I’m referring to both “lol lmao why am I putting this leaf in” posts and “omg I found a leaf in my chipotle” posts here because both have the same issue of broadcasting their confusion over the internet instead of just looking it up.
You could chalk this up to social media but even before that’s advent you had Jamie Oliver showing you a 30 min dinner that consists of leftover ingredients that are not picked up by his show / cookbook and also assumes you’re cooking on kitchen grade equipment instead of the landlord special like most of his presupposed target audience and feel free to swap him for any number of aspiritional celebrity cooks.
It’s all showstuff. Which can be nice but let’s be honest here, if you’re cooking a lot at home you’ll be eating slop (non derogatory) most of the time because between price and time investment that’s what gets you tasty, manageable, affordable.
But that’s not in the cookbooks, I’m pretty sure I own all of them because if you’re a known home cook they just end up at your house. If you ate nothing but Jamie Olivers Healthy 30 min Dinners (all of them take about an hour or so because they presuppose you start with a 10L boiling pot of water and have the skills necessary to dice a large onion in a minute) you’d end up nutritionally deficient and poor.
But say you were to google lense your bay leaf and find out what it does, where does that leave you? I feel like there isn’t a site in the world that teaches you home economics cooking where you concoct up something healthy, tasty and time saving out of like half a pantry and a capsicum you bought on sale. I speak two languages and I’ve never found one - where the fuck are they?
Nobody teaches ‘functions of ingredients’.
I had to go to culinary school to learn that.
i just fell asleep to pirated episodes of Good Eats for a couple years and i can wing it pretty well now
In spite of Alton Brown being insufferable, he did present stuff on that show pretty well. That was a show that piqued young me’s interest in food beyond just shoving it down my throat.
Learning simple, and flexible, porridges/curries/stews (slop by some definitions) is the way. They’re simple, in that they often let slow simmering do most of the “work” of cooking for you. They’re highly flexible, in that you can adjust to what’s available instead of being locked into buying specific ingredients that may not be economical. These are the dishes normal people ate every day for thousands and thousands of years of human history. Yet, we’ve become addicted to trying to eat like some sort of french aristocrat for every dinner and that’s simply not feasible for most people who don’t find cooking innately rewarding and have money to spare.
I feel like even if you find cooking innately rewarding - or could - and have money to spare which is Jamie Olivers and his ilk actuals target group so they can brag about their cheap healthy dinners to their lessers you’re still gonna go run out of time on the stuff
I agree in most cases, but I know people for who cooking is just another hobby, they put on some TV or a podcast and lose themselves in the labor. For those people it’s feasible, maybe not EVERY night, but on a frequent basis. The point you’re touching on is a very good one though, because it highlights how people are made to feel ashamed for not making “refined” food, or pressured into eating “conforming” (typically over-processed and made hyper-palatable with a lot of nutrition stripped out.) food that isn’t healthy.
For those people it’s feasible, maybe not EVERY night
I see how I’ve failed to convey this but this is the point I’m trying to make: Jamie Olivers 30 mins healthy weeknight dinners cookbook sells itself on the fact you’d do that. But you can’t and even if you could, you wouldn’t, unless you’re so hilariously rich your mise en place is telling your live in sous chef to get on it, which messes with the “anyone can do this” attitude of the thing
i love cooking but i make one to two “fancy” meals every two weeks and the rest is curries or fastish meals that ive partially prepped ahead of time (teriyakis on rice, for example)
im also probably really nutrient deficient.
unless you have a severe dietary restriction (medical, logistical, self-imposed) you are not likely to have any nutrient deficiency. it’s way over hyped myth.
eat some fortified processed food once in a while if you are worried. and Vit D, with folic acid if you might stay preggo.
Eat mostly vegetables cooked in cast iron cookware and you’re mostly there
I am lucky enough to have been brought up cooking wise by a grandma who was a master of this “slop” and feeding a family of six from a small apartment building kitchen with a very low budget. Actual cook books of that time and the home economy class books we got at school were also all about this basic everyday cooking.
I’ve watched probably all the cheffy chef shows and made lots of stuff from them. They are always needlessly complicated and I cut all the corners I can think of when making them, just because I got that grandma knowhow.
These basic home food things are still in books most of all I think. Especially in older ones.
I don’t know about school elsewhere, but we have 1 to 3 years of basic home economics in middle school where everyone cooks. You learn to dice an onion, use aromatics, bake a bread and all of it if you don’t have anyone to teach you.
I also very much think that the sort of wholesome home cooking that was essentially taters, veggies and a protein aren’t in any way slop. The best tasting and most satisfying food I’ve ever had came from my grandmothers low budget kitchen. Difference is she cooked for days at a time typically, I do the same. This way you only spend a lot of time cooking a few times per week.
Bay leaf is for me to read on the ingredients list and think “i aight doin’ all that” and ignore and not substitute with something else
I might use bay leaves at work if they’d get some kitchen twine or cheesecloth for me to tie it together and fish it out but they don’t do that and I’m not about to be fishing 7-8 leaves out of a ratatouille or stew
How big a stew are you making?
I aim to feed like 60-70 people and then if I hit that and a bunch of like elementary school students come in and plough through my food because it looks good and they’re not conditioned to think vegan=bad I rush to cook more while swearing frequently and loudly
so uh idk like 3-4 gallons of stew
won’t buy string lol
they might if i made a big deal out of it but eh i don’t really care, I don’t think it really adds that much flavor so I’m fine skipping it
you dont have to fish it out. the people eating it can do that.
