![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksMeme via thistleingrey and yhlee. A very not just U.S. but Southern-U.S.-centric meme, but one I find interesting in its assumptions about food.
Have you ever:
1. Made biscuits from scratch?
Sure, both U.S. and British. The thing is, though, even there it depends on how you define a biscuit. Bettina's Emergency Biscuit, which I have relied on as a quick side dish for more than a decade, is I think classified by the British as a scone? though not an inherently sweet one. Whereas while I have made a baking-powder biscuit, I certainly don't do it often, because the results tend not to justify the effort.
2. Fried fresh okra?
Had it but not made it... I think. I have only ever had okra from professional barbecue places, and if something is deep-fried, well-spiced, and served hot, for all I can tell it could be fresh, frozen, or canned and turn out about the same way.
3. Made sourdough bread?
No. Despite having had multiple pets and a child, I have never felt responsible enough for a sourdough starter.
4. Fried chicken?
No. I know the theory, but I don't cook meat, because Ruth is a vegetarian and I get my obligate-carnivore needs met via restaurants. As a result, I generally don't know how to cook meat and meat-related food.
5. Made spaghetti sauce from scratch?
Oh sure. Most jar sauces have a lot of sugar, and sometimes lurking onion, to which I am allergic. There are five or six spaghetti sauces I'd say I know, in that if I were going to make them I would just go into the kitchen and start without reaching for a recipe: plain tomato, pesto, aglio e olio (if that counts), carbonara, puttanesca, picatta. I know how to make amatriciana but it is so thoroughly onion-based that I actively can't. That said, I am not inherently against jar sauces, I just dislike spending time squinting at the ingredients list wondering what they mean by 'and spices'.
6. Made any kind of yeast bread?
Yes. Yeast likes me. I like yeast. It works out. I miss having the stamina to cook-- which I think if things progress the direction they are progressing in medically may come back in the medium-term future, fingers crossed-- and I especially miss the stamina for yeast doughs.
7. Baked a cake from scratch?
My stress relief in times of trouble before I developed debilitating anemia and migraines.nineweaving has been doing the pandemic stress baking around here, which I appreciate. I have made only one cake this calendar year, which is an extremely low number for me (and I would not have gotten it made without nineweaving), but it was butter pound cake for Ruth's birthday and it was fucking delicious. If you have a stand mixer, this is one of the best cakes I have ever had. Anywhere. Not just at home. I did splurge for the fancy butter, which I think helped, and I would not suggest trying it without a stand mixer, but damn.
8. Made icing from scratch?
Yes, but I'm not good at it like I am with cake, so I prefer to make a really fancy cake with like custard and jam layers and then whip some cream and fling some berries at the whole thing. If you are eating a cake I made, the cake is definitely the focus.
9. Cooked a pot roast with all the veg?
I just roast the veg. Also, I don't like pot roast, so even on the rare occasions I cook meat, I'd rather make something I enjoy.
10. Made chili from scratch?
Not what I think of as real chili, which a) has meat and b) is spicy, but I can do a perfectly respectable version that isn't either of those, which means Ruth can eat it. I suspect my standard extremely quick dinner, which I think of as beans and biscuits, would count as chili if it had sauce instead of the beans being spiced but dry.
11. Made a meatloaf?
No, although I probably should some time. Making my own is the only way I will ever get to eat one, since literally everyone who makes meatloaf puts onions in it. It is a food I do not even bother trying to order at restaurants anymore, as it never, ever works out.
12. Made scalloped potatoes?
Yes, but although I liked them, I felt they were too much work when there are other potato preparations I like much more.
13. Made mac/cheese from scratch?
Absolutely. The box kind is a staple around here because it is so easy (well, Annie's white cheddar shells'n'cheese, really), but I can make it if I want. I prefer baked ziti, though; the tomato really adds something.
14. Made a jello salad?
No, but I have intentions. Years ago, I went to a cooking contest for which the MC sang the song 'Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise', and as a joke she had also made some and entered it, and the surprise was that she won because everybody loved it. I have wanted to inflict it on my family ever since, because I genuinely really enjoyed it.
