Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Black salt's a subcontinental thing, I think. Goes into chaat masala, for instance. You wouldn't put it on your chips but it adds an interesting extra dimension to reasonably strongly flavoured things...
 

muser

Well-known member
Ah ok a friend put it in scrambled eggs by accident thinking it was pepper, definitely not the intended use.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Home alone. Beans with (not on) brown toast. Early eating to reap the last hour of solitude. Add chipotle flakes to the beans to burn out the bronchioles and loosen the Covid spores.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Feeling kinda broke with no money coming in and various annoying expenses (new car key 140 euros for example) so bought all the ingredients for a huge chili yesterday. Except when we got home and started cooking we realised that we hadn't picked up any beans for the chili. Instead we bulked it out with lentils... basically it became something else but a pretty nice something else. Albeit disconcertingly orange.
 

luka

Well-known member
i had to do a big lentil thing the other day too Rich. it's the one thing i've got a huge surplus of. that and white rice. at least i wont starve.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Don't. One of the most annoying things about cooking for a 9 year old is the insistence that all foods must be clearly separated on the plate. Marked off in their separate zones. Food apartheid.

Chuckles. This is just my own finicky tangent of food plating. If I did this with the kids I might wake up to more revolutionary acts of excrement vandalism.

It boils down to enjoying crispy toast. If you dump beans on toast withinin a minute or 2 it goes soggy. I even go so far as leaving beans in the bowl post-microwave, toast on the side. If bacon is added, best crunch it up, stir it into the beans and get the full rush

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Cheese and ham sandwich with mayo - and on the side a glass of gazpacho (out of a carton) with some hot sauce stirred in to make a kind of quick fake virgin mary.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The other day I bought some flour specifically for making pasta (tho fuck that, far too much hard work) or pizza dough (now you're talking), which is made from a certain kind of wheat and milled to a certain fineness. Anyway, it made a brilliant dough, markedly better than the dough I usually make just with the same strong white flour I use for making ordinary bread.

Slightly unusual toppings too, with pastrami instead of salami/chorizo or similar, which gave it a kind of "Jewish NY deli" feel, and some Saint Agur in addition to the mozzarella and parmesan. So not very authentically Italian, but pretty fucking good. Washed it down with a really decent bottle of Bourgogne, too.

pizza3.jpg
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Anyone here put salt on watermelon? It was something that I had never heard of until a year or two back until I happened to mention that watermelons were the only refreshment that seemed to hit the spot when it was super stuffy at night. A chef friend on facebook said that I simply had to have it with salt, and then about a thousand other people chimed in and said "Oh yeah it's amazing, you gotta try it" and made me feel as though there was a whole universe of people eating watermelon with salt and looking down on hapless ignorant fools like me who somehow were unaware of this. Anyway, I tired it and, yeah, fair enough, they were right, it did add something. And then I added salt every time and I got used to it and now I basically look down on anyone who doesn't as some kind provincial backwards fool (not really).
And that was the end of the story* until now, cos when girlfriend came back from France she'd eaten loads of melon there and now she keeps buying loads of different types of melon from the local supermarkets. To be honest, unfathomably, I didn't really know much about melons, in my head there were watermelons which are incredibly refreshing and, other, inferior ones, which I believed to be less refreshing and thus not worth considering. But actually it turns out that lots of them are really good. And they're pretty much all better with salt in my opinion.
Yesterday had a beautifully sweet one, dunno what it was but it was fantastic. Especially with salt.
Today my dinner was I bought a pizza from Aldi - bacon and some sort of cheese - but on top of it I put a whole tin of anchovies and all of the oil before I put it in the oven. And it worked really well, the oil sort of sank into the cheese and it all puffed up and became fluffy and delicious and the topping worked perfectly too - in fact the anchovy flattened everything else and the rest of it couldn't really be tasted but that suits me cos I like anchovy.
But then afterwards, because of the salt I guess, and also because it's a really super stuffy night, I developed a raging, uncontrollable thirst. Nothing will slake it. I've had litres of water, a huge cup of tea (can sometimes do the job when colder drinks somehow fail), several cans of lager, I've had muscatel and then more water still and I'm still so thirsty. And then I remembered the delicious melon from last night... but if I have deliciously refreshing melon with salt on it, will it refresh me or just make me more thirsty?


*using an incredibly generous definition of the word "story"
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
In Russia you can get virtually everything pickled - which is salt too I guess but not the same.
Chili is a good point actually, I like chili in everything pretty much. As you can probably guess I ended up going for salt on the melon in the end, it seems to be doing the trick, along with sitting on the balcony cos in fact it's not that stuff out here, just still.
 
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