Cookclub

glennmagusharvey

I'm guessing their staple starch before that was wheat, in the form of bread?

Stormtroper

I'll be disappointed if there's no brioche/cake recipe that you can make even if you can't have regular bread.

lrdgck

^^ It does seem to me like France was even more into bread than other places at the time. I mean, I can eat groat. Perhaps it's because a loaf is more convenient to store and munch on while working. Potatoes were generally seen as unappealingly exotic until, like, late 18th Century and in France they only made in-roads thanks to the obsession of one crusading nutritionist. (Antoine-Augustin Parmentier if you were curious.)

lrdgck

It's the quintessential summer-holidays-at-grandma's-cottage dish.

lrdgck

Kashmir-style vegetables time!

Or that's what my cookbook called it. I wonder if anyone in Kashmir heard of it, but I don't mind. It's a recipe for a vegetable stew in the Indian style (so a 5h14+704d of spices) in a nice yoghurt-based sauce. And it's hard to spoil, too.

You'll need:

• a good handful of potatoes;
• a cauliflower, a broccoli, or both;
• something else like chopped green beans, or okra, or pretty much whatever you fancy and doesn't have a strong flavour (I've tried out zucchini and it worked);
• a cup of Greek yoghurt;
• a cup of vegetable stock;
• frying oil;
• and, of course, spices: a teaspoon of cardamum, cinnamon, paprika, black pepper, cumin, and an amount of ginger equivalent to a cube a few centimeters a side.

The spices are optional to an extent. Last time I added green onion and it worked fine.

So. Peel and chop the potatoes into small cubes. Heat up the oil and add shredded ginger. (The recipe said to add a small chopped chilli pepper, which I haven't listed, and don't really care for anyway. You can spice it up with grounds.) After a few minutes add the other spices and give it a minute. Add potatoes, turn to a low heat, and cover. Mix once in a while.

Potatoes need a while, so you can now take your time rip the cauliflower into small, uh, flowers? (Or whatever it's called.) After some 15-20 minutes, add the cauliflower and the other vegetables, and give it a few more minutes.

Now, do you have stock prepared? It's a good moment to add stock and yoghurt. Take some hot stock, mix it well with yoghurt so it won't curdle from heat, add some more, repeat. At least, I did it that way the last time, and then poured the yoghurt-stock mix into the pot. Should be enough that the vegetables would stew in it. So, stew. Low heat, cover, some 30 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Give it a mix once in a while so it won't get burned.

lrdgck

I rarely make sweets, but today was the day again: apple and cranberry muffins. My favourite recipe book says it's an American recipe, so @glennmagusharvey I'm curious if this sounds familiar.

The ingredients:

• an egg;
• four spoonfuls* of butter;
• 140 g of flour;
• 100** g of sugar (no specifics - I used cane);
• 125 ml of orange juice;
• like a spoonful or so*** of orange zest;
• a teaspoonful of cinnamon;
• half a teaspoonful of ground nutmeg;
• quarter teaspoonful of ground ginger;
• half a teaspoonful of ground allspice (turns out that's how you guys call "the English herb");
• half a teaspoonful of salt;
• half a teaspoonful of baking soda (or how you call NaHCO3);
• a teaspoonful of baking powder (ditto, NH4HCO3);
• one to two**** finely chopped apples;
• half to a full cup of cranberries;
• half a cup of crushed***** hazelnuts.

* I have no idea what a spoonful means in this context, so I was like, will this piece I just cut off roughly fit on a spoon?
** You can probably add only a half of that and be fine.
*** I didn't use it so the amount here is simply what feels like enough to me right now.
**** I used, like, three?
***** I mean, like, I took a bag and rolled it over with a rolling pin until the nuts were, like, not whole.

So the idea is like this. Melt the butter, then wait until it's cooled. Whisk an egg in a bowl, add sugar, butter, and juice, mix well. It's possible the acid in juice caused the egg to cauterize a bit, but it didn't seem to hurt the end result. Perhaps I whisked it enough. Take another bowl, dump all the flour in there, preferably through a sieve though I didn't do it and it didn't result in a culinary failure, add the spices, salt, and baking powders. (Oh, and probably the zest too, I dunno.)

