Food

Heya,

I'm starting to get interested in foraging, mushroom picking in particular although the season doesn't start for a few months here. I know there's subreddits but would much rather get involved here on slrpnk.net, which would seem to be the natural home of such activities. Can't have a solar punk future without developing an understanding of our wild natural resources can we?

I just scanned this community for posts and it seems to be more about cooking than gathering?

Would anyone be up for a dedicated foraging community? Or maybe one exists elsewhere on Lemmy? Or maybe that's something people would be keen to discuss on this community?

One problem might be how foraging differs depending on your habitat, I think it would be good to have some kind of rule where people state the relevant region and season to the foraging they're discussing.

I've found biomes useful to think about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome

Canonical YouTube link

My neighbor recently asked me for recommendations for veggieburgers, and my SO and I started writing up this list and I thought I'd share it here, hope that's okay. It's a bit more commercial than a lot of the stuff I post here, but meat substitutions are honestly the easiest way I've found to get friends and relatives to try vegetarian stuff. It's easy to cook, guilt free, and with any luck, at least some of these options fit easily into their existing routine. From conservative relatives to friends on camping trips, we've gotten good results with these.

By it's nature, this list will be tailored to American brands accessible in my geographic reach. If you have any recommendations of your own, I'd love it if you shared them.

Hamburger:

• Impossible/Beyond Burger for closest fit to the real thing. They're even better if you pour a little worcestershire sauce (turns out this has anchovies in it whoops) on them
• Trader Joe's Quinoa Cowboy Veggie Burger - really good breaded veggieburger. Crisp them up so they don't fall apart, good with pickles and cheese. Personal favorite, try seasoning them like you would chili. 
• Trader Joe's Veggie Masala Burger - good basic bean burger. 

Chicken:

• Quorn's Meatless Homestyle ChiQin Cutlets are like chicken breasts, good on their own or chopped up in sandwiches, stir fry, pasta, or soup
• Quorn makes a breaded, cheese-and-pesto-stuffed version which is awesome on its own, sort of like the premade Stuffed Chicken Cordon Bleu from the freezer section.
• edit: Daring. Plant Chicken Pieces

Nugs (you really can't go wrong here, they're all good):

• Morningstar Farms Vegan Chicken Nuggets (regular and buffalo): closest I think to the real freezer-section thing (minus the gristly bits) and probably the cheapest 
• Impossible Chicken Nuggets - also very close, sometimes more expensive 
• Trader Joe's Chickenless Crispy Tenders - a little bit their own thing but very good
• Gardein Breaded Turk'y Cutlets - my personal favorite. These are a bit small so I'm counting them as nugs

Bacon:

• Morningstar Veggie Bacon Strips, it's not super close but it's a similar experience, a little easy to burn if you like it crispy

Deli meats:

• Tofurky brand Hickory Smoked Deli Slices

Sausage: 

• Morningstar Breakfast sausages - good in breakfast sandwiches, omelets, rice, or just on the side
• Trader Joe's Soy Chorizo - this is awesome in all kinds of stuff, including soups, rice, pasta, and fauxganoff
• Field Roast Classic Recipe Plant Based Sausage Breakfast Patties - great in soups and rice dishes, especially spicy ones
• Impossible Sausage - these are apparently the closest fit to grilling sausages though I haven't tried them yet

Steak:

• Trader Joe's Beefless Bulgogi - This stuff cooks up more or less like steak tips and goes great in stir fry, and especially in soup, where it even holds its shape and texture and lends a nice flavor

Turkey (Thanksgiving style):

• Quorn Meatless Turkey-Style Roast - my SOs recommendation 
• Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast - my recommendation 

A few years ago, while we were cooking, my SO showed me a blog post about common spices and their substitutions. I thought it'd be cool to use that to make a chart we could hang on the wall. It turned into a fun light research project, then a fun art project.

I started reading various blogs and realized that while many covered the same core spices, there were a lot of others that only one blog or another mentioned. So I started gathering them all up. As I read about them on Wikipedia I'd stumble into their histories, and scope creep hit. I decided to add a column for interesting facts about each. (While gathering those, I was kind of struck at the disparity between them - some spices, have centuries of warfare, murder, and espionage wrapped around them, while others are so common or easy to grow that nobody seems to have stabbed anyone at all for it.)

I built it first as a spreadsheet in Google sheets while I was researching, pasted it into a poster-size libre office writer document for layout and font changes, exported that as a pdf so I could import it into GIMP. That let me make more detailed changes and add the flourishes that hopefully make it look like something that might've hung on the wall in your grandparents' kitchen.

This was a pretty casual project spread over seven months. It's got forty-some spices with descriptions, fun facts, and substitutions shamelessly plagiarized from cooking blogs and Wikipedia.

I've learned since that several spices are actually really unspecific, like what’s sold as oregano apparently may come from several different plants. So I'll say it's useful for cooking and accurate to the best of my ability, but I wouldn't reference it as a historical or scientific resources.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1278678

From https://sh.itjust.works/post/1278677

plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.

This looks like a fun little project that I think people here would enjoy! I have a little stack of tin foil takeaway boxes that I could use for this. Just need to get hold of the plexiglass (or the oven bag they suggest, but I'd like to do it entirely with reusables if possible).

EDIT: Grammar.

"For some reason a very crucial component to worldbuilding seems to be an afterthought in most fiction I've consumed. And I am talking about the most consumable of consumables: Good Food.

Not just the protagonist ate something, that's boring. I want to know what the texture was like, the aromas, seasoning, cooking techniques, how it compared to previous meals, what memories did it evoke, how does the food tie into the culture, what makes this a unique experience to the individual? Fantasy just doesn't feel alive without food to flesh out the local culture. "

Getting a ridiculous amount of avo's on the tree this year. In a rental so i'm not knowledgable about this. What's a good way to make the most of the season? Theyre staying green on the tree, and taking 1-2 weeks to ripen once picked atm. How long will they stay like this? I presume they start dropping off eventually, is that likely to happen all at once? Do they freeze well?