So I have this problem… I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.
THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.
So I’ll find a pan that makes me go “Oooh!” then I look for excuses to use it.
So it’s not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. “More time to make and clean up than eat? I’m not making it.” Cooking for OTHER people?
Chuck roast:
Shakshuka:
Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:
Beef roast:
Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:
Ableskievers:
Find a homeless shelter and cook for them? Idk, just an idea. Food looks amazing
Cooking at scale is a much, much bigger deal. Hard to maintain quality, both in terms of ingredients and end product.
There’s a good reason why school lunches are garbage. :(
Holy fuck that chuck roast looks good
It was really good, with bacon, veggies, braised in Malbec wine and Grand Marnier.
I found 2 recipes I couldn’t decide between so I just combined them. ;)
1 pack of bacon, diced and cooked in olive oil on medium high until the edges were brown, then removed.
In the same pan, 2 diced carrots, 2 diced celery stalks, 2 diced Walla Walla sweet onions. Cooked on medium high until carmaelized, then removed.
3.37 pound boneless chuck roast. Patted dry, heavily salted and peppered, seared on one side for 5 minutes, flipped and then seared on the other side for 5 minutes and removed.
Added back 1/2 cup Grand Marnier and 2 cups of Malbec Wine. Deglazed the pan scraping up all the brown bits.
Put the bacon back in, put the veggies back in, stirred until well distributed. Added bay leaves, thyme and rosemary, several cloves of minced garlic, topped with the meat.
Brought to a boil then placed in a pre-heated 325° oven for 3 hours.
After 3 hours, beef was to temp and easily shreddable. (Finally! A reason to use the meat claws!) Resting on stove top while I cook some pasta to go with it.
Pasta was super simple. Boiled water and salt, cooked a bag of egg noodles for 8 or 9 minutes. Drained, removed, then melted a stick of butter in the pot, added a small container of heavy cream, added rosemary and thyme, brought it to a simmer then popped the pasta back in and cooked a couple of minutes.
Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.
Are you me? I keep doing that too
Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it’s just such a bother.
Croissant
This, I love, LOVE croissants, and have basically baked and made every other thing I love that much at some point or another. Flattening a giant sheet of butter again and again into a dough sheet? Ain’t nobody got time for that
Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.
Ditto puff pastry from scratch.
I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I’m pretty motivated to make food homemade.
Baklava is the one I’d like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.
Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.
Skillet lasagna is the answer you seek! Maybe.
I don’t really lack for motivation, I’ll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can’t logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I’ve checked,) and I just don’t have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I’ve made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I’ve helped butcher chickens, I’ve made beef Wellington, sushi, I’ve baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I’ve made ice cream, homemade pierogies.
Billionaire
I have the Ladurée macaron cookbook and I look at it frequently, and then go buy a lesser version of the cookie and pretend I’m happy.
Lamb Vindaloo.
God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas
I just made that this week and think I may agree with you, or at least I’d not try on a workday again. I didn’t have the right peppers and used dried ancho, jarred roasted red pepper and a little fresh red pepper and it came out really good, sorta new world /old world delicious fusion but my God, toasting, grinding, processing, tasting, resting the paste. Started in the morning and let it rest while I was at work. Also started sourdough naan in the morning & of course made a vegetable dish to go with the meat - everything was good but I was exhausted by the end of the day!
I’ve never even tried to make it, so you’ve done much more than I!
Its my favourite dish whenever I go out to eat… but I just couldn’t put aside the time, money or effort to make it…
As much as I love barbecue I don’t and won’t own a smoker.
Homemade pizza. Making the dough creates a mess and requires delicate manual labor in several steps at precise times over more than 24 hours. Looks great on YouTube but that’s just not me.
Edit: thanks for the suggestions, guys. Who knows, maybe one day… 😉
Well it depends on what you want to achieve. Because there is also the oven, which os important, and your ingredient.
I love making pizza since I was a teenager and I learned slowly. Internet was great for learning cold fermentation or about different type of pizza.
But you can make a decent pizza quite easily.
Maybe try focaccia first it’s super fun. This is the recipe I use.
A ceramic stone in the oven has been a gamechanger for my pizzas.
Yep, if you make pizza in a home oven it’s really important to have a stone plate.
Sourdough
It’s honestly not hard at all.
Do you have a reliable starter recipe?
Spring rolls. They are so much work. If you wanna do them right you have to start the night before. So many ingredients, the sauce. But they’re soooo good.
