Food memeage
Aug. 11th, 2020 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThe food prep meme going around.
1. Made biscuits from scratch?
Yep. Mostly buttermilk biscuits, but several different recipes. Can't say I've ever made cream biscuits.
2. Fried fresh okra?
Nope. I *think* I've worked with file' powder once and I know YOU DO NOT DO BOTH FILE' AND OKRA IN THE SAME RECIPE, though.
3. Made sourdough bread?
aaaah hahahaha hahaah hahaha
*cough*
Um. Sorry. I've had a jar of starter that originated in a purchase from the King Arthur Baking Company in my fridge since moving to Massachusetts. I use it regularly. Before that I had a starter that I caught in the wild on my own in New Jersey (it performed reasonably well, for yeasts that originated in Hoboken) and a King Arthur starter before that. I've baked from all of them on a semi-regular basis. Also did some work with starter samples from San Francisco and Alaska, and with pain de campagne starters. And at one point I had a rye starter going except I never baked more than one or two loaves with that. I've done sourdough pancakes, although they're not really favorites of mine compared to pancakes made with homemade buttermilk. My standard pizza crust recipe these days involves semolina or durum and a good portion of the sourdough starter, too. My parents gave me a book on sourdough baking the Alaskan way that came with an Alaskan starter packet after they took a trip up there a few years ago because they were familiar with the amount of sourdough baking I did/was willing to do. I make sourdough chocolate chip cookies when I can manage it because I like the texture. I buy distilled water specifically to safely feed my starter. Sourdough bread was only the beginning.
4. Fried chicken?
Yeah, although I'm not a big fan of deep-frying it, mostly because I hate trying to be sure I've fried it long enough. Also, um, gonna be honest, not a big fan of cooking anything with the bones still in, but if you count frying or sauteing chicken cutlets I do that reasonably regularly. I'm not great at the standard breading procedure, though. (Food Prep and Hospitality Management I included this in the Poultry chapter, it's part of efficiently getting restaurant quantities of chicken ready for the fryer; one hand for dredging the chicken in the standard-sized pan of seasoned flour and dipping it in the similarly sized pan of egg mixture, the other for taking it from the egg mixture and dredging it in the standard sized pan of seasoned crumbs before sending it to the fryer.)
5. Made spaghetti sauce from scratch?
You're going to have to be more specific. Which spaghetti sauce? sorry, I grew up in an Italian-American family; my grandparents on one side were the children of immigrants from southern Italy. The one time I asked about buying a jar of sauce instead of making it as a kid, I got the kind of dressing-down normally reserved for religious heresies. All spaghetti sauce is homemade sauce in my family, and if you're too tired or ill to make your own sauce, you take the sauce you or your mother made back before Easter out of the freezer and heat it up to use (or else just make your damn spaghetti with garlic and olive oil or possibly with butter and cheese). Buying sauce is for other people.
... also, buying frozen ravioli, my family's kind of strict about that. You make your own ravioli. Starting with making your own pasta dough and your own filling. At least we're allowed to buy the ricotta at the store rather than having to make it on the stovetop.
6. Made any kind of yeast bread?
Since somewhat before I bought my starter, yes. My very first loaf of yeast bread as a kid was a brick-dense nightmare and I'm still not sure what happened, but it's been rather different since then. I buy yeast by the pound bag at this point and keep it in the freezer, and bake whole wheat honey rolls with added oats twice a week when I'm not doing other yeast breads.
7. Baked a cake from scratch?
Yup. Pillsbury Starlight Double Delight Cake is one of my favorites for this.
8. Made icing from scratch?
Yup. It's part of the recipe above, in addition to the other times I've made it. Mostly I make icing when I'm doing cupcakes, I don't actually bake full-on cakes all that often. That said, I currently have a container of homemade cream cheese-buttercream coffee icing in the fridge waiting for my next opportunity to bake molasses spice cookies, because damn, that icing goes well with molasses spice cookies.
9. Cooked a pot roast with all the veg?
Possibly? I can't say I remember doing it, but I'm almost sure I did it once just to say that I did.
10. Made chili from scratch?
A couple of different kinds. Confession time, I usually use tomato puree rather than whole, diced, or other recognizable tomato units. I don't like the texture of cooked tomato, which has not stood me in good stead with my Italian-American relatives. But I've done a few kinds of chili from scratch, sure.
