lazy cooking
2/10/04 17:31![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schmericaCooking for myself continues to be ridiculously satisfying and enjoyable. I really can't imagine how it took me so long in my life to discover this.
I mainly only had very very basic things this week, but there was still good food to be had. I particularly relied on two of my time-tested Really Tasty Yet Really Easy Recipes.
The relatively healthy one is my lazy adaption of "Roasted Root Vegetables" in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It basically just consists of heating up some olive oil or butter in a roasting pan on the stove, chopping up a bunch of onions and carrots and potatoes, mixing the vegetables with the fat so it's call coated, and sticking it in a 425 degree oven. After a half hour I take the pan out and stir everything up and add a head of peeled garlic cloves and stick it back in. After another half hour it's generally browning and cooked through and yummy.
The other recipe -- which I made today -- is just a variaton on the general tasty-yet-easy pasta. But today I was all out of tomato sauce, so I went with the oh-so-indulgent "butter and cheese" version. Which as the name implies, basically just consists of melting a bunch of butter till it's quite hot (preferably browned, even) and then as soon as it's physically possible once you've drained the pasta, mixing together the butter and the pasta and a good helping of shredded Parmesan, working quickly so it all melts and coats each other and becomes a tasty gooey mess.
(There's a lot of other stuff to add to that to make it rather better, but each addition also cuts down on the "lazy" factor.)
Tonight I also finally did something with the chicken I bought earlier in the week. I actually went and bought flour today, so I sauteed up the two chicken breasts. Which turned out ... okay, in that the cooked chicken is certainly tasty. But How to Cook Everything seems to have failed me in this instance, as following all the instructions, with the estimated cooking time I ended up with divine-smelling, beautifully browned chicken that was completely raw in the middle. This is another place where cooking for yourself is nice, I think, as I had no hurry to get the food on the table.
Next time I think I shall just cut it into small bits first, as that's how I plan on eating it anyway.
Tomorrow I need to get to Safeway. Getting home on the bus is going to be a pain, though, as my list is just getting longer.
I mainly only had very very basic things this week, but there was still good food to be had. I particularly relied on two of my time-tested Really Tasty Yet Really Easy Recipes.
The relatively healthy one is my lazy adaption of "Roasted Root Vegetables" in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It basically just consists of heating up some olive oil or butter in a roasting pan on the stove, chopping up a bunch of onions and carrots and potatoes, mixing the vegetables with the fat so it's call coated, and sticking it in a 425 degree oven. After a half hour I take the pan out and stir everything up and add a head of peeled garlic cloves and stick it back in. After another half hour it's generally browning and cooked through and yummy.
The other recipe -- which I made today -- is just a variaton on the general tasty-yet-easy pasta. But today I was all out of tomato sauce, so I went with the oh-so-indulgent "butter and cheese" version. Which as the name implies, basically just consists of melting a bunch of butter till it's quite hot (preferably browned, even) and then as soon as it's physically possible once you've drained the pasta, mixing together the butter and the pasta and a good helping of shredded Parmesan, working quickly so it all melts and coats each other and becomes a tasty gooey mess.
(There's a lot of other stuff to add to that to make it rather better, but each addition also cuts down on the "lazy" factor.)
Tonight I also finally did something with the chicken I bought earlier in the week. I actually went and bought flour today, so I sauteed up the two chicken breasts. Which turned out ... okay, in that the cooked chicken is certainly tasty. But How to Cook Everything seems to have failed me in this instance, as following all the instructions, with the estimated cooking time I ended up with divine-smelling, beautifully browned chicken that was completely raw in the middle. This is another place where cooking for yourself is nice, I think, as I had no hurry to get the food on the table.
Next time I think I shall just cut it into small bits first, as that's how I plan on eating it anyway.
Tomorrow I need to get to Safeway. Getting home on the bus is going to be a pain, though, as my list is just getting longer.
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(no subject)
2/10/04 19:46 (UTC)i went with kat the other night. to make the french toast. because my mother gave me money that day.
can i go with you tomorrow, if you want?
i was going to come and show off my lovely purple balloon to you, but then i was home and it was cozy. . .
(no subject)
2/10/04 19:59 (UTC)(no subject)
2/10/04 20:35 (UTC)Mmmm, or lazy college quesadillas in the toaster oven. Cheese, salsa, tortillas.
(no subject)
2/10/04 20:46 (UTC)(no subject)
3/10/04 00:41 (UTC)Haha, me too. It's amazing.
Chicken -- if by 'sautee' you mean 'cook in a frying pan with oil', yes, smaller pieces definitely help, although then it heads more into the realm of stir-fry (what makes a stir-fry? Just technique or does it have to be Asian-flavored?). My new favorite way of doing chicken, though, is to marinade it in yogurt and spices Indian-style and bake it. Next time in a covered casserole dish-type thing, I think, as I don't like the super-dry tandoori-style chicken so much. But Chicken Tikka Masala is the next project.
(no subject)
3/10/04 12:46 (UTC)The Indian chicken does sound quite good, too -- I didn't have any real ingredients this week, but maybe I will look into that for the future.