This just depresses the fuck out of me. The whole meal, from the concept (or lack thereof) to the crappy execution, has nothing that you should be proud of. No useful techniques. No novel pairings of ingredients. No insights into food or cooking of any sort. Even the photography has that sort of crime-scene forensic quality. Here's a shot of the victim, male, 34. The murder weapon. Blood spatter. A plate of vegetable fajitas. A tire tread...
This is the epitome of the ethnic foodway I like to call American Supermarket Casual. Where you pull from a limited number of always-in-season, non-confrontational vegetables that had to travel thousand of miles to reach your kitchen. That have been cultivated to be hardy and low maintenance. And are ripened artificially on a truck or in a warehouse somewhere. Seasoning provided by garlic, a sauce from a jar or bottle and/or ground spices. Preferably pre-formulated in foil lined pouches. For your convenience
Pair that with chicken breasts if you're being "healthy" or a piece of steak from a branded "premium" cut, sliced skinny so that everyone gets their own steak, drained of blood, injected with CO2 to keep it rosy and sealed away in styrofoam and plastic wrap. For your convenience.
And you can only use ingredients found on a TGI Fridays menu. Cooked in a non-stick skillet because food changes in a non-stick skillet in a gradual, predictable way. And it goes right in the dishwasher. And lets be real here. When cooking is a chore, you're as concerned with the mess you're producing as you are the food. And then pair the result with a generic, uncomplicated starch.
This sort of cooking has no roots. It has no traditions or purpose aside from the efficient creation of edible calories. It says nothing worthwhile about the culture that produces it. It's born out of necessity, a lack of curiosity, a broken tradition of cooking knowledge formerly passed down generation by generation - and most of all it's born of capitalism and the modern supply chain. A culture that glorifies the broccoli floret but discards the stalk. Steams it's vegetables. Buys pre-sliced button mushrooms. Has never held a pea-pod, broken down a chicken in a non-psychological way and has no idea that those unassuming little brussels sprouts grow as knurled protuberances in a spiral around the girthy shaft of Mother Nature's most nightmarish dildo.
Don't be a person that cooks this way. Just don't do it anymore. You didn't make a Fajita tonight. Skip the black beans and swap rice for tortillas and add a couple squirts of soy sauce and you've got the classic lazy college stir fry. A confusing mishmash of too many disparate ingredients. Which unlike the A-Team are brought together not because they each contribute a specific, useful skill. But because they were all heading to the same place at the same time. A plane crash.
And all your ingredients are so fucking sweet. There's no attempt at any sort of balance. Yellow and red peppers, because they're sweet. No green peppers, because they're bitter and weird and harder to figure out. An onion. Sweet. Button mushrooms - which taste inherently like pleasurable nothing. Corn - sweet. Black beans - why? Why would you put canned black beans straight into a Fajita? At least the broccoli isn't contributing to the fructose hellscape you've conjured up. But then you added the motherfucking shredded carrots. And that's what compelled me to respond. The fucking shredded fucking carrots.
The Jar Jar Binks of cuisine. Except Jar Jar is corpulent and riding his little supermarket scooter inexorably towards your house where he is going to make you watch as he fucks and eats your dog. Shredded carrots exist because places like Applebees need something cheap that they can sprinkle on their food that adds color and texture but no one is allergic to and has an unobjectionable flavor that they don't have to work with, or around. It's confetti. It's not food. Unless you eat confetti. Like a deranged, escaped, animate pinata. But I figure even a pinata would know to add cumin to his Fajitas.
And why both sour cream and guacamole? Why not avocado crema? Or guacamole and cheese. Or just cheese. Or neither. And the tomatoes and shredded lettuce at the end I don't even know what to say. You saw the packaged flour tortillas and you flashbacked to the 1980's coked out Normal Rockwell tableaux of the most American Middle Class White Person dinner ever - taco night. Courtesy of El Paso, who provides the jarred "taco sauce" and the spice packets you add to lean ground beef to which you supply the package of pre-shredded cheese, the diced tomatoes and the shredded lettuce. And if you grew up in my household, a can of black olives - the punchline to an undelivered joke. The ultimate ASC meal. Dirty one pan. No difficult knifework. No recipe, just ingredients. Assemble at table. Eat with your hands.
