Use herbs and spices. Use different spices. I get tired of recipes that use the same 4 flavors over and over, so I look for recipes that use something else. Under-used spices I love: cardamon, rue, sumac. Under-used spices that I can only fit in certain recipes: caraway, mace, fennel seeds.
Get spice mixes for pre-balanced flavors, like Herbs de Provence, Garam masala or Harrissa paste (you can make this yourself, but you should try a few versions to figure out what you’re shooting for).
Maybe these are al old hat to you, but here are some standard examples:
add tarragon to tuna/chicken salad
add cardamon and nutmeg to cooked oatmeal and omit cinnamon
Interesting, never heard of rue. Translated it to German and never heard of Weinraute either :D I’ll have a look at the store the next time. And I’ll also give sumac a try.
Caraway is very commonly used in Germany, but my South African wife does not like it, so I very rarely use it.
I must say I’m a bit lazy with herbs, and I just buy “italian herb mix”.
For other spices, I always have chili (we love hot), pepper, salt, tumeric, all-spice, one hot curry madras mix, and nutmeg.
Depending on the recipe, I also have a lot of different dried chilies, and usually some standard fresh ones (jalapeños and habaneros)
One thing I’d like to recommend you: toasted ground coriander seeds. Toast them carefully over low heat until they release oil, grind in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle. Use for most meat dishes, but also goes into some salads. Widely used in South Africa, especially in their traditional Boerewors, which is why I stock it.
Oh, I bought it as a live plant. We’ve had it in the ground for several years now. Even when the rosemary bush died in the cold, the rue lived on. Our thai hot pepper plant is in a pot and has to come in before it frosts. Of course we always have to buy new basil and cilantro seedlings each year. You can’t stop mint from coming back – same goes for perilla. Anyway, sample links to seeds: earthcareseeds and/or seedneeds.
I’ve had a cactus die from lack of water, my wife is the green thumb person and only grows chili plants ;) we only have a balcony, so not that much space. According to Wikipedia, rue is European, so I still have hopes of seeing it at the store.
First, I want to make sure we’re talking about sumac and not poison sumac. I originally got it as garnish for my hummus and Baba ghanoush. It works well in lots of Mediterranean recipes. For me, it seems to lose potency when cooked too long, so I generally add it towards the end.
P.S. I make hummus from 1/2 pound dry garbanzo beans cooked for a long, long time. Add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda near the end to ensure soft, mushy beans. Maybe 15-20 minutes of extra cooking after that, then drain off excess water and let cool. The beans shouldn’t be dry, of course, but not soupy, either. There are vegan recipes that use that leftover liquid, so consider saving it.
In a food processor, add several cloves of garlic, about 3 tablespoons tahini, and a bit of salt (maybe 1/2 teaspoon or less). Add somewhat cooled beans, 1/2 teaspoon sumac, and about 1-2 small lemon of zest and juice OR 1/2 -1 large lemon. You can save some juice to the side for correcting flavor later. Optionally add pine nuts or other flavor agents, like roasted red peppers or parsley. I diverge from the standard hummus by adding a glug of olive oil directly into the mix as well as using it as a topping, so add a couple tablespoons in if you so desire. Buzz repeatedly, scraping down the sides as needed until you have a creamy mix. Correct seasoning as desired, then put in a bowl, create a swirling depression in the middle and sprinkle with sumac, then drizzle with olive oil. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate. A good olive oil may make it stiffen up in the refrigerator, so if you are going to eat it cold and added oil to the blend, you may want to make it with extra liquid.
My baba ghanous is almost the same recipe, but with roasted eggplant instead of beans, and extra tahini when the eggplants are over-mature, which means darker, more bitter seeds (and which the extra tahinin cuts).
Add MSG. Another meaning of MSG besides Monosodium glutamate is “Makes Stuff Good”, because besides normal salt and fat, it’s another great flavor enhancer for anything savory. And no, it almost certainly doesn’t give you headaches, that was racist bullshit and has long since been disproven.
Baking soda and the Maillard reaction are friends. You know how they tell you, you can’t caramelize onions in 5 minutes? With baking soda, you can. Add a knife’s tip and bam. Just be careful, it also makes them burn far more easily. This also works with meat, where the meat keeps water better and browns more beautifully. One of my favorite uses is for roasting cauliflower, which gets a deeper brown and tastes so much better in cauli mash.
Sodium Citrate for cheese sauce. You want creamy cheese sauce? Like for Nachos? Add a teaspoon of sodium citrate to your cheese when melting, and it will all combine without any of the fat separating. It’s best for dips, but it can be used for something like mac & cheese in a pinch, but you’ll get better results there if you make a proper roux.
