I recently made a leg of lamb that turned out pretty okay. Slow roasted over close to 5 hours. I have also bought a wireless heat thermometer.

I now want to pick up another leg. I know most people use leftover lamb to make sandwiches, but I prefer sandwiches over traditional lamb serve with mash, rice, or whatever.

I haven’t had a lot of lamb in general and cooked even less so tbf I don’t know how well it pairs with some things. I did a tandoori marinade last time and it was pretty good.

Does anyone have a recipe or ideas for specifically a sandwich? Don’t mind slow roasting it to tender or being a little experimental and trying to get it sliiightly pink (I’m a bit cautious with rare meat).

I wish I could show a photo of the crime scene in front of me looks like for reference. The first plantain I peeled was easy and smooth, with the skin coming off nicely. The plantain right in front of me will not let go of the skin and I’m having to carve into it with a knife. How do I peel plantains?

My family and I are running out of meals to cook. were all picky but we try to not be. ive had Mac n cheese and pork chops so much that I cant eat them anymore. we eat a lot of chicken and spaghetti cause we dont know what to cook anymore. the kids dont like fish unless its Gordon's from the freezer. plz help. sometimes well make chicken casserole or chicken noodle soup but its warming up too much for that. thx in advance.

I'm thinking about buying a rice cooker, but I'm not a fan of kitchen appliances that only have one function.

So, a few questions:

What else could I cook in it besides rice? I’m thinking specifically of other grains or lentils… Would that work?

And is it really worth it, in the end? I’m particularly wondering about the energy consumption of this type of appliance compared to cooking on electric or induction stovetops...

Thanks in advance for your answers!

I'm talking same ingredients, same measurements, same steps. I even bought a kitchen scale because I thought maybe my cups were off. Watched the video three times before starting. Set a timer. Didn't skip anything.

The result? Looks like something you'd find abandoned in a gas station. The recipe photo looks like it belongs in a magazine.

Is there some secret step that food bloggers just don't mention? Like do professionals have different ovens, different pans, or do they just lie about the recipe? Because I'm starting to think these photos are staged with inedible props and I've been getting played for months.

Please tell me I'm not alone in this.

If you think these restrictions seem completely incompatible with making cooking easy while also tickling your tastebuds, let this post to prove you wrong!

1. The entire art of cooking is to simply not overcook anything and not undercook anything.

• If we ever have doubts about when to add something or how much longer to cook something, just remember this rule and use it as a guiding principle.
• What can happen is we add all of our veggies to the pot at the same time and then as we're trying to get our potatoes to turn soft, all our greens have now become an overcooked sickly green-brown sludge. To get everything to cook perfectly together we sometimes need to delay when we add things.
• Add dense tubers, squashes, grains and anything cut large first.
• Add medium density roots, onions, stalks and anything cut medium-size in the last 1/3 of cook time.
• Add light greens, spices, herbs and anything cut small at the very end of cook time when everything else is finished.
  • Only ever add these in when the heat is completely off. The heat from the other cooked veggies will cook them. Their flavors will adequately steep in the broth after only 2-3 minutes.
• As a rule of thumb, the harder something is to chop, the longer we have to cook it.
• Once everything's fully cooked take it off the heat and leave the lid off! Things will continue to cook even if the heat is off but the lid is left on! We can turn a perfectly cooked dish into overcooked school-cafeteria gruel after only 3-5 minutes of making this fatal error (and believe me, I have!) Light to medium veggies, especially chopped, cook very quickly. Their cook time ranges from 2-10 minutes max.
• We won't be perfect at this at first. We'll sometimes overcook things or undercook things. The more we do it though the better we get in knowing how long things need and when to add them.

2. DON'T chop and/or rinse any veggies when arriving home from shopping.

• Instead, simply cut the bottoms off of any greens and put them in pots of water in the kitchen. They keep longer this way and so it allows us to buy more fresh veg while making fewer grocery trips per month.
  • For root veggies we can place them in a shallow dish (like a pie plate) with water up to 1/2 their lying height and that will keep them crisp.
  • We don't need to pot cabbage, it's almost eternal if we consume it by pulling off its leaves rather than cutting into it (sometimes it's convenient to cut into it though so play it by ear).
  • Roots and cabbage last probably a month or longer. Greens will last a few days to two weeks when potted depending on the green. Everything will last longer if additionally placed in a fridge.
  • Remove only as many greens from the watered pots as needed for cooking that day and rinse & chop them right before use.

