Food Cooking The Green Way - part 2 of many

I've posted about rice cookers as a very inexpensive way to cook and use less energy, make fewer dishes to wash up, and generally make your kitchen life a lot easier. I'll add a few more notes on them here, and continue on to a few related things.

I know there are some bloody expensive rice cookers out there that have programs for everything. But do they make for better rice? Undoubtedly - if you're new to cooking rice. Are they more versatile? Possibly. But even a cheap Big-W AUD$13 rice cooker is okay if you want to take the time to get to know them. 

The biggest secret to rice is the rice to water ratio. The second biggest, and which affects that ratio the most, is what type of cooker you have. If you use a saucepan then 1 portion of rice by volume to 2 portions of water by volume is about right. If the saucepan has a tight-fitting lid, you can use less water, but you'll need to dial it in. If you have a AUD $400 computerised Ferrari of the rice cooker world, you might get away with a 1:1 ratio. Most of my rice cookers like a 1:1.5 ratio - 1 cup rice to 1.5 cups water. 

But also - in the saucepan, don't boil the guts out of the rice. Bring it to the boil then reduce to a simmer. Much nicer rice. Even my simple rice cooker can do that - it cooks until the water's all evaporated and the temperature internally goes above 100C, then reduces its heat to the keep warm setting. 

So - you don't need the best appliances, just tips, tricks, and techniques - and I have plenty of those for you. 

But Wait There's More

I'm assuming a small (0.75litre or so) so-called "mini" rice cooker here. They're the best for a single person or for preparing rice or beans etc as a side dish/carb for two.

Most rice cookers have a short period of time where the temperature can be above 100C before their thermostat kicks in. That's where a nice sautee comes in. Put in some peanut or vegetable oil, some choppped onions, meat, vegetables, whatever, and put the lid on and hit "cook." After a few minutes you'll hear sizzling, then the "click!" as it turns to the keep warm setting. Let it go another minute, open the lid, use a chopstick or other wooden implenet to stir and decide - another sautee? 

If not, add softer vegetables and rice, stock, flavourings and seasonings, and let it cook the meal to the end.

This is a one-pot meal (don't eat it from the rice cooker though, you'll mess up the coating) and as simple as it gets. 

I've also used rice cookers to prepare lentils and small beans like mung or field beans, you just need to put in less than a cup of the dry food and more water, you'll need to find your own ratio here or may even have to add a second lot of water for some.

You can also make cous cous or polenta, cook buckwheat, pasta, or boil two minute noodles. You get the idea - for a person who boiled eggs and pasta in an electric kettle in one's student days (and we've all been there, right? Hunger and lack of funds produce ingenuity) these gadgets are an eye-opener. I'd go as far as to say that I wish this was the first appliance I bought instead of an electric kettle and toaster. 

Beyond The Rice Cooker

Appliances I've tried and found multiple uses for:

• Pressure Cooker: This old gadget was a game-changer for cooking, reducing cooking times for difficult foods by an order of magnitude, and people developed a plethora of recipes  to take advantage of the technological marvel of the day.
• The Toaster: These two devices I wasn't going to bother with but then I remember shared house days...
• The Kettle: Between the toaster and the kettle, we made entire dinners. So yeah, I'll include them both.
• Sandwich Press: Sandwich presses and panini presses are great little cooking gadgets that are so simple that they've become one of the more versatile ways to get stuff done. 
• Microwave: This is pretty much THE modern appliance to start New Wave Of Cooking, after all. Ther were electric kettles and toasters, but they were just advances of existing devices.
• Instant Pot: This is one of those devices that everyone had to have a few years ago, but are now old hat. They do have a good range of uses though
• Electric Pressure Cooker: I have one. It pretends to be an IP but it has far fewer uses than the instant pot, is still a valuable part of my kitchen
• Air Fryer: in the last few years a new thing's arisen, the air fryer. There are so many variations and they're the ne plus ultra of current kitchen "healthy" appliances. I haven't used one but I have my doubts.
• Steam Oven: More recently I found out about these - their angle is that they're a tabletop oven (like the AF mentioned above) but they generate steam and circulate that to conduct heat into the food. 
• Tabletop Oven: There were also many tabletop ovens and toasters, up to the size of microwaves and having one or two heating elements to them. 
• Tabletop Convection Oven: A good cross between the AF and the tabletop ovens, these had a large thermal glass bowl on some kind of stand, and a glass lid with the actual heating gear in it. 
• Dehydrators, Vacuum Sealers: Yep I consider dehydrating a kitchen and cooking hack, especially when making biltong or jerky, veg crisps, tomato (and of course other vegetables) powder, drying out bread cubes for crouton or dumplings. 
• Blenders, Food Processors, Stick Blenders, Stand Mixers, Hand Mixers, Juicers, Graters, Grinders, Mincers, Pasta Rollers and Presses, oh yeah and Ice-cream Makers: You get the idea... These things are designed to be versatile and I don't think I'll be able to suggest recipes that push the envelope that haven't already been covered in the decades that we've had them.
• Anything else not covered above: There are of course slicers dicers and Flying Spaghetti Monster knows what else, I'll endeavour to cover all those I've found useful and versatile as well.

