Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2020

Michael Symon’s Essential Knives You Need to Own | Food Network

Filed under: Food, Tools — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Food Network
Published 13 Aug 2020

Take it from the pro Michael Symon: These are *THE* essential knives you need to make your meal prep quick and efficient! 🔪🔪

Have you downloaded the new Food Network Kitchen app yet? With up to 25 interactive LIVE classes every week and over 80,000 recipes from your favorite chefs, it’s a kitchen game-changer. Download it today: http://food-network.app.link/download!

#SymonDinners, Sundays at 12:30|11:30c.

Follow Food Network on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foodnetwork/
Follow Food Network on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoodNetwork
Visit Food Network online: http://www.foodnetwork.com

October 13, 2020

A Single Spice Blend For Your Entire Kitchen – Kitchen Pepper From 1777

Filed under: Americas, Food, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published 8 Jul 2020

Visit Our Website! ➧ http://www.townsends.us/ ➧➧

Help support the channel with Patreon ➧ https://www.patreon.com/townsend ➧➧

Instagram ➧ townsends_official

October 11, 2020

“Doctrinaire cuisine is dangerous”

Filed under: Food — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is not a fan of printed recipes, for they quash the creative, adventurous spirit he feels is required for proper cooking:

“The Joy of Cookbooks” by shoutabyss is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I believe in freedom and one of the reasons for my hatred of recipes is their peremptory, commanding tone, as if the writer knew the only way to fashion the dish. Variants from the inflexibly regimented columns of most cookbooks are made to seem like heresies.

Recipes are typically officious and pettifogging, treating readers as idiots, who don’t know how to suit their own taste or adjust traditions.

Many read like nursery-school arithmetic: add x amount of flour and y of milk to z of butter to produce a predictable outcome. Creativity and adventure get no badge. By specifying quantities, the teacher robs cooking of its status as art and turns it into drearily certified schoolkid-science.

Doctrinaire cuisine is dangerous. Friendships founder and marriages crash over differences about whether — for instance — to put onions in Spanish omelette or chillies in curry, or disputes over whether eggs are better scrambled in a deep or shallow dish. I’m happy to leave chacun à son goût in almost everything.

If you want to marmalade your kippers or make mayonnaise with sunflower oil, I’ll despise your mind and denounce your taste, but I’ll defend your right, as thoroughly as if you wanted to vote Republican or learn line-dancing. I’ll tolerate tinned tomatoes in ratatouille, as long as I don’t have to eat it, or rose veal in Wiener schnitzel, or even honey instead of molasses in baked beans.

But there are some abominations that are destructive of happiness, because they deprive eaters of opportunities of enjoyment, or turn wonderful ingredients to waste. Most of them occur in recipes exposed to the internet, where nannies write for nincompoops.

August 25, 2020

How we used to “dine out” (and someday might be able to again)

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, Europe, Food, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Alexander Larman reviews The Restaurant: A history of eating out by William Sitwell:

The recent enforced lockdown closure was a potential death blow to the entire [restaurant] industry. Which makes William Sitwell’s luxurious book both a celebration and an unintentional requiem for what may be a bygone time.

His central thesis is clear: the history of dining out is also a social history of evolving cultures and tastes. This means that the subjects he writes about range from ancient Pompeii to the growth of the sushi conveyor belt restaurant, encompassing everything from medieval taverns and the French Revolution to the rise of Anglo-Indian cuisine.

It is a broad and impressive spectrum, but perhaps Sitwell has, like some of the less fortunate people he describes, bitten off more than he can chew. His opening chapter about Pompeii is rich in surprising detail (graffiti uncovered outside one tavern when it was excavated ranged from the poetic — “Lovers are like bees in that they lead a honeyed life” — to the crude — “I screwed the barmaid”) and an insightful evocation of the dining culture in Ancient Rome.

He is then, unfortunately, faced with the insurmountable difficulty that the restaurant, as we know it today, did not exist until the late eighteenth century, meaning that his definition of “eating out” has to do some extremely heavy lifting.

There is as much padding in the early chapters as there is around some of his subjects’ waistlines. Much of what he writes is very interesting and often amusing, such as the way in which coffee, first drunk in London around the time of the Restoration, became associated both with health-giving properties and reportedly making men impotent, withered “cock-sparrows”. Yet there are also lengthy sections that have little or nothing to do with restaurants, such as a potted history of the Industrial Revolution.

Nevertheless, when Sitwell finally gets into his stride and begins to write about eateries proper, his authority and enthusiasm are palpable. He describes the dawn of fine dining in Paris in the nineteenth century evocatively. London lagged behind, although gentlemen’s clubs such as the Athenaeum and Reform offered some delights for the wealthy thanks to chefs (French, naturally) such as Alexis Soyer who implemented what one biographer called “the most famous and influential working kitchen in Europe” in 1841, complete with gas-fired stoves, butcher’s rooms and a fireplace devoted to the roasting of game and poultry.

