Rice with Rice
Sometimes i like a little variation am go with pasta and rice
My favorite dish
Here to introduce you some of the easiest comfort Korean food: Kimchi Fried Rice!
Stir fry some leftover kimchi with some salt and some soy sauce and some olive oil(you can skip that tho). Put cooked rice after 1-2min and cook for another 3 min.
If you don’t like Kimchi’s strong flavor this is definitely the way to try. There’s plenty of recipies online and honestly it’s a recipie that just couldn’t go wrong.
As a college student, I live off of that.
Lentil soup with rice. My wife calls it her favorite comfort food.
What I do is:
Preheat a dutch oven with a little olive oil over medium heat
Dice 2 small/1 large yellow onion
Chop (don’t peel) 2 small/1 large yukon gold potato
Chop a couple of carrots and sometimes a couple of celery stalks
Start the onions cooking down first (sometimes adding just a touch of brown sugar)
After a little bit I add the rest of the veggies and a lot of cumin powder
Wait until all the veggies are getting a just bit tender/browned, stirring occasionally
Add a little bit of white wine and scrape off bits at the bottom of the pot
Add 4 cups water and 4 teaspoons Chicken Better than Bullion
Add more cumin, a bit a ground cardamom, ground coriander, and garlic powder
Let it boil a bit for the veggies to get even more tender
Add 1 cup red lentils and simmer
At this point I start cooking some white rice in my instant pot, takes about 15 minutes
Just about when the rice is done, the lentils should be soft, so take an immersion blender and blend until smooth (should still be a little chunky)
Salt and add bit of lemon juice and/or white wine vinegar to taste
Serve over the rice, garnish with some fresh parsley if wanted
Ok writing it out maybe not the absolute easiest dish – but I think its pretty simple and most of it is totally on auto-pilot. Totally delicious and the leftovers are amazing too.
You can make a super easy version if you’ve got an Instant Pot / pressure cooker - just chuck all the ingredients into a ceramic bowl (I do this instead of putting it in directly as it makes it easier to clean, plus, you can eat right off the bowl when it’s done).
To elaborate, I rinse the rice and lentils together (approx 1:1 ratio but I prefer a bit more lentils than rice, for more protein and a creamier texture), add twice the amount of water, then chuck in veggies (at its very basic just onions and tomatoes; optionally ginger, garlic and chillies), plus spices and seasonings (at its very basic I’d just add turmeric and salt; for more variety I’d add cumin, coriander powder and a pinch of asafoetida -> this is a game changer btw). Close the lid and let it cook for about 15 minutes and then rest for 5-10 mins. Take out the bowl, adjust the water consistency if necessary, garnish with fresh coriander and you’re done. Optionally serve with microwaved or roasted papadoms on the side.
Fast, easy, fuss free and healthy too.
Fried rice. It takes a good bit of technique, but I was able to practice a lot and get good at it while living somewhere where I had a high temperature wok burner. Now that I have the technique down, I can manage pretty well in an ordinary skillet on an electric stove.
Black beans on the crock pot:
- 454g of dry black beans
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 teaspoon of garlic powder
- 4 bay leaves (big)
- 1 piece of dried kombu
- 2 carrots, sliced
Add everything to the crock pot, with 6 cups of water. Cook for 5 hours on high. Once it’s done, add 2 teaspoons of salt and mix well.
I make this every Sunday, and eat throughout the week with fresh rice, salad, nuts, and some protein (tofu or soy in my case). It’s delicious and nutritious.
Are the beans dried? I imagine cooking canned beans for 5 hours will turn them to mush
You’re right! Dried beans, I’ll edit the comment, thanks!
In winter I find soups are great dishes with minimal effort. I chop up some root veg, roast it in the oven until it’s soft then mix it with some liquid and blend it. You can use whatever you have on hand (carrots, squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes) and you can vary the liquid as well. I usually use vegetable stock but coconut milk works well. Add some spices to the vegetables when roasting or just stick with some salt. Then just serve with the nicest bread you can get hold of and eat!
