I don’t know about nobody - I make enough homemade chicken broth with veggies for a week or so and make a single serving of ramen (sans flavor packet) each time so that the noodles are always firm. They’re not the best thing, but they’re cheap enough for my budget and eschewing the awful flavor powder helps them not be nutritionally abysmal.
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Are you secretly a viral marketing agent for Ramen Food Stuffs and Allied Heavy Industries? I love your pitch 
Loved it (other than the metal utensils in Teflon that set my teeth on edge). But her latest chicken recipe is quite the show. Might as well call it salmonella/listeria basted chicken. Granted if it goes right from the freezer to the oven, cooked as long as she recommends, it should be OK. But when she tells the viewers to take it out of the freezer and leave it on the counter before going to work… not with the current state of mass produced chicken, uh un, no motherfuckin’ way. 
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I love her. Very direct person, funny as hell.
I don’t get the people saying “but she doesn’t look poor.” I don’t think she’s claiming she is, but rather probably has been and knows people who are. It’s almost like people want some one who was a convict to live in abject poverty forever. What the hell? Maybe she got her stuff together later in life and got a job, married some one stable, saved money. Maybe her kids and she all pitch in together and pay a mortgage. Maybe she always had money and just spent some time on drugs… maybe a million things. It seems like people would be happy about her having a nice looking home. Like, wow, there is a person who has overcome a lot!
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…agreed. Besides, if she takes it out of the freezer the evening before and puts it into the fridge, it’ll keep the fridge cold - for free! (actually, it’ll save her money) - and help keep her from getting her guests sick.
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My job (EMS) has made me a bit of a germiphobe, but in a more realistic way. Wash your hands when needed, don’t cross-contaminate, etc. But buying a sous vide circulator caused me to read a couple books on its use… DAMN I didn’t need that much information on botulin, listeria, salmonella, and the “danger zone” of 4.4C - 60C. Le sigh.
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Oh, fucking hell, melodrama. Yeah, ramen with seasoning packets isn’t good for you, and neither is Pilsbury, but we live in a country where there are people who don’t cook and go spend their money at a restaurant all the time because they claim they don’t have time to cook and/or refuse to cook for various reasons.
Not everyone has access to a well-stocked grocery store and/or farmer’s markets, you know. I live in an area where the grocery stores are…meh, better than many, but meh…but even though it’s a poor area it feels like a privilege to have space to grow things like sweet corn. Not everybody has the option of taking corn right off the stalk, or buying it from the back of somebody’s pickup, or getting it out of the cooler of a “serve yourself” stand on a country road. And grilling it on a charcoal grill…yum, the sugar carmelizes on an open fire.
Anyway, again, not everyone has this open to them; and honestly, there’s something different about cooking a meal, vs. just getting it out of a bag.
If anyone’s ever traveled in the Southeast, you’ll probably notice that most restaurants and hotels serve biscuits and gravy. I see people from other areas look down their noses about it. Nowadays it’s a way for people like me to further get fat and further harden their arteries, but during the Depression it was a way to find a use of the fat left over from sausage, fried chicken, bacon grease, and so on. All gravy is, for the people who are scared of it, is a white sauce made using grease instead of butter and maybe some extra salt and pepper. That’s it, really. Put it over some buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes, toast, or whatever, and you’ve got the energy for a few hours of work.
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How many people can you feed for $3.35 at McDonald’s? This is about people who have very limited money. You have to start somewhere to get a leg up.
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That’s a nice and inexpensive Farberware Restaurant Pro skillet (if you don’t use a metal spatula).
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Yep. I don’t have a problem with her videos. They’re cute. They’re frugal. They get the job done. Imagine if you had a really large family to feed… would ya spend all day every day in the kitchen making fancy sauces and stuff? No, you’d be too tired. Her way of cooking gets food on the plate. It’s not fancy. A lot of it’s pre-processed and not even really that healthy… all that salt and fat. But she accomplishes a lot in a short time.
I also like some of the subtleties to her methods:
•Mixing flavor into a bag of frozen chicken wings IN THE SINK. Easy cleanup.
•Breaking the ramen into bits inside its own bags.
•Browning the ramen to give it more flavor than it would have had.
•Causing the ramen to make its own sauce in the pan by carefully using the right amount of water.
•Showing two ways to make the chicken wings: self-gravifying and not, by sprinkling with flour, or not.
•Appreciating herbs and spices for what they are: sometimes color alone, sometimes flavor, sometimes both.
•Distilling a cooking process down to its bare, no-frills essentials.