There's a potential concern in that both kinds of baking powders have a taste of their own, but orange juice should be able to cancel them out. From indirect experience I can say it's relatively easy to add too much of them and ruin the taste. While tasting, I had the notion that I can kinda sense it's there, so beware.

The next step should be, make a little crater in the flour and pour the butter-egg-juice in, except I did the opposite. In any case, whisk fervently and add whatever-you-are-adding slowly, it should work then. (I don't know if it works all the same, or I was just lucky.) Whisk it into a uniform thick mixture, then add apples, cranberries, and hazelnuts, and mix well. Preferably with a spoon, the whisker is probably too soft for heavier particles you've just added. Dough's ready to go now.

Grease muffin forms (twelve of them is the intended amount), pour the mix in, then stuff into an oven set to 180 degrees Celsius. The recipe I had said to check once in a while if it's grown and returns to the previous shape after being pressed, so I pressed them with the tip of a spoon, but it wasn't all that clear to me how long should be enough. In any case, some 40-50 minutes should do the trick. Take them out, let them cool a bit, then you may powder them a bit with, well, powdered sugar, but it should be sweet enough.

glennmagusharvey

Muffins are a common baked good here in the US but apple and cranberry muffins aren't a thing I've ever had before.

Also, 99% of the muffins I've had were bought from a store rather than home-baked.

And I'm also woefully inexperienced with baking.

Also, I think baking powder is a combination of baking soda with other things in order to generate CO2 upon being dissolved in water. Not just simply nor necessarily ammonium bicarbonate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder

fourteenwings

I haven't baked in a while but this sounds like a fun recipe to try out, though I have a fraught relationship with fruit-themed desserts (especially if there's fruit in them too).

lrdgck

This is not so much a recipe but a story, but I made a brave attempt at pulling off a 17th Century recipe.

Pretty much all it said was to fry pieces of chicken in butter, coat them in optionally saffrony pancake dough, fry that again, then pour in stock with a mix of spices and bake(?) for some time. You know how these old-timey recipes rarely care to provide specific amounts of ingredients. Well, exactly speaking it was more detailed, but not by much, and certainly not to provide a counterexample to my previous sentence.

Turned out I could do it all in one frying pan, despite what the recipe implied, though I needed some additional kitchenware.

So, I began to fry all these pieces of chicken I had prepared for this very purpose, on butter which I also had prepared for this very purpose, and in the meantime I made some pancake dough. Flour, milk (diluted with water since I ran out of milk), an egg, and saffron which I didn't want to miss the opportunity to use. It was supposed not to be thick, but I made it thick.

I fried the chicken for a while until it was white, got rid of all that watery chicken scum, dried the pieces a bit, melted some more butter, and began to fry dough-covered chicken pieces. Turned out it didn't work well with the dough I had, which flowed down and off the chicken. I'm wondering if it means I should have, like, batted the chicken in flour, or if the dough was too thick. Anyways, after a while, and turning up heat, it began to look like it kind of worked.

(Is it how you call it? "Batted"?)

Like, it kind of worked. It went better than I expected.

Then I added some chicken stock and ground nutmeg, and chopped fresh ginger, and some ground cinnamon, and freshly ground pepper, and a chopped lime, and some sugar, and salt. The recipe also mentioned vinegar and raisins, but I didn't feel like going that far.

The spices did it fine. The broth did not.

I expected that the result would be pieces of batted chicken in a sauce, but I covered the frying pan, and it got moist, and it fugging all clogged together. Like, it went from batted chicken to a wet pancake-y mass with chicken pieces. I took off the lid, turned up the heat, and began to mix, in hope I can salvage it. I mostly could, what more is there to say.

Outcome:
1) Ground nutmeg and fresh chopped ginger are a fine addition if you want to spice up your chicken roast.
2) I managed to make a dish out of a 17th Century recipe, good for me.
3) Could've been better, the chicken itself did not soak up the aroma and the batting... battering... that pancake-y stuff feels a bit heavy on my stomach right now, but it's not a no-no for the concept itself.
4) I did not feel the taste of the lime, perhaps I should have added more than one and the vinegar too, but I was afraid I'd make it too sour.
5) That was an interesting experiment.

glennmagusharvey

I think the word is "battered", the past tense of the verb "batter" which can mean "to cover with batter" [the noun].

