Community center class: Yes, You Can Actually Cook

[vdistinctive]

"Starch," Eliot said, as soon as it looked like they had all the students they were going to get, this week. There was still a large pile of vegetables on the front desk, and diced up waiting for the students at their work stations. There would always be a large pile of vegetables in this class. No one -- in Eliot's culture at least, and he was guessing several others, too -- ate enough vegetables. "It's cheap. It's filling. It's just nutritious enough to keep you going in a tight spot. There's a reason why various starches show up as staples in pretty much every region of Earth. Today we're going to deal with two of the more popular ones worldwide: noodles and rice."

Eliot held up a rectangle of tightly packed dried pasta. "Any of you who spent any time tryin' to keep yourself fed on a real tight budget in the US will probably recognize this. It's one of the cheapest things in most American grocery stores, clockin' in at less than a dollar for a 'full meal'." Oh yes, he was doing air quotes there. "Comes in a little brick just like this, cooks in about three minutes in boiling water, and is edible dry if you're too impatient for that. Has a little flavor packet that'll make your cardiologist cringe. This is American ramen. We basically owe the Japanese a big time apology for these. But if you toss out the flavor packet and use some fresh ingredients, you can make yourself something tasty that provides more than just the absolute basic calories you need to survive in no time at all."

He set the noodles down and picked up a mason jar of long grain white rice. "I'm hopin' any of you who've spent more than the last two weeks on Earth know what this is. It's one of the about ten or so cereal grains, mostly grown in Asia, and one of the three most cultivated food plants in the world. It can be a pain in the ass to cook the first couple of times you try it, involving a lot more precise measuring than noodles to get that perfectly tender result. Lucky for you, I have a nice, easy guide for you all to follow so you get something edible. Rice works as a base for any number of recipes, from stir fries, to chilis, to jambalaya. I've got recipes for all those up here, but stir fries are probably your best bet for something fast and flavorful.

"Now the real trick when it comes to making a starch for your meal is the timing. Boiling water can take awhile. And no, adding salt to the water does not make it boil faster, not without enough salt to ruin what you're tryin' to cook. Salting the water does cut down on the metallic flavors you can get from modern tap water, brings out the flavors of whatever you're cooking in it, and helps keep your pasta from sticking together. There's a reason salt was once worth more than gold on this planet.

"But that's enough from me. You got your choice of recipes at your station. If there are any terms ya ain't familiar with, ask. Best way to learn any cooking technique is to actually try doing it yourself. And the same rule applies as last week: cut off a finger or set anything on fire, and I will kill you."

Comments

Sign in

[vdistinctive]

Living off of ramen

Re: Sign in

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan Jarrus

Re: Sign in

[myownface]

Sparkle

Re: Sign in

[talentforlying]

John Constantine

Listen to the lecture

[vdistinctive]

Wonder what made that flavor packet so evil. (Salt. It was salt.)

Re: Listen to the lecture

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan's mouth twitched a little into something resembling an amused smile. He appreciated that 'that spent more than the last two weeks' classifier there.

The funny thing was, he did actually know rice to see it. And noodles, even if those ones were different from any he had seen before.

His galaxy was a funny place.

RE: Listen to the lecture

[solo_sword]

Jaina had had an ex who went to college. She definitely knew ramen.

Hey, she was lucking out in this class so far!

Boil some starches!

[vdistinctive]

Be it ramen noodles, or rice for your stir fry, chili, or jambalaya.

Don't forget the salt. Yes, Eliot realizes this seems contradictory. But there are types of salt. Amounts of salt. Context matters, dammit!

Re: Boil some starches!

[uncertain_dume]

Kanan poked through the recipes, looking for one that had the most ingredients he could actually guess at. If that meant a fairly basic bacon and egg breakfast ramen dish, well, at least he still had to guess at 'scallions.'

Everything else he wasn't sure about, like nori or chicken broth, was at least neatly labelled on the package. And 'broth,' he knew. But what the hell was a chicken? Or a Korean, for that matter?

Re: Boil some starches!

