What can you expect in the Food Thread on PF?

[Moonbear]

Yea, beans don't need soaking. I just toss them in water and bbring them to a boil. YUM!

Bleck...I've tried it that way, because people have told me you can do that with beans. They end up with NO flavor and a nasty texture. I'll stick with canned beans.

 

[Evo]

Bleck...I've tried it that way, because people have told me you can do that with beans. They end up with NO flavor and a nasty texture. I'll stick with canned beans.

Oh Moonbear, I'm going to have to make you my minnestrone soup. It'll change your mind. The beans are soft and moist and have absorbed the flavor of the soup. Of course you can't do it if you are whipping up a 30 minute soup, my soups usually cook for 2-3 hours.

The trick is to compensate for the dried beans by adding enough liquid and increasing the seasonings to flavor the beans.

 

[Moonbear]

Oh Moonbear, I'm going to have to make you my minnestrone soup. It'll change your mind. The beans are soft and moist and have absorbed the flavor of the soup. Of course you can't do it if you are whipping up a 30 minute soup, my soups usually cook for 2-3 hours.

The trick is to compensate for the dried beans by adding enough liquid and increasing the seasonings to flavor the beans.

I've simmered soups for that long with dried beans (after boiling them by themselves a while to get them started) and they're still awful. If that was the only way I ever had beans, I'd think beans were nasty things unfit to be eaten. I think canning preserves them better than drying and then trying to reconstitute the things. They lose something in the drying process.

 

[_Mayday_]

Burger King anyone?

I myself live simple food, like pasta or homemade pizza and homemade bread. Anyone got any suggestions for working with Pasta? I have the pasta but I am looking for ideas in terms of flavours with the pasta. I already have this tomato/chilli flavour which is great but I think I need a change...

 

[turbo]

Oh Moonbear, I'm going to have to make you my minnestrone soup. It'll change your mind. The beans are soft and moist and have absorbed the flavor of the soup. Of course you can't do it if you are whipping up a 30 minute soup, my soups usually cook for 2-3 hours.

The trick is to compensate for the dried beans by adding enough liquid and increasing the seasonings to flavor the beans.

That's critical. If you are cooking with dried beans, you have to have high heat for several hours to get good results. If you are slow-cooking New England-style baked beans at low temperatures over a long cooking time, the beans will be mealy and flat-tasting unless you soak them overnight first or parboil them in boiling water for a while. If you want to shorten the time and try parboiling, here's how to test the process - use a fork to rescue a bean or two from the boiling water and gently blow on them. If the skins split and cleanly curl away from the beans, they are ready for slow-cooking. If not, you risk dry mealy beans. This is ancient French-Canadian technology, but it works. When your winter meals revolve around beans, salt pork, molasses, etc, you learn how to make it palatable. I not only learned these tips from my mother and grandmother, but from an old fellow who used to contribute bean-hole baked beans to each PTA supper because he was a nice guy and he had grand-children and great-grandchildren at that school. When I was a little kid in grade school, and we went to the PTA suppers, I would always find Calvin and ask which table his baked beans were on, so I could sit there. He was a cook on the Kennebec log drive, and the cook-staff preceded and accompanied the log-drive crew down the river. It was the responsibility of the cookee to stay ahead of the crew with a skiff, get to the pull-outs, and boil beans while he started a roaring wood fire in a stone-lined baking pit. When the wood had burned down to coals, he would transfer the parboiled beans to the cast-iron kettle with the molasses, mustard, salt, pepper, salt pork, etc, and lower that big pot into the bean-hole to cook slowly over the course of the day - covered to prevent the heat from escaping. Depending on the speed of the drive (rapids, rock-gardens, and ledges could make driving wood difficult) he might try to get ahead of the crew, but would normally hang back and prepare breads, biscuits, etc and help the drive cook prepare the evening meal.

Bean-hole beans are a Maine tradition. They are cooked slowly in a rock -line pit for many hours, and the beans must be parboiled or they will come out mealy and dry.