"Beer-battered fish" is a thing for example.

lrdgck

I just wanted to say I took a bag of these menthol-eucalyptus sweets and dissolved them in vodka. Has a kick.

glennmagusharvey

A historcal overview of "chaufa", which is basically the Peruvian version of Chinese fried rice. ("Chaufa" is basically a Spanish transliteration of the Chinese term for fried rice, in at least Cantonese if not other dialects.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/08/25/arroz-chaufa-chinese-servitude-peru/

Here's a recipe, but note that with a dish conceived as a practicality, there's a lot of potential variation in the recipe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/arroz-chaufa/

h/t to https://med-mastodon.com/@bicmay/110962185424877554

lrdgck

Aaah, it's one of these recipes with a chopped-up omelette. I once did some sort of Chinese fried rice to use up an old pancake, it kind of worked. (As in, if you don't know how the dish is supposed to taste and it's such a mix of flavours anyway, it doesn't really matter you added a stale vanilla-flavoured pancake.)

As for this one, I'm generally wary of Peruvian cuisine because I'm much too fond of guinea pigs, but this one is safe, so I might try it out one day, thanks.

(Unfortunately I haven't really had time for cooking for a long while now.)

lrdgck

...I guess you guys deserve a new entry in this thread: a week's worth of pilaw. I found it somewhere on wikibooks recipe section, but I can't find it right now so there's no link. (Also of note, it's just one out of what seems to be like a million varieties of the dish.) I'm writing from memory, but it was a simple recipe, so even if I misremember something you're not gonna come out wrong.

You need:
* 500g basmati rice
* 500g minced beef
* two or three onions
* a can of green peas
* a can of chickpeas
* some water or broth
* a few garlic... these small units garlic is made of
* some oil
* spices: garam masala, ground cumin, ground coriander seed, salt, pepper

Like I said, the recipe is simple enough. First you chop the onions, and garlic, and fry in oil. Then you add the meat and fry it together. Add the spices, mix, let it fry. Then you add the rice, which has been rinsed a few times so that it will not clog in the future, and add the water/broth so it will not burn. Set to low heat and cover, and stir once in a while. If you were afraid of raw meat, don't, it will cook along. Add the peas at the end, not too soon, so they will not get too soft, but let 'em stew a few minutes anyway.

There, that's all. Sort of. As far as I remember. I ate that shizzle with yoghurt and there was enough of that stuff that I ate it for like an entire week or so. More, if you count the days I was invited to a family dinner, so the issue of the dish of the day was already solved for me. What I can tell you is that it wasn't yet smelling bad after almost two weeks later, so there's that. Altogether, I could spice it up, but it wasn't bad either and I can recommend it for all of you who wanna do the cooking once a week and be done for the rest of it.

Stormtroper

Mostly not about cooking but eh, close enough:

lrdgck

Quick question: is school lunch universally unappealing? Apart from my personal un-favourites, the worst dish served there was this nasty brown lump of minced cooked beef.

Also, I find it amusing it's called a "cafeteria" in English. Like, gee guys, it's not like there's a friggin' Starbucksie in there, innit?

Stormtroper

I know our university lunches (there were no children-school lunches when I was there and AFAIK that's still the case) were never anything special nor looked appealing at all but still tasted quite nice.
Though ngl, the only meals from that video I wouldn't enjoy eating (as an adult) are the 40s one and 90s one.

lrdgck

Oh, yeah. It doesn't look all that bad. My pick of decades would be slightly different: I have some mixed opinions on the fast food options and the stuff (say, 1990's and later), and the 1940's do look the most unappealing to me as well.

As for university-level dining, nowadays it's pretty much the American cafeteria thing, except they still serve kompot. But I've been to a few places that looked like time stopped for them some fifty years ago.

Also:



Come to think of it I have once heard of beef wellington, which is like the fanciest the Britons could come up with and it's still a piece of meat in dough.

fourteenwings

it's not like there's a friggin' Starbucksie in there,

In The Clique book series, there actually is (it's later replaced by some organic smoothie chain that didn't last too long).

IIRC it was based on some ridiculous stories about a fancy private school PTA that took over half the school's board and blew half the budget on cool but unneccessary things (IIRC since they were rich later on they just increased the budget by that much anyways). I don't think it was a Starbucks at the real life Westchester NY schools though.