Things I need: An AU where Bucky hosts a youtube channel cooking anything and everything and his commentary has this dry sassy humor.
He’d have a different apron each episode ranging from the plain, ones with puns, ones with various other sayings, and ones with various patterns.
Sometimes he’d vlog while visiting a market or something, he’d point to a freezer full of meat and be all “welp guess they finally found that winter soldier guy”
“how does this dude wield a knife so well”
“where does this guy get all his aprons”
things i knead
Can we somehow combine this with Eliot Spencer guest starring on the show? In his own punny apron and scary good knife skills? Pretty please?
“And today, we’re going to show you how to break down a chicken.”
“Make sure your knives are clean of any foreign matter first also. Cross-contamination is a thing.”
“How did you get foreign matter on your knife today?”
“Don’t ask. Let’s just say the guy now has a very distinctive walk that will let Interpol nail him shortly.”
RENO MY RENO! Canadians fix people’s home improvement mistakes and are super nice about it but FIRM with man who don’t finish projects!
so far some shows that have worked for me:
Lord & Ladles – scottish chefs cook historical feasts in historical mansions! you meet wacky old money people and learn about strange things their ancestors got up to! you get to watch as world-renowned chefs fail at catching a fish! someone makes a hedgehog out of marzipan! people in the olden times ate some crazy shit! every episode ends with the chefs cheersing each other while lying on vintage furniture!
Big Dreams, Small Spaces – cute british people have cute yards that cute gardening man helps to make into much cuter yards. one lady wants to grow vegetables to share with her neighborhood. one lady wants to sculpt a huge mud head covered in moss coming out of the ground. one dad wants a garden for his down’s syndrome kid so he makes a sensory garden with a thousand different smells and textures. one couple wants to grow flowers for their wedding. it’s all wonderful.
Nailed It! – a bunch of people probably got high and decided to throw money at this show idea. everybody tries their best and everybody comes away either having learned something helpful, having had a rollicking good time, or having won a bunch of money. all the judges are good sports and nobody is made to feel bad for doing bad. also there’s some fucking crazy shit they get up to with modeling chocolate i tell you what.
Skin Wars – actually a lot about artists and their craft??? not really at all about sexy ladies being naked??? very cool stuff done by people with atrocious fashion sense and a complete willingness to buy into the moment. a few bad apples but mostly the reality-show-ness is pretty toned down and people are there to make cool art.
A Cook Abroad – chefs go to different parts of the world and learn about food there. A dumb white guy makes bread with adorable egyptian ladies! A british man gets exhausted by the length of roads in argentina and is only recharged by steak! An awesome woman makes cheese in france!
Love Your Garden – british man does garden makeovers for wholesome deserving families with special needs. Maybe a little bit on the weepy side of things but his assistants are all great and have fantastic hairstyles and people in wheelchairs deserve flowers!
Puffin Rock – this show is supposedly for babies but it is SO PRETTY and SO CHARMING and it’s about animals and nature and stuff and doesn’t really completely shy away from that?? like, one of the characters is a little rodent and the seagulls are the bad guys and he’s actually afraid of getting eaten?? anyway baby birds sing songs with baby bunnies and play splishsplash with baby seals and snuggle with baby animals of all sorts in a beautiful hand painted island.
Animal Airport – hey did you know some crazy shit goes down in Heathrow?? Did you know that there isn’t rabies in the UK? Everyone’s doggies and kitties have a long trip but they all get home in the end and also there are turtles and cheetahs and bugs and fish and everything!!!
this list is so relevant to my interests it hurts.
i’d also suggest the bbc historical farms series–it’s not on netflix, but it *is* mostly on youtube. the metafilter guide that originally introduced me to it is here. there are a bunch of different series of it, now, and each one is a group of archaeologists and historians living on a period location–victorian farm, they live in a farmhouse from the era, and they farm and raise animals and etc wearing period clothing, using period tools and sources as guides. and it sounds like it could be cringey, but they’re all experts in their fields and actually really invested in trying to do things well, so instead it’s a bunch of shows about teamwork and being friends (most of the core team stays the same) and learning things, and it’s delightful.
similarly, the sweet makers and victorian bakers have modern confectioners and bakers recreating period foods wearing appropriate clothing and using cookbooks from the era to guide them. (warning that one of the sweet makers episodes deals heavily with the history of sugar, and the slavery and horrific abuses associated with the same.)
a good list but i just want to point out that Lords and Ladles is Irish. the chefs are Irish. it’s filmed in Irish manor houses. no Scottish in sight.
