Cooking with an Oven - You can eat good/cheap and be lazy too

[Ira the Weatherman]

Here's my thoughts on brussel sprouts and bacon from the Ja/ck/ thread if anyone's interested:

Spoiler

His abuse of the sprouts triggers me. There's a reason you cut the stem off (beyond the fact that the stem is the toughest part): it's so the outer leaves easily fall off, because they're often wilted or tough in their own right. Jack is oblivious to this and just throws them all on a baking tray. Now, this shouldn't really be a problem if they look alright and you were intending to just boil them. But grilling them in the oven will make those thin little leaves char like crazy. Predictably, however, he seems to have burnt all the sprouts. And I can guarantee they were uncooked in the center, hence why he quickly cut away after his first bite (because he was probably chewing like a cow on the greens and undercooked bacon for a minute). He should've just parboiled them beforehand: make a small cut in the base, toss em in the water and they'll be ready for the oven in 5 mins tops. Though this is a recipe that could just as easily be done in a pan, with less chance of fucking it up.

And drizzling liquid sugar on sprouts 'n bacon would get you fucking lynched round these parts.

I'd still rather he parboiled them and then sautéed rather than half-boiling them in all that fat, but then again it's Jack we're talking about and this is more of a taste thing than cooking methods that are objectively, horribly wrong. At least this is somewhat edible, and he even seems to show some suprising culinary common sense here (breaking the bacon into smaller pieces, draining excess oil), which is the real disturbing thing as it shows how far he has regressed over the last years, that his gastronomic peak was during the fucking Aunt Myrna's Salad era.

One of the best oven recipes I can recommend are Cornish pasties. They're incredibly easy, versatile and relatively cheap. Chef John's recipe is a great starting point:

I made poorfag variants of these, so:
-I replaced the lard (which isn't a thing where I live) with more butter
-Instead of skirt steak I used beef-pork mince
-Had no neeps so just used more potato
-Added worcestershire sauce, ground chili flakes, sage and some sugar to the filling
-Didn't have time to let the dough chill for hours so I just gave it a quick 15 minute rest

Despite me taking a lot of lazy short-cuts, the end product still tasted surprisingly amazing for how simple it is. The only drawback is that the mince clumps together in a big ball. I suppose you could counteract this by frying it beforehand, but I feel that would end up with an ultimately inferior end result than if you just allowed everything to nicely stew in its pastry shell.

With about a kilo each of bread flour and mince respectively I got ten large-sized pasties. One thing you certainly don't want to do is underseason your filling. It's better to add too much than too little.

 

[A Grey Cat]

Easy fish and chips, box of Gorton's, bag of oreda, one baking sheet and thing of foil. Just pop it all in set to 375 or so and wait, I usually have my after work shower while it heats up. Was my favorite after school snack as a latchkey kid now it's my go to choice food for after work.