a while ago, but I've yet to make a proper curry... Maybe that's something to tackle in the near future.

For sure - well you've gotten into baking (the pretzels looks really fucking good) - and that's a pretty hard skill to master. Well, at least in my opinion - I prefer cooking where you can fix it on the fly, baking requires measurements, which I don't dig at all.

But, curry is one of the main ways I got into cooking (which was immediately followed by the other - being my experience at a DC French restaurant as a sous) and that's when you can really work with spices and blending without really risking it being inedible.

I made this recently



the salad is kale/spinach/carrot/tomato with a basic balsamic reduction and olive oil accent and sardine skin - the chicken is a lightly brushed mushroom and clam sauce. It doesn't look pretty - but considering the lady is on a wedding dress diet, it was sure delicious.Low carb and filling! Also, yes, that is a fox head plate - my plate is a bear head.

I should start a wedding dress diet myself.

My mom's partner made a pretty cool thing tonight, it was a pork loin with a panko crust with a maple/mustard sauce. No pictures but it was good.

Cooking in Korea is hard. I don't have an oven or a slow-cooker, and so many ingredients I rely on heavily are simply entirely unavailable. I know how to make a few Korean dishes, but it's pretty tough to cook interesting Korean food for yourself because groceries here are largely designed to be purchased and used by families of people rather than single people living on their own. You can't buy loose bananas - gotta buy like 8-10. Can't buy a single onion - they come in 3 kg bags. Anyway this has led to some pretty sad dishes, like my shitty tacos I make all the time and a lot of salads, but I have started to experiment just a little with really simple stuff that's easy to make and which takes advantage of the different prices of foods here.

Example: I never buy grape or cherry tomatoes in America because they're expensive novelty tomatoes for white yuppies, but here I can get around a pound of delicious grape tomatoes for about $1.50. So, roasted tomato pasta, naturally:

Chifferotti al forno with walnuts:

oooh - I think I'll do pasta tonight.

You blaspheme, cherry tomatoes are delicious! Especially the home-grown variety; my family had a big patch of those in our garden as I was growing up.

To share some wisdom, a friend of mine who's an excellent cook recently shared his ham soup recipe:

I don't blaspheme! All I meant by that is that they're just way too expensive to ever buy in America, but they're dirt cheap here (among the cheapest of all produce and far cheaper than regular sized tomatoes).

I buy Kumato these days - it's winter and tomatoes are trash unless they are hothouse grown or hybrid. It's a little less than a dollar for one and they have a sweet brownish hue and taste significantly better than other tomatoes this time of year.

That or it's just time to make pasta with canned sauce :<

I've been eating a lot of the weird seitan in a can that's intended to mimic things like duck.
Honestly, it's not that awesome straight out of the can, but it's surprisingly good in a curry. It's a bit like eating boiled chicken skin, though.

I'd be interested in trying to make my own seitan. I've only ever had it one other time, and it was awfully bland to the point of being off-putting, but I see all these pictures online of it fried and plopped on plates of curry sauce, and it looks fucking good... I want something like that.

Boiled, jiggly chicken fat emulations are okay, but I feel like I could do much better.

Don't make your own seitan from wheat flour. I tried it once and it's a shit ton of work for little amounts of food, and it's also a waste because you'll send everything that's not gluten down the drain. Buy pure gluten, that's what I'm doing next time. You'll probably have to order it online but I'm told it's cheap.

The taste of seitan depends wholly on how it's prepared, but it has a nice consistency and is good, filling, low carb foodstuff.

ha, thanks for the advice.

I was actually considering trying to make my own flatbread soon, and I thought I might attempt to do seitan while I was at it, so that is good to know.

Made some pretty good salmon the other night with horseradish and Panko. Unfortunately, forgot to take a pic.

Here's some pumpkin risotto with carrots:


Pretty good, but not superior to mushroom or sage or other classic variants. Though the use of goat parmesan gives it a nice touch.

In a streak of madness I made roughly 2 kilos of the stuff which I probably have to eat all myself. Sweet Cheesus!