Also: The Supersizers Go/Eat [historical period]: Sue Perkins and history/food person explore different time periods and cultures. can be found on youtube.
The Great British Sewing Bee – like bake off, but with clothing!
The Great Pottery Throw Down – like bake off, but with pottery!
The Great Australian Bake Off – the comedians are annoying, but the judges are great
Celebrity British Bake Off (Sports Relief and Comic Relief) – hysterically funny because half the contestants are comedians and half have never baked a thing in their life, so just turning the oven on is A SUCCESS
Great British Bake Off : An Extra Slice – Aftershow for the main series with Jo Brand, good stuff
Junior Bake Off – bake off, but with kids! Also, better, because at least the most recent series, they not only had lots of racial diversity and gender parity but a few kids with disabilities!
The Chefs’ Line – awesome Australian show that focusses on the staff of a restaurant cooking against a handful of amateurs, a different cuisine every week. Season two has just started! Also, the judges are amazing and 100% not white, which is super rare on tv.
Family Food Fight – another Australian show with families of different food cultures cooking against each other to find the winner. Season one of this was AWESOME and so warm and wholesome. We’re getting another season soon!
TIME TEAM – Watch British people get excited digging holes, finding tiny bits of pot and floor tile, and different colours of dirt. In the rain!
Britain’s Best Cook – Mary Berry’s new show that is sort of like bake off, but with all kinds of home cooking, not just baking!
I need this list right now because i just finished Lords & Ladles and I’m bereft.
Adding a few more of my favorites:
Somebody Feed Phil and I’ll Have What Phil’s Having – both are travel food shows hosted by Phil Rosenthal. He is the sweetest person I have EVER seen on TV. He loves everything he eats & makes friends in all the random places he visits.
The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure and
The Hairy Bikers’
Chicken & Egg – There are MANY Hairy Biker series…but these are the two on Netflix. These guys are entertaining & enthusiastic. They travel and cook and tease each other and just LOVE all the new culture they are exposed to. The two of them in the US cooking fried chicken made me love them forever.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Oddysey -Neil deGrasse Tyson has such a soothing voice, along with being incredibly excited about space, he calls out the inherent misogyny of the history of science in general & astrophysics in particular. I love this man with everything I have. This just left Netflix, I’m hoping it shows up on another streaming service soon.
Oooh, yeah, Hairy Bikers are great. Their Best of British is super good, too.
Oh, also, The Cook and The Chef. What it says on the tin – Maggie Beer (cook) and Simon Bryant (chef) hang out in Maggie’s real-life kitchen and make food from whatever’s in season or growing in Maggie’s garden or orchard. Heavy focus on local, sustainable and heirloom foods. Pretty much unscripted and adorable.
Ooops-Those-Bananas-Are-Brown Scones! (Minus the two and a half that we ate before photographing.)
I pretty much stuck to the recipe this time, just swapping the two flours out for GF flour blend. I had to add a little extra flour when bringing it together into a dough because my egg was big and I guesstimated the amount of honey left in the jar was roughly the right amount, but it was probably more, so the mix was wetter as a result. I also cooked it for an extra five mintues again, because my oven is still slow, and the extra moisture needed to cook out. It was super hard to cut this into equal portions because it was sticky as and just wanted to glue itself to the knife, even with a little oil on the blade.
