Blogs : General Topics Digest
General Topics Digest Weekly highlights from the most interesting Chowhound posts on the General Chowhounding Topics board, such as the best frozen pizza, how to store chicken breasts, what restaurant to pop the question at, and where to find your mail order meats.
Quick Homemade Indian Food
Spice mixes, wet and dry, are what make Indian dishes special—but they take time to make fresh. Store-bought sauces and spice mixes are ho-hum. Is there any middle ground? One approach is to make your favorite spice mix or paste fresh in bulk, portion it out ,and freeze it, suggests LauraGrace. Then, weekday after happy weekday, you’re only minutes away from fresh, special, homemade Indian food. It works well with any sauce that doesn’t have dairy, she says. “I’ve done it with korma too — just make the sauce up to the ‘add vegetables’ point and before the ‘add cream’ point, then freeze in Ziploc bags or ice cube trays,” says LauraGrace.
If you do use a packaged mix, doctoring it up with fresh ingredients can give it more of a homemade feel. “Whenever I use the dry mix, it’s just as a flavor enhancer, not following the recipe completely on the packet,” says foodwich. “Play around with it to suit your taste and that will be the best way to use them.”
Board Link: Indian cooking/simmer sauces
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Nuts Are Not Shelf-Stable
Is your all-natural organic granola rancid? How about your nuts? “Rancidity is a huge problem all over, especially with natural foods containing no preservatives,” says Jim Leff. “And, worse, there’s so much rancidity out there that consumers don’t perceive mild rancidity as an ‘off’ flavor; it’s one they’re used to.” comestible agrees, and has seen the problem in his local health food stores. Any product containing nuts is vulnerable to rancidity, since nut oils degrade rapidly when they’re not vacuum-packed, irradiated, or otherwise preserved. Nuts just aren’t shelf-stable.
“I taste/smell rancidity all over,” says Jim Leff. “I think most consumers are actually well-acquainted with that aroma, but just don’t identify it correctly (same with skunky beer….for many people, that’s ‘the great imported taste’ of Heineken, in those green bottles that let in the frequency of light that interacts badly with the hops).”
Board Link: Really Great Granolas?
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Potato Chips That Burn
Cheese Boy recently sampled some Cape Cod Jalapeño & Aged Cheddar potato chips and was very impressed. “The cheese and pepper flavors weren’t lacking like in some inferior brands,” says Cheese Boy, and the heat was certainly there too. “I had no complaints at all, except for the usual fact that most potato chip bags are filled half with air. Other than that, these were very good,” he says.
Board Link: “Jalapeño” and “Amen” for these potato chips
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Complicated Does Not Equal Better
“Over and over again, I prove to myself that more time spent in the planning and preparation of a meal does not necessarily make for a more delicious, more enjoyable, more exquisite meal,” says CindyJ. Call it the law of diminishing culinary returns. Great effort does not necessarily yield great food, and sometimes the most memorable food is a great ingredient in a simple presentation.
“The general rule is that the higher the quality of the ingredients, the less you need to do with them,” says Ellen. Good-quality fresh food—dry-aged, organic grass-fed beef; farmers’ market veggies; fresh local butter—needs little intervention or extensive preparation to shine, she says. “On the other hand, I once spent hours making a classic beef Wellington that was beautiful but such a yawn compared to the effort.”
shaogo agrees. “The more complicated (I say ‘convoluted’) my plans for dinner become, I guarantee you the ‘wow’ effect of a dish (or of the whole meal) diminishes,” he says. “Like others who’ve posted here, some of my best ‘home-run’ dinners were created à la minute from a short list of simple ingredients.”
Board Link: The Laws of Diminishing (Culinary) Returns
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How's the Hospital Food?
greygarious was recently, uh, privileged to sample his local hospital food—and his Chowhound sensibilities were scarred for life. “I ordered a side salad [and] it was a tiny bowl with perhaps a half cup of lettuce and a slice each of cucumber and tomato,” he says. “I could understand small servings of the less healthy items but you’d think they’d size in such a way as to promote the healthier foods.”
Pei finds the same to be true of her local hospitals. Expect such delights as “chicken broth that tastes like it was made from powder, gummy oatmeal, ultra-pasteurized juice and Jell-O that taste like they’ve been cooked to death and yet are still chock full of chemicals, bleh,” says Pei. “I feel sad just thinking about it.” taos was served “Jell-O (essentially sugar water), super salty chicken broth, white toast, and tons of butter”—on a cardiac ward, no less.
There is a trend, however, toward hospitals providing tasty food that might be healthy enough not to undermine their healthcare mission. shaogo has had experience with good, made-from-scratch food at a hospital, which contributed to patients gaining much-needed weight. Pia has also had a great experience with hospital food: “delicious salad with spinach and strawberries, and really good cheesecake” were among her selections. This is a hot trend. “Hospital food-service operations all over the country are starting to serve very good quality food,” says shaogo. “It’s in all of the industry magazines. Slowly but surely, the days when hospital entrees were flavorless rubber, and hospital veggies were sulfurous gray gack, are ending.”
Board Link: How is the hospital food where you live?
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Mexican Oregano Is Not from Mexico
Some recipes call for Mexican oregano. Does that just mean oregano produced in Mexico? Nope, says MazDee. “Since I live in Mexico, and buy oregano here, I always figured it WAS Mexican oregano,” she says. But while traveling she noticed Mexican oregano plants for sale that had big leaves and didn’t resemble the more commonly used Greek oregano. “I am astounded!” she says. In fact, so-called Mexican oregano is a close relative of lemon verbena.
Mexican and Greek oregano are different plants, but both are lovely for their appropriate uses. “I use both Greek and Mexican oregano for different recipes,” says bushwickgirl.
Board Link: Mexican Oregano
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