Louisa 🍽 @Louisa@toomanycooks.social

I'm sorry if you reply to me from mastodon.social, I won't see it!

I just have to post my favorite author's words about my favorite subject, all quotes by Terry Pratchett:

📖 Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realising that most of his customers want meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits. —Men at Arms

📖 A good cook is always the first one into the kitchen every morning and the last one to go home at night. —Witches Abroad

📖 A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman.  —Monstrous Regiment

📖 I wouldnae argue wi’ a cheese. —Wintersmith

#introductions

It's Louisa! I've been around the fediverse for a couple of years now, if you know me you know I love to cook and eat and talk about food

My parents are English but I grew up in the northeastern US, so my strengths are in those regions' foods, but I love to experiment and try new things

Here's some things I've made

You can tell the weeks where I buy a pack of pork chops huh

This is an Egyptian warm potato salad, it has boiled potatoes, cilantro, white vinegar, cumin and coriander seeds toasted in oil with garlic, paprika, honey, salt and pepper

Cookbook: try not to use [ingredient available everywhere], you'll get the best results from [ingredient you've never seen for sale]

Me, knowing I'm only going to be able to get and use the one they say to avoid: ok

I frequently make meals that just happen to be very low in fat (apart from the tiny bit added by the lean loin chop, the only fat in this recipe is one teaspoon of bacon fat) without really being healthy, I'm almost on to something

WHOA suddenly got a day's worth of notifications all at once

Hmm, not getting notifications on this account when people @ me, that's new

Does anyone know a good furikake I could get through Amazon that does *not* have seaweed? I just really don't like the taste of seaweed, and the 3 types at my grocery store all have it

I've been thinking about Japanese food again, since watching Midnight Diner

I adapted this recipe for the tamagoyaki: https://www.japanesecooking101.com/tamagoyaki-recipe/ I added more soy sauce, less mirin, and some minced green onion

I really wanted to make it in a rectangular skillet, but I don't have one, so I used a non-stick loaf pan right on top of the stove. The omelet tastes good but as you can see it has some dark edges from where the thin pan didn't disperse heat well. Next time I'll use lower heat

The rice is plain white rice with Trader Joe's umami mushroom seasoning mixed in

It's mushroom day on toomanycooks dot gov

Hell yeah! Time to get nuts

I've been wanting to try making mushroom ketchup again, I thought about working directly from some old recipes, but they're quite vague

I decided to work from a modern interpretation of an old recipe instead, it's all going well so far (the link has the written recipe, pictures, and a video with the video transcript)

https://savoringthepast.net/2016/04/13/mushroom-ketchup/

Changes: My box of mushrooms is 1.5lbs rather than 2, so I'm adding some reconstituted porcinis for flavor and liquid volume; and I don't have fresh grated horseradish, so I'm going to use fresh grated garlic instead (the nice thing about old recipes is substitutions can vary wildly, depending on what you have— here garlic and horseradish would both work as intense flavor additions)

Tomorrow I'll see how well it comes out!

It took me a while to figure out this was cayenne pepper

So as far as I can tell, the name of the fruit mango became synonymous with the mango pickle/chutney that was imported. This is further complicated by British chutneys being very unlike Indian chutneys

Indian chutneys vary by region and can be thick or thin, cooked or raw, sweet or sharp

British chutneys are cooked sweet and sour fruit compotes with strong flavors of mustard, horseradish and garlic

Cooking suffers from the same language problems as animal and plant taxonomy: if it's sort of the same shape and color, it might end up with the same name

I think I found the reason in the Dictionarium Domesticum, which gives you the definition of mangos

I went down a rabbit hole reading these old cookbooks (Dictionarium Domesticum and A Lady's Assistant, both late 1700s English books, both free on Google books if you want to read them)

A Lady's Assistant has many recipes for "Mangos", a cross between a jam and a pickle, with different fruits/vegetables featured

...Why are they called mangos?