 

[Evo]

I've simmered soups for that long with dried beans (after boiling them by themselves a while to get them started) and they're still awful. If that was the only way I ever had beans, I'd think beans were nasty things unfit to be eaten. I think canning preserves them better than drying and then trying to reconstitute the things. They lose something in the drying process.

From the tv show I watched on making canned beans, they are made from dried beans, not fresh.

 

[turbo]

Burger King anyone?

I myself live simple food, like pasta or homemade pizza and homemade bread. Anyone got any suggestions for working with Pasta? I have the pasta but I am looking for ideas in terms of flavours with the pasta. I already have this tomato/chilli flavour which is great but I think I need a change...

Make sure that you saute the meats at high heats to get the browning going, and make sure that you saute the vegetables that are going to go into your sauce. It doesn't matter if you're going to make a spaghetti sauce or if you're going to build a lasagna. If you don't brown the meats and vegetables before you construct your pasta meal, you're going to end up with bland crap. Once you've got the basic ingredients prepared and ready to go start constructing your sauce, while simmering. You have to keep tasting unless your know what your doing, and if you forgo the tasting, you're going to screw up whenever your ingredients don't meet your expectations.

Good opportunities for spicing up a small spaghetti sauce include the addition of Italian sausage or finely sliced pepperoni. Mushrooms don't add that much, but having a nice selection of Italian hard cheeses to grate over the results will impress your guests.

 

[_Mayday_]

Make sure that you saute the meats at high heats to get the browning going, and make sure that you saute the vegetables that are going to go into your sauce. It doesn't matter if you're going to make a spaghetti sauce or if you're going to build a lasagna. If you don't brown the meats and vegetables before you construct your pasta meal, you're going to end up with bland crap. Once you've got the basic ingredients prepared and ready to go start constructing your sauce, while simmering. You have to keep tasting unless your know what your doing, and if you forgo the tasting, you're going to screw up whenever your ingredients don't meet your expectations.

Good opportunities for spicing up a small spaghetti sauce include the addition of Italian sausage or finely sliced pepperoni. Mushrooms don't add that much, but having a nice selection of Italian hard cheeses to grate over the results will impress your guests.

It's 02:10 am here and I have to wait 7 hours until that is possible, I'm so hungry! I've tried a creamy sauce in the past with mushroom but as you have said it can be quite bland. Thanks.

 

[OmCheeto]

Not enough water, eh? That's sad.

Yes. I used plenty of water...

How much water did one use.

Just as much as Evo said to use. 2" above them. 32 ounces of water for 1 lb of beans.

I think lentils and beans need at least 2-3 times the volume of water. Most recipes seem to say just to cover the lentils, and they take 10-20 minutes. If they simmer overnight - in which case they'll be overdone - turn them way down. I think, overnight with a limited selection of settings, it would be best to cook them over 10-20 minutes, and then turn off the cooker and let them sit.

I put in raw chorizo and was afraid I would kill myself if I undercooked it.
Have any of you seen raw chorizo? It's disgusting!

But it was definitely overcooked. It was still malleable when I woke up and didn't taste too bad, but I'm sure it is brick hard by now. Maybe I can use it as a base for my spaghetti sauce tonight.

 

[turbo]

Good luck, Mayday! Cooking is pretty simple on theoretical terms, but pretty darned complicated on practical terms. I wish I could start a cooking school to push this home. Cooking is not some arcane art, but a a skill that can be handed down. I don't need to charge someone $40K a year to teach them how to cook, but I'll bet if I could get some people to rent some low-cost places during the summers, teach them to raise the best garden-fresh food, and train them in freezing, canning, etc they could be among the most sought-after cooks in the world, especially in small restaurants that want to free themselves from large suppliers of supplies/herbs/produce.

 

[Moonbear]

That's critical. If you are cooking with dried beans, you have to have high heat for several hours to get good results.

