Home Made Food Flex Off

[Mercer]

I thank the universe every time I get to sit down with the fam, or the few people I'm lucky enough to share a meal with. Keeps my head straight. Used to drink free coffee at the warehouse I worked in, and dump extra sugar because I couldn't afford breakfast (or lunch) till the next check. Good food, with good people is key to good life.

 

Don't post takeout, or restaurants, or that cool spot you found out about on instagram where the food looks amazing, but tases like shit. No processed shit either if possible. Bonus points if it's made from scratch, platinum membership if it's from your garden.

 

High quality, low cost.

 

 

Country Omelette

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arroz con Bacalao & Salsa Romesco to dip bread in:

 

 

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by Mercer

[misteraven]

HA! Super legit!

 

Probably some overlap with the ogg grid thread, but I'll try to remember to take some photos to post in here since we regularly are cooking with stuff our of our garden or from my livestock (or a neighbors).

 

And agreed... Nothing like breaking bread with friends and family over a quality home made meal, especially when the ingredients came out of the dirt or off the land you own.

[Mercer]

Wifey cultivates her own home grown sourdough strains in house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm on some heavy usage of alfalfa sprouts myself, necessary when you're over 40 and constantly injuring joints/tendons. Cultivating about $20 worth of sprouts a week in my cabinet, years supply of seeds $10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by Mercer

[misteraven]

@MercerIn regards to the pancakes you posted... You should try this: Go pickup some local, farm fresh heavy cream. Get yourself two nice sized mason jars (about the content size of a nice beer mug). Fill the first one about 2/3 with the heavy cream and then go watch TV and while watching, shake the crap out of it. After a while the cream will separate. Keep shaking and after about 30 minutes or so, you'll have what looks like a ball of milky wax (butter) and a whole bunch of liquid (butter milk). Then take the butter part of it and whip it in a mixer while drizzling in a little local sourced, unpasteurized honey, as well as a sprinkle in a little sea salt (both to taste). 

 

Use the butter milk to whip up a new batch of pancakes and then use your new butter to butter them up. Experiment with topping it with fresh and real maple syrup or better yet, mix in fresh blue berries into the batter, cook them up and then top off with your fresh butter, a sprinkling of powdered sugar and a dollop of fresh lemon curd (you can make that too). Garnish with some mint leaves.

 

Honestly its some super gourmet shit and you'll never want to eat pancakes any other way. For the full on recipe, you can check out this from Pioneer Woman and substitute in the butter milk and butter into that recipe. The lemon Curd is the best part IMO and not part of her recipe, but well worth it. If you don't make your own, pickup a little jar from Dean & Deluca next time you're in the city. Lemons and blueberry too unless you can source from a farmers market.

 

Link: https://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/lemon-blueberry-pancakes/

 

---------------

 

Gives me an idea for a new thread... Same way there's those challenges where one writer does an outline for another writer and send to them to pain or other variation where one writer paints another writers name in their own style... Maybe we challenge each other to a cook off / bake off by challenging each other to ever more sophisticated recipes and then post back images and feedback? Heck of a way to push our eating / cooking game way up!

 

[Mercer]

@misteravenI'm going to show her this and see what she says. Wifey has two strains of sourdough she makes pancakes/bread/waffles from. We get our Maple syrup smuggled in by my homie Buddha, who's from the Mohawk reservation near Montreal so he knows his syrup. Makes them extra special.  Been getting locally sourced honey (Queens) for years at the farmers market, they've got spicy jalapeno honey that's actually bangin plus locally sourced = greater immunity to local pollen. I'm kind of particular about butter (store bought) and cooking with the right butter, Just stopped typing to read your post out loud to my wife, I'll post flix next round, one of her recipes uses buttermilk.

 

Flex something from the camera roll in here.

[Mercer]

Sent the link to the recipe, said she knows the pioneer woman.

[misteraven]

@MercerNothing better than home made butter once you get it dialed in. But keep in mind it doesn't last nearly as long as store butter so either freeze it or make enough for a few days only. Especially awesome with fresh bread and going to assume your wife can make some if she's already making dough. My daughter makes an awesome honey wheat, but I kind of suck at making bread.

