I have a work trip to Chicago coming up soon and I was hoping any locals or people who have visited Chicago could suggest some food places I should be checking out.

I'll be staying at a hotel near the Woodfield mall, so ideally places closer to the mall would be best, which I know is not close to downtown Chicago. I'll be primarily working, so I won't have a ton of time to wander around or check out the city.

I will literally try anything so just looking for good or interesting food.

I've been thinking about getting into cast iron cooking. I need a new skillet, and I've seen recommendations for cast iron, but some things seem daunting:

• Seasoning. How bad is it really? Did you purchase a pre-seasoned pan and just cook with it? Do you re-season occasionally? How often? What oil do you use? What is your process?
• Cleaning. How do you clean your skillet? Soap and water? How do you know when you are done cleaning? What materials do you use?
• Unknowns. What did you not know until you started cooking with cast iron? Any surprise benefits/costs?

Have any of you used cast iron, then returned to Teflon or stainless steel after being disappointed in the experience? What are the biggest differences between cooking with cast iron and other materials?

Considering that non-stick manufacturing poses environmental risks, and iron may provide a net positive effect for folks needing more iron in their diet, it seems like this is a natural way to go.

I’ve been exploring coffee and came across this interesting news about “co-fermented coffee”

https://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/discussion-undocumented-infusion-in-green-roasted-coffee-t102005-230.html#p1079794

So in a nutshell, the claim is that you can take green coffee beans and ferment them with some other food item such as spices or fruit, and this process will in turn affect the flavour of the coffee after you roast it and brew it.

Full disclosure, I’ve never heard of co-fermented coffee before. To the best of my knowledge I have never had it before.

The controversy appears to be that perhaps on some or even all cases, the co-fermentation is being augmented or even faked by the addition of glycol and artificial flavours. The suspicion is that typical flavours that are being claimed shouldn’t be stable at the temperatures used in roasting coffee. They also shouldn’t be identifiably the same flavours as the fruit that go in, yet you have lychee co-ferments that apparently taste like lychee, mango co-ferments that taste like mango, and so on.

I’m curious how this all came about. I assume initially co-fermentation was a purely natural process. It sounds like a super obvious thing to attempt. Now we apparently see widespread evidence of chemical additives. Maybe it is in response to instability of the process? Did it ever work as claimed, and did these tests possibly only target the most egregious flavour profiles which therefore found the artificial flavours while not testing the milder and natural variants? I’m sure there are many questions since this seems like an early stage of examination.

So my question is, tilderinos, what’s your take? Is this just gatekeeping, is this fraud on the consumer, do we need certification ala sparkling wine vs champagne for processes, is this possibly just a good and useful evolution of coffee processing?

By sandwich, I am excluding "the Shaggy", where you just pile every good thing you can think of on.

I mean what is your favorite traditional sandwich, such that you could say the name to a stranger and have a reasonable chance of them knowing what fillings you are thinking of.

You may include candidates which are not not universally be considered a sandwich, such as hot dogs, quesadillas, burgers, etc. So long as you genuinely beleive it to be superior to all other sandwich forms.

My current shortlist of candidates, as examples:

1. Grilled Cheese - Simple, easy, accessible to the masses

2. Bahn Mi - A Vietnamese sandwich of a split baguette with kewpie mayo spread, stuffed with marinated grilled pork, cucumber, carrot, and sliced green pepper.

3. Italian Combo - An informal sub combination typically consisting of salami, capicolla, and some form of cheese, mozzarella being used as a default .

You can choose your own metric for what makes for a superior sandwich and may consider any standard toppings for the sandwich like mustard/mayo to be included.

Hi all. I'm interested on hearing about recipes you've come up with yourself, whether completely from scratch or variation on an existing one. Maybe you were lacking an ingredient one day, and subbed one that changed the recipe in a good way. Maybe you tried a dish at a restaurant that you love and attempted to recreate it at home. Maybe you had a bunch of leftover ingredients you didn't know what to do with, so decided to throw them all together and pray for the best. Or maybe inspiration struck suddenly one day for a perfect dish, and you gave it a shot. Would love to hear the backstory of the recipe if you have it. I'll start.

