Cooking is intuitive and experimental until something gets set on fire: FOOD

[Ignatius]

Are they from the same animal? Because that would be incredible!

[Thermofusion]

Even more so if that animal ain't a pig

[Ah_Pook]

my lady made lemon curd this morning. this is a Good Thing. it turns out that making fruit curd is quite easy, and now we're real excited to make more curds. im thinking grapefruit curd should be the next one.


also the other morning she made us these sweet potato pancakes with sauteed sugary bananas and man let me tell you

[DCDave]

Are they from the same animal? Because that would be incredible!

Not this time.  I bought a pig last year and both the hams are still around and I have a claim to one of them sooooooo

[Bernard]

ghostface chili

[Antero]

And Method Ham?  And Inspectah cake?

And of course, everyone's favorite, Ol' Dirty Casserole.

[Ignatius]

M-E-T-H OD HAAAMM

[alex]

Damn, we cooked some tasty food yesterday. Potato strudel and broccoli with flaked almonds and butter. And since we were going to make the pastry for the strudel from scratch anyway (which worked out surprisingly well for a first unassisted attempt, I'd only once made it together with my mother before that), we made a huge apple strudel for dessert, as well.

My mother - whom I had called in the morning to inquire about how to make the filling for the potato strudel, for which I had no recipe - called me in the evening to ask how it went, and was clearly pretty proud of our cooking skills when we told her we had mastered the strudel.

[YojimboMonkey]

Tell me more about this.... potato strudel.....

[alex]

There's lots of different ways of making it, I guess. The version I made essentially consisted of steamed* potatoes, peeled and cut into thin slices, and then mixed with a few tablespoons of sour cream, some salt, pepper, nutmeg, caraway/cumin, fresh parsley and whatever other spices you fancy (I guess I used some paprika poweder and some Mexican spice mix which is essentially chili and garlic - in fact, I would have used fresh garlic as well, had I not gotten paranoid about preparing the apple strudel with garlic fingers). You wrap all of that into pastry and bake it, pretty much.

* boiled works as well, I'm sure, although my mother would deny it

[alex]

The pastry I made was actually from an apple strudel recipe, which works well, since it's not sweetened: just flour, oil, water, egg, and salt.

[Ignatius]

I made some lasagna with bechamel sauce, sauteed mushrooms, some onions and tomatoes and a little parmesan. I prepared it before going to work, and had my dad cook it, so I'd been looking forward to it all day. It is so gooey and delicious and such an excellent way to finish a tired and slightly icky day. This was also the first time I've made bechamel sauce and now I want to make scalloped potatoes with mornay sauce and various other unhealthy things.

[ellaguru]

I got a raw food vegan cookbook a couple weeks back, and finally got around to making something - a corn chowder. I don't have a dehydrator, so I couldn't make coconut bacon for the bacon bits, but if you substitute coconut bacon with, y'know, real bacon, it's pretty good.

[Antero]

I feel like most vegan cookbooks would be improved by the casual substitution of bacon.

[nonotyet]

I would be interested in hearing more about coconut bacon.
This is an old picture I took when I was home for the weekend once and we cooked vegetarian bacon and real bacon side by side:


THAT SHIT IS AGAINST GOD

[Antero]

What the fuck is that?  Stationary?

[mixed cats]

Morningstar bacon is stupid
Tempeh bacon is pretty good
There's a place in Philly that does smoked coconut bacon and that sounds awesome but I've never had it.

[Greg Nog]

Oh man, once when we were having a roll-your-own-sushi party, a friend of mine made tempeh in some way that made it taste exactly like bacon.  It was amazing!  I think she might've used some bacon-tempeh recipe from the Veganomicon.

[YojimboMonkey]

Last weekend Mindy and I got sidetracked on our way to Quincy to pick up the kids, and we ended up taking a completely different route than usual.  Which is often nice, as was the case this time.  We ended up getting off the road to eat dinner in Toluca, IL, which is a small town of about 1300 that for whatever reason, has for decades supported 2 competing (though both owned by the same people these days) Italian restaurants, called Mona's and Capponi's.  We stopped at Mona's and got fried chicken, etc.  The pasta was OK but the fried chicken was amazing.  For some reason, you can stop into just about any little tavern in any small town in Illinois and get amazing fried chicken, in my experience. 

Anyway, it's just kind of bizarre, how these 2 places can have existed a half-block away from each other in such a small town for such a long time.  Here's an article about the 2 places, and here are some photos I took of their neon signs

[silentsigh89]

A good, avocado-obsessed friend's birthday is coming up and so we want to make her an avocado dessert. Do any of you guys have experience with avocado ice cream? What kind of pastry would it taste good with? Looking at the recipe, we can't really tell how sweet it will be.

[davy]

Whoever cooked that Morningstar bacon cooked it wrong. You gotta skillet-fry that shit in butter or it ain't worth the trouble. If you do it right though, get it brown and a little crunchy, I think it kinda rocks.

[Greg Nog]

A good, avocado-obsessed friend's birthday is coming up and so we want to make her an avocado dessert. Do any of you guys have experience with avocado ice cream? What kind of pastry would it taste good with? Looking at the recipe, we can't really tell how sweet it will be.

How much sugar is in it?  What else does the recipe contain?  I bet it would be great with crumbled shortbread and candied lemonpeels.

[FreddyKnuckles]

Man, this indian place here in dc makes the best fucking thing.  It's a braised lamb shank.  SO MUCH FOOD.  SO MUCH DELICIOUS.  I don't want the rice, the naan, the weird dish of stuff, JUST GIVE ME LAMB SHANK BHUNA. 

[Bernard]

And Method Ham?  And Inspectah cake?

And of course, everyone's favorite, Ol' Dirty Casserole.

m-e-t-h-o-d HAM
m-e-t-h-o-d HAM
m-e-t-h-o-d HAM
here I am

[Bernard]

crush-your-nut butter

haha, I love this game