Low Spoons Food Thread

Discussion in 'General Advice' started by Vast Derp, Apr 22, 2015.

  1. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Or tinned in juice is good!
     
    • Agree x 1
  2. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    If you can stand eating organ meats (they're not for everyone), they're higher in nutrients than muscle meat and fairly quick to cook. I know they used to be cheaper too, but that might not hold everywhere as they're kind of in vogue.
     
    • Agree x 1
  3. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    If you can afford the investment, an air fryer is a really versatile and useful device - no one likes standing over a stove to fry things and an air fryer does it for you, and you can use a lot less fat in the process too.
     
    • Agree x 1
  4. PotteryWalrus

    PotteryWalrus halfway hideous and halfway sweet

    As someone who is very sensitive to bitter flavours so has a problem with some offal - particularly livers and kidneys, for example - beef or lamb heart is really delicious! I've chopped it up fine raw into a portion of precooked rice before with some frozen peas and corn and microwaved the whole lot, and it works really well when you really want that red meat kick but can't face getting the frying pan out.

    The heart-meat is really soft and chewy, and while it won't have the nice sear you'd get from other methods of cooking, it cooks more than adequately in the microwave and if you mix some ketchup in with that bitch before eating you can't even tell the difference :)

    On another note, I've been taking to eating 'loaded' cup ramen these past few weeks. If you add some soft veggie greens - I've been going for baby spinach and pak choi, and even thinly sliced broccoli once, although it was definitely Al dente still when eating time came - and precooked/sandwich meat in on top of the dry noodles before you pour the water into the container, and then seal the whole thing a little better than normal with some foil during the 'wait three/five etc mins and then stir' period, then the soft veggies get cooked in the heat of the hot water and yay, you've been eating your greens!

    I think I've been eating more veg that way these last few weeks than I've even touched these last months, tbh. It's a bit ridiculous but we gotta cut corners where we can, right?
     
    • Useful x 4
  5. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Ready-bought smoked fish can be eaten without further cooking, or with a short time in the microwave if you can't stand cold fish (I can't). It'd also work for the abovementioned loaded ramen!
     
    • Agree x 2
  6. Everett

    Everett local rats so small, so tiny

    Ive heated up a frozen naan or paratha and just put some like smoked fish fillets on it plus Whatever seemed good and it was Acceptable fooding
     
    • Agree x 1
    • Winner x 1
  7. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Regarding the organ meats, I tried chicken livers. They taste fine, but it's kind of offputting because they taste less like chicken and more like beef. Weird dissonance there. I guess I need to eat them more than once to get used to them.
     
    • Informative x 2
  8. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    Chicken liver pairs really well with acidic fruit, which cuts the richness of the fatty liver and offsets some of the iron flavour.
     
    • Useful x 3
    • Agree x 1
    • Informative x 1
  9. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    IMO liver in General goes real well with apples
    (Which is my plan for the weekend)
     
    • Winner x 3
    • Informative x 3
    • Agree x 1
  10. VernalBee

    VernalBee Dirt Appreciator

    suggestion time: i'm a pseudo-vegetarian (not veg on purpose, just have texture issues with a lot of meats) and peanut butter, canned nuts, and freezer bag edamame are my favorite things. they generally aren't expensive either.
    a trick i learned from my mom is to make a bunch of hard-boiled eggs all at once, and then save them to eat throughout the week. my favorite fancy-feeling sandwich is bagel +cream cheese+ hard boiled egg+ sliced tomato.
    in general, eggs are amazing! fried egg on leftover rice takes like 3 minutes to make, and almost no mental energy once you've done it one time and know how it goes.

    my question: does anyone have any healthy crunchy snack recs? crunching is a very calming sensation to me so i find myself stress-eating like, corn chips a lot, but i'd like to replace it with something healthier.
     
    • Agree x 1
  11. sirsparklepants

    sirsparklepants feral mom energies

    Snap pea crisps/dehydrated snap peas! You can also roast or dehydrate chickpeas to crunch them up.
     
    • Agree x 1
    • Winner x 1
    • Informative x 1
  12. VernalBee

    VernalBee Dirt Appreciator

    ooo i made roasted chickpeas with a friend once and really liked them, but it never occurred to me that i could just make them on my own whenever. excellent idea thank you
     
  13. Loq

    Loq rotating like a rotisserie chicknen

    slow cooker chicken bog

    need:
    chicken (boneless skinless is easier, but if you don't mind pulling those out yourself later you could probably just use a wholeass chicken, I've done it with wings and bone-in breasts before)
    1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
    2 chicken gravy powder packets (or thickener + spices to taste, but... gravy packet easier)
    water
    whatever spices you want with your chicken
    slow cooker (+liner for easier cleanup)

    do:
    Mix soup, gravy packets, extra spices if you're using them, and water together (I just use the soup can as a water measure, 1:1 soup:water). If you want minimal dishes you can do this in the slowcooker.
    Slap your chicken in the slowcooker (and the Soup Mix if you didn't mix it in there to start). Make sure soup covers the bottom of the cooker, slather a little bit on top of the chicken so it don't dry out.
    Cook on low for 6-8 hours, until it falls apart when you stab it with a fork. If you gotta go longer (or forget about it for longer) that's fine, the gravy/soup will keep it from drying out for a while.
    (optional: around the 5-hour mark, you can add frozen veg and/or rice to the pot for Extra Nuntrients. If you're adding uncooked rice, throw another cup or two of broth or water into the pot with it.)
    Eat as-is or pull chicken apart with some forks/stabbing implements of choice for pulled chicken. If your chicken had bones, now is the time to fish them out and toss them.

