the Old Granny thread

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Dewrad »

Pan-fried fillets of salt cod (or any white fish) with polenta, leeks and sausage

A current project of mine is to come up with Dravean con-cuisine, and this recipe is fairly close to being representative of Dravean food: somewhere between Northern Italian/Balkan/Middle European. So, I suppose it could be better described as:

Filètei de merlun fraicei cu polènta, porrei e locança
[fiˈlɛti de merˈluŋ ˈfraiʃi ku puˈlɛŋtǝ ˈpori e luˈkaŋʃǝ]

To serve two, you will need:

2 x 225g fillets of white fish: cod, haddock or hake would be my preferences. Skin on, please.
125g cornmeal (denizens of the UK: not cornflour! Either pay top price for "polenta", or go to the part of the shop where they sell Carribean foods and buy a bag of cornmeal. It's cheaper.)
1 litre boiling water
1 leek, sliced thinly
1 clove garlic
maybe 200g-odd of dried sausage. Saucisson sec or a northern Italian salami would be appropriate. Not chorizo, however.
salt and pepper
flat-leaf parsley, coarsely chopped

First, salt your fish*. Take a plate and cover it in salt. Lay your fillets skin-side down on the plate, then cover the flesh with more salt. No, cover it in salt. Not just a few shakes, you want the entire thing covered in salt. Set aside for five minutes. If you're worried about flies, etc, you can cover the plate with a clean tea-towel. Don't put it in the fridge yet, otherwise it will bloody stink the thing out. After five or so minutes, rinse off the salt and pat dry with some kitchen roll. Cover loosely with cling-film and chuck in the fridge while you make your polenta.

Place a large pan over a medium heat so that your water is simmering, not at a rolling boil. Throw in a pinch of salt, not too much. In a slow, steady stream, pour in your cornmeal, whisking vigorously. If you don't whisk at this stage, it will go lumpy and nobody wants that. Keep whisking: it will thicken pretty quickly. After about ten or so minutes of whisking, turn the heat down low. Traditionally, one is supposed to stir polenta constantly throughout its cooking time so it doesn't catch on the base of the pan. Fuck that shit, I am not standing and stirring something for forty minutes. A muscular stir every couple of minutes should prevent it from catching. I tend to stand and read a book while doing this, or compose hexameters in my head.

While your polenta is doing its business (which should take about 40 minutes total), get your leeks and sausage going. Generously oil a large frying-pan with your choice of oil: groundnut in my case. Sautée the thinly sliced sausage until done. Transfer to a pile of kitchen towels to drain and reserve. Return the pan to a medium heat. Crush the garlic with the flat of your knife, take off the skin and chuck in the pan with the leeks. Sautée over a medium-low heat until tender: try not to burn anything. Mix into the cooked polenta and set aside in a warm place.

Now the fish: preheat your frying pan to a very high heat. Very high. When you pour in the oil for frying, it should smoke. If it smokes, the pan is hot enough. Take your fish fillets and once again dry off the skin side with some kitchen roll: the secret to crispy skin is totally dry skin and a very high heat. Place in your hot pan, skin side down. Do not move them about. You are not making a stir-fry. Resist the temptation: this fish should only be moved once, when you turn it over. Turn the heat down to medium-high and cook the fish for about three minutes or so, depending on how thick your fillets are. Once the flesh has gone from translucent to opaque about halfway up the thickness of the fillet, it should be ready to turn over. Season the flesh with some black pepper and flip the fish. Throw your sausage back in the pan with the fish to reheat. The fish should take only a couple of minutes to finish cooking. Remove from the pan and set aside, otherwise it'll over-cook.

To serve, divide the polenta between two plates and scatter over the sausage. Top with the fish fillets (served skin-side up, of course, so everyone can see how wonderfully crispy the skin is) and garnish with the parsley.

