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Food, processed
Nov. 22nd, 2021 02:02 pmYesterday, after bathing Emma and vacuuming the house, as I got underway with some cooking projects, I realized they all shared the common denominator of requiring the food processor:
1. Breadcrumbs: we often have a bag of bread ends in the freezer, and a couple things I want to cook this week call for breadcrumbs. This was my most successful breadcrumb-making endeavor yet: I ripped everything up into small chunks, put the pieces in the oven to dry out and toast a bit more, then food-processed and used a colander to sift out the bigger pieces for reprocessing. Now I have a big bag of breadcrumbs of heterogeneous but reasonably small size. Two things were helpful this time: ripping up the bread ahead of the drying step, and not worrying about trying to get everything perfectly dry before food-processing. Failing to do those two steps has always resulted in hard, recalcitrant bread chunks that are too big to be considered "crumbs."
2. Cheese: It still amazes me that stores sell pre-shredded cheeses. It's some combination of cheaper/better to buy blocks of cheese and shred them at home instead.
3. Hummus: this was last. I bought tepary beans in Arizona this past summer, so I made a batch of tepary bean hummus, which came out very well considering that I winged it in terms of amounts of garlic, lemon juice, tahini, smoked paprika, and salt thrown in.
The benefit of these back-to-back food processing projects is they didn't necessarily require a total clean-out of the food processor between uses, so long as one doesn't mind some slight cross-contamination across foods.
By the time those projects were done, I was tired of being in the kitchen, so I still have more work to do to cook up some pasta trays for meal prep this week.
1. Breadcrumbs: we often have a bag of bread ends in the freezer, and a couple things I want to cook this week call for breadcrumbs. This was my most successful breadcrumb-making endeavor yet: I ripped everything up into small chunks, put the pieces in the oven to dry out and toast a bit more, then food-processed and used a colander to sift out the bigger pieces for reprocessing. Now I have a big bag of breadcrumbs of heterogeneous but reasonably small size. Two things were helpful this time: ripping up the bread ahead of the drying step, and not worrying about trying to get everything perfectly dry before food-processing. Failing to do those two steps has always resulted in hard, recalcitrant bread chunks that are too big to be considered "crumbs."
2. Cheese: It still amazes me that stores sell pre-shredded cheeses. It's some combination of cheaper/better to buy blocks of cheese and shred them at home instead.
3. Hummus: this was last. I bought tepary beans in Arizona this past summer, so I made a batch of tepary bean hummus, which came out very well considering that I winged it in terms of amounts of garlic, lemon juice, tahini, smoked paprika, and salt thrown in.
The benefit of these back-to-back food processing projects is they didn't necessarily require a total clean-out of the food processor between uses, so long as one doesn't mind some slight cross-contamination across foods.
By the time those projects were done, I was tired of being in the kitchen, so I still have more work to do to cook up some pasta trays for meal prep this week.
