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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4169 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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You guys got any dinner plans for this weekend? I plan on making teriyaki chicken again, now that I made it once, with TWICE the amount of chicken.

Also do people around you know how to cook? I work at a gas station on weekends and I think there's a fair amount of people that just buy easy dinners and cook those most of the time. This is in rural Midwest America, though. I think most of the younger generation is getting worse at cooking.

Also do people around you know how to cook?

For me, there are three levels of cooking knowledge:

  1. You can't cut an onion to save your life.
  2. You can follow instructions.
  3. You can create original recipes.

Chiming in, as always, with another Indian perspective:.

Modern Indian men are no better cooks than their dads and grandads, and the younger women are maybe worse, though who knows if it's because of a lack of experience or they just don't see it as a priority.

Though of course they all know a far larger diversity of cuisine than before, at one point all you could get in India was Indian food. You know, what we just call food.

What did strike me as mildly funny was that back when I lived in my college dorms, none of the ~200 male med students cooked. Not even for occasions.

On the other hand, the separate female dorm, was redolent with the aroma of the girls getting right at it, within the limited confines available. Someone's birthday? Let's make her something special! Whereas for a guy? Hey buddy we got you just about the most expensive whisky we could afford, all $20 of it.

In fact, it was the other way around, whoever was celebrating the occasion was supposed to treat their buddies.

I’m learning. I think it’s a skill that’s been vastly over complicated by modern cooking — exotic ingredients, multiple pans, and so on. If you want to learn I recommend getting old cookbooks from the 1970s or 1980s that teach classic recipes. I like some Asian style cooking as well, and most of it isn’t too fiddly unless you want to make Korean pancakes or Japanese rice balls or something.

I’m not even sure that Gen Z or Gen α are really that much worse at cooking than their elders at similar ages, they just have really upped the expectations of what a home cooked meal should look like.

It's going to be cold so I'm going to cook either chili, 15 bean soup, or some variety of lentil soup. The 15 bean soup in particular is a totally idiotproof way to produce something that's reasonably healthy and tasty with no real work or skill. Chili is also idiotproof, but then I have a tendency to want to stuff a bunch of crackers in it that undermines the "healthy" part.

My biggest weakness as a cook (aside from general mediocrity and occasional intoxication) is a tendency toward making things cheap and healthy at any cost, and figuring out the flavor later. Sometimes this makes for weird things that horrify my friends (savory oatmeal, for example), but that taste fine IMO. On that note, I think I'm going to try buckwheat at some point.

My friends (SEC college townies) are a mixed bag but trend toward not great given how easily they're impressed by the stuff I make.

I’m going to shamelessly mooch off my parents. Er, visit them, which will also involve being well fed. My grandparents would always do it for them, and they’ll do it for me, and…well, it makes my childless self think.

I work at a gas station on weekends and I think there's a fair amount of people that just buy easy dinners and cook those most of the time. This is in rural Midwest America, though. I think most of the younger generation is getting worse at cooking.

Nice, you probably see me stop by every day for my usual. Thanks for keeping the pop dispensers clean.

Flattery will get you nowhere! I see you buying this overpriced shit every day! You're better than this! Stop making such a damn mess! Don't let your kids do that! Get better taste in food! Lose some weight! Good God, don't wear that in here! No pets allowed! For fuck's sake, don't park in the fuel bay if you're going to go gamble for an hour! Does this look like a grocery store? Is that why you're buying over $100 worth of this brand name garbage on food stamps? Maybe you could tell me when you spill gasoline all over the ground? For that matter, maybe you could stop blowing up my bathrooms over and over again? No, we don't make sandwiches anymore! Stop asking! We're closed!

I'll probably make a Japanese-style chicken curry. The store-bought seasoning mix makes it quite easy, though I try to make each batch unique by adding some additional spices and things like grated fruit, cocoa powder, different vegetables, etc.

I went from being a subpar cook to a decent one during the covid lockdown when I had nothing better to do at home, mostly by messing around in the kitchen trying to recreate things I had eaten and liked in the past. I'd say most people around me are worse cooks than their parents' generation, though this is more pronounced in the children of immigrants, where you typically go from someone with a deep knowledge of their ancestral foodways to someone with a shallow knowledge of a half dozen cuisines with a limited ability to recreate any of them.