Cincinnati style daal. The family chili recipe growing up was cincinatti/skyline style chili. I've thus always preferred my chili without beans, and I love the depth of flavor cincinnati style chili has. My family even likes to use ground turkey meat because we think it absorbs the flavors of the spices better than beef does. When I moved to the UK, I suddenly had access to excellent Indian food, daals now being one of my favorites. One thing that immediately struck me about daals was the depth of flavor in them. The lentils serve to add texture and some creaminess, but the spices in it are the highlight of the dish. In fact, this kinda reminded me of my family chili. I began wondering, could I make a daal but with the spices from my family chili? This would be pretty nice, as turkey is kinda hard to find outside of christmas time here and lentils are a good low-cost protein. Well, it turns out the cooking process for daal and my family's chili are pretty similar, so I took a black daal recipe from dishoom and tried subbing the cincinatti chili spices for the spices in the daal. Many of the other ingredients between the two recipes are similar. And it's come out pretty good! I'm still refining it, it lacks some umami without the meat, but I think the next batch will be great. Serving it with naan and cilantro, instead of spaghetti. Always with shredded cheese and chopped onions of course.

Filipino Dip. One of my favorite recipes to make is chicken adobo, so easy to make and it's delicious. I usually have some chicken and sauce left after making a batch, and one day it occurred to me that there was enough sauce left I could dip a sandwich in it. Huh, that's kinda similar to a french dip. So I shredded up the remaining chicken, toasted a baguette, and sauteed a bunch of onions to add to the sandwich. It was absolutely delicious, and what I will be doing with my leftover chicken adobo from now on.

St Patrick's Day Ramen. So, this year I decided to make my family's St Patrick's Day meal. Kinda hard to do in the UK, as corned beef is really not a big thing. (Yes, I know they have the tinned version, no, it's nothing like the real deal). But I corned my own beef, and then braised it in red wine, and invited friends over to share. Afterwards, with all the corned beef gone, a friend and I were looking at the braising liquid. There was a ton of it left, and it tasted frankly delicious. My friend pointed out that it reminded him of a ramen broth, and so an idea was born. I bought some thinly sliced beef from the local asian grocery store, and assembled the ramen with it, the noodles, cabbage, thinly sliced green apples (I know it seems weird, but it's used in the family cabbage recipe), and pickled garlic/cucumbers made from the leftover corned beef brine. It came out delicious, and will definitely be doing it next year.

Oven roasted brussel sprouts and carrots. This came from a restaurant near me that unfortunately closed. They would make the most amazing, crispy, roast brussel sprouts and carrots served with a tangy, smokey dressing. After it closed, I would dream of these brussel sprouts, and I tried googling recipes to find something similar with no luck. I knew only a couple of things: that the head chef was Peruvian and said on the menu it had inspired this dish; there was mezcal in the dressing, likely providing the smokey component. So after researching Peruvian recipes, I've come up with a vinaigrette that's as close as I can remember: bragg's cider vinegar, juice from one lime, olive oil, salt and black pepper, and a splash of mezcal. If available, add a touch of aji amarillo paste. May need to add a little sugar for a hint of sweetness. It took some time to figure out a crispy brussel sprout too, as home ovens can't get as hot as a commercial kitchen, but also finally found an oven roasting recipe I was happy with.

Looking forward to hearing everyone elses recipes!

A little less than a year ago, I asked for your recommendations on bread maker tips, tricks, and recipes, and thought I’d give a small update.

The bread maker I bought is functionally the Breville Custom Loaf, rebranded for the local market (“Tramontina by Breville”). I paid R$3069 for it. It was on sale: the same machine now sells for anywhere between R$2991 to R$3690. (These equate to about 565USD then and 594USD to 732USD now, considering contemporaneous exchange rates.)