I don’t have any tips that most don’t already know. I cook with simple ingredients. I save and freeze a bit of stock and cook with stock where I can. It adds a bit of depth that oil/butter doesn’t.
For my stock, I’ll save vegetable scraps and freeze it until I have enough. Then boil it down for a few hours. Vegetable is fun to play with. You can add different flavors, and different elements depending on the vegetables you use. Mushrooms will have a unique umami.
Same with seafood stock, I’ll save shrimp shells and fish heads and boil (simmer?) it down. Chicken stock I just boil the bones down after I roast a chicken. For beef, same thing, I’ll roast the bones for more flavor and boil it down. Also I’ll add carrots and celery to the boil for more flavor.
In a similar thought, I love to use coconut oil when cooking when I want a sweeter taste. And finishing a dish with some sesame oil can add a really good flavor. (Sometimes I’ll lightly toss noodles in sesame oil after they’re cooked, or do the same with roasted veggies)
Great ideas with stock. Alas, I don’t have enough leftovers for it as I tend to use everything (and for meat, I’m weird and don’t like bones or anything, so it’s always ground or filet. Only sometimes when beef shanks are on sale I eat leftovers and cook them for my wife, but that doesn’t leave many bones)
edits:
And finishing a dish with some sesame oil can add a really good flavor
Toasted sesame oil. I use it on pretty much anything somewhat Asian :D
For the stock, when you roast something, chicken or whatever, if you have space in the oven add another pan and roast the bones or vegetables, careful not burn them, you keep for stock before boiling them, you get deeper flavour and a nice colour.
For #3 and for people that might not have sodium citrate handy, adding a slice of American cheese to cheese sauces will do the same thing as there’s plenty of sodium citrate in there to go around.
I’m gonna add another vote to look into some cookbooks. One that comes to mind is called Company by Amy Thielan. It’s specifically about cooking for large groups. Most of the recipes are for large groups though (8-12), so you may end up needing to half the recipes, but the best thing about the book is the prose. She writes a lot about strategies and the planning that goes into cooking for a group. Lots of insights into the ingredients to keep on hand, the equipment to use, and recipes that can be made ahead or are best at room temp to make the whole process less stressful. Getting three hot dishes out at the same time is tough on 4 burners. But a meal with a room temp veggie side, and a cold appetizer, means the attention can be given to the main event. I’m sure there are other books addressing all this, but Amy’s just released and I’ve been cooking from it and loving the shit out of it. I highly recommend it. If you’re hesitant to purchase, maybe check a library to see if they have a copy?
I’m approaching this as a “stupid brain won’t do what I want” situation as I used to eat the double portion also. My work around was to cook out of sync to what I ate. This meant I didn’t need to worry about what I was eating “now” because everything I cooked was for later. So as an example, I would cook some chilli, but that day I would be eating some curry that was already sitting in the fridge. If you are wondering how to start the cycle, the simplest solution to avoid your cravings messing it up is to cook and then order takeout somewhere so you don’t eat it any of it.
It could be that the improvising is getting in the way. Does this mean you don’t know what to cook until you do?
find a professional cook book. these books teach you how to calculate recipes and scale them (even in relation to whether something is a side dish or mains, they also include tips on calculating waste/trimmings and what to do with them). check your local library. i think there is a starter course from the culinary institute of America, in German there is “der junge Koch”
I have found that there are different skills you need to learn if you’re going to make food for 1-2 people vs 4 people or 6+. You’ll find that you can’t simply scale up every recipe you have and that some recipes would require a commercial kitchen to achieve for larger groups. The best you can do is know your kitchen and equipment and its limitations. For example, if I make crab cakes, I need a pan to fry them up in. My pan only fits 4 cakes and you need 2 per person. So what is the solution if I’m cooking for 4 people? You can add another pan if you have one and have another burner open or you can set the oven to a low temp to keep the first batch warm while you cook the second batch. Some items I will cook in the oven instead on the stove if I’m cooking for more people, but then you need to make sure you’re not using the oven for something else. Aside from that, lots of things scale up well. I’m actually living temporarily with my parents and will scale up certain dishes simply by doubling the amount. If I make pesto with chicken, I have a large cast iron pan that I cram 4 chicken breast halves into and then add pasta to a pot in twice the quantity. Then of course there are large scale meals. I’m taking 6+. I usually try to utilize an outdoor grill in this case and make lots of sides ahead of time that can be served cold or warmed up. I hosted Thanksgiving once and I had to make a planner for the meal to make sure I had all the pots and pans I needed at the right time. Don’t know how people do that every year, but it was fun to do once and I learned a lot. I had to cut dishes out because I only had so much oven space or burners or dishes to put them in. In the end, you’ll learn with practice.
