My favorite is probably Breakfast Croissants.

Croissants cut in half horizontally with 2 scrambled eggs with some breakfast sausage pieces incorporated into the eggs. A slice of cheese on top of the eggs. Serve.

"How to cook without a book" by Pam Anderson

The recipes are quick and out of the pantry. her recipes are more guidelines than anything else but you will find the book very helpful.

I have the butcher run it through the cuber or I tenderize it with a 48 blade tenderizer then I make Swiss steak or Chicken fried or country fried steak.

You use a "fat separator" like this one: http://www.amazon.com/OXO-1067506-Sof...

You pour in the fat laden braising liquid. The fat floats to the top. The spout on the separator is at the bottom of the container. When you pour the liquid out, the non-fatty liquid pours out first leaving the fat behind.

By the way, pork shoulder and boston butt are one of the cheapest of meats maybe not quite as cheap as chicken. I routinely buy it for $2 per pound and on sale $1 per pound.

crockpot pulled pork is very easy, cheap and can be frozen in ziploc bags that will hold enough for 2 or 3 sandwiches.

3 - 4 pounds of pork shoulder or boston butt
1 12 ounce bottle of beer
8 - 12 ounces of pineapple juice
1 16 ounce jar of barbecue sauce
1 medium onion very roughly chopped
1/3 cup of pork rub made up of 2 Tbls Kosher salt, 2 tbls smoked paprika, 1 tbl garlic powder, 1 tsp ground black pepper, 1 Tbl of onion powder.

Put a layer of onions into the slow cooker. Sprinkle the pork with the rub and then add the pork to the pot.

Add the beer, pineapple juice and the beer to the crockpot. Put the lid on and set to low for 8 - 12 hours.

Remove the pork from the pot and shred (pull) it. Portion it into ziploc bags and freeze what you won't eat immediately.

Mix the pork with some fresh barbecue sauce and put on hamburger buns. put a sweet onion ring and a teaspoon of pickle relish on the meat and serve.

If you don't want to be wasteful, you can use the braising liquid to make barbecue sauce. Defat it and then cook it down to concentrate the flavors. Add some thyme and ground black pepper and whatever else you think I make it better. I like to add a teaspoon of dijon mustard. Thicken it with a mixture of corn starch and water. You will have to bring the pot to a boil to get the cornstarch to thicken.

This bbq sauce will hold for about 4 -5 days in the fridige.

Technically ... quarts are a wet measure and and 1 cup salt is a dry measure so they aren't the same. I suppose you could measure in weight. 8.33 pounds or 133 ounces per gallon of water. 1 cup Morton Kosher is 10 ounces so the ratio the recipe calls for is 6.6 to 1 water to kosher salt.

Ok... I'm through being pickyunish. The brining ratios that I am familiar with is:

Table Salt 1 cup per gallon 1/4 cup per quart
Kosher Salt 1 1/2 cups per gallon 6 Tbls per quart
Diamond Kosher 2 cups per gallon 8 Tbls or 1/2 cup per quart

My calculation would be 3/4 cup or 18 Tbls Morton Kosher salt for 3 quarts water.

I believe Alton is using a "heavy" brine because he is corning. Using his recipes ratio would be 1 1/2 cups Morton Kosher salt for 3 quarts water.

A few recipes that are cheap, easy and quick.

Boxed Mac & cheese with a chopped smoked kielbasa sausage thrown in.

Zatarain's boxed Jambalaya with sausage rings thrown in. best with Andouille but kielbasa will work.

Oven Barbecued Pork Tenderloin HH

There is a difference between pork tenderloin and pork loin. Make sure you get a tenderloin. At my store, they usually come two at a time in a cryovac plastic bag. The two tenderloins probably won’t weigh more than 2.5 pounds.

Trim the tenderloin of the silverskin and tie up the thinner tail. Here is a link to a video showing how to do that. http://video.about.com/southernfood/Roast-Pork-Tenderloin.htm

This is optional but I recommend tying your tenderloin with string to maintain its round shape. Here is a link describing that process. http://allrecipes.com//HowTo/tying-roasts/Detail.aspx

Put your tenderloin(s) in a zip lock bag and pour in 6-7 tablespoons of soy sauce and 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. As you close the zipper, squeeze out as much of the air as possible. Roll the tenderloin around to distribute the soy sauce and to dissolve the sugar. Put the bag in the refrigerator and let soak for 45 minutes to an hour. This process is called brining. It puts water and flavor inside the meat. I highly recommend it for pork or chicken. You can brine with salt too. Here is a link describing the science of brining.
http://www.edinformatics.com/math_sci...

After 1 hour rinse and pat dry the tenderloin. Season with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Sear tenderloin in a med high stainless steel frypan with a little oil for 3 minutes on each side.

Put the tenderloin in a 350 degree oven until it reaches an internal temperature of 135 degrees as monitored by a digital temperature probe. If you don’t have a probe, you can bake it for about 15 minutes.