The flavour’s really great on this one, so I probably won’t modify it in the future, unless I want to change it up by adding nuts or choc chips or something. I might try using a flour like buckwheat or brown rice in place of the whole wheat, too, to try and get that deeper flavour in there.
so a little while back, i wrote a cookbook, and the post’s being passed around tumblr a whole lot lately. (thanks for that, by the way! i’ve made like a hundred dollars this week and my cat’s very excited about the fancy pumpkin-and-nastiness catfood that she’s going to get in celebration.)
when i released the book, i was like, oh, i oughta do something for promo! which i promptly did not do, at all. but i’m doing it now! free cookbooks for all! well, for some. five. five, to be exact, free cookbooks for five.
anyhow, this is the book i wrote:
Cooking is terrible, and food is often a massive pain in the ass. Eating is sometimes ok, sometimes a giant drag, and somehow still a thing that you have to do multiple times a day, which seems enormously unfair.
This book isn’t going to teach you how to cook, or turn you into the kind of person who hosts effortless dinner parties, or make you more attractive and popular and interesting. At best, it’s going to make it slightly more likely that you manage to eat something in the ten minutes between walking in the door and falling into the sweet embrace of the internet. I’m not joking—a lot of this can be done, start to finish, in ten to fifteen minutes. I resent thirty-minute meals because it feels like about twenty-eight minutes too long to spend on feeding myself.
If you’re excited to get home from work and spend an hour cooking dinner, this isn’t the book for you. If you really value authenticity, this isn’t the book for you. If you literally only eat three foods and you’re happy like that, this isn’t the book for you. If you, like me, are tired and depressed and just need to get some food into your face once in a while, this is definitely the book for you. You should buy it. Maybe it’ll help.
you can buy it on amazon or gumroad, or you can win a copy (in pdf, epub, or mobi format) by reblogging this post.
other important stuff:
winners will be chosen by a random generator
please don’t spam people–reblog no more than twice
Inside you’ll find recipe comics, food related journal comics, eggs adventures and a exclusive introduction comic.
I hope you’ll consider it !
YAY RAMEN
For folks who really get into ramen there’s also the blog The Ramen Rater, with comprehensive reviews of the quality of noodles, broth, and whatever else comes with a pack or cup.
Lately, I’ve been loving stirring a couple of raw beaten eggs into a base of tonkotsu (Sapporo Ichiban makes one with chicken, and it’s SO GOOD) or gomtang/seollontang (Paldo’s amazing for that) and adding leeks. It’s so comforting.
Yo my sister taught me how to do this, and like, it’s amazing how much better it is.
holy shit this sounds delicious
Mum brought in two huge bowls of mandarins yesterday when she mowed, and this barely put a dent in them. Apparently, trees are still loaded – mandarins, limes and blood oranges everywhere. Send help.
Hey y’all the kid I’m going to be nannying starting in August is gluten intolerant. I’d really like to perfect some recipes for her before I start working with that family.
Does anyone have some good gf baking tips?
I’m going to keep reblobbing myself until I know everything about gf baking
*Avoid or modify the scone recipes as these contain spelt, a low gluten but not zero gluten ancient wheat variety. All other recipes gluten free.
**Not completely gluten free but has a good collection of recipes searchable by tags
From people living with Coeliacs for over ten years, The Basics are:
– The four big ‘no’s’ are Wheat, Barley, Rye, and Oats. Wheat is sneaky because it’s in everything, and because you need to avoid ‘ancient’ variants such as spelt and other variations, such as durum, semolina, cous cous and burghul/bulgar. Barley is sneaky because it’s often used as a flavouring agent – avoid things like Malted milk and Worcestershire Sauce unless it’s labelled gluten free. Rye is sneaky beacause people don’t associate it with gluten. Rye bread is very much not gluten free. Oats are sneaky because it’s a grey area. Some people react to them, some don’t. Some say the only problem comes from farming and processing it alongside wheat and other gluten grains. Some say people who have no reaction to it are still reacting to it, they just don’t feel it. There is a market for ‘uncontaminated’ oats that are grown and processed in isolation from other grains. Some Coeliacs eat these. We are one of those families, but every person’s reactions are different, so it’s safer to avoid if you’re not sure, or when it’s a child.