I understand where your coming from. If you are used to cooking “by the seat of your pants” for one scaling to a group is more complex than just increasing the amounts.
A couple things that can trip you up:
Prep: Bigger ingredient amounts mean you probably should prep them before starting. E.g I can peel and dice one potato in the time it takes water to come to a boil. 6 potatoes, not so much. Do a mise en place.
Seasoning: taste more often and consider aiming for a more “average” palette. E.g I like my food with very low salt but more pepper, but I don’t do this when cooking for others.
Pans: larger sizes mean you might have to do some steps in batches (browning) or use two pans where you could have used a single pan for one (e.g. split the pan and brown meat at the same time as cooking onions). Create pans/trays to hold the parts of the meal that are partially cooked. When making a lot of something, a little prep and organization makes things go smoothly since you might be repeating the same task several times, so if that task is a little quicker, you get a big benefit. Whereas you might not want the extra prep pans to wash when cooking for one, when cooking for more the better organization actually makes it go quicker.
You still can cook by taste/eye/instinct for the ingredients and amounts. It’s just that planning and organization becomes more important.
I’ve been vegetarian for 22 years or so now, and the recent uptick in vegan food reminds me of the early years of being vegetarian. When I first started there were very few options to eat out where I lived (more rural area didn’t help) and not even a lot of good grocery options. Eventually places started offering in house attempts at vegetarian mains, which led to wildly variable quality, and eventually we saw some standardization across restaurants. It’s rare now to get a vegetarian dish at a restaurant that is terrible.
The article mentions mass market vegan butter being pursued, which makes me hopeful that restaurants will start introducing more vegan meals, and upping their game on that front. The more options for people the better, and as much as the article romanticizes the boutique shops with their in house versions, that isn’t achievable for most restaurants who would otherwise tuck one or two options into their menu.
Over the past five or so years, I’ve watched the vegetarian frozen food section at my supermarket expand from one little freezer door with some Annies meals and Bocca burgers to five or six sections carrying even generic store-brand vegetarian and vegan meals. I don’t often buy prepared food but I like walking by to see what they have. Same with milk options - it went from a shelf with either soy or almond to a full section of different nut milks and flavors.
Some of the wildest changes to me have been at festivals and events. It used to be that you got french fries or onion rings or popcorn and that was about it. Then they started making efforts, as misguided as they could be, like just slapping steamed veggies on a sub roll and calling it done, or serving pasta and plain tomato sauce. Now I go to festivals and there’s usually at least one really good vegetarian option at every stand, if not an entire stand serving just vegan and vegetarian options. I look forward to seeing what unique choices there will be rather than trying to eat ahead of time so I don’t have to worry about it.
It depends if you can get it where you are, but Flora plant butter is really good, I’ve used it for cooking and just as a spread and seems to work well.
Read the article - that’s really not the case anymore. My wife is a baker, and she makes Vegan deserts all the time, I can tell you first hand that when done well, Vegan deserts are every bit as delicious as “normal” ones
I would say it depends on what you are making. Some home vegan baked goods are a fair bit of extra effort to get just right. But honestly, things like croissants are always a pain, which is why I eat them when I got out, versus muffins which I make at home.
Some of my household is vegan, and it’s amazing how much things have changed in the last 5-10 years. It’s no longer a downgrade for the rest of us when we cook/bake vegan stuff. Although I still think that the best vegan meals are from cuisines that inherently embrace veganism/vegetarianism.
Definitely, instead of a pretend burger or chicken. I get why some people do it, and we do it a home quite a bit with pretend mince etc. I always feel a bit of a cheat though and am trying and steer my wife away from that.
Not vegan myself, but I think the move away from mock-meat and mock-dairy opens up more interesting food opportunities. Vegan food is way better when it’s not trying to cater to non-vegan palates.
Sesame oil in ramen definitely takes it to the next level. Another fun addition is liquid dashi concentrate, which lends a nice deep umami flavor.
The other umami adder that’s worth playing with is fish sauce. I find that as it cooks it loses its aroma, making it easy to use in a wide variety of recipes.
Please elaborate. I have a vegetarian here and have not found a vegan dashi. The best I can do is use kombu in my ramen/Asian/miso-based soups (but not in Euro-centric soups, like Senate Bean Soup or Cauliflower-Potato). I’ve got a decent vegan Worcestershire sauce, and would love a link for a good vegan dashi base to add to my cooking toolkit.
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