I’ve started cooking some red lentils in some beef stock, adding them and some breakcrumbs to mince meat to pad the meat out a bit (and hide some extra veg in the meat). With meatballs you cant even tell the difference. What are some of your hacks/tips/tricks?
Mash a large pot of potatoes your usual way. Salt, pepper, milk, butter etc. Drain and flake a large can of tuna in oil, mix it through the potatoes. Scrape it into a large casserole dish and top with grated cheese.
Bake at 180 or 200 Celsius until the cheese is melted and/or golden. Steam frozen vegetables while that’s in the oven. Serve with tomato sauce for kids or if desired.
Baked loaded sweet potatoes.
Basically cook a sweet potato, then open it up and stuff it full of things you like (beans, corn, sour cream is a good one).
Oh yeah? Sounds interesting! What sort of beans?
I usually have a tin of kidney beans that go straight in, or I’d like to try roast chickpeas as well. You can stick in back in the oven if you want everything to warm up nicely together.
This is not really a hack or trick, it’s just something people skip over a lot these days:
Always reuse scraps for broth/stock/soup. Everytime you cut up your vegetables, put all the ends and unused bits in a freezer bag. They will add a lot of flavour and nutrients when slow cooked with the leftover bones (from roast or fried chicken, for example). Then just strain the liquid and use it for whatever you want.
Time/temp/liquid ratio?
if you have a slow cooker - enough water to cover, and then half more, turn on low, leave for 6 hours or until it smells good.
Oh yeah, my time to shine:
Jaffle iron, wholemeal bread, hot sauce, and the fancy Heinz beans when they’re 1/2 price on sale.
Red lentils, cumin, paprika, pepper, soy sauce. Boil for 15 minutes and you have curry.
Frozen veg of choice, packet Singapore noodles, massel laksa stock cube. Way better than instant noodles for about the price, microwave together for 3 minutes, easy.
Loaded fries. Coles fries in the airfrier, TVP microwaved with soy sauce paprika and pepper, sauce of choice, 1kg Coles hummus.
Sweat down leafy green of choice, in the same pan fry garlic, ginger (jarred) anf chilli flakes in canola oil. Add Coles microwave rice.
Let me know if you like these, I’ll dump more after work
fancy Heinz beans
As in baked beans? How do you do them in the jaffle without making lava! Any time I’ve tried a baked bean toastie its ended with sauce covering every inch of the house, and a filling so hot in china syndromes through the core of the earth. Also whats TVP in the loaded fries? But yeah they all sound like winners I’d love to hear more!
Thank you!
hot lava tostie
Jaffle iron is required to seal it in, and you only need a tablespoon and a half of beans. Many people go overboard, this ain’t toastface over here.
TVP
Textured Vegetable Protein is defatted soymeal (the byproduct of soy oil production) and can be used as a mince substitute. Cheap and easy to hydrate.
