Introduction; oven-fried chicken

[steorra]

Hi, I just joined. I'm not entirely sure I belong here, but I think some of my struggles with cooking might fit with this community.

My main struggles with cooking have to do with meal planning, recipe selection, and coordinating associated shopping.

I don't think I've gotten any worse at these things over time, but I think in the last few years my circumstances have changed so that I'm in more challenging situations.

For me, a full dinner ought to include the following components:
-Vegetables (ideally of at least two colours)
-Carbohydrate (grain products, potatoes, etc.)
-Protein (milk, eggs, meat, legumes)

When I moved away from home, I developed a pattern of cooking that was not particularly interesting, but included all components. A typical dinner would involve:

-Steamed vegetables (fresh or frozen, depending what I had and how much of a hurry I was in)
-Rice or pasta
-a protein-containing 'variation' like cheese sauce or tuna or scrambled eggs or occasionally chicken or some other sort of meat.

This system made it so that the only component of the meal I really had to *plan* was the 'variation'.

I don't really like cooking meat and largely avoided it due to concerns about food poisoning from undercooking it or cross-contamination.

In the last few years, several things have changed:

1. For religious reasons, I now try to avoid meat, eggs, and dairy products at certain times. This has resulted in using more legumes (especially beans and lentils and also tofu), which I didn't often cook before. I don't have a repertoire of simple ways to include these into my basic cooking pattern, and so have ended up struggling quite a bit with how to cook during these times; I've come up with some things that work, but the options I've found for these periods tend to take considerably more time and effort than my normal pattern of cooking. I need to find/develop simpler meal plans including all relevant components (and not just recipes for one or two components) that are essentially vegan.

2. Instead of living on my own, I now live with housemates. We share cooking responsibilities, which in some ways makes things easier, since I don't have to cook every night. However, one of my housemates has trouble eating large quantities of dairy products, or egg that's not mixed with a considerable proportion of other ingredients, which means that some of my basic meal options are not good for me to cook for my housemates. It also means that I'm driven to cook more with meat, which I don't have a lot of simple options for, and get daunted by.

I find myself spending inordinate amounts of time looking at recipes and recipe books and eliminating most of the recipes I look at as unsuitable, either because they seem too complicated, or the involve ingredients and equipment I don't have and am not likely to have when cooking unless I specifically plan to make the recipe enough ahead of time to go shopping for its ingredients (and I only grocery shop about once a week, due to transportation limitations).

I found the free stonesoup e-cookbook that was linked on here a while back and have been using a few recipes from it with success, though a number of its recipes also seem to call for ingredients I'm not likely to have when I want to cook.

So there's the long version. I suppose the primary things I'm looking for are:
1. Simple practically-vegan meal plans, or if not complete meal plans, vegan protein recipes that can be combined into my typical cooking pattern.

2. Simple meat-containing recipes that I can integrate into my typical cooking pattern.

I suppose it's worth noting my own dietary restrictions:
1. No nuts or peanuts (pine nuts are okay, though)
2. No hot pepper or black pepper (not a health restriction, but I find even small quantities unpleasant).

Finally, I'll present a very simple chicken recipe that I found useful in my first years of living away from home, though I'd almost forgotten about it and haven't made it in a very long time.

Oven-fried chicken:

Ingredients:
A.
1/2 c. flour
1 t. salt
1 t. paprika (optional)
1/4 t. pepper (optional)

B.
Pieces of chicken with skin on, as many as desired.
2 t. butter or oil (or 1 t. butter 1 t. oil)

Combine A. ingredients in a plastic bag. Add a piece or two of chicken and shake until well coated. Repeat until you have coated all you want.[*]

Heat butter/oil in a baking dish in a 425°F (about 220°C) oven until melted (only a minute or two).

Place coated chicken skin sides down in pan.

Cook uncovered 30 minutes.
Turn chicken; cook uncovered about 30 minutes longer.

At its simplest, this recipe would involve only 4 ingredients: chicken, flour, salt, butter/oil.

[*] Put a tie twister on the bag once the chicken is baking, label the bag, and put it in the freezer for the next time you make oven-fried chicken. You could also double or triple the coating recipe and put it in a plastic container to save time for the future.

Comments

[kake]

I have an article on vegan bean stews on my website, that you might find useful. The first example has peanuts in, but there are three other examples too.

[steorra]

Hmm... that looks like it might be useful. I'm very much a recipe cook, not an improvisatory cook, but those directions might be close enough to recipes that I can use them.