[myownface]

Okay, so, Sparkle was basically flinging himself entirely into the deep end today, grabbing for that Jambalaya recipe like his life depended on it. A little bit because it looked the most complicated, yes, and partly because he'd already basically perfected every tight-ass ramen recipe the world had ever seen.

Mostly, however, because he was desperate for the distraction, and taking one of the slightly more complex recipes seemed like something that could drag his focus into it and away from the gnawing worry about Atton that was growing every day.

Re: Boil some starches!

[soniaroadsqueen]

Ringo frowned as she looked around her station. "Where's the rice cooker?" she asked, not realizing that she was talking out loud. "How do you cook rice without a rice cooker?" The concept just didn't compute for her.

Looked like she was going to make something with Ramen.

Re: Boil some starches!

[vdistinctive]

"With a pot," Eliot said with a rueful smirk, pointing to the small, lidded saucepan at her station. "On a stove. The way people were doin' it for centuries before automatic rice cookers were invented."

He'd be grumpier about this conversation if Ringo were an adult. Teenagers he allowed to not know better.

Re: Boil some starches!

[soniaroadsqueen]

Ringo blinked, not sure she understood. "People cook rice without rice cookers?"

That didn't make sense!

RE: Boil some starches!

[solo_sword]

Since Jaina had done the ramen thing, she put some rice on while she decided to go with stir fry, because she wasn't scared of vegetables and it was hard to screw up.

And yet she turned the rice to mush. "Wait," she said, staring at it. "How?"

Re: Boil some starches!

[vdistinctive]

Eliot looked over her shoulder. "Too much water," he said. "You want a 2-to-1 water to rice ratio. Too much and the rice starts to fall apart. Go on and try it again."

Re: Boil some starches!

[stickitupmyjinx]

Vanessa decided to try a recipe that called for adding ketchup to ramen because she wasn't saying she'd done that before out of desperation but she would say she was curious about whether the other ingredients made it taste better than sadness.

Re: Boil some starches!

[captainskullpoopl]

And Wade was... mostly just along for the ride. Unless you people wanted the stove to catch fire. Did you want that? No, you didn't.

"Oooo, and ethnic fusion. We're fancy as shit."

Talk to Eliot

[vdistinctive]

Ask what happens if you only almost cut your finger off.

OOC

[vdistinctive]

There was a guy in my high school who would put boiling water in a thermos and break ramen into it before leaving for school. To eat it for lunch. It was like a disintegrated ramen smoothie. I also knew a kid who would save up the flavor packets and eat them straight when he got hungry in class.

High schoolers are weird.

Re: OOC

[uncertain_dume]

... The idea of a disintegrated ramen smoothie makes me never want ramen again.

Fortunately, reading all of those recipes saved it for me again. These will supplement my ramen omelette nicely. (College was a dark time.)

Re: OOC

[vdistinctive]

I burned out on ramen young (two parents who worked full time and weren't enthusiastic cooks to begin with = middle school me breaking plates in the microwave trying to make pizza out of white bread, baloney, and american cheese. Ramen was brought home to save the crockery). But researching those recipes last night has made me wonder if 20 years later it's time to try it out again!

Re: OOC

[filleauloup]

For some reason this reminds me of how, in the interest of drought-related water conservation, one of my favorite restaurants swapped out the rice in a lot of their recipes for sorghum.

I have since decided I quite like sorghum.

(I'm not actually sure how much of a contribution that makes to saving water, but eh. I got to try a new thing.)

Re: OOC

[vdistinctive]

. . . I don't think I've ever had sorghum as itself, instead of as a flour or whatever in something else. Maybe it requires a lot less water to get tender?

RE: OOC

[solo_sword]

Even at my poorest I never tried ramen.

Solely because I have high blood pressure and honestly worried the sodium might kill me and I didn't know you could skip the flavor packet till today.

Re: OOC

[vdistinctive]

Faaaaaaaaaaaaaair. I think I figured out you didn't need the flavor packets out of desperation because Mom kept buying the wrong flavor. I definitely started reducing the amount of the packet I used at some point, too, even on the flavors I did like. Or draining out the water like with regular pasta and then adding the packet as a topping, because I didn't feel like measuring the water.

I don't recommend that one. It was pretty gross.