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[Iduno]

I've been experimenting with tuna mixes (as in, canned tuna + mayo) lately, and found that cinnamon actually complements the flavors quite well and helps round out the taste while cutting down a bit on any remaining fishy notes. I was inspired to try and do something with this, so I decided to make a pasta salad with tuna. Grabbed some lettuce, baby spinach, spring onions, cherry tomatoes and a bit of lemon juice to go along, plus a tiny drizzle of olive oil (along with the tuna mix itself, consisting of tuna, mayo, bit of mustard, black pepper and of course cinnamon).

It's... Alright. I just feel like I put a lot of ingredients and effort into this mix for it to all end up turning out fairly... I'unno, uninspired? The cherry tomatoes are kinda the best part of the whole thing, and I don't really even like tomatoes.

If your goal is to get rid of the fishy taste, try canned chicken.

From what I remember of tuna-noodle mixtures, part of the problem with the lack of flavor is the ingredients. It's fairly bland fish, with noodles (texture, but no flavor), mayonnaise (which is mayonnaise), and often bland vegetables. It's like it was designed to have no flavor.

Back in college (when I was eating for price more than quality of ingredients), I did pretty okay with a tuna (in oil) stir-fry as a way to use cans of the less-preferred tuna in oil. Just add the tuna last so it heats up but doesn't get too fragrant/burned. You could do something similar with the wilted spinach salad you're talking about, and just dump the noodles and mayo. Up the lemon and oil slightly if you want to serve it over something (like the noodles or rice).

The tuna salad is farily basic in its flavor profile for the most part, I fear adding too much random stuff is gonna lead to a mess. Have you tried a red sauce variant? Basically a mix of onion, carrot, pepper and tomato with canned tuna added near the end, and if you want some more stuff in there, canned corn or beans works pretty good with it as well. Goes great with any sort of pasta and makes for a pretty good summer lunch since it's tasty both warm and cold and is fairly light and quick to whip up.

Peas are also a good vegetable to add some texture to this, but tomato instead of mayo is a good way to improve it. It should take the onion and pepper flavors nicely. I would say the tomato will overpower the taste of the tuna, but that also sounds like part of Kagus' goal.

[nenjin]

My next culinary adventure will beeeeeeee.......homemade Beef Jerky!

I don't have a dehydrator but this recipe makes doing it in the oven look pretty damn simple.

I've wanted to do this for a while but the biggest stumbling block was needing to cut several pounds of meat in to jerky thin strips so they'd dehydrate properly. But the video above was just like "ask your butcher to do it" and I feels stupid that that never occurred to me before. (To be honest I've never had cause to speak to a butcher or a grocery store meat department until now.)

Once you take the cutting out of the equation, it's literally "take 3 minutes to make the marinade, marinate the meat for 3 to 24 hours, have a cookie sheet and a rack, apply and let cook for many hours, enjoy jerky." Doesn't get much simpler than that.

[nenjin]

(Lotta detail in the full size picture)

[nenjin]

The Jerking is complete.





Thoughts:

-Overcooked the first batch I believe, at 3.5 hours. It's still edible, but doesn't bend without breaking and some of the edges might charitably be described as crispy. I guess I expected it to be softer somehow.

-The thickness of the cut has a lot do with it I think. I had them go thinner than an 1/8th of an inch and that has a big impact on how much wiggle room you have on cook times. If it's thicker it has to cook longer but it probably stays more pliable. Thinner and the line between not cooked and overcooked is much smaller. My oven might also had something to do with it.

-It absolutely needs to sit in an air tight container for a few hours after cooking. Eating some 10 minutes after cooling out of the oven, it was very dry and brittle and I was kinda like "oh god what have I done." After a few hours in a ziploc, it did get softer and more pliable and definitely tasted like and had the texture of jerky.

-Doing it in the oven, you have to contend with one issue: fat. Even with the leanest cut of meat I could get, after a few hours the fat pockets in the meat liquefied and sat in little pools and crevasses of the meat, giving it a greasy, shiny appearance. Because the fat doesn't actually go anywhere, that means it's still there and in a few weeks will probably go rancid. So this isn't the kind of jerky that will keep for weeks and weeks and weeks in an air tight container. Not sure how you're supposed to deal with that, other than trying to cut all the fat out of the meat before cooking which seems like wasted effort. I guess that's just one inescapable side effect of using an oven vs. a dehydrator. Maybe hanging the meat in the oven as opposed to letting it lay flat would help some of that fat run off the meat during the cooking process.

