You don’t need to soak em.
beans + tomato paste + mixed veggies + meat + misc. (kale, onions, cheese, whatever i’m in the mood for) is what i have for most meals (when i don’t feel like having something fancier). Lasts me about a work week of lunches/dinners and it’s $15 tops for everything.
That’s all you really gotta do, just throw a bunch of food stuff in a pot and add spices and there you made a meal!
yeah I did that from 19 - 22 almost every day and now I hate cooking
my first adult recipe that I memorized was a tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes
the recipe is literally 1. chop up tomatoes 2. oil + garlic in medium-high heat pan for a bit 3. throw tomatoes in pan 4. wait for tomatoes to become sauce (~20-30 minutes)
and then boil your pasta and you’re good to go!
heck you can even just use a can of whole tomatoes, whole garlic cloves or an onion, a lot of butter (like 5 tbsp,) 30 mins on medium with a potato masher and yr delicious. doesn’t get easier than that
The first sorta complicated pasta recipe i learned was aglio e olio, which is really only tricky cos you have to pay attention with it. it’s really, really super great, though. the girlfriend asks me to make it all of the time. finishing any pasta properly is fun to learn how to do and really makes a difference!
aglio e olio is a spaghetti with a sauce consisting of finely chopped or minced garlic and red pepper flakes cooked really gently in EVOO until it’s only just starting to brown, at which point you toss your cooked spaghetti right in the pan, add a quarter cup of the water the pasta was cooked in, crank the heat and start tossing and stirring it until its smooth. add chopped parsley, s&p, and goat cheese if yr feeling frisky. the best thing ever.
wow that sounds amazing! and it looks pretty easy too – I’m definitely going to try that out asap
but the point I was going to make before i got all self-absorbed is that all you need to do is find a recipe that you can reliably recreate easily, and then experiment with it a little using different ingredients or techniques or whatever and YOU’RE A CHEF NOW
my tomato sauce recipe is fractionally more complex but still dead simple
Use canned peeled tomatoes, preferably those fancy roma tomatoes, and you’ll probably have to taste test a bunch of different brands till you find a kind you like.
Bring a pot of water with salt in it to a boil. heat up some olive oil in a sauce pan (medium high heat), mince some garlic, toss in minced garlic and stir it around until it’s aromatic (about 15 seconds) but not browned or burnt or anything like that. Deglaze the pan with some red wine (usual cooking with wine rules apply: it should be drinkable but not expensive).
Add the can of tomatoes, turn heat to low and let it cook while breaking up the tomato chunks with whatever you’re using to stir the sauce. Make the pasta now while the tomato sauce is cooking. once the pasta is done, reserve a half cup of pasta water, the sauce should have reduced a bit and generally appear saucy. Add that pasta water to the sauce. Take it off the heat and wait for it to cool down enough that you can touch it without burning yourself. Take a handful of salt and gradually add it to the sauce while constantly tasting. Eventually it will taste like the best sauce you’ve ever had. Don’t put any more salt in. Add in some basil by tearing up the leaves over the sauce and stirring them in.
On that note, real fettuccine alfredo is stupidly simple to make and way better than american restaurant alfredo. Make fettuccine, reserve pasta water, set the pot you used to make pasta to low heat and add a 1/2 cup of butter (chopped up into smaller pieces) put the pasta back into this pot and start incorporating in a 1/3 cup of parmesan. Add in some pasta water whenever it gets too thick. Once all the cheese is in and evenly distributed and like a sauce, you’re done.
I generally like pasta as a “first dinner recipe” because it’s filling, tastes good, and uses ingredients that aren’t difficult to come by – all of this makes pasta super easy to learn and it’s great to practice and experiment with
there’s also the added benefit of being meat-optional, meaning that if you’re not confident in your meat preparation techniques you can still make a pretty great and satisfying dish without the risk of accidentally food poisoning yourself, and adding meat to a pasta dish is usually nothing more than “cook meat separately, throw in sauce” if you want to be super safe
because they can be really simple, pasta dishes are a great way to see yourself “progress” as a chef! you can do the exact same recipe and change one thing, see if it makes the dish better (or even changes it at all), and try it again
the cool thing about @la_ciel’s recipe is that it’s the simplest pasta recipe you could make outside of just boiling spaghetti and eating it (don’t do that), and so you can start from there and get more and more complex with it
half a cup always seems like so much! i never go for that much in a tomato sauce. it is what all the recipes and italian folks say though.
is this the pasta thread now? HEY SEVEN you wanna 20 minute from scratch mac and cheese recipe
the water’s so glutinous that it basically thickens up the sauce more than it thins a sauce out.
well, yeah, i know that’s how it’s supposed to work. maybe i just cook pasta w/ too much water sometimes
STOVETOP MAC AND CHEESE in no time::::
you can bluebox it all you want but this shit is the real deal. mostly made with stuff people have around the house anyways. hope you like dairy. This sounds really complicated but it’s exciting and it’s really child’s play after a couple tries. It keeps you busy, it will make you a better cook.
ok so yr making a bechamel sauce, which is basically milk that’s thickened with a roux (fat+flour cooked together.) This usually gets made in big batches and takes some time, but enough for one person + leftovers can come together in like 15 minutes.