 

Yeah, local honey is always best for the reason you mentioned. Fun fact about honey is its naturally very highly anti bacterial. In a pinch if you had no options to pack a deep wound, honey would be a good option as it'll seal it and keep bacteria from sitting in. Read an article about honey they found in an ancient Egyptian tomb and after running studies, they said it was basically the same and just as good as when it was stored, several thousand years ago. Again, because its anti bacterial it never goes bad. Personally I love honey, but sad fact is that its processed by your body about the same as sugar. Was still planning on doing honey bees just to help the environment and to pollinate my garden and fruit trees extra heavy.

 

 

[misteraven]

5 minutes ago, Mercer said:

Sent the link to the recipe, said she knows the pioneer woman.

She films some of her shows over at the studios in Chelsea Market (or used to when I was there). Her chicken dumpling soup is a family favorite that my wife makes pretty regularly.

 

Recipe: https://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/chicken-and-dumplings/

[misteraven]

Another related fun fact: @diggity's parents own a bed and breakfast down in Georgia and cook up award winning southern food. Always meant to stay a weekend and try it all out, but havent had the opportunity yet.

[Deine Mudder]

Great thread idea and awesome posts so far, thanks for sharing!

 

[Mercer]

27 minutes ago, misteraven said:

@MercerNothing better than home made butter once you get it dialed in. But keep in mind it doesn't last nearly as long as store butter so either freeze it or make enough for a few days only. Especially awesome with fresh bread and going to assume your wife can make some if she's already making dough. My daughter makes an awesome honey wheat, but I kind of suck at making bread.

 

Yeah, local honey is always best for the reason you mentioned. Fun fact about honey is its naturally very highly anti bacterial. In a pinch if you had no options to pack a deep wound, honey would be a good option as it'll seal it and keep bacteria from sitting in. Read an article about honey they found in an ancient Egyptian tomb and after running studies, they said it was basically the same and just as good as when it was stored, several thousand years ago. Again, because its anti bacterial it never goes bad. Personally I love honey, but sad fact is that its processed by your body about the same as sugar. Was still planning on doing honey bees just to help the environment and to pollinate my garden and fruit trees extra heavy.

 

 

Honey is the only simple sugar I'll purposely ingest most of the time. Some recipes obviously need sugar, but I use honey in a tea if I feel a cold coming on, I think some it's antibiotic properties translate into the same even after it's digested. Also dig the immunity from introducing your body to the proteins in the local pollen, from locally sourced honey. If I get a small farm going one I'll for sure have hives of my own, find a neighbor with a frame centrifuge and work a deal.

[Mercer]

Back to flexelence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rhubarb, is one of my favorites. We copped this rhubarb from the farmers market but if get one of these planted in your yard you're set for life. Kinda goes hand in hand with growing strawberries which also do well in moderate/cool climates.

 

 

[Mercer]

 

 

 

[One Man Banned]

No pix but I smoked some burgers last night and had some awesome strawberries in the sun that my pops made.  

@Mercer have you tried any other flavors of that brand ice cream?  They make some funky shit but I have not tried.

Just noticed the dog, great!

[Mercer]

@One Man Bannednot yet, I can vouch for that vanilla though. We both acted like we'd eat half of it, and save the rest for later. 10 minutes later and everything was gone figs and all. Dog even helped and he usually doesn't like ice cream.

[Bojangles]

Totino's Pizza with canned chili,  Ramen noodles and fried eggs on top.

(The cherry tomato thing made it fancy looking.)

Yes...it was as delicious as it looked.

Edited July 7, 2019 by Bojangles

[pissdrunkwhat?!]

18 minutes ago, Bojangles said:

Totino's Pizza with canned chili,  Ramen noodles and fried eggs on top.

(The cherry tomato thing made it fancy looking.)

Yes...it was as delicious as it looked.

This has to be old totinos pizzas are square now haha

[diggity]

This is 12oz. Shouldn’t ya’ll be searching Instagram for #cucumberchallenge ?

 

im been wanting to get back to cooking, I’m usually pretty happy with how things turn out. My typical southern dishes rarely look good in photos. One of my favorites growing up was chicken and dumplings and they lack aesthetics for photos really. 

