Food that’s not worth the effort

[BarrelOfOtters]

Crab…picked yourself
Unfilleted fish
globe artichoke all that finiking for some little bites

I agree with @CornishGem1975 and @angela99999 about cooking a roast. I find it comforting and strangely therapeutic with its little rituals. Perhaps because I am in my 60s and have memories of grannies roasts and then my mother's. There is something deeply satisfying about reserving the veggie water and making the gravy. I went through the routine on here once on a roastie thread and got absolutely hammered for "living in the 50s". Sadly my yorkies just don't turn out brilliantly whatever method I try. The shop ones are always higher and crisper.

We always have a roast from about September through to late April/early May.

sourdough:

1)get the starter out of fridge, pour a bit into bowl. Feed generously with flour and water and leave until it's bubbly. might take a few hours or a day.

2. Add flour water to make a wettish dough. leave for at least half an hour or a few hours doesn't matter. THEN add salt.

3. Stretch and fold 3 times. leave each time you've stretched and folded 3 times, for a couple of hours

4. heat up oven (200) and put in casserole dish. put flour in bottom to stop loaf from sticking.

5. when dish is hot put in shaped dough, cut and flour the top.

6. Bake for about 40 mins

7. Bake again with top off until done..

you might all be thinking blimey!!! but if you're working from home, it's easy peasy and not labour intensive. It punctuates work. Just lots of little stages. It's slow food for sure, but it's a way of making bread that's so very ancient, and I like that x

My steps include peeling and chopping onions, peeling and crushing garlic, peeling and chopping any other veg, carrots, celery, peppers etc., sweating them off, browning the mince, adding a tin of tomatoes, tomato purée, herbs, seasoning and then cooking the sauce. It’s not as simple as one pan for the sauce!

Well this really my kitchen is a right mess when I made lasange. I don't make it any more ill have it if I'm out for a pub meal but that's it.

My two tips are:

• get the tray/oil really hot first - like 10 minutes at 220C
• Use the James Martin recipe except just chuck it all in a food processor at once https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/yorkshirepudding_81824 - this makes A LOT of YPs so some people could probably half it

Even I can make them and I'm from west of the Pennines.

I was just about to say, the oil and tray need to be molten lava territory, preheated for 10 mins at 200-220c depending on your oven. When you pour in the batter it should hiss, spit and sizzle. Then immediately back in the oven and don’t open it again until they’re done.

If you are not doing a roast, you could just make big Yorkshire puddings and serve your casserole or whatever inside the YPs 😅

Perhaps not one for summer, but come autumn, bring them on.

Another tip is maybe don't make them in a tiny/top oven as the whole thing becomes filled with a YP monster 😂

My gran used to make the best Yorkshire puddings. I was very fussy with food when I was a child so my roast dinner usually consisted of just a mountain of Yorkshire puddings, gravy and a slice of gammon.

I still think lasagne is a lot of work, particularly as you need to make a large quantity to make it worthwhile. There's a lot of vegetable prepping and you need at least 2 kinds of meat for the ragu, preferably 3, usually beef, pork and chicken livers, and it takes ages to cook , and then there's the white sauce which I find time consuming as I never manage the all in one method without lumps. And grating parmesan is hard work. Then there's the assembly and there never seems to be enough white sauce for pasta/meat no matter what recipe I use. And then you have to use the hob and the oven. I don't know that its' not worth it, but I continue to believe it's a faff. Anything with a white sauce is a faff for me. Fish pie ditto - white sauce and mash. Not difficult but labour intensive.

That actually sounds doable on a quiet day WFH, thank you.

Do you have one of these spiral whisks? No more lumpy white sauces and they cost about £2.50. I can be very casual about adding milk to the roux with this and it gets all the lumps out. Also it froths warm milk nicely too.

This thread directly induced me to buy an Aldi Specially Selected lasagne by the way as I remembered I hadn't had one for ages.

@Catspyjamas17 maybe the spiral whisk is the way to go to relieve me of my white sauce stress

@Ontopofthesunset I live in the ancestral home of Lasagna 😂 and I don't know anyone who puts liver in it! I buy chopped celery, onion and carrot (frozen) which cuts down on prep a little. All the mince goes in together whether one or two types. Only 20 minutes to cook in the oven and no parmesan in the sauce!

Weirdly, I saw my ice cream recipe (which I got from a website called "Food on a Dime") on the New York Times today, glammed up by using Dulce de leche instead of condensed milk (which I must try as I happen to have some home made Dulce de leche in). If you haven't made it, you can put unopened cans of condensed milk (not ones with the pull tab opening) in a slow cooker, cover them with water and leave on low for about eight or ten hours.

@Oncemoreunderthebridge it is Delia's recipe that uses chicken livers. The Parmesan is not for the sauce but to sprinkle on the top. I do have Waitrose soffritto in the freezer so I could use that I suppose but the texture is not as good - the onions are always a bit small and watery but it's good for quick tomato sauces or soups.

Another vote for spiral whisks (didn’t realise that’s what they were called). Also very useful for making gravy as you can use it to really scrub stuff off the bottom of the tray.

Sounds like my recipe, we never put parmesan in the sauce, just seasoning and sometimes nutmeg. Chicken liver sounds a step too far!

Chicken liver sounds a step too far!

It's a very classic bolognese sauce ingredient. I've made it with and without. It does add something, although I have to admit I don't generally bother for lasagne.

Not the topic of the thread, but spurred on by it, I made lasagne for dinner last night, but using a roasted mushroom bolognese instead of meat sauce. The whole thing took under 2 hours, including non-hands-on simmering and baking time.

Talk about twisting what I said. I said the food the op posted to me absolutely was worth the effort and for me the effort to heat up a can proportionately is larger. Going with your 'point' the same could be said about ops food. "Just don't buy them." But then we wouldn't have any level of healthy debate would we?

Chicken livers in bolognese sauce sounds interesting. I love chicken livers just sautéed with bacon lardons and served with celeriac mash.

The easy - and maybe a bit healthier - way to make white sauce is to use oil rather than butter. Then you can blend the flour into the oil cold and the milk into that, and then heat and whisk a bit once it's getting hot. Obviously no good if you want a buttery sauce but if you're going to be adding cheese or there's lots of other flavours in the dish then it's fine.

AS for pomegranates, forget all this bashing and such. All you have to do is cut the top off. Then you will see like a veil that divides the red seeds into compartments, you take a knife and make cuts from the cut off top to the bottom following these dividers, then the pomegranate opens up like a flower and with your fingers the seeds just fall out into your bowl. Easy peasy.

But the Charlie Bingham's one is so salty! Honestly the one from Lidl's extra special range is nicer .