3. Swap out oil sauté with water sauté.

• Water sauté is a very convenient, healthy and versatile cooking method. It has essentially zero cleanup compared to oil sauté because there's no oil (duh) and never any charred bits stuck to the bottom of the pan.
• It's basically the same as making a soup but we use a lot less water. The idea is to add water up to 1/2 to 3/4 the height of our largest vegetable chunks.
• The densest vegetables, like squash or potatoes, are placed at the bottom of the pot and the lighter vegetables are placed on top of them (either added at the start of cooking or later on depending on how long they require to cook) where they will be steamed from the shallow water below.

4. Squashes, starches, and legumes are our thickeners.

• Squashes tend to be lighter than starches (though there are some exceptions, like buttercups) but they also tend to have a lot more flavor. They therefore make for excellent flavorful thickeners in a water sauté. Try them all. Butternut, acorn and spaghetti are the most common but we can often find buttercup and delcata seasonally.
• I suspect the current protein craze is very damaging to our health, and is likely fueling cancer growth, and so use legumes more sparingly & occasionally unless we're trying to be a professional bodybuilder—in which case we're probably not the type of person who cares about shaving a decade or two off our lifespan anyway. All must be sacrificed before the altar of gains!

5. Always start cooking a pot of rice at the very start of cooking. (applies to any other grain like barley/buckwheat/quinoa/pre-soaked-beans/etc as well) 

• These generally take longer to cook and starting them early allows them to sync up with the rest of our food.

6. Cook what needs to be cooked rather than what we feel most comfortable cooking.

• Greens starting to wilt? Celery turning yellow and getting floppy? Roots going soft? Spuds starting to sprout? At this stage they're still perfectly edible and nutritious. Instead of throwing them out or letting them go to rot, look at their urgency to be eaten as a creative cooking prompt: How can I prepare and mix these ingredients together to make a delicious dish? We'll often be surprised at what we can come up with.
• It's these opportunities where real growth in the kitchen happens, not from the first nights back from the grocery store. Sometimes we might prepare a dud but those will few & far between and will become increasingly rare as we refine our abilities. I've been saying this for years and it's as true today for me as it was then; we learn the most in our cooking—and get the most creative—right before we go to the supermarket when we've "run out of food".

7. The only reason we should chop things small is if we want them to cook faster.

• Don't make the mistake in thinking we need to chop everything into small pieces to cook it. We can chop things large & coarse, which is a lot less work, and they will still cook just fine that way—though it will take longer.
• Be mindful of how it increases cook times though. We will likely have to delay when we add faster-cooking vegetables.
• The only other minor benefit of chopping things small is we'll save a bit on our energy bill. It requires less overall heat to cook a finer chop.

8. Fresh ginger, garlic, and other WHOLE spices will allow us to completely forget about salt.

• Add these to dishes at the very end, and be liberal with the fresh ginger and/or garlic. It's quite hard to add too much of these two specifically. They often serve as our spice base on which other spices can build on top of.
• Experiment to find the spices we like best and the amounts which are appropriate to add to a dish. Focus on one spice at a time and try to learn it. Taste it by itself. Try to make a few dishes seasoned with only that one spice. The goal is to build a flavor memory of that spice so we will be able to identify it and know what kind of vibe it will contribute when we mix it in with other flavors later on.
• Some spices, like cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, or black pepper, are very potent & distinct and we only want to add them cautiously in small amounts. Other spices are more forgiving to overuse like cumin and coriander (though it's still better to use them judiciously).  Some of my personal favorites are coriander, fennel, rosemary, cinnamon, black pepper, bay leaf, and cumin.

9. Try a new vegetable (or fruit) we've never tried before every month (or every week if we're feeling up to it) and experiment with preparing it in different ways.

• Try cooking it in various ways by itself first, or with few other ingredients, so we build a flavor memory of it which will help inform us on how best to include it in our future meals.
• Try it raw or in a salad, cooked in a soup, steamed, in a water sauté, etc.