 

Overall i think people try to over complicate southern food. A dude at work was telling me he was making chicken and dumplings and brought some in for me to try. It didn’t taste anything like what they should so I asked what was up. He starts telling me about the white wine he cooked the chicken in.... I fucking laughed at him. No one on the farm ever cooked with white wine. He says he got the recipe

off the internet and it made me think most of the recipes you see online are probably bullshit and written for page views. I’ve seen Pinterest picts that have ingredients in them that arnt in the recipe or vise versa. 

 

If your making something that uses chicken broth, you gotta cut up a chicken. You can’t do precut cause you need the back to get the flavor. Get your hands dirty. 

 

I worry that we are suffering from a major lack of handed down of knowledge from our parents.  Ive been watching some master classes on cooking. A lot are shit I’ll never make but you do get some good pieces of info here and there. Sometime around college I let someone convince me to cook in olive oil rather than vegetable. I thought it would be healthier but it disrupts the flavor of the food your trying to make - unless you want it to taste like olive oil. Other thing is vegetable oil has a higher smoke temperature so your less likely to burn things if your pan frying or whatever.  My dumbass just accepted what others told me rather than sticking to what I had known/been taught by my parents who do the shit for a living. 

[Mercer]

9 minutes ago, diggity said:

Overall i think people try to over complicate southern food. A dude at work was telling me he was making chicken and dumplings and brought some in for me to try. It didn’t taste anything like what they should so I asked what was up. He starts telling me about the white wine he cooked the chicken in.... I fucking laughed at him. No one on the farm ever cooked with white wine. He says he got the recipe

off the internet and it made me think most of the recipes you see online are probably bullshit and written for page views. I’ve seen Pinterest picts that have ingredients in them that arnt in the recipe or vise versa. 

This goes back to my IG "looks great, tastes like shit" comment. It's insane how much focus is put into pretentious shit like fried chicken made with white whine, sounds exactly like the hip wave of restaurants that latch go for all this fusion bullshit when the same recipe has been doing just fine for the last 100 or maybe 1000 years depending on the region the food is coming from. Like you wouldn't rock a thin euro mustache and french beret, with overalls and cowboys boots, how can they expect someone to take the food equivalent of that seriously. 

 

9 minutes ago, diggity said:

If your making something that uses chicken broth, you gotta cut up a chicken. You can’t do precut cause you need the back to get the flavor. Get your hands dirty. 

 

I worry that we are suffering from a major lack of handed down of knowledge from our parents.  Ive been watching some master classes on cooking. A lot are shit I’ll never make but you do get some good pieces of info here and there. Sometime around college I let someone convince me to cook in olive oil rather than vegetable. I thought it would be healthier but it disrupts the flavor of the food your trying to make - unless you want it to taste like olive oil. Other thing is vegetable oil has a higher smoke temperature so your less likely to burn things if your pan frying or whatever.  My dumbass just accepted what others told me rather than sticking to what I had known/been taught by my parents who do the shit for a living. 

This right here is key. I think there was a ton of people in the boomer's generation that lost, devalued gardening, and cooking skills when compared to the generation before them, who survived/reversed great depression. You're lucky IMO to have that foundation of knowledge to work with because most people don't, myself included. My parents really didn't cook much, and when the did it was from a frozen box that made in a factory half the time. Some of the generation X/Y millennials are actively trying to re-learn these skills online, there's a bunch of great stuff on youtube. Most will just stay trapped in the American cliche of financial, and health issues. Me personally, I think it would suck to be alive during our time with virtually unlimited resources, and still miss out on an entire lifetime of eating good food.

[misteraven]

2 hours ago, diggity said:

This is 12oz. Shouldn’t ya’ll be searching Instagram for #cucumberchallenge ?

 

im been wanting to get back to cooking, I’m usually pretty happy with how things turn out. My typical southern dishes rarely look good in photos. One of my favorites growing up was chicken and dumplings and they lack aesthetics for photos really. 

 

Overall i think people try to over complicate southern food. A dude at work was telling me he was making chicken and dumplings and brought some in for me to try. It didn’t taste anything like what they should so I asked what was up. He starts telling me about the white wine he cooked the chicken in.... I fucking laughed at him. No one on the farm ever cooked with white wine. He says he got the recipe

off the internet and it made me think most of the recipes you see online are probably bullshit and written for page views. I’ve seen Pinterest picts that have ingredients in them that arnt in the recipe or vise versa. 