For instance, mandolines and V slicers are great for making Julienne strips or fine dice, so are rotary slicers like the ones you see in delis. The old potato chip press has helped me make several sizes and styles of cubed vegetables, a potato ricer can, as it turns out, also squish over-cooked pasta or rice for thickening soups and stews. I'll get to these in future posts. Juicing vegetables and then putting both the juice and pressings into soups and stews produces incredibly flavourful meals. 

If you want me to research air fryers and steam ovens etc you could help me acquire them by scrolling to the footer and using my groovy graphic to make a donation or regular donation, and while you're there subscribe to my newsletter via the News Stand link. Also by sharing this article and others like it so I get a bit more of an audience and perhaps a new patron or donation... 

For the moment - and to start the whole topic off - I'll put a few uses for pressure cookers that aren't totally according to "the rules" but still worth remembering. Pressure cookers are great at turning dried beans into cooked beans / meals or semi-cooked for use in other dishes. They're excellent for turning a tough cut into fork-pulled roast. I've used ours to extract bone broth for future soups, to cook vegetables soft enough to blitz and then add to soups and stews. 

A Quick Disclaimer and Claimer(???)

If all you want are quick meals then I'll probably disappoint. I mean, I make my meal preps and cooking times as quick as possible using all these appliances, but my main aim is to extract every bit of value from the ingredients I buy, and make the meals as flavourful and tasty as I possible can. My wife calls me The Grand Poobah Of Soups / Stews / pretty much any meals I cook because of my focus on making the food good, nutritious, and so tasty that not a scrap is left after the meal. 

And these days that's becoming more important again. Because food waste is quite often to a meal not being enjoyed and so thrown out, or "oh, I can't cook those coriander roots / spring onion roots in this meal!" when the truth is that those are "food waste" not "crap waste" and deserve a better fate than being dropped into the compost bag. Are you throwing out the prawn ("shrimp") shells and heads when you make that specialty garlic prawns main dish? Why? Put them on a baking tray in a hot oven for ten - twenty minutes, throw them in a pot with a pinch of salt and simmer for ten - twenty more minutes, then strain the broth and concentrate it, freeze it for the next seafood dish that you want to mega-boost the flavour of. 

We never get a ready-roasted chicken but that the bones aren't immediately PC'ed for bone broth or stock. Ditto if I bone out a roast, or chops for the medallions. Ends of carrots / celery / onions / what-have-you? I sometimes gather those things in a silicone freezer bag and when I have enough, use the PC to pressure cook the he-l out of them, then concentrate the liquid, turning a few kilos of scrap vegetables into half a glass of frozen vegetable stock concentrate. Saves so much space in the freezer and it can happen in the background while I'm making dinner or whatever.

By using these (mostly) electric cooking gadgets I end up using the gas cooker (that I can't change, being a renter) a lot less and that means less greenhouse gases in the world. Unless the meal is a gassy vegetable meal and then all bets are off! 😼

Anyhow - see you next article or recipe!

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Mushrooms. Gippsland. Mayhem.

This is just a fairly short post. I'm using a fairly topical and still under investigation because many people still want to know about what occurred here, but my lesson is VERY tangential to that, it's more of a question really - about us being very deliberately separated from our food knowledge.

Okay - the story here is that four people (possibly five) were struck down with food poisoning, three passed away from the effects of the toxin, one is in a stable but still quite acute condition, and the 5th may be the suspect. This revolves around a media circus, a bunch of sometimes contradictory statements, a lot of supposition, and a handful of facts. You read it, be the judge. I say it's just not able to be decided on the few things that have been revealed. 

