dduane:

stitch-n-time:

algorizmi:

This is the recipe I’ve been using for years for Paprikash. (a.k.a. Paprikás Csirke / paprika hendl) In respose to the current hype, I figured I’d share it with you all. Makes 6 servings.

Ingredients

• Oil, butter or lard – 2 tablespoons
• Chicken thighs, deboned & skin-on – 2 ½ to 3 pounds
• Onions, thinly sliced – 2 (or 3 if small)
  
• Hungarian sweet paprika – ¼ cup
• Korean chili flakes – 2 teaspoons
• Pastry flour – 2 tablespoons
• Poultry stock, unsalted – 1 ½ cups
• Red bell peppers, diced – 2
• Salt and pepper – to taste
• Sour cream – 1 cup
• Lemon juice (optional) – 1 tablespoon

Directions

1. Heat the oil over medium-high flame in a large cast iron skillet. Add the chicken skin-side down and brown until skin is crispy, about 7 minutes. Remove to a board, and cut into bite-size pieces.
2. Remove any excess oil leaving about 2 tablespoons and add the onions. Sauté the onions until wilted and beginning to brown. Stir in the paprika and flour and cook for 1 to 2 minutes.
3. Whisk in the stock in portions, breaking up any lumps. Add the browned chicken pieces, bell peppers. and the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through and tender.
4. Stir in the sour cream and lemon juice if using. Adjust seasoning and reheat over low flame. Serve hot with noodles or gnocchi.

Variations

• Mushrooms can be added with the stock.
• Kosher version: Instead of sour cream, use 50% more flour and 33% more lemon juice. For passover use potato starch instead of flour.
  

THIS!!!
This is almost exactly the recipe I use, but without the pepper flakes, and it gets baked in the oven instead of simmered.

This stuff is amazing, and disappears when put out in a crowd.

cc: @petermorwood

valentinebitchbaby:

Heart foods

deepspaceclawstation:

lyrslair:

thenorsiest:

trekcore:

startrekships:

msfbgraves:

lemonsharks:

aqueerkettleofish:

mermaidelephant:

math-is-magic:

aqueerkettleofish:

ravenclaw-burning:

aqueerkettleofish:

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:

In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:

1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”

2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.

3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.

4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)

The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.

Hmm.  This is a fair point.  It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter.  Wasn’t made in Texas.”

I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well.  I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients. 

1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.

The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.

Right, for that you need the holodeck.

Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here: 

The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better. 

Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us. 

First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat. 

You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales. 

You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship. 

You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow  your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass. 

The tamale tastes like home. 

You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it. 

Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and 

Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods. 

The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma. 

Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste. 

Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better? 

Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it. 

And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.

I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.

Fourth:

You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement. 

The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea. 

It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge. 

If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does. 

The third option is how many ready made “festive” meals are made by supermarkets already. Unilever, at least, hires great chefs, and then puts the result to a test panel. They tweak the recipe - which was very high quality - until they get something that appeals to the majority of people. And that is often something that is familiar to most people, some of whom may not have access to healthy, fresh ingredients, or have been taught to cook, and even though nobody rates it a ten now, most people rate it a 7, and that’s what they sell.

And that really makes you ache for something made just the way you like it, doesn’t it?

A replicator can’t do that for you, either, and sometimes it just tastes like sadness.

Y'all forgetting that replicators are MUCH lower resolution than transporters, probably to save on energy and computing power, so you cannot equate them. So maybe just maybe replicated food just isn’t as tasty as real food.

Plus all of the above.

Starfleet replicators exist with “nutritional guidelines” to make it all “healthy” - recall Troi trying to order a real chocolate sundae. Which means, well, imagine a diet meal that’s ready made. Or a protein/ fiber/ diet/ Atkins bar. Yeah, they look like the thing, but might not taste quite right because things have been changed to be more nutritious.

Also, it’s a government bureaucracy. We know there are variants, like 14 varieties of tomato soups, and different teas, etc. But each one is going to be programmed by a committee.

They’re going to determine the number of varieties to offer to cover there bases, then make an amalgamation of divergent recipes for each one, so it’s tastes like a middle ground of them all. So is bland and inoffensive. The common denominator.

Replicator food isn’t truly designed to replace real cooking, it serves the purpose of making food available to all, ending hunger and for Starfleet, making food storage and cooks obsolete.