My +/- weekly recipe eventually settled upon via much trial and many errors comes from an amalgamation of various sources, by now mostly lost. In the summer, I have to halve the recipe and make bread twice as often, or the maresia / damp sea air makes it mould before we can eat the whole thing!

I have also not tried to make anything but this exact bread since I started. My dreams of raisin buns are as of yet unrealised. Next year for the end of the year, I plan to make panettone in it, as we don’t plan to travel.

My unhalved recipe is:

• 450ml water (filtered, cool)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cups 100% whole wheat / integral flour
• >1 tsp demerara sugar
• <1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp (freezer stored, instant dry) yeast
• ~3/4 cup walnuts, in pieces, raw, unsalted, to fill the “automatic” dispenser on the machine (sometimes the bulk goods shop by me is out of nuts. the bread is better with nuts, but fine without.)

Cost wise, this breaks down to:

• 500mL olive oil : R$25 (0,75/loaf)
• 1kg flour : R$7 (3,17/loaf)
• 1kg sugar : R$10 (0,05/loaf)
• 1kg salt : R$4 (0,02/loaf)
• 100g walnuts : R$10 (12,50/loaf)

I didn’t include the yeast in the breakdown because I have yet to buy any. The 1kg package of yeast I purchased four years ago to make pizza and kept in the freezer since is still going strong. At present, a kilo of yeast costs ~R$23.

Without nuts, my cost per loaf is R$3,99, while with nuts, it’s R$16,49. My local supermarket sells a (frankly inferior) and much smaller (350g) “100% whole wheat” loaf for R$25.

Having kept incomplete records, I believe for most of the year we have made a loaf about every five days: let’s pretend means over the past year, I’ve made 70 loaves at about a 50/50 split of nuts or no-nuts, so let’s put my total cost of making bread as R$716,80. If we buy bread, it’s an every-other-day occurance, so R$4562,50 spent on bread in a year. Adding the cost of the bread maker to the mix, if these were real figures, we would have saved R$776,70 so far, just in this year alone.

And it has served us well, with some slight oddities!

The first is based on the machine: never once in the usage of the machine has the “automatic” dispenser of nuts automatically added the nuts at the proper stage. I have read the documentation, and I can find no explanation. At present, if I want nuts added, I have to remain at home when the maker is going, as it screams something awful (buzzer) when it’s “going to” add the nuts, and then I run along and poke open the dispenser door with my finger until the latch opens and the nuts dispense into the awaiting dough. If I know I won’t be home, I don’t add nuts, because otherwise, I will come home to a nice loaf of bread and a small dispenser of lightly warmed nuts. (Heh.)

The second is that my recipe is not as good when I have to halve it! In the damp season, I had to throw away a few half-loaves, as mold loves my poor little bread, and the bread does not survive well in the fridge. But splitting the recipe (and altering the settings on the bread maker to reflect, which is itself an imprecise science) has yet to lead to a smaller version of my usual recipe: what comes out is a biscotti-shaped, flat, dense, but still edible loaf. I’m still figuring it out!

All in all, thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the previous thread, and let this be encouragement to anyone else on the fence to try out a breadmaker!

Hello,

I'm into self-hosting and when my daughter (elementary school) started writing her own recipe book, I kinda went "She is young, she shouldn't be doing this in paper form" and I started looking around for a solution for kinda non-existing problem.

I stumbled upon Mealie, which is server that can be used in docker and is self-hosted recipe book/website. It seems like you can come in and say like "I have these ingrediants, what can I do?", it also seems to be able to generate shopping lists based on your selected recipe, you can use checkboxes when bringing all the ingredients on the kitchen board/table/top (non-English native speaker here) and so on.

It seems like the right software for me, but before I delve into it, I wanted to ask if someone else possibly runs such service for themselves at their home. Is there somebody who is using something like this? It doesn't have to be Mealie, specifically. But it should be server-side service, not some smartphone app. I know there are other such services, which are also open-source, but I forgot the names, sorry.

Thanks for any relevant answers!