– Look for alternatives. Other grains and gluten free options are your friends. Buckwheat, despite the name, is not a wheat, and is fine. Just look out for additives. Quinoa is fine, rice is great, beans, pulses and seeds and nuts in their natural forms are fantastic. TVP is a good meat alternative, just check the labels for colourings and flavourings. A good GF pasta is gold – we use Buontempo – but don’t overcook it or it turns to inedible glue. Rice noodles are great, just check they’re 100% rice. Chang’s brand does good wok-ready instant noodles you don’t have to rehydrate.
– Read the labels on everything. Wheat and other gluten containing grains like barley can hide in soy sauce, cornflour, iced tea, potato crisps and other snack foods like crackers and nuts, frozen bake at home fries, soba noodles, BBQ sauce, rice bubbles, corn flakes, chocolate, tofu and other vege meats like Quorn, ice cream, flavoured milks and coffees, sausages and burger patties, crumb coats or batter coatings on meat and vegetables, custard, stocks, marinades and gravy. Gluten containing cereals are used as thickeners, flavouring agents, colouring agents, source of maltodextrin, source of glucose syrup, as a booster of protein in breakfast cereals and as a filler in things you’d think would be wheat free (I’m looking at you, soy sauce.)
– Keep your kitchen spotless. That microscopic toast crumb on a chopping board can ruin a Coeliac’s day, or even send them to hospital, depending on how their allergy presents. Have separate working spaces and kitchen utensils if possible, because that takes the stress out of it. If you can’t, then wipe down and clean everything, every time, if you know there’s been gluten in the area. Separate chopping boards are a must. Separate plastic bowls are ideal, or do what I did and switch to stainless steel and pyrex, neither of which scratch up and retain food particles like plastic does. Consider investing in separate cake tins if you’re into baking, since it’s impossible to clean flour out of every crack and crevice, or be absolutely meticulous in lining with baking paper or dedicated GF silicone liners every time.
– Have a separate tub of butter for your GF friend. No matter what, there are always crumbs transferred from knife to tub. I cannot stress this enough.
– Play around with recipes and learn how baking works. Gluten Free Makeovers is amazing for this. Making my own bread using the flours I could get my hands on using Beth’s substitution table was one of the most empowering things I’ve done. Plus it saves you a whack of money. Premade shop bought gluten free bread is hard to find, expensive, and most of the time, underwhelming to say the least.
my grandparents have to lock their car doors when they go to sunday mass because people have been breaking in to unlocked cars and leaving entire piles of zucchini
i feel like i should’ve added more context when i posted this. my grandparents live in a rural area where farmers and casual gardeners alike are, at this point in the year, suddenly being hit with unexpectedly abundant zucchini crops. there aren’t just some random vandals leaving zucchinis in people’s cars for the hell of it, this is the work of some very exasperated, probably very elderly, folks who have more zucchini than they know what to do with
Yep. You can also expect to find a bag of zucchini on your porch.
My grandfather once found his neighbor stealing his tomatoes out of his garden at three in the morning. Red-handed, with a basket of the nearly-ripened ones. He thought he was going to find gophers or something, but no, here’s Henry, taking his tomatoes. The best ones.
There was a long pause between them.
My grandfather (allegedly) said, “Henry… it’s OK. You can take some tomatoes if you want them.”
Henry sighed in relief.
“But,” my grandfather said, “you have to take two zucchini for every tomato.”
There was another long silence. “That’s a harsh bargain, John,” said Henry. “But I accept. I’ll tell Joe up the street, too.”
My grandfather said, “Tell Joe he needs to take three.”
a friend of my dad’s came by in the middle of the night, he seemed very nervous when my dad answered the door. he wouldn’t come inside but he leaned in and whispered to my dad in spanish, “i have some fresh grapes for you.” and then this happened:
the melon was a special bonus.