Nothing too fancy planned this weekend. We have some frozen fish fillets. Maybe I'll make tonkatsu. My wife has ingredients to make her favorite potato salad.

I like to think I'm a good cook, with or without a recipe. I make a great sucre à la crème. My wife is a good cook too. My brother is a great cook. Most of my friends are at least decent.

Nah. I'm going to cook something, as there's nothing in the fridge for next week. Probably roast some pork.

I learned to 'cook' when I stopped having access to subsidized student food.

Started with various lentil soups, later goulash stew, later started roasting meat or made schnitzels (way too much work for me). Following a recipe isn't difficult. If I'm lazy I just make myself one big 3-4 egg omelette a day, down it with beer.

I'm told I'm good at it at home, by both parents. Once you get some practice you start to have some instinct what the food is missing. Salt/spices/acid etc. Once that's added, usually the end result is appreciated.

If anyone's got a suggestion how to make food more 'basic' (less acidic) without having to use the lye I keep around for cleaning drains, give me a hint pls.

most of the younger generation is getting worse at cooking.

It's sad. Cooking is not difficult, it's far cheaper than anything else.

Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.

thx. I use food grade citric acid instead of vinegar (doesn't spoil, easily crushed into powder in a mortar) but I sometimes overdo it so this'll help.

Good news, vinegar doesn't spoil and you don't even need to crush it in a mortar.

It does spoil. No one I know uses citric acid. I had like a liter of vinegar stored in the fridge and something started growing in it after a year or so. Why do you think I stopped using it?

That's not spoilage. That's the vinegar mother and it's harmless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_vinegar

Harmless but disgusting.

Anhydrous citric acid never does this, that makes me happy. Plus, more place in fridge.

It's not even disgusting, it's literally the natural process of how vinegar is made.

If anyone's got a suggestion how to make food more 'basic' (less acidic) without having to use the lye I keep around for cleaning drains, give me a hint pls.

Dairy or baking soda. Much more often i just use sugar though, which while it doesn't actually reduce the acidicy, balances the flavours.

I have a particular aversion to sugar so baking soda it is. Thx!

I'm bad at cooking, but I'm also not a terribly picky eater, so it mostly works out. Some fun bachelor recipes:

  • Tamale pie. Get a shallow oven-safe pot or burner-safe pan, brown ground meat, toss in canned veggies (usually corn, green beans, cubed tomatoes) and beans, spice to taste or use a generic chili spice packet, simmer for five minutes while mixing. Smooth flat, then layer top evenly with cornbread, bake until golden brown. Top with sour cream and salsa. Serves well with spinach, zucchini, or watermelon salads.

  • Bachelor Risotto. Cook short-grained rice with beef, fish, or veggie stock at a 1:1 ratio, either stovetop or rice cooker. If stovetop, add two more unit stock as it boils down. Brown slices of kielbasa sausage or smoked sausage with canned sliced mushrooms and a bit of garlic. Dump them in with butter and a parmesian or cheddar cheese to taste. Serve with ricotta, goes well with roasted chicken or vegetables.

  • Skewers. Pick a red meat to your preference, marinade for about an hour. Whole mushroom, tomato, sliced onions, on a stick. Grill if possible, drizzle with oil and bake on a pan if not. Serve with browned naan or pita, fruit chutney if you can find a decent one.

  • DIY Sushi. Cook short-grained rice without rinsing it first. For each one cup raw rice, make a seasoning at a ratio of 2 tbps rice vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt (or you can just buy pre-mixed as 'sushi rice seasoning'), mix it into the cooked rice. Spread over a nori seaweed sheet, add strips of smoked salmon, cucumber, cream cheese, (avocado and mango if in season), roll (you can get 'bamboo' mats specifically for this, but in a pinch a hand towel in a plastic zip-lock bag works as well or better. Cut into slices, or keep as a sushirito. Serve with pickled ginger and wasabi, soy sauce or eel sauce. There are dessert variants, but they're a little more finicky.