Your execution is perplexing. You cooked all your vegetable and everything at once in a non stick pan over a low heat. You're now cooking for the lowest common denominator - that one ingredient that takes forever to soften. Or you negotiate with the terrorists and give your dining companions something to chew on while the rest of the vegetables slither down their throats.
So the peppers get soggy before the mushrooms have released all their moisture. And by adding water and keeping the heat low, you're ensuring your vegetables will steam, rather than develop any flavor from interacting directly with a hot pan. No browning, searing, scorching. All desirable things in the right quantities. And then you plop it into a tortilla you for some goddamn reason decided not to reheat the lazy way like it says on the package - under a damp paper towel in the microwave - or the right way - in a skillet. So you end up with something that looks more like origami than the pillowy food spliff a tortilla is meant to produce. You actually needed one of those feathery club sandwich toothpicks to hold the fucking thing closed.
Don't do this shit. You learn nothing cooking meals like this. You don't improve. You reinforce bad habits. There are so many real Fajita recipes a google search away that have actual, tex-mex origins. Read a few. Notice what they have in common - cumin, lime juice, hot peppers, only a few vegetables. Maybe some oregano or cilantro or chili power. Grilled. High heat. All you had to do to make this great was take some nice meaty portobello mushrooms, cut them in strips, marinade them for a little while in lime juice, cumin, cilantro, jalapeno, oil, and garlic and soy sauce. Cook them in a hot pan. Take some bell peppers and onions and throw them under your broiler until lightly blackened. Cut into strips. Toss with some of the reserved marinade. Serve with warm flour tortillas, avocado slices, cilantro for garnish, rice and either some black beans you cooked down with the same sort of stuff you put in the marinade and mashed with a fork or refried beans. Skip the salad. Vegan, tasty, quick, and it pays lip service at least to the flavors and techniques and culture that produced the essential archetypal recipe for fajitas.
Buy a cookbook. Use it. Recipes aren't rules that constrain you. They're the distillation of a thousand years of trial and error, pared down to their most essential lessons. Don't limit yourself to the produce you find at the supermarket. Visit places that specialize in produce - every metro area has one. Farmers markets. Ethnic supermarkets. Buy stuff in season grown in your time zone. Be proud of your food. Make an effort. Don't cook things that aren't eggs on non-stick. Buy some cheap metal pans and learn how to use them. Heat is your ally, not the countdown timer on time bomb that you have to defuse at the last possible second.
Make good food. Good food doesn't always look great or taste perfect. But it has purpose and a reason for showing up on your dining room table aside from reducing your calorie deficit for that day.
27 comments
1 SnapshillBot 2017-12-06
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1 incineratechicken 2017-12-06
This just depresses the fuck out of me. The whole meal, from the concept (or lack thereof) to the crappy execution, has nothing that you should be proud of. No useful techniques. No novel pairings of ingredients. No insights into food or cooking of any sort. Even the photography has that sort of crime-scene forensic quality. Here's a shot of the victim, male, 34. The murder weapon. Blood spatter. A plate of vegetable fajitas. A tire tread...
This is the epitome of the ethnic foodway I like to call American Supermarket Casual. Where you pull from a limited number of always-in-season, non-confrontational vegetables that had to travel thousand of miles to reach your kitchen. That have been cultivated to be hardy and low maintenance. And are ripened artificially on a truck or in a warehouse somewhere. Seasoning provided by garlic, a sauce from a jar or bottle and/or ground spices. Preferably pre-formulated in foil lined pouches. For your convenience
Pair that with chicken breasts if you're being "healthy" or a piece of steak from a branded "premium" cut, sliced skinny so that everyone gets their own steak, drained of blood, injected with CO2 to keep it rosy and sealed away in styrofoam and plastic wrap. For your convenience.
