I thought I’d split off from the dinner thread and spawn a more general cooking, techniques, tips, and tipple thread.
Northwest Dashi
For things such as miso soup, Dashi is a wonderful vegan stock that has a deep, rich flavor. This is kind of a “what is in your garden or fridge” recipe, and unconventional.
Yesterday I made three entirely different loaves of bread: a plum bread for breakfast, a country boule for the day, and a 7-grain loaf for sandwiches for school lunches.
One of my cheats is to have a dough bucket (plastic with cover and volume markings) always going in the fridge. I can take a hunk out and add other ingredients (including other types of flour) and shape it how I want. Between the final rise and baking it’s about 2 hours to a fresh loaf.
You’ve only got a short window before the kid becomes a toddler and evolution protects them by making them INCREDIBLY PICKY about food then. (So that when they’re finally mobile they don’t start putting everything they can reach in their mouths, poisonous or not…the ones who did that, by definition, didn’t live long enough to reproduce.)
Make what is normal food for you, but hold back on spices, and grind it up to feed the baby little bits so that the flavors become known. There’s a general consensus on order of introduction, but really, you know your kid (and what comes out in their diapers) better than anyone.
I’m not a dad, so take everything I say with a boulder of salt. But there was a cool thing a dad friend of mine did for a long time.
Unsalted vegetable stew in a crock pot with a variety of grains like quinoa. Then us adults would have stew, and he would use something that looked like one of those rocket smoothie blenders to make babbe food. I just thought it was really kind everyone was involved, and it was waaay cheaper.
Of course I doused mine with chili’s, cilantro, and cheese. Babbe will get there some day
My little asks about lots of foods before eating them: “Is not spicy?” She has learned because dad likes a Scoville number that would melt a Nazi’s face. So she’s onto my plot.
She is a cheese-head, descended from cheese-heads. I haven’t tried bleu yet, but we definitely will. Thank you for the suggestion! She, so far, digs the sharpest cheddar, so I think she will probably be up for Maytag. I will report back.
California, Wisconsin, New York and Vermont produce the most interesting cheeses in the US. However, that is not a statement about production, because there are lots of states that produce tons.
Bland, yellow colby “cheddar” is the most common, as well as that processed yellow smooth crap called “American.” Yes, they are cheese, barely, but there are tons more and in many styles here. We don’t all just sit around eating hot dogs and drinking Budweiser.
Nothing wrong with hot dogs, Budwiser on the otherhand… Though I have had it fresh off the factory line same day and it was passable (yay for friends with non drinking parents who work at the brewery). But honestly I think Michelob is the only one from that megabrewery I could regularly drink and I can’t even get that in Seattle.
Yeah, our cheese tradition is not nearly as strong as Frances, bit there are a lot of greats. Fraga and Willamette valley from around here are fantastic. Humbolt Fog is one of the world’s greats. Beecher’s Just Jack from Seattle is stylistically perfect, and makes perhaps the best grilled cheese sammies.
That said in my fridge right now… English cheddar and a gouda I think is from Switzerland.
Oh yeah, like you, I’m no cheese snob, just as I’m no beer snob. Maybe I gave off that impression that I’m super picky choosy and opinionated. I’m not.
What is it called when you aren’t a snob because you’re not going to go, “FIE on your Wensleydale” but you go, “Well, Velveeta is the lowest common denominator of things technically defined as cheese, so I recognize it as cheese. It’s just not very good cheese. I eat everything else.” People who are willing to chop off the lower echelons, but are not going to be an asshole about everything else above that minimum baseline level?