UPDATE: 11 Sept 2023: One thing more to support my position that we've been dumbed down with reagrd to our food knowledge: A month or more after the events that prompted me to think about our relationship to food, mushroom sales are still down. (Also, sorry the article may have appeared disorganised before this update - in fact that was caused by me clicking the update button, without realising, before I'd re-assembled the article in its updated form.)

Why Is This A Subject?

How many of you reading this are competent at mushroom foraging? I consider myself a bit of a forager but not with mushrooms. You can eat any mushroom once, not quite so many twice. You can make a mis-identification and realise it after consuming them - and by then it's too late as the toxins in the wrong mushroom start destroying your organs, all you can do is pray you can live without your liver and kidneys and half a stomach or whatever. They are unforgiving. 

So?

Well, I was born in Europe at the edge of Alps country, but all of that area for thousands of kilometres around has abundant crops of mushrooms to be had. And many of my family there lived on the land and identifying the right and wrong types was almost second nature to them. Had I stayed out on the farm, I'd have absorbed the knowledge of that imperceptibly, and now know the hundreds of species of mushrooms from Belgium to Sicily to France and back that are edible and more importantly, the ones that are not... 

How many types of mushrooms are there in my local supermarket? Swiss Browns, White mushrooms, button mushrooms. If I went to herbs and spices and weird stuff section of that cooler, I might find styrofoam trays of Oyster, Shitake, Enoki, Pins, and maybe Straw mushrooms. There are quite literally thousands of others and many of them grow wherever you are. But unless someone shows you which ones are edible (and more importantly, shows you all the local ones NEVER to try) or you have an endless supply of test subjects and can wait for a fortnight for any to show ill effects, you won't know.

The Point - 

is that my folks back there would have known all that and passed it on to me. Someone in the past may have paid the ultimate price for identifying the wrong ones, but that lesson was passed down through generations so as not to cause more deaths. It's one of the reasons we have traditions, teachings, and recipes. 

I've just grabbed a stock photo thumbnail from a random image search, but you get the idea - for each species there, there are sub-species that are also okay, sub-species that are decidedly not, and a lot of other species that look similar but aren't. 

There are only two or three types there and they're likely to be non-toxic.

 And how's that working out for the supermarkets? Just lovely, thank you. They have customers that wouldn't know an edible fungus from a hole in the ground so if they want safe mushrooms they have to buy them at the supermarket. Or they can go pick 30 edible ones and one look-alike, and then everyone will avoid free mushrooms like the plague. 

There's a (very short) link to an article here before, the linked article is about food misinformation, long story short, things like kids thinking hot dogs and bacon and cheese are vegetables, popcorn is animal-based. 

I also collect stories like the mother chiding her child's teachers for teaching that fish come from the sea because "everyone knows they come from the supermarket." Or the person berating a person online, who admitted to being a hunter, and the naive person told them off well and good telling them to stop going out and "killing animals, just get your meat at the supermarket where it's just there on styrofoam trays." 

Have you heard that bacon isn't a meat but a garnish? I have. That cheese is vegan? I have. Follow me for more true facts like that . . . 

And the supermarkets continue to try to foster food ignorance - from things like replacing "HFCS" with "sweetener" and similar tactics. Food companies will also commit quite deliberate and bare-faced fraud. Don't let labels with great claims ("they wouldn't lie about it being organic, would they?") fool you, either.

What Does That Even Mean?

I present a well-known chilli pepper sauce with another meaningless term. "Aged for up to 3 years"

That can mean it was sold 3 weeks after being made. It's either aged for three years or it isn't. "Up to" is meaningless drivel, providing no assurance of any kind. And when you look at the ingredients you see that it's distilled vinegar and salt and chilli peppers. That doesn't generally tend to ferment any further as the acid and salt will inhibit fermentation bacteria. 

The original sauce actually was fermented for a certain period of time, but the acid content was provided by lactic acid which is produced when you add just the right amount of salt to a vegetable to favour the growth of a lactobacillus bacteria. It's how sauerkraut and kimchi are made, and also properly fermented gherkin and other vegetable pickles. 

So this is just an attempt to cash in on the mystique of the original product. Ah well... 

On the subject of total drivel is another pet peeve of mine:- "New And Improved!"

Ah... No... No, it isn't. It's either new, in which case it can't have been improved upon, or it's an existing product that's been improved. I know it's technical hair-splitting but it points out the exact kinds of bullshit food corporations get away with. Because we let them off the hook. 

KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

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