 

If your making something that uses chicken broth, you gotta cut up a chicken. You can’t do precut cause you need the back to get the flavor. Get your hands dirty. 

 

I worry that we are suffering from a major lack of handed down of knowledge from our parents.  Ive been watching some master classes on cooking. A lot are shit I’ll never make but you do get some good pieces of info here and there. Sometime around college I let someone convince me to cook in olive oil rather than vegetable. I thought it would be healthier but it disrupts the flavor of the food your trying to make - unless you want it to taste like olive oil. Other thing is vegetable oil has a higher smoke temperature so your less likely to burn things if your pan frying or whatever.  My dumbass just accepted what others told me rather than sticking to what I had known/been taught by my parents who do the shit for a living. 

The info being handed down issue is very real and I've seen two sides of this... One you guys can look up for yourselves...

 

1. Obviously I've been running this forum for a minute and you guys (most of you anyways) have been posting for a minute. As digital cameras came into their own and the quality started to rival film / scans and the costs came down to a point where anyone could squeeze out a pretty good one without too monumental a challenge, online images exploded. This is the age of Flickr and there was just tons and tons of very high quality, high resolution images. Because of our forum here, I would regularly scour the internet for good graffiti photos and use Google image search and using tools, filter by size to see only high resolution images. There was always pages upon pages of high res files served up. As the iPhone revolutionized photography by becoming the number 1 digital camera for photos first on Flickr and then the internet as a whole, the quality dived even thought the number of photos being published went up (which further led to a decline in quality in itself). I have an iPhone X and the photos look awesome on mobile, and pretty crusty on a desktop most of the time. The teeny sensor the squeeze into an iPhone is a miracle for a smart device / phone you keep in your pocket always, but pales in comparison to the sensors in even the bottom end digital cameras of today. Worse, when social media came along and especially Instagram, the images being uploaded are compressed to save disk space on their servers, they're cropped into a square and most often, are very heavily processed using the filters they provide. Now when you search for high resolution images on Goggle image search, most are camera phone shots in a square aspect ratio that are capped at 1008px (max size Instagram allows) and heavily processed. Even popular writers we're calling out on the #12ozFreshFridays series we're running on the 12oz Instagram, which I've been trying to link to a forum thread here, is getting hard to do. There just aren't enough quality photos available as the vast majority is actually not high res and just look like shit here on the forum, unless being viewed on a mobile device. I know this isn't 100% what @diggityis referring to, but in many ways is... We're literally seeing the culture of graffiti being lost in that magazines are all but dead, as are most Graffiti forums. We've not only forfeited the platforms we used to document graffiti for shit like Instagram, but we also forfeited better tools to document it with. If your goal is Instafame, then a smart phone shit is fine. If your goal is to document and preserve a photo of something, then the mobile phone and Instragram is an exceedingly poor way to do it. I'm curious how many graffiti photos were lost when MySpace was shut down? At least in that case, the originals likely exist somewhere. Now imagine when Instagram shuts down (which is inevitable and seems to been well on its way)... Think how much graffiti history will disappear with it, with the only evidence being a bunch of crusty low res smartphone shots that may or may not be lost as you lose your phone or upgrade it.

 

2. Living in the mountains of NW Montana and looking into methods to live in more balance with nature and just a more simple lifestyle overall, I'm exploring ideas like permaculture and function stacking and old school traditional farming methods from before commercial agriculture and modern methods like GMO's and chemical fertilizers, etc. It is surprisingly hard to find this information online. In fact, a farrier came over recently to tend my horses and he had a book in his truck her refers to that was published back in like the 40's, that he said doesn't even cover the knowledge the "old timers" had. Learning what to plant next to what to avoid issues with flea beetles or how to rotate crops is info that is slowly disappearing. I did come across a book series years ago that I've been slowly collecting that speaks directly to what @diggityis referring to called the Foxfire Series where a teacher leveraged his students something like 50 years ago to urgently document a generation of very old people in the Appalachian Mountain region that were dying off in an attempt to document the last bit of knowledge of frontier life before it disappeared forever. Very interesting in terms of historical perspective, but also very interesting in that a lot of the knowledge presented is simpler and more effective than what is taught / encouraged today. Here's a link to the site: https://www.foxfire.org/ and to the book series on Amazon (also sold individually): https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Collection-Anniversary-Editions-Anniversay/dp/B00MRH3RYU/ref=sr_1_1

 

Anyhow, sorry to thread jack @Mercerbut I think this still speaks to the spirit of what you were going for with this thread.