AH! That explains the problem I've had then. I don't cook ANYTHING on high heat for several hours. When I cook things like soups that cook a long time, it's on a slow simmer so I can do things other than stand around in the kitchen all day watching that it doesn't boil over or boil dry. I think I had been told to just boil an hour, and obviously that's not enough then. I think I'll stick with canned beans. Dry just seem to take too long no matter how you do it.

 

[Evo]

Yes. I used plenty of water...

Just as much as Evo said to use. 2" above them. 32 ounces of water for 1 lb of beans.

That's for a quick 30 minute cooking time. Overnight would require more. But lentils are really too delicate for slow cooking, IMO. Perhaps you can make biscuits out of them?

 

[turbo]

That's a problem with beans and peas, Moonie! If you don't you give them a long luke-warm soak or a shorter high-temp parboil to break their skins and get them ready to absorb the other ingredients, you can end up with flat-tasting, mealy beans and peas. When I was a kid, we ate a LOT of cheap stuff that involved dried peas, beans, lentils, etc, and it almost always involved pre-soaking or parboiling the legumes. You've got to open those rascals up so they can absorb the flavors from the other ingredients, spices, and herbs that you add to the dish.

 

[OmCheeto]

That's for a quick 30 minute cooking time. Overnight would require more. But lentils are really too delicate for slow cooking, IMO. Perhaps you can make biscuits out of them?

I did purchase a second pound of lentils in case something went wrong. The neighbor cats should be as happy with this batch as they were with my pork stuffed with english wood hyacinth bulbs versus bull garlic bulbs. I noticed a severe mental transient that week. (I've learned not to mix my flower garden with my herb garden}. Alkaloid poisoning, although interesting, can be quite fatal.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Hepburn" and search for tulips...

 

[Andre]

All the pea talk reminds me of our genuine Dutch split pea soup (snert). But I wonder if you can call it soup if the spoon stays upright in the pan. Very traditional dish for the winter. So when there is natural ice ocasionally, drawing a large crowd for skating, you may find a temporary stand where they sell Snert

Ingredients: Split peas, carrots, onions, celeriac (turnip-rooted celery), plain celery, parsley, leek, pork all sliced and diced and simmered for a couple of hours. Stir every 15 minutes. Add a lot of smoked sausage only at the end to keep it from falling apart during the simmering.

Hmm perhaps tomorrow.

 

[Moonbear]

All the pea talk reminds me of our genuine Dutch split pea soup (snert). But I wonder if you can call it soup if the spoon stays upright in the pan. Very traditional dish for the winter. So when there is natural ice ocasionally, drawing a large crowd for skating, you may find a temporary stand where they sell Snert

Hmm...wonder if that's where we got the word "snot?" Y'know, I've never had split pea soup. I refused to eat it as a kid, because it looked like a big bowl of green snot to me, but I really should taste it sometime.

 

[turbo]

Split-pea soup is not bad, but I much prefer soup made of whole yellow peas with onion, celery, and chunks of ham-hock. If we had ham in the winter as a kid, I knew that pea soup was on the menu soon, with either biscuits or corn-bread.

BTW, Isn't Snert Hagar's dog?

 

[Evo]

I just got back from the grocery store. I was so angry at how much everything cost, I came home with only the cheapest block of frozen spinach I could find, 79 cents for 10 ounces. I'm going to mix it into a cheese sauce and pour it over my baked potato tonight.

 

[turbo]

Evo, here's a real treat. Fire up your oven and bake a potato. Put a few cloves of garlic in a baking pan and stick that in the oven, too. When the the potato is done, turn up the oven to about 500 deg, and take everything out of the oven. Split the potato in half lengthwise and chop the potato flesh inside the skins. Nip the ends of the garlic cloves and squeeze the garlic into the chopped potato (just like toothpaste!). Season with some salt and pepper and top with some grated cheese (I like sharp Vermont cheddar), and put those potato halves in the pan and return to the oven until the cheese is melted and starts to brown. Mmmm! About 25 years ago, my wife had a bad case of the flu and although I managed to keep her hydrated, I couldn't get her to eat anything for days. I came up with this little treat, and got her eating again, and it turned out to be something that she wanted over and over again. We sometimes make these to serve with our hot chili con carne.

