#cooking with kraid

[realfakekraid]

Cooking with Kraid.

Are you looking for the kind of person who treats cooking like an art form? Who only uses the freshest of ingredients, makes their own seasonings & sauces, will marinade a hamburger pattie overnight, obsesses over every single little detail as if they're afraid they'll be drawn and quartered if they screw it up? Well, you're looking in the wrong place cause what I am is a lazy, foul mouthed mother fucker who has spent years figuring out how to put as little work as possible into cooking while still getting results that's better than what I can buy out of the grocer's freezer.

Still here? Okay then, let's do this.

Today's recipe: Vegetable Soup w/ Polish Kielbasa.

Okay, we're looking at about a half an hour of work here with three hours, give or take, of keeping an eye on things while simmering.

Okay, we're going to need a few things for this:

Potatoes

An onion

Other vegetables (carrots, corn, okra, peas, whatever you like) (fresh, frozen, canned, it doesn't really matter)

Polish Kielbasa

A couple cans of tomato soup

A tablespoon of salt

Three dixie cups of water (about 6 measured cups, I think)

Maybe some rice or pasta

Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is put the water in a pot big enough to hold all this stuff and turn it on to boil. While it's heating up we're gonna slice up the Kielbasa into whatever you'd call thick sliced pepperoni. Then we're gonna throw it in the water, whether it's reached boiling point or not. When it does reach boiling point we're gonna set a 10 minute timer. This is important, because if we don't boil the sausage before adding the other stuff, we'll end up with this strong metallic taste that just fucks up everything.

While we're waiting on the boiling, let's go ahead and be peeling & slicing up our onion, potatoes and any other fresh veggies we brought to the table.

Now when the timer goes off, we're gonna add all the fresh veggies to the pot. If we have any frozen ones we're gonna add them too. Then we're gonna be opening up our canned goods while waiting for the pot to come back to a boil.

Now that it's boiling, we're gonna add our canned veggies and the tomato soup and we're gonna stir it all up real good while waiting for it to come back to a boil. It shouldn't take near as long this time, unless we dumped like a dozen cans in there or something.

If we're cooking it on the stove top then we put the lid (or a plate, whatever) on the pot, reduce the heat to low, and set a time for about 3 hours. We'll then need to come back and stir it a little bit every half our or so, otherwise it'll burn along the bottom. And once we get to the last hour, we'll need to stir it every 15~20 minutes.

We can also use a crock pot, which will take longer but doesn't need to be stirred every so often. We just need to get our crock pot out and let it be heating up while we're doing all the work. Then we just dump the stove pot into the crock pot after adding the canned veggies and bring back to a boil. And we need to be extra careful to avoid scalding ourselves when transferring from the stove pot to the crock pot, cause that shit hurts for fucking hours! Finally we set a 4 to 5 hour timer and just kinda fuck off until it's done.

Right now I'm trying it in the Dutch oven, in the oven. I'll update on how that turns out.

Update: it turned out just fine. 300f for about 3 hours.

Notes, Alterations, etc.

The beauty of this recipe is that if there's anything in it that we don't like, we can just leave that shit out. And if there's anything missing that we would like in it, we just add that shit in. Pretty easy to figure out when to throw it in, too. Not a good idea to omit the onion, though. Or the tomato soup, though tomato sauce and a bucket of salt would probably work in its place. No green beans.

A good way to tell if it's done or not is to look for the onions. If we can still see them, then it's not done and we'll need to adjust our timer accordingly.

Okra is good in it - and would've been in it if I could've found some in my freezer - but keep in mind that the more okra we add, the more slimy our soup will be in the end.

We peel our potatoes. This isn't like baking or frying, we do not want those hulls in our soup. We've learned from our past mistakes.

Seriously, no green beans. They're the product of the devil and they should be banished from the Earth like the abomination they are.

I know I said fresh, frozen or canned doesn't matter, but maybe don't use canned potatoes. I haven't tried it, but I can't imagine that working out too well. If you do try it, lemme know how it works out, I promise not to judge you. I will judge the hell out of you if you add green beans, though.

