Easy cooking

[oyceter]

commodorified's Cooking for People Who Don't blog carnival is up!

I've been skimming over some posts to try to get back into the habit of cooking. So far, I've done two holiday-meal-ish things since November and promptly remedied that by eating out all the time or scrounging.

I started cooking a lot more Chinese food in the winter of 2010, and though I read a fair amount on cooking, I had to figure out a lot of shortcuts from my sister because there aren't that many English-language resources online that have good "quick Chinese cooking" advice. So... maybe some of this will be useful to someone?

I tend to be shorter on time and energy than money, which is reflected in the tips. I also only cook for one to two people at a time, and I've discovered that I'm absolutely terrible at things like buying in bulk and then storing in single-serving containers in the freezer unless I am 100% on in terms of mood and energy.

This also assumes having the basic ingredients and tools for basic Chinese cooking and relies heavily on the freezer and the microwave.

• I like putting about two handfuls of frozen in-shell edamame in a bowl, sprinkling maybe a tablespoon or more of water in the bowl, and then microwaving for 1-2 minutes to steam them. Toss with sesame oil, salt, and pepper. (I like shelling edamame myself, but I suspect you can do the same for shelled edamame with some variations on water and microwave time. This gets one bowl and a pair of chopsticks (for mixing) dirty.


• Stir-fried veggies require comparatively minimal ingredients and prep (for stir fry, at least). Usually I wash green veggies, chop, heat oil in a pan, throw in some very coarsely chopped garlic, thrown in veggies, dump in some water, put lid on and steam, then toss in some salt later. Pea shoots are very time-intensive if you want to get the non-edible curly bits off. Cabbage is fairly easy: chop into quarters, slice the stem bit off, chop a bit more. Pre-chopped broccoli from a supermarket is more expensive but extremely fast. This usually gets a chopping board, a knife, a spatula, a frying pan, and a dish dirty.


• Frozen onion pancakes! My extremely lazy meal consists of two of these with egg. Fry up the pancake on both sides. Put pancake on plate. Beat an egg. Pour egg into frying pan that is still hot from pancake, swirl around till it's kind of round and about the size of the pancake. Put pancake on top of egg. You can eat this with various sauces, like sriricha or oyster sauce, but I kind of just like it plain. This usually gets a frying pan, a dish, and a spatula dirty. (I have reused the frying pan before washing to fry more pancakes too.) ETA: When I have no energy for frying, I put the onion pancake in the toaster oven and smear a bit of oil on both sides. Doesn't quite taste the same, but it is edible.


• I like hitting up people who makes their own dumplings or bao and sell them on the side, or people who know those people. I've definitely seen this in Bay Area, but I don't know how prevalent it is outside of Bay Area. The stuff is usually tastier than the ones in the supermarket. I also go to dumpling restaurants, which will usually have frozen dumplings for sale as well (at least in Bay Area?). I think dumplings aren't usually sold pre-cooked, whereas bao have usually been pre-cooked and then frozen.


• Frozen pre-cooked bao + microwaves = yay! I usually wet a paper towel and squeeze off the excess, then wrap the wet towel around the bao and microwave for about a minute. Yay no dishes! Also, the steam slightly loosens pre-existing gunk in the microwave, and you can wipe it off more easily if you want.


• I try to slice ginger and freeze when I can. Peeling optional, though washing is good because I use the ginger straight from the freezer. Frozen ginger is soggy upon thawing, but if I'm using it for stir fry or soup or stew, it doesn't matter that much. (Although! When you throw the frozen ginger into your oil for stir fry, the frozen water will make oil splatter a lot.)


• I like cooking instant noodles in a pot because then I can crack an egg in. The egg usually reaches the half-solid half-liquid yolk state about 2 minutes in on my stove. If I have washed veggies around, I try throwing those in later to each something non-preserved. (Also, if you cook in a small enough pot, you can eat out of the pot and not get a bowl dirty.)


• I like taking white rice home from restaurants. Half the time I don't get around to eating it, but during the times I actually have food but no rice, it's nice to just microwave instead of waiting for the rice cooker.


• Easy pickled cucumber side dish: smash some Asian cucumbers up with the flat of your knife (or chop them! I like the texture of smashed ones and of course the act of whomping them). Put in container, pour in some rice vinegar, add some salt, add some smashed garlic cloves. Close container, shake, refrigerate for as long as you want to get the flavor right. I like this for summer.


• ETA: I usually don't get around to this, but sometimes my mom buys me meat and she does it, and it is awesome. She'll buy meat for stir fry (usually beef flank or pork loin), then cut it into the correct sized strips for stir frying (roughly an inch or two wide and long, usually so it's a very long strip that slices into little rectangles), then wrap each section in plastic wrap and freeze it. When she takes it out to cook, she'll defrost them but only maybe by a third or so, because it's easier to cut the little strips for stir frying when the meat is still mostly frozen.


