You Suck At Cooking
Published 7 Oct 2023Hashbrowns. Also known as fried potato shreds. Also known as 2D potatoes. Also known as even greasier potato chips. Also known as hashbrowns.
If you’ve never fried before or you want to brush up on the details, check this out
https://food52.com/blog/18669-the-do-…This deep fry safety page is also very good
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/gui…Basically hot oil can get out of control so you need to monitor your temperature and not let it get too hot. Electric stoves are deceptive in that they can get the oil very hot even at a lower settings, there’s just a longer delay.
RECIPE
Capture potatoes
Apologize to potatoes
Remove outer thermal membrane
Disintegrate potatoes
Rinse potato smithereens or soak them if you want them less starchy
Wrap them in some cheesecloth or a clean dish towel and squeeze the hell out of them (but mainly the water and leave some of the hell)
Cook them in a non stick pan with a tablespoon of oil for around ten minutes so they won’t be medium rare
Let them cool off a bit
Put them in a bowl
For each potato add
1 teaspoon corn starch
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
some pepper pepper pepper
Wangjangle
Form into patties or triangles but NO OTHER SHAPES
Heat your oil in a cast iron skillet but not so hot that you burn your house down
Most recipes recommend around 350 degrees Fahrenheit but as long as you get a sizzle going when you put them in it’s hot enough
Fry until the first size is golden brown. Somewhere between 4-8 minutes
Fry the other side until golden brown which is gonna happen faster, probably 5 minutes max
Lay them down on a paper towel and tell them they did a good job
Let them cool or spray a heat resistant gel inside your mouth and eat immediately
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January 8, 2024
Crispy Hashbrowns – You Suck at Cooking (episode 161)
December 30, 2023
QotD: Post-Christmas dining
Refusing to do any shopping until the Christmas food is all gone so dinner tonight will be Pringles and sprouts topped with mince pies and, for dessert, Bounty Celebrations and Baileys with a stuffing jus.
Amanda (@Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2021-12-29.
December 29, 2023
Rubaboo – Pemmican Stew of Canadian Mounties
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Sept 2023
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December 27, 2023
Eating like a Lighthouse Keeper from the 1800s
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Sep 2023
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QotD: “Healthy eating” after the holidays
So good to be eating healthily again. I feel fitter and better in myself alreadyDay 2 of healthy eating
I miss cheese so much I want to cry. I’ve forgotten the taste of chocolate. Vegetables taste of sadness and resentment. I’ve never known such miseryAmanda (Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-01-04.
December 25, 2023
Homemade Eggnog Recipe – How to Make Classic Christmas Eggnog
Food Wishes
Published 22 Dec 2015Learn how to make Homemade Eggnog!
I’ve never been a big eggnog person, and that’s putting it kindly. It’s too thick, too sweet, and way too artificially nutmegy. I even did an anti-nog tweet recently, just for a few cheap, seasonal laughs, but then I realized I was being unfair to this iconic Christmas drink.
I was basing most of my hating on the stuff in the carton from the supermarket, which features no booze, and a nutrition label you seriously don’t want to read. The homemade stuff I’ve had was significantly better, and so I decided to film this rather easy process, since I get so many requests this time of year.
Go to http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2015/1… for the ingredient amounts, more information, and many, many more video recipes! I hope you enjoy this easy Classic Christmas Eggnog recipe.
December 23, 2023
Ribbon Candy for Christmas at Lofty Pursuits
Lofty Pursuits
Published 19 Dec 2016Public displays of Confection use a very old ribbon candy machine to finally make some nice ribbon candy just before Christmas 2016. This batch was cherry, but we’ve made tutti frutti, and peppermint too. Lofty Pursuits makes candy on equipment made from the late 1800’s until the modern day. We concentrate on finding and restoring old candy equipment and re-learning the dying art of hard candy making.
http://www.pd.net to see the candy we sell.
