Adventures In Cooking

[hoosierbitch]

I have been COOKING! It started at the beginning of the semester, when I was too poor to, like, buy food, and was scraping things together--but I'm still going! I've been doing little things like buying carrots/celery/peppers/broccoli and cutting them up all at the same time. Then I just put them in little ziploc baggies and take them to school

Comments

[coffeethyme4me]

Cut your onion through its fuzzy butt. Don't cut it so you have one side with all fuzzy butt and one side without. Don't ask me why, but there's less crying.

I've only been cooking for a few years now. (Cooking used to be an open peanut butter jar and a spoon for me.) But I've become really good! I'm proof it can happen. ;-)

Best of luck to you -- in this and everything.

<3

[hoosierbitch]

I think what I'm gonna do is buy a super cheapo food processor thing so that onions won't make me go blind and also it'd save me some time. I just don't want to buy one and then, like, lose my desire to cook. 'Cause it is new and weird. O.o

If you have any quick-meal tips (vegetarian ones!), lemme know! :-)

Thanks, darlin'!

[rabidchild]

Whee! Cooking! Actually, the food processor will make the crying worse - the more the onion is damaged by a blade, the more noxious gases escape. I don't cry from onions, I think because I wear contacts. But the type of onion matters too. White and red ones are particularly horrible. Yellow ones less so. "Sweet" yellow ones like vidalia are the least bad.

Do you know you can make marinara sauce in the time it takes to make the pasta? You will never buy a jar of sauce if you:

Fill pot with water, add salt, put on high to boil.
Heat smaller pot over medium heat.
Add 2 tablespoons oil, 2 cloves of garlic, smashed (or minced), a pinch of red pepper flakes. To the smaller pot - did I mention? Cook 1 minute
Add 1 large (28-oz) can crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, a big pinch of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano. We're still talking sauce here.
Stir. Bring to a simmer and reduce heat under sauce to low.
Add pasta to water and cook.
Drain pasta and enjoy.

[hoosierbitch]

I actually used sweet onions, and they still made me cry a lot. Food processor would mean less exposure time, which seems nice.

I did not know that tomato sauce was so easy!!! I am totally going to do that!

[embroiderama]

Yay, cooking! Your food sounds wonderful, especially challah...YUM.

[hoosierbitch]

It is v. tasty! My favorite part of challah is then making challah French toast...mmm...

[embroiderama]

OMG yes! When I was in college I lived about three doors down from a 24-hour Ukranian restaurant that had the most amazing challah french toast. Also you could get a bowl of soup and two thick pieces of challah with butter for like $2.50. *misses like crazy*

[hoosierbitch]

OM NOM NOM

That sounds delicious! I think I need to go raid my fridge now. O.o

[castalie]

Yay cooking!

What I love about it is that it doesn't have to be fancy to be tasty. For today's lunch I made rice with mushrooms and pieces of parmesan, mixed with sour creme and mustard. Easy as pie but so good! #SmacksLips

[hoosierbitch]

I'm still hesitant on making anything that doesn't come with a recipe, but I'm working on it! Your concoction sounds delicious! :-)

[miri_thompson]

I've never made my own challah--how did that go? Is it crazy labor intensive?

And the potato soup sounds yummy!

[hoosierbitch]

It's actually really easy, it just takes a while since you have to wait for dough to rise & then bake. I usually make it on a day when I'm also doing difficult reading for school, since having scheduled breaks every 45 minutes to check the bread is a nice mental rest. :-)

[photoash]

If you sprinkle your cutting board with white vinegar and also sit a shallow dish with vinegar in it beside the cutting board it absorbs a lot of the onion gas and makes crying significantly less :) or not at all.

You can keep sprinkling your cutting board if you're cutting up lots of onion.

Buying sweet onions helps too. And really just becomming used to how to cut them and of course using really sharp knives :)

If you have quality knives it's worth it to pay to have them sharpened if you can find somewhere to do it cheap. If you have cheap crap knives you're better off buying new knives that are also inexpensive or ceramic from somewhere like tjmaxx :)

[hoosierbitch]

Thanks for the vinegar tip! I'll try that next time! :D I even use sweet onions already, my eyes are just apparently really sensitive. (I am slowly getting faster at cutting up veggies--I did take a tiny chunk out of my thumb the other day, tho...I'll be looking for better knives that'll make chopping easier.)

THANKS!