15. Made peanut brittle?
I don't really like crunchy candies, so no.
16. Made fudge?
Yes, but not since childhood. I don't know why fudge doesn't occur to me, but it doesn't. I always wind up making caramels or something instead.
17. Made cookies from scratch?
Duplicate question.
18. Cooked a pot of beans from dried beans?
Yes, but they were adzuki beans to make paste for fried sesame balls, which I suspect is not the intent of the original asker. For other sorts of bean, I find canned perfectly adequate if I boil them for thirty seconds with baking soda to take out the tinny taste.
19. Cooked a pot of greens?
Yes. Kale, chard, beet greens. Kale always feels like I'm mud-wrestling it and I'm not always sure that I win; there's just so much of it and it just takes so much washing and picking over and drying and blanching and sauteing and oh god. Beet greens are one of my favorite parts of borscht. I should really try cooking collards sometime.
20. Made cornbread from scratch?
Yes, but I stopped because I realized that I don't actually like cornbread that much.
21. Made a pie dough from scratch?
Yes, and it always turns out terribly, and mostly I throw up my hands and buy a perfectly good pre-packaged. Every so often I get a wild hair and try again. I can do anything with yeast, or egg, but cold butter? Different story. I broke someone else's nice blender trying to make pie crust, once. I don't even know how I did that.
22. Cooked a whole turkey?
Yes, but I don't see the point. Goose. Or duck. Something with fat, please.
23. Snapped green beans and cooked them?
Yes.
24. Made mashed potatoes from scratch?
Yes.
25. What’s the most people you have (alone) prepared a whole meal for?
Oof. This is hard because if I am making food in a large quantity it is usually for the sort of event where a large, random number of people wander in and out and a whole bunch of other people have also made a great deal of food. So I've made quantities before that I estimate would feed, like, twenty, but in practice there's no way to tell. I guess pre-Fox I usually did madly elaborate Christmas Eve dinner for me, Ruth, Ruth's parents, andnineweaving, and that was usually four courses for five people?
26. Poached an egg?
Yes. One of my favorite ways to eat an egg. It changed my life when I realized I could boil the water in a mug in the microwave and poach it directly in the mug.
27. Made pancakes from scratch?
Yes, but I haven't found a recipe I really love, so they're different every time. Ruth and Fox make pancakes together a lot.
28. Roasted vegetables in the oven instead of boiling them?
Why would anyone boil a vegetable? Yes, I roast them, one of the more common things I do to veg.
29. Made fresh pasta?
Another thing I miss from before being disabled. Someday I am again going to make smoked duck-cashew ricotta ravioli because those were the best things that have ever come out of my kitchen. The nice thing about making your own ravioli dough is that you can put any filling in that you want.
30. Made croissants from scratch?
No, but they're on my life list. I am a bit afraid of them because of the whole pie crust situation, though.
31. Made tuna salad?
If this means, do I mix kewpie mayo, pickle relish, mustard, and tuna and eat it directly from the can, sure. If this involves other ingredients and removal from the can, probably, but not for many years.
32. Fried fish?
If this means breaded and fried, no. I can meuniere.
33. Made baked beans?
I dislike baked beans intensely and have never had any reason to make them for anyone else.
34. Made ice cream from scratch?
Yes, though I have not had a non-communal ice cream or gelato maker, and don't particularly want one.
35. Made jam or jelly?
See, the trick with jam is that it's the jarring and preserving it that's hard. Making jam in small quantities is easy and tasty. And if you use a fruit that has a lot of pectin, such as raspberry, the only things you really need are the berries and sugar.
Quick Raspberry Jam
Pick over your berries and wash them. Don't dry them, that's the water for the jam.
Put your berries in a saucepan. Get out a bowl and-- okay, the classical prescription is for an equal weight of berries and sugar, but I hate weighing and I like a less-sweet jam. So, by eye, an amount of sugar equal in volume to one-third the volume of the raspberries, and then remove a tablespoon. If I were weighing I'd do one-third by weight, and either tastes fine, just different. If you make enough jam you can do this by taste. Dump sugar over berries.
