Asymmetrical Information

A tangential but still relevant question: how does one turn off the smoke detector in an apartment? They seem to be supplied with everything but an 'off' switch (for good reason).

The key to easy cooking:

crock pot, aka, slow cooker

Throw all the ingredients in, a bit of water, and let it fly itself for about 6 hours. Dinner for 2 for about 3 days with the larger models.

Makes great pot roast, pulled pork, and various stews.

Altho I now tend to cook them on the grill over chunk hardwood charcoal, I was originally taught to cook burgers on a hot, salted skillet. The salt prevented sticking until enough fat rendered out to take over. I would think that this was fairly similar to the searing described here. I've found that the frozen patties hold together better than hand pressed, and if you buy them in the bag at Aldi's rather than in the advertised box they are almost as cheap as buying ground beef.

As for the slow cooker, there are infinite recipes online which use it. I've even posted a few myself. One thing to note is that not all of them take the awkward six hours, many will let you get in a full day's work or a full night's sleep.

The simplest way to turn off that smoke detector is with a shower cap.

I actually worked on a design project briefly for a self-resetting kill switch for them, but decided to convince the client that aftermarket install was more hassle than the market would support.

The shower cap idea sounds good, but if that doesn't work, the answer is that you rip it off its base and take the battery out. Then you forget to put it back in for a few months, and hope your house doesn't burn down. ;-)

wave towels at it! If you have young kids, they will like to do this towel waving dance with you.

Also, this food blogging is pretty cool.

I must confess that I don't see how #2 is "roast" meat; unless you left out the step where it goes in a hot oven for a while, that's "fried in a roasting pan", which isn't bad, but it's not roasting either.

And then there's my cheap, easy, relatively-healthy pot roast: Brown cheap roast. Place in pot/dutch oven, water to nearly cover. Medium-low heat to simmer, or oven.

Add vegetables, in big chunks (carrot, potato, onion, etc.), at a time depending on how cooked you like them - and if picky, add them in reverse cooking order, carrot first, then potato, then onion (for example). Whole cloves of garlic optional.

Remove after about an hour, total, under heat, pick out veggies, dump the water, slice the meat, eat.

Ah braising -- another favorite.

I take any crappy, tough piece of meat, brown it in a dutch oven and deglaze with chicken stock from a box. I put the meat back in the pot, add stock and wine to 2/3 cover, and put the whole kaboodle in the oven at low heat.

The key with braising is not to let the liquid boil.

It is almost impossible to overcook braises. They also taste better if left to cool and heated up again the next day.

Uh, you guys are kidding, right? After a week of Jane's sermons about how only an idiot would eat at a low-to-midrange restaurant because you can make the same food much faster at home, this is what you come up with? Skillet-fried hamburgers, yogurt with raspberries and tofu stir-fry?

As it happens, I'm reading this while eating the leftover roasted chicken (with salt, pepper, rosemary and olive oil) I brought to work, so it's not like my sensibility is so far removed from yours. But it hardly makes me a moral hero even though, unlike you two, I'm such a freaking gourmet that I roasted potatoes along with the chicken!

And chicken breasts, in chicken soup? Uh, hello -- the key is the dark meat!

What's the deal with Kosher salt anyway?

I can taste a between sea salt and mined salt, if I'm pressed and tasting only the salt, but Kosher salt?

Curious

One factor with kosher salt is that it is marketted as a slightly larger grain than table salt. In searing this probably helps with the non-stick benefit which I mentioned above.

The other is that it is not iodized, which is why it is used in pickling, as the iodine can affect color. I suppose that when used in large quantities this could also begin to show up in the flavor.

Kosher salt is also guaranteed free of pig menses.

This guy my dad knew asked him what was a good way of cooking hamburger, because for some reason, that was about all he ate. It turned out that the guy had been rolling it all into a big ball and boiling it.

Uh, you guys are kidding, right? After a week of Jane's sermons about how only an idiot would eat at a low-to-midrange restaurant because you can make the same food much faster at home, this is what you come up with? Skillet-fried hamburgers, yogurt with raspberries and tofu stir-fry?

That will be enough out of you. The post was about, quote, "cheap, healthy, and easy". Here's one for you, however: Roast anything on the grill. A shish-kabob skewer of fresh vegetables (bell peppers, onions, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, summersquash, baby portabella mushrooms, etc.) lightly sprayed with olive oil and then roasted until the edges start to dry and blacken, will be the equal of any sauteed vegetable dish from a restaurant.

If you have leftovers, spread tomato sauce on a piece of pita or herb-infused flatbread, spread the fire-roasted vegetables over the sauce, cover with mozarella cheese, and bake at 350-425 until the cheese just starts to brown. That will be the equal of many gourmet pizza joints. And cheap, if you buy your flatbread off the markdown rack.

Also, a reasonably moist beef-roast can be sprayed with olive or vegetable oil to promote surface searing, then cooked on the grill (rotate frequently for even finish) until the very center reaches ~120F. This will give you a main dish that is somewhat tougher, but has a similar flavor, to prime rib (at substantially less cost).