At this point, put your favorite barbecue sauce on the tenderloin and continue baking to 150 degrees or about 5 more minutes. Take the tenderloin out of the oven and wrap in aluminum foil to rest for 10 minutes.

Slice in ¼ inch slices and serve.

You could serve any kind of rice with this. Even Zatarains yellow rice mix in a box. A nice salad would go nicely. Some bbq beans. We will pretend you made them form scratch rather than buying a can of Bush’s.

Roasted chicken leg quarters
This is about as easy as it gets and it is rock bottom cheap. You can get leg quarters for 0.59 to 1.29 per pound.
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Mix some chili powder, smoked paprika, garlic powder, salt and pepper
Trim the excess fat off the leg quarters and pat dry with a paper towel.
Sprinkle the spice rub on the skin of the leg quarters.
Put the leg quarters on a rack in a jelly roll pan. If you don’t have one use a broiler pan. With 4 or more, you may need two pans to hold it all. The chicken will render a lot of fat so it would be nice to have them elevated off the bottom of the pan. That is why I use a drip rack.
Bake in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour and serve.
Rice pilaf goes well with this. Even boxed mac and cheese goes well with this.
Variations:
You can change the spice rub around. I have seen soy sauce used. If you like heat, you can add some cayenne to the rub.
Look up recipes on the web if my spice rub is not to your liking.

Beef Stroganoff Hamburger Dinner in a Skillet ala HEH

Ingredients:

1 pound lean ground beef
.25 tsp soy sauce
3 Tbls flour
.25 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped
8oz. sliced white button mushrooms
1 tsp chopped garlic
.75 pound egg noodles, cooked
2 cups beef broth & beef base
.5 cup sour cream
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Chopped parsley, for garnish

Directions:
Season the beef with the pepper.
In a large cast iron skillet, heat the oil over medium heat.
Add the seasoned beef and cook, stirring, until well browned and all pink has disappeared. Drain off any excess oil in the skillet.
Add the onions and cook, stirring, until soft, 3 to 4 minutes.
Add the mushrooms and garlic and cook, stirring until the mushrooms have released their juices, about 2 minutes.
Sprinkle flour and stir in for a minute.
Add the beef broth, soy sauce and mustard.
Cook, stirring, until the mixture thickens slightly, 5 to 6 minutes. Add the egg noodles.
Add sour cream.
Sprinkle with the chopped parsley and serve immediately.

The purists here won't like it but if you really want raspberry flavor, use Loran's Flavor oils. They make a raspberry one.

http://www.amazon.com/LorAnn-Flavorin...

If you just insist on natural flavor, then cook down some raspberries, remove the seeds and separate the pulp from the juice. Be sure to save the pulp. concentrate the juice by cooking it down. Your recipe called for 8 ounces of raspberries and cook the liquid down to 12 cup so you could do it with 16 ounces and cook it down to 1/2 cup. I would just use the flavor oil in addition to the original recipe.

Decorate it with raspberries but stuff each one with a chocolate chip and drizzle each one with apricot jelly to glaze them. Maybe put each one into a little rosette of stabilized whip cream.

I think that would taste and look wonderful.

Assuming they taste good, you could make chocolate truffles. I make "Black Forest Truffles" with 16 ounces of dark chocolate, 8 ounces of heavy cream, 3 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons of cherry brandy, 10 drops of Loran's cherry flavor oil and 1/2 cup dehydrated cherries that I have rehydrated with the cherry brandy. I would think you could change out the cherries with bananas, the brandy with some of the vodka and the cherry flavoring with either banana flavoring or no flavor oil at all.

Once you make the genache, roll and dip them in either chocolate or cocoa or coconut or nuts.

I saw this article on making your own home made cadbury eggs. http://food52.com/blog/6103-homemade-...

I think I can do better. I think we could make a Cadbury truffle.

In the article, the author used sugar and butter and even more sugar to approximate the ultra sweet interior of a Cadbury egg. He/she mixed part with yellow food coloring and orange zest to simulate the yolk then refrigerated it to make it hard then enrobed the white sugar substance around the yolk, shaped to look like an egg and dipped it in chocolate.

I think we could use a white chocolate genache, color some of it with food coloring and orange zest ... maybe even some Grand Marnier. Then refrigerate to make the yolks hard and enrobe with uncolored genache. We could flavor the white part with vanilla ... maybe even some amaretto. The we could dip in dark chocolate

I think that would be a pretty UBER RICH chocolate treat.

When you change a few words in the directions and delete his name from the recipe. ;-)

When I first married my wife (40 years ago next week), I compared her cooking to my mom's occasionally. I even said a few stupid things like that isn't as good as moms but i got smarter and more sensitive. Judy hung in there. She was a pretty good cook in her own right.

Later...many years later, I figured out that my mother wasn't all that good of a cook. It was quite a shock for me.