Things you can add at this point if the spirit moves you, or not (and not all at once): a pinch of salt; an amount of lemon juice ranging from a sprinkle to like five tablespoons; cinnamon; vanilla; the remnants of the almost finished jelly of whatever kind is sitting in your fridge.
Turn the heat on to medium-high and stand there stirring until the sugar crystals dissolve. Bring it to a boil. Then stand there stirring occasionally (scraping it off the bottom) for another seven minutes.
Look at the stuff on your spoon. Does it look like jam yet? If not, give it another thirty seconds.
Hurrah, jam. And much nicer than the stuff you buy. You have to eat it within about a week, which is the price of not canning it. But if you do this with a single punnet of berries, or less, you'll get through it before it goes off.
You can make jam out of just about any fruit in small quantities if you add a big spoonful of raspberry jam or a couple of apple slices or some redcurrants for the pectin. I think there's a lot of mystique built up around jam when the hard part really is giant batches and having to sterilize things for preservation.
36. Zested an orange or lemon?
Yes. One reason I have a microplane. The other reason is Parmesan.
37. Made grits from scratch?
I have never made grits of any sort. Not sure why. Just haven't.
38. Made an omelette?
Yes, but the difficulty is that I only like them if I make them the difficult froofy way, so I don't do it often.
39. Lived in a house without a dishwasher?
Several times. We have one at the moment, though.
40. Eaten a bowl of cereal for supper?
Often. Though I would really prefer a peanut butter sandwich if I'm at that level of not-cooking.
thistleingrey and yhlee. A very not just U.S. but Southern-U.S.-centric meme, but one I find interesting in its assumptions about food.Have you ever:
1. Made biscuits from scratch?
Sure, both U.S. and British. The thing is, though, even there it depends on how you define a biscuit. Bettina's Emergency Biscuit, which I have relied on as a quick side dish for more than a decade, is I think classified by the British as a scone? though not an inherently sweet one. Whereas while I have made a baking-powder biscuit, I certainly don't do it often, because the results tend not to justify the effort.
2. Fried fresh okra?
Had it but not made it... I think. I have only ever had okra from professional barbecue places, and if something is deep-fried, well-spiced, and served hot, for all I can tell it could be fresh, frozen, or canned and turn out about the same way.
3. Made sourdough bread?
No. Despite having had multiple pets and a child, I have never felt responsible enough for a sourdough starter.
4. Fried chicken?
No. I know the theory, but I don't cook meat, because Ruth is a vegetarian and I get my obligate-carnivore needs met via restaurants. As a result, I generally don't know how to cook meat and meat-related food.
5. Made spaghetti sauce from scratch?
Oh sure. Most jar sauces have a lot of sugar, and sometimes lurking onion, to which I am allergic. There are five or six spaghetti sauces I'd say I know, in that if I were going to make them I would just go into the kitchen and start without reaching for a recipe: plain tomato, pesto, aglio e olio (if that counts), carbonara, puttanesca, picatta. I know how to make amatriciana but it is so thoroughly onion-based that I actively can't. That said, I am not inherently against jar sauces, I just dislike spending time squinting at the ingredients list wondering what they mean by 'and spices'.
6. Made any kind of yeast bread?
Yes. Yeast likes me. I like yeast. It works out. I miss having the stamina to cook-- which I think if things progress the direction they are progressing in medically may come back in the medium-term future, fingers crossed-- and I especially miss the stamina for yeast doughs.
7. Baked a cake from scratch?
My stress relief in times of trouble before I developed debilitating anemia and migraines.
nineweaving has been doing the pandemic stress baking around here, which I appreciate. I have made only one cake this calendar year, which is an extremely low number for me (and I would not have gotten it made without nineweaving), but it was butter pound cake for Ruth's birthday and it was fucking delicious. If you have a stand mixer, this is one of the best cakes I have ever had. Anywhere. Not just at home. I did splurge for the fancy butter, which I think helped, and I would not suggest trying it without a stand mixer, but damn.8. Made icing from scratch?
