I consider both industrial meat production and veganism to be sub-optimal across all dimensions. I've recently jumped into this growing niche market for more sustainable and ethical meat. It's a little more pricey, unless you buy in bulk (e.g. 1/4 to full cow at a time), but I think it's worth it in the end.

I'm looking to share sources of info and network of producers/farms in this regard. Allan Savory has the Savory Institute which I found to be a good start. Though FYI there have been back-and-forth essays written about the criticism and defense of these practices (too many to post here but easy to find in the two above links).

I found one local family-operated farm that practices e.g. "organic" (in this case no herb/pest/fungi-cide) farming (crops for the animals), legitimate free-roaming chickens and sustainable land management that allows soil and ecology equilibration (reducing fertilizer use and subsequent runoff). Plus, buying and directly supporting local farmers and ranchers is always a plus!

EDIT: I foresee this thread being hijacked towards a discussion about how "meat is bad" and how we eat too much meat etc. I am being narrow here because I want to be pragmatic, rather than opine on global economics and dietary needs.

I've been making an effort to eat healthier but sometimes putting in the effort is hard--especially when tough life situations arise.

What are some foods and recipes I can have on hand that are dead simple yet nutritious?

Below are some guidelines of what I'm looking for. I'm open to any ideas, but the main feature is that it has to be EASY:

• No prep or very low prep
  • If prep is needed, can be made in a large batch and stored as individual servings
• Few ingredients
• Prepackaged foods are an option (so if there's a great protein bar out there or something I'm totally open to it)
• Instant pot is a cooking option (so if you've got any good pressure cooker dump recipes, let me have them!)

Any recommendations?

Lately I've been trying to be better about cooking a decent breakfast for myself every morning instead of grabbing sugary stuff at a coffee shop, blowing money for something fancier, or wolfing down a breakfast bar.

I'm also trying to be a boring adult and limit my sugar intake, avoid gluten on account I'm apparently at risk for celiac disease, and would like to try and be vegan whenever possible.... couple this with me being incredibly lazy and us not having a dishwasher in our apartment, and I've got what feels like very few options.

For the past two months, every weekday I've been crumbling firm tofu over a heated pan set to medium, throwing in some paprika, turmeric, salt, garlic & onion powder, nutritional yeast, stirring that up a bit for five minutes, and then ripping up a cup of pre-packaged kale/spinach leaves over it before taking it off the heat and tossing in a tablespoon of oat milk. I'll then eat half and leave the other for my wife.

It's been OK, but I'm trying to look into other options just to add some variety, and was curious if someone else has found something that works for them that I might be able to piggyback off of for inspiration.

we need more casual questions in here (there are 4 topics specifically tagged casual on the first page rn), so let me cast the first stone to that lot. bonus style points if you link to what the food is if it's country specific/kinda esoteric/something most people wouldn't know

So, I was looking for soy sauce the other day and my grocery store has created a whole new "ethnic" section. This section was near the entrance so I went there first to look for the soy sauce. It wasn't there. It was with the other condiments like BBQ sauce. Cool. Then I wanted oyster sauce and that wasn't near the soy and BBQ sauce, but back in the ethnic section...

So just wondering, where do you expect to find this sort of thing - ethnic and ethnic that's considered mainstream? (I also found tea in like five different places...)

Cooking is a hobby of mine, and as a result I really enjoy watching food related YouTube channels. Some of the ones I like are

• Alex French Guy Cooking - A fun channel of a creative french amateur cook. I like this channel because I have similar taste in food to him (check out his instant ramen series!), but his solutions to problems in the kitchen are seriously creative. To give an example, he builds a dough sheeter in his croissant series in order to get the perfect thickness of dough, and he makes a makeshift dehydrator in the ramen series. Stuff I would never do in the kitchen, but it's fun to watch.

• Bon Appetit - I totally did not expect Bon Appetit to have such a well put together web presence (for some reason I considered them an old fashioned publication). In any case, check out the "It's Alive with Brad" series. It starts out as a series about all things related to fermentation (beer, hot sauce, kombucha, sourdough, etc), but expands a bit in scope.

• Binging with Babish - Perhaps the most well known of recent food related YouTubers, Babish recreates meals from movies and TV. He also has a nice series on cooking tutorials. I don't watch him as much as I used to, but he's still a lot of fun.

• Townsends - A bit different than the rest, and not exlusively food related. Townsends is a historical enthusiast focusing on the colonial era, and he has a lot of videos recreating recipes and techniques from the time period.

EDIT:

Forgot to include

• Jun's Kitchen - Some seriously therapeutic cooking videos featuring sushi and cats.

I'll start: Hessian 'Tater soup. Maybe not very exciting, but I just love the stuff.

Start off with a diced onion and about 1 - 1.5 kg of peeled, sliced potatoes. Throw into a big pot on high heat with some oil and let it develop some color. Meanwhile, get peeling and chopping on this stuff - carrots, celery root, leek, parsley, parsley root. Amounts as desired, but I like to use a lot of parsley - root or leafs. If your taters get enough color, cover with water and add the rest of the veggies. All that in place, cook until soft. Blend. Add 200ml of sour cream and season with nutmeg, pepper and salt. Consistency should be thick, maybe slightly chunky.