And you can only use ingredients found on a TGI Fridays menu. Cooked in a non-stick skillet because food changes in a non-stick skillet in a gradual, predictable way. And it goes right in the dishwasher. And lets be real here. When cooking is a chore, you're as concerned with the mess you're producing as you are the food. And then pair the result with a generic, uncomplicated starch.
This sort of cooking has no roots. It has no traditions or purpose aside from the efficient creation of edible calories. It says nothing worthwhile about the culture that produces it. It's born out of necessity, a lack of curiosity, a broken tradition of cooking knowledge formerly passed down generation by generation - and most of all it's born of capitalism and the modern supply chain. A culture that glorifies the broccoli floret but discards the stalk. Steams it's vegetables. Buys pre-sliced button mushrooms. Has never held a pea-pod, broken down a chicken in a non-psychological way and has no idea that those unassuming little brussels sprouts grow as knurled protuberances in a spiral around the girthy shaft of Mother Nature's most nightmarish dildo.
Don't be a person that cooks this way. Just don't do it anymore. You didn't make a Fajita tonight. Skip the black beans and swap rice for tortillas and add a couple squirts of soy sauce and you've got the classic lazy college stir fry. A confusing mishmash of too many disparate ingredients. Which unlike the A-Team are brought together not because they each contribute a specific, useful skill. But because they were all heading to the same place at the same time. A plane crash.
And all your ingredients are so fucking sweet. There's no attempt at any sort of balance. Yellow and red peppers, because they're sweet. No green peppers, because they're bitter and weird and harder to figure out. An onion. Sweet. Button mushrooms - which taste inherently like pleasurable nothing. Corn - sweet. Black beans - why? Why would you put canned black beans straight into a Fajita? At least the broccoli isn't contributing to the fructose hellscape you've conjured up. But then you added the motherfucking shredded carrots. And that's what compelled me to respond. The fucking shredded fucking carrots.
The Jar Jar Binks of cuisine. Except Jar Jar is corpulent and riding his little supermarket scooter inexorably towards your house where he is going to make you watch as he fucks and eats your dog. Shredded carrots exist because places like Applebees need something cheap that they can sprinkle on their food that adds color and texture but no one is allergic to and has an unobjectionable flavor that they don't have to work with, or around. It's confetti. It's not food. Unless you eat confetti. Like a deranged, escaped, animate pinata. But I figure even a pinata would know to add cumin to his Fajitas.
And why both sour cream and guacamole? Why not avocado crema? Or guacamole and cheese. Or just cheese. Or neither. And the tomatoes and shredded lettuce at the end I don't even know what to say. You saw the packaged flour tortillas and you flashbacked to the 1980's coked out Normal Rockwell tableaux of the most American Middle Class White Person dinner ever - taco night. Courtesy of El Paso, who provides the jarred "taco sauce" and the spice packets you add to lean ground beef to which you supply the package of pre-shredded cheese, the diced tomatoes and the shredded lettuce. And if you grew up in my household, a can of black olives - the punchline to an undelivered joke. The ultimate ASC meal. Dirty one pan. No difficult knifework. No recipe, just ingredients. Assemble at table. Eat with your hands.
Your execution is perplexing. You cooked all your vegetable and everything at once in a non stick pan over a low heat. You're now cooking for the lowest common denominator - that one ingredient that takes forever to soften. Or you negotiate with the terrorists and give your dining companions something to chew on while the rest of the vegetables slither down their throats.
So the peppers get soggy before the mushrooms have released all their moisture. And by adding water and keeping the heat low, you're ensuring your vegetables will steam, rather than develop any flavor from interacting directly with a hot pan. No browning, searing, scorching. All desirable things in the right quantities. And then you plop it into a tortilla you for some goddamn reason decided not to reheat the lazy way like it says on the package - under a damp paper towel in the microwave - or the right way - in a skillet. So you end up with something that looks more like origami than the pillowy food spliff a tortilla is meant to produce. You actually needed one of those feathery club sandwich toothpicks to hold the fucking thing closed.
