Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cookery

Wok stir-fry cooking: best resources for instuctional cooking videos?

Ligament — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:14:29 -0800

Wok stir-fry cooking: best resources for instuctional cooking videos? Hi All,

I recently purchased a very high end cast iron wok, and a very high output outdoor wok stove (165k BTUs). Now that I have the equipment to do true high temperature wok cooking, I'm looking for online cooking videos for some great authentic recipes. I'm interested in any type of cuisine that uses a Wok as a main cooking vessel. I'm also interested in videos that try to instruct on authentic recipes as opposed to easy or watered-down for the American palette recipes.

Links, please! thanks!

Mashed potato

stenoboy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:55:15 -0800

Why does homemade mashed potato taste like fake mashed potato the day after? Is there a way I can make a load of mashed potato and keep it for a few days without it tasting weird? It always tastes like that horrible powdered stuff when eaten a few days after. In fact, it seems potatoes of any description don't do so well as leftovers. Any tips to make them taste better?

What can I cook with 25 kids and no kitchen?

mooreeasyvibe — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:46:22 -0800

What non-cook foods can we prepare at school? I'm a teacher who is doing cookery with 25 kids tomorrow. They are all about 11 or 12 years old.

We're doing world foods. Last week we did Italian Bruschetta, the week before veg Sushi.

We have no kitchen at the moment so we have to do it in the classroom.

What meal can we prepare?

It needs to be simple and require no ovens or microwaves or anything. Chopping and salads are good or anything you might think of.

Many thanks.

Ask PastyFilter

popkinson — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:34:03 -0800

How do I get my pastry for Cornish pasties to have the consistency of a good shop-bought pasty? Now I'm Cornish myself, so I feel pretty ashamed asking this question to a group of people who, in the main, are neither wreckers nor tinners, but here we go...

If you've ever eaten a pasty made at a good Cornish bakery, you'll know the consistency of the pastry, but I'll try to describe it nevertheless. It's quite thin (probably around 3mm) yet has a high degree of resilience - it needs that so that it can be carried around in the pocket of one's donkey-jacket. The texture is slightly chewy, distinctly layered, and holds the rest of the ingredients together well. There's nothing crumbly or flaky about it. If anything the consistency is almost like the crust of a calzone.

My mother (a strong advocate of the "it's not a pasty if it isn't wrapped in shortcrust" school) says it's just a variety of shortcrust. But I'm not convinced as I haven't been able to replicate it.

So... do we have any expert pastry- (or better still, pasty-) technicians willing to offer some tips?

Copper pans and electric heat, do they mix?

aussicht — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:42:04 -0800

Can I use my three-ply (out-middle-inner) copper-aluminum-stainless steel pots and pans on an electric range? Will it mess them up?

Fine food, fiddles and festivals

Jofus — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:14:18 -0800

Top tips for making good food at music festivals I'm a bit of a food snob and am about to spend a few days at The Green Man Festival. Was wondering if anyone had some top tips for cooking and/or any related equipment to take.

For reference, I've got a little pisspot gas burner, a frying pan and two saucepans, and anywhere between 2 and 4 people to cook for per night. Let's assume I've got to carry it all, and concentrate on the following criteria:

1) Food that makes a bit of a splash. (To cheer everyone up after what I assume will be a windlashed and rainy few days)
2) Food that won't kill us all after a couple of days unrefrigerated.
3) Anything that can easily be assembled after, say, 4 pints of hallucinogenic cider. (OK, maybe don't concentrate on this one so much.)

Anyone got anything to share?

Looking for Keith Floyd TV Shows

Otis — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 06:26:58 -0800

Floyd On... Looking for Keith Floyd cooking TV shows. Do these exist in electronic format anywhere out there? Looks like they were never released on DVD and VHS tapes seem hard to find and expensive (and in PAL format, which doesn't help me here in the States). Here's a list of the shows. Help me get my Floyd fix!