YOUR BASIC RATIO IS 1tbsp butter : 1tbsp flour : 3/4 cup cold milk = bechamel. measure it all out beforehand!
So while yr pasta water is heating up, get a small pot or saucepan and melt a tablespoon of butter in it on medium heat. while that’s happening, pick an aromatic - garlic, onion (sorry) or shallot - and throw some minced up into the butter to cook for a minute. it should start to smell great already. now add your spices - you can add whatever you like, but i like black pepper, a bit of dried oregano, a pinch of cayenne and nutmeg. the nutmeg is very important.
Next, throw in a tablespoon of flour and stir it up vigorously with a wooden spoon. it should come together thick and brown and kinda froth and bubble. if it just balls up it means you added a bit too much, but that’s not a big deal. A large part of cooking is dealing with imprecision. anyway, let that go for 30 seconds or so in the pan until it smells really nice and nutty, and then the fun part - add about half your milk to the roux and start whisking it hard. don’t stop. pretty quickly as the whole thing heats back up it will start to thicken - at that point add the rest of your milk and keep going with the whisking. turn the heat up a bit if you’re impatient. your mac should be cooking now, by the way.
As you whisk, the sauce will thicken back up just a bit as it comes to a simmer. when that happens, you can ease up. It shouldn’t be too thick, just enough to coat the back of a spoon. Turn the heat off. add a bunch of salt, a bit of mustard if you have some, and then add your cheese in 3 handfuls, stirring it in gentle. it will be the bestest cheesy thing you ever smelled. if it isn’t, more cheese and a bit more salt!
dump this shit, er, awesome sauce onto your cooked macaroni and stir it up until you really just want to eat all of it. This stuff should be illegal.
Massive agreement over here. Definitely a good thing to find your cooking legs with.
@seven, I think the biggest hurdle in learning to cook is not being scared of it. It’s so easy to think of it as some sort of arcane magic that, if slightly fumbled, will go terribly, terribly wrong, wasting hours of time and $20 of ingredients, leaving you starving and unloved. Nope! It just won’t taste quite as awesome as it could have, but it will still probably be okay. Seriously, as long as you even vaguely follow the directions in almost any recipe, what you produce will come out quite edible, likely delicious.
Once you’ve cooked a few different recipes, you’ll start to feel a lot more comfortable with the process, then you can branch out to more and more involved stuff as desired (not that it will necessarily taste better to you).
I don’t know if it will work for you, but learning a little bit about food chemistry also made me more comfortable with cooking (although I was already pretty comfortable with it, so YMMV). Alton Brown’s Good Eats does a nice job of mixing simple food chemistry with very good recipes: might help take the feat out and replace it with a sense of “Oh. So that’s what’s going on.” If you love this idea, Harold McGee’s book On Food and Cooking is excellent, but rather dense, long, and lacks direct recipes. Something for your long-term future if you like Alton Brown, maybe?
[Sidenote: I think it’s kind of hard to find free episodes of Good Eats online, but I’d recommend finding a way to start at the first few episodes. The first season especially focuses on basic dishes.]
Concrete Suggestions:
Seriously, you’ll be fine. All you have to fear is fear itself.
We maybe have moved past beans but I want to shout out to red beans for being healthy +tasty
We can move back to beans i love beans i’m eating beans right now
Seven can make red beans and rice and then Toups can show up and yell about Louisiana or whatever
it felt really nice waking up and seeing all these replies. <3 u all
i am really busy today but i am gonna try to respond to everything when i get the chance
Do you have a Trader Joe’s nearby?
I’ve been just subsisting on their brown rice medley, frozen teriyaki chicken (5 mins microwavable and it’s legitimately good chicken), chopped tomato, and spring greens mix.
Do you know how to make rice? You have a pot, you can make rice.
I been all about bean pies lately. I use red beans instead of navy but it’s a fine mix of protein and starch that works beautifully pureed and poured into a pastry crush any which way.
taking inventory today. tomorrow i will attempt my first food prototype.
the first project will be…
eggs.
it’ll just be eggs.
it is the simplest thing i could possibly think of. i struggle to visualize myself in front of a stove that isn’t catching fire. so, uh. wish me luck.
and thank you for all the recipes in this thread! i’ll be trying a bunch of them over the next few days.
it sounds like my shopping list right now is:
@AmishChipmunk thanks for the list of useful implements! this is helpful for me not forgetting stuff, which i’m really good at.
bug, stop deleting your posts! i like reading them