Lasagne. And I hate Mondays.
If it helps, we’ve found cooking the noodles was unnecessary. It holds together better if you don’t.
I just soak the sheets in water whilst making the other elements then construct otherwise I’ve found sometimes you get crunchy lasagne.
That’s never happened to us. Could be our usual sauce is too wet.
Maybe I need more wetness ;p
Skillet lasagna is the answer you seek! Maybe.
And if you’re really feeling lazy, cook up some ravioli, put it in the skillet with the meat sauce, cover it with mozzarella, and throw it in the oven for a few minutes. Voila! Psuedo-lasagna
protip : you can cook anything. maybe you don’t cook it well the first time. but if you’re not completely freeballin it, and are following an established well reviewed recipe, once you cook it poorly or not to your taste, you can always make notes, and adjust the next time. be fearless in your experiments, there’s a lot of freedom (and cost savings) in learning how to cook what you like to eat, the way you like to eat it, at home.
Cubanos. I want to really, really bad. But I know I will never go through that.
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.
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.
It could easily be a family recipe. It looks like riffs on this theme are pretty common. Maybe it was a Hungarian recipe? Sounds like a great mystery!
That Hungarian dish looks visually the closest but it was definitely made with wet cottage cheese.
I am absolutely going to butcher the name/spelling but it was called “cvlockclusa” in my house. I’ll ask my mom how it’s spelt.
She responded immediately. It’s called “Quark Klöße” according to her.
Looks like the specific ingredients and prep are a family thing, but that’s definitely what it’s based on.
Now I can rest easy. It was gonna drive me crazy if I couldn’t remember the name of the food. Haha
This seems pretty close to what you described: https://www.chefkoch.de/rezepte/166041072019596/Suesse-Quarkkloesse.html
It sounds good / I’m thinking about giving them a go. If you find a better recipe let me know.
I think my mom’s recipe is all in her head. I do know that she tends to add some lemon peel zest into the dumpling mix which gives it just the faintest citrus smell/taste prior to the butter and brown sugar being added at the end.
Bed of luck. Let me know how you like em.
Will do, thanks! I totally get having the tweaks in your head or written into the family recipe book with a pen. Our better homes cookbook has tons of notes/tweaks written into it now.
I should probably ask my mom to write down her recipes for posterity sake at some point. I think my sister knows some of them .
I think they are called Topfenknödel in German, i remember my family making them as well, served with jam, they are delicious!
I don’t really lack for motivation, I’ll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can’t logistically make happen.
For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I’ve checked,) and I just don’t have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.
I’ve made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I’ve helped butcher chickens, I’ve made beef Wellington, sushi, I’ve baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I’ve made ice cream, homemade pierogies.
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It’s a ham sandwich. If you can pick your nose up can make a passable bechemal
Cooking in general
Spring rolls. They are so much work. If you wanna do them right you have to start the night before. So many ingredients, the sauce. But they’re soooo good.
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.
Lamb Vindaloo.
God I wanna be good at making that. And veggie samosas
I just made that this week and think I may agree with you, or at least I’d not try on a workday again. I didn’t have the right peppers and used dried ancho, jarred roasted red pepper and a little fresh red pepper and it came out really good, sorta new world /old world delicious fusion but my God, toasting, grinding, processing, tasting, resting the paste. Started in the morning and let it rest while I was at work. Also started sourdough naan in the morning & of course made a vegetable dish to go with the meat - everything was good but I was exhausted by the end of the day!
Croissants. Tasty and pretty, but a ridiculous amount of fiddly work with all the rolling and folding.
Ditto puff pastry from scratch.
Traditional versions also contain ~50% butter by total pre-cooking weight. (Hello heart-health my old friend…)
Dunno about your area, but there’s some pretty awesome frozen puff pastry sold in thin-ish sheets at most stores around here. It bakes up quick and almost magically multi-layered, and I would not for a million years be able to tell it from scratch puff pastry from une belle boulangerie.
Yeah, frozen puff pastry is a go-to ingredient. You just won’t catch me making it by hand because as my grandmother used to say, bugger that for a game of soldiers.
Sourdough
It’s honestly not hard at all.
Do you have a reliable starter recipe?
As much as I love barbecue I don’t and won’t own a smoker.
Croissants - 3 days prep time minimum? You have to be very precise with everything and it’s just such a bother.