[misteraven]

2 hours ago, Mercer said:

Some of the generation X/Y millennials are actively trying to re-learn these skills online, there's a bunch of great stuff on youtube.

Indeed... Here's a really good one I've been following for a few years...

 

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOSGEokQQcdAVFuL_Aq8dlg

 

https://abundantpermaculture.com/

 

Also, the Survival Podcast I keep referring to also has a ton on the subjects ranging from permaculture / gardening to food preservation (canning, smoking jerky, etc) and cool shit I've been wanting to try out like brewing mead...

 

http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/survivalpodcasting?feature=mhum

 

 

[misteraven]

Oh yeah, meant to add this bit (more on topic)... I highly recommend the Kitchenaide. Super freakin useful for so many things, especially if you also start investing into the attachments. Built like a freakin tank and also classic as its been produced for ages, so you can count on it not becoming obsolete and in being able to continue buying compatible attachments for it.

 

I recently got the ice cream attachment for my birthday and not for nothing, but slow churned ice cream made at home from local ingredients is about as good as it gets. Literally comes down to a handful of ingredients, so super simple as well. Also, they usually have these for cheap and often with an extra discount at Costco and also on Amazon. Well worth the cost.

 

https://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-KP26M1XGA-Professional-Bowl-Lift-Stand/dp/B07H9JH24J/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kicthenaid&qid=1562515707&s=home-garden&sr=1-1&th=1

 

[diggity]

I’m on the road so just a couple real quick replies. 

 

@misteraventhe foxfire stuff is real shit. It fell off my radar for a bit and I appreciate you bringing it up. I found it years ago and shared with my mom and she had read them all back when she was in school. I think they were required reading for her in school while growing up. 

 

If your ever trying to sniff out bullshit on southern comfort food just put yourself in their shoes. Farmer’s wives cooked with shit that was available on the farm. They didn’t go out for specialty items. If it wasn’t found there, they didn’t use it. Most is butter and salt - seasoned with bacon fat/ grease. Actually most cooking is butter and salt. 

 

Another thing I picked up from those masterclass things was the reason you can’t salt something after it’s been cooked is because the pores have closed up so it won’t hold properly. 

[earmuffs]

Fuck

Edited July 7, 2019 by earmuffs

[Mercer]

3 hours ago, misteraven said:

Oh yeah, meant to add this bit (more on topic)... I highly recommend the Kitchenaide. Super freakin useful for so many things, especially if you also start investing into the attachments. Built like a freakin tank and also classic as its been produced for ages, so you can count on it not becoming obsolete and in being able to continue buying compatible attachments for it.

 

I recently got the ice cream attachment for my birthday and not for nothing, but slow churned ice cream made at home from local ingredients is about as good as it gets. Literally comes down to a handful of ingredients, so super simple as well. Also, they usually have these for cheap and often with an extra discount at Costco and also on Amazon. Well worth the cost.

 

https://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-KP26M1XGA-Professional-Bowl-Lift-Stand/dp/B07H9JH24J/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kicthenaid&qid=1562515707&s=home-garden&sr=1-1&th=1

 

We got the Pro 600, no ice cream attachment yet but looking it up now. lol

[diggity]

@misteravenkitchenaide is dope. My moms had one that they have used pretty much everyday for 30+ years. It’s not a commercial one, just very well made. We got one when we got married and it’s been a work horse. Few things you buy these days last, and I hope this isn’t one that they tweak the formula on to make it cheaper. 

[misteraven]

Ice Cream Kitchenaide attachment was on sale on Amazon for like $36 recently and most places (Target) will price match them.

[misteraven]

Fresh raspberries, blackberries, blueberries (mostly) from the garden and a very simple, old school recipe for Dutch Baby Pancakes using fresh duck eggs from our flock as the base and cooked in the oven in a cast iron skillet.

 

Coated in fresh butter and powdered sugar.

 

(Ducks RIP a few weeks ago after a grizzly ate them so no more duck eggs until next spring when we get new ones).

 

 

 

 

 

[~KRYLON2~]

I made this at 3am before work last week. Held me down until dinner

[Magnum OPiss]