A few weeks back, @[email protected] posted a thread talkin shit about about a recipe posted on the official Cheeto's website: CHEETOS® FLAMIN' HOT® Spicy Vodka Pasta |. Not one to take slander of my American cultural heritage lying down, I vowed to prepare this dish and post a review.

Before I get into my thoughts, I should mention that I didn't copy the original recipe verbtatim, because I didn't have all ingredients available 1:1 and because I saw a couple of ways to improve it without dishonoring it.

The base recipe is just some version of penne ala vodka, afaict, which is a lot like the Penne Rosa recipe from Noodles and Company, where I used to work 20ish years ago.

The biggest modification I made here was that I used pasta sauce (Rao's Homemade Pasta Sauce) instead of tomato paste. Spicy Hot Cheetos are rather tangy, even crass in flavor. The sweeter, almost metallic flavor of tomato paste struck me as the wrong way to go for a base flavor for this dish. I also added chicken and mushrooms to it.

I started by butterflying and pounding the chicken out and searing it to completion while the pasta boiled.

For the sauce, I browned the onions in a bit of neutral oil (I used red because its all I had, but would have preferred yellow), then tossed the sliced shrooms in til they browned, then the garlic, all over med-high heat. I added a bit of water to the pan as needed to control moisture and browning. Then I added the red pepper flakes for just a few seconds before addind the red sauce.

I added enough of that to coat the amount of pasta I made and cooked it for 30 seconds to a minute, then added a shot or two of vodka and cooked until the harsh alcohol smell was gone, about 15 seconds.

Finally, I cut the heat and added a cup or two of cream. The original recipe has you adding sauce and cream at the same time, which strikes me as a mistake. I want the alcohol to deglaze the marinara because there's some chemical reaction shit that happens with tomato and alcohol, and I DON'T want the cream to cook hot enough for milk solids to burn. Also, it keeps more sweetness this way.

I tossed the pasta into the sauce, then topped it with chicken cut on the bias, just like my manager taught me.

Instead of cooking the crushed cheetos into the sauté, I crushed them and used them as a garnish, like bread crumb, to add some texture. I added feta instead of parmesan because frankly feta and hot cheetos just sounded betta togetha. I didnt have basil, which sounds amazing in this tbh, so I added cilantro for color.

This fuckin' slapped. Normally, a Penne Rosa is kinda sweet, slightly spicy, but mostly inoffensive. This was THE most popular dish at Noodles and Co for people over the age of 12 and I think it's because it's rich and satisfying, but also a little bit boring. Spicy Cheetos are aggressively flavored, almost intolerably tangy, but with a corporate-tested umami that keeps you snacking. This smack-you-in-the-face quality gave the Penne Rosa the kick that it needed, and the feta bridged the two wonderfully. I tried parmesan on a second bowl of this, and it was decent, but not as good.

I'd probably pair with with a dry red or white, but I didn't have any booze with this.

I'd give it a B. Would make again if I had spicy cheetos on hand, but I usually dont.

there's so much wild shit out there like, they got a cross between brussel sprouts and kale now, it grows little kale nuggets, it's weird

Im a huge fan of broccolini except idfk what to call it because that's apparently a trade mark of the Del Monte corporation and other places call it "sweet baby broccoli" but that's INACCURATE because it ISN'T BABY BROCCOLI it's actually a cross between BROCCOLI and GAI LAN which yields the succulent floral broccoli tops combined with the crisp crunchy asparagus like stalk of the gai lan and altogether a super premium ultra vegetable. I love that shit

If you want broccolini tips i've been tossing it in a light lemon garlic vinaigrette and then throwing it on the char grill until it's charred and people go omg your broccolini, it is a so amazing

Anyway what are some other good weird brassicas y'all enjoy

I just bought an ice cream machine with a compressor for half price. I thought it would be easy (it isn't) but I am nerding out.

I will explain to you all, to my best understanding, some theory about frozen deserts.

First, about ice formation: Imagine some water-ice mixture. Liquid H₂O molecules will, with some probability pertaining to their low kinetic energy and being next an ice crystal, join the ice crystals, making the ice crystal grow. At the same time, water molecules on the surface of the ice crystal, will, with some probability related to their kinetic energy, break loose of the crystal structure and join the liquid water.