I was going to ask if it was possible to use other beans in place of the flageolet beans and plain brown/green lentils in place of the Puy lentils, since the ones called for are not readily available here, but I see that the related recipe you give for 'Red Pepper and Puy Lentil Stew' says you can.

What other 'strongly-flavoured mushrooms' would work in place of chestnut mushrooms? I'm not familiar with chestnut mushrooms.

Thanks.

[kake]

What kind of mushrooms can you get? You could use any kind of mushroom, really, but I think it would be a bit bland if you used e.g. the white button mushrooms that are common in the UK.

[steorra]

(Finally replying almost a month later...)

The kinds of mushooms I can recall seeing around here are:

white button mushrooms
crimini mushrooms
portobello mushrooms
(I just learnt from Wikipedia that these three are the same species in different stages of maturation)

Oyster mushrooms

There may be a few others that I'm not remembering or haven't noticed.

[kake]

Crimini mushrooms would be perfect — they're very similar to chestnut mushrooms.

[rydra_wong]

2. Simple meat-containing recipes that I can integrate into my typical cooking pattern.

Stir-fries? I was nervous about cooking with meat when I started learning to cook, and it really helped to begin with meals where the meat is cut into sufficiently small pieces that you don't have to worry about whether it's cooked all the way through when it looks cooked on the outside.

Stir-fries are also fast, visually clear, and it's easy to make a stir-fry with meat or fish, a couple of vegetables, and some simple flavour elements like garlic, soy sauce, and/or sesame. Once you've got the basic principle and have a sense of what flavours go together, they're fairly easy to improvise.

If you want more carbohydrate in the meal, you can cook some noodles and tip the stir-fry on top of them. And of course if you want a vegan version, you can just use tofu instead of the meat.

I can provide more details if this might be a useful possibility for you?

[steorra]

I've learnt a little bit of stir-frying, but not much, and would gladly learn more. One of my housemates taught me to make a basic chicken stir fry when we moved in together.

One thing that makes stir-frying somewhat tricky for me is that I'm very much a recipe cook, and stir-fries tend to be an improvisation thing, so I tend to make consistently about the same stir-fry (well, I vary the vegetables a bit, but I've never used anything but chicken, and I only have one type of sauce/flavouring).

So yes, more details please, and perhaps the most useful more details would be about sauce/flavouring combinations, and suggestions about using tofu and meats besides chicken in stir-fries.

[rydra_wong]

Okay. I'd suggest to start with that you cut the meat into bite-sized pieces. If you're nervous, then when it looks done on the outside (which should take a matter of minutes with a stir-fry), take a piece out and cut it in half so you can see if it's cooked through to the middle. Then there's not a lot to worry about.

If you don't like using hot peppers, I'd suggest something like using a bit of toasted sesame oil as your cooking oil, cooking some chopped garlic and onions before you add the meat and vegetables, then adding a splosh of soy sauce or tamari just before you finish cooking.

That gives you a nice flavour base that will go well with a meat like beef or chicken (and for vegetables, I'd be selecting from things like bell peppers, bok choy, broccoli, spinach, baby sweetcorn, mushrooms, carrots cut into very thin sticks, etc.).

A different way to go would be using some coconut oil as your cooking oil -- you get a mild coconut flavour which works well in gentle curries, especially with chicken or fish or seafood.

I'm not a great tofu expert, but because it tends to be blander, you could to try marinading it before you cook it.

If you can get dried tofu, that might be interesting to experiment with -- you can store it for ages, so it's a good food to have in the cupboard for those days when shopping hasn't happened. And it rehydrates like a sponge, so it has a quite different texture to regular tofu (more rough and chewy) and absorbs flavours very well.

One thing that makes stir-frying somewhat tricky for me is that I'm very much a recipe cook, and stir-fries tend to be an improvisation thing

I sort of think of stir-fries as about having a basic equation where you can just plug in different variables, if that makes any sense. Once you have a "pool" of flavours which you know tend to go together, it's hard to go badly wrong.

Oh -- is tempeh of any interest? I haven't cooked with it at all, but someone else I know was just posting about her love for it; I could ask her if she has any tips.

[steorra]

(Finally responding nearly a month later...)

I'm tentatively interested in tempeh. I've tried using it once or twice but haven't been very happy with it, but that might just be because I didn't really know what to do with it.

[vass]

Here via rydra_wong.

The thing about tempeh is, it has a very specific flavour, which some people don't like. The darker the tempeh, the stronger the flavour, and if it has black spots, that's normal.

It's nice fried until it's browned a little. I like it fried in olive oil. Some people like it steamed - I've never tried that myself.

[steorra]

Thanks.