12. Made scalloped potatoes?
Mmmm... don't think so. Keep meaning to do a gratin at some point but I can't say I remember doing this.
13. Made mac/cheese from scratch?
A couple of times, yeah. I was a little shocked to discover that it gets baked, though. I usually just make my damn mac and cheese on top of the stove from the appropriate recipe or the box and go from there.
14. Made a jello salad?
This one's a no.
15. Made peanut brittle?
I can't say this is one of the candies I've ever made, but I've made pralines from pecans and brown sugar and the appropriate other bits, does that count?
16. Made fudge?
Yes, primarily from Tom Skaarup's recipes after my first attempt produced sugar-based obsidian. (Long story. Short version, the first fudge recipe I found was from somewhere in the Commonwealth and included the term 'gas mark 4', which I thought meant 4/5ths of the dial on my mother's gas stove, and since it did not say 'now add the chocolate chips' I was waiting for my mixture to start turning a chocolate-like shade of brown; I'm lucky I didn't lose the spoon.)
17. Made cookies from scratch?
Sure. Including spritz gun Christmas cookies, although those were always partially Mom's work because I don't actually own a spritz gun.
18. Cooked a pot of beans from dried beans?
Yup. Standard stovetop pot, pressure cooker, Colombian cargamantos, and on one memorably long occasion, Boston-style baked beans from scratch. More likely to cook lentils up from dried lentils but that's because they're faster. I love my legumes any way I can get them.
19. Cooked a pot of greens?
Not if I can help it. This is more my Mom's thing. I have that gene where most dark leafy green vegetable options taste bitter or soaplike.
20. Made cornbread from scratch?
A couple of different varieties, sweet and otherwise. Tried making corn dodgers once, that didn't work out too well. My mom's had me do Thanksgiving cornbread once or twice.
21. Made a pie dough from scratch?
Along with the rest of the pie, yes. Do not ask me to make a cherry pie from scratch more than once a year unless the cherries come to your hands straight from the ghost of Ah Bing himself. Pitting a pie's worth of cherries takes forever. Just give me a $2.99 peeler and a decently sharp santoku and a big bag of apples and we'll talk. But I pretty much always make my pie dough from scratch; I tend to prefer all-butter crust or crust with mostly butter and a bit of sour cream. Butter and shortening or butter and lard produce good results but then I'm stuck with the shortening until the next time I use it.
22. Cooked a whole turkey?
Not for myself. I've assisted Mom with the turkey cooking. I have made broth from scratch using a turkey carcass, though.
23. Snapped green beans and cooked them?
Sure. Especially with new red potatoes. And for preparation to go with Chinese recipes, when I can't get snow peas or similar, too.
24. Made mashed potatoes from scratch?
Yep. Including, on one memorable occasion, making them from scratch to use in potato candy (spoiler: it's there as a binder for the much more memorable coconut and since it's all being dipped in chocolate, potato candy is basically a Mounds bar)
25. What’s the most people you have (alone) prepared a whole meal for?
Four, I think. Again, Italian-American family. Someone will assist in the kitchen at some point. My cooking classes at various institutions mostly required us to collaborate on meals that would be served to the entire class.
26. Poached an egg?
Yeah, as part of learning to make eggs Benedict. I don't really do it any more but I have done it.
27. Made pancakes from scratch?
Weekly. 3 ounces whole wheat flour, 5 ounces white flour, half a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon baking soda, two teaspoons baking powder, 2-3 teaspoons sugar, dash of mace, 2 cups home-cultured buttermilk, 3 tablespoons melted butter, one large egg, half a teaspoon vanilla extract, four ounces (by weight) blueberries. sift the dry ingredients together. whisk the butter and the egg together, then mix in the buttermilk and vanilla and add the blueberries. add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until fully combined but still a bit lumpy. let rest for ten minutes, start heating the pan with a little oil when there are five minutes left to go. using a 1/3 cup or 1/4 cup measure, cook two or three pancakes at a time, flipping when the edges are starting to dry and the bubbles are getting big. yield should be around 15 pancakes. you may add up to one ounce of oat pulp (by weight) left over from making homemade oat milk, but you should subtract an ounce of flour if you do so.