I suggested a steak and it seems a lot of people agree. I suggested a steak for the following reasons:
It's easy and not time consuming.
It's expensive enough to impress and show that you want the evening to be special but it doesn't break the bank.
It's eaten rarely enough to be a treat for a meat eater.

I would have beer and wine available although if he is invited to dinner and doesn't have enough class to bring wine or a dessert, you might want to think about throwing him back.

or the cook with nothin on it

He's a guy. We just aren't that hard to figure out. Fix him a porterhouse or a ribeye steak and some kind of potato. I suggest a baked potato. You want to get fancy try a twice baked potato.

After the initial seducement, you can fix him whatever you like and he will say he likes it....even if he doesn't. Pay attention to what he orders at restaurants and mimic that style of food.

My family and I like chicken marsala, Swiss steak, lasagna, stir fry of almost anything.

Develop some kind of spaghetti or pasta dish.

The secret to a successful date for a guy is ... you showing up. Anything that doesn't end with you spitting on his shoes after that is a win!

Of course ... the list came from an American web site. Chowhound is an American web site, also. Both sites are in English... so why shouldn't it be American-centric?

Perhaps the non-american cooks should start their own list.
Even better... maybe they should start their own web sites in their own countries. Oh but there wouldn't be near as much traffic, would there?

Why would "hot pot", miso soup or the ability to make pickles be more important than pancakes, or meatloaf?

I've never made any of the three dishes you feel are so important.

Not sure it would be an experiment... I used Callebaut dark chocolate. I'm sure the vintage Hawaiian stuff would have been even richer but as it was, this stuff would blow the top of your head off. It was so rich.

Here is a recipe and below it a picture of Sherry Yard's Rainbow Room Chocolate Bombe

http://books.google.com/books?id=4VHM...

Man... I would like to make that!

Alas, I couldn't bring myself to pay the price for the Hawaiian stuff. I think it was over $25 per pound 6 or 7 years ago.

Still incredibly decadent.

You might be entertained by this thread I posted when I was fairly new at Chowhound.

Not only was i new here but i was experimenting with making threads that would generate a lot of responses.

To complicate things... I really like to argue. I was on the debate team in college.

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/717363

This the richest chocolate dish I have ever made. it is Emeril's Hawaiian vintage chocolate souffle.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/em...

Essentially, it is a rich chocolate souffle then you break it open and pour a chocolate orange Grand Marnier sauce down the middle.

I couldn't eat it all (a fairly small ramekin). I don't usually have that problem with chocolate.

You can make risotto with basmati rice. You can make it with any rice that has a starch coating. Unfortunately, a long grain rice doesn't have as thick a starch coating as arborrio or other short and medium grain rice. The sauce long grain rice creates won't be quite as thick and creamy as with arborrio.

Risotto is more of a technique for cooking rice. Pilaf is another rice technique.

I often make risotto with long grain rice because I don't like to use a $3 per pound arborrio when $0.79 to $1.00 per pound long grain is available.

That being said, many Chowhounders will vociferously disagree. However, Linda Larsen of "about.com" says she makes risotto with long grain rice.

Bottom line... long grain rice will not make a risotto as well as arborrio but still does adequately.

I'm going to step on LP's question here.... hopefully he won't disagree. 10 minutes would be a maximum. Generally you cook them until they turn pink and then get them off.

I sometimes cook shrimp and just put a skewer them on top of a dish. When I do that i put them under a broiler for 3 minutes each side.

Iodized salt is a smaller grain than kosher so the percentage of table salt has to be adjusted but it works fine.

Some people will swear they can taste the iodine. I have my doubts considering that they use 60 ml of potassium iodate in a ton of salt. The Swiss use the highest percentage I have heard of. They use 20 mg in 1 kg of salt which is .002 % iodine.

I made a spreadsheet a while back on brining. Use 4 tablespoons or 1/4 cup of table salt, 6 tablespoons of kosher salt, and 8 tablespoons of Diamond kosher per quart of water.

There is a lot more people trying to learn how to cook than before. Economics is a big motivator.

Although when we were a lot younger, my wife and I ate out a lot. There cam a time when we just couldn't stand the thought of seeing another restaurant. Don't get me wrong... we could always cook and we started doing it more often after we reached that point.

I never made curry in my life...don't intend to.

Along with stirfry, risotto and jambalaya, I definitely want to work on the following dishes to see if I can get them up to the level of the ones i listed in the original posting.

mussels
Rack of Pork
Cajun Pasta
Pasta Carbonera

I'd like to develop a stuffed chicken cutlet but I have to find a stuffing that doesn't include cheese or at least only mozzarella.....E.F. Mama don't eat cheese except for mozzarella.

I knew someone would come up with chicken piccata and upstream someone came up with Chciken paprikash or chicken paprika.

I'm sorry what is pork larb?

I'm still mad at the restaurant industry for doing away with breaded pork chops. I'm sure breaded are more fattening but give me breaded every time.