 

[Evo]

Good lord, will someone please educate Rachel Ray on the difference in cooking oils so that she understands that extra virgin olive oil is only suited for moderately heated and uncooked dishes? She just told people to rub a grill with extra virgin olive oil, of course when she did this the grill immediately started smoking and wouldn't stop. BIMBO! You can't use extra virgin olive oil for high heat cooking, it breaks down and has a low smoking point!

She also made some coleslaw and was using red onions (which is common in raw dishes because it is mild). She told her viewers they could use any onion because there is no difference. No difference? Of course there is a difference! OY VEY!

Even searching on the internet anymore there is so much mis-information being propagated. Soon no one will know how to cook.

 

[Evo]

Evo, here's a real treat. Fire up your oven and bake a potato. Put a few cloves of garlic in a baking pan and stick that in the oven, too. When the the potato is done, turn up the oven to about 500 deg, and take everything out of the oven. Split the potato in half lengthwise and chop the potato flesh inside the skins. Nip the ends of the garlic cloves and squeeze the garlic into the chopped potato (just like toothpaste!). Season with some salt and pepper and top with some grated cheese (I like sharp Vermont cheddar), and put those potato halves in the pan and return to the oven until the cheese is melted and starts to brown. Mmmm! About 25 years ago, my wife had a bad case of the flu and although I managed to keep her hydrated, I couldn't get her to eat anything for days. I came up with this little treat, and got her eating again, and it turned out to be something that she wanted over and over again. We sometimes make these to serve with our hot chili con carne.

Oh, that sounds wonderful turbo! Maybe I'll throw in a couple of extra potatoes and make those too!

 

[turbo]

Good lord, will someone please educate Rachel Ray on the difference in cooking oils so that she understands that extra virgin olive oil is only suited for moderately heated and uncooked dishes? She just told people to rub a grill with extra virgin olive oil, of course when she did this the grill immediately started smoking and wouldn't stop. BIMBO! You can't use extra virgin olive oil for high heat cooking, it breaks down and has a low smoking point!

She also made some coleslaw and was using red onions (which is common in raw dishes because it is mild). She told her viewers they could use any onion because there is no difference. No difference? Of course there is a difference! OY VEY!

Even searching on the internet anymore there is so much mis-information being propagated. Soon no one will know how to cook.

She is a cheerful, over-active, under-educated cheerleader for food that she does not understand or know how to prepare. Maybe Britney can take over her show with bare midriff, headphone mic, and dance moves. It would be as entertaining, and less damaging to culinary arts.

 

[Evo]

It's alarming, just from this one 30 minute episode, millions of people now think that there is no difference in onions and that extra virgin olive oil is suitable for all types of cooking. Riiiight, just fill up that deep fryer with extra virgin olive oil. You'd think the "food network" would at least prevent their cooking show hosts from blatant misinformation. There is no difference in potatoes, squash or peppers either. Don't have zucchini? Just substitute acorn squash. Don't have bell peppers, just substitute habaneros.

 

[Moonbear]

Evo, here's a real treat. Fire up your oven and bake a potato. Put a few cloves of garlic in a baking pan and stick that in the oven, too. When the the potato is done, turn up the oven to about 500 deg, and take everything out of the oven. Split the potato in half lengthwise and chop the potato flesh inside the skins. Nip the ends of the garlic cloves and squeeze the garlic into the chopped potato (just like toothpaste!). Season with some salt and pepper and top with some grated cheese (I like sharp Vermont cheddar), and put those potato halves in the pan and return to the oven until the cheese is melted and starts to brown. Mmmm! About 25 years ago, my wife had a bad case of the flu and although I managed to keep her hydrated, I couldn't get her to eat anything for days. I came up with this little treat, and got her eating again, and it turned out to be something that she wanted over and over again. We sometimes make these to serve with our hot chili con carne.