-Flavor is good. One marinated for about 9 hours, the other about 12 and I don't see much difference between them. Wondering what a 24 hour marinade would be like, but based on this, it seems like it would be a bit much.

A fun experiment and I'm keen to try it again sometime. This was about $16 worth of meat. Compared to what you get out of a ~$8 bag of jerky at the grocery store this is way, way more affordable.

[Iduno]

-Doing it in the oven, you have to contend with one issue: fat. Even with the leanest cut of meat I could get, after a few hours the fat pockets in the meat liquefied and sat in little pools and crevasses of the meat, giving it a greasy, shiny appearance. Because the fat doesn't actually go anywhere, that means it's still there and in a few weeks will probably go rancid. So this isn't the kind of jerky that will keep for weeks and weeks and weeks in an air tight container. Not sure how you're supposed to deal with that, other than trying to cut all the fat out of the meat before cooking which seems like wasted effort. I guess that's just one inescapable side effect of using an oven vs. a dehydrator. Maybe hanging the meat in the oven as opposed to letting it lay flat would help some of that fat run off the meat during the cooking process.

Turn it over halfway through? Probably so the front-top becomes the back-rear so it cooks evenly.

[nenjin]

Maybe. Although I don't feel like the backside of each piece was any less greasy. The fat takes on a tacky quality when it's been heated for that long. Right now my plan is to just dab dry the fat off during the cooking process, which I didn't do previously except after it came out of the oven.

People seemed to enjoy it though. Was called "edible" on multiple occasions

[Telgin]

I tried to make mushroom risotto for the first time tonight but didn't get it quite right.  I based it on a slow cooker recipe, so it was already pretty different from the traditional method, but it didn't get as creamy as it was supposed to.  It barely got creamy at all, for that matter.

If I make it again I'll probably try the traditional way instead, and also try using arborio rice like most recipes recommend.  All I had on hand was some parboiled rice of some kind and I'm guessing it just doesn't release the starch like the recipe needs.

The flavor wasn't bad, at least.

[Yoink]

Hoo boy. Since my household apparently ran out of sriracha in my absence, I borrowed some of this "hot chilli sauce" I found in the fridge (don't worry, my housemates are away) for the quick meal of pasta+beans+spinach I was cooking - I haven't any official pasta sauce, hence why I was using this stuff (mixed with some sweet chilli and tomato sauce) in the first place.

I chucked a bit in there, stirred, and damn! The stuff singed my fuckin' eyebrows off.
Not sure how brutal this "midnight snack" is gonna end up being, haha.

[ggamer]

@nenjin ur very brave to try jerky, not a lot of people would go through that much effort for, objectively, the worst way to eat meat 

[nenjin]

@nenjin ur very brave to try jerky, not a lot of people would go through that much effort for, objectively, the worst way to eat meat 

Is it the worst way to eat meat?

It's fast.

It's flavorful.

It's healthy.

It lasts.

How about this: If I buy and make a steak and eat it, that's my meat for the day. I'm not gonna be like "hey I want more meat, I guess I'll make ANOTHER steak." With Jerky, there's always meat around, ready to supplement other meat. Have meat for dinner, and have some more meat for a night snack.

And I dunno. I grew up hiking and eating jerky and there is almost nothing sweeter on the trail than ready to eat protein.

I mean, I'd rather eat Jerky than boiled meat, which to me IS the worst way to eat meat. Flavorless, fatless grey meat versus super condensed, flavor-packed jerky.

[ggamer]

Boiled meat is arguably not food

[Mephisto]

As the weirdo who boiled two cornish game hens on a lark just to say he did it, they're tasty if seasoned properly.

[Trekkin]

As the weirdo who boiled two cornish game hens on a lark just to say he did it, they're tasty if seasoned properly.

Did you boil them in water, though, or in stock? The latter is much more common; it's the basis for a lot of slow-cooked soup recipes, for example, Linsensuppe being the first I can recall.

[Mephisto]

Did you boil them in water, though, or in stock? The latter is much more common; it's the basis for a lot of slow-cooked soup recipes, for example, Linsensuppe being the first I can recall.

Stock and wine. Topped off with a bit of water.

[itisnotlogical]

My wife turned me on to having a meal replacement shake blended with frozen fruit instead of a full breakfast. One shake, one banana and a cup of frozen berries is 200-400 less calories than a typical (for me) breakfast, but somehow just as filling. It must be a placebo, right? Either way, they're damn good. Only downside is the protein/meal replacement/breakfast whatever is pretty expensive.