    Goes good on rice or toast, reheats well from fridge. Haven't tried freezing it yet tho.
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2021
    • Informative x 1
  14. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    @PotteryWalrus Beef heart is indeed delicious! It turned out a bit tough when I air-fried it though, what might work better?

    Vegetable-flour-based pastas are more expensive than regular pasta, but if your problem is lack of time and energy more than money they're a good way to get vegetables into you. Chickpea, pea, lentil, soy, black bean, corn, kelp, and konjac yam are the ones I know about.
     
  15. PotteryWalrus

    PotteryWalrus halfway hideous and halfway sweet

    I tend to put it in dishes with more moisture? It works really well in soups and stews, and since my abovementioned microwave rice dish is usually doused in sauce and with frozen veggies, the water from that tends to compensate for the toughness of the meat.

    I tend to cut heart-meat up really fine, too, like almost a rough mince, and that also helps with the gristle content.
     
    • Informative x 1
  16. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    small hearts (chicken) i put into soup whole, bigger ones like turkey or indeed beef I'd braise or slice up and throw into soup
     
    • Informative x 2
    • Agree x 1
  17. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    i've also done turkey hearts stuffed with things, but that's probably too involved for the low spoons food thread.
     
    • Agree x 2
  18. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    • Informative x 2
  19. Verily

    Verily surprised Xue Yang peddler

    Chickpea mash you can refer to as hummus! I mean it is, but it’s very half assed, so I’m managing expectations.

    tl;dr: mash canned chickpeas with a fork. that’s the recipe. but also consider lemon juice, cumin, garlic, olive oil, salt, perhaps a lot of pepper because it is my foible, and other hummus things if you have any

    Good: Few ingredients, easy to leave most ingredients out unless they’re necessary to the flavor you want, very few extra dirty dishes, no dirty cookware or special equipment unless you want to use a blender, in which case you’re gonna end up with something far too fancy for this post and I can’t help you anymore

    Bad: Probably doesn’t scale past one serving without the blender, fairly light but repetitive manual effort over a number of full minutes, needs enough attention to hunt for stragglers at least for the first few minutes, no measurements whatsoever are provided by me because I didn’t measure

    Erm. So anyway, it turns out you can indeed make tasty yet half assed hummus that’s perfectly decent for making a meal out of any stray pita bread or whatever. If you think chickpeas are delicious, and I know I do, you’re golden. I didn’t try using it as dip, so while I have faith that dipping is a mechanically sound prospect, I could not say if it’s tasty. Though it was quite tasty when tested by itself, so I don’t see why dipping chips in it would be its undoing.

    This will be terrible for anyone who wants even vague ballpark measurements because I just wanted a pita sandwich with cucumbers but also not just cucumbers. It should be okay for anything where half assed hummus sounds like it would do. Because I was actually making a sandwich, I approached the hummus more or less like a salad in the form of a paste. An underrepresented method, I’d venture. This is intended to make only one serving with its amazingly slapdash approach, so go for approximately that amount of chickpeas. I would not recommend attempting to mash an entire can of chickpeas with a fork. I wouldn’t particularly try to stop you either, but be it upon your own head.

    Requires:
    • Canned chickpeas
    Probably all optional depending on your feelings about what constitutes acceptable hummus for your purposes:
    • Lemon juice
    • Garlic
    • Ground cumin—For That Spice!
    • Olive oil
    • Salt
    • Pepper??? Cayenne? Black? Both..?
    • Other hummus ingredients if you have and want them, which I didn’t and still don’t
    I care little for fresh ingredients if they’re inconvenient, so I used the lemon juice that comes in a plastic lemon-shaped container, and also the squeezy minced garlic in a tube because we never have garlic cloves lying around. I was quite pleased with the outcome. The pita sandwich was delicious and filling. The cucumbers were complemented.

    Directions, such as they are:

    1. Mash some canned chickpeas. This is a bit of time and effort, at least if your idea about how is to use a fork in a bowl small enough to restrict said mashing. If you care about a nice, even, creamy texture you will be sad about not using a blender. Me, I was about ready to call it good as soon as it stopped being beans and could like, mix with ingredients and act as a spread. Canned chickpeas like to slip away from under the fork, but you only really need to get them good once and then they’re pretty easy to continue mashing. It took a few minutes, but even with the inconvenient setup it wasn’t exactly a feat of physical strength or endurance. A bit of dexterity perhaps.

    2. Uncontrollably add garlic because the squeezy tube is fickle. This isn’t exactly a recommendation, but it’s what I did so here we are. I then regarded the outcome with some concern, decided garlic mixes in fine, like in general garlic mixes in fine usually, and I decided to go with it, but you can skip this step. The garlic did mix in fine, so either a lot of garlic is a good idea, or I just like a lot of garlic. Adjust to taste. Does this count as “to taste” or is it more “to ability” or if you’re feeling charitable, maybe “to happenstance”? Whatever the cause of your garlic, just try to deal with the amount that ends up happening, which may be none. If it’s none, go ahead and pat yourself on the back for neatly dodging the shenanigans.

    3. Every other instruction is basically like the garlic, but with less overenthusiasm on the part of the container, probably. Squirt with lemon juice. Mash. Check flavor. Mash. Dash of salt, light drizzle of olive oil, sprinkle of cumin, in no particular order, mashing and taste testing all the way. Finish off with any black or red pepper you desire, otherwise you are already finished.
     
    • Like x 5
    • Winner x 3
    • Agree x 1
  20. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Seeds and nuts are good little protein boosts, in solid or butter form.
     
    • Agree x 2
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