Frozen dinners, MREs in the military, nutrition bars and shakes, etc. That’s what replicated food is. It’s not designed to be the best. Just to be good enough.

As to why some people comment on it and others don’t? It’s clear some have only ever had replicator food. Cooking seems to have become uncommon except maybe at restaurants (I’d imagine replicators at restaurants have the ability to program their own recipes) or with stubborn traditionalists.

And why not? If you can order a full course meal after a day at work or play with your kids instead of cooking for 2 hours, wouldn’t you? Look how much cooking has declined in the last few decades. How many things a week do you have takeout? Or if you cook, it’s a prepared meal.

As for taste, bananas of today are different than the ones of 70 years ago. Give it a Google. The original taste was different and is been lost. Then there’s tomatoes at the grocery. You can get ones my mom used to call “hot house” that are pretty bland. Or super tasteful ones from local gardens. Mass production can alter quality and taste, and you could go your whole life not knowing until you taste the real thing.

So a lot of people who’ve only had replicator food have no idea what real cooked, grown stuff tastes like. Once you do it’s a revelation and you can’t go back, so you complain.

Add all of these ideas together from all the above replies? You can imagine why they say as they do.

Guys!

The aroma!

Smell is a part of taste.

Even if it’s replicated with all the spices and ingredients that’s not going to give you the same smell as what you get from cooking.

I was going to comment on that last bit. In addition to the variation thing which is definitely A Thing - with even restaurant food there’s a period of time you get to ANTICIPATE it where you can SMELL it and get hungry for it before actually eating it.

Consider how ravenous you are for a slow-cooked meal that’s been on ALL DAY versus something that can be cooked quickly.

Is it actually BETTER? Or is it that you got to ANTICIPATE it for longer and it made you want that specific thing so much more?

Proposed solution: program variations into the replicator (we have been shown people can add their own programmed recipes in, after all) - enough to fool your own brain - and set it to come out at above-eating-temperature so that you have to WAIT for it for a few before eating it.

I love this entire discussion! I agree the most with what @lemonsharks but I have another point -

You know how some commercial crop varieties taste bland or off because they are genetically engineered to optimise low requirements+resilience+taste+aesthetics instead of just taste? Same could be true for replicator dishes except they overlook or compromise on a variable that makes that dish especially appealing to you, or a variable that is already overlooked like smell or texture.

For example, sure you get a very aesthetically pleasing vangyacha bharit, but then you realise they pureed the brinjals instead of mashing them, and while that makes for a homogeneous appearance, the absence of chunks gives it a weird texture. This thing already happens at busier or high-end restaurants with pav bhaji where they just run the components through a mixer instead of taking the time to mash them to save on time, money, and resources.

The only argument against this may be that surely the recipes are screened and go through ‘beta testing’ (‘tasting’?) before being 'released’? In which case, the next question would be regarding who do we think test these recipes, and what are the diversity parameters for the test groups. I mean, if there were humans involved in taste-testing plomeek soup no wonder Vulcans don’t like the replicated version. We all know what British people call tikka masala would be inedible to those of us back east.

dappercyborg:

wildernessflavoredjellybean-dea:

America is absolutely disconnected to meat

I think I realized this when I had went to see my dad and stepmom one day and asked if I could place my hawk’s food. (A rabbit leg) in the freezer. My step mom was disgusted by the idea that a leg from an animal was in the freezer meanwhile an entire chicken was sitting in the fridge.

Your rotisserie chicken is an entire chicken.

Your pork chop is a hunk of pig.

Your rack of ribs are from a cow’s rib cage.

It’s like Americans view meat as colorful red and pink hued shapes that just exist and come into the world packaged.

You see so many people getting harassed or even having their content flagged for showing how to process or field dress meat when it’s at it’s freshest. Right after culling. For some reason this is considered “gore” by many folks when in reality it’s no more different from plucking a processed chicken after cull.

You also notice that Americans have an idea of what’s normal meat and what isn’t normal meat and there’s racist undertones that I’ve noticed in a lot of these comments left on foreign cooking videos

You have people that claim a video of a man in a different country preparing something like this is “eating a dog.” Meanwhile this is roasted goat.

You have people who’s only perception of an edible fish is in fillet or fish stick form and they call something like this nasty because “Eww there’s a head!” Yeah.. most animals have heads..