When serving, fry up a few slices of old sausage to throw in there. This one is a traditional north hessian sausage, but any only lightly spiced and smoked, coarse ground, fatty hard sausage will do. Add a sprig of parsley if you feel like upping the presentation.

For me, it has to be ramen. It's so easy, yet so filling, and so tasty, and has practically infinite variations, so it can hardly get old! It can be done for one or more persons, and it replaces an entire meal: having noodles as replacement for bread, meat, vegetables, and broth to drink afterwards. Just an all-around great thing. My family certainly loved it.

I just had an "Impossible" burger here in Vegas. I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't meat.

I'm not vegan or Vegetarian, but I eat it from time to time.

Any other good recommendations out there for good meat substitutes?

Does anyone have any good recipes for bread?

My wife and I have been doing a lot of baking lately and I absolutely love making bread. It's easy (most of the work is sitting around waiting for it to rise/proof) and we've been making fresh sandwich bread to use in our lunches for the past few months.

I've found two recipes that I really like:

• BA's Best Sandwich Bread
• Simple Country Load

I'm making an effort to cut out meat from my diet and I'd love to hear what everyone's favourite vegetarian meals are.

For a long time I have been making pasta with ground beef and I recently found out that I can just not put the beef in and it tastes even better. The tomato sauce really gets a chance to shine without the beef.

For my daily tea-drinkers: What are you drinking today? Where'd you get it? How would you rate it?

For my non-tea drinkers: Feel free to ask any questions you might have about the most widely consumed beverage in the world (next to water). Share a time you had a good experience or a bad experience.

In mid-2012 I decided to become a vegetarian, both for health and ethical reasons. Before then I had mostly been on autopilot when it came to food - I just ate what what was the norm in my family. My choice forced me to get out of my comfort zone, to try out new foods I had never considered before. For this reason, the change has been incredibly positive to me; I'm much more conscious of what I eat now. And by setting a precedent it later helped me make more changes, like cutting down sugar. I'm currently testing to see if the bloating and stomach aches I suffer daily are because I am lactose intolerant; if it is indeed the case, that will require another drastic change, although this particular one will be by necessity rather than choice.

What is the biggest change you've ever made to your diet? Was it by choice, or did you feel obligated to do so, for example because of health issues? What did you get out of it? How much thought do you put in your daily diet, in general?

I'm fairly happy with mine, it's simple and tastes good, but I'm hardly a chef so I'm sure it can be improved. Bonus points if its simple enough to do when you're tired as hell and just want a nice drink.

Mine:

Start heating milk on low heat, then slowly add sugar and cocoa powder while mixing, 1 tbs each per 4oz of milk. I find this pushes the saturation limit of the milk a bit too close, so I add some more in to make sure everything dissolves. Add in some cinnamon, along with a pinch of nutmeg and salt. Once hot splash in a bit of cool cream and serve.

hey all!

i see these kinds of posts in ~music where people talk all about what they're listening to that week, what they checked out for the first time, what they really enjoyed or hated. i thought it'd be cool to do a food version!

did you try a new recipe this week? how was it?

eat at a cool new restaurant?

try a new dish that you absolutely loved / hated?

grab a plate and dive on in!

For me, its Eggs Benedict.

Perfectly hand poached eggs, fresh scratch made hollandaise, fresh baked english muffins, ham steak (maybe add some spinach to make a Benedict/Florentine hybrid) served with potatoes O'Brien and an espresso. mmmm.....

Just wondering if people here like whisky/ey. I recently discovered that I actually enjoy Irish whiskey more than scotch even. What are your favorites? Do you like all kinds or just a kind in particular? Favorite brands there? Any particular whisky you've tried that is not common and you'd like to recommend? Microdistilleries that you really like?

For me, its a bowl of cereal, usually grape nuts or cheerios. Sometimes with blueberries. Quick and easy.

Also, weird fact;

I put table cream or half and half in my cereal. My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm on PEI and when they were kids the best cream was always used by her family for cereal or tea. Well, she had 6 kids, who then had 13 more and all of us use cream like weirdos (and drink lots of tea). And no, we are not all obese because of it, everything in moderation. =)

^ I may or may not be eating grape nuts and cream right now.

Is there a "theory of cooking"? I'm interested in learning to cook (but could not spend much time learning it unfortunately), but I don't like the general ad-hoc and very subjective nature of recipes. Also, information is very disorganised, it's dispersed in many resources, most hardly accessible. I always thought that there should be a general set of theories when preparing food, like what sort of ingredient does what, how things react when mixed together at different times, and what processes like heating, freezing or kneading do to food. Indeed generally it's possible to find detailed and nearly objective information, sometimes even physical and/or chemical explanations to certain stuff, but then it's always ad-hoc, i.e. related to the particular food item or recipe I'm looking for. I've been searching for a resource that aims to be a comprehensive and scientific (as much as possible) intro to cooking that gives the sort of culinary theory I want, but I've been unable to find such a thing so far. Does anybody here know of such a resource?