If more molecules go from liquid to ice, more ice will form. If more molecules go from ice to liquid, the ice melts. What effect dominates depends on the average kinetic energy of the water molecules aka the temperature. Above 0 °C, more ice melts than freezes onto crystals; below, more freezes than melts.

Now, if, instead of pure water, you dissolve sugar (or salt or ethanol or whatever) into the water, that will make it less likely for liquid water molecules to join the ice crystals, because the sugar is in the way of the water molecules wanting to join the ice. It makes the liquid-to-solid transition less common, less probable, because there are just less liquid water molecules next to the ice surface. Because the sugar doesn't join the ice crystals itself, the ice is is just pure water, and the opposite ice-to-liquid transition is not affected by the sugar.

So, in a sugar-in-water solution, for the same temperature, less H₂O molecules will join the ice, while the same amount will melt as in the pure water case. This effectively depresses the freezing point. You now will need a lower temperature than 0 °C to form ice in order to make up for this. You can approximately calculate this temperature quite easily because the drop in freezing point is proportional to the amount of sugar (or salt ...) molecules in the solution.

Interestingly, the mass of the sugar doesn't matter, only the number of molecules does: If you dissolve a certain amount of sucrose (a double sugar) molecules, it will affect the freezing point the same way as adding the same amount of glucose molecules, even though glucose is half the mass. The same goes for salt: One NaCl, because it splits up when dissolved in water, will depress the freezing point approximately like two sugar molecules.

The second important point: The concentration of sugar in the water increases as ice forms. The sugar stays in the liquid solution; the ice is pure water. So more ice means a higher sugar concentration in the liquid that remains, depressing the freezing point of the remaining liquid. This means that for any specific temperature, sugar-water will freeze only partially to a certain percentage. You can calculate (for example), if you have 500 g of sucrose dissolved in 1 l of water, and you freeze that to -18 °C, about 79% of the water will be in ice form.

i made my weekly batch of beans and this time i went with pinto beans, which i havent made before, and green chilis. I opted to skip any meat as I'm short on cash (and also havent found things like TVP at my local grocers yet). They turned out ok, like they dont taste bad, but theyre missing something and I dont know what. The word I keep thinking of is bass but i dont really know what i mean by that foodwise. Umami?? How do I add more bass to my beans? mushrooms?

ingredients i used:
pinto beans
green chilis + onion + garlic
oregano, cumin, some chili powder, garlic powder, s&p
cooked in faux-chicken stock

so today's mushroom and tofu siopao turned out soooo much better than the batch i made the other day. last time i think i made the mistake of letting the dough dry out so they were very difficult to work with but this time i left them in a plastic container so they stayed soft and malleable while i was filling each one. i was able to stuff them with so much more filling too! idk i'm pretty proud of these ones!!!! :D

inside look

do it

i have like 5 cans of chickpeas i got for a discount and want to use them.

especially if you have one that uses cumin

I just discovered this recipe in Ian Knauer's book 'The Farm' only to find out it was an even older recipe so here's a picture from a print thats from the 70s. (Image from reddit.)

I LOOOOOVE citrus desserts and had to share this.

I'm going to start off by saying this is inauthentic as hell. This recipe is made to be quick and to be done in a western home kitchen with no smoke and ingredients you can find at most supermarkets. Substitutions can be made, quantities of ingredients can be changed to tasteIf you're good with a knife, you can realistically have this done in 30 minutes. This is also a recipe I made to cook for 8 people so cut the recipe in half for less

Ingredients

Sesame oil (any oil will work, just don't use butter) 1 bag of green onions, sliced 1 white/yellow onion, diced 2 tbsp of garlic 2 inch knob of ginger 2 tbsp red pepper flakes 1 bag of frozen stir fry mix of choice 1 bag of broccoli 2 cups of Soy Sauce/Coconut Aminos 1 cup of Lime Juice 1/2 cup of Rice Vinegar 1 cup of Chicken Stock 2 tbsp white pepper (black pepper is fine) 2 tbsp salt 3 tbsp brown sugar (white sugar is fine, use less if you used coconut aminos) 2 tbsp garlic powder 2 tsp peanut butter Whatever chicken you have laying around (idk, I just used leftover rotisserie chicken) Cashews (I also just used leftover cashews for this)

3 tbsp corn starch 3 tbsp of water

3 cups of Jasmine rice (any rice works, Jasmine just cooks quicker) 4.5 cups of water

Steps

1. Start by preheating your oven to 450f and getting your rice water boiling. You're going to bake your vegetables. You do not have a big enough pan to brown all the vegetables at once, and you don't want to do it in batches, that will take forever. Oven. Start this before you start on the stovetop, because it's pretty involved once it's started.

