Random gripe of the day

[ritaxis]

I hate recipes that start every sentence with a piece of major expensive kitchen equipment. I beat my eggs with a whisk, thank you, and I don't have a food processor either. And I have no idea how your convection oven translates into a regular one. And when you get down to the exact brands and specific attachments, that's a lot of verbiage for me to cut through to find the actual verb and description for what is supposed to be happening to the food. More often than not, I'll wander off and look for an older recipe.

And as long as I'm grousing about recipes, you know what else I hate? I hate that I am browsing this huge repository of vegetable recipes and I don't like any of the recipes except for the ones I already do. The same things keep showing up over and over, and they're dumb. Bundles of green beans wrapped in bacon. That one green bean casserloe, you know, with the cream of mushroom soup and the canned fried onions? Over and over and over, every time "this is a new and unique version." Brassicaceae of various sorts glazed with maple syrup. Bacon in everything. Everything grilled or roasted, including things that ought to be braised. Honey in every damned thing. Why? Grits, polenta, pasta, dried legumes, couscous, all passed off as vegetable dishes. Yeah, they're plant matter, but you eat them for the starch: they do not have the culinary characteristics of vegetables and do not fulfill the craving for green (or orange).

Long gripe. Short version: I do not understand and do not approve of a bunch of people's approach to vegetable cookery and it makes me grumpy to wade through this when I'm looking for something I like.

Comments

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I feel similarly about recipes that call for slow or pressure cookers and don't offer an alternative method.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

yes, that counts as expensive kitchen equipment!

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

yummly.com has a reasonably good search engine that allows you to specify things you want in your recipe and things you definitely don't want, plus various search options. We've had a fair amount of luck finding interesting things through them.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I think what I've found is that I got to the point where I can basically cook, for a subset of cooking known as 'ordinary family meals'. So having looked at ginger pak choi recipes yesterday, I knew that 'crushing sesame seeds' wasn't about to happen, but that stirring in tahini certainly could; and that adding mushrooms and one of my little bags of frozen shredded chicken would work in that meal, and it could then be served with noodles and everyone would be happy. Is that following the recipe? More sort of using what other people cook to develop plans.

For veg, I've loved everything I've cooked by Ottolenghi, and much of the first book was initially Guardian articles and is available on the internet.

[lada-hitam.livejournal.com]

For recipes that call for slow cooker, I just cook it on the stove, but with very low heat and lid on for a few hours.

Also, I've successfully made shredded pork using this kind of method, while the original recipe calls for cooking it in the oven.

[lada-hitam.livejournal.com]

I also don't have food processor. I usually use the dry mill attachment of my blender to process some ingredients. I made pesto, peanut butter, and chili paste using it, but since it's small, you have to do the processing in small batch.

As for vegetable recipes, I think you'll have more luck looking at Asian recipes. Indonesian certainly have many types of vegetable recipes. Although maybe the taste doesn't suit you :)

ETA: I beat my eggs with fork/spoon/chopsticks, never whisk because it's harder to wash than those three ;p