*Salting the fish is pretty much optional, those on low-sodium diets can forgo this step. However, if you do, make sure your fish is extremely fresh. Salting draws out moisure, firming up the flesh and mitigating to some degree any unpleasant odours (as well as making the fish slightly salty): in the UK supermarkets generally sell fresh fish vacuum-packed, which tends to make the flesh waterlogged; salting greatly improves such fish. It's also a useful trick to know if, to pluck an example at random, you're late placing the fish order and all your fishmonger can send you is forty fillets of hake which isn't exactly at its best and oh fuck there's a hundred covers booked in for tonight.
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

You obviously know a lot more than I do about these things, so feel free to ignore me.

But I was wondering, how likely is it for a landlocked central european country to have traditional meals that involve white fish? This seems strange to me for two reasons: first, because iirc Dravea was landlocked, and thus more likely to be eating river fish than sea fish; and second because the nearest coastline, again iirc, is the mediterreanean, and white fish (cod, coley, haddock, hake, pollack, etc) are all endemic to the north atlantic, ideally the far north of the atlantic (and in some cases the north pacific as well) and aren't found in any numbers in the mediterranean.

I'd expect Draveans to primarily be eating carp, catfish, danubian salmon, etc, like the hungarians do, and for more exotic meals ship over some mediterranean oily fish from the adriatic (brown trout, adriatic salmon, bream, seabream, seabass, swordfish, etc). I suppose, though, that you do get sharks in the mediterranean, and sharkmeat is white - most people probably don't realise that the 'huss' sold alongside cod, plaice etc in fish and chip shops is actually sharkmeat. Quite a different taste and texture, though, I think. Maybe this is a traditional expensive meal with imported sharkmeat, but for price reasons the shark has been replaced by mass-imported atlantic whitefish in modern popular cuisine?
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Dewrad »

Salmoneus wrote:You obviously know a lot more than I do about these things, so feel free to ignore me.

But I was wondering, how likely is it for a landlocked central european country to have traditional meals that involve white fish? This seems strange to me for two reasons: first, because iirc Dravea was landlocked, and thus more likely to be eating river fish than sea fish; and second because the nearest coastline, again iirc, is the mediterreanean, and white fish (cod, coley, haddock, hake, pollack, etc) are all endemic to the north atlantic, ideally the far north of the atlantic (and in some cases the north pacific as well) and aren't found in any numbers in the mediterranean.

I'd expect Draveans to primarily be eating carp, catfish, danubian salmon, etc, like the hungarians do, and for more exotic meals ship over some mediterranean oily fish from the adriatic (brown trout, adriatic salmon, bream, seabream, seabass, swordfish, etc). I suppose, though, that you do get sharks in the mediterranean, and sharkmeat is white - most people probably don't realise that the 'huss' sold alongside cod, plaice etc in fish and chip shops is actually sharkmeat. Quite a different taste and texture, though, I think. Maybe this is a traditional expensive meal with imported sharkmeat, but for price reasons the shark has been replaced by mass-imported atlantic whitefish in modern popular cuisine?
This is actually an excellent point. You are correct that cod and other white fish are endemic to the North Atlantic: however, they have remained remarkably popular in the cuisine of the Mediterranean for years in the form of dried, salted cod and stockfish, both of which were widely traded across Europe (including the upper Balkans) for many years. By "salted", I mean of course the heavy-duty cure used to preserve fish almost indefinitely, not what I describe in the recipe above ("real" salt cod would have to be reconstituted by soaking for the best part of 48 hours.)

You're correct in recalling that Dravea is landlocked: the country's heartland is between the Danube, Drave and Lake Balaton. So yes, river and lacustrine fish features heavily in their diet. Unfortunately, it's an area of cuisine which I haven't actually been able to experiment much with myself: here on the south coast of the UK it's actually surprisingly difficult to get your hands on non-sea fish (beyond trout, that is).
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

And salmon, obviously (we get our salmon from the sea, but atlantic salmon is also found in rivers, and other types of salmon are primarily freshwater, iirc).

