But noooooooooooo!
They have to be perfect!
No burnt edges!!
No mouthfuls of batter when you bite!
Perfection must be our goal, otherwise what the hell are we doing here???
:ivylass goes screaming off into the night, glad as hell it’s Friday and that her kids don’t want pancakes this weekend:
Pickle juice. A teaspoon of dill if you like your tuna spicy, sweet juice for sweeter tuna.
Here! Here! 
I love food threads too.
I wouldn’t exctly call what I do a recipe per sey, as I just gather together the ingredience ans dump them in a pot and simmer.
It’s really no more complicated than chilli.
If you want the ingredience list, Email me. Same name at Yahoo. Just be sure you mention the SDMB on the header or I’ll think you’re just junk mail and delete it without reading.
If anyone is interested in starting a recipe exchange, I’ll start the thread. I’m sure some of us would love to ask for recipes or advise. There’s just too many experienced cooks here to waste the resources.
Anyone got a recipe for “Fudge overnights”? i
The Secret of Biscuits:
Preheat oven to 450F. You can’t bake biscuits if the oven isn’t already hot. Ideally, let it get up to heat at least 5 minutes before putting in the biscuits.
2 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tb suger, 3 tsp baking powder. Mix together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder.
Get 1/4 cup of butter from the refridgerator. This is half a stick. You can use up to a full stick if you want, but that always seems excessive…a whole stick of butter? But remember, your butter has to be cold and hard. You cannot make biscuits with soft butter. It must be ice cold. It doesn’t have to be frozen, but if your fridge isn’t very cold you might try popping the butter in the freezer for 20-30 minutes.
I repeat: the butter must be ice cold. If the butter is not cold you won’t make light fluffy biscuits. If the butter is cold it will stay in little pellets when you cut it into the flour. When the biscuits bake the little pellets melt, creating the layers and flakyness of the biscuit. If the butter is warm, it will incorporate into the flour, and you’ll have a homogenous hockey puck.
Cut the butter into the biscuits, until the butter crumbs are pea-sized. See, if the butter wasn’t cold it would just mush into the flour, and you couldn’t have pea-sized butter crumbs. Did I mention that you have to use cold butter?
Add 3/4 to 1 cup of milk depending on how moist you want the dough. The exact amount isn’t that critical. Turn out the dough and knead 10 times on a floured surface. Flatten the dough into a sheet, being careful not to knead the dough much more. If you knead the dough too much, you’ll develop the gluten from the flour, and the biscuits will be tough. I just cut the sheet up into squares, making round biscuits always seemed silly to me. But remember, you can’t take too long and let the dough warm up, or the butter will melt and then you’re screwed.
Bake for ~10-12 minutes. But you CANNOT rely on a timer. You have to watch the biscuits and see when they’re browned.
And there you have it. Perfect biscuits. Oh, if you want to make buttermilk biscuits you should use 2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp baking powder, since the buttermilk is acidic and 1 cup to 5/4 cups buttermilk instead of the milk, since buttermilk is thicker.
Now, class, it’s time for the quiz. The most important secret to making biscuits is the temperature of the butter. The butter should be what temperature?:
A. Melted
B. Softened
C. Room Temperature
D. Cold
E. None of the Above
The answer is D, Cold. Class dismissed.
Rice-I cannot make rice. I have tried adding rice to boiling water and letting it sit off the heat for 20 minutes, I have tried adding the rice to cold water then bringing it to a boil. I have tried my rice cooker. I have tried converted rice. I have even (don’t kill me) tried minute rice in the pot or in the microwave. No matter what I do I get mushy sticky globs that are still crunchy on the inside (OTOH-I do OK when the rice is supposed to be “saucy”-my risotto is great!)
P.S. I also need advice on sauteeing mushrooms without getting mushroom soup-no matter what I do they see me and start releasing tons of fluid into the pan so that I have to physically remove and dry them before adding other ingredients. Hmm-now that I read this I realize I may be scaring those poor mushrooms into loss of bladder control!
See? I knew they were hiding something…
Thanks!!
Mouthfuls of BATTER?
???
I think maybe your batter is a little too thick.
Of course the edges can’t be allowed to burn, but as long as you make sure they’re dry before you remove the flapjacks from the pan, uncooked batter in the interior shouldn’t be an issue.