28. Roasted vegetables in the oven instead of boiling them?
As part of cooking class, yes, mostly otherwise I roast just potatoes. More of my vegetable preparation is stir-fry or steaming.
29. Made fresh pasta?
My family made pasta from scratch every Easter and every Christmas and occasionally in between. I started taking cooking classes after telling a friend of mine that I'd just tried a recipe for cracked black peppercorn fettuccine but that it didn't work very well with a rolling pin instead of a hand cranked pasta machine; his response was 'you should maybe consider cooking school, normal people don't just do that kind of thing'. I make pasta at home every so often and use an attachment on my Kitchenaid to roll it out because the handcrank machine I have doesn't like my table or my counter edge very much.
30. Made croissants from scratch?
I don't think so. I think they came up in one of my CIA weekend classes but I wasn't in the group that made them. Puff pastry's a pain in the ass.
31. Made tuna salad?
No. Not a big tuna person.
32. Fried fish?
Yup. Flounder, mostly. Sometimes catfish. Both deep-fat frying and sauteing, with and without batter.
33. Made baked beans?
Yeah, once. I don't really like having my oven running for four hours at a stretch. Also, not a big fan of cutting up the fatty fat that is salt pork. If I'm working with that much solid fat I prefer it to be because I'm grating it to make soap. (Kidney fat makes the best soap when it comes to fat from animals rather than plants.)
34. Made ice cream from scratch?
Oh yes.
35. Made jam or jelly?
Afraid not.
36. Zested an orange or lemon?
Yep. Most recently, to provide zest for making celery soda from scratch.
37. Made grits from scratch?
I don't think so, no. I very much liked grits as a kid, having encountered them on a car trip to Virginia, but I don't recall making them myself.
38. Made an omelette?
I thought I did multiple times as a kid, until I went to Foods Prep I at County college, at which point I found out that what Mom and Grandma called 'omelettes' the rest of the world called 'frittatas' and then I had to make omelettes for class as part of the chapter on eggs.
39. Lived in a house without a dishwasher?
House, no, apartment, yes. The apartment in Hoboken didn't have one.
40. Eaten a bowl of cereal for supper?
Once or twice. Hurricane Sandy was responsible for the most recent time I did that.
1. Made biscuits from scratch?
Yep. Mostly buttermilk biscuits, but several different recipes. Can't say I've ever made cream biscuits.
2. Fried fresh okra?
Nope. I *think* I've worked with file' powder once and I know YOU DO NOT DO BOTH FILE' AND OKRA IN THE SAME RECIPE, though.
3. Made sourdough bread?
aaaah hahahaha hahaah hahaha
*cough*
Um. Sorry. I've had a jar of starter that originated in a purchase from the King Arthur Baking Company in my fridge since moving to Massachusetts. I use it regularly. Before that I had a starter that I caught in the wild on my own in New Jersey (it performed reasonably well, for yeasts that originated in Hoboken) and a King Arthur starter before that. I've baked from all of them on a semi-regular basis. Also did some work with starter samples from San Francisco and Alaska, and with pain de campagne starters. And at one point I had a rye starter going except I never baked more than one or two loaves with that. I've done sourdough pancakes, although they're not really favorites of mine compared to pancakes made with homemade buttermilk. My standard pizza crust recipe these days involves semolina or durum and a good portion of the sourdough starter, too. My parents gave me a book on sourdough baking the Alaskan way that came with an Alaskan starter packet after they took a trip up there a few years ago because they were familiar with the amount of sourdough baking I did/was willing to do. I make sourdough chocolate chip cookies when I can manage it because I like the texture. I buy distilled water specifically to safely feed my starter. Sourdough bread was only the beginning.
4. Fried chicken?
Yeah, although I'm not a big fan of deep-frying it, mostly because I hate trying to be sure I've fried it long enough. Also, um, gonna be honest, not a big fan of cooking anything with the bones still in, but if you count frying or sauteing chicken cutlets I do that reasonably regularly. I'm not great at the standard breading procedure, though. (Food Prep and Hospitality Management I included this in the Poultry chapter, it's part of efficiently getting restaurant quantities of chicken ready for the fryer; one hand for dredging the chicken in the standard-sized pan of seasoned flour and dipping it in the similarly sized pan of egg mixture, the other for taking it from the egg mixture and dredging it in the standard sized pan of seasoned crumbs before sending it to the fryer.)
