It's late and I have to go to bed soon, but I've found myself cooking a tremendous amount lately. The other night, I made a gallon of spaghetti sauce. It tasted exactly like how Dad makes it. Tomorrow, I'm making beans and oranges - a Latin American dish - with pork and rice along with it. The whole making food from scratch thing, while delicious, is both time consuming and expensive. The ingredients I needed for tonight? Something like $20. I will defray the costs through my housemates and all the others who eat the food, but still, that's like a weeks worth of groceries devoted to a single meal. A single dish even. Sometimes I wonder if I'm being too extravagant. I currently have the beans soaking in beer (a tip I got from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything (thank you Grandma Anne and Judy)) and the pork is marinading in a spicy sauce. The pork cut is the shoulder, so it is extraordinarily fatty. Apparently the recipe calls for that cut, but still, I wonder if it won't be too chewy and gristly. Esp. since I will be cooking it in a pan instead of roasting it or broiling it. Hmmmmm... The recipe for beans and oranges says it is best to use the fat from the pork to help cook the rest of the dish, including the beans and vegetables added to it. I'll be crossing my fingers, and probably crossing my eyes as well. I've spent soooo much time in the kitchen lately.
What's worse is that my housemates are not especially good cooks, so they wouldn't even dream of attempting the stuff I do. However, I refuse to eat spaghetti sauce out of a jar on principal, and the whole cooking in bulk is good because then you have lots of leftovers. I'm making 2 lbs of beans, on top of 2 lbs of pork, and about six cups of rice. This is to feed between 10 and 20, I think. I'm not completely insane. Y'know how in the Harry Potter books, Molly Weasley just magics her way around the kitchen? Why can't I do that? Or at the very least, get a staff of Ecuadorian prep cooks and dishwashers like Uncle Rick.
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An Adventure Journal of Science, Exploration and Razz-Matazz Whizzbang'ry.
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- Born April, 1988. Looks like himself. Lives here. Favorite color is blue.
4 comments:
Yea, Mark Bittman! Glad you are trying stuff. Do you have any access to a freezer? The pork would do fine.
FYI: Some sauces from a jar are indeed delicious, just not the cheap ones like Ragu or Prego. Would you eat your father's sauce if he preserved it? Yay for cooking in general! The hardest part is figuring out how to cook just enough so there is the right amount of leftovers but not so much that it goes to waste.
Part of the reason things seem so expensive now is that you have to build up a supply of the occasional items like spices, and you are paying that cost up front for the first dish rather than distributing the cost over all future meals that will use, say, that same bottle of tumeric. The other thing to remember is that you're not spending $20 on a single meal, you are spending $20 on a single DISH which will feed a single person for like 6 meals. So it comes out to be a lot less per meal.
-H
Re spices: Find a coop and buy small (very small) amounts of bulk spices as you need them. The bigger bottles never get used up, and they deteriorate with age. GA
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