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Re: Cooking?

Posted: August 10th, 2017, 11:47 pm
by Herschie
DaHeckIzDat wrote:I miss the stove at my parents house. It was electric coil, but the coil was underneath a thin sheet of glass so that the entire oven was perfectly level. My apartment's burners are lopsided which makes cooking on them hard.


Yep, makes all the difference in the world! Gas seems to give you a much larger "sweet spot", where you can cook your food without burning it. Your parents seem to have a nice electric stove as well. But yeah, those coil stoves are the worst. When I was a kid, my mom would burn stuff too. I still have a scar from the time I got curious to see what would happen if I touched the coil when it was red. And I wondered why my mom worried about me so much.

Re: Cooking?

Posted: August 11th, 2017, 7:35 am
by Voor
I'm sure there's a George foreman cookbook out there.

My mom always said "if you can read, you can cook"

Re: Cooking?

Posted: August 10th, 2018, 4:19 pm
by Herschie
Ok, want to have the best hot dog ever? Then listen up! First thing you do is you go to the store and buy some S. Rosen's buns, I prefer the kind without poppy seeds. Then, of course, you pick up a package of Vienna Beef franks. Kind of hard to have the best hot dog ever if it's not Vienna Beef. Also if you want the best hot dog ever, I hope you live around Chicago because Vienna Beef is quite abundant around there.

Anyway, you throw the dogs into a steamer and let it go for, oh, ten minutes or so. But these next few steps are key:

-take the bun and throw it into the steamer for about 15 to 20 seconds, no more. The bun gets soggy real quick.

-put the hot dog into the bun. Add any condiments you want except for ketchup. If you add ketchup, get the hell out of Chicago and go root for the Packers.

-Smash the bun around the hot dog. This gives it that ballpark taste, as if you've been sitting in section 511 on a cold April afternoon at Wrigley after the vendor comes by.

And that's about it. I had two of the best dogs I've ever had in my entire life. Oh, and they were plain. Vienna Beef dogs need no help whatsoever.

Re: Cooking?

Posted: August 11th, 2018, 9:48 pm
by SpaceGuitarist
I love cooking and I've been doing ever since I was little. My mother used to work all day and taught me and my brother how to cook for ourselves at an early age. I think the easist thing to learn for people who want to start or have just started cooking would be pasta. Pasta is very forgiving with its cooking time (as opposed to meat, which overcooks in seconds, or risotto, which never seems to come out the way you want it) and the best thing is that you can taste it continuously during the cooking process - which you can't do with meat and other stuff.

Just a few things on cooking/eating pasta: 1) put salt in the water 2) don't trust the cooking time written on the package - just taste it three or four times and when it has the "bite" you like drain it - the cooking time written on the package is just a generic indication and it's not the gospel (unlike oven time in baking, which is the gospel) 3) toss it well with the sauce before serving it - in the ads they always show you a bowl of plain white pasta and a big scoop of sauce on top of it, but that's just nonsense, 'cos by the time you serve it you end up with a big slab of tasteless gluey pasta at the bottom. Just toss it in the sauce before you put it on the plate, as you would with a tossed salad.

Re: Cooking?

Posted: August 14th, 2018, 1:52 pm
by ptdebate
This is a great thread. I consider myself a good cook but I have a few dishes that I specialize in. Whenever my girlfriend is craving one of them, I cook. For pretty much everything else, she cooks while I play the role of sous chef.

She's from the Philippines so we have a lot of Asian food at home. Sinigang is a sour pork stew with a tamarind-based broth. Adobo is a simple dish consisting of any bone-in meat pressure cooked with soy sauce, vinegar, and black pepper. I like to cook katsu curry or any of a variety of Indian dishes that I honestly learned from one of my exes who was from India (I don't share this detail ;) ). When we go out, Korean and Chinese are easily our two favorite cuisines, followed by Japanese. There's a family-style Sichuanese restaurant about 15 minutes away from us that is probably our favorite local restaurant.

Sometimes, instead of cooking we just go to the nearby Korean grocery and buy marinated vegetables for $3 and a gigantic portion of bulgogi or jajangmyeon from the food court for only like $8 or $9.

Re: Cooking?

Posted: January 12th, 2019, 11:07 pm
by Herschie
If you have a few extra bucks but there aren't really any games out that you're looking forward to, do yourself a favor and get an air fryer. My wife just made some buffalo wings in there, and they were the best I've ever had!What's cool is that they're perfectly crispy, and actually have less fat than even putting them in the oven, let alone deep frying them. You don't add any oil, and the fat drips to the bottom of the fryer. My mouth doesn't feel all greasy.

I think tomorrow I'll make wienerschitzel.