10. Make a habit of eating every part of the vegetable that's edible.

• Cooking squash? Leave the seeds in (they're chewy and delicious anyway). Cooking broccoli? Slice up the stalk into discs and throw them too (it's honestly the most flavorful part). Cooking fresh carrots or turnips? Dice up those pretty greens shooting out of their tops into a salad or add them at the end of a water sauté for extra flavor.
• Not only is this usually healthier since we're getting more nutrients from our food but it's also a bit cheaper (we get more food) and requires less preparation & cleanup (no need to be dainty and "clean" everything before adding it).
• The one exception to this is the skins of a lot of vegetables. In an ideal world we'd happily eat these too because they're full of nutrients, but with modern farming practices these parts of the vegetable can often have pesticide & herbicide residues on them. If we do want to eat them then invest in a good scrub brush and scrub them well before cooking. Otherwise, peel them.

Example meal: Buttercup squash with fennel & onions over rice.

1. Start cooking a pot of rice
2. Grab another pot for the veggies
3. Peel half a buttercup squash and slice into large 3-4 inch chunks (this is the hardest part but so worth it)
   1. Add them to the veggie pot
4. Cut an onion in half and slice its exposed underside into 4ths
   1. Add to the veggie pot
5. Cut off the bulb of a fennel stalk, rinse, and slice it into 4-5 cross sections
   1. Add to the veggie pot
6. Fill the pot with water only until it's up to 1/2 to 3/4 the height of the buttercup chunks
7. Bring to a boil and then put the lid on and turn off heat
8. Cut off about half a thumb's worth of fresh ginger root
9. Peel the skin off it with our thumbnail
10. Using our thumbnail again, go around the exterior of the peeled ginger nub and tear off half-centimeter-width strips (or smaller) into a bowl. These strips will come easy if we pull them in the direction of the ginger's grain
11. In the same bowl pour in about 1-2 teaspoons of whole coriander seeds
12. When we no longer hear any rumbling from either the rice pot or the veggie pot, check to see if they're cooked by taking a nibble of the rice and poking the veggies with a spoon. If they're still a bit raw, put the top back on and turn the stove back on until we hear it rumbling again and then turn the heat off again
13. When the rice is soft & cooked, crumple two bay leaves into small pieces over the rice and mix in. Then add 5-8 peppercorns lightly crushed in half (no need to grind) and mix in. Put the lid back on and let them steep.
14. When the veggies are soft & cooked add in our ginger and coriander and mix them in
15. Let the spices steep for 2-3 minutes and it's ready to serve
16. Enjoy and be amazed how rich, satisfying and flavorful this is despite no fat or salt!

Bonus tips:

11. Everything can work with everything, we just need to know the appropriate cook times and amounts.

• This is analogous to music advice you might hear in jazz circles: "There are no wrong notes!" And it's true in cooking as well but it requires a more & more refined flavor palette as we work with stronger and more "exotic" combinations.
• As you increase your flavor memory and cooking experience you'll naturally start to know and get an intuition for how various flavors and textures can be married to one another, even if it might fly in the face of conventional flavor wisdom!

12. Find a decently healthy zero-effort dish to have on hand as a backup, or as a treat, if we either can't cook or just don't feel like cooking that day.

• For me this is oatmeal with flax seeds and fresh fruit or raisins. I just pour some rolled or steel-cut oats, add a spoon or two of flax seeds, add some fruit/raisins, and then add water. I don't even boil the water. Rolled oats soak up water quickly, and steel cut oats just give our jaw a bit of a workout. It's kind of too easy of a meal honestly. I feel like I can easily end up eating too much of it as a result. Better I treat myself with this than cookies or chips though.

13. Try to get fresh, local and organic/veganic if we can but don't beat ourselves up if we can't.

• We should use what's available to us because our increased demand will help drive the change in our community to better freshness & quality of our veg & fruit in the longterm.
• There are certain workarounds to using less fresh foods that I implement myself to this day because I'm not always able to get the highest quality either. Rinse your greens and get a good vegetable scrub brush. If you don't have a scrub brush, peel the produce that you can't rinse (due to a wax coating or something).
• Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. A low fat, no salt, whole food plant-based diet, even if not fully organic or veganic, is infinitely better than the Standard American Diet and likely far better than any other diet that includes regular consumption of animal products. Make the improvements you can today and don't wait for perfection because it will never arrive.