Some of ya’ll need to realize what your meat looks like prior to processing and that it’s prepared in different ways. We also need to erase the stigma behind non traditional meats.

People really do act like there are only 4 meats, beef, pork, chicken, and lamb

My old hotel served squirrel one season, they have an incredible mark up 50p to by one in, it cost £30 for the 2 course menu that it was on

I got given some pigeon breasts from work that were spare after an event, my mother was in town and refused to eat them, pigeon is one of my favourite meats but she couldn’t get past what it was

Rabbit is great its gamey, duck is fatty, ostrich is like if beef and chicken had a baby, goat is an incredible meat when you know what to do with it (see Indian and Caribbean food)

And offal is fantastic, haggis, Beef neck, hearts are an incredible cut of meat because it’s constantly working, perfect for stuffing, and so cheep (beef hearts are delicious duck hearts aren’t bad be not tried any other types),

I can’t ever go vegetarian for medical reasons so if an animal has to die we have an obligation to use the whole animal

desultory-suggestions:

Food is meant to be enjoyed. It is not solely about nutrition. It’s also an joyful, social, cultural experience. You deserve to eat for the sake of enjoyment.

inneskeeper:

Listen. Listen. Most of you have likely never tasted genuine soy sauce as it has historically been made. The vast majority of the entire world population has never actually tasted soy sauce. Because soy sauce takes years of fermentation in a giant custom made squeezable barrel and there’s only a very few remaining people who make traditional soy sauce. Only one single company atm afaik makes the special barrels anymore that are required to do it. They make them by order.

Like, can you fucking imagine what a loss it would be if just a single person stopped doing this? If that singular company simply no longer makes the barrel. If those sporadic soy makers moved on or lost their business. Can you even begin to imagine? You can’t. There is an entire taste that you have never experienced for yourself because it is dying. And one day it will die and you will never taste it and neither will anyone else ever again.

Saffron crocuses are dying because of climate change. Because of the rising temperatures and drier climates in Iran, the crocuses aren’t growing as well, and of course by harvesting the saffron stamens, that prevents the crocuses from being able to go to seed. The balance of this incredibly important historic ingredient is being undone out of circumstances beyond the crocus farmers’ control. One day there is a very real chance that a staple ingredient in food across the entirety of the Middle East will no longer exist. No more shirini keshmeshi; no more yakhni pulao; no more mandi djaj. An entire taste will be erased from the world, and all these foods, all these proofs of humanity, of the connections we have with our past and our ancestors, it will be severed as simply as if by a cutting knife.

How can I even begin to cope with the depths of that grief? How do you live with the knowledge that these things could very likely die in your lifetime? That you could witness the atrophying of entire swathes of history and culture happen in realtime, because of greed, because of callous uncaring for others?

How can I explain to anyone why every time I cook with saffron it feels as if I am saying goodbye to someone I love, for the ones who will come after me? Where do I begin to describe to the children who come next the food that our ancestors have eaten for countless generations will never exist for them in the way they were intended to be?

How do I understand my grief when it is based in the knowledge that eventually, it would be impossible to understand?

hokoribunny:

trappedinavelociraptor:

transhumanisticpanspermia:

xeduo:

wilwheaton:

bookoisseur:

adulthoodisokay:

je-suis-loupseul:

balfies:

ruinedchildhood:

me and my partner have been obsessed with the unhinged insanity of this video for the last day. I can’t stop thinking about it.

I can feel parts of my body shutting down in self-defense while watching this. The amount of damage food like this does should be criminalized. The sheer amount of dairy in it alone is a capital crime.

I’m reblogging this to find it to use as an appetite suppressant in future.

it just keEPS GOING

Can we talk about this video and how I CAN NOT.

…the fuck.

The “And One More Thing” quality of this reminds me of the Taco Town SNL sketch

i think what makes this one special is how long into the video it remains credibly edible. like “oh it’s pulled chicken. oh, chicken tacos. chicken tacos in a pizza shape? okay sour cream goes with tacos, the mayo’s weird but. hey wait what are you doing with those frying ingredients”

Shay Spence on Twitter

“kind of tempted to make that deep fried bbq chicken deep dish quesadilla pepperoni pizza tonight”

Twitter

Someone on Twitter made it. It filled them only with regret.

Wow…

I’m a simple guy. I see a picture of a taco and I immediately want tacos. Anytime of day or night. No matter how hungry I actually am. Tacos always sound good