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What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Rice!
I got a rice cooker recently and it's amazing. I wish I'd bought one twenty years ago. I'm by no means a bad cook and I can (and do) cook pretty good rice without a rice cooker. But a rice cooker just does it perfectly every single time. Not good rice, perfect rice. Soft and fluffy and flavourful and perfectly distinct grains.
So I bought a few bags of good quality rice and we've been eating lots of it. "Rice with stuff" is now a staple meal in our house. Rice with eggs. Rice with meatballs. Rice with beans. Rice with whatever is in the fridge or freezer. Basmatic rice, wild rice, sushi rice, brown rice, all the sorts of rice.
Rice. If you like rice I urge you to get a rice cooker. You (probably) won't regret it. I'm usually not pro single-use kitchen gadgets but the rice cooker is joining the waffle maker and ice-cream maker as one of the good ones.
I've had the same rice maker for over 20 years - nearly half my life - so they're also a pretty good investment if you get the right one. They tend to be simple and easy to care for, and because they have only one use, they do that well.
For some reason, my wife doesn't like using the rice maker - she thinks it is more complicated than doing rice on the stove because you have to wash the rice. I explained that she should be washing the rice either way, but... well, there's a reason I cook 90% of our meals.
My one isn't a pressure cooker. I've never really got on with pressure cookers personally, but I know lots of people get great results with them.
The rice cooker does have a slow cooker mode and, from what I can looking at the electricity meter, uses less power than slow cooking in my oven.
My wife likes to use the timer on the rice cooker to have hot rice porridge ready for her breakfast in the morning.
I made spaghetti all'assassina, which is super simple and great. I didn't follow a recipe, but this one is probably fine... just do what you normally do for a sauce.
I'm doing a Wim Hof breathworking course at the moment and last night the girlfriend of the instructor had made this incredible creamy hokkaido soup with potatoes, carrots and a bit of chili in the mix. But the kicker was chopped up apples soaked in honey and roasted sunflower seeds as topping. Wasn't expecting that combination to work so well but it really did. When I got home my wife asked me straight up if it was better than hers...and I think I waited to long to answer that question.
Question for Tildes: what unusual or old fashioned candy would you recommend?
One of my kids has an insatiable sweet tooth, and rather than just grumbling about it I would at least like to encourage her to eat interesting candy. She has tried and enjoyed some “old timey” candy like horehound. What else would you recommend? Bonus points if the candy can be made at home.
Are you specifically looking for candy recipes, or will any dessert do? Candy can be a bit harder to make at home, but if the latter:
Have you ever had a Nanaimo bar? They're a bit divisive, due to having coconut in them. But they're a Canadian staple, and I personally love them. Butter tarts are another Canadian classic worth trying too.
As for proper "candy", the only kinds I have ever made myself at home are various fudges, brittles, and barks. But given that Christmas is coming up, candy cane bark might be a fun one for you and your kids to make together. Peanut brittle is my absolute personal favorite though, and relatively easy to make so long as you have a good thermometer, and you're careful not to burn yourself.
Depending on the age, rock candy could be a bit of kitchen science. Not as cool as estimating the speed of light by melting cheese, but I don't know of any sweet cheese or cheese tooths.
Making kettle corn into caramel corn is another seasonal classic to go with cfab's. Candied orange peels are a lot more trouble than they're worth, but they fit the interesting category.
Cinder toffee is makable at home. Turkish delight is doable, but can be a bit messy. Coltsfoot rock has a secret recipe, and I have no idea if coltsfoot extract is available, but you can make fruit versions using "candy cigarette" recipes. Here's an ebay link to the fruit product: https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/1454581197?iid=223917807108&var=522659577972
In the UK we have "Winter warmers" which are hard boiled sweets / hard crack candy flavoured with things like cinnamon (quite gentle) or clove.
Big caveats around safety. Obviously hot sugar is a burns nightmare, and you can very quickly cause huge amounts of damage. But the oils too. Making boiled sweets is in theory really easy - you just heat water and sugar to the right temperature, add your oils and a bit of citric acid, then cool it down correctly.
I tried once to make Winter Warmers. I heated the sugar and water, and I dropped in some spearmint oil. There was a gentle diffusion of steam, but it was okay. And I poured the mix onto a marble chopping board and moved it around with a palette knife to cool it down. And it mostly worked - I hadn't nailed it, but certainly a good start. So I cleaned everything down and started again, this time with peppermint. Again, there was a gentle diffusion of peppermint in the air, but it was fine, and I started thinking that I could with a bit of practice get good at this, and maybe I needed to think about a commercial set up and this could be a little line of product that I could make and sell. So, I clean everything down and start again. And this time - drop drop drop - I add clove oil. And BAMN it's like being hit in the face with a clove oil airbag. Like I got karate chopped to the throat. There's no gentle diffusion, it's an explosion of vaporised oil. My eyes clamped shut and I'm standing there thinking "welp, maybe I just made myself permanently blind". And I notice that my body expelled all air and it's refusing to breathe again because I'm in a cloud of what's probably chemical weapon grade fumes. I sink to my knees, hoping and preying that my cooking isn't so bad it literally kills me. I'm lying on the floor now, getting tiny gulps of dusty air. I make my way over to the (luckily open) window and hold my head outside trying to get a bit of fresh air. I'm wondering whether I need to call an ambo or not - or whether it's even safe to do so? Maybe I need firefighters in full breathing apparatus? Of course, the toxic cloud has mostly gone by now. And that's the story of how I only have one lung. No no, I still have both lungs! But that apartment smelled like Christmas for about 3 years, so ups and downs.
Don't let any of this put you off doing it though! Just be super cautious about adding oils to boiling sugar.
Clove oil can be incredibly incredibly potent and potentially very dangerous stuff depending on its concentration, but is also a godsend if you have a tooth ache. The key to using it in any application other than aromatherapy is to dilute it first with a carrier oil though. And most high concentration bottles should have instructions telling you to do exactly that, and also warning you to keep it away from flames and high heat (due to vaporization like you experienced). E.g. The back of my bottle looks like this. Did your bottle not come with any such instructions or warnings?
Gummy candy! There are plenty of recipes out there, so I won't get into specifics of what might be healthy and appropriate for your kid. But it's fun to make, adaptable to the point that it's hard to get bored, and you can experiment extensively with cheap ingredients. It's relatively hazard-free compared to hot sugar syrups. (I'm making my own high CBD/low THC doses, and still playing with consistency and flavors...)
Honeycomb is always fun to make at home. Depends a little on how old the kid is as to how involved they can be in making it because molten foaming sugar isn't the friendliest thing in the world.
Marshmallows are pretty fun to make. If you want to go old school, why not Turkish Delight?
If you want to busy the kid in the kitchen for hours, comfits take forever (but are extremely delicious). It is possible to engineer a powered solution to making these if you have access to a power drill and a large-ish tin and a few other things.