I’m not an aficionado on those specific sandwiches but you should try setting your microwave to half power and cooking for twice the time. I get much better results on most things when I cook like that - food will be more evenly heated and won’t be so brutally overcooked.
Amazing popcorn: Corn - 106g or 1/2cup Sunflower Oil - 43g or 1/4cup - 8g of that geing ghee (clarified butter) for godly flavor Salt (flavacol is best)-5g or 1tsp
Combine in 6q or larger pot and move the pot around on the stove, or better yet, use a whirly-pop. (Whirlypop.Com) remove from the stove when there are 2 seconds between pops.
In case it’s not obvious, you need to keep the lid on or use a splatter guard for safety purposes.
Microwave the result for 30 seconds to remove excess moisture for better crunch and less squeak.
Legend has it a similar recipe would work in a microwave safe bowl, but I’m not a heathen so I never tried it.
If using plain salt, uniodized salt that is ground into a fine powder works best.
A friend of ours had gotten some feet from someone at a fair and shared; after that I truly experienced the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Apparently they contain glucosamine which is good for our good boy’s joints.
And if you’re new to cooking, try cooking your food a bit longer than you would usually. Taste it and decide if you enjoy the heavier caramelization. When I realized I should embrace the char, foods like mushrooms became so so so much better.
Microwave or parboil veggies before sauteing on high heat. Lets you get the perfect exterior without having to worry about if they are cooked through. It’s also faster and if you parboil in salted water you allow salt to penetrate deeper into the veg. I especially like this technique for starches like potatoes, as they take a long time to cook and I’m impatient.
So I’m just laying in my bed minding my own business and you had to go and make me hungry. May your socks be forever wet and your bendy straws all have holes.
I’m definitely not on the oily broth soup camp, but I guess that’s because I barely make broth-based soup. I do love ramen with sesame oil, though!
I prefer creamy soups for winter, whatever the base: lentils, kabocha, black/brown beans, onions, hearts of palm. Super easy to make, if you have a handy blender to make quick work of it. That or oats & milk porridge for breakfast, I’m set for a chilly day.
If you use cast iron, carbon steel, or stainless pans, buy a chainmail scrubber. They are SO GOOD.
Also steel wool ball scrubbies are nice for real cast iron disasters, but they can scratch or get gross if used as a first resort.
Nonstick is not worth it and cast iron is a million times easier to care for than people make it out to be. You can wash it with soap - it was only old school lye soaps that were an issue. You can let food soak in it some. If it rusts or the seasoning is damaged, that’s easy to fix. It’s a hunk of iron - don’t worry about babying it if that’s the thing keeping you from trying it!
I find it does sometimes have food stick more rhan with nonstick, depending on whether I’ve been doing the extra cast iron care things recently or not, but the ability to use steel utensils/spatulas/scrubbies compensates for that very well, imo.
Tldr try cast iron or carbon steel if you haven’t!
You dont have to go full meal prep, there's small things you can do ahead of time to get better results with less time and effort later on. boiling some cubed potatoes for 10 minutes, or sous vide some chicken breast. then when it's cooking time, all you need to do is get some browning on them, they're already cooked through and extra tender.
Also: slow cooker. I gave mine away after I got an instant pot, but as I said, WFH. For people who go to work, a slow cooker is amazing. Throw food in, turn it on, have it done when you are back. Hot early or late doesn’t matter.
A good flat metal spatula will do you so much good. It gets under the food and if a little piece does stick to the pan you can just scrape it off and retain the brown goodness. Plastic spatulas that became prevalent thanks to teflon are the worst.
Regular stainless steel and etc pans can become fairly nonstick by letting them heat up first, then adding fat or oil and swirling it around to let it polymerize
Do they not burn? Ever time I’ve thought of trying wooden utensils with a pan I’ve worried I’d burn them, so I’ve always thought they were just for serving or mixing.
Huh I use wooden spoons but Ive never used a wooden spatula but I could see how a well made one could get better than a plastic one, but peeling power of a metal baby cant be beaten.
I have a metal spatula from … maybe the 80s? that is now falling apart, but every replacement I’ve tried is too stiff compared to my battered old friend. I like how it bends under pancakes to allow a good, high flip. I love how I can scrape all the crusty bits off my cast iron pan and get them all frying into whatever the dish is. It wasn’t a special purchase at the time, but the modern ones are all too thick or stiff. Do not like.
On wooden spatulas, I have a dead-flat bamboo one I use to stir soups and roux-based sauces. It was dead cheap from my local asian market and I ended up buying 10 of them to give as christmas stocking stuffers. Not sure it if this example is as flat as mine, but it is similar.
Some people like to think they’re super water-efficient doing the dishes, but they’re not; dishwasher saves water.