MY DREAM
A friend of mine lives in a rural area and he has been surrounded by zucchini for most of May, June, and July.
At one point he was so done with the whole zucchini madness that he came to classes actively begging people to “Please please please!! Take some my family’s damned zucchini!! I’ve been eating zucchini for weeks!! I’m going insane!!!”
Having grown up in a rural area and having come home to zucchini on the front step or in the mailbox, i find it highly amusing the OP had to clarify. I’m sitting here nodding “yup.”
I have a friend with a garden in Oregon who literally made Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies and sent them to me in Indiana. I texted her back “I SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING HERE”
I’m waiting for the day when someone will hear about my background in Botany and ask me for advice on what someone who’s just wanting to start exploring planting vegetables should try.
I know fuckall about gardening because my background is wild plants and not agriculture, but I’m gonna tell them
“Zucchini. Definitely try Zucchini. Just plant plenty of them and you’ll get a decent sized crop! They’re very rewarding to grow.”
It may be a bit of a long game, but I’ll enjoy their screams of despair from across the void as they realize that they will eat zucchini forever
This is NOT an exaggeration, guys. Zucchini (and most squashes, really) will outgrow you so fast. Let our tale be a caution– or an encouragement, whichever. You decide as you hear the story of Squish.
When we were so broke we had to choose between gas and store-bought-food (I think I was about 10?), we had a garden so we could eat regularly (we also had chickens and pigs and hunted, but that’s beside this point). One summer, we planted 6 rows of yellow squash and 6 rows of zucchini. Each row probably had 10, maybe 12 plants in it. We created this giant squash-block in our garden plot so it was all right there together in the middle, and the needier plants like tomatoes were on the outside of the whole plot. We thought we were clever, til the first crop started coming in.
The outside two rows of each squash, yellow and zucchini, were normal. High yield, of course (because squash), but standard size for both summer squash and Italian zucchini. The inner 8 rows, however, created this hybrid monstrosity that we called Squish. It was pretty– a nice swirly yellow and green combination that made it clear the squash and zucchini had interbred.
Squish became a living nightmare for us. Something about the hybridization caused them to forget how to stop growing, or at least how to grow at a normal rate because those suckers were longer than my dad’s forearm, and bigger around than my (albeit child-sized) thighs. They didn’t get all hard and nasty on the inside, either, for some reason, like most squash will at that size. And they just kept coming. I don’t even remember seeing that many flowers, but every day we were pulling upwards of 20lbs of Squish out of the garden, only for there to be more the next day, or sometimes by the end of the day if we harvested in the morning. I don’t know where they were hiding, but it was like some sort of squash portal had opened into our yard and started crapping out Frankenstein’s Squashes.
At first, it was great. We could eat all we wanted and not worry about rationing it. But the growing season in Arkansas is long, and we had incredible weather that summer, so those darn things kept alternating flowers and fruit. Pull off a few Squish, new flowers budded out, and they ripened super-fast in the heat. We were absolutely swimming in Squish, because they were so big that even gorging on them meant only 1 or 2 got eaten per meal. (I think I recall using a few particularly enormous ones as swords for a duel with my sister, if that says anything about their size. I cannot overemphasize how absolutely, heinously gigantic they were. You probably don’t believe me but I am not kidding. Those things were bigger than a newborn by several many inches and a couple pounds.)
We had (luckily) a big deep freezer, and someone gifted us a bunch of freezer ziploc bags, so we started chopping them up and freezing them as we pulled them off. We ran out of bags real fast, so we caved and bought a ton more. We filled that deep freezer near to bursting. It was probably 3-4 feet deep, (as I remember barely coming up to the edge of it), and at least 4-5 feet long, about 2.5 feet across, and we filled it to the top with Squish. And that’s while we’re eating fresh ones every day with dinner! But still more Squish came before the first frost, so we started packing the fridge. And my grandma’s freezer. And my grandma’s fridge. And feeding them to the pigs and chickens. And giving them away at church.
