Ask Lemmy

So I have this problem... I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.

THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.

So I'll find a pan that makes me go "Oooh!" then I look for excuses to use it.

So it's not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. "More time to make and clean up than eat? I'm not making it." Cooking for OTHER people?

Chuck roast:

Shakshuka:

Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:

Beef roast:

Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:

Ableskievers:

Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.

Croissant

Beef Wellington.

Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it's just such a bother.

Beef Wellington

Billionaire

Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I'd ordered just for the task:

The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn't want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.

Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.

There's also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it's also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.

Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh

Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.

Ditto puff pastry from scratch.

Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.

Papa reyeñas(sp?). They're so good, it's basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping

Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes...I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There's also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes

I don't enjoy cooking, but I'm pretty good at it when I want to be... But I have to want to be

Sourdough

I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I'm pretty motivated to make food homemade.

Baklava is the one I'd like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.

Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.

It's been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.

Century egg

Doughnuts. I made doughnuts by hand recently, and kneading the dough. For. 30. Minutes. By. Hand. Fuck, never again. I usually don't mind kneading dough by hand, but this was the first time I wish I had a mashine for it

I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.

For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.

I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.

Homemade pizza. Making the dough creates a mess and requires delicate manual labor in several steps at precise times over more than 24 hours. Looks great on YouTube but that's just not me.

Edit: thanks for the suggestions, guys. Who knows, maybe one day... 😉

I have the Ladurée macaron cookbook and I look at it frequently, and then go buy a lesser version of the cookie and pretend I’m happy.

Lamb Vindaloo.

God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas

Proper paella. I enjoy making it in the sense that it's simpler to cook and is more like a risotto, but to make an actual paella as close to the way the dish should be made takes so much effort, the correct ingredients and equipment I have neither the time nor the money for.

protip : you can cook anything. maybe you don't cook it well the first time. but if you're not completely freeballin it, and are following an established well reviewed recipe, once you cook it poorly or not to your taste, you can always make notes, and adjust the next time. be fearless in your experiments, there's a lot of freedom (and cost savings) in learning how to cook what you like to eat, the way you like to eat it, at home.

My mom makes these cottege cheese and bread crumbs dumplings that she boils until they float and then you cut them in half and drizzle melted butter and brown sugar on them.

I could never pronounce or spell the name of the dish but she claims it's a traditional German dessert.

I tried explain it to chat gpt and it had no clue what the hell I was talking about. It kept telling me about Turkish dishes that have the right ingredients but look nothing like the baseball sized dumplings she would make.

https://www.kitchentreaty.com/40-cloves-of-garlic-soup/

I made it once for Thanksgiving years ago. Everyone loved it. It was a pain. Especially since I didn't have an immersion blender.