2. Start by cutting up your stuff. Dice your onions, slice your scallions. Use a cheese grater to grate the ginger, it's way faster than dicing it.

3. Fry the white onion in your oil of choice for about 5 minutes on fairly high heat, char is completely fine, preferable even. Add in the white parts of the green onion after this and fry those for about 2 more minutes.

4. Add in garlic, ginger and cashews, keep it moving at this point, don't burn the garlic. This should take about a minute

5. Once everything starts smelling fragrant, add in your liquids to keep it all from burning and add in all your spices except for the salt.

6. Let it simmer for a bit and taste it for flavor after the acids have boiled off a bit. It will taste too sour at first, but the acidity will boil off as it heats up more. Add more sugar, chicken stock, or sesame oil to balance out the acidity.

7. When the vegetables are done, throw them in the sauce and stir them in. Add in your leftover chicken at this point too. Give the chicken a few minutes to warm back up

8. Make a corn starch slurry (cold water and corn starch whisked together) and stir it into everything to thicken the sauce and boom you have yourself a "stir fry"

Have fun cooking!

it was my first time making these and i struggled a bit with the dough and stuffing technique but they turned out tasty so it was all worth it! my partner ate them growing up and they really liked it so i'm very happy!!! i have lots of leftover filling so we're gonna make more tomorrow but now time for rest.

It turned out so pretty! Only problem is was a flat so i used coconut oil to add fat, it wasn't bad at all but coconut definitely seemed incongruent.

Meat is fine with me, but also open to vegan recipes.

Whatcha got?

Ingredients

• One block extra-firm tofu
• 3 tbsp corn starch
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

1. Press the tofu for 30 minutes.
2. Mix soy sauce and olive oil together in one container; mix seasonings and corn starch together in another.
3. Add pressed tofu, cut into cubes, to the soy sauce and olive oil mix.
4. Shake the container a bit just to get the tofu nicely coated in the liquid.
5. Add seasoning + corn starch mix and shake more until everything's coated.
6. Preheat air fryer to 375°F or 190°C.
7. Cook for 15 minutes; shake halfway through.
8. Enjoy your air-fried estrogen cubes!

I got a bunch of 'extra' little green bell peppers I gotta do something with.

First take some potatoes and boil them or steam them until they're tender, then let those bad boys cool down

Once they're cool enough to handle, get your fingers all up in there and tear them apart all goblin mode until they're bite sized chunks

Then go deep fry the chunks until they're a dark golden brown

Congratulation, you have now cooked a really good potato, now you can toss it in seasoning or a sauce or just eat like like a fuckin animal, either way you'll be like "oh, oh wow"

A simple oven-cooked oat "risotto" with black , red bell pepper, onion, garlic, olive oil and fresh basil.

The oats are "cooking oats", very delish and one of my favourite things to eat.

Vegetable soup with lots of pan-fried chick- , peppers, shrooms, onion and basil.

Spices: ancho-chili, black pepper, garlic & salt.

I can figure it out on my own i just thought y'all might have some better ideas for me to steal

Current plan so far is grilled eggplant steaks I'm gonna rub in olive oil and crushed toasted fennel seed/cumin/etc and serve with a drizzly lemon garlic tahini sauce, with one side being grilled broccolini that's also gonna be lemony and garlicky and good

the sous chef and i were lazy on Friday and didn't really figure out third thing but he was like "what about chickpeas and uhhhh tomatoes" so my current plan is roast some chickpeas, roast some diced tomatoes, toss it all together and season it like if i made harissa paste but leave the tomatoes chunky

any other ideas chat, or does that sound good, i get nervous my menu will be stupid. but chickpeas add protein and starch so like..