But yes, salting is a good reason why central europe would have these fish (and smoking, I guess - know whether smoked fish were traded in the same way?).
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Drydic »

Salmoneus wrote:And salmon, obviously (we get our salmon from the sea, but atlantic salmon is also found in rivers, and other types of salmon are primarily freshwater, iirc).

But yes, salting is a good reason why central europe would have these fish (and smoking, I guess - know whether smoked fish were traded in the same way?).
Most salmon spawn in rivers then migrate to the sea, and come back to their home lake or pond to spawn new salmonlings.

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Dewrad »

Salmoneus wrote:And salmon, obviously (we get our salmon from the sea, but atlantic salmon is also found in rivers, and other types of salmon are primarily freshwater, iirc).

But yes, salting is a good reason why central europe would have these fish (and smoking, I guess - know whether smoked fish were traded in the same way?).
The taste for smoked fish never seems to have spread quite as far as that for salted; or at least I can't find any references to it in traditional non-Northern European cuisines.
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Radius Solis »

Mega-Garlic Parmesan Pasta

Simple, strong, and divine. For a meal for one, or side dish for two:

1. Boil 1/2 pound of your choice of pasta according to package instructions. Noodle and macaroni types work equally well. Drain, but do not rinse, and set aside for a moment (in the strainer or in a separate bowl or whatever).
2. Put 2 - 3 tbsp butter into the same pot and let it melt. If there is enough residual heat to get the butter melted and bubbling then that's sufficient, otherwise return to low heat until that condition is met.
3. 2 - 4 fat cloves of garlic, to your preference, are pressed through a garlic press and added to the butter.
4. Stir around just long enough to distribute garlic in butter, plus maybe 5 - 10 seconds to let the heat mellow it just slightly. Add pasta back to the pan while it's still hot, and toss to coat evenly in butter/garlic.
5. Serve covered in a blanket of freshly grated or shredded parmesan, or any comparable hard salty cheese. Generally, use amount sufficient to mostly hide the pasta from view, but not so much you have a ludicrous mountain of it.
6. Postprandial breath mints may be of assistance.

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Radius Solis »

Kereb wrote:
Radius Solis wrote:Maybe I would can the post, but frankly, I don't really want to eat it later - and I'm a bit tired from having just sat down from, you guessed it, canning something. Salsa, as it happens.
granny thread that shit
Okay. But what I did is not safe to store at room temperature - i.e. it's not proper canning. If you do this, freeze anything you aren't going to eat within a week.

I was going to say this is an easy recipe, but there is one hard part: your tomatoes need to be completely ripe. Bright fire-engine red. Using insufficiently ripe tomatoes will result in salsa that looks wrong and tastes wrong. To ripen store-bought tomatoes, put all of them in a brown paper sack (specifically that kind of sack, it has the right gas permeability) and close it tightly. Leave it in a warm part of the house. Check once a day and discard any that start going bad. It may take a few days. If you have any overripe bananas laying around stick them in the bag, so long as they aren't rotting or moldy; this can accelerate the process.

Ideally, you have your own tomatoes and you leave them on the plant in the sun until they are so red they're bleeding.

Salsa Chipotle

20 medium/average tomatoes - get the ones sold "on the vine" if you can, or Romas otherwise
1 large sweet yellow onion
1 small can chipotles in adobo sauce
1/4 cup lemon juice
optionally, half a dozen (peeled) whole garlic cloves
salt to taste

Remove stems and slice tomatoes in half vertically. Cut onion into 10-15 large chunks. Place them and garlic in a single layer, tomatoes face up, on a sufficiently large cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or else just sprayed with cooking spray. Don't use foil. Brush tomato tops and cut onion faces with oil or just spray them briefly. Roast in the oven at 350 F for 30 - 45 minutes until tomatoes are sagging puddles of glop and onions pieces are a bit blackened at the tips.

Run tomatoes, onions, chipotles or chilis, lemon juice, and garlic through the blender at low speed, in batches if needed, just enough to chop and mix it all. Transfer to large saucepan and simmer gently for 10 minutes or so (don't bring to full boil, and don't overcook). Add salt to taste. Transfer to jars or bowls or whatever and chill in the fridge. Freeze any salsa you won't eat within a week.

