Ask your too-stupid-to-be-real cooking questions here.

Cafe Society
161

Rice - whether in a rice cooker or on the stove top, I just follow this ratio:
Jasmine - 1 cup rice to 1 1/2 cups water
Basmati - 1 cup rice to 2 cups water

It doesn’t matter what you use for your “cup” measurement - any small bowl or container will do as long as you use the same for the rice and the water.

Annoying recipes that call for 1/2 a chopped onion, or 1/4 cup, etc. - chop up the whole darn onion and whatever you don’t use, put in a ziploc and freeze indefinitely. Pull it out for omelets, stews, whatever. My eyes are terribly sensitive to onions and it’s so nice to pull out a chunk of frozen onion and toss it in the skillet without having to chop!

I prefer to bake fish uncovered in the oven rather than wrapped in foil because I like the top and edges to get a bit crispy. After baking, I often broil the fish on high for 2 minutes to crisp it.

When baking plain chicken breasts, I prefer to wrap it in a foil pouch or cover the dish with foil - keeps it from drying out. A dash of white wine or lemon juice, or any salad dressing and herbs adds a bit of flavor and moisture. However, if the recipe uses a good amount of liquid / sauce, I don’t worry about covering it.

I’ve also just learned that if you want to use dried beans and didn’t have the foresight to soak them overnight, you can cover them with water, and microwave them for 15 minutes on high in a loosely covered dish! Tried it the other day, worked a treat!

162

If you peel it, whack it in half and wait for an hour or so, it won’t make you tear up when you chop it.

163

We used half a red onion the other day and had the remaining half in a plastic bag in the fridge for 2 days. Yesterday I chopped it up - I use a manual chopper so I don’t have to touch the onion too much and it was still burning so badly I had to walk away twice. And THEN I had my husband finish it for me, it was that painful.

Maybe leaving the onion at room temp for an hour or so would make a difference.?? I’ll give it a try. I’ve even resorted to goggles at times - some relief, but doesn’t completely eliminate the burning and tears. Weird. Even weirder, I was the designated “onion slicer” in my house growing up because I seemed to be immune - never had a problem. Then, I had my first child at 35 and haven’t been able to slice an onion without pain since!

164

I stand corrected.
Supposedly a chemical reaction takes place when the cut and peeled onion is first exposed to air. I often tear up with a fresh onion, but never from one that has previously been cut. Please let us know if cut at room temperature and resting makes a difference. Other wise I am subject to my own sig! :slight_smile:

165

If that doesn’t work, perhaps you could try going in the other direction and throw your onion in the freezer for a half hour or so. At least, I’ve always found that a cold onion is a safe onion.

166

I’ll be darned - I learned something. I would have assumed that you put it in corresponding to the shape of the gadget also. The “cut toward the holes” so that it gets turned a bit inside-out does make sense though. If you put it in so that the inner dome goes into the middle of the cut side, there’s no “reaming” action so it wouldn’t work as well.

Anyone know how well these things work? We don’t own one - we have the standalone dome that has a flat rim around the base, the rim has holes to let juice but not seeds pass through. You have to prop it up on a cup or something then twist and grind the fruit onto it manually. And it tends to slip.

167

I’m pretty sure the dough should be more of a batter consistency so it can be squeezed through. The one time we made spaetzle, it was perhaps thicker than cake batter. I used a food mill, with large holes, and cranked it on through.

168

I have two juicers.

The first is a Zyliss juicer, and it’s GREAT. It has two juicer sizes - one that works for limes & small lemons, the other that works for large lemons and oranges. This baby gets more juice out of a citrus than any other juicer I’ve tried.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s made anymore, because hell if I can find one for sale. I’d buy another in a heartbeat because mine is showing its age.

The second is one like you’re talking about - the hand-held yellow one. We use that one all the time as well, and it works almost as good as the Zyliss one. It’s better for when you just want to juice one or two limes/lemons - it’s fast and a lot easier to clean than the Zyliss. The Zyliss is pulled out for when we need more than a little bit of juice, or if we have larger citrus than will fit in the hand-held yellow one.