Obviously, grill recipes don't work as well for many apartment situations, albeit those with outdoor decks may still have the gas grill option. Since fire-blackened and smoked foods are mildly carcinogenic, you probably don't want to eat like this year-round, but in the summer it's great (especially if you have a prolific vegetable garden to dispose of).

Pot Roast: If you coat the meat with a flour/salt/pepper dredge before browning, brown, remove the meat from the dutch oven, put 3 (or so) large, halved, sliced onions on the bottom of the pot, replace meat, add potatoes and carrots on top, and then place into the preheated 450 degree oven (turn down to 300 degrees after 15 mins), the moisture from the onions (which will disintegrate) will deglaze the pot, and join with the fat and flour to form a sauce. The carrots will not become soggy, and the cubed potatoes will be done. Leave in the oven for a couple of hours (more than three). Easy as pie. Added water boils the meat (not good eats).

Roasting is a dry convection heating method with little to no conduction. Every one of these is conduction based, not convection based. It might be good, but it ain't roasted (grilling might be roasting, except that it's more a radiation method than a convection method).

There's no need to spray oil on a roast to promote surface browning (crusting). Just salt it well with kosher salt (wide flat crystals adhere well to the meat) a few minutes before you plan to cook it. Protein laden juices will come to the surface and a sufficiently hot cooking temperature will do the rest.

Kosher salt is also easier to pinch and sprinkle than table salt, popcorn salt, or pickling salt (kosher salt isn't typically used in pickling where the pickling liquid isn't going to be heated because the larger crystals take longer to dissolve: picking salt is also not iodized, but it is a much finer powder and dissolves quickly in cold water).

If you have an electric cooker to do your braising in, you can set it to the desired internal temperature of the meat and go to town. It would be almost totally impossible to overcook at that point (if you cook beef in 185 degree water and it gets to 185 degrees, it's going to be tough and overcooked no matter how long you braised it for).

My neighbor told me the key to the perfect hamburger. I didn't believe it till I actually tried it. Put a LOT of pepper on the burger. Then put more pepper on it. Not kidding.

One of the forgotten secrets to cheap, quick, and easy meals is the pressure cooker, the philosophical antithesis of the slow cooker.

Cheap cuts of meat become tender and succulent in minutes rather than hours. It's essentially hyper-drive braising.

They're also no longer the danger they sometimes were. Technology has even reached that corner of the kitchen.

To Brahma:

Added water won't boil the meat. If that were so, braising would never work. Same reason that when you bake a custard, you put the ramikins in a water bath. Water helps to maintain an even temperature, so the outside doesn't overcook.

The key is temperature control. Braising works because the slow and low cooking method dissolves the connective fibers. At which point, the meat falls apart. No chewing required. Same concept behind barbeque. Now, if you put the burner on high, you're in trouble.

BTW, I've never done a pot roast in the oven. It seems silly. Why do you call it pot roast if you don't use a pot? I use a dutch oven (sometimes over a campfire) on the stove top. Bring to a boil, and then ramp it down to low. Leave it be for 4 hours on low. Who needs a crock pot? I don't trust ovens, to be honest. They are great for roasting, but braising?

It's fast and easy to chop your own burger with two chefs knives. It's sort of like drumming. Music helps. It's better tasting, you choose the fat ratio, any trimmings or cut will serve. Cut it into strips then keep the beat. Fold the edges in when it spreads, as it will, to get an even chop. Stop when you like the looks.

Salt draws juices to the surface and so retards searing. If you want a good sear quickly, so that it isn't cooked so much inside, add the salt after sear.

Fry up some skirt steak in a lightly oiled pan. It is so thin that it will cook thru evenly to well done when the outside looks done. Chop it up the way back40 describes after it is cooked and you will match the meat used for filling the best restaurant burritos and tacos.

If you do it on a mirror with one knife you will be revealing something you might not want others to know about.

The key to making your food taste restaurant-quality: for any dish calling for butter and salt, add more butter and salt than the recipe calls for.

This is also the key to being a lard ass like me.

"If you try this with potatoe,"

cooking with Dan Quayle...

That will be enough out of you. The post was about, quote, "cheap, healthy, and easy". Here's one for you, however:

Oops, I'm in for it now! The big gun is trundled out and it's...

"Pizza", made by putting canned sauce and cheese on a pita, and sticking it in the toaster oven! The staple of my diet as a 12-year-old latchkey kid!

To reiterate: recipes like these are precisely what my wife and I eat 90% of the time. To me, the cost and time savings make it worthwhile. But this insistence that skillet-fried hamburgers and yogurt with berries outdo anything you could get off the menu of a mid-range restaurant (as opposed to something more complicated, like, say, meatloaf) and that anyone who thinks otherwise is somehow defective strikes me as carrying sour grapes way past the point of aburdity.

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