Cooking cheat codes

We do all this already but in case you don't.

tldw:

* soy sauce
* curry powder
* curry paste
* coconut milk
* olive oil / lemon
* fried egg on anything
* toasting bread
* sugar

Surprised, they cooked curry paste while all the videos of Indians demonstrating cooking they emphasize frying the powders as first step, but here they add it to their water for rice without doing that.

An acquaintance cleans houses for people. One of his clients gave him a gift set of ten curry powders. He's a very good cook but that was way too many curries. So, he kept the best five and gave me his five rejects. All of them were excellent and I went through them like that *snap*.

I consider chile powders a cooking cheat. There is a powder for every type of chile so you can control the flavors. Plus you can make your own powder by drying chile that you buy. All of the curries are improved with some type of chile powder. It's very good on things you might not think of like popcorn. Curry popcorn with chile powder added. Cooked in the butter that's poured over the popcorn. In the same pot that the popcorn is popped. Sprouts has bulk bins of popcorn kernels for $1.25 a pound.

But never buy "chile powder" a mix of things for chile con carne or whatever. Every time I used that stuff, like "taco mix" powder, the stuff gave me extreme heartburn. While powders made from individual chile types are fine.

My dad drizzled Tabasco sauce on his fried eggs, but chile powder and curry powder with chile added  is even better.

Coconuts. Since buying the juicer, I bought four coconuts from two different King Soopers and all four had mold and couldn't be used. I bought five from the Asian market and one had mold. I bought four from Sprouts and those are the best. The coconut milk that you make yourself from the copra is a lot better than the coconut milk that you buy in cans.

I consider the coffee mill a cooking cheat. I mill things like popcorn kernels and posole kernels for polenta. Shrimp and grits with bacon and jalapeño or with curry powder or chile powder. Cornmeal that you buy oxides rapidly. While cornmeal that's fresh from popcorn has an outstanding fresh corn flavor that is surprisingly bright.

The coffee mill also grinds all types of beans to produce powder to cook into a bean paste for various types of bean hummus that's good hot or cold. The coffee mill is a very handy kitchen tool. I used it last night to produce instant seafood dashi from dried kombu seaweed and bonito smoked tuna flakes. A tiny amount, about 1/4 teaspoon makes excellent broth, a common base for miso soup.