The only extra cost is electricity, but it’s easily offset by the savings brought by cooking more often caused by the reduced hassle of doing the dishes. It’s like 1-2 dollars of electricity per use (YMMV but it’s that order of magnitude: less than a tenth of a dine out).
I never got this. Maybe it’s because we don’t have or want children, and are only us two. But dishes take me ten minutes every day. And I have a bunch of higher quality things that can’t go into a dishwasher anyway. If I had the space, is probably still get one, but I just don’t see how saving 7 minutes a day is a big thing.
If it’s worth to purchase a dishwasher… it varies a lot given each ones own priorities and situation.
If saving X minutes a day is a big thing or a small thing… it also varies a lot given how you value your time and how much you enjoy dishwashing by hand. I know a few people who love to do it; no need to take away that joy for the sake of efficiency.
But for the vast majority, if you have a dishwasher idle, those are some minutes you get back practically* for free.
I also cook only for two, but I do it three times a day, and I have a lot to do so I value each minute saved in chores immensely. My dishwasher has been a blessing, without it I would be eating out or ordering delivery MUCH more frequently.
I don’t enjoy it, but I guess I also don’t mind it that much. And I only cook once a day. Mornings are usually cold, evenings only my wife eats and that’s warned up. So dishes are just those 10 minutes, once a day. That’s about 2-4 songs playing on the kitchen speaker ;) if I had to do the dishes middle time a day, I’d probably like it less as well ;)
I live alone and cook one time per day. Dishes takes me like 2 minutes since I just shove everything in the machine and come back two hours later not just to everything being clean, but also heat sanitized. The only things you can’t put in there are knives, as well as nonstick and wooden items. I would personally hate cooking if I had to scrub every item by hand afterwards…
Absolutely, this is a personal thing. I’ve found myself not buying things that are incompatible with the machine as much as possible so I don’t really have that issue
And some things I just toss in there anyway. My Wusthof knifes for instance are not carbons steel and don’t have wooden handles, and my machine has a neat spot that secures it perfectly upright so the edge isn’t touching anything. I have been doing this for years and observed no noticeable downside.
Some people like to think they’re super water-efficient doing the dishes, but they’re not; dishwasher saves water.
About that. I know of one study done in Europe on this, and it was paid for by dishwasher companies, and didn’t exclude outliers like the guy who used about 400L of water doing the dishes by hand.
I once measured water and power usage of me doing the dishes by hand, and it was both below what I found online for dishwashers.
If you do 2-stage cleaning (soapy hot and cold clean water), then dishwashers will be better because they don’t. Amount and source of hot water governs if you are more energy efficient. The advantage of dishwashers is that a badly used dishwasher is far more efficient than badly (= wasteful) handwashing, and even efficient handwashing is not much better than dishwashers (though I wouldn’t know how to calculate production and recycling of the dishwasher itself, not even what order of magnitude that is). Which was, as far as I remember, also in the conclusion of the study, unless there has been another one since then.
It’s plausible that handwashing uses less electricity, specially if you let the machine heat-dry the dishes. But water? If you do the comparison against a fully-loaded machine, no way. Modern machines use half the water from machines of 15 years ago, and those were already competitive against handwashing. Best case scenario for handwashing (single water bath) still uses about twice as much water. Dishwasher detergent is stronger and the machine takes longer so it has more contact time, the chemistry heavily favours using less water for the same amount of gunk to dissolve.
In your case, as you already mentioned you only cook once a day and you don’t want to degrade your high end stuff in the machine, it’s reasonable that you won’t generate dishes enough to fill the machine. If you would be using a half-loaded dishwasher then it is plausible that you would use less water handwashing, but it’s still a close call - which is why I sometimes use the machine filled 1/3 without worry.
You did say earlier that you cook once a day, meal for two. When I do that, all dishes for the day take a third of the maximum load on my machine, so I could wash once every three days, therefore averaging like 3 L per day tops? You handwashing every day are spending 6-8L daily which is more than double.
If it is true that you can spend <8L for an arbitrarily large amount of dishes, though, then I guess there must be an amount of dishes that you will outperform a dishwasher. They cannot handle an infinite amount of dirt, unfortunately. If you hand wash every 7 days you will be averaging less than 1L a day which really does sound unbeatable.
Prep ingredients before you cook, and clean as you go. Makes the whole process more focused and more enjoyable. And if you clean as you go, after meal clean up is a breeze.
I’d like to offer a counter point to mise en place. If you are experienced enough, you probably know when the recipe has downtime, and what ingredients are needed when. I prepare what I need until the next time when the cooking becomes passive.
Cleaning as I go would be great, but our two person household electricity usage is already at 4 person household levels, and hot water is electric… so I do that after eating all at once.
Another upside to this is that it ensures you stay focused and don’t wander off and forget that you were cooking when there’s downtime. That’s assuming this is a problem you’re prone to.
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