That red, plastic cup you can see in a couple of the photos is what I mean by dixie cup. I think that one's actually a Walmart brand one though, or a dollar general one. Definitely a store brand cup.

[ddrkirbyisq]

It's the new year!  So far, 2020 seems to be a year full of learning new things for me. Kitchen Kitchen organization continued and I'm pretty happy with how it's all turned out!  My new hinoki cypress wooden cutting board has been one of the best xmas gifts -- it's lightweight, great to use, and the perfect size for me. Recipe that I'm aiming to try in the near future -- nasu dengaku (miso glaze eggplant).  I've also started freezing a portion of the ramen broth whenever I get ramen at Nijiya.  I've never been one to bother home-making stock since I just don't cook a lot of dishes that use it (though I guess that's sort of a catch-22), but now that I have a bunch of random cubes of frozen broth I may start exploring ways to use them.  I might try making a tan tan ramen again...which reminds me, I keep on meaning to make some homemade chili oil but never get around to it...now's the time... Poi I've been surprisingly drawn into practicing poi spinning lately, and spent a good portion of last night getting pulled into practicing random moves.  I've finally been able to clean up the planes a bit on my low windmills, and yesterday I actually managed to look up and learn two new moves -- a 4-beat thread the needle, as well as 3-beat archer weaves (though I still need to work on both).  I've also been drilling my stalls a bit, trying to work on those elusive up stalls and top stalls... Puyo Puyo Not sure what to say except that I need a lot more practice.  On the one hand, I'm way more comfortable with a lot of things than I used to be.  On the other hand, there are a lot of situations that I can tell I'm handling very poorly when it comes to just building a transition and tailing effectively.  I'm just going to have to sit down with it some more and think through some of these situations more carefully to come up with solutions.  At some point I'll also start watching more videos carefully to analyze other people's solutions, but for now I think I can just sort of grind through things on my own for a bit longer. Super Metroid Randomizer I played through a seed last night and my total time was something like 1 hr 20 minutes, though I had a few deaths and such in the middle of that, as well as some time spent looking up a few tricks.  This seed had me doing a hi-jump-less gravity jump to get into lower norfair, which I hadn't done before, and I had to refresh my memory on how to do Zebetite skip as well.  It was actually a pretty easy seed, with go mode coming pretty early on -- varia suit was at Norfair hijump location and Gravity suit I believe was at Croc, which opened up the way to do Lower Norfair and then Maridia (having picked up Speed Booster and high jump somewhere along the way) before finally doing wrecked ship and then Tourian. I also learned how to moonfall!  Moonwalk still definitely trips me up at times, need to get used to that, but I guess might as well learn how to deal with it... There's a couple of things that I'd like to actually go and practice (maybe using a practice ROM), specifically things like the Phantoon fight and Kraid quick kill, after that I can maybe start just recording (and streaming) real runs! aLttP Randomizer I haven't done a full seed lately but I've been doing a ton of routing simulation on Z3RSim (great website btw).  My execution and on-the-fly decision making probably sucks ass but at this point I'm happy if I can at least make sane routing decisions and not forget about something super obvious like forgetting an easy location with 5 items in it, as well as at least having a general sense of routing for all of the dungeons. Suspiciously I keep on doing Z3rsim seeds where I get early cape or something like early hammer/hookshot which makes me really suspicious that it'll be a seed where Aga1 is required.  Some of them have indeed worked out that way -- there was a seed where the key progression item was on pyramid -- but others weren't.  But again, that's another decision that I'm at least getting a little more familiar with. EleTD I dunno if I'm supposed to talk about this one, but getting into this too. Life In general, has been good.  There are definitely times when I feel an anxiety in my chest, but I'm living through them just fine, thanks to a lot of things.  Sleeping better and making sure that I'm taking great care of myself as well as achieving the things I need to, is all I can really wish for and try to do.