/anthro/ - Anthropomorphic

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Cooking has always been a hobby of mine, though I don't do it much any more.

This is a marinara sauce recipe that came down from family members, one of whom claimed to have gotten it from an Italian guy from Brooklyn with whom he served in the army.

And, of course, this is going to lack a lot of exact measurements, but we can deal with it as we go.  All the seasonings are "to taste."

You'll need yellow cooking onion, the kind you sometimes hear called Spanish onion, maybe one or two, depending on size, and a couple complete bulbs of garlic, totaling maybe a couple dozen cloves.  You'll need a couple of cans of tomato paste plus a can or two of crushed tomatoes.  You'll need bacon grease and salt and pepper and basil and oregano, the latter two of which can be found as "spaghetti seasoning" in most American supermarkets in the spice section.  You'll need red wine or cooking sherry.  White button mushrooms are optional. You'll want them washed and cut into thin slices. I think in the produce section you can still get them already sliced. While you are in the produce section a green bell pepper or two, which you're going to core and chop coarsely.  Speaking of peppers, also optional is just a pinch or so of cayenne pepper flakes, if you feel adventurous and want to go in an arrabiata kind of direction.

You're also going to need a big oven-safe kettle or pan, with an oven-safe lid.  And a sautee pan or frying pan.

Oh. Do you like meatballs? We can do meatballs. They are:

ground pork + ground beef, 50-50 by weight
breadcrumbs
minced onion + minced garlic
salt and pepper
beaten egg to help bind it all together

The ground meat, breadcrumbs, and so on get mixed thoroughly and rolled up into meatballs, of course. You put them in a foil lined pan to brown in a 400 degree oven while you do this other stuff.

Heat up a little bacon grease in the sautee pan.  Then, yellow cooking onion + garlic go in the blender. Reduce them to pulp. You might possibly need to add a little water. I guess you could use a food processor too.  Try to sautee this onion puree and just start to caramelize it, just start to brown it a little in the pan.  Brown the mushrooms and bell pepper pieces too.  Don't let anything burn, just start to brown everything.  Take it off the heat.  Deglaze the pan with red wine or cooking sherry and get all its contents into the big kettle.

Check on the meatballs. We just want them brown on top.  We don't want them burnt.  When they're browned take them out of the oven.  Put them aside.  We'll get back to them.

Put the canned crushed tomatoes in a big mixing bowl.  Add the tomato paste.  Tomato paste is very heavy and dense and you will want to use a wire whisk to break it up and get it to mix, get it uniform-ish.  It's okay if the texture is a little lumpy.  It gives the sauce character.

Add the tomato mixture to the browned onion and mushroom mixture.  Stir everything, coat all the mushroom slices without breaking them up.  Add salt, pepper, basil, and oregano to taste.  This may be more than you expect it to be if it's a big batch.  If you wanted to add cayenne pepper, this is the time.

Are the meatballs browned yet?  Good.  Put them in the sauce, stir them, and cover them.  Any fat that may have drained out of them as they browned, and depending on how much breadcrumbs you used, there may not be much, stir it in too.  It gives the sauce a little more flavor.

Now you have the sauce in the kettle.  Put the lid on it.  Put it in the oven, which is probably still warm.  Turn the oven up to 275 F.  The oven will keep it at a simmer without burning it, that's why.  Let it simmer in the oven 4-6 hours.  Maybe pull it out of the oven every hour or so to stir it.  In the last hour, cook some spaghetti al dente.  Don't throw away the water in which you cooked the pasta.  Put a few ladles of water into the sauce and stir it in.  The dissolved starches help it stick to the pasta a little better.

And there are a lot of possible variations.  Supposedly "old country style" would, instead of meatballs, have a pork roast, or a tough cut of beef like round or chuck that was browned on both sides in oil dropped into it to simmer with the sauce.  I've done that, but I can't swear any of this is very authentic.

Breaded fish

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Buffalo wings are my favorite food but really any kind of buffalo chicken qualifies. I actually learned how to make them at home because buying them from a place in burgerland is ridiculously expensive. I can make a good 20 wings out of an 8-9 dollar package of wings, I just have to cut them myself.
>cooking
All I really do is run the wings through a mixture of salt and flour and fry them in hot oil (Peanut oil if I can afford it) until they're golden brown and there's no visible spots of blood or pinkness. You get a really crispy salty skin on them with this method and they're good as is but making buffalo sauce is really damn easy, you just melt butter at medium heat and combine it with equal parts hot sauce of your choosing. You can use whatever but it's usually Frank's when I do it, and I also wanna try it with Valentina next time I make them. Or you can just use whatever store bought sauce you want.