How to clean sticky egg from pans?

wackybrit — Tue, 09 May 2006 10:50:17 -0800

How do you clean a saucepan and utensils that have been used to prepare eggs? I don't eat eggs, my girlfriend does. I do the washing up in the house. Whenever she cooks eggs she does it in some way they all go 'fluffy' (is this 'scrambled eggs'?). When it comes to washing up, even boiling water can't shift the white sticky gunk from the pan! Instead I have to scour and scrape and end up smushing the white waxy stuff all around the pan. It really is like wax and takes forever to remove. The same applies, to a lesser extent, with utensils, but with a smaller surface area I can eventually scrub the egg off.

As most people tend to eat quite a lot of eggs, surely there's some simple way to clean away the white waxy nastiness without spending five solid minutes with a scouring pad destroying our pans?

Help me find a London cookery course

k8t — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:26:46 -0800

Please help me find an affordable cookery (cooking) class (course) in London. I have loads of free time in May, April and June, due to exams and I'd like to improve my cooking skills. A few more details: a course that focuses a lot on produce would be good. I don't eat meat, but my partner does. Cuisine shouldn't be specific. Affordable means, well, not breaking the bank. I live in Islington, so a place that is in North or Central London would be nice, but I'd also be willing to travel around the city.

Battle Refrigeration!

stet — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:23:31 -0800

Taming an uneven refrigerator? You know how one can increase the performance of an oven by leaving a pizza stone in it? I'm wondering if the same can be done with a fridge. Our refrigerator is one of the crappy kind that has only a single temperature adjustment and doesn't maintain an even temperature throughout. Near the freezer, food freezes and toward the bottom my vegetables aren't cold enough. It rankles. Also it spoils a lot of food.

Since a pizza stone or similar stored in an oven helps maintain a consistent internal temperature by absorbing heat when the oven overheats and radiating heat when the oven temperature drops, the oven just plain works better with a big ole heatsink inside of it.

What occurs to me is that a similar trick could be employed in my fridge. Perhaps if I were to store those blue cold packs or similar throughout the fridge, the internal temperature could be kept more even. Has anyone out there experimented with this or something similar? Failing that, is there a better way to increase the performance of a crappy refrigerator? Bonus points will be awarded for solutions that also lower the humidity of the refrigerator.

One caveat is that the fridge is miserably small and techniques that require taking space away from food storage are less than ideal. And no, our landlord has no interest in buying us a new fridge.

Northwest Cooking for Couples

stet — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:50:28 -0800

Dinnerfilter: Help me decide what my girlfriend and I should cook for her birthday. We live in Seattle and prefer things the are Seasonal and Local (tm) and are not averse to digging around the market and fishmongers. We eat a lot of seafood and some meat. Plus the occaisional ribeye. Mussels are coming into season and we're pretty excited about that. A new appetizer recipe for mussels would not go amiss.

Aside from sashimi, we mostly cook in the California/Pacific Northwest style. Our favorite restaurant is Dandelion and we cook in that style, generally. Caprial Pence has written a number of cookbooks from which we regularly and happily cook.

We are pretty good cooks and not intimidated by difficulty, but this is a birthday dinner, so the recipe should be complicated but the fun kind of complicated. Lots of chopping and sauteing are great, but hours of basting would be less fun.

I was hoping to have about three courses and desert or cheese. My plan is to get everything prepped and cook and eat each course before moving on to the next. I realize that there are lots of recipes online, but our cooking has been in a bit of a rut lately and I'm hoping the good citizens of metafilter will come up with some directions that wouldn't have occured to me otherwise. Thanks much.

Rattlesnake Quesadillas

robocop is bleeding — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:00:39 -0800

I am cooking rattlesnake quesadillas tonight for a small dinner party. Every Google'd recipe I've seen so far treats rattlesnake the same was as chicken when it comes to preparation. However, the nice folks at Savenor's said the rattlesnake should be parboiled, which has thrown my limited cookery skill into a tizzy. So how are you supposed to cook rattlesnake? Is there a way to season it while it's being parboiled?