Ooh, yummy! You can't go wrong with roasted potatoes and roasted garlic. Mmmm.

Evo, I don't think Rachel Ray knows there are oils other than "E.V.O.O." But, I guess "S.O." (sesame oil - good for stir frying, and adds a wonderful flavor) or "C.O." (Canola oil - a healthy-ish oil for high heat frying, like deep frying, when you don't care about flavor because the point is to keep the food from absorbing oil) just don't sound as fun to say. She's really just trying to tell you what a big fan she is of you, EVO-O.

 

[Moonbear]

You'd think the "food network" would at least prevent their cooking show hosts from blatant misinformation.

More importantly, from the liability of burning their houses down! That goes beyond botching the flavor of a dish and to flat out risking safety.

If she can't taste the difference in onions, that would explain her cooking...she has no tastebuds to discern good food from bad!

 

[turbo]

Make the baked garlic potatoes for yourself, Moonie! You will love it. It's killer with chili, BBQ chicken, or grilled steak and a tossed salad. We eat potatoes a lot (Maine is a potato-exporting region) so it's not a real surprise that I turned to potatoes to try to get my wife eating again during her illness. You can't rely on sugar and electrolytes to maintain health during serious illnesses, so the appeal of the browned cheese and the smell of the garlic was important to promote the vitamins of the potatoes and their skins. There are complex nutrients there that are are a whole lot more supportive than supplements. Please understand that I have no medical background, but that my mother and her female elders all had a hand in my treatment when I (and my sisters, cousins, etc) got sick.

 

[Evo]

I think that turbo, Moonbear, Zz, and I should approach the Food Network with a new tv show concept called "Real Cooking" where we can explain to viewers how produce and meats differ, so when they go to the grocery store they can actually make an informed decision.

Actualy, that really is a novel idea for a cooking show, explaining to people what the difference is between types of squash or potatoes, or apples. It seems a lot of people don't have this basic knowledge. A show just aimed at educating people about food. Then you could cook recipes highlighting the differences.

BACK OFF, THIS IS MY IDEA!

 

[turbo]

You can count me in. I can't travel, but the producers can show up with a camera crew and document my gardening, harvesting for freshness, and processing for maximum flavor. Most folks in the US haven't a clue.

 

[Evo]

You can count me in. I can't travel, but the producers can show up with a camera crew and document my gardening, harvesting for freshness, and processing for maximum flavor. Most folks in the US haven't a clue.

That's exactly my concern turbo, in the past, knowledge about food was handed down, but we are now faced with mothers learning from Rachel Ray and others like her that have no clue about ingredients that are passing this misinformation down to their children. It won't be long before any actual realistic information on food becomes unknown in America.

I know you don't have cable, but Jamie Oliver (on the Food Network) has just started a new show where <gasp> he uses produce grown in his garden, of course he has a professional gardener that does the actual gardening, but at least it's a more realistic and non "How much can I smile before my face breaks" show than what's prevalent on the network. I was dying laughing today at Sandra Lee as she walked backwards across her set to the refrigerator never turning or losing her fake smile. It was so unnatural it just stuck with me. Get a grip woman, just walk to the ****ing refrigerator.

 

[Astronuc]

I think that turbo, Moonbear, Zz, and I should approach the Food Network with a new tv show concept called "Real Cooking" where we can explain to viewers how produce and meats differ, so when they go to the grocery store they can actually make an informed decision.

Actualy, that really is a novel idea for a cooking show, explaining to people what the difference is between types of squash or potatoes, or apples. It seems a lot of people don't have this basic knowledge. A show just aimed at educating people about food. Then you could cook recipes highlighting the differences.

BACK OFF, THIS IS MY IDEA!

I like that idea!

Real Home Cooking!