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Okay, I'm in one of those moods.  Now I'm gonna talk about my mother's fried chicken recipe.

You're gonna need some chicken.  And some bacon grease--like, a lot, enough to put a 1/8" to 1/4" layer in the pan once it's melted, which is going to be around a cup, maybe more, for a 10" frying pan, and for bigger frying pans you will need more than that.  And one egg, and some flour, and salt and pepper.  And a cup of water.  And a big frying pan with a tight-fitting lid.  And a big mixing bowl of some kind.

Wash the pieces of chicken.  Sprinkle them with lots of salt and pepper.  Let them stand while you beat an egg and sift about half a cup of flour, more or less, depending on how much chicken you want to cook, and put a little of the sifted flour in the bottom of the mixing bowl.  Get the bacon grease heating up in that pan.  While it's heating up, go back to the chicken.

Coat the chicken with flour.  Be very thorough.  Put the pieces of chicken in the bowl with the flour and sprinkle more flour on them.  Dip them in beaten egg.  Roll them in more flour.  All the pieces of chicken should be very completely coated with beaten egg and flour.

As the bacon fat comes up to frying temperature, start putting the chicken in the pan.  It's been a lot of years since I watched my mother do this, and I don't remember the details, but a guy named Alton Brown had some recommendations that make sense to me.  You're going to put the chicken in skin side down, for those pieces where there is a distinction of one side having a lot more skin than the other, to start, and you're going to put the thighs in the middle, because they are dark meat, which will take the longest and require the highest heat to cook them.  Other pieces can go to the edges of the pan.  They are going to need to cook until you get a nice golden brown texture on the bottom side, and you see lots of moisture appearing on the tops.  This is going to vary with your stove, the size of your pan, the sizes of the chicken pieces, the exact composition of the bacon grease, and so on, so be watchful.  Typically this is 10-15 minutes.  Turn them over.  Brown them on the other side.  This will take about the same amount of time.

Next step, and this is something my mother learned from relatives who lived through the Great Depression, and remembered having nothing to cook but tough old hens that were so old they'd stopped laying eggs. They could also have told you stories about cooking snapping turtle, and muskrat, and raccoon, and skunk, and anything else their husbands could bring in. Anyway, my mother was taught to do something that makes those chickens edible and makes ordinary supermarket chicken moist and tender.  Slowly pour in that cup of water and bring it to a boil.  With all the heat a big cast iron pan holds, it doesn't normally take long and may even boil within seconds of adding it.  Turn the heat way, way down to simmer.  Put the lid on the frying pan and wait 45 minutes to one hour, during which the chicken will steam and most of the water will evaporate.  Put the chicken on stacked paper towels to absorb some of the grease and serve.

And, because I'm feeling magnanimous, now I'm going to talk about my mother's recipe for gravy to be served with mashed potatoes that accompany the chicken.  Foodies and culinary arts students are going to recognize this as a variation on bechamel sauces.

After you remove the chicken from the pan, there will be lots of dark bits in there, and a lot of the original bacon grease.  Heat the pan up again and add some more flour, half a cup or more.  Use a wooden spoon to mix it vigorously with the grease in the pan to make a roux.  Brown the roux.  Cook it until you see it darken.  It will begin to smell like frying pancakes.  Add a pint of milk, or more, to the roux, a bit at a time, mixing it thoroughly with that wooden spoon.  Add salt and pepper to taste, and for Mom, this was "lots and lots."  Bring the milk mixture to a boil, stirring rapidly with that wooden spoon, and boil it until it begins to thicken.  This is the way she made gravy when she made fried chicken.  A meal would typically be chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable.  She was extremely enthusiastic about canned green beans.  On special occasions it might be corn on the cob.

Now, were I to attempt something similar today, I'd need to get an awful lot of bacon grease, which could be a little awkward because I'm not eating a lot of bacon these days.  And I'd season the chicken with more than just salt and pepper.  Paprika smoked over mesquite is nice with poultry, and garlic powder, and cayenne pepper, powdered dry mustard, maybe just a tiny pinch of cumin.  At this point I'm really just thinking out loud.

>>58546
You can't fool me.  Buffalo don't have wings.

plov with beef, it's really tasty when you add veggies

>>58530 (OP) 
shrimp scallop pasta