Looks good. I love slow-cooked meats, made some chicken thighs that way a couple of weekend ago. They came with bone and skin and while deskinning is easy, deboning is not my forte, so decided to just cook them so and remove the bones after shredding. Turns out it was not needed. The bones cooked so soft as well that you could just chew them to pieces and get that sweet, sweet marrow.

I'm not so hot with deboning either, mostly cause I don't have the proper knives but alas, fortunately the shoulder had no bones in it. As for chicken yeah I suppose if it's small enough the bones would be quite edible but not do much for something like pork.

I really need to get a grill again. I miss grilling and smoking things but I haven't had a proper grill in two seasons. Hopefully when I get a new house I'll get a good grill and be happy.

Does anyone here pickle/can stuff? I was looking at making pickled garlic, green olives, mushrooms etc. but I'm not sure how one processes/seals the jars.

Are you planning on leaving the stuff bottled for a long period? If you plan to consume the pickles within a month, say, I don't think you need to bother with any vacuum sealing or anything like that. I made pickles several times last year and I could never leave them for more than a week or two before eating them all

Do you have a recipe for homemade pickles? I know there's plenty online and everything but I want to make some à la Starmere!

I pickle eggs and garlic and all sorts of shit. Basically, all you need is mason jars like Fish said.

However, if you want to keep them and gift them down the line or whatever, it's fairly easy.

You basically add your stuff you want to pickle, the brine and spices, and seal your mason jar. you then put your jars in boiling water for about 30 minutes or so, just keep the water hot. then pull 'em out with tongs and let them sit for 8-12 hours over that course, you're going to hear random popping and whispering, this means they are sealing. Make sure you add vinegar (white) to the water to ensure that no minerals seep in from your water.

simple.

@Metantoine It's actually insanely simple. Just use a 1:1 ratio of filtered water and distilled white vinegar (I used Heinz Pickle Perfect) and add some modest amounts of salt and sugar (can vary depending on your taste). There are special types of pickling salt you can use but I think I just used normal sea salt and it was fine. Kosher salt would be good. Anyway, once you have your solution, just add your sliced vegetables to the bottle and stuff in some dill sprigs, garlic slices, maybe some peppercorns and fennel seeds. (It's easiest if you make the solution in a measuring cup, stuff the veggies/spices into the jar first, then pour the solution in last.) That's it!

Really sweet pickled bell peppers are brilliant. Strongly recommended.

I just heat my washed jars and lids in the oven at 100 degrees for twenty minutes before canning jams, sauces and pickles before filling them up and sealing while still hot.

The best part of the summer is here:

Chantarelles, the food of gods. And me.

Found them in the backyard forest while looking for tiny oak sprouts for the rebuilt yard with the youngest one. It's time for a velvety and creamy soup tomorrow.

Why would you want to remove the bones at all? Cooking anything on the bone always imparts more flavour.

I'm vacationing at my friend's cabin for a few days and acquired a few dutch ovens. I'd like to make spare ribs but I don't know much about good spare rib rubs. Any suggestions so I can rub out a good one on my meat?

Hail, cooking thread!

I usually have pasta or some pasta-related dish for dinner at least 4 times a week. It's relatively easy to cook pasta and a pasta sauce, and it tastes great. I can also easily splice it with massive amounts of Tabasco sauce, which is a massive plus. I can't imagine having pasta with such regularity is healthy though, and it has a tendency to get a bit boring. Can any of the infinitely knowledgeable food gurus of the cooking thread suggest any easy to cook, tasty things that could replace pasta on a day-by-day basis? I cook more elaborate stuff sometimes, but it's a bit more effort than I'm willing to expend in most cases.

I you are (like me) a lazy bum who cannot be bothered to cook anything that needs to be attended much during preparation, paella is the thing for you. Throw rice with olive oil in a pan/pot, and throw stuff - poultry, chickpeas, peppers, whatever - after it. If the rice burns because you are too lazy to stir it, that's actually the most priced part of the dish. If you are a Spaniard, at least.

Paellas are super great, I should make some again, I did a super good one with sausages once.

Cards, you forgot to mention that you're mostly vegan (Satan saves your soul!), this would help for recs.

I have 4 vegetarian things to recommend you:
1) Anything with tofu. It's cheap and easy to prep. I did many salads with tofu and a bunch of veggies and it's filling. You could do a big batch and have lunches.
2) Oatmeal or chickpea burgers, there's many good recipes for these including one from Mille from Kreator in my Metal Cookbook!
3) Quinoa + ____
4) Homemade pizzas, it's easy to do your own crust and you can put whatever the fuck you want on 'em.

(thanks for the new quote)

Yeah, you got a slow cooker, Cards?

Wish I had seen this thread earlier, could learn a thing or two from yall. Been learning how to cook since moving out. Worked my way up from boxes of mac n cheese to making chicken fried rice so far.
Any tips on making the perfect burger? Think I'm gonna cook some up later this week.

