Gotta agree this is outstanding - I always look for okra on the menu at Greek restaurants
There’s one Mexican restaurant in town. To be fair, they’re pretty good. Except they don’t know how to make chiles relleno. They stuff a pepper, then wrap it in an omelette! :eek: I don’t remember if they dip it in batter. I don’t get them there.
There are several Mexican restaurants in Bellingham (and Ferndale), but Mrs. L.A. says their rellenos have ‘freezer taste’. They obviously make up a batch beforehand and then fry them when they’re ordered.
So if we want good chiles relleno, I have to make them.
Risotto. Easy peasy but So. Much. Stirring. And while you’re doing that you can’t be doing anything ELSE for dinner, nope, the risotto requires the complete attention of one person until it’s done. Splash of stock. Stir stir stir stir stirstirstir. Another splash of stock. Stir stir stir stir stirstirstir. Repeat a million times. Let it sit long enough to go take a pee and hey presto, enjoy your burned mess of apparently uncooked rice! Fuck that shit.
Bread. Really easy, actually, but man is it tedious and time consuming and if you dare get busy or distracted at the wrong time, enjoy your gigantic messy blop of goop all over the place, yay! Plus, so much stickyfinger time, yuck.
I was going to Walt Disney world, and am a bit of a foodie (“Food is an attraction”). Some friends asked if I was gonna go to that Mexican restaurant there (there are three, sorta)- I pointed out: "I live in San Jose. Do you know what we call Mexican food here? Food. "
Try cleaning as you go. My kitchen experience is improved by cooking mise en place, and by cleaning as I’m working. When I finish cooking a meal the kitchen is cleaner than when I started. After we eat, I just have plates, cutlery, and wine glasses to clean.
My gf is my polar opposite. Watching her in the kitchen is exhausting. She is constantly peeling, chopping, flailing about. When she is finished it looks like vandals attacked the kitchen. But she is a good cook.
Pizzelles
I inherited my great-grandmother’s pizzelle iron and am tasked every Christmas with making them for the family.
Simple to make, you stir up the batter, heat up the iron on the stove, grease the iron, spoon some batter in, and flip the iron over to keep it evenly heated. The pain in the butt part is repeating it 40 times, without being able to leave the cooking unattended for more than 30 seconds.
If you don’t want the peels, it’s a lot easier to remove them after the potatoes have been boiled. Quarter the potatoes, boil them, and the peels can be removed easily without a peeler.
I would expand on that – anything fried.
We tried some fried dishes when we were first married. They are easy. The food tastes good. And you end up with droplets of oil splattered all over the kitchen, and a giant container of slightly-used oil that will just oxidize if you don’t use it again soon.
So you have to either fry all the time or never, or it’s too much of a pain. We chose never. I buy fried foods at restaurants. (french fries, fried chicken, fried fish, fried calimari…)
A little off topic, but maybe this is a good place to ask – how the heck to you cook and layer the pasta? Because I find that step really hard and fussy, trying to handle hot fragile sheets of pasta precisely.
Put them in a pot with water, some dill, and a little butter. Cook until they just turn from bright green to dull green – but don’t over-cook, or they get all soggy and icky. Strain, and dress with more butter and some lemon juice. Fabulous!
I’ll eat the over-cooked green beans with bacon and onions thing, but that’s just okay, it’s not the delight that properly cooked green beans are. 
Seconded.
I happen to like mashed potatoes with skins more than the ones without, but I agree they are basically different dishes. When I want to use peeled cooked potatoes, I par-boil them until just soft (or finish cooking them, depending on the recipe) and THEN peel them. I just grab the peels with my fingers and remove them. They come right off, even around the eyes, taking very little potato flesh with them.
People are complaining about cutting green beans???
Hey, I grow green beans. A lot of work there. Snapping the beans is nothing at all. (And you do snap them, never cut.)
Really I was most curious about the lack of pork, be it bacon, ham hocks, ham, pancetta, bacon grease, etc… That seems to be more or less the default around here. Cooking wise, there are multiple ways to do it- I actually prefer them not cooked to death, except in certain preparations like this.
I use no-boil noodles. But if you prefer not to use those, then just as a hunch I’d suggest finding a pair of tongs that have extra-wide, extra-flat jaws. Or two pair of tongs at once, and some skillful two-tong manipulation. 
Did you forget a zero or are you only making single servings?
I made empanadas from scratch last week. Preparing the ingredients and even making the dough was super easy; just chuck the ingredients in the food processor and pulse until the dough comes together/the filling is the proper consistency. The pain in the ass was the assembly.
Same with wonton, egg rolls, tortellini, etc.
My cooking fats of preference are butter, olive oil, or peanut oil, depending on what I am cooking. (Or goose fat, but I know that’s unusual.) That’s partly because I’m not from the south, and partly because I’m a Jew, and partly because (for reasons having nothing to do with kosher) my husband and daughter have stopped eating pork.
But I do think that almost everything that tastes good with pork fat tastes even better if you use butter, instead.
I don’t know… I’m a big butter fan, but some things are better with one or the other in my opinion.
One thing- if you haven’t had potatoes fried in duck fat, you really need to! They’re awesome. Not sure if goose fat would be the same; I don’t think we saved any goose fat when we cooked a goose a few years back.
Potatoes fried in goose fat are awesome! One of the best things about cooking a goose for Christmas is having oodles of goose fat to save for frying.
I made potatoes in goose fat, and all my friends asked “how did you MAKE THIS!?” Yes, it was a hit. I think duck fat would be even better. I have both in the fridge, duck is more strongly flavored than goose. I love goose for popcorn (where I think duck is a little too much) but duck is awesome when you want it. It would be good for a lot of the things pork fat is good for. Oh – and goose fat and duck fat have pretty high smoke points.
Lasagna noodles do not have to be boiled first; just add water or tomato juice to cover the whole shebang, and bake about 15 minutes longer.
Here’s one of my favorite long-simmered string bean preps. That’s not the exact recipe I use, but that’s the basic idea. No need for smoked meats (I tend not to like my vegetable side dishes to be smoky. Perhaps as a main dish, it would be fine). Just some onions, tomatoes, garlic, and whatever strikes your fancy, with a kick of lemon juice and a fresh herb of your choice at the end. That particular recipe has a cooking time of 45 minutes. I tend to go more like an hour and a half, two hours.
… though I think with pouring over enough water for the regular noodles, it might be easy to adversely affect the texture (and the wet-factor if there is such a thing) of everything else in the dish.