A quick onion dice is actually pretty straightforward
Back when I wasn’t so fucking old, I had gotten some cookbooks that were aimed at the “first apartment” or “college dorm cooking,” distinctly aimed at people dealing with cooking for themselves. Those had good, simple recipes, not a lot of prep but got the essential nutrients and calories in you. Not sure if there’s any cooking websites out there like that, although I have to imagine you could
those cookbooks.Also, will echo @NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net on the old Good Eats episodes, those are a gold mine.
I remember how long it took me to dice onions because my dad refused to get a proper chef knife ever “because there’s nothing wrong with the ones we have” even though it’s a serrated knife set by Cutco. God damn it felt nice to finally get a chef knife and then learn to sharpen/hone it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Obligatory “how to hold a knife” guide (yes it feels weird at first but it is much, MUCH safer)
This is true. I know most of this stuff, been a cook for 15 years. If someone did the nerd side of a website id be happy to contribute. A culinary database of sorts would also help pros, we Google recipes all the fucking time but usually its just for one unfamiliar aspect or id we dont know and follow it exactly and dont like the results we know what to fix, having a straightforward guide would help
I have reached a point of cooking where most all of my meals are made virtually the same way, but it would not make for a sexy video tutorial despite being easy to do and tasty.
- Preheat oven to 400°
- Pick whatever vegetable(s) you want, cut them up however you want, and put them in a large pyrex dish with avocado oil or olive oil. (Avocado oil preferred due to high heat tolerance)
- Set timer for 60 minutes after putting the pan in the oven
- Pull out whatever protein you want, and let it warm up on the counter for 30 minutes. Heat up a cast iron skillet while you fuck off to watch tv or something
- At 30 minutes remaining on your timer, start cooking your protein in the now hot skillet. Fuck off to watch tv or something again
- At 15 minutes, flip your protein over. Fuck off again
- With 5 minutes or so remaining, put your cast iron in the oven to finish cooking your protein and fuck off again for 5-10 minutes.
- Enjoy all of your food hot and ready at the same time
This is how I cook almost everything, with minor modifications. Making fish? Dont finish it in the oven. If making chicken? Marinate the chicken starting 30 mins before you start doing the veggies, so that you start cooking the chicken after 1 hour of marinating. Making tacos? Add a step to heat up some torts in the oven. Want thicker vegetables like acorn squash? Start that at 90 mins and then add the rest of the veggies at 60 minutes. Want onions? Start the rest of the vegetables and then add the onions at 30-45 mins remaining.
The overall process stays the same, and you are simultaneously a great cook and being lazy as fuck the whole time you are cooking
So much cooking stuff on social media is just a list of ingredients and instructions without any sort of explanation as to “why” this stuff happens. I’ve sometimes thought about making a series of videos or something about cooking and why things are done the way they are, from really basic stuff like “we put oil in the pan so the food doesn’t stick” to stuff that seems to confuse a lot of people like “we rinse the starch out of these potatoes and then cover them in starch before frying because starch on the outside makes them crispy, while starch on the inside makes them soggy.”
Just seems like a lot of people find cooking “intimidating” and I think it is because it is a lot of lists of sometimes very obscure ingredients and just big lists of instructions instead of explanations, so when people try to follow a recipe and it turns out wrong, it just feels like they failed, not like they get to learn something.
if you’re cooking a lot at home you’ll be eating slop (non derogatory) most of the time…
No. I like my girl dinner snacks if I’m feeling lazy, but I cook world class food (at least when it comes to flavor, presentation is hit or miss).
That said, I have a couple YouTube channels that work out home econ food things:
- Life By Mike G
- Ethan Chlebowski
Bay (laurel) leaves - normally I’ll sub thyme if I don’t have them on hand, but they’re inexpensive, and add a nice savory element to stewed. I guess I just learned that through exposure - but I was a fat child on the spectrum lmao not everyone is reading and internalizing the spice rack
Literally this - wish it was in higher resolution
I was five when I started cooking myself food. we had a space rack, I remember adding random spices to my Ramen all the time. Must’ve been stuff like thyme, cumin, allspice, ginger, black pepper. I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve just thrown stuff together without knowing what I’m doing regarding spices.
Regarding the bay leaf : traditionally I’ve always used it in spaghetti sauce, but I’ve also always added ginger too. It wasn’t until I really started learning different cultural practices of food that I started using Bay leaves more. Latine and Asian foods can use a lot of bay leaf. (from observing people cook on YouTube or TikTok.)
One way that I connect to my Filipino heritage is through cooking, there’s not really any restaurants around here so I have to make it all myself. Which means I need someone to teach me, so videos online are really what I have to go by. And I have learned that a lot of Bay leaf is used in certain dishes, such as adobo.
This has spurred me to learn more about what the bay leaf does exactly, this is something I do with all food now. I like to know exactly what the benefit is of each thing that I cook with. Many spices are actually nutritious, the bay leaf is no exception. it’s natural properties can counter acidic flavors, such as in spaghetti sauce. 🙂
I remember this book being popular a while ago
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/253666/a-girl-called-jack-by-monroe-jack/9780718178949
