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4923. judithathome - 8/6/2013 4:08:45 AM Roast beef, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and onions in the slow cooker with beef broth, a packet of brown gravy mix, and some red wine and you have a meal...or two.
Save some wine to drink, too. 4924. arkymalarky - 8/6/2013 4:39:55 AM Haha! I used to do stuff like that and Stan loves that kind of food. I used onion soup mix. Yum. My grandmother made roast like that. Stew, soup, chili--all good and easy. I quit cooking when I got so busy on rural Ed, grad school, etc., and spending an hour and a half a day commuting I'm just tired on work days. 4925. alistairconnor - 8/6/2013 9:25:04 AM I second Wombat's remark about gas. For electricity, you need a flat-bottomed pseudo-wok, it's not the same thing. Though to tell the truth, I get by with my current halogen stove, it's nearly as hot as gas.
I've been cooking with a wok all my adult life, having learned from Asian flatmates as a student (I remember one friend who wanted to know what the delicious dish cooked by a Chinese flatmate was called. He wouldn't accept his assurance that it didn't have a particular name, and eventually settled on "Basic Chinese Meal".)
I use a fair amount of oil, very hot. I chop all the vegetables (generally four or five varieties of whatever's in season, paying attention to the colour balance) into bite-size bits, marinate the meat or tofu, mince up equal amounts of garlic and fresh ginger (easiest thing for the ginger is to keep it in the freezer and grate off the amount you need). Throw in the garlic/ginger and stir for a few seconds before adding everything else gradually, in order of cooking time, making sure to always keep the heat up. Once everything's fried, add some liquid (my basic mix : soy sauce, some sweet wine or sherry if I have it, sometimes a bit of sugar or honey, water, a bit of cornflour to thicken it -- but anything goes !) and turn down the heat, keep stirring to finish the cooking by steam, with a lid on if you have one.
Well, that's more detail than you'll need -- you'll find your own tricks. 4926. Wombat - 8/6/2013 12:20:55 PM While I love all manner of Asian food, I find that stir frying at home doesn't do much for me. I have some sort of mental kitchen timer that rebels against cooking methods that take more time to prepare than it does to cook and eat. 4927. Wombat - 8/6/2013 12:24:38 PM I've been using the slow cooker to make multiple meals' worth of soups. Two books I recommend are French Cuisine for the Slow Cooker and Italian Cuisine for the Slow Cooker. Some of the recipes seem over the top, but the soups, stews and braises work quite well. I am dying to try the recipe for rillettes, but I'd be the only one eating them, and given their fat content, I probably would literally "die" to eat them. 4928. Trillium - 8/6/2013 5:40:23 PM Thanks for the tiling tips, Judith! Don't know when I'll get to this project, but it's making more and more sense to me. Got to find a way to improve the house drainage also without ripping out the landscaping (if that's possible). I love my trees. It has not stopped raining, which is wonderful in several ways but the basement is way too damp. 4929. Trillium - 8/6/2013 5:44:38 PM About U.S. food quality, a young friend noted that when she spent a summer session in Austria, the food agreed with her tummy... not always the case in the U.S. for whatever reason.
I can't complain. A weekend job was cancelled suddenly and I took the opportunity to hop a plane and here I am in San Francisco! Daughter has been using "The Jerusalem Cookbook" and just made a burnt-eggplant concoction with pomegranate seeds (and lemon, olive oil, chopped mint and parsley) which is a ticket to heaven. Lord, please make my kids into excellent cooks... and then let me stay with them :)
Life is good today. 4930. arkymalarky - 8/6/2013 6:00:11 PM oh well, what great post! When Stan retires, I'm hoping we'll keep a garden. We can grow beautiful squash zucchini tomatoes peppers pretty much anything that you wanted to cook with. we have garlic and we're going ginger in a pot right now. 4931. arkymalarky - 8/6/2013 6:01:20 PM that first sentence was supposed to say oh wow! What great posts! 4932. judithathome - 8/6/2013 6:20:06 PM I agree....
You can do Cornish Game Hen in a slow cooker, too...cover them in the spice rub you like, stuff them with a small whole onion, make a little rack of some sort to rest them on, and add a little water and some white wine.
Note: don't forget to take the "giblets" out of the cavities! 4933. webfeet - 8/6/2013 8:32:14 PM How timely. We just tried out belle mere's electric wok tonight and it was disappointing. It never got hot enough and, finally, I salvaged the meal by throwing it on the skillet where the beef, vegetables and aromatics finally carmelized.
Wok is a crock. A wide cast iron skillet at home works best, and I don't need to bother with the extra work involved with one more gadget. 4934. judithathome - 8/6/2013 9:23:09 PM I disagree...woks have been used for centuries. Electric woks may be a crock but REAL ones are great.
If you cut up what you want to make ahead of time...like cut the vegs in bulk and store them in baggies so you have what you want to cook on hand, wok cooking takes very little prep and if you use one on a gas range top, it certainly gets hot enough and the results can be quick and amazing.
Cooking takes time...that's why fast food has become so popular. Sure, cooking with a wok takes a little prep time but what home-cooked dishes don't? 4935. arkymalarky - 8/6/2013 11:02:15 PM being southerners, we use cast iron skillets a lot. But a wok serves totally different purpose. Mexicans make something similar to a wok and use it very similarly, and the results are very different from a cast iron skillet 4936. judithathome - 8/6/2013 11:44:40 PM Like those workers at your place, right? Using it over an open fire. 4937. arkymalarky - 8/7/2013 12:04:16 AM Yes! They used a welded farm disc off a tractor. We have them but they're too shallow. Their food was amazing on that thing. 4938. arkymalarky - 8/7/2013 12:07:09 AM Were y'all here when they were there? He was the neatest guy. His crew was great but we only talked to him. Mario. Stan and I were talking about him in connection with the wok discussion here. 4939. judithathome - 8/7/2013 4:16:27 AM No, we never met him, just recalled your stories about how good the food was. 4940. alistairconnor - 8/7/2013 3:37:59 PM "electric wok", another fad gadget. Quick, donate it to the Abbé Pierre.
Bought a fad gadget myself, and am very happy with it : I've been missing barbecue these past years, living in a flat. Yes I could have bought an "electric barbecue" but that, like the electric wok, is a contradiction in terms. I ended up with a marvel of (German) technology : a charcoal barbecue the size of a large pressure cooker, so smokeless that you could use it indoors. The charcoal is in a small cage that is protected by a steel plate in the middle of the circular grill. Battery-operated fan.
 4941. judithathome - 8/7/2013 5:38:36 PM When we came back from living in Germany, we brought along a schwing braten (or what sounds like that)...a little habichi-sized gizmo that used charcoal and it had a rack that fit between this hanger-type set-up...you'd sit there and "swing" the rack back and forth and around and around until the meat was cooked. It was pretty neat! 4942. Wombat - 8/7/2013 7:44:17 PM As long as you didn't let go of it by accident...
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