There are more, and even though I don’t cook like she does, I can see the value in it. I’m glad she’s putting these vids out. Plus they’re fuckin’ funny.
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PRIMUS SUCKS!
Look, the reality of some people’s lives is that they can’t, for whatever reason, eat to ideal standards. Get over it please.
I can’t eat most of what she cooks because I have autoimmune disease and can’t eat gluten/wheat/most anything with grains (I do sometimes anyway, but I pay the price and my Dr would shake his head at me). However, the truth is people like this make me feel less alone and less ashamed because I don’t have time or energy to cook much for myself, and find it a pointless nuisance… so quick and easy food is better than nothing, right?
Now I deal with it all by eating mostly raw smoothies, yogurt, and nuts. Then again I can afford those things, live in a city with TONS of food options, and only need to feed myself (well and my cat, but I don’t think I want to eat his food).
She shows creative ways to make the best of a limited set of options.
I like this chicken recipe actually because with the right seasoning it doesn’t need any flour.
Now I don’t even freeze chicken because I buy what I’m going to cook that day if I buy meat at all (I don’t like handling raw meat at all, actually).
No one ever said you have to handle it the way she does. I wouldn’t put it directly in my sink either.
At the same time, I’ve had acute food poisoning about three times that I know of, twice from freaking salad in a restaurant and once from a garden party where some one showed up with a stomach virus (omg if you are that sick please stay home). It sucks, but there are worse things in life.
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I have an even simpler improvement to her chicken-in-the-sink method. Do it all in the bag. Just open the chicken and leave it in its own bag. Run some cold water in there to break it up and get it wet. Then, strategically holding the top mostly closed with your hands, dump out all the water, keeping the chicken in the bag. Then put the spices in and shake it up. Same result.
Instead of flour, have you tried arrowroot, corn starch, oat flour or rice flour …or any other non-glutinous thickening substances? You might still be able to have gravy and get away from flour altogether.
You can do the same meat-handling trick with big ziplocks. I prefer to marinate in a ziplock - it’s much easier to get the air out and all you have to do to mix it is massage the bag a bit and throw it back into the bowl in the fridge. Yes, I put ziplocs full of marinade in a bowl or on a plate in the fridge. I put one in there one time with a tiny hole and guess what? Frikkin marinade all over the goddamn place, leaking down into the vegetable drawers. Learned my lesson. Containment.
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“Youtube really should have an option so I can block all vertical video…”
This is as good a thread as any to address this misplaced indignation; if filming in portrait gives the best angle, and if most video being consumed is on mobile devices, or when it’s not it’s on a computer that plays video regardless of orientation, what does it matter? The only time it would matter is if it’s on a widescreen tv being played fullscreen, and it’s unlikely that’s how Sista Girl’s fans are watching her.
If anything, it seems to me that YouTube is to blame for not creating vertical player.
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“I’m listening to the click, yes I’m suffering with the click track right now…”
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It does not matter for mobile viewing as they can be rotated any way. A sizable number of players are however run on laptops (do these count as mobile devices?), desktops and even TVs. It matters there a lot; it is therefore one vote against vs one vote to abstain. Landscape video therefore should be a default, except for a VERY small and case-by-case decided number of exceptions.
I’d suggest the mobile recording apps to display a warning over the preview screen if the orientation is portrait.
The vertical-video hate is well placed. As long as there are landscape-only screens, portrait-oriented video should be considered a form of discrimination (“displayism”?).
I’m firmly in the cast iron camp myself. It takes a little work to prep in the beginning but nothing cooks better, is easier to clean, and the coating is “self healing” Once you get one “seasoned” it lasts damn near forever.
Bacteria and cleanliness rant… You are in too nice a kitchen to have been (be) poor (and or) in jail comment… Ongoing portrait filming orientation is ruining video war… You’re doing it wrong for x , y, or z reason…
We have such a privilege to have the time and resources to maintain all of this self validating crap
carry on.
(I tried to throw some xml like tags around this for my own snarky amusement but they did not show up in the post. I’ll get over it though.)
One thing that helps cast iron break in is to scrape scrape scrape with a metal spatula. This helps smooth the rough spots.
The 6.5 skillet turned out to surprising useful for a couple runny eggs. I also have a cast iron wok that weighs about 15 lbs and that is a lot of fun.
The other inexpensive dish that works well in cast iron is that simple casserole of stale beard and beaten eggs and a little ham and cheese poured in a hot frying pan and browned under the broiler. It has a different name in every country.
And lots of garbonzos (chick peas) which go well enough with the noodles. They are also much easier to cook than most legumes.