July 27, 2020

Food in Ancient Rome – Garum, Puls, Bread, and Moretum

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

SandRhoman History
Published 7 Jul 2019

Food in ancient Rome – the cuisine of ancient Rome is probably not everybody’s cup of tea. Food in ancient Rome was consumed at the mensa, the dining table of the ancient Romans. A usual ancient Roman meal for the upper classes could look like this: puls, one of the main ancient Roman meals. This was essentially a form of porridge, along with that they might have eaten bread, refined with olives and figs. Bread was often eaten with moretum, a spread, made of sheep cheese, a lot of garlic and herbs. Most Roman meals would have been spiced with garum, a fermented fish sauce, to go along with such a meal, the Romans drank water or wine. Beer, called cervisia, in contrast would have been considered barbaric. The wine was usually diluted with water and sometimes spiced with herbs and vinegar. Water with vinegar was called posca, another variant was mulsum, wine spiced with honey.

Ancient Roman food had even more variety, but for now we just made the recipes below. We might make some more ancient Roman food in the future though.

Ancient Roman recipes:

First off: Put garum into everything. That’s actually what the Romans used, usually instead of salt and/or other condiments. [Consider it the ketchup of the ancient world.]

Garum recipe
– 1000 g small fish (sardines, anchovies or similar, fresh or frozen but uncooked)
– 500 g sea salt
– 2 1∕2 tbsp. dried oregano
– 1 tbsp. dried mint
– 1,5 litres water
– 5 tbsp. honey
Put everything in a pot and cook it until the fish falls apart (ca. 15 minutes). Pestle it with a spoon or similar and reduce this broth for at least 20 minutes. Then strain it, let it cool and strain it again. Additionally, you can pour it through a filter cone to refine the garum even further. Keep the garum in the fridge and throw it away if it gets dreggy.

Moretum recipe
– 300 g of ricotta
– 100 g pecorino (or similar hard sheep cheese)
– 3 tbsp. white wine vinegar
– 3 tbsp. sea salt
– 3 cloves of garlic
– a bunch of thyme
– a bunch of rosemary
– a bunch of estragon [tarragon]
– a bunch of coriander
garum
Press the garlic, grind the pecorino and stir all the ingredients until you get a consistent mass. Done!
Pro tip: You might want to be careful with the amount of salt and especially garlic you add. Three cloves make it very intense.

Puls recipe
– 500 g rolled oats
– 1.5 litres of water
– 1 tbsp. olive oil
– 100 g pecorino (or similar hard sheep cheese)
– 1 onion
– 2 carrots
– 150 g mushrooms
– 100 g streaked pork
garum
Chop all the vegetables and cut the pork into strips. Then roast it gently in a bit of olive oil and put it aside. Cook the rolled oats with some water and add continuously as it disperses until you get a porridge-like consistency. Then add the prepared vegetables and meat and fold in the ground pecorino.
If you want to stay somewhat authentic to the Roman recipe use white, violet or yellow carrots: orange ones weren’t known in the occident until the Middle Ages.

Panis militaris castrensis (Roman bread) recipe
Ingredients for one loaf (4 – 6P):
– 500 g spelt flour (whole grain)
– ½ tsp. of salt
– olives
– figs
– 3 tbsp. olive oil
– 1 tsp. honey
– 3 dl water (hand-hot)
– 15 g yeast (or one package of dry yeast)

Mix everything up and knead it for at least 15 minutes. Then let it rise for an hour in a bowl covered with a towel (preferably in a warm spot). Form a loaf, cut six pieces (halfway through) and bake it for 35 minutes at 180°C.

Pro tip: take big olives and lots of them because the whole grain flour will be so dense that they kind of disappear.

Those recipes are taken from a cookbook which has been written about 2,000 years ago. Taking this into account you should be rather careful applying these cooking techniques. We are not to be held responsible for any damage resulting, neither for smelly apartments, nor for health issues.

#food #ancientrome #history #ancienthistory #rome

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sandrhoman

July 7, 2020

Homemade Flatbread in Minutes – How to Make the World’s Oldest Bread

Filed under: Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Food Wishes
Published 17 Nov 2014

Learn how to make Homemade Flatbread in minutes! Visit http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2014/1… for the ingredients, more information, and many, many more video recipes. I hope you enjoy this easy, homemade flatbread technique!

June 1, 2020

Buffalo Cauliflower Wings with Blue Cheese Dip – You Suck at Cooking

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

You Suck At Cooking
Published 5 Feb 2020

Buffalo Cauliflower, also known as Buffalo Cauliflower Wings, is based on Buffalo Wings, which are Chicken Wings in Hot Sauce. Who knew that combining food with hot sauce would taste good? Nobody did.