- If using fresh chili peppers instead of canned chipotles, de-stem them and roast them whole along with the tomatoes and onions. The chipotles will produce a moderately strong heat level.

- The purpose of the lemon juice is to bring the pH down, which improves shelf life. Feel free to use more if you're okay with the taste. It always seems like lime juice would be more appropriate than lemon, and the substitution is safe, but it never seems to taste like it should... so proceed at your own risk.

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Oh, why not.

Chicken
I don't normally eat chicken, since it's surprisingly expensive and has little taste - if I'm splashing out on meat, I prefer to get something that actually tastes of meat. But every now and then I feel like trying to do something with it.
This was one of the more succesful attempts.

Steps:
- take chicken. In this case it was some sort of filleted chicken - thigh, mainly? Selected primarily by being what was cheapest
- lay chicken in oven-proof dish
- drizzle over some basil-infused olive oil
- add a few splashes of lemon juice
- add some garlic (not too much, it's not meant to be garlic chicken), some cayenne pepper (it's not meant to be chili chicken either), black pepper, thyme. I also used some sumac - never sure if it really adds anything to the taste or not, I've not experimented rigourously with it, but it smells nice and the colour is a nice addition
- add some torn up chunks of mushroom
- put in oven. I went for around 180.
- take out of oven ten minutes later, ensure nothing is sticking to dish, put back in
- mix together a relatively small amount of milk, a bit of white wine, and some pesto alla genovese. Again, I just used a small spoon of pesto, didn't want to drown everything out.
- take chicken out of oven another ten minutes later, pour over mixture. The idea isn't to have the chicken submerged, just enough mixture to pour over all the chicken. By this stage there was a fair amount of liquid anyway, between the chicken and the mushrooms both shedding water...
- add small slices of mild soft cheese to the top of the chicken
- return to oven
- remove from oven after another ten minutes or so
- eat.

Result:
I had this chicken with - because yes, I'm horribly plebeian and lazy sometimes - some oven-roasted onion rings and roesti, and some green vegetables.
Not an overwhelmingly powerful taste (it's chicken), but I thought it was really nice. The chicken was moist throughout (though fully cooked) and tasty, not dry and tasteless as I often find chicken. The concomitant liquid ended up being effectively mopped up by the batter of the onion rings and by the roesti - wasn't too liquid, although I suppose some might want to thicken it artificially.
One thing that might have been a bit wrong was the cheese. It was perfectly pleasant, but by the end I thought maybe the cheese was a touch too strong for the other flavours. I felt that in principle it was a good idea, though, and I think next time I'll just use slightly less, or maybe put it in earlier so that it melts and spreads more. [I certainly wouldn't do this if you don't have a nice mild soft cheese - this is not a job for your ripe camembert... (this one was a chaource)]

Now I have a dilemma. I'd planned to use the remaining chicken tomorrow with some coconut milk (which I've never used before) and chillis and stuff... but now I'm thinking I may just do the same thing again... [Doesn't help that the coconut comes in sachets that are far too large, so I'll probably end up throwing most of it away]

Anyway, that's the view from culinary philistine country today.
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Radius Solis »

It may be bland on its own, but chicken is a) the healthiest of the meats, after fish and b) extremely versatile. I use a lot of chicken because it keeps the protein content of my meals up and their glycemic index down (which is important for 2/3 of the people in this house), without having to worry much about the health issues caused by a high rate of eating mammals.

And because chicken is indispensible for about a billion recipes. It would be a poorer world without, say, marinated, pan-blackened chicken breast served with pearl couscous and roast vegetables all drizzled with harissa - or chicken and tofu stir-fried with snow peas, bok choy, shiitake mushrooms, and scallions in a thickened-broth sauce with a little soy sauce and sichuan pepper. Or chicken+cheese enchiladas served with either beans and rice or posole in a puddle of red or green chili sauce and a sopaipilla on the side. Or even just something simple, like chopped chicken and tortellini in pesto. Anytime you can't figure out what to do with some chicken, just ask me, I know tons of things. A few of them are in this thread already.