In summer, I always enjoy pasta dishes with some kind of pesto. All you need for a normal pesto is garlic, toasted nuts, oil, an Italian hard cheese and basil. Pine nuts are traditional but cashews are more readily available (and cheaper where I live). If you’ve got a lemon, squeeze some juice in as well. The last month or so has been wild garlic season so I’ve foraged for the leaves and used it in place of both the basil and garlic. Carrot, beetroot and radish leaves are good too (plus others I haven’t tried that I’m sure will also work) or you can roast beetroot or pepper and blend them into the mixture. I just serve this with some pasta, vegetables and cheese (normally feta) and you can make the pesto quite quickly while the pasta is cooking.
Usually when I make soups I boil the veg in the water then blend. Does roasting it first improve the taste?
Yeah, like @Sentenial@lemmy.ml said, the maillard reaction makes stuff taste nice! Compare a boiled potato to a roast potato and see which is better - it usually takes more time to roast over boiling but it’s worth it.
This applies to meat as well. Imo there’s a big flavor improvement to a stew made with seared meat vs one where the meat was added raw to the stew.
Yes, especially if you use relatively highly heat to get some browning. Called the maillard reaction and makes food taste good. Browning a steak in a hot pan is the same thing.
Japanese curry is always a nice comfort food.
Chilli is maybe not super super easy to make, but you can make a ton of it, freeze the rest and eat it every day / every other day in a different style, one day burrito, one day nachos, one day with rice, etc etc.
latte with oat milk + cig 👩🍳🤌
(suppresses appetite and tasty, honestly ditch the cig even, i haven’t eaten in days)
Cook whatever pasta you got. Throw some silken tofu, plant milk, nooch, salt, pepper, and some kind of fat in a blender, taste and add whatever flavor you feel like. Cook some garlic, throw sauce in, add spinach, tomatoes chickpeas, or whatever veggies you want and stir the noodles in. Add more pepper. Usually the sauce is ready by the time the noodles are done so its very quick. Plus its got a bunch of b12, protein, iron, etc depending on what you put in.
So. Much. Pasta.
Here are two more:
- Cook spaghetti; drain and set aside
- In pasta pot, heat generous amount of olive oil
- Add sage leaves; fry until almost crisp
- Add fresh chopped garlic; continue to fry until sage is crisp and garlic bits are brown
- Remove from heat; spaghetti back onto pot and toss. Add salt to taste.
- Serve
3 ingredients (excluding salt, olive oil, and water) and it takes about 15 minutes.
My second current favorite is cous-cous. You just use whatever you have handy. You just add in butter, raisins, almond slivers (or almost any combination of fats, sugars, and protein you have in the cupboard) and cooks in 5 minutes, with no fussing or stirring. The deliciousness-to-effort ratio is insanely high.
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese mixed with Ground beef. Not healthy, but very delicious.
Chopped up hot dogs is the way
Yes plus islands of ketchup
My college version of the creation was can of tuna + Kraft Dinner. Lazy, relatively cheap, and surprisingly good. I called it the poor-man’s tuna casserole.
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I’ll do a simple stir fry. Diced chicken breast or thigh (salted and peppered) I’ll stir fry them and lightly mix in some sauce (sometimes a Thai sauce or general Tso sauce). I’ll also add some veggies, mostly broccoli and mushrooms but sometimes peppers and peas. And also I’ll make some rice as a side dish.
Stir fry is an awesome go to dish. Although noodles can sometimes be better for leftovers, as you shouldn’t reheat rice.
Slice up about a third of a can of Spam into slabs, and cook them in a pan until brown and crispy. Then cook up some basic ramen. After the Spam is done, make a simple over easy egg. Put it all together, and you’ve got a simple and pretty cheap meal thatll keep you full until Gabriel’s horn sounds