  • Shakshouka. LemonDrop does it fancy, but you can absolutely one-pot it like the Tamale Pie.

  • Savory pies. Either cut pie crust dough into pieces to make hand-pies, or spread all over one piece to make a single giant (and admittedly a little messy) pastry. I've got a version of this with chicken, apple, and goat cheese I like, but would recommend trying your own.

And yeah, for a lot of the last decade-or-so, it's been far easier to get away with ordering takeout all the time, especially for smaller families or singletons. There's just wasn't that big a margin between fast food or even some lower-end sitdown restaurants until recently, unless you make big batches.

Dude, I love DIY sushi. The first day I ordered takeout sushi I found out that it was like $10 for even a simple roll and thought "there's no way this shit costs that much to make". I've found some pretty simple salmon rolls (I cook the salmon, I'm no sushi chef) are pretty damn awesome for the extremely minimal effort put in. Only recently did I discover that we should have been packing in dramatically more rice than we were. To that end we've started cooking 4 cups of rice instead of 2, though we use medium grain rice to save some money. I use this sushi rice recipe. Also if your avocados are perfectly ripe, the more you put in a roll, the better it gets. Generally I try to not put any eel sauce or spicy sriracha on at least the first few rolls I make; I typically like to dunk about 25% of the piece I am eating in soy sauce. I also like shichimi togarashi or sesame seeds on mine.

I feel like your recipes are significantly more adventurous than most Americans are in the kitchen. Those seem like somewhat complicated recipes too, so I don't think I'd describe you as being bad at cooking if you made even half of those. If you really are bad at cooking, my condolences!

Yeah, sushi's a blast, and one that people expect to be a lot harder than it is. Even without a rice cooker it's pretty easy; with one it's almost set-and-forget.

There's a few types of commercial roll that are either extremely messy to make well (eg tempura spatters oil a lot), finicky to prep right (real crab), or just obnoxious to supply (good luck finding a variety of sushi-grade raw fish), but if you're working with cooked or smoked fish and vegetables, you can easily get closer to 1-4 USD / roll and be grinning the whole time.

I feel like your recipes are significantly more adventurous than most Americans are in the kitchen.

They're adventurous, but they're very forgiving. Wrong ratio of sushi seasoning to rice, or use long-grained rice? Still pretty good, if a bit messier to pack together. Forget the egg in your cornbread mix, or didn't preheat your oven for tamale pie? Will come out a little denser, but it's fine. There's a lotta goofs with risotto that will disappoint an Italian grandmother -- some purists will argue against meat or mushroom at all, and even to normal people overabsorbed rice is 'wrong' -- but it'll all still be edible and delicious. All of the recipes can be 'over'- or 'under'-spiced by at least a tablespoon and still have a decent flavor profile, with shakshouka's cumin being the most sensitive.

About the only one I'd have to warn about novice cooks about are the meat skewers: if you cube or slice your meat too thick, or don't preheat your oven or grill, you end up with a really narrow time window where the veggies haven't been charred, but the meat's not mooing(bleating, whatever). Dunking veggies in the marinade before skewering them helps a bit, along with adding some flavour to the mushrooms, but it is still a failure mode.

good luck finding a variety of sushi-grade raw fish

One trick I learned a while back, but don't know where my link is at the moment to get the specific temperature number, is that you can "cook" your fish in a sous vide, but at a surprisingly low temperature (something like 105-115), which will help with safety but retain that 'raw fish' texture. It then cools down a bit while you're finishing the prep, so it really does seem like it's just the same.

Also, IIRC, "sushi-grade" isn't really a thing. It depends on species, but for many species, all fish that is sold (at least in the US) is required to be flash frozen to kill parasites. I've seen videos of the commercial operations, where they have the fishing boats that go out and catch the fish, then, while they're still at sea, they transfer their catch to a processing boat. On this boat, while at sea, they do the flash freezing and cutting; I can't remember whether or not they included much packaging on the boat or if that was delayed. But the upshot is that for all of the fish that is caught by these large operations, it is completely impossible for you to get a non-frozen fish; it's frozen long before it comes to dock. You'd pretty much have to have a source that is a local, small-time fisherman who is willing to sell you stuff individually right at the moment he comes back in.