But maybe you should stick with waffles…
[sub]Mouthfuls of batter…mouthfuls of batter…mouthfuls…[/sub]
Grandma’s tuna secret: Add a small pinch of sugar.
ivylass: Umm, might life be nicer if you made waffles instead? 
I have always had good luck with bread machines, but the one I have now is awful. I cannot make good (cooked, e.g.) bread in it.
Hmmm… I’m still thinking about the ‘roasted beer’ …
Anyway, I can make TurDucken, souffles, brioche and my turkey is never dry. I studied with Nathalie Dupre and had a small cake sculpting/catering business but I CANNOT make biscuits.
Not being Southern, I figure there is a gene missing but I have tried and tried and I am hoping to catch ‘Good Eats’ on this mystery food.
Rice. I cannot consistantly make good rice. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it comes out too hard and sometimes it’s a gooey mess. This is especially galling and pathetic since I am Puerto Rican and rice is the cornerstone of all good Puerto Rican meals.
True story-- my girlfriend took her kids to a fast food restaurant at about 5 one day. At ten her youngest asked her “When are we having dinner?”
“What do you think we ate at McDonalds?” She answered.
“That wasn’t dinner.” He said indignantly, “Where’s the rice? Where’s the beans?”
I could probably replace all the tile in my shower with all the hard-burned grilled cheese sandwiches I have made in the past couple of months. My fiancee asks me why i find it so difficult to make the stuff. “It’s easy,” she says, “just keep a watch on it.” I do watch it, I watch as it flash-burns to a carbon wafer in mere nanoseconds! Now my apartment smells like torched bread, and it’s been three days. It’s giving me a headache…
I can bake boneless chicken, make pizza from scratch, and sorta make sweet & sour chicken (by trail and error), but god help me, why can’t I make the damned grilled cheese? :mad:
I don’t know if flan qualifies as basic, but I can’t make it.
I took flan to work last summer, but scalded the milk
& the entire thing tasted burnt.
Some master cooks I know recommend buying a pancake griddle with a thermostat that you can set. That makes cooking pancakes a lot easier & the temperature of the griddle will be more even.
For you folks having trouble making grilled cheese sandwiches-- how high are you turning your stove? If it’s too high, you’ll get cheese-stuffed hockey pucks.
My recipe: Liberally butter two slices of bread on both sides. Turn on stove to low-medium heat (at about 4 on a 1-10 heat scale). Put small pat of butter in pan, and once it’s melted, put your bread in. Let them turn golden brown. Put cheese slices atop one of the bread slices. Flip the other slice of bread up and place it browned-side up atop the cheese. Let that fry for a minute more, until the cheese is melted.
Mmmmm.
I do grilled cheese exactly opposite from you, AudreyK .
Heat an electric griddle up to 450. Put a thin patina of butter on one side of every slice of bread. Put half of the bread on the griddle, butter side down. Imediately put cheese on top, then put the rest of the bread on top of that, butter side up. When the butter on the top pieces has melted, flip. Wait a couple minutes, then check the undersides - remove when the color matches the top.
Well, that’s not totally opposite… you just add less butter and add the cheese sooner. 
Yup, I’m with you on the gravy. Mine always tastes like watered down broth.
And coffee. I don’t drink it but occasionally I’ll make it for guests. They’ve requested that I not make it any more.
Napalm. It always sticks to the pot.
Meatloaf. My attempts have gotten better, but the resulting dish has been referred to as “meat glop–best served with an ice cream scoop”!
For special occasions, my mom makes this seafood quiche that is maddeningly good. Scallops and shrimp and oysters paired with the most caloric concoction of cheese and whatever else you put in quiche, plus some sort of tomato paste and anise… DAMN.
Anyways, buying the ingredients is the only part that requires any real effort on her behalf, and she can churn out like six quiches in an afternoon. So why do I always fumble this seemingly simple recipe?!
…probably because if I ever mastered it, I’d just eat seafood quiche for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack, and soon become a fatty to end all fatties. BLORP
This is ABSOLUTELY the best way to hard cook eggs! A variation works well for corn on the cob: bring water to a boil. Add shucked ears of corn. Make sure water covers the ears. Cover the pot. Turn off the fire. Set timer for 15 minutes. Remove ears immediately when timer buzzes. Eat and enjoy!
I can’t make a pie crust to save my life.