I got linked to this recipe yesterday.
The comments on the recipe, here, seem to be unanimously dismissive, with people trying to be funny.
I have other problems with the recipe:
1. the amount of butter. Butter in the recipe seems to be measured in cups and sticks. I have no idea how to cram butter into a cup, and can only assume that a stick would be used to extract the butter from the cup after it has been squashed in.
2. I have never heard of peas in a can. I use frozen peas, so don't even know if there's a standard can size for peas.
3. the recipe doesn't say how warm the peas should be. Surely you would need to heat the peas to a level where bacteria & viruses are destroyed. I don't see how "warm" would do that.
4. the recipe doesn't say whether there wants to be an even coating of butter over the peas. I would presume that tossing, mixing or stirring would be necessary, but I don't know which would be the most successful method of buttering the peas.
Looking at the comments, I see a couple of them berating the author for writing a recipe elsewhere that instructs the cook to buy products from a store and pretend that they are home-cooked. I think that this is a great idea ... if something is difficult to cook, I would love to be directed to buy it instead. Far fewer disasters, that way!
1 stick of butter = 118.294118 millilitres, apparently. But as you can see here:
ReplyDeletehttp://alignedleft.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/stick-of-butter-wrapper.jpg
The butter is labelled in useful measurements, thereby making its use somewhat easier.
And your bog-standard can size in the US is 15 ounces.
And of COURSE it's going to have too much butter, if it's for a US cooking site.! ^__^
But, raeyn, we don't measure butter here in the UK in millilitres or cups, or tbsp - it's all done in weight, so either ounces or grammes. I know that a stick of butter is four ounces but that we also have confusing measures such as a knob (which is probably about 10g or a shade under half an ounce). Differences in terminology are one of the most confusing things about trying to use international recipe sites.
ReplyDeleteI am absolutely none the wiser about butter sizes using that picture!
ReplyDeleteHah! I found the blog associated with that photo, and that blog post is about how uninformative the butter sizes are, as written there! :D
Haha, excellent. :) And me, I just sort of eye it; I can't be bothered to be precise with my yellow gold. It seems to work out alright, but I know - that's not the point, either.
ReplyDeleteLiving in the US 1) Not all of us use Paula Dean's amount of butter (she is actually known as The Butter Queen!) 2) the recipe on the foodnetwork site says that the can should be 14 1/2 ounces right on it and 3) a cup is 8 oz of material - if you can't use one kind of measurement for something there is very often a conversion chart (either in a handy cookbook or online) that will let you get it into workable form. Just because a recipe calls for 4 cups of something doesn't mean that when you go to the store, the something will be measured in cups on the packaging - so you'll have to convert to know how much to buy!
ReplyDeleteAs for heating peas to get them hot enough to kill bacteria - not necessary with canned (or, I think, frozen) peas. Canned things usually have any bacteria killed off during the canning process and freezing kills a lot of germs as well, so I would think that "heat" means "warm them up to an acceptable eating temperature". If you were using fresh veggies, I'd just rinse them first. The worries about germs and bacteria is not the same with veggies/fruits as it is with meat, where you must cook them all out. Fruits and veggies can often be rinsed off and most of your worries are gone!
actually amilianna, salmonella and E.coli are both now recognized as hazards with fresh fruit and vegetables, despite decades of being told that they're not risky.
ReplyDeletethat, my friend, is NOT a recipe. canned peas? um. no. ew. best thing you can do, and this really IS piss easy, is to take a mug full of frozen peas, pour just boiled water on them - leave for about 30 seconds to a minute. drain (i use a tea strainer, with the domed side inside the cup), and refill with water from the same boiling. leave for 30 seconds. repeat. your peas are now perfectly cooked, still taste fresh and beautiful, and have taken no more than 3 minutes all told. serve with a dressing made of toasted sesame oil and parsley (finely chopped), as an accompaniment to almost anything. GORGEOUS.
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