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Post by jklinders on Feb 10, 2014 0:43:26 GMT 1
Beef has such a rich flavour on it's own I tend to let it be it's own star. pork and chicken on the other hand often need a lot of help. Take the A-1 sauce out and that looks good for chicken. Too bad the food biz has all the cheap chicken in the world bought up already.
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Post by CAPT Issac R. Madden on Feb 10, 2014 1:03:57 GMT 1
Agreed. Thing is, this marinade doesn't kill or cover the beef flavor. If anything, it seems to enhance it to my palate. That said, if it was a good cut of steak, I wouldn't bother with using my marinade or sauce: a good steak can stand on its own. Sadly, I can't afford good steak so I have to roll with what I can get.
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Post by CAPT Issac R. Madden on Feb 10, 2014 1:37:07 GMT 1
Ok. Part two: cooking. This won't be as long since it's pretty straightforward. To be honest, something like this almost demands to be cooked over a charcoal grill, but since that's not an option (and the military won't let me have an electric grill), I'm going the pan-fried route. First off, the oil: Extra Virgin olive oil. Accept no substitutes. You needn't add much. Just enough to cover the bottom of the frying pan. Let's see how the steak looks: Yup, it's ready. The key to this is low heat and a touch of patience as shown: And while I wait to flip the meat, here's the veggies I'll be having: Spinach, sweet peas, and beets. Each gets nuked for two minutes in the microwave. Let's see how the meat turned out: Just on the line between rare and medium-rare; hot yet red and juicy on the inside. Now add veggies with coarse ground sea salt and black pepper and you've got a meal. While I won't be having my own cooking show on TV any time soon, I think I'm doing pretty well for a self-taught cook.
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Post by Cali on Feb 10, 2014 1:58:10 GMT 1
Stop makin' me hungryYou son of a bitch... STOP!
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Post by Lily Ariel Linders on Feb 10, 2014 2:52:57 GMT 1
That looks delicious, Iron...
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Post by herrwozzeck on Feb 10, 2014 5:04:46 GMT 1
Huh, that doesn't look too bad Iron.
Now if only I can figure out how to keep stuff from sticking to the bottom of my pans. They're good pans, but I'll be damned if it doesn't get annoying trying to un-stick stuff from the bottom of it.
Hell, I think I'm gonna have to post one of my home cooking adventures in the near future...
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Post by jklinders on Feb 10, 2014 11:10:59 GMT 1
It's actually pretty helpful to pre-heat the pan to the temperature you are cooking with before adding the food. Putting food in a cold pan, even a non stick pan is just asking for it to stick. If the pan is hot though, it gets a little seared right away and releases a lot easier. Done right, you don't even need these new fangled teflon pans (which I hate with a burning passion for anything other than cleaning). I like good old fashioned cast iron personally. www.macheesmo.com/2010/07/ten-reasons-for-cast-iron/You can use these buggers for everything. Best cooking technology is over a 1000 years old. Try it and learn to use it, you won't go back.
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Post by herrwozzeck on Feb 10, 2014 14:46:55 GMT 1
Yeah, the food still sticks to the pans I have even when pre-heated. It's like I never put enough friggin' olive oil on the bottom.
Eh, it's whatever.
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Post by CAPT Issac R. Madden on Feb 11, 2014 0:32:03 GMT 1
It's actually pretty helpful to pre-heat the pan to the temperature you are cooking with before adding the food. Putting food in a cold pan, even a non stick pan is just asking for it to stick. If the pan is hot though, it gets a little seared right away and releases a lot easier. Done right, you don't even need these new fangled teflon pans (which I hate with a burning passion for anything other than cleaning). I like good old fashioned cast iron personally. www.macheesmo.com/2010/07/ten-reasons-for-cast-iron/You can use these buggers for everything. Best cooking technology is over a 1000 years old. Try it and learn to use it, you won't go back. If it weren't for having to keep everything military clean, I wouldn't be using teflon pans. Alas having a seasoned cast iron pan is considered a health issue to the powers that be.
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Post by herrwozzeck on Feb 12, 2014 5:10:05 GMT 1
So I did some experimental home cooking tonight, and I thought I'd share the results. So... well, I haven't mentioned this much since I got back, but I ended up moving to Cleveland to deal with school-related stuffs. Anyway, last semester, I discovered the West Side Market, and man do they have some quality ingredients there. Including things that are a lot of fun to work with. So what was I working with today? Why, a turkey wing, of course! Look at that monster! LOOK AT IT!!!!But I didn't just do it that way. Noooo, I varied it up a little bit, 'cause just salting and peppering the darn thing was boring. No, I ended up using a couple of other ingredients. One of them including this bad boy down here: For those of you who don't know Chinese 5-Spice, it gives most meat a kind of nutty, cinnamony flavor. The aroma you can get from these things is friggin' amazing, too, so there's that. So anyway, as you can see from above, I started by browning the meat in the saute pan, and then I added some butter and soy sauce to give it a little extra saltiness. I then transferred the meat to the oven: And then it sat there at 250 degrees for about two hours. The meat was still moist when I took it out, and that's always a good thing considering that I find turkey to be boring and tasteless since most people cook the fuck out of it and leave it dry as hell. Anyway, after that, I ended up doing a little garnish of veggies. So I took honey, soy sauce, salt, and a couple of pinches of nutmeg and combined them into a marinade. I then took some carrots, spinach, and leeks, and came up with this marinade: I ended up cooking these things briefly in another pan I had on hand ten minutes before I removed the wing from the oven. Lemme tell ya, there's nothing like cooking veggies in a pan, especially since they have the common courtesy of not sticking half the time. But anyway, here's the finished product: And that, my friends, is how fun times are had in my kitchen!
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Post by lieden on Feb 14, 2014 8:43:30 GMT 1
These look nommy! I cook too, daily (which is a bit of a time sink, but at least we eat well). Sometimes I bake on weekends, too. I made this apple berry tart in late January. It looked, uh, shiny, but was a bit on the sour side. I ended up eating almost all of it. No regrets! XD
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Post by Lily Ariel Linders on Feb 14, 2014 11:12:09 GMT 1
Ooh, that looks tasty, Lieden! Dammit, now I want berry tarts...
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Post by lieden on Feb 14, 2014 12:54:08 GMT 1
It's ridiculously easy! Plain flour-and-butter tart base, toss the berries together with some sugar, lemon juice and a little cornstarch, and bake! (I bake the base on its own first, so that it doesn't end up mushy - then add the berries on top).
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Post by Tillian Panthesis on Sept 7, 2014 14:37:56 GMT 1
I'm having strawberries, with honey, lemon and zest. A little sour on the side, but I've enjoyed it.
Next time, I'll experiment a little more. With lemon grass and cider from a certain recipe on a certain site...
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