So that’s a long way of saying yes, those types of juicers work. Really well, in fact.

169

Does anyone have any instructions/recipes for using a food dehydrator? I got a food dehydrator for Christmas and it came with an instruction book. I followed the instructions for bananas- slice into 3/8" slices, no pre-treatment, put into the dehydrator for 12-16 hours. They came out edible but shriveled looking and much different than the banana chips I’ve bought at the store.

I’d like to use my dehydrator more, but I don’t feel like I can trust the manual. I’m most interested in fruits- bananas and strawberries especially, but if anyone has instructions for vegetables or jerky I’d be happy to hear that too.

170

What kinds of things can you use as a marinade (keeping in mind that I like stuff to taste pretty much like what it is–so hiding the flavor of chicken in a bunch of spicy stuff or whatever wouldn’t be my thing)? When I make chicken on the stove I just put it in a skillet with some chicken broth and cook it for about 7 minutes on each side, and this works great. I’m just thinking the oven method might be slightly less messy/cleanup intensive. Can I use chicken broth as a marinade in the oven?

Also, another stupid question: If I buy meat (fish, chicken, whatever) and put it in the freezer, what’s the best way to thaw it? Do I just put it in the fridge? For how long? Can I take it out in the morning I plan to cook it and let it thaw in the fridge for the rest of the day, or does it need to go overnight?

Thanks again for all this Remedial Cooking help :slight_smile:

171

[QUOTE=Infovore;14656737Also, another stupid question: If I buy meat (fish, chicken, whatever) and put it in the freezer, what’s the best way to thaw it? Do I just put it in the fridge? For how long? Can I take it out in the morning I plan to cook it and let it thaw in the fridge for the rest of the day, or does it need to go overnight?

Thanks again for all this Remedial Cooking help :)[/QUOTE]

Thawing meat in the fride is an excellent, if slow, way to do it. From experience I would suggest putting the meat in the fridge before you go to bed if you’re going to cook it for dinner the next day.

If, however, you forget to do this (as I often do) a quick way of thawing I quite love is to place the meat in a ziploc bag (pushing out as much air as possible), placing it in a large container and put that under the tap with the water just barely running. If you have, say, 3 chicken breasts it’ll take about an hour or so to thaw.

172

To Sam:

Home dehydrated foods seldom look like the stuff you can buy in the store. The booklet that came with your dehydrator will give you the basics. There are a kajillion books available that can also give you the basics, but your foods still won’t look like the stuff you can buy in the store.

Your best bet is to experiment: just dry a test amount of a particular food, and see what the end results are. Taste it plain, rehydrate it, throw it in a soup. You’ll find some foods you really like, and others that you’ll sneak into the garbage can.

Most fruits need to have an acid bath before drying. You can dip them in a lemon juice solution, dissolve a couple of vitamin C tablets in water, or buy a product called “Fruit Fresh.” This is necessary to keep the fruit from darkening to the point where it looks unappetizing. Veggies that dry well are summer squash and celery. I probably use my dehydrator more for celery than anything else. If you have a food processor, slicing acres of celery is no problem!

Make SURE everything is completely DRY before packaging in air-tight containers. Otherwise, you’ll have a nice mold culture for a science project.

If you have kids, this is a wonderful, healthy snack: cut apples and pears into thin slices (1/8 inch) through the “equator.” Don’t worry about the core or seeds. Dip the slices in powdered Jell-o. Lemon and “red” jell-o seems to work best for these fruits. Dry completely, and then snack away! If the skins are too tough, or if you don’t like the core, just discard those as you are eating.

You can make your own jerky with ground beef that will save you a small fortune.
~VOW

173

You can use soy sauce, fruit juices, or chicken broth to add to the chicken packet. I would not cook any chicken that has the skin on for this method as the chicken skin would get slimy from the wet cooking method.
The microwave is the best method for defrosting. The refrigerator takes forever. There may be a small issues with texture and you have to rotate and flip the meat to keep from cooking parts of it, but the convenience of thawing food in minutes rather than hours is worth it.

174

Question: is cold-pressed oil always a bad choice for stir-fry because of its lack of refinement?

