I’d love go make chana masala, my favorite indian dish. but it just takes too long to make…
Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.
It’s been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.
It’s not 14 hours of effort. It’s 14 hours of letting shit boil.
I highly recommend getting slow cooker if you don’t have one. You can do stocks and broths without having to keep an eye on them. I let my bone broths go for two days.
Cake. Orange cake.
Mmm, that’s not too hard to make. Orange-olive oil cake is so good.
Tofu.
Pressing the water out, marinating for hours, then cooking properly so it’s delicious and not a rubbery mess is just too much hassle.
I once even made the tofu myself. That was a mess. But an interesting experiment. 😅
Just dice or slice it, dust it with corn starch and fry it until crispy. Serve with sauce or in a stirfry. No need for pressing water out. It won’t be rubbery.
I rarely even marinate my tofu, and have never really had issues with it getting rubbery, but the hassle of pressing the water out is enough of a deterrent for me. I’ve considered buying a tofu presser, but I have a small kitchen, so I don’t really like owning such specialized tools.
but the hassle of pressing the water out is enough of a deterrent for me
Get super firm, they are vacuum sealed and pre-pressed. You can skip the pressing step entirely.
Really? That’s what I usually buy, but there’s still some liquid in the package, so I’ve always pressed it. I guess I’ll have to try it without pressing some time.
Lamb Vindaloo.
God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas
I just made that this week and think I may agree with you, or at least I’d not try on a workday again. I didn’t have the right peppers and used dried ancho, jarred roasted red pepper and a little fresh red pepper and it came out really good, sorta new world /old world delicious fusion but my God, toasting, grinding, processing, tasting, resting the paste. Started in the morning and let it rest while I was at work. Also started sourdough naan in the morning & of course made a vegetable dish to go with the meat - everything was good but I was exhausted by the end of the day!
I’ve never even tried to make it, so you’ve done much more than I!
Its my favourite dish whenever I go out to eat… but I just couldn’t put aside the time, money or effort to make it…
Most of them. They require not only the right ingredients and even the right brands. But the amount of tools you would have to go out and get, just to make that thing. I currently am struggling to make homemade butterbeer, from harry potter, because I spent like a combined $30+ in materials and ingredients and that’s only by one recipe. Which is another thing, recipes vary and have their own way of doing things which again is going to require having to spend more just to make it.
It’s a no-brainer why people would rather have take out or go out to restaurants.
You really don’t need a ton of tools to cook most dishes. And once you have the tool, you have it for the next dish that needs it. You think ingredients are expensive? Restaurants use the same ones and up charge you.
Ordering or eating out for every meal? In this economy?
Let me know when grocery shopping is cheaper than ordering or eating out. Then we’ll talk.
Guess I’m in for a long wait then if all you did was downvote.
What? Right now. Even fast food is like 12 bucks for a shitty burger and fries. What does everyone currently complain about? The price of eggs. 7 bucks for 12. That’s four three egg omelets for almost half the price of a fucking happy meal. What are you talking about?
Sourdough
It’s honestly not hard at all.
Do you have a reliable starter recipe?
My mom makes these cottege cheese and bread crumbs dumplings that she boils until they float and then you cut them in half and drizzle melted butter and brown sugar on them.
I could never pronounce or spell the name of the dish but she claims it’s a traditional German dessert.
I tried explain it to chat gpt and it had no clue what the hell I was talking about. It kept telling me about Turkish dishes that have the right ingredients but look nothing like the baseball sized dumplings she would make.
It could easily be a family recipe. It looks like riffs on this theme are pretty common. Maybe it was a Hungarian recipe? Sounds like a great mystery!
She responded immediately. It’s called “Quark Klöße” according to her.
Looks like the specific ingredients and prep are a family thing, but that’s definitely what it’s based on.
Now I can rest easy. It was gonna drive me crazy if I couldn’t remember the name of the food. Haha
This seems pretty close to what you described: https://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/166041072019596/Suesse-Quarkkloesse.html
It sounds good / I’m thinking about giving them a go. If you find a better recipe let me know.
I think my mom’s recipe is all in her head. I do know that she tends to add some lemon peel zest into the dumpling mix which gives it just the faintest citrus smell/taste prior to the butter and brown sugar being added at the end.
Bed of luck. Let me know how you like em.
Will do, thanks! I totally get having the tweaks in your head or written into the family recipe book with a pen. Our better homes cookbook has tons of notes/tweaks written into it now.
I should probably ask my mom to write down her recipes for posterity sake at some point. I think my sister knows some of them .
Croissant
This, I love, LOVE croissants, and have basically baked and made every other thing I love that much at some point or another. Flattening a giant sheet of butter again and again into a dough sheet? Ain’t nobody got time for that
You fold and flatten it like 3-4 times, each takes like 5 minutes and then it goes back in the fridge for 45 minutes.so while it takes like 4-6 hours of time to make croissants from scratch (including proofing the dough etc.), it’s more like 1 hour of work. Really not as bad as people make it out to be.
effort wise I find it on par to making sourdough bread, what with all the stretching and folding of the dough dgring proofing.
and you can prepare them the day before and proof in the fridge, then bake the next morning. Actual fresh baked croissants in the morning are fucking amazing and well worth the work
I love homemade croissants, and make them, mostly because with sourdough starter in there the flavor is incredible but while I am a reasonably neat- handed person, you are understating the difficulty of laminated dough. It wants to tear, the dough and butter have to each be at the perfect magical temperature, can’t overwork it, dough is delicate and butter is tough. It’s fussy as fuck.
I mean, yes, i takes some practice. I was more commenting in terms of time+effort, which imo is not that much actual time spent doing stuff compared to e.g. just making regular sourdough bread. which also takes practice if you want nice big bubbles. In my experience, getting a pretty sourdough bread with high hydradation dough actually took more practice (in terms of handling the sticky dough) than getting good croissants.
And even the first couple of croissants turned out pretty good when i started. Not on par with bakery ones but still tasty. So it’s not like practice results need to go in the bin
Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh
Everything that has to be individually worked like that is a drag. Each one rolled out and cooked by itself. And it’s never one, right? The only time we do that is for a party so it’s at least two dozen.