Dude, I love DIY sushi

I love my sushi deep-fried.

This is doubly a joke because I can't stand fish (or most seafood).

/images/17051482444709158.webp

The average Indian guy can't cook worth a damn. In all honesty, they don't need to, any place with a decent concentration of workers, be they blue or white collar, has an abundance of small stalls that serve everything from snacks to passable meals for cheap and cheerful prices. And they can always lean on their wives/mom, or if middle class, a visiting cook, if richer, a live-in one, and "tiffin" services that deliver meals to you at the workplace for lunch or dinner are popular, if you don't want to order from a restaurant.

Not that I don't know guys who can cook, but they range from being able to just about making a passable meal to being decent, and most of them were forced to learn it because they were living in dorms during college and couldn't tolerate the cafeteria slop or afford takeout.

I can't call myself a cook with a straight face, but I do know the absolute basics, and can probably serve something that doesn't cause food poisoning. I do intend to learn, especially if I have to live alone in the West. A median doctor's wage in the UK makes splurging on takeout, as I would prefer, fraught. I can get away with it today because I have no expenses worth the name and a respectable salary by Indian standards, but my girlfriend made it clear that she won't cook for me if I can't make some contribution to the process (well, when we were in the UK I did chop vegetables and made undercooked chicken noodles!), and it is entirely possible that due to the vagaries of mandatory rotational training we might not even be able to live together. Shame, because she's a great chef, though her attempts at biryani come out weird (still tasty, just not biryani), and the one time she made vegan biryani* for my vegan cousin and his British girlfriend, it literally brought her to tears from the spice, though she gobbled it down like a champ.

Well, I don't have particularly high standards, I'm happy with making myself spaghetti, bacon, steaks and so on indefinitely. Worst case I'll subsist off frozen pizza.

*An absolute abomination of a concept. If you think pineapple and sardines on pizza is abhorrent, you can't imagine my distaste for that travesty. It's worse than the South Indian predilection to put coconut in it.

As a man who has made biryani at home, I can't recommend an instant pot enough if you ever try it. It really helps.

Do you have a particular recipe to recommend? I have an Instant Pot and do appreciate a good biryani.

I am already sold on rice cookers, and ovens. For some reason the latter is a rarity in India, and after experiencing their charms in the UK, I want one desperately.

And probably an air fryer too, while I'm at it.

What kind of biryani did you make?

Dude it blows my mind that they don't have ovens in India. I used to work with an Indian dude who one time revealed he only ever kept pots in his, and was like "well we don't have them back home either so I don't really have a use for one". I use my oven so often I could not conceive of not having one in my home.

I made chicken biryani, using this recipe (@VoxelVexillologist, here you go). I did use white meat instead of dark cause I prefer white meat, but otherwise I thought the recipe was really good.

That recipe has my seal of approval, it looks like biryani, and probably tasted pretty good. Unlike some claims in the West about what biryani can be, which left me comatose haha.

Dude it blows my mind that they don't have ovens in India.

Easy mistake for outsiders to make. The whole country is the oven.

It's going to be cold here (single degree highs, negative single degree lows) so I'm going to make chili. It hits all the right notes: warm, tasty, and actually healthy (if you don't load it down with cheese and shit). That should keep me set for a few days at least.

I cook pretty well if I say so myself. I'm often too lazy to cook, but I can cook most recipes I've tried (even modestly technical stuff) and they come out pretty well. I often am pretty critical of my own cooking (in the way that lots of craftsmen are their own harshest critics), but my friends and family generally say they really enjoy what I make which is what matters.

Good choice. I also had a hankering for chili. That's partially because it's so cheap to make. I like to make a lot so it lasts for a long time, though, and this weekend we've got a couple other dinner plans for the house, so I guess I'll wait til next week to make it. The last one we made was one of my favorites, I threw in a can of chipotles en adobo and some chorizo and it turned out very well.

I think I'm the same as you. Every time I cook something, especially if it's for the whole house, I can name at least one thing I should have done differently, even if it's a dish I have a lot of experience making. There's always something to improve.