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Kereb »

I guess there are places where chicken is expensive
around here it's way cheaper than any other meat but I get put off eating it sometimes because a couple blocks down the hill from me is a big grey monolith where chickens go to become a non-count noun and it's been sporting some blatant but chronically uninvestigated violations of whatever regulations there might possibly be on that kind of operation -- including dumping chicken guts into the storm drain -- and about three or four times a week the smell wafts up into the neighbourhood and it's hard to have an appetite for bird
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Pthagnar »

WHITE PEOPLE CHICKEN IS NOT STRONG. IN AFRICA YOU GET STRONG CHICKEN, MAKES YOU STRONG

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by sirdanilot »

I don't eat a lot of chicken either, because I prefer not to buy the really cheap chicken breast, both for culinary reasons (a bit bland in taste) and for ethical reasons. they are raised under horrible circumstances, and often only for the most popular part; the chicken breast. I feel a bit less guilty for buying legs or wings or something as at least here I think they don't really raise the chicken for those parts. However, I always consider that kind of thing more food that you eat together with others, rather than a regular week night dinner for myself.

In general I don't really eat that much meat. Usually when I do I eat pork: bacon, ground pork+beef (in a 50/50 ratio, it's sold here like that and is very cheap), sausage, shoarma pork (some kind of turkish/greek/middle east thing I suppose?)...

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

I guess if you need to eat a lot of meat, chicken makes sense, yes. I generally get around the problem of the unhealthiness of mammalmeat by not eating much meat.
I'm afraid that just listing a series of meals with chicken in them isn't going to magically make me like chicken. I think I've explained already that I find it quite bland, and hence rarely worth the price (of course, anything bland will be 'versatile', but 'nothing' is more versatile than anything, and much cheaper). While chicken can improve some meals (eg caesar salads), I've very rarely found anything where it improved it enough for me to regularly want to spend the extra money and consume the extra calories (eg chicken and tortellini in pesto sounds perfectly fine, but I'd mostly just cut out the chicken - almost exactly the same end product, but cheaper and healthier). So I only really do chicken very rarely to provide a little variety. Stir-fried, mostly. And now and then I want to do something with a sauce or something where something solid and chunky is required (eg my plan with the coconut chicken). There's also an interesting thing involving marinading in chinese spices and very slowly steaming over many hours and then frying that when done right gives an unusual crispy-but-elastic effect, but i'm not sure it's worth the time and effort and I never get it right anyway. I also know a guy who makes excellent roast chicken, but when I do it myself it usually ends up too dry, and besides a roast chicken is rarely more something for more than one person (and if I am making food for more than one person, I'd normally want to make something nicer than chicken).
[incidentally, not the most appealing menu options for me there - I really don't like badly burnt meat, I'm not sure how people eat it. Besides, I worry i'm being too extravagant and wasteful just eating meat at all, let alone taking perfectly food meat and charcoalising it! I guess I haven't worked hard enough at training my palette. (what's pearl couscous, by the way? Is that like giant couscous, or what?)]

As I say, though, I'm a philistine, and clearly less of a refined gourmet than yourself (and, judging by some of your ingredients, I have to fear rather less wealthy, also). I'm sure you're right about the indispensibleness of chicken to contemporary sophisticated cuisine, but I hope you understand that not everybody eats the same way you do. Some of us have unrefined and simple tastes, and have barely progressed beyond the assuaging hunger stage. Not everyone is going to like the things you like.