My recent favourite among easy-to-make foods is simply baked potatoes with smoked ham or some kind of salmon. Not necessarily quick, as they take about two to three hours in the oven, but very easy to get right, and they take a minimal amount of actual work. Just get suitable big spuds and put them in the oven in about 150 degrees (real degrees, not the mickeymouse variant) with a plate of water underneath, and you're good to go. Forget the aluminum foils and such crap, it's not necessary. Some cold-smoked salmon and a suitable creamy or cheesy thing as a condiment, and that's it. Yum.


The insults on this board are growing ever more subtle.

Slow cookers are the best, I've been using mine to make a lot more stews/soups than normal lately. Recently perfected a beef stew recipe that's basically your standard ingredients + about 5x as much Worcestershire sauce as the recipe calls for and a bottle of a local brewery's farmhouse ale. And tonight's dinner is a recently slow-cooked chicken chili soup with onions, green salsa, tomatoes and chili peppers.

Napero, I'll definitely have to make those for myself sometime - I've been woefully behind on fish cooking lately since my fiancee doesn't like any kind of fish.

Anyone have any good salsa recipes? I started making salsa this summer with a chipotle/garlic recipe would like to try some others. Anything's welcome - verde, pico de gallo, mango, etc...

Oi! Thanks a lot. I used to make homemade pizzas all the time, but I've just forgotten about over the last few months. I found a recipe for dough in an old cookbook, and yeah, it tastes great. I'll try out all the other stuff over the next couple of weeks too.



If that was a sincere question, then no I do not. If that was some kind of sneaky jab at my dimwittedness or something, then I'm way out of my depth here.

Marking a vegetarian Moussaka tonight. Basically the same as a standard vege Lasange except using eggplant rather than pasta for the layers. Ticks all the boxes as my other half is both vegetarian and Greek. Going to serve it with a piece of roast lamb for the meat eaters and a nice salad.

Speaking of Lamb, I was reading a bunch of articles online recently about how Americans don't really eat it. Went into some interesting reasons - a lot of which had to do with the 19th century cattle wars between sheep and cattle ranchers, the experience of ww2 GI's eating Brittish tinned mutton and not liking it, and a lot of comments about just generally finding the taste/smell too strong and not liking it. What are your thoughts? Growing up in NZ and Australia it's an absolute staple.

I'm not an American, but mutton is rather rare here as well and a lot of people complain that it tastes 'woolly'. Like eating an old cardigan or something... I suppose that's mostly old folks who have mostly eaten the fatty parts of mutton and not lamb. Personally I like the flavor, but it is rather expensive here, especially domestic stuff. We get a lot of imported frozen lamb/mutton though that can be rather affordable at times. It's common for people to have it for Easter, what with the christian tradition.

In American, I think the cattle industry being so damn big and having a huge lobby, I think they've rather pushed the sheep out of the regular joe's palate pretty much.

You definitely find lamb on the menu in plenty of higher-end restaurants here in the US, but it doesn't really have any presence at all in your average, mainstream cuisine across the country. You will find it at the falafel shops/halal carts in any major city that has a significant Middle Eastern/Levantine/Greek population. I was kind of surprised when I first moved to New York and found that gyros were such a common street food in the city.

But mutton? Yeah I don't think I've ever seen it on a menu here.

It was. There's shitloads of really easy, delicious recipes for slow cookers. Basically, dump a bunch of tasty stuff in there, leave it on for eight or twelve hours, then eat the stuff. There are whole websites devoted to slow cooker recipes. Could be a good investment!

I made this recently, whole grain noodles with veggie-peanut-coconut-sauce in one pot:



Instead of Thai curry I used Indian curry paste. The pot was too small which made stirring a pain. It'd be smarter to use some type of noodles with less air inbetween, like broken tagliatelle or farfalle or something. Also I added too much liquid because I thought there wasn't enough to get the pasta soft. When it was soft there ended up being way more sauce than shown in the recipe, but whatevs, very delicious regardless. Garnished with sprouted mung beans, though I figure green onions would have been better.


Tofu is instantly improved by a magnitude if it's smoked. Though don't buy smoked tofu that isn't properly dark and dry. So far smoked tofu has improved every recipe I've used it in, and I'm led to believe it's infallible. I put raw pumpkin and smoked tofu on this frozen pizza, and the tofu was the least awful thing about it. Pics of smoked tofu tiramisu coming up.

That looks intriguing. I'm a vegetarian too but, worryingly, I don't particularly like vegetables, so I'm always trying to find new ways to make them tastier. Roasted vegetables, soup, curry and (once a week) pizza loaded with 'nuff vegetables are the staples of my current diet. I've found mushroom, chickpeas, garden peas, green & red peppers taste surprisingly good in a well-made curry.

That's tough, but there are many great ways to make veggies tastier. For me the easiest and most often used is to fry them and use them in tomato sauce for pasta.

Something I made just now: cauliflower in cream and cheese with potatoes.