14. Floss & brush our teeth soon after our last meal to help deter ourselves from idle snacking & overeating.

• If we end up implementing a decent amount of the advice here we'll likely get quite good at cooking after a while and when we become a good cook we'll tend to overeat since we'll always have an abundance of healthy, cheap & tasty food just 15-30 minutes away. To help mitigate this, we can try to eat just one or two meals a day, and after our last meal (when we feel like we've reached our healthy limit) I've found that flossing & brushing my teeth soon after can be enough of a deterrent from continuing to pig out. Nobody wants to floss & brush twice, even if it means we can have just one more bowl!

I hope you found something in this list useful. Thanks for reading and happy cooking!

I’ve tried making white rice three times this week, and it’s a disaster every time. It either sticks to the bottom of the pot and burns, or it ends up looking like mashed potatoes. I’m just following the instructions on the bag, but clearly, I’m missing something.

Do you guys wash your rice until the water is clear, or does that actually matter? Also, is there a specific "golden rule" for the water-to-rice ratio that never fails?

I’m tired of eating mush, please help

I buy rolled oats and boil them in unsweetened vanilla almond milk. I do add salt, probably around an eighth of a tsp for 55g oats, and a lot of cinnamon, but I'm not tasting any cinnamon. Or vanilla? I added vanilla extract once and couldn't taste that either. I tried adding a splenda packet but that also didn't work. Please help!

After the breakup, I started cooking for myself. I'm pretty good at it, but I'm curious about what spices are important in the kitchen.

I am making oven baked French toast Sunday morning and I bought loaves of brioche and Texas toast today. They won’t get stale in time. Would it help to leave the bread slices on the counter uncovered to get dried out (and if so, for how long)? I’m planning on soaking the bread in the custard overnight then baking in the morning.

Just starting to cook and want to practice with meats that are hard to overcook or ruin. Which ones are the easiest and most forgiving?

i cook the outside too much the insides too rare . i cook on medium high heat for 3:30 minutes each sides. what should i do next time shut the heat down(then i'm stride it won't get good sear) or shorten the time i cook it , maybe to 3:15 seconds on each sides. it's tricky for me i keep doug the same thing over and getting medium rare.

I have my dad to thank for this, because he turned it into a game my entire childhood to guess what seasonings he put into our dinner every night, so now I am something of a spice wizard and I can pretty accurately recreate the flavor of most seasoned dishes just from tasting them once. I have zero issues with seasoning food; I do it very confidently and without recipes.

Now, actually cooking though? Absolutely no clue what I'm doing. I have 15 different salmon marinades that I've invented, but I have to google how long to bake it and at what temperature every time. And I do bake it every time, because I don't know any other methods of cooking it, nor do I trust myself to execute them (and salmon is expensive!). I can come up with my own ingredient list for a shepherd's pie, but I still need to consult recipes to figure out in what order I'm supposed to add ingredients and when the heat should be high or low and when I'm supposed to put it in the oven. I could not tell you when the hell you're supposed to add tomato paste or when the mashed potatoes are supposed to go on top, or anything of the sort.

So... where do I go to learn the actual cooking part of cooking? I feel like I'm not getting any better at it no matter how much I cook. And every "cooking for beginners" resource I've found is very focused on the seasoning aspect, which I don't need any help with.

Edit to add: I prefer reading to watching videos, so if you have books or articles to recommend, that'd be great, but I'll take anything!

Basically im trying to get into cooking properly and I find that my sieve is a nightmare to clean as little bits of whatever im draining get stuck between the metal rim and the mesh where they connect.

its a really minor thing but its an issue I absolutely hate and just cant find any thst dont have it, am I searching for the wrong thing, are they just uncommon, am i just cleaning or using it wrong??

I got 3 liters of coconut water, what should I do with this ,; it must be something simple., preferably a dessert.

i know you cook it on 375 degrees but how long. for and it's marinated so you cook it a little longer

Every time I make fries, they’re fine, but never quite like the ones you get at restaurants, I mean crispy on the outside and soft inside. What am I missing?

The recipe for m following for pizza dough calls for instant yeast but all I have is original, if I followed the same recipe what would I have to do differently because of the yeast?

Hi everyone! I blanched and stored some cabbage in a ziploc bag with a paper towel in the freezer and its been a few weeks. today the cabbage is yellow but has no foul smell or slime to it, is it still safe to consume?