Cooking Thread~ Recipes & Things

Those two, at least, are not particularly good advice these days.

The best way to use a garden is to grow high calorie or high micronutrient crops that are preferably also space efficient and that you can't easily buy cheaply. Leeks aren't completely terrible for micronutrients and growing them would likely save you money, but onions? Not worth it at all. Focus on growing leafy herbs instead, like parsley and basil, and maybe some fava beans.

I don't know how it was back in the 1700s, but these days meat is far far more expensive than butter. You need protein from somewhere, sure, but just buying more meat is generally the opposite of what poor families should do. Better advice would be for them to get more legumes and cheaper varieties of offal into their diet.

Only cheap compared to restaurants. Not even slightly cheap overall.

The thing to realise is that your average daily/weekly calorie intake is more or less constant. So if you really want to cut down the grocery bill you need to minimize the cost per energy, not the cost per weight or cost per meal or whatever. There are other important considerations to eat well like protein, micronutrients, and flavor (generally in that order) but cost per energy is where to start.

As a side benefit cutting your food bill this way almost automatically means you're counting calories, which means you can easily adjust to slowly lose or gain weight if you're overweight or underweight respectively.

 

I've done both for various things at various times and never seen much difference. I'd say try both at different times and stick with whatever you like better.

 

Which stewing meats do you suggest? Beef? Pork? Tanuki?

Inquiring minds want to know!

 

I might have screwed up making ginger in syrup, especially the part where you cut up the ginger.

Internet says something about bite-sized chunks, which I did, but uh, it's still a bit too spicy. Maybe it's because I used old ginger when it specified young / fresh ginger?

I mean, I like the spiciness of the old ginger, but man, takes away the sweetness.

Or perhaps I used too little sugar while making it, but the syrup undiluted is, well... syrupy. A bit viscous and all that.

... Maybe I should've cut it into smaller sizes and cooked it longer, but in my defense, it was made from 2am to 4am, so might be a bit biased.

 

You've heard about adding other ingredients on ramen noodles to spice it up and making it a more complete meal, rather than just starch and flavour packet.

But what if you turn it around?

Add flavour packet to your huge pot of soup! Depending on the flavour, you may need one packet per 1-2 liter of soup. Or maybe the one I can source here is hilariously strong.

But think about it: the flavour packet need to make instant noodle enticing considering it's just a noodle. So it is indeed very strong!

 

Don't forget that the first finger knuckle water measuring method never fails.

 

Not to mention the golden rule: always wash your rice. Does't take much, just a strainer, bowl, a good bit of tap water and a few minuets. Just make sure the water run off from the rice is clear before putting it in the rice cooker.

 

Ma taught me to wash the rice thrice with tap water, and once with filtered water, then let it soak in the following batch of filtered water for like half an hour before switching on the rice cooker.

Granted, we use brown rice, so...

 

Does that kind of stuff help with brown rice? We've been starting to use brown rice more and I've noticed that its coming out of the cooker a bit less cooked than the white rice was.... Though it may also be my imagination or us using short grain brown rice after using long-grain Basmathi rice for so long.

 

The knuckle method is not reliable since difference riice needs different amounts of water and even the same type of rice in different conditions needs different amounts of water.

Starchy rice for instance needs different levels of water depending on how much you wash it.

Measuring cups are simply more precise and allows for greater reliabilty when aiming for rice of different levels of cookedness

Technically this isn't needed for good low starch rice.

Straining helps when rice is very starchy or dirty. In most places only the cheapest possible rice fit this criteria. For rice that already runs clean washing rice doesn't help much.

Yes

 

That's not a golden rule. That's a superstition. Whether you should wash your rice before cooking, after cooking, or not at all, and whether you should boil your rice in just enough water or a large excess depends on what you're doing with it and what noteworthy pollutants are in your rice, if any.

I never wash my rice. Shockingly, I'm not dead.