Tag: cooking

#oneaday Day 317: Kitchen essentials

I'm not a particularly amazing cook or anything, but I do make a decent chilli and curry. Over the years, my wife and I haven't been super-extravagant in the things we've bought for our kitchen, but in the last couple of years or so in particular, we've come across a few things that are pretty much essentials, and which I recommend anyone who spend any amount of time in the kitchen, regardless of ability level, should invest in.

The first is simple: non-stick pans that are actually non-stick. We'd been working with the same pans for a long time, but a few trips to Lidl ago, my wife picked up a couple of new frying pans that she thought looked both decent and reasonably priced. Reader, they are a marvel. I do wonder how long they will remain this way, but certainly right now, frying anything in them is an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely nothing gets stuck to the bottom, even with my typically rather aggressive approach to heat management (somewhat unavoidable with induction hobs, in my experience) and this, in turn, means that they're very easy to clean. And as we all know, chipping burnt-on crap off the bottom of pans is no fun at all. So save yourself the hassle; spend the money and get some decent non-stick pans.

The second is an air fryer. I know it's a haha funny meme (for some reason) to enthuse about air fryers, but seriously, if you don't have one, get one. Not only is it good for "frying" stuff without immersing it completely in oil, it also makes an excellent substitute for your oven if you're cooking small stuff, like, say, a portion of chips or some breaded chicken breasts.

It will take you a little experimentation to convert "oven" times to "air fryer" times (you generally need quite a bit less time — in my experience, anywhere between 50-75% of the stated oven time) but once you've nailed that, it's so much more convenient. And, like the non-stick pan approach, air fryer trays are a lot easier to clean than a whole-ass oven.

You can get cheap air fryers, but I would recommend you splash the cash a bit and go for a good one, preferably one that has multiple baskets. We have a Ninja one and it's great. The two baskets can be set up independently, and even "synced" with one another so the second one comes on after the first one has been cooking for a certain amount of time. No more bunging everything in the oven for the same amount of time and hoping for the best!

I will also note that an air fryer makes a surprisingly good toasted cheese sandwich. It's not quite up to Breville standards, but it's a whole lot less messy to clean up afterwards. If all you care about is that your cheese sandwich goes "crunch" a bit, then air frying a cheese sandwich is a great thing.

The third thing is a rice cooker. These come in all manner of levels of complexity, but ours is a super-simple one: you just pop in the amount of rice you want, add an appropriate amount of water (in my experience, roughly twice as many cups of water as you have rice) then turn it on and leave it. Pretty much perfect rice every time, though ours does have a tendency to stick a bit to the bottom. It's easy enough to clean, though, because the main pain is removable and can even be stuck in the dishwasher if you're super lazy.

Between these three things that I've outlined above, we cook almost everything we eat. They are, without a doubt, the best kitchen investments we've ever made — and if you're lacking any or all of them, I highly recommend adding them to your kitchen, too.

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#oneaday Day 544: Om Nom Nom

After a delicious meal at sort-of Japanese restaurant chain Wagamama, I find myself inspired to write about food. Food is delicious and, after all, essential to survival, so you may as well enjoy what you eat.

I'm not a fantastic cook, really, despite having spent a memorable period working alongside my friend from university and beyond Mike Porter in a pub kitchen. We made a mean prawn cocktail and only occasionally accidentally deep-fried an Ultimate Combo when no-one had ordered one in order to have something delicious to munch on ourselves. (There was also the memorable time that a bunch of food was being thrown out and Mike ended up with a ridiculous number of rib-eye steaks, finding himself eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for some time. And the time we had an apple sauce fight that culminated with the pouring of apple sauce into each others' chefs hats and a strong temptation to pour it down the hairy and perpetually-visible bumcrack of our (female) companion in the kitchen.)

My one redeeming trait in cooking is the fact that I'm willing to experiment and improvise. I've made some delicious spaghetti sauces, curries and chilli con carnes using said talent, and they're never quite the same as each other.

All those foods are staples, of course, and pretty much anyone who's been away to university knows how to prepare all of the above as a means of dining reasonably nutritionally well on a teeny-tiny budget. But over the years, it's become clear that the interpretation of each recipe varies enormously according to each person. I, for example, never put onion in anything because onions are actually little Satan poos, and no-one wants to eat Satan's poo. I may have made that up, but onions still taste like shit (not actual shit) and make me retch if I can taste them, so I avoid them at every opportunity.

I was quite happy with my simple chilli recipe, too — tin of tomatoes, packet of mince, tin of kidney beans, bit of chilli powder — until I went over to a friend's house one evening and he made a chilli that was somehow infinitely, indescribably more delicious than any I'd ever made. His secret? Using twice as many tins of tomatoes as you "need" and then allowing them to reduce over a much longer cooking period. Also, adding bacon and/or chorizo.

Even within relatively simple foods, then, there is a huge amount of variation. This goes right down to the simplest of the simple dishes. Take two people who enjoy Bovril on toast, for example — one may put a thin film of the beefy, yeasty black stuff on top while the other may enjoy the curious enamel-stripping mouth-burning sensation inflicted by putting slightly too much Bovril on a piece of toast. (Incidentally, try Bovril on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. It's amazeballs. Assuming Bovril doesn't make you gag.)

I'd like to cook better, and once I get back into my own place again I have every intention of exploring and trying things out. Cooking can be a pain in the arse, but it's also immensely satisfying when it goes right — to look at, to hear bubbling away in the pot and, eventually, to taste. And if you fuck up, well, you've learned from the experience — plus hey, the Chinese takeaway is only just down the road if the worst comes to the worst.

"Healthy" food can eat a dick, though. At least the interpretation from a lot of people, which is either "undressed, extremely dull garden salad" or "fat free, flavour free bullshit". I'm fully aware that it is, in fact, possible to make delicious and healthy foods — the BBC Good Food magazine have a range of low-cost books with some excellent recipes designed around this very principle for example. But with healthy eating it's all too easy to fall into a bland, boring trap of flavour free nonsense and forget how amazing it is to eat something with a bit of sugar or salt in it.

Food, then? Delicious when prepared correctly, enough to make you wonder if it was worth bothering with if prepared incorrectly. This has been a message from the Ministry of Stating the Obvious.