Yes, but I'm not good at it like I am with cake, so I prefer to make a really fancy cake with like custard and jam layers and then whip some cream and fling some berries at the whole thing. If you are eating a cake I made, the cake is definitely the focus.
9. Cooked a pot roast with all the veg?
I just roast the veg. Also, I don't like pot roast, so even on the rare occasions I cook meat, I'd rather make something I enjoy.
10. Made chili from scratch?
Not what I think of as real chili, which a) has meat and b) is spicy, but I can do a perfectly respectable version that isn't either of those, which means Ruth can eat it. I suspect my standard extremely quick dinner, which I think of as beans and biscuits, would count as chili if it had sauce instead of the beans being spiced but dry.
11. Made a meatloaf?
No, although I probably should some time. Making my own is the only way I will ever get to eat one, since literally everyone who makes meatloaf puts onions in it. It is a food I do not even bother trying to order at restaurants anymore, as it never, ever works out.
12. Made scalloped potatoes?
Yes, but although I liked them, I felt they were too much work when there are other potato preparations I like much more.
13. Made mac/cheese from scratch?
Absolutely. The box kind is a staple around here because it is so easy (well, Annie's white cheddar shells'n'cheese, really), but I can make it if I want. I prefer baked ziti, though; the tomato really adds something.
14. Made a jello salad?
No, but I have intentions. Years ago, I went to a cooking contest for which the MC sang the song 'Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise', and as a joke she had also made some and entered it, and the surprise was that she won because everybody loved it. I have wanted to inflict it on my family ever since, because I genuinely really enjoyed it.
15. Made peanut brittle?
I don't really like crunchy candies, so no.
16. Made fudge?
Yes, but not since childhood. I don't know why fudge doesn't occur to me, but it doesn't. I always wind up making caramels or something instead.
17. Made cookies from scratch?
Duplicate question.
18. Cooked a pot of beans from dried beans?
Yes, but they were adzuki beans to make paste for fried sesame balls, which I suspect is not the intent of the original asker. For other sorts of bean, I find canned perfectly adequate if I boil them for thirty seconds with baking soda to take out the tinny taste.
19. Cooked a pot of greens?
Yes. Kale, chard, beet greens. Kale always feels like I'm mud-wrestling it and I'm not always sure that I win; there's just so much of it and it just takes so much washing and picking over and drying and blanching and sauteing and oh god. Beet greens are one of my favorite parts of borscht. I should really try cooking collards sometime.
20. Made cornbread from scratch?
Yes, but I stopped because I realized that I don't actually like cornbread that much.
21. Made a pie dough from scratch?
Yes, and it always turns out terribly, and mostly I throw up my hands and buy a perfectly good pre-packaged. Every so often I get a wild hair and try again. I can do anything with yeast, or egg, but cold butter? Different story. I broke someone else's nice blender trying to make pie crust, once. I don't even know how I did that.
22. Cooked a whole turkey?
Yes, but I don't see the point. Goose. Or duck. Something with fat, please.
23. Snapped green beans and cooked them?
Yes.
24. Made mashed potatoes from scratch?
Yes.
25. What’s the most people you have (alone) prepared a whole meal for?
Oof. This is hard because if I am making food in a large quantity it is usually for the sort of event where a large, random number of people wander in and out and a whole bunch of other people have also made a great deal of food. So I've made quantities before that I estimate would feed, like, twenty, but in practice there's no way to tell. I guess pre-Fox I usually did madly elaborate Christmas Eve dinner for me, Ruth, Ruth's parents, and
nineweaving, and that was usually four courses for five people?26. Poached an egg?
Yes. One of my favorite ways to eat an egg. It changed my life when I realized I could boil the water in a mug in the microwave and poach it directly in the mug.
27. Made pancakes from scratch?
Yes, but I haven't found a recipe I really love, so they're different every time. Ruth and Fox make pancakes together a lot.
28. Roasted vegetables in the oven instead of boiling them?
Why would anyone boil a vegetable? Yes, I roast them, one of the more common things I do to veg.