[I hardly ever find myself needing to find something to do with something like chicken, thank you - I only buy extravagancies like meat when I already have a definite plan for them in mind. (Which is a problem sometimes, since it means I tend to ignore the many recipebooks lying around, since I always know in advance what I'm doing)]

-----

Anyway, I set aside the finally-doing-something-with-coconut plan and just made the same chicken meal again tonight.
I reduced the amount of cheese added at the end, to the correct amount, didn't bother with the sumac (made no discernable difference other than in colour), added an onion rather than using onion rings, slightly reduced the thyme, added a dash of worcestershire sauce at the beginning, turned the chicken over for the middle third of the cooking, and was a little more daring with the pesto and with the wine. The result was even better than before - an interesting but fairly mild-mannered taste that I felt went well with the chicken, which itself was lusciously soft and not dry at all, but still had texture and firmness.
An experiment for next time might be moving up adding the sauce to earlier in the process. I also should think of something more healthy and interesting to do it with.

Anyway, Rad, would you like to tell me what I'm doing wrong?
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Kereb wrote:I guess there are places where chicken is expensive
Waitrose sell boneless parts of chicken mostly at between £10 and £14 per kg - I used thigh fillets, which are presumably lower quality (and indeed, they had a fair amount of fat and the meat was inconsistent and thin, so I guess they wouldn't be ideal for many purposes, although they were great cooked the way I cooked them), at £7-something. By comparison, beef mince and diced beef at £6-£10, frying steak and better braising steak and roasting beef at £13-£14, burgers £9-£15 (and they're actually really good), steaks at £20. Lamb options at £12-£17, although the real price might be a bit higher if you take bones into consideration. Pork £5-£10.

So, other than pork, chicken does tend to be cheaper (and if you buy a whole one it's cheaper still), but not remarkably so. As I say, I do get chicken for variety sometimes, but generally if I'm having meat I'd rather splash out a few pounds for beef or lamb. [Or just go with the ridiculously cheap but very nice sausages].
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Pthagnar »

Kereb suggests there might be expensive places to buy chicken and the first word of your post is 'Waitrose'? I thought the whole point of london was you could get cheap halal chicken from smiling bahamians or something

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Kereb »

god yeah chicken thighs cost less than half that here
is Waitrose's like a UK version of Whole Foods or something?
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Pthagnar »

Kereb wrote:god yeah chicken thighs cost less than half that here
is Waitrose's like a UK version of Whole Foods or something?
more like Trader Joe's, I think, but I think the comparison is fair.

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Pthagnar »

also stop calling meat 'an extravagance', you pretentious ponce

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by sirdanilot »

Salmoneus wrote:
Kereb wrote:I guess there are places where chicken is expensive
Waitrose sell boneless parts of chicken mostly at between £10 and £14 per kg - I used thigh fillets, which are presumably lower quality (and indeed, they had a fair amount of fat and the meat was inconsistent and thin, so I guess they wouldn't be ideal for many purposes, although they were great cooked the way I cooked them), at £7-something. By comparison, beef mince and diced beef at £6-£10, frying steak and better braising steak and roasting beef at £13-£14, burgers £9-£15 (and they're actually really good), steaks at £20. Lamb options at £12-£17, although the real price might be a bit higher if you take bones into consideration. Pork £5-£10.

So, other than pork, chicken does tend to be cheaper (and if you buy a whole one it's cheaper still), but not remarkably so. As I say, I do get chicken for variety sometimes, but generally if I'm having meat I'd rather splash out a few pounds for beef or lamb. [Or just go with the ridiculously cheap but very nice sausages].
What ?!?! Those prices are absolutely RIDICULOUS.

I can sometimes get chicken breast here for less than 5 eur when on discount. Regular price for chicken tighs shouldn't be more than say 6 or 7 euros. Ground beef will be about the same price as there, though maybe a tad cheaper (like 6 euros).

As for not splurging on culinary stuff: I completely agree, I rarely buy anything luxurious either. But even with everyday ingredients, you can cook delicious food, without too much extra effort, if you are willing to experiment. Either experiment by combining things yourself, like you're doing, or by following a recipe and adjusting it to your tastes.
Why not buy some chicken legs and oven-roast them or something, for example? Bone-in chicken has much more flavour than boneless. And it shouldn't matter too much as far as price is concerned (it's much cheaper per kg but of course it does contain bone).