(don't mind the dirty plate, I had pasta earlier today and reused it since I'm a lazy slob)

Basically I tried to recreate a dish my parents used to make a lot during my childhood but which I don't know the actual recipe of.

1 cauliflower head
~750g potatoes
1 onion
1 clove garlic
some oil or butter or whatever
~400ml cream
~150 soft cheese (mine was a blue mold)
1 tsp instant broth
nutmeg
rosemary
pepper

Start cooking the potatoes (real men eat the peel). Mince onion and garlic and start sautéing them in a pan that you can cover. Meanwhile, disassemble the cauliflower. Once onions are translucent, add cheese and mash it using whatever you're stirring with. When the cheese has melted, add cream, then spices and broth and blend everything together. Once the sauce starts bubbling, add cauliflower to pan and cover it. Reduce heat so it's still bubbling but doesn't boil over. Occasionally stir a bit so the cauliflower gets cooked evenly. Take potatoes out of water when they're done. Once cauliflower is properly cooked, turn off heat and serve.

Does anyone here cook with a cast-iron skillet? I bought one a few months ago because I thought it would be nice to use something that's really durable, but I've been having a hell of a time cleaning it. I fried up some burgers the other day and had to throw them out for tasting so fucking horrible.

I don't use mine very frequently, but it shouldn't be that hard for you to clean. All I've ever done is rinse immediately, using a sponge if necessary (don't use detergent), then put it on low heat to dry. Afterwords just apply a very little bit of oil.

That's what I've been doing, though. Maybe I just need to use more oil so that the juices and whatnot rinse off more easily.

I've been making my own jams/preserves lately, it's surprisingly easy to do and I make the fruit ones without any added sugar maybe sweetened with a bit of stevia or erythritol if needed. They are so much tastier than store-bought jams, healthier and not even that much more expensive to do.

They're plenty cheaper if you get the berries/fruit yourself. Unless of course, you put a price on your time, but even so, an outing in the forest, especially with good company, can be an entertaining outing by itself. But yes, the self-made stuff is definitely better than the store-bought. At least the reasonably priced ones. I steer fairly clear of the ones on the top shelf with the exorbitant prices. Personally I've been doing spiced pear/apple/plum butter recently.

I envy you if you have pear/apple/plum forests nearby where you can freely pluck fruit

Well, I actually meant berries (bil- [that's European, wild blueberry for you yanks] and lingonberry mostly, cloudberries and cranberries are fairly difficult to find this far south) since apple-, pear- and plumtrees don't really thrive in forest surroundings. Or the wild in general. But yeah, I kinda went off on a tangent there. The taste of bilberries and lingonberries as well as black-, white- and redcurrants and gooseberries is too exquisite to actually mess around too much with spices, apples, plums and pears are better for that. Though bilberry jam flavored with vanilla is pretty great as well. While pears and plums are rare around here - I buy the ones I use from the shop - apples in fall are plentiful. My parents have a few trees at their house and our summer place has some so there's plenty to make jam and the apples aren't too good as eating apples so better used for jam or pies. But if you live in the right area and it's a good year for apples, often people will offer you apples free of charge if you just go pick them yourself, because otherwise they'll just rot in the ground and eventually in the trees.

Oh, redcurrants are godly. I used to gorge myself on them from the markets when I lived in the Netherlands. Can't get them here. I've found cranberries make great jam, you can even use frozen berries without losing too much flavour. We do have a few berry farms not too far away, strawberries, raspberries blackberries and the like, where you pick your own and pay by weight. I might try making a few jams from those in summer. Berries are also generally the lowest fruit in natural sugars, which suits me perfectly.

Having all kinds of berries available all year round is really one of the things I miss most while living in the mediterranean. There is nothing more godly than freshly picked blackberries, redcurrants and strawberries with quark (or yogurt, for you poor non-middleeuropeans), with a tiny bit of honey.

Can't even buy that stuff frozen down here!

Freshly picked berries are indeed too good hence summers are a great time. One can dive into the currant and/or gooseberry bushes and come out with a delicious breakfast. Mind you, quark is also available in the Nordic countries. Or at least in Finland.

We just binged on The Great British Baking Show. Apart from the annoying as shit hostesses, it was a good time with some really delicious looking bread goods.

In the cold months, northern Germans like to make a traditional dish combining tons of kale and meat. I replaced the meat with smoked tofu, which worked extremely well, so well in fact that I'm planning to make a few kilos of this stuff for xmas dinner.



It's pretty simple to make too. I had a 250 gram block and 400 grams of shredded kale. It is also essential to cook some potatoes. The tofu I diced and fried in veggie fake lard (a lot is needed, 100 gram at least) with minced onion. Then I stirred in the kale, reduced the heat to a minimum and let it cook for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. After that I added about 60 grams of oat flakes, waited another 45 minutes (the oats tend to burn easily, so don't forget to stir), and finally added salt, pepper and a big tablespoon of mustard.

Inhumanist contaminating my thread with his vegan recipes again!!!! This actually looks decent, what sort of meat sane people actually use to make it? Ground beef? I like kale!