5. Made spaghetti sauce from scratch?
You're going to have to be more specific. Which spaghetti sauce? sorry, I grew up in an Italian-American family; my grandparents on one side were the children of immigrants from southern Italy. The one time I asked about buying a jar of sauce instead of making it as a kid, I got the kind of dressing-down normally reserved for religious heresies. All spaghetti sauce is homemade sauce in my family, and if you're too tired or ill to make your own sauce, you take the sauce you or your mother made back before Easter out of the freezer and heat it up to use (or else just make your damn spaghetti with garlic and olive oil or possibly with butter and cheese). Buying sauce is for other people.
... also, buying frozen ravioli, my family's kind of strict about that. You make your own ravioli. Starting with making your own pasta dough and your own filling. At least we're allowed to buy the ricotta at the store rather than having to make it on the stovetop.
6. Made any kind of yeast bread?
Since somewhat before I bought my starter, yes. My very first loaf of yeast bread as a kid was a brick-dense nightmare and I'm still not sure what happened, but it's been rather different since then. I buy yeast by the pound bag at this point and keep it in the freezer, and bake whole wheat honey rolls with added oats twice a week when I'm not doing other yeast breads.
7. Baked a cake from scratch?
Yup. Pillsbury Starlight Double Delight Cake is one of my favorites for this.
8. Made icing from scratch?
Yup. It's part of the recipe above, in addition to the other times I've made it. Mostly I make icing when I'm doing cupcakes, I don't actually bake full-on cakes all that often. That said, I currently have a container of homemade cream cheese-buttercream coffee icing in the fridge waiting for my next opportunity to bake molasses spice cookies, because damn, that icing goes well with molasses spice cookies.
9. Cooked a pot roast with all the veg?
Possibly? I can't say I remember doing it, but I'm almost sure I did it once just to say that I did.
10. Made chili from scratch?
A couple of different kinds. Confession time, I usually use tomato puree rather than whole, diced, or other recognizable tomato units. I don't like the texture of cooked tomato, which has not stood me in good stead with my Italian-American relatives. But I've done a few kinds of chili from scratch, sure.
12. Made scalloped potatoes?
Mmmm... don't think so. Keep meaning to do a gratin at some point but I can't say I remember doing this.
13. Made mac/cheese from scratch?
A couple of times, yeah. I was a little shocked to discover that it gets baked, though. I usually just make my damn mac and cheese on top of the stove from the appropriate recipe or the box and go from there.
14. Made a jello salad?
This one's a no.
15. Made peanut brittle?
I can't say this is one of the candies I've ever made, but I've made pralines from pecans and brown sugar and the appropriate other bits, does that count?
16. Made fudge?
Yes, primarily from Tom Skaarup's recipes after my first attempt produced sugar-based obsidian. (Long story. Short version, the first fudge recipe I found was from somewhere in the Commonwealth and included the term 'gas mark 4', which I thought meant 4/5ths of the dial on my mother's gas stove, and since it did not say 'now add the chocolate chips' I was waiting for my mixture to start turning a chocolate-like shade of brown; I'm lucky I didn't lose the spoon.)
17. Made cookies from scratch?
Sure. Including spritz gun Christmas cookies, although those were always partially Mom's work because I don't actually own a spritz gun.
18. Cooked a pot of beans from dried beans?
Yup. Standard stovetop pot, pressure cooker, Colombian cargamantos, and on one memorably long occasion, Boston-style baked beans from scratch. More likely to cook lentils up from dried lentils but that's because they're faster. I love my legumes any way I can get them.
19. Cooked a pot of greens?
Not if I can help it. This is more my Mom's thing. I have that gene where most dark leafy green vegetable options taste bitter or soaplike.
20. Made cornbread from scratch?
A couple of different varieties, sweet and otherwise. Tried making corn dodgers once, that didn't work out too well. My mom's had me do Thanksgiving cornbread once or twice.
21. Made a pie dough from scratch?
Along with the rest of the pie, yes. Do not ask me to make a cherry pie from scratch more than once a year unless the cherries come to your hands straight from the ghost of Ah Bing himself. Pitting a pie's worth of cherries takes forever. Just give me a $2.99 peeler and a decently sharp santoku and a big bag of apples and we'll talk. But I pretty much always make my pie dough from scratch; I tend to prefer all-butter crust or crust with mostly butter and a bit of sour cream. Butter and shortening or butter and lard produce good results but then I'm stuck with the shortening until the next time I use it.