When I make chili it generally lasts for 3-5 days, depending on if my wife and I hit it up for lunch and dinner for those days. I make a fair bit because it's so easy to knock out a large batch (and like you said, it's pretty cheap).

I can definitely imagine the chipotle and chorizo chili going well. I pretty much always do the same chili, a recipe I've built up over the years. Ground beef, habanero pepper, corn (it's heretical but it really works), diced tomatoes, tomato juice, beer and spices. I will mix it up from there depending on my mood. Sometimes I add poblanos, sometimes ancho chile powder, sometimes other peppers, onions, etc. And I also cook up elbow macaroni to go with the chili, which is mainly because my mom always made chili with noodles and I grew to love it that way.

Chili is on the stove simmering, so I'm gonna eat good tonight. :D

The vast majority of people around me can cook, although it's notable just how much better the men are. I know one woman my age that is actually a good cook but every other guy seems to be.

One major difference seems to be that the guys cook even when they're alone.

Perhaps it's just the bubble I'm in.

Most women seem to learn cooking from their mothers, while most men seem to learn it from YouTube. Since most default YouTube chefs (Babish, Josh Weissman etc) are better cooks than the average mother of previous generations (who typically cooks whether she enjoys it or not and, even if she is a good cook, may not be a good cooking teacher) it makes sense that men on average are better cooks in my opinion. The young women I know who are great cooks either love cooking and consume much cooking related content online / in recipe books or they have good relationships with moms who are great cooks.

If I think about my grandmother, (who was a good cook and had actually worked part-time in a restaurant for a while) of the 20 things she cooked regularly 5 were excellent, 5 were pretty good, 10 were average or bad. But many of those bad or average dishes could have been completely repaired with some basic YouTube knowledge, or now even with chatGPT. It wasn’t a lack of mechanical skill, just of knowledge, of tiny mistakes compounded, of recipes that were blander than they had to be, because they were of another time. Perfectly mechanically decent home cooks spent decades making burgers with lean beef because popular knowledge that 20-25% fat works best just wasn’t there. A lot of home recipes for bolognese or chili or casserole or meatloaf are of course inferior to something derived in hours of experimentation by Kenji Lopez-Alt or whoever.

I’ve also noticed that men often cook special meals or weekend meals, but even in families where the man is a better cook it’s often the woman who does more weeknight cooking. Dad will cook a great lunch for everyone on Sunday that takes a few hours to prepare, but on Tuesday night when everybody’s tired and you just need to put something together in 20 minutes, it’s mom’s job.

My mom is a great cook, when she can be bothered to (maybe once every month or so). Though given what she does make, which is often a ridiculously greasy sphaghetti (this is the exact opposite of a criticism, I fucking love it), I doubt she picked that up from her mom. More likely to be the cookbook porn she enjoys, I see why Tumblr and TikTok cooking influences are only a continuation of previous trends heh. I used to get mad at her for buying so goddamn many of them, when she wouldn't make half the dishes, but I end up watching cooking videos on occasion on YT myself, which would probably have surprised the shit out of me if someone had told me that ten years back.

I will note that it is surprisingly common (at least to me) that a lot of middle-aged Indian men like cooking, at least for special occasions. Think of it as the equivalent of the suburban dad who likes to take the grill out on occasion. Beyond innate affinity, it's probably once again because they were forced to learn to do so in college. And of course, if it's a family occasion, everyone starts chipping in, even if an outright potluck isn't common. The host is expected to do the cooking and it would be mildly disrespectful (not that anyone would really complain) to bring your own food and upstage them. A nice bottle of whiskey or scotch? Or a hand in the kitchen? Now we're talking.

I certainly don't mind, I pay my respects to their culinary talents by finishing my plate and another two servings.

I've noticed this a lot in my social circle - in the couples it's almost always the guy who does most of the cooking and enjoys cooking a lot more than the girlfriend/wife. The guys also geek out together over recipe ideas, Kenji videos, and cooking products. It's a hobby for them, a way to experiment and tinker. It's also a way for men to feel like providers for women in an era when women don't need them to survive.

