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Well,
I make pizzas or generally get one for 50 cents from a discount shop just as a base and add ham, egg, cheese. anything goes. It's really not a junk plate despite it being overrated. like "you can't cook, you make pizzas"
YES.

@skybrook
Oh no… even Octavia is embarrased by me. That's sad, man.

@skybrook

@ToastedTruffles

Bread's a very forgiving kind of recipe, so it almost always turns out well.

I… think… that… depends on your latitude. In colder climates, it's just impossible to get the yeast to rise well. My bread usually comes out tasting like vinegary flour paste, rock hard on the outside, weak on the inside. And it never holds up to being buttered or used in a sandwich.

Oh there's also the fact that I only have the cheap bread flour to work with.

I actually bought a heating mat recently (for sprouting seeds lol) I've been meaning to try it out to see if I can get a better rise in the dough.

If yeast works slowly, then just give it more time to rise. Overnight is plenty. There also might be an issue with using too much yeast, or the yeast not having enough life in it. I've seen videos from a YT channel called the Life of Boris, and I think he did some yeast fermentation by putting the yeast/dough container inside a larger container of warm water to help keep the temp up. Or use baking powder to get a rising effect in your bread.

Are you remembering to add some sort of oil to your bread? Something like olive oil for pizza dough, or shortening or lard for other kinds of bread. If you want a better internal structure, also consider adding a beaten egg or replacing some of the liquid with milk.

Depending on the humidity and other variables, the correct ratio of water and flour is going to be different. Start with your liquid components and then gradually add your solid components to it.

I'd emphasize more frequent, smaller-scale experiments rather than trying to find the "perfect" recipe and making a large loaf of that bread. Best to learn what all the kinds of ingredients do to the bread so that you can mix and match to get the kind of bread dough you want. If you have a smaller loaf, it's also easier to make it disappear with a few mediocre-but-serviceable peanut butter sandwiches. If the bread is really tough and dry, then putting it into a good soup makes it palatable.

I'm just using the normal "all-purpose flour". I hear that the US has to use special bread flour because their normal all-purpose flour is much lower quality than the all-purpose flour that's available in Canada. That's what my cookbook says, at least.

@Soft Lava

@skybrook

I didn't know borscht was supposed to be from chicken stock

It's cheeper

Making marinara is surprisingly easy, if you start with tomato sauce. It's a lot cheaper and tastier than buying a prepared sauce, and it keeps a long time. You just dump a bunch of garlic, onion and oregano, some chili powder and maybe thyme into it, and leave it on the lowest heat you can, stirring every hour or so. If I had a crock pot, it'd probably be even easier. I also like adding turmeric and tarragon myself, but I don't think that's traditional.

@ToastedTruffles

Bread's a very forgiving kind of recipe, so it almost always turns out well.

I… think… that… depends on your latitude. In colder climates, it's just impossible to get the yeast to rise well. My bread usually comes out tasting like vinegary flour paste, rock hard on the outside, weak on the inside. And it never holds up to being buttered or used in a sandwich.

Oh there's also the fact that I only have the cheap bread flour to work with.

I actually bought a heating mat recently (for sprouting seeds lol) I've been meaning to try it out to see if I can get a better rise in the dough.


@Soft Lava

Step three. Add chicken leg. Raw. With blood over it. Shove that whore in there.

Ooh, I didn't know borscht was supposed to be from chicken stock. Thought that was an Americanization.

I've been making bread. I mix up the dough before I go to bed and then cook it in the oven the day afterwards. Bread's a very forgiving kind of recipe, so it almost always turns out well.

Borscht.

Step one. Get Beet. Cut that bitch.

Step two. Boil water till it's hot as fuck.

Step three. Add chicken leg. Raw. With blood over it. Shove that whore in there.

Step four. Say blyat. Loud. So neighbours can her you and tremble in fear as you fucking cook.

Step five. Mix the shit together. Add salts for good luck and swear on Putin's grave you didn't add too much salt to the point of the whole fucking meal becoming unedible salty shit-fuck.

Step six. Watch in awe as your red fucking mess of a soup rises up from the pot right into your fucking mounth, saturated steam filling your kitchen like it's 1945 all over again.

Step seven. Load up your Calashnikov, listen to the russian anthem and fucking eat.

I've been really busy so the most complicated meals I make right now are pizza from scratch and "The Poorman's Meal" from the YouTube channel Great Depression Cooking. I've discovered how to bend a can of peas so I can dump them straight into my mouth without even dirtying a fork. I do that most days. I used to make a ton of freezable burritos and stuff half my freezer full of them. Hopefully I'll have time to start doing that again soon.

>tfw no stove or oven, even a microwave
Besides such non-cookery as cereal I like to make Russian-style sandwiches when I'm peckish. Slice of bread topped with mayonnaise, smoked cheese, cheap sausage and some salami. Hopefully I can get back into cooking, I used to make all sorts of stuff, even lasagna, in a pressure cooker.

Woah, that's really efficient! Thanks for the tip.
And no, unfortunately.

I've recently been enjoying cooking a certain kind of meal, and that led me to start wondering about what kinds of meals other people tend to like.

What I've been doing is I've been taking a cast iron pan and putting it into my oven to preheat at 350F. While this is happening, I'm marinading a couple of pork chops and preparing some potatoes, carrots, and onions.

The oven usually pre-heats before I'm finished preparing the vegetables, so I put the pork chops onto the pan to do some cooking and hopefully get a bit of a sear on them.

I chop the vegetables up reasonably small, and then toss them in olive oil and salt. Once this is done, I take the pork chops out of the oven and move them on to a plate temporarily. The vegetables are then transferred into the hot pan, and the pork chops are laid on top of them.

The idea is that the pork chops are slowly and thoroughly cooked, and their fats and juices are absorbed by the potatoes and carrots as they cook. Since it's such a big thermal mass, I don't have to worry about taking it out of the oven at a really specific time, and can even leave it in for a while as long as I turn the temperature down a bit.

I've had this a couple of days in a row so far, and so far I've found this to be a very low maintenance one-pan meal that tastes fantastic.

~

Do you have any sorts of meals you like to prepare? Maybe something that's even simpler than this? Maybe something that's a bit more complicated, but is well worth it?