I would use chicken mostly for stuff like curry rice and stir fries and such, and also in pastas it can be a great addition to pesto pasta, or just use cubed chicken rather than minced meat in a bolognese style sauce.

But of course, you don't need to use chicken if you don't want to. I rarely do myself for mentioned reasons. Bacon is much cheaper anyway and has more flavour, just use bacon.

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Salmoneus
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Salmoneus »

sirdanilot wrote:But even with everyday ingredients, you can cook delicious food, without too much extra effort, if you are willing to experiment. Either experiment by combining things yourself, like you're doing, or by following a recipe and adjusting it to your tastes.
Gee, thanks mister, that dose of being fucking patronised was just what I needed. After all, I've only been contributing to this cooking thread for the last seven years, your advice there just hadn't occured to me!
Why not buy some chicken legs and oven-roast them or something, for example?
Because I don't particularly like oven-roast chicken legs at the best of times, and when I do them they tend to become dry. For very slightly more money, I'd rather cook lamb, beef, duck, or fish.
Again, not everybody is going to like exactly the food that you like.
I would use chicken mostly for stuff like curry rice and stir fries and such, and also in pastas it can be a great addition to pesto pasta, or just use cubed chicken rather than minced meat in a bolognese style sauce.
I don't like curry, I've already said I stir-fry chicken, I don't often just have pesto pasta and when I do I don't find that chicken is that great an addition, and if I'm cooking bolognese it's because I want to eat beef [tangent: I find it really hard to imagine chicken in a bolognese sauce. Hard to imagine it really goes]
But of course, you don't need to use chicken if you don't want to.
Thank you, that's so very kind of you.
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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Radius Solis »

Salmoneus wrote: As I say, though, I'm a philistine, and clearly less of a refined gourmet than yourself (and, judging by some of your ingredients, I have to fear rather less wealthy, also).
Wealthy! Ha. Ha. I cook dinners of the sort I mentioned all the time, for an average between $3 and $4 per day per person. Food stamps cover about 2/3 of this cost, or I'd be eating raw flour every day instead. Basically, I've traded monetary cost for time and labor: I normally spend a couple hours a day in the kitchen doing everything myself instead of buying more-expensive pre-prepared products, plus I grow a couple hundred dollars worth of produce per year in my garden, which is somewhat time-consuming but otherwise almost free. (Or maybe you're thinking of the spices? In the long run, if you actually use them and don't let them rot in the cupboard for years, they are fairly cheap. My $4 jar of harissa spice blend will get me a dozen or two meals with it, for example.)

Of course, I say all this the day after having blown $24 on a pizza because I just didn't fucking want to cook.
Anyway, Rad, would you like to tell me what I'm doing wrong?
Doing wrong with what? If something went wrong with your recipe, I've missed it in your post, and it sounds like something I might even try (with a few modifications).

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by finlay »

Chicken here is ¥59/100g in Seiyu (Walmart) - that's roughly $0.60 or £0.40. It's significantly cheaper than even the cheap places in the UK, to the extent that whenever I cooked curry in the UK, I did it vegetarian with chickpeas, but switched back to making it with chicken when I came here...

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by sirdanilot »

You know that you are doing something wrong when your roasted chicken legs come out dry, right? Or did you think the universe just doesn't want you to eat chicken legs and makes them dry to stop you from eating them?

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Re: the Old Granny thread

Post by Pthagnar »

Salmoneus wrote:Gee, thanks mister, that dose of being fucking patronised was just what I needed. After all, I've only been contributing to this cooking thread for the last seven years, your advice there just hadn't occured to me!
who could possibly have imagined, that if you pose as an ingenu, a philistine, with 'simple tastes' who is basically just bungling through throwing different things together and awkwardly talk about how you just don't know much about anything gosh, somebody here on the ZBB (Motto: please indicate when you are being sarcastic) might think you are being sincere about it! They might even be doing it with sincerely good intentions, hoping to encourage you to stop being so wet.
Last edited by Pthagnar on Fri Oct 04, 2013 5:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

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