Do you realize how big a deal it is that people who were so broke that they had to choose between gas and the power bill were GIVING AWAY FOOD??? That’s how much gosh darn Squish we had. And little did I know, but apparently, my dad HATES squash. He only planted them because they were a cheap, quick source of food and my mom loved squashes. And he got stuck with the folly of his decisions. For over a year.
Yep. We had Squish in the freezer for over a year. Eating it regularly. It lasted for over a year. A family of 5, plus often feeding my grandmother, we ate off a single garden’s haul for over a year. Of just the Squish. I tell you, if we’d had a farmer’s market back then, that Squish could probably have single-handedly lifted us out of poverty. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.
We never planted both again, probably because my dad would have combusted out of rage if he’d ever seen another Squish in his life. But man those were the days for thems of us what loved squash.
So survival tip: If you need an absolute crapton of food, plant you a row of yellow squash and a row of zucchini, and keep that pattern going for as many rows as you like. You too can drown in Squish and love it.
Oh wow.
The last story is well worth the read. It might be long but I found it absolutely delightful! Thank you for sharing your childhood Squish gardening adventures!
Meanwhile, people are starving to death.
Ands What do you expect poor rural farmers who just have excess zucchini to do about that exactly? Mail them to Africa?
I was just talking to a friend today about gardening and she said “I’ll plant zucchini for this project.”
“Oh dear… what’s your damage control plan?”
“Oh,” she said, intuiting what I meant. “Eating the blossoms. Love stuffed blossoms. Pumpkin, squash, zucchini. It keeps the crop down, and you get lots of mileage out of them. You keep a mixed crop that way, too. Plus, people don’t always welcome gifts of zucchini, but they find gifts of blossoms exciting.”
This struck me as absolutely game-changing.
We occasionally got left a box of zucchinis longer and thicker than my arm by a neighbour when we lived in the country. So we made relish. This recipe is amazing. Hot, sweet and sour, and with a beautiful balance of spices.
Sweet Courgette Relish from The Preserving Book
Makes approx 1.5kg (3lb 3oz) (2 medium preserving jars)
Takes 1 hour 25 minutes
Keeps 6 months
Ingredients
900g (2lb) courgettes, finely chopped by hand or food processor
1 large onion, very finely chopped by hand or food processor
500ml (16fl oz) cider vinegar
350g (12oz) granulated sugar
2 tsp English mustard powder
1 tsp tumeric
1-2 tsp chilli flakes
2 tsp cornflour
2 tsp coriander seeds
Method
1. Put the courgettes and onion in a preserving pan or a large heavy-based, stainless steel saucepan. Pour over the cider vinegar and stir to mix.
2. Add the sugar, mustard powder, turmeric, chilli flakes, cornflour, and coriander seeds, and stir over a gentle heat until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 40 minutes-1 hour or until the mixture has thickened. The relish is ready when it is the consistency of burger relish. (Dragging the spoon across the base of the pot reveals a clean pan.)
3. Ladle into warm sterilized jars with non-metallic or vinegar-proof lids, seal, and label. Store in a cool, dark place. Allow the flavours to mature for 1 month, and refrigerate after opening.
My Notes
Out of the relishes and chutneys I’ve made, this is my absolute favourite. It’s easy to scale it up if you’ve got a greater volume of zucchini, so long as your pot is big enough, and people love this relish as a gift. I’ve found it keeps fine for longer than six months, so long as your jar is sterile, something easily achieved by filling your jars while the mix is piping hot and inverting the jars to sterilise the lid. Also, though it says to mature it (and it will be better if you do) it is perfectly edible and delicious when it is first made. That’s great if you’ve got an uneven amount of product and there’s a half-jar that needs eating. Goes beautifully with burgers but also on sandwiches, in cheese toasties, on baked potatoes, and by the spoonful if you’ve got a craving for it.
knitting in the dark 