29. Made fresh pasta?
Another thing I miss from before being disabled. Someday I am again going to make smoked duck-cashew ricotta ravioli because those were the best things that have ever come out of my kitchen. The nice thing about making your own ravioli dough is that you can put any filling in that you want.
30. Made croissants from scratch?
No, but they're on my life list. I am a bit afraid of them because of the whole pie crust situation, though.
31. Made tuna salad?
If this means, do I mix kewpie mayo, pickle relish, mustard, and tuna and eat it directly from the can, sure. If this involves other ingredients and removal from the can, probably, but not for many years.
32. Fried fish?
If this means breaded and fried, no. I can meuniere.
33. Made baked beans?
I dislike baked beans intensely and have never had any reason to make them for anyone else.
34. Made ice cream from scratch?
Yes, though I have not had a non-communal ice cream or gelato maker, and don't particularly want one.
35. Made jam or jelly?
See, the trick with jam is that it's the jarring and preserving it that's hard. Making jam in small quantities is easy and tasty. And if you use a fruit that has a lot of pectin, such as raspberry, the only things you really need are the berries and sugar.
Quick Raspberry Jam
Pick over your berries and wash them. Don't dry them, that's the water for the jam.
Put your berries in a saucepan. Get out a bowl and-- okay, the classical prescription is for an equal weight of berries and sugar, but I hate weighing and I like a less-sweet jam. So, by eye, an amount of sugar equal in volume to one-third the volume of the raspberries, and then remove a tablespoon. If I were weighing I'd do one-third by weight, and either tastes fine, just different. If you make enough jam you can do this by taste. Dump sugar over berries.
Things you can add at this point if the spirit moves you, or not (and not all at once): a pinch of salt; an amount of lemon juice ranging from a sprinkle to like five tablespoons; cinnamon; vanilla; the remnants of the almost finished jelly of whatever kind is sitting in your fridge.
Turn the heat on to medium-high and stand there stirring until the sugar crystals dissolve. Bring it to a boil. Then stand there stirring occasionally (scraping it off the bottom) for another seven minutes.
Look at the stuff on your spoon. Does it look like jam yet? If not, give it another thirty seconds.
Hurrah, jam. And much nicer than the stuff you buy. You have to eat it within about a week, which is the price of not canning it. But if you do this with a single punnet of berries, or less, you'll get through it before it goes off.
You can make jam out of just about any fruit in small quantities if you add a big spoonful of raspberry jam or a couple of apple slices or some redcurrants for the pectin. I think there's a lot of mystique built up around jam when the hard part really is giant batches and having to sterilize things for preservation.
36. Zested an orange or lemon?
Yes. One reason I have a microplane. The other reason is Parmesan.
37. Made grits from scratch?
I have never made grits of any sort. Not sure why. Just haven't.
38. Made an omelette?
Yes, but the difficulty is that I only like them if I make them the difficult froofy way, so I don't do it often.
39. Lived in a house without a dishwasher?
Several times. We have one at the moment, though.
40. Eaten a bowl of cereal for supper?
Often. Though I would really prefer a peanut butter sandwich if I'm at that level of not-cooking.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 04:47 pm (UTC)That also struck me, although then I think it's hilarious that I did not encounter okra until I was an adult because my father, having been exposed to it through the same Southern cuisine of his part-childhood that meant I grew up in New England thinking that grits were a normal everyday food, absolutely hated it.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 05:29 pm (UTC)I am with you on the baked beans. And thank you for the jam directions.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 05:11 am (UTC)I so look forward to your feeling well. And if you start cooking again, that will be a very nice fringe benefit.
Nine
no subject
Date: 2020-08-16 01:28 am (UTC)My mother's scalloped potatoes were very easy -- she didn't bother with a white sauce, but just dredged the potatoes in seasoned flour, poured over milk, dotted with butter, and let it thicken as it baked. I quite like ham and scalloped potatoes but haven't made it in years, as my husband can't do dairy any longer, and my kids didn't much like the dish back when he could.