December 22, 2023
Roast Smoked Goose – A Christmas Goose Special
Food Wishes
Published 8 Dec 2011Learn how to make a Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
Visit http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2011/1… for the ingredients, more recipe information, and over 650 additional original video recipes! I hope you enjoy this Christmas Roast Smoked Goose Recipe!
December 21, 2023
9 Ways to Slice a Pineapple
You Suck At Cooking
Published 6 Sept 2023There are many ways to cut a pineapple, but only nine of these are officially supported by the Pineapple Slicers Association of The World. None of those methods are depicted here.
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December 20, 2023
Eat Like a Medieval Nun – Hildegard of Bingen’s Cookies of Joy
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Sept 2023
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December 16, 2023
QotD: British meals – potatoes
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
December 8, 2023
“An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are”
Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:
On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.
The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.
Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?
As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.
Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.
Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.
The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.
Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.
Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …
The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.
The Real Betty Crocker’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Aug 2023
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December 5, 2023
QotD: British meals – the midday meal
The richer classes have their midday meal at one-thirty in the afternoon and call it “luncheon”. At about half-past four in the afternoon they have a cup of tea and perhaps a piece of bread-and-butter or a slice of cake, which they call “afternoon tea” and they have their evening meal at half-past seven or eight, and call it “dinner”. The others, perhaps ninety percent of the population, have their midday meal somewhat earlier – usually about half-past twelve – and call it “dinner”. They have their main evening meal at about half-past six and call it “tea” and before going to bed they have a light snack – for instance cocoa and bread-and-jam – which they call “supper”. The distinction is regional as well as social. In the North of England, Scotland and Ireland many well-to-do people prefer to follow the working-class time scheme, partly because it fits in better with the working day, and partly, perhaps, from motives of conservation: for our ancestors of a century ago also had their meals at approximately these hours.
But though the name and the hour may differ, every British person’s idea of midday meal is approximately the same. We are not here concerned with the quasi-French meals that are served in hotels, but solely with British cookery, and therefore we can leave both soups and hors d’oeuvres out of account. Most British people are inclined to despise both, and do not care for them in the middle of the day. British soups are seldom good, and there is hardly a single one that is peculiar to the British Isles, while even the word “hors d’oeuvre” has no equivalent in the British language. The British midday meal consists essentially of meat, preferably roast meat, a heavy pudding, and cheese. And here one comes upon the central institution of British life, the “joint”: that is, a large piece of meat – round of beef or leg of pork or mutton – roasted whole with its potatoes round it, and preserving a flavour and a juiciness which meat cooked in smaller quantities never seems to attain.
Most characteristic of all is roast beef, and of all the cuts of beef, the sirloin is the best. It is always roasted lightly enough to be red in the middle: pork and mutton are roasted more thoroughly. Beef is carved in wafer-thin slices, mutton in thick slices. With beef there nearly always goes Yorkshire pudding, which is a sort of crisp pancake made of milk, flour and eggs and which is delicious when sodden with gravy. In some parts of the country suet pudding is eaten with roast beef instead of Yorkshire pudding. Sometimes instead of roasted fresh beef there is boiled salt beef, which is always eaten with suet dumplings and carrots or turnips.
[…]
In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery – its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.
[…]
If the midday meal ends with cheese, that cheese will probably be foreign. Some of the cheeses native to Britain are very good, but they are not produced in large quantities and are mostly consumed locally. The best of them is Stilton, a cheese rather the same kind as Roquefort or Gorgonzola, but stronger-tasting and closer in the grain. Wensleydale, a similar but milder cheese, is also very good.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
November 17, 2023
Rationing In Britain
Imperial War Museums
Published 8 Jan 2010An American commentator looks at the effects of rationing on the people of England in 1944. The film presents a “typical” family of four (housewife, engine-driver husband, factory-working daughter, schoolboy son) to illustrate the basic rationing system, the workings of “point” systems and other restrictions, and the difficulties the average family faced when eating “on the ration”.
Explore IWM’s film collection: https://film.iwmcollections.org.uk