And if it’s something large, turn it over at some point. There’s a post on here about someone who cooked a turkey only to realise upon carving that it had still been frozen on the bottom when it went into the oven.

175

I use the “take packaged meat out of freezer before I go to work and leave in empty sink” method of defrosting. Since all my meat is taken out of the store packaging and put into Ziploc bags in meal-sized portions when I get home from the supermarket this works quite well.

At a pinch, if I forget to take something out of the freezer, I’ll put a Ziploc bag in the sink in some tepid water, use the microwave, or cook something from frozen (e.g. a thin sheet of ground beef, which takes minutes to cook in a pan from frozen).

Which brings me to my tip about mince (ground) meat.

Put the meal sized portion of minced meat into a ziploc bag and squish it flat. Then you can freeze it in sheets. Not only does this save space in your freezer, but it is much quicker to defrost. If you flatten chicken breasts or pork chops with a mallet you can do something similar. Just remember to label the meat with the date or store the new meat under or behind the older meat.

176

RE: Thawing meat. Despite all the warnings, you can do it in warm water and not kill anyone. Several different food safety agencies have been testing it lately and declare it to be true.

It works really well and really fast. Once again, our grandmothers were right.

177

Okay, everyone gather around. Get your notebooks out.

I have shared this tip with zillions. And out of those zillions, maybe five or six people have actually done it. Honestly, though, this will SAVE TIME, SAVE MONEY, and even SAVE A FEW CALORIES.

Ready?

Next trip to the grocery store, buy a big bulk package of hamburger. Five pounds or so.

When you get home, spray the crockpot with no-stick spray, dump in the hamburger. Get the blender, throw in some celery and onion, and a cup or so of water. Garlic is nice, a carrot works, too. Blend this to a slurry. Dump the slurry into the crockpot.

Set the pot on “high” and do what you gotta do for the rest of the day.

Each time you go into the kitchen, take a pancake turner and chop up the mass of hamburger. Give it a stir to mix the veggies in there. You are looking for an eventual crumbled meat texture throughout.

When it’s all cooked (6 hours or so), add enough water so you’ve got at least an inch and a half of liquid above the surface of the crumbled meat. Turn off the crockpot and let it cool.

Before you go to bed, push a small plate into the crockpot, so it is submerged completely. Your goal is to get all the liquid fat above the plate, and the meat below it. Put the crockpot liner and the plate still inside all in the refrigerator.

The next day, pry the plate out of the crockpot. You’ll be able to remove most of the grease from the hamburger mix, it will be clinging to the plate. Discard the grease, keep any “jelly” with the meat.

With your pancake turner, cut the mass of hamburger into wedges like a pie. Five pounds of meat should give you at least five wedges.

Now, get out your quart size freezer zipper plastic bags. Label with “Hamburger Mix” and the date. Scoop out each wedge and package individually in the plastic bags. Squeeze out the air.

You can now flatten the hamburger mix inside the bag, so the bag lays completely flat. Find an undisturbed place in your freezer and stack the bags. They are VERY slippery, and you may need to stack them inside a box first, then place the box in the freezer.

After 24 hours, the bags can be separated, and tucked into any place in the freezer where they fit.

Congratulations! You now have wonderful “time savers” in your freezer, good for five meals!

ANY recipe you have that says, “Take a pound of hamburger and brown it…”

No defrosting, no fuss, just cut the plastic bag and throw the slab into the pan. No more will you have a hunk of frozen burger, sizzling in a hot pan, while you scrape sheets of toughened browned meat from the chunk!

What else is this good for? You are only limited by your imagination! Spaghetti sauce, tacos, sloppy joes, beef and gravy, hamburger pizza topping…
~VOW

178

This should be illegal save for people with children.

:slight_smile:

179

In addition to the other answers, there are also two types of stock: brown and white, which has nothing to do with the type of meat. Brown stock simply means that you first roast the bones and veggies before simmering in liquid. White stock means that you just dump the bones and veggies into the water without browning.

180

To carnivorousplant:

The tip will mostly benefit working parents.

You may return to your filet mignon.
~VOW