Don't do this shit. You learn nothing cooking meals like this. You don't improve. You reinforce bad habits. There are so many real Fajita recipes a google search away that have actual, tex-mex origins. Read a few. Notice what they have in common - cumin, lime juice, hot peppers, only a few vegetables. Maybe some oregano or cilantro or chili power. Grilled. High heat. All you had to do to make this great was take some nice meaty portobello mushrooms, cut them in strips, marinade them for a little while in lime juice, cumin, cilantro, jalapeno, oil, and garlic and soy sauce. Cook them in a hot pan. Take some bell peppers and onions and throw them under your broiler until lightly blackened. Cut into strips. Toss with some of the reserved marinade. Serve with warm flour tortillas, avocado slices, cilantro for garnish, rice and either some black beans you cooked down with the same sort of stuff you put in the marinade and mashed with a fork or refried beans. Skip the salad. Vegan, tasty, quick, and it pays lip service at least to the flavors and techniques and culture that produced the essential archetypal recipe for fajitas.
Buy a cookbook. Use it. Recipes aren't rules that constrain you. They're the distillation of a thousand years of trial and error, pared down to their most essential lessons. Don't limit yourself to the produce you find at the supermarket. Visit places that specialize in produce - every metro area has one. Farmers markets. Ethnic supermarkets. Buy stuff in season grown in your time zone. Be proud of your food. Make an effort. Don't cook things that aren't eggs on non-stick. Buy some cheap metal pans and learn how to use them. Heat is your ally, not the countdown timer on time bomb that you have to defuse at the last possible second.
Make good food. Good food doesn't always look great or taste perfect. But it has purpose and a reason for showing up on your dining room table aside from reducing your calorie deficit for that day.
1 TrailerParkBride 2017-12-06
Oldie but goodie 👌🏻
1 takaci 2017-12-06
It's not that old is it?
1 blacknblue12 2017-12-06
no
1 japsock 2017-12-06
Same
1 IvankaTrumpIsMyWaifu 2017-12-06
Wiwi
1 snallygaster 2017-12-06
A+++
1 Redactor0 2017-12-06
u/FermatsRiemann cook me like one of your French girls.
1 SethRichOrDieTryin 2017-12-06
🤔🤔🤔
1 zergling_Lester 2017-12-06
Also ends sentences with "lmao" and disrespects punctuation. /u/riemann1413 you suck at making alts lmao
1 riemann1413 2017-12-06
i don't use alts lmao
1 zergling_Lester 2017-12-06
Prove it.
1 riemann1413 2017-12-06
no u
1 Country-asshole 2017-12-06
I am riemann1413. I am a bull faggot and I enjoy being fucked by skinny assed black men with small penises. This is one of my many alts.
1 riemann1413 2017-12-06
wow can't argue with that
1 TheThng 2017-12-06
Dude saw ratatouille and thinks he is an expert on gourmet cooking
1 Senator_Chickpea 2017-12-06
1 Ennui2778 2017-12-06
/r/iamveryculinary because /u/theladyeve will need help populating it after the Day of the Can.
1 TheLadyEve 2017-12-06
Do I want to know what the Day of the Can is?
1 Ennui2778 2017-12-06
Shhh bb, you'll know when the nice people come 4u.
1 Ennui2778 2017-12-06
Also unban me pls.
1 Ennui2778 2017-12-06
Also unban me pls.
1 pepperouchau 2017-12-06
Okay, which one of you guys here has this alt?
1 Country-asshole 2017-12-06
You mean that wasn't Turd on Toast?!
What the fuck!
She screwed up my order.
1 Senator_Chickpea 2017-12-06
"Le Pain Allemandaise", or "Scheissebrot"
1 ConsoleWarCriminal 2017-12-06
Otto Von Bismarck Did Nothing Wrong
1 OnlyRacistOnReddit 2017-12-06
/u/kesekimofo you kill me! Damn that was funny.