Some questions to get us started:

• Do you drink water? Does it taste like anything?
• Coffee or tea? What kind? Do you put milk in it?
• Do you drink the alcoholic beverages? What's your drink of choice?
• Do you drink the carbonated beverages? What's your fizzy drink of choice?
• Do you drink the fruits or the veggie or the smoothie? How you drink it?
• Do you make a Drinky McDrinky Drink, what is it, how do you make it so I can drink it?
• Does the word drink sound funny now?

As the title says, I am looking for your go-to recipes for when you are not in the mood to cook. They should be fast and simple to make and be preferably not too expensive.

Let me start this: Tortelloni with tarragon-cream-sauce (3-6€/2servings, depending on the tortelloni)
*500g Tortelloni, 250ml (sweet) cream, 2 tomatos, tarragon/salt/pepper;

1. Water with salt in one pot, cream with tarragon and 4 short splashes of water in another;
2. Cut the tomatos into pieces and add the to the cream when it boils slightly
3. When the tomatos are added, stir the cream (it should get slightly red from the tomato juice
4. add salt and pepper
5. at this point the water should be boiling, add the Tortelloni
   5.1 I usually buy the Tortelloni from the fridge, they only need to be boiled for 2 min, adjust the timing when you heat up the cream according to needed time to boil the pasta
6. When everything is finished put everything together and enjoy

I always look forward to fresh ingredients for substantial salads during the hot months of summer. Unfortunately, my repertoire is wanting. I make the same basic salad every time just changing a few ingredients depending on availability. This consists of greens, sometimes cold penne or other pasta, usually garbanzo beans, sometimes meat of some kind, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, basil or oregano and/or mint and perhaps hard boiled egg, sometimes pickled beets.

Thanks for any suggestions or recipes.

What I mean by "treat yourself" is something which makes you happy, not just something which satisfies an urge. We all get days where we just want to gulp down a nice plate of spaghetti but what meal do you prepare/buy for yourself when you really want to eat something special?

When I have the time, money, and energy, I like cooking proper meals from scratch (as much as is reasonable, anyway). There's one that I like making more than any other, though, and that I've been making for several years now: pizza. There's nothing quite like a pizza made from freshly rolled dough, a good sauce, and cheese shredded by hand (with none of that cellulose getting in the way), and the smell of the yeast from the dough is wonderful. There's still quite a bit I need to learn to make it better, but I've so far gotten to the point of preferring it over anything you'd get from the popular pizza chains, so I'm pretty confident in what I've managed so far!

What about you? Do you have a favorite? What meal do you consider your "specialty"? Is there anything in particular that keeps bringing you back to it?

What's your go-to weekend dish? Whether it's a fried breakfast or eight hour smoked pork shoulder, what do you love to cook on the weekend?

Personally it's split between bacon and egg sandwiches on homemade bread; my chili recipe, loosely based on SeriousEats Best Ever Chili and potato, chorizo, and cabbage hash with a runny egg on top.

I've somewhat recently become vegan and am looking for more recipes to cook. I love pretty much all kinds of food, especially kinds I haven't tried before. If anybody has any great recipes that are vegan, I would love to share.

You probably know the drill, but in case not - you get an unlimited supply of one specific beer to drink when marooned on an island - presumably til death.

I love California blondes. I want to try some others that ~ loves, and thought other folks might like to do the same.

Firestone Walker 805 for me. You?

edit: just to say, oops, not dessert...desert.

I went to the local farmers' market on Saturday and was impressed by both the mushroom guy and the stand selling venison. I've only been able to find venison a few times (don't have any hunter friends), and the times I've made it before, it's gone into chili. So, I bought a pound of stew meat, a half pint of Cinnamon Cap Chestnut mushrooms, and some produce to finish out a stew. I braised it all up last night in some beef broth and red wine. That may have been a mistake, as the venison basically came out tasting like stew beef. Process went a little like this:

• chop up the venison into bite-sized chunks
• brown the venison in a bit of butter
• add more butter and some flour to make roux
• add a splash of red wine and about a carton of beef broth
• add mushrooms, potatoes, garlic
• realize I'm out of onions, so add onion powder
• reduce until gravy-like

All in all, it was tasty (the mushrooms were great!), but the venison was basically very tender, $9 / lb stew beef. Did I treat it wrong by using beef broth, or is that just the way it tastes?

Quite a lot of us will have them. They are pretty damn useful, and make for decent lazy meals.

Apart from stock, here is one of the recipes I really like for the IP.

https://www.justonecookbook.com/pressure-cooker-pork-belly-kakuni/

Japanese pork belly slices. Works brilliantly and stunning flavour. In fact Just One Cookbook is generally a great site, but this was the first of theirs I tried. I make it every time my wife goes away as it's not her thing, but I love it.

Interested in your favourites!

New group, new topics, this is all so exciting. I'm a chef myself and enjoy discussing the business and philosophies of what I do. I'm wondering if other people in the industry have found their way unto Tildes at this point.