YSAC Book and merch: http://yousuckatcooking.com
http://instagram.com/yousuckatcooking
https://twitter.com/yousuckatcookin

RECIPE
• To make this Buffalo Cauliflower, you can start with a small or medium sized cauliflower.
Rip it apart while making loud grunting sounds.
• Combine two tablespoons of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of water, 2 teaspoons of garlic powder, and some salt in a bowl and wangjangle it until there’s no need for further wangjangling because you did a good job.
• Combine the pre-buffalish elixir to the cauliflower in a bigger bowl and gallop around the house. Alternatively, you could have made the elixir in that big bowl to begin with. Now you’re thinking
Throw that cauliflower onto a parchment papered pan and bake it at 450 for 15 minutes.
• Meanwhile, make the Buffalo sauce: two tablespoons of melted butter and ½ cup of pepper sauce.
• Take that cauliflower out of the oven (unless you have an Automated Oven Sauce Dispenser), and put that sauce on the cauliflower in one way or another. You can brush it, spoon it, slather it, or whatever you want.
• Bake it for another 8 minutes or until it’s the texture you like. A bit less for more of the natural cauliflower crunch, a bit more to make it soggier. The choice is yours, even if you make a bad one.

December 23, 2019

QotD: British meals – puddings

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currents or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.

British pastry is not outstandingly good, but there are certain fillings for pies and tarts which are excellent, and which are hardly to be found in other countries. Treacle tart is a delicious dish, and the large or small mince pies which are eaten especially at Christmas, but else fairly frequently at other times, are almost equally good. The mince-meat with which they are filled is a mixture of various kinds of dried fruits, chopped fine, mixed up with sugar and raw beef suet, and flavoured with brandy. Other favourite fillings are jams of various kinds, lemon curd – a preparation of lemon juice, yolk of egg and sugar – and stewed apples flavoured with lemon juice or cloves. An apple pie is often given an exceptionally fine flavour by including one quince among about half a dozen apples.

The other main category of puddings – milk puddings – is the kind of thing that one would prefer to pass over in silence, but it must be mentioned, since these dishes are, unfortunately, characteristic of Britain. They are preparations of rice, semolina, barley, sago or even macaroni, mixed with milk and sugar and baked in the oven. The one made with barley is somewhat less bad then the others: the one made with macaroni is intolerable to any civilised palate. As all of these puddings are easy to make, they tend to be a stand-by in cheap hotels, restaurants and apartment houses, and they are one of the chief reasons why British cookery has a bad name among foreign visitors.

There are, of course, XXX countless other sweet dishes, including the whole range of jellies, blancmanges, custards, soufflés, ice puddings, meringues and what-nots, which are much the same in all European counties. A few oddments which do not fit into any of the above categories are pancakes – British pancakes are thinner than those of most countries, and are always eaten with lemon juice, – batter pudding, which is made of much the same ingredients as Yorkshire pudding, but is steamed instead of being baked and is eaten with treacle, and baked apples. The apples are cored but not peeled, filled up with butter and sugar, and cooked in the oven: it is important that they should be served in the dish in which they are cooked With cooked fruit of any kind British people always eat cream, if they can get it. In the West of England a particularly delicious kind of clotted cream is made by slowly simmering large pens of milk and skimming off the cream as it comes to the surface.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

December 10, 2019

QotD: British breakfast – “Not a snack but a serious meal”

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First of all, then, breakfast. Ideally for nearly all British people, and in practice for most of them even now, this is not a snack but a serious meal. The hour at which people have their breakfast is of course governed by the time at which they go to work, but if they were free to choose, most people would like to have breakfast at nine o’clock. In principle the meal consists of three courses, one of which is a meat course. Traditionally it starts with porridge, which is made of coarse oatmeal, sodden and then boiled into a spongy mess: it is eaten always hot, with cold milk (better still, cream) poured over it, and sugar. Breakfast cereals, which are ready-cooked preparations of wheat or rice, taken cold with milk and sugar, are often eaten instead of porridge. After this comes either fish, usually salt fish, or meat in some form, or eggs in some form. The best and most characteristically British form of salt fish is the kipper, which is a herring split open and cured in wood-smoke until it is deep brown colour. Kippers are either grilled or fried. The usual breakfast meat dishes are either fried bacon, with or without fried eggs, grilled kidneys, fried pork sausages, or cold ham. British people favour a lean, mild type of bacon or ham, cured with sugar and nitre rather than with salt. At normal time it is not unusual to eat grilled beef steaks or mutton chops at breakfast, and there are still old-fashioned people who like to start the day with cold roast beef. In some parts of the country, for instance in East Anglia, it is usual to eat cheese at breakfast.

