We Packbats exist in mortal form that requires regular feeding, and sometimes we cook a thing for that purpose. Here are some things we wrote down how to cook.
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lentil pasta sauce
Ingredients:
Lentils, about 1 cup / 250 g.
Canned tomato, crushed or cubed or whatever, about 28 oz / 800 g.
... and whatever your favorite pasta sauce secret ingredients are - ours are:
Part of an onion, if we have some, chopped small (can substitute onion powder).
Olive oil (unadulterated - look up how to get real olive oil in your country because there's a lot of fake stuff).
Tomato paste.
Garlic, if we have some, chopped small (can substitute garlic powder).
Oregano.
Ground cumin (balances the onion).
Salt and/or soup base. (The brand our groceries have is Better Than Boullion, except they presumably know how to spell bool-yon, the soup cube things.) (Editor: it's "bouillon".)
Directions:
Rinse the lentils and soak them for an hour. The recipe still worked that time we forgot to soak them but we assume this does something positive for the dish.
If you have veggies (onions and/or garlic), cook those in the olive oil, give 'em some color. We added salt to our onions the day we wrote this recipe because that helps them flavor the oil.
Feel free to squirt some tomato paste in after the veg is colored - it won't do it any harm to toast, and it makes us feel like a YouTube cook.
Open the big can of tomato and dump that in. Use the can to top it off with more water, now and as needed.
Drain the lentils and dump those in too.
Add your remaining pasta sauce secret ingredients.
Put the lid ajar on top, removing to stir at whatever frequency means it doesn't burn. Keep it bubbling, keep enough water in the mix to make those lentils cook.
The sauce is done when the lentils are done - like 30-60 minutes probably. Produces enough sauce for about 2 lb / 1 kg dry weight of pasta. Freezes well. Can easily be made vegan.
Texture note: the lentils are whole and very present in this one - if little round discs with a thin shell and kinda crumbly interior are a dealbreaker for you, this sauce will break your deal. If, on the other hand, that sounds like good textural variety, cool!
(Dairy is mentioned below, but all other described ingredients are vegan.)
Ingredients:
100% flour. Flour quantity will determine final loaf size - its weight will be approximately 150% of the weight of the flour, so 300 grams for a one-pound loaf. Options we have tried: a couple different brands of white all-purpose, white bread, whole wheat. Affects amount of water required.
1% salt.
0.5-1% active dry yeast.
Optional herbs and spices (quantities of these are very imprecise):
0.5% garlic powder
0.5% onion powder
0.25% oregano
0.25% rosemary
0.25% rubbed sage
0.25% seeds (e.g. carraway, poppy, sesame)
We presume other herbs would also work best around 0.25%; we have not done a great deal of experimenting.
Other optional add-ins like cheese or diced and sauteed onions, for which we have not determined any specific amount; near 5% is probably fine?
Optional enrichment - about 5% sugar can have a nice effect on flavor, and might make the bread last longer before going moldy.
Sufficient water to make a wet dough that is not liquid - usually 80-100%.
Procedure
Combine dry ingredients and optional extras in a reasonable-sized container. Stir to mix.
Add water a bit at a time, stirring with each addition, to make a wet but solid dough. Adjust with water or flour if too dry or wet - you will develop an eye for it as you experiment. A over-dry dough makes a crumblier loaf, an over-wet dough makes a very flat one.
Partially cover the bowl (e.g. a lid with one corner cracked). Let dough rise for a couple hours. (If you want to convert this from no-knead to low-knead, reach under the edge of the dough, pull it towards the center, and repeat around a circle every half hour.)
Dust with flour and form into a ball, using more flour as necessary to reduce stickage. (We do so by stretching the surface of the dough downwards and squishing it together at the bottom, among other manipulations.) Plop this ball in cast-iron skillet. (Presumably a bread pan would work but we haven't tried it.)
Cover the ball in the skillet using a clean kitchen towel (or plastic wrap, if you must) and let rise 1 hour. During rise, preheat oven to 450°F/230°C (Gas Mark 8? Stufe 5? please do your own conversions, we cannot be trusted); our oven takes about half an hour to reach this temperature, so we start preheating a half hour after shaping the ball.
Optional: immediately before inserting to bake, use a bread knife to cut a steam vent across the top of the loaf. This won't work very well if your knives are dull.
Bake until browned - about 35 minutes. To confirm loaf is done after removing from oven, knock on the underside - it should sound hollow.
Let cool to room temperature before slicing. (We always cool on a rack, but we will trust your judgment here.)
Total time: ~4 hours plus cooling.
As the ingredients list implies, it's fairly easy to make this vegan. Presumably the loaf can be shaped in some other fashion, but we haven't tried it. The cast-iron skillet is also presumably unnecessary - Kitty Unpretty makes reference to a loaf pan, and the magazine article describes using a pizza peel to slide it onto a pizza stone.
In our experience, if sealed up in a ziplock bag or similar, the loaf should remain good for a few days at room temperature. (We would eat it within three, to be safe.) We're told that bread freezes well - the one time we tried it, it was fine.
Our first many loaves were underhydrated (67%) and had a slightly crumbly texture; they were fine to eat alongside soup or chili, but not well suited to sandwiches. Our last three loaves (80% hydration) had more of an artisan-loaf texture, and served well as sandwich bread.
vegetable bean chili
This is less a recipe than a vague gesture in the direction of one.
Ingredients
Beans. We always use a pound of substantial dry beans, like small red beans or kidney beans or black beans or white navy beans or whatever, soaked overnight, plus half a pound of dry lentils that we just throw in there when we're throwing everything else in.
Chili peppers, chopped up small.
Bell peppers, chopped up small.
Onions, chopped up small.
Vegetables, chopped up small. If they are good cooked in liquid for an extended time, they'll work. Potatoes, carrots, kale (the tomato has enough acidity that it's not sad), bok choi, broccoli, corn, prolly most anything else.
Tomato - canned diced tomato, tomato paste, and dried tomatoes all work. Fresh tomatoes don't behave the same but they work.
Broth or broth substitute. We usually use "Better Than Bouillon" soup base but we've also used storebought cartons and actual bone broth made from actual bones. This is your main salt source.
Spices. We use oregano, cumin, garlic powder if we don't use fresh garlic, onion powder if we don't use onions, paprika, often black pepper. Also bay leaves - remember to take them out. Powdered ginger works if you have a light touch.
Some source of oil or fat - usually olive oil (verify your source, there's a lot of fake olive oil out there), but occasionally we've made a meat version of this and that brings the fat by itself.
Procedure
If you're using meat, brown the meat.
If you wanna caramelize the onions, you're a more conscientious cook than we are.
Put everything in the pot, with enough water to cover it all. Put a lid on ajar to reduce water loss (you can remove it at the end if you need to reduce water).
Turn up the heat enough to get it bubbling, keep the heat high enough to keep it bubbling.
Add water if it's getting low relative to the other ingredients - you need enough water to cover or the beans won't be cooking and you'll get a paste gluing itself to the bottom of the pot.
Stir a reasonable amount. If you know what a reasonable amount is, please tell us because we don't - we have to forcibly make ourselves wait at least five minutes between stirring.
Cook until the beans are done and it tastes good. You can add salt if needed.