Working theory:

Median American / Western woman (especially before marriage) see cooking for her significant other regularly as some sort of 1950s housewife shackling and, therefore, have a highly emotional response to doing it. It's a "betrayal" to the ideas of modern feminism (however defined). But, a lot of these same women will do their best to throw down for Thanksgiving / Christmas / Super Bowl (any of the Big American Gluttony Feasts) when their own extended family is present and especially when a finacee's family is present. There's still something that whispers the necessity of nourishment providing in order to secure marriage approval. Maybe.

As for the over-representation in baking - yes, this is a thing. I often find it hilarious as about 50% of "bakers" are just freaking terrible and aren't producing anything better than the made-for-kids brownie packets I used to rock with my Mom on Friday nights in gradeschool.

I feel like I can cook pretty decently. I'm not going to be impressing anyone with my foods, but I can follow just about any recipe we've had a Hello Fresh subscription for a while now. I can sometimes come up with my own creations. A few days ago I made a Quiche that turned out pretty well. The crust I made low carb by using Keto flour. Added Bacon and Sauteed Onions to it, because that was the spare stuff I had in the fridge that fit with a quiche.

I got an air fryer for Christmas, which has been pretty fun. Looking forward to roasting some veggies with it.

I've heard rumors that an air fryer is basically that one mode on the oven which I never use, which is oven + heavy air recirculation. (always paranoid it's just going to make stuff extra dry)

The rumors are true, but a they are particularly competent convection ovens. A lot of ovens are pretty shit and their size makes their job a lot harder.

Bah! Meal kits. I understand there are a lot of positives, but always my impression is that the person getting it is too lazy to go shopping themselves and they end up paying a premium for it. That being said, the one guy I know who gets a meal kit gets quite the variety. I was jealous of the tonkatsu package he got this week.

Air fryers are great. Ours handily replaced the George Foreman grill we were using previously to quickly cook up some meat for sandwiches and stuff. The thing I like to do best with the one we have that's like this is just throw in a pork tenderloin with seasoned salt, but it's been a while since I used that one at all. I used the other one we have just last night to finish off some sausages that I had partially grilled, but had run out of gas in the middle of cooking.

All that to say: good purchase! Lots of utility. The one that resembles a toaster oven gets more use from me, just because it's basically a lower cost oven that costs less to use if you're cooking less food.

too lazy to go shopping themselves and they end up paying a premium for it.

This is explicitly why we like the meal kits. Reduces the amount of shopping we need to do. And yes we pay a premium over doing our own shopping, but from experience we actually just order out more rather than shop more. So it still saves us money.

Ultimately that's what made meal kits worth it when I was alone: I'm low maintenance and I don't care too much about myself, so if I have a choice between having to shop and then choosing what to eat and finally cooking a good homemade meal and ordering out/eating frozen dishes, I'll go with the easy option. Meal kits are a good halfway option where the agonizing decisions are taken care of, there's no having to manage what to buy, trying to find out what to do with leftovers, etc... Not making your meal kit is a massive waste so you DO make it, and don't order takeout. But now that my wife lives with me we don't use them. The economies of scale are a bit better with "normal groceries" for two than for one. There's some recipes and cooking tricks I learned from meal kits I've integrated in my cooking though.

They're difficult to get right, but my favourite veggies to roast in the air fryer are broccoli and cauliflower, lightly coated in olive oil. You will really have to watch them the first time you do it though, because half a minute is the difference between delicious crunchiness and weirdly textured cardboard. On my air fryer they take 4.5 minutes at 200°c though, to give you a guide.

My least favourite veggies to cook in the air fryer are sweet potatoes - they just dry out too much. Imo the secret to good roasted sweet potato is charring - when the entire outside edge is black, but the centre is still moist and soft to touch, each piece is like candy, it is easily my favourite roasted vegetable in the oven. But oven cooking them is easy as - to make things easiest on myself I peel the sweet potato and then slice it into finger width circles, bang them in a freezer bag with sunflower oil and coat them, then lay them out on a tray and whack them in the oven at 190°c for about 45 minutes. When I pull them out they should be black around the edges and just dry enough in the centre that they aren't sticking to the baking paper - perfection. But in the air fryer they are constantly being blasted with air, so they seem to start to dry out before they're even cooked all the way through.

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