After the meat course comes bread, or more often toast, with butter and orange marmalade. It must be orange marmalade, though honey is a possible substitute. Other kinds of jam are seldom eaten at breakfast, and marmalade does not often appear at other times of [the] day. For the great bulk of British people, the invariable breakfast drink is tea. Coffee in Britain is almost always nasty, either in restaurants or in private houses; the majority of people, though they drink it fairly freely, are uninterested in it and do not know good coffee from bad. Of tea, on the other hand, they are extremely critical, and everyone has his favourite brand and his pet theory as to how it should be made. Tea is always drunk with milk, and it is usual to brew it very strong, about one spoonful of dry tea leaves being allowed for each cup. Most people prefer Indian to Chinese tea, and they like to put sugar in it. Here, however, one comes upon a class distinction, or more exactly a cultural distinction. Virtually all British working-people put sugar in their tea, and indeed will not drink tea without it. Unsweetened tea is an upper-class or middle-class habit, and even in those classes it tends to be associated with a Europeanised palate. If one made a list of the people in Britain who prefer wine to beer, one would probably find that it included most of the people who prefer tea without sugar.

After this solid breakfast – and even now, in a time of rationing, it is usual to eat a fairly large bulk of food, chiefly bread, at breakfast – it is natural that the midday meal should be somewhat lighter than it is in many other countries.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

November 9, 2019

QotD: British Cookery

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Voltaire made his often-quoted statement that the country of Britain has “a hundred religions and only one sauce”, he was saying something which was untrue and which is equally untrue today, but which might still be echoed in good faith by a foreign visitor who made only a brief stay and drew his impressions from hotels and restaurants. For the first thing to be noticed about British cookery is that it is best studied in private houses, and more particularly in the homes of the middle-class and working-class masses who have not become Europeanised in their tastes. Cheap restaurants in Britain are almost invariably bad, while in expensive restaurants the cookery is almost always French, or imitation French. In the kind of food eaten, and even in the hours at which meals are taken and the names by which they are called, there is a definite cultural division between the upper-class minority and the big mass who have preserved the habits of their ancestors.

Generalising further, one may say that the characteristic British diet is a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet, drawing much of its virtue from the excellence of the local materials, and with its main emphasis on sugar and animal fats. It is the diet of a wet northern country where butter is plentiful and vegetable oils are scarce, where hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day, and where all the spices and some of the stronger-tasting herbs are exotic products. Garlic, for instance, is unknown in British cookery proper: on the other hand mint, which is completely neglected in some European countries, figures largely. In general, British people prefer sweet things to spicy things, and they combine sugar with meat in a way that is seldom seen elsewhere.

Finally, it must be remembered that in talking about “British cookery” one is referring to the characteristic native diet of the British Isles and not necessarily to the food that the average British citizen eats at this moment. Quite apart from the economic difference between the various blocks of the population, there is the stringent food rationing which has now been in operation for six years. In talking of British cookery, therefore, one is talking of the past or the future – of dishes that the British people now see somewhat rarely, but which they would gladly eat if they had the chance, and which they did eat fairly frequently up to 1939.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

August 22, 2019

No Wheat? Rice Bread – Gluten Free Recipe

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published on 18 Jun 2018

Today’s featured cookbook ➧ https://amzn.to/2MCOF6A ➧➧

Visit Our Website! ➧ http://www.townsends.us/ ➧➧

Help support the channel with Patreon ➧ https://www.patreon.com/townsend ➧➧

August 19, 2019

Cooking With Carrow – Episode 02

Filed under: Food, Gaming, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 11 Jul 2019

“Conjure Milk Raspberry Scones” with Brian Lewis and Christian Doyle, from the recipe by The Gluttonous Geek.

August 13, 2019

How to Make Really Good Garlic Bread

Filed under: Food, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

America’s Test Kitchen
Published on 3 Mar 2019

Keith shows Bridget how to make the absolute best garlic bread.

Get the recipe for Really Good Garlic Bread: http://cooks.io/2I9Anbx
Buy Our Winning Rasp-Style Grater: https://cooks.io/2VrLqlU

ABOUT US: Located in Boston’s Seaport District in the historic Innovation and Design Building, America’s Test Kitchen features 15,000 square feet of kitchen space including multiple photography and video studios. It is the home of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and Cook’s Country magazine and is the workday destination for more than 60 test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.

If you like us, follow us:
http://americastestkitchen.com

July 20, 2019

Early American Ginger Beer – 18th Century Cooking

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published on 2 Oct 2017

In this episode we make a simple and delicious, 18th century Ginger Beer. #townsendsgingerbeer

Our suggested books on brewingâ–¶ http://www.townsends.us/book-recommen… ▶▶

Help support the channel with Patreon ▶ https://www.patreon.com/townsend ▶▶

Check Out Our Website! ▶ http://www.townsends.us/ ▶▶

July 14, 2019

How To Cook Perfect Eggs Every Time

Filed under: Food, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasty
Published on 1 Oct 2017

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress