Well, you’re saving money I tell ya
True. And we’ve gotten our son going on the seafood train, he loves sushi, and shellfish, and especially salmon right now. And just last week he asked if we could get anchovies on a pizza. Yes we can!
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Lordy it’s been probably a year since I’ve gotten anchovies… Thanks for the weekend plans.
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I grew up with seafood. Fish sticks, filet o fish, tuna cans…really classy stuff.
Yes, we have seafood in the Midwest, but it’s not as fresh or common as on the coasts. My lack of exposure to it had less to do with availability and more to do with my parents’ budget. I didn’t try steak until I was 18.
When I was getting ready for my LDS mission people asked me where I wanted to go. I didn’t want to jinks it so I would say anywhere was fine. Then they would ask if there was anywhere that I didn’t want to go.
I would answer, that I didn’t like rice and I didn’t like fish, so Asia would probably not be the highest on my list. So I was called to Taiwan. I learned I didn’t like freshwater fish and I didn’t like Minute Rice. What they had in Taiwan was delicious.
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Oh hell no to minute rice. That’s all I knew as well, it was a loooong time before I had decent rice.
Nowadays I have a rice cooker and the local grocer stocks lots of great rice.
Between Minute Rice and terribly over cooked steak (really any meat, if it had any moisture in it it wasn’t done according to my mom, who was an incredible baker) I didn’t really know what good food was until I was out of HS.
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Same. College was wild. Found a sushi joint. Loved it. Cajun. Yes, please. Had a friend from Costa Rica teach me what ceviche was. Had another friend from Pakistan who fed me curry and carrot pudding.
Didn’t get to try it all but definitely got way, way more food diversity in college.
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Are you me? I could have written these exact words.
A couple of years ago…
Me: Mom, these pork chops are really delicious! What did you do differently this time?
Mom: I Googled how to bake moist pork chops. It said to bake 3/4” chops for 15 minutes at 350. My old cookbook says 45 minutes at 375.
So yeah… my mother was cooking pork chops for triple the current recommended time and also at a higher temperature. So you can imagine what the stuff she served when I was growing up tasted like.
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in her defense, pork is a much cleaner animal than years ago, and only recently did people realize they could cook pork medium rare
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Sure but after 45 minutes at 375 they were better suited to be doorstops than food that you’d actually eat.
We had the same pork chops. Fortunately, my mom always served them with mac & cheese and applesauce, so that’s what I ate on pork chop days.
Beef wasn’t quite as horribly overcooked. It was probably medium typically, but often redder.
All in all, most of what she cooked was good, although it is far easier to remember the bad meals for some reason. Maybe that’s a sign of being a good cook, where you expect more?
As i said, my mom was an incredible baker. She also did pretty good with casseroles. Sunday roast wasn’t too bad and ground meat wasn’t bad either. But a pork chop, steak or piece of chicken was like leather.
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I think most of my meals growing up came out of a casserole dish or crock pot. Hamburger helper was another regular. My dad would grill quite often, but that was usually a bunch of hamburgers and brats that would become leftovers for the week.
Certain fresh fruits like mango, pineapple, and avocado seem to confuse both my mom and sister to this day. They would have no idea where to begin.
I have encountered a person who desired to grill appropriately quintuple the quantity of food that anyone had any interest in eating. I don’t get it.
Leftover hamburgers are terrible. A freshly pan-fried burger is light years better than a leftover grilled burger. What is the appeal of doing this??? Especially now with George Foreman grills. A burger grilled on a real grill is only slightly better than one grilled on the George Foreman to begin with. But a freshly grilled GF burger is light-years better than a leftover real-grill burger.
I am very much a fan of taking orders for the exact number of burgers and hot dogs each person wants, grilling exactly that much, and no more.
Unless there’s a dog you’re feeding leftovers to anyway.
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Yeah, pork used to be dangerous, as it carried trichinosis, and had to be cooked pretty hot. Now the FDA requires that any meat fed to hogs be cooked, and that’s almost eliminated trichinosis from domestic pork. The rate cases that show up are usually from bear. And because people know you need to cook bear well-done, they are often actually from other meats ground in the same machine that was used to grind bear.
I’ll make a pile of hamburgers when I make them, usually like 8 for 2 people.
It’s completely serviceable to slap it onto a skillet for 3 minutes, flip and put on cheese, leave another 3 minutes. It’s not quite as good as fresh because it’s hard to have anything but well-done but it’s a perfectly fine lunch that can be ready in less than 10 minutes.
But why not just wait to cook it the first time? I can cook a burger on the George Foreman pretty quickly… less than 10 minutes for sure. And it’s way better cooked only once.
What advantage is there to cooking it twice?
I typically buy ground beef in 3-5 pound packs and freeze them, then make large amounts of food when I decide it’s time to defrost one. I prefer not to leave a few pounds of raw beef in the fridge for more than 2-3 days.
Sometimes I divvy them up into smaller Zip-locks but I’m usually too lazy.
I can see that. But I don’t like to leave cooked ground beef for more than a few days either.