re: What is your Food Philosophy?

It depends on the night and the time Ihave to prepare it. On work/school nights, I keep it as simple as possible using mostly tried and true recipes that I keep in my head mostly. On weekends or holidays I venture outside my comfort zone some. I live in an area that doesn’t cater much to exotic and lesser known ingredients so I steer clear of using recipes that use ingredients I’d have to drive an hour or more to find. Always strive to cook well seasoned and flavorful foods from scratch. I cook with the philosophy not to overuse seasoning and spices though personally I like things that may be too salty or too spicy for some. You can always add more. Also since I do most of the cleaning too, the amount of cleaning that I will have to do after cooking many times determines what I will be cooking.

The older I get, the less interested I am in recipes with lots of steps and ingredients.

If I see a recipe with 20 lines of ingredients and 11 steps, I lose interest. Not that I don't enjoy cooking something like that when I have the time and someone to share it with.

But a dish that's simple and fast that can be really great if done right is what I get the most satisfaction out of. - something like spaghetti carbonara or egg fried rice or a good pan sauce after sautéing something.

My philosophy?s This is more like a rant, but....

No boiled green things. Ever. Also applies to certain non-green things like yellow squash. I grew up thinking I hated vegetables, but as it turned out, I only hated the ones my mother (and all her relatives) cooked. It was an eye opening experience to finally try real (or at least "real Amercanized") Chinese food in my early twenties and discover what vegetables could really be.

No cornbread. It's disgusting. It can make a good dressing or stuffing, but in those cases other sources of moisture and flavor have been added to make it better, and if you get it moist enough without becoming watery it works well for that. Other than that, it's just more dry, coarse cornbread. It is particularly disgusting to watch someone crumble up their cornbread and put the mushy boiled green things mentioned above in it. Revolting.

No microwaves. They ruin the taste of everything they touch.

No food out of a box. No rice mixes, no mac and cheese out of a box, no just heat and add water side dishes. One exception: most cake mixes taste better than most homemade cakes because most homemade cakes are so dry and coarse. Don't know why, I'm not a big desert maker so I haven't cracked the code on that one, but I did go through a significant effort to make good Toll House Cookies and learned that the same recipe executed in a slightly different order using a slightly different methods makes a tremendously better product, though with significantly greater effort. I suspect that a lot of recipes people used are dumbed down to make them more popular.

Opening a jar or a can and heating something up is not cooking.

Overcooked meat sucks. I realize that some people simply can't stand the thought of even a trace of pink being present at the table they are eating at, and I understand being picky like that (see the cornbread abomination above), but please don't incinerate a good cut of meat and expect me to eat it. Let's just boil some hotdogs instead, or maybe it's a manwhich night.

Iodized salt tastes metallic. Kosher salt, sea salt, Himalayan pink salt, mediterranean flaked salt, Lawry's seasoned salt.... there are so many options.

Black Pepper should only be eaten freshly ground. Yes, it's effort, but it is totally worth it and gets better every time you go through the effort.

The best hams are simply labeled "Ham". If you then take it and bake it at 350 degrees F for twelve hours until it is dry and shriveled, you'd probably be better off with one labeled "ham and water product". You're not likely to be able to tell the difference between them at the end and the second one is much cheaper.

Every time I go grocery shopping I think about how much easier my life would be if I could eat pre-prepared foods, but every time I eat something like that I am reminded of the last time I went to a Krystal's restaurant in 1988. Yep, I think that's still sitting in my gut.


Edit: forgot one. Always get a whole chicken and cut it up yourself. Chicken is always better on the bone and skin on. Look for the smallest chicken, it's always better. 3.5 lbs is best, if you can find it. 5 lbs is rubbery.

Even though you obviously need to learn how to make cornbread, I'm giving you an upvote, baw, simply for the effort you put into that rant.

Sounds like you got more issues than cooking. May God bless you and help you with your burden. And tiss the season. Jesus had it more difficult and had harder decisions and he say the bigger picture. I know you can do it.

You freaking nailed it

My wife and I are leftover experts and love our Walmart grocery delivery service too

quote:
the feminist movement has tried to extinguish the family

True.

I don't just throw slop on the table. I enjoy cooking and do 95% of the cooking in my household. That's only because of my wife and I's work schedule. I get home first so I start cooking, she wraps up work and does some clothes, we eat, typically as family, then we typically both clean the kitchen.

I cook as an act of love, to provide for my family. I rarely do box stuff and do most things from scratch. The art in cooking to me is having everything timed to be ready at once and making something out of nothing.

I'm 46, so my mother was a mother of the 70s-80s and I can say she never served us anything out of a box (aside from mac-n-cheese). She made a lot of rice and gravy and beans.

I eat it