• ETA2: tofu in those juice-box-like packages last a very long time and doesn't need to be refrigerated. Also, for a really quick meal, sometimes I do cold soft tofu on a plate and pour Japanese sesame dressing on top. Other very fast meals of unknown nutritional value include heated rice, soy sauce, and either teriyaki nori or kim.

Comments

[phi]

Yeah, so many of my cooking shortcuts assume plenty of money and no time/energy,which is why I didn't participate in the carnival.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who eats out of a pot to avoid having to wash a bowl!

[oyceter]

Heh, if you have any more shortcuts, I would love to hear them! I was writing this up and thinking, "OMG people will read this and be absolutely horrified by how I eat."

My general sense of the carnival was that it had a pretty large scope for "food security," as long as you're not "This is the only way to do it!!!!" I think I posted because I vaguely remembered people talking about cooking tips for when you're low on spoons, which sometimes goes with other types of cooking tips but sometimes doesn't.

Which is to say, you should totally post though only if you feel like it!

[inkstone]

I was writing this up and thinking, "OMG people will read this and be absolutely horrified by how I eat."

No, we won't! I do most of these things myself!!

[oyceter]

Excellent!

I wanted a more non-Western-food-centric tips section, since a lot of mine only make sense if you're making Chinese food.

[phi]

A big one for me is to make chutneys in huge batches when I have time/energy. I line an ice cube tray with plastic wrap, fill the cubes up with chutney, and cover with more plastic. Once the chutney freezes I pop out the cubes and cut apart the plastic and put it all in a giant freezer bag. One ice cube worth is perfect for me to have as a condiment with rice. Also, I can put up huge quantities of chutney when herbs are cheap at the farmers markets in the summer, which saves money in the winter.

Another is that one of the biggest impediments for me making curry is that chopping and frying onions takes 20 minutes, and that's just horribly overwhelming to me when I'm depressed. So I make huge batches of caramelized onions in my dutch oven when I have the time/energy/undepressedness. I fill freezer bags half full with the onions, and press out all the air, and freeze them flat, so they make big square sheets of cooked onions. So when I want to cook, I just break off a chunk of onion to use as the curry base.

I hate cooking enough of a meal to freeze and eat later -- I get sick of eating it, and then forget about it, and then rediscover it months later and it's just a mess. So for me, saving time is about lowering the energy barrier to start making something new, instead of having ready-to-go meals in the freezer.

[oyceter]

Okay, I need to do that freezing in ice cube trays to put on rice thing!

I also once made so much curry by mistake (bought too many vegetables and wanted to use them all up because I know how rarely I have energy to cook) that I was sick of it in a week, even though I still had two giant tupperwares left.

But yeah, a lot of it for me is actually about lowering the barrier, ergo my focus on how many dishes get dirty... I always talk myself out of cooking by thinking about how much work it'll take to clean up the kitchen afterward =(.

[thistleingrey]

I do some of these, too, including eating dinner out of the pot if what's there or what's heated up from leftovers is single-serving sized. I didn't post because I don't feel as though I've enough to share.

One thing I do related to your instant-noodles idea--minus the instant noodles, since I don't eat much wheat--is to cook soba while (optionally) pan-frying a bit of salmon or microwaving some frozen or leftover meat, then slice up some Japanese or Persian cucumbers or some bell pepper. Put the soba on top and add a tablespoon or so of ponzu, then mix. Not as nice as with the proper dipping sauce, but buckwheat has some protein even if one has no meat around. (During years when I'm not strapped for cash, I buy the pricier soba that has more buckwheat, less wheat.) This is ten minutes at most and can be done with a toddler underfoot.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I felt kind of stupid about posting, except when I was reading through all the posts, it was pretty clear that most people were talking about a... primarily not Asian diet. And I think what gets categorized as "low energy" depends a lot on what your staples are in the kitchen, since obviously a recipe with soy sauce and ginger for me is going to have a much lower threshhold to entry due to my refrigerator contents than a recipe that calls for butter or milk (which I almost never have and only buy for specific baking or cooking needs).

I did not realize buckwheat had protein! That is really good to know, actually.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, very much agreed. When I was growing up, my mother cooked specifically Korean food about once a week, but I've been realizing that her treatment of mainstream-US foods had a subtle E Asian-compatible bent. No cheese atop roasted root vegetables, no bread around for making breadcrumbs/etc., and water for cooking oatmeal (until cooking it in milk became the only way that my daughter is willing to have milk at home, and she's still at an age when she ought to have some)....

Not a ton, but more than wheat does! Largely by not being a grass (grasses = wheat, rye, barley, millet). Quinoa, also not a grass, likewise has somewhat more protein.