22. Cooked a whole turkey?
Not for myself. I've assisted Mom with the turkey cooking. I have made broth from scratch using a turkey carcass, though.
23. Snapped green beans and cooked them?
Sure. Especially with new red potatoes. And for preparation to go with Chinese recipes, when I can't get snow peas or similar, too.
24. Made mashed potatoes from scratch?
Yep. Including, on one memorable occasion, making them from scratch to use in potato candy (spoiler: it's there as a binder for the much more memorable coconut and since it's all being dipped in chocolate, potato candy is basically a Mounds bar)
25. What’s the most people you have (alone) prepared a whole meal for?
Four, I think. Again, Italian-American family. Someone will assist in the kitchen at some point. My cooking classes at various institutions mostly required us to collaborate on meals that would be served to the entire class.
26. Poached an egg?
Yeah, as part of learning to make eggs Benedict. I don't really do it any more but I have done it.
27. Made pancakes from scratch?
Weekly. 3 ounces whole wheat flour, 5 ounces white flour, half a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon baking soda, two teaspoons baking powder, 2-3 teaspoons sugar, dash of mace, 2 cups home-cultured buttermilk, 3 tablespoons melted butter, one large egg, half a teaspoon vanilla extract, four ounces (by weight) blueberries. sift the dry ingredients together. whisk the butter and the egg together, then mix in the buttermilk and vanilla and add the blueberries. add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until fully combined but still a bit lumpy. let rest for ten minutes, start heating the pan with a little oil when there are five minutes left to go. using a 1/3 cup or 1/4 cup measure, cook two or three pancakes at a time, flipping when the edges are starting to dry and the bubbles are getting big. yield should be around 15 pancakes. you may add up to one ounce of oat pulp (by weight) left over from making homemade oat milk, but you should subtract an ounce of flour if you do so.
28. Roasted vegetables in the oven instead of boiling them?
As part of cooking class, yes, mostly otherwise I roast just potatoes. More of my vegetable preparation is stir-fry or steaming.
29. Made fresh pasta?
My family made pasta from scratch every Easter and every Christmas and occasionally in between. I started taking cooking classes after telling a friend of mine that I'd just tried a recipe for cracked black peppercorn fettuccine but that it didn't work very well with a rolling pin instead of a hand cranked pasta machine; his response was 'you should maybe consider cooking school, normal people don't just do that kind of thing'. I make pasta at home every so often and use an attachment on my Kitchenaid to roll it out because the handcrank machine I have doesn't like my table or my counter edge very much.
30. Made croissants from scratch?
I don't think so. I think they came up in one of my CIA weekend classes but I wasn't in the group that made them. Puff pastry's a pain in the ass.
31. Made tuna salad?
No. Not a big tuna person.
32. Fried fish?
Yup. Flounder, mostly. Sometimes catfish. Both deep-fat frying and sauteing, with and without batter.
33. Made baked beans?
Yeah, once. I don't really like having my oven running for four hours at a stretch. Also, not a big fan of cutting up the fatty fat that is salt pork. If I'm working with that much solid fat I prefer it to be because I'm grating it to make soap. (Kidney fat makes the best soap when it comes to fat from animals rather than plants.)
34. Made ice cream from scratch?
Oh yes.
35. Made jam or jelly?
Afraid not.
36. Zested an orange or lemon?
Yep. Most recently, to provide zest for making celery soda from scratch.
37. Made grits from scratch?
I don't think so, no. I very much liked grits as a kid, having encountered them on a car trip to Virginia, but I don't recall making them myself.
38. Made an omelette?
I thought I did multiple times as a kid, until I went to Foods Prep I at County college, at which point I found out that what Mom and Grandma called 'omelettes' the rest of the world called 'frittatas' and then I had to make omelettes for class as part of the chapter on eggs.
39. Lived in a house without a dishwasher?
House, no, apartment, yes. The apartment in Hoboken didn't have one.
40. Eaten a bowl of cereal for supper?
Once or twice. Hurricane Sandy was responsible for the most recent time I did that.
