#I have a bad habit of overcooking any meat I put on the stove
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heyclickadee · 2 months ago
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And recipe nine of me trying to cook all the way through all three of the newer Star Wars cookbooks, Rorkid Bread, from the Life Day cookbook:
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AKA garlic knots. They’re. They’re garlic knots.
Weirdly comforting to know that Ewoks—all three of these books are in-universe cookbooks, and rorkid bread is an Ewok recipe in that fiction—have garlic knots.
So, yes, they’re garlic knots with a little matcha (still using mulberry as a substitute, since now I’ve got a huge bag of mulberry leaf powder to get through) sprinkled on top, but they’re really tasty garlic knots. Garlicky, buttery, herby, and pretty easy to make, as far as bread goes. Would recommend.
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Also, see that nice helpful picture on how to make them? You know where that would have been great?? On the five blossom bread recipe. Would have been great to have that on the five blossom bread recipe.
(Especially since the Life Day cookbook has, on the whole, the weirdest layout. Text placement is odd at times and there are pages with short recipes that are mostly empty where pictures could be, but are otherwise empty. I like all three of these cookbooks, but the life day cookbook is the one where the presentation is slightly phoned in at points.)
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jeanjauthor · 4 years ago
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One of the most important things they don’t teach you is how ingredients cook differently.
Carrots are dense hard vegetables, and will take longer to cook than broccoli  Broccoli, cauliflower, and especially cabbage will get sulfurous if they’re overcooked, technically the same with kale, but it works a little differently.  (If you’ve ever smelled overcooked cabbage, you’ll know exactly what I mean.)
Beets take as long or longer to cook than potatoes for the same reason, whether it’s boiled or baked.  Radishes technically can be cooked but hardly anyone ever does it.  Radish greens can be eaten raw or cooked.
Spinach and kale both can be eaten raw, but while spinach stems aren’t too bad, you’ll probably want to cut out the thick midrib (central vein/stalk) from cale because it’s just too thick.  And while they both can be cooked, kale is a much denser leaf and will need to be cooked longer--not higher heat, just longer--plus while you could start with 4 cups / 1 liter of both when raw, you’ll end up with less than 1/4th that amount in the measuring cup when cooked, so plan accordingly.
You don’t want to cook eggs at a super-high heat because the whites will try out and turn rubbery.  And while some people insist on extra-rare meat...if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and how to gauge the temperature of the cooking efforts, AND if you don’t know the quality of the meat...all those things together, which a beginner cook wouldn’t yet know (no shame in admitting it, either)...it’s better to shoot for medium rare to medium (mildly to barely pink) to ensure you don’t have any food poisoning problems.
The EASIEST way to tell how foods react when cooked...is to cook them on their own.  Boil things in a bit of water and a dash of salt.  Fry them in a pan with a spritz of cooking spray or a little cooking oil.  Find a recipe for baking them in the oven and take the time to try that.
Be careful of using butter in a frying pan, as the milk solids will burn at higher heats--if you want some of that flavor of butter without the burning issue, and want to cook at higher heats, learn how to make ghee, which is hella expensive in the store-bought jars, but can be incredibly cheap to make at home.
The HIGH setting on your stove is for boiling water.  Once the water is boiling, turn it down to medium-high.  Never use the HIGH setting with a teflon-coated pan, as it can scorch the teflon and release toxic chemicals that can severely harm small house pets (birds primarily, possibly others).
Invest in a good digital instant-read food thermometer, and clean it after every use.  Soap, water, bit of scrubbing, rinse and dry thoroughly.  Clean it between uses especially if you’re going to be using it multiple times in a single round of cooking, and very especially across multiple dishes.
For that matter, when cooking raw meat, either swap to a fresh spatula, or rinse your spatula thoroughly with hot water halfway through the cooking process.  (This helps cut down on cross-contamination risks.) ...And ALWAYS use a CLEAN dish to put your cooked foods into. Never use one that had raw food in it, even veggies. (The risk is very low with veggies, but might as well get into the habit with everything, to be safe.)
They constantly say “use separate cutting boards for veggies versus meats!” but honestly, who can afford that?  Get 1 cutting board, grooved side for meat, non-grooved side for veggies.  Wash both sides after each use, as well as the edges, and do it before you slap the meat-used-side down on your countertop.
Cooking pasta is fairly easy (compared to some things) but understand that different types of pasta will cook at different rates.  Thin pasta will cook faster.  Thin but complicated shapes will take longer.  Thick pasta will take even longer.  Different parts of pasta will cook at different rates, too--think of bowtie pasta.  The outer corners will cook faster than the inner scrunched bit where it bunches all together.  And different types of flours will cook at different rates--rice flour will take a lot longer to cook past the very al dente stage (chewy), while corn flour pasta will cook faster, and quinoa will cook somewhere in between.  Garbanzo bean (chickpea) pasta will take a little longer than usual, but has the closest-to-wheat-flour flavor in some ways.  (I have two family members with celiac disease/gluten intolerance, trust me I know.)
If you want to make a pasta salad, you’ll want to cook your pasta past the halfway point of al dente but no softer.  Add the vinegar and other flavorings before you add the olive oil, so the vinegar soaks into the pasta.  Trust me, you can use a fair bit of vinegar even if vinegar isn’t your thing if you let it soak overnight in the fridge, because the vinegar will actually be reacting with the other ingredients and losing much of its strong flavor.  And if you’re very sensitive to the acidity in most vinegars (like me), try rice wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar.  Just be sure you know which one you’re using, in case you have seasoned vinegar bottles in your cupboard/fridge.  (Like the time I accidentally used a savory-seasoned vinegar for making vinegar-pastry crust for a pie...oy!)
Learn to cook ingredients on their own.  Figure out how long they take to cook, and at what sizes of pieces--thin cook faster than thick, etc.  Once you know how those react, plan out a stir-fry, and add the ingredients in order of how long they take to cook, or how long they can tolerate heat.  Onions can tolerate heat for quite a while, and they flavor the pan, so people tend to put in chopped onions, then slices of meat, cook that until very close to done, then add in carrot slices, broccoli, etc, with thinly sliced cabbage near the very end.
Understand that the seasonings you add at the beginning of the meal are the base, the foundation, and the sauces you add (or create) at the end are the closing touches.  If you’re going to use a closer from the beginning, something like barbecue sauce to cook meat in, use low slow heat, because these sauces often contain things like sugars that will burn if you use high heat, and burnt sugar is nasty, blecch!
If you can afford to do so, invest in a slow cooker and learn how to use it.  Not necessarily an insta-pot or whatever.  They’re a pain to clean out, may need to be soaked overnight, but at the end of the day when you’ve been working and working and want a decent meal, a slow cooker can be a lifesaver.
i am not joking we need to force teach cooking in schools. like. it is an essential thing for survival. do you know how easy it is to make things if you know even the bare bones shit about how cooking works. we need to teach teenagers how far you can take an onion and some other veggies it''s sad that people grow up not knowing how to prepare literally anything. and i'm not talking about oh this home ed class taught me how to make chicken nuggets at home i'm talking about learning the balancing of sweetness and acidity and saltiness and bitterness and shit like that and techniques and oil temperatures and how meats cook. it needs to be taught because it's literally not even that difficult and it matters so much
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