Ask Lemmy

Soup dumplings. The broth for the soup has to be make in a specific way to solidify and I think there's also a complex method of incorporating the soup into the meat and veggies in the dumplings. It's just a very time consuming process all around. It's sucks tho because I love soup dumplings and being able to make a huge portion of them would be amazing.

Ramen. Like true, 14+ hrs of effort tonkotsu broth.

It's been a dream of mine for a long time, but fuck is that a long time.

So I have this problem... I enjoy cooking and when my grandmother passed away, I inherited her recipe book and her Le Creuset dutch oven.

THEN I discovered I lived a short drive from a Le Creuset outlet store AND they have a mailing list that regularly delivers 30% to 70% off coupon deals.

So I'll find a pan that makes me go "Oooh!" then I look for excuses to use it.

So it's not really a lack of motivation, but rather I want people to cook for. Cooking just for me? Incredibly lazy. "More time to make and clean up than eat? I'm not making it." Cooking for OTHER people?

Chuck roast:

Shakshuka:

Chocolate hazelnut chocolate chip cheesecake:

Beef roast:

Pork loin w/ scalloped potatoes:

Ableskievers:

Most of them. They require not only the right ingredients and even the right brands. But the amount of tools you would have to go out and get, just to make that thing. I currently am struggling to make homemade butterbeer, from harry potter, because I spent like a combined $30+ in materials and ingredients and that's only by one recipe. Which is another thing, recipes vary and have their own way of doing things which again is going to require having to spend more just to make it.

It's a no-brainer why people would rather have take out or go out to restaurants.

Croissant

I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I'm pretty motivated to make food homemade.

Baklava is the one I'd like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.

As much as I love barbecue I don't and won't own a smoker.

Buying tortillas is getting kind of expensive, but making tortillas seems like such a damn pain uuugh

Sourdough

Billionaire

Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.

Ditto puff pastry from scratch.

Chicken Biryani. I keep getting the ingredients and making simpler things.

Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I'd ordered just for the task:

The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn't want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.

Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.

There's also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it's also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.

Papa reyeñas(sp?). They're so good, it's basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping

Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes...I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There's also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes

I don't enjoy cooking, but I'm pretty good at it when I want to be... But I have to want to be

Beef Wellington

Khao soi

My mom makes these cottege cheese and bread crumbs dumplings that she boils until they float and then you cut them in half and drizzle melted butter and brown sugar on them.

I could never pronounce or spell the name of the dish but she claims it's a traditional German dessert.

I tried explain it to chat gpt and it had no clue what the hell I was talking about. It kept telling me about Turkish dishes that have the right ingredients but look nothing like the baseball sized dumplings she would make.

All food is like that to me. I only cook because otherwise I'd die of starvation. I eat to live - food has always just been fuel for me. I don't want to put any more effort into cooking than what is absolutely necessary. If money was not an issue, then personal chef would be the first person I'd hire. Hell, if it was possible I'd hire someone to eat it for me too.

Doughnuts. I made doughnuts by hand recently, and kneading the dough. For. 30. Minutes. By. Hand. Fuck, never again. I usually don't mind kneading dough by hand, but this was the first time I wish I had a mashine for it

Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.

Proper paella. I enjoy making it in the sense that it's simpler to cook and is more like a risotto, but to make an actual paella as close to the way the dish should be made takes so much effort, the correct ingredients and equipment I have neither the time nor the money for.

Century egg