So... with us at our household one of the biggest arguments against gardening and food storage in the past has been, "Why should we can all that stuff, if you guys aren't going to eat it?" or, "Why do it if no one eats it?"
This argument has been used against both gardening and canning the food grown in the gardening.
So here's what you can do;
You make tempura vegetables. You can do this with squash, zucchini, pumpkins... those are the hard ones to figure out what to do with. The zucchini cooks fast and you have to be careful of it not being soggy or thin. I thought tempura pumpkin stuff was pretty good. You can do this with carrots also. All of that helps you find ways to USE it.
So I hope you can use what you grow. Especially since its basically an extra educational step.
1) Learn how to grow it.
2) Learn how to store/can it...
3) Learn how to use it and cook it (both for the raw phase and post canning);
Now there were a couple questions I had, to hope that others might help me with this;
What else can I make that's good to cook with especially zucchini, squash, and pumpkins? Ideally you'd need to be able to juggle 2 or 3 good recipes, that are simple back and forth. You don't want complex stuff because the way the economy is going in the future, you might not always have the complex recipe ingredients. And you want to keep it simple to economize, thus simple recipes and simple # of items you rotate on. (And hopefully stuff that tastes good. I have a hard time with just boiled vegetables because they don't taste salty enough...)
I ask this about recipes also because... I can't eat tempura everyday. Sure its good but... yeah doesn't feel like it could be eaten everyday. Also I think some meat to complement the tempura would go better. This time around I was just trying to show and prove to myself that I could use the stuff I grow so it was all vegetable tempura. But I think you need meat and salty stuff to complement the vegetables for your palette needs. Plus tempura can be stressful to make because you have some fire risk with it. Another reason to look at other recipes.
Also a tempura question; when you listen to people teaching tempura cooking they quote you need to heat it to like 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Does this mean heating the pan's inside oil to 320 degrees? Or the actual burner? Why I ask, is tempura is very temperamental. If you don't get the heat right then the vegetables get soggy. But if you get it too hot its actually stressful to cook worrying about the oil combusting. For this reason also I wouldn't reccomend people to let kids cook tempura, or someone not responsible if you have people in your house that are reckless. Several times cooking this stuff on open burner, the little drops of oil outright ignited in flame when they got dripped on the burner... that would be problematic for some households.
(Anyway, it probably would minimize some stress with an air fryer... but still)
So when I was cooking this I used a temperature laser and the actual burner said over 500 degrees, but the oil in the fryer pan and the pan itself only said like late 200s temperatures... this surprised me why there was such a big difference? And this is why I asked about this? Do you target the pan being that hot or just the burner?
This argument has been used against both gardening and canning the food grown in the gardening.
So here's what you can do;
You make tempura vegetables. You can do this with squash, zucchini, pumpkins... those are the hard ones to figure out what to do with. The zucchini cooks fast and you have to be careful of it not being soggy or thin. I thought tempura pumpkin stuff was pretty good. You can do this with carrots also. All of that helps you find ways to USE it.
So I hope you can use what you grow. Especially since its basically an extra educational step.
1) Learn how to grow it.
2) Learn how to store/can it...
3) Learn how to use it and cook it (both for the raw phase and post canning);
Now there were a couple questions I had, to hope that others might help me with this;
What else can I make that's good to cook with especially zucchini, squash, and pumpkins? Ideally you'd need to be able to juggle 2 or 3 good recipes, that are simple back and forth. You don't want complex stuff because the way the economy is going in the future, you might not always have the complex recipe ingredients. And you want to keep it simple to economize, thus simple recipes and simple # of items you rotate on. (And hopefully stuff that tastes good. I have a hard time with just boiled vegetables because they don't taste salty enough...)
I ask this about recipes also because... I can't eat tempura everyday. Sure its good but... yeah doesn't feel like it could be eaten everyday. Also I think some meat to complement the tempura would go better. This time around I was just trying to show and prove to myself that I could use the stuff I grow so it was all vegetable tempura. But I think you need meat and salty stuff to complement the vegetables for your palette needs. Plus tempura can be stressful to make because you have some fire risk with it. Another reason to look at other recipes.
Also a tempura question; when you listen to people teaching tempura cooking they quote you need to heat it to like 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Does this mean heating the pan's inside oil to 320 degrees? Or the actual burner? Why I ask, is tempura is very temperamental. If you don't get the heat right then the vegetables get soggy. But if you get it too hot its actually stressful to cook worrying about the oil combusting. For this reason also I wouldn't reccomend people to let kids cook tempura, or someone not responsible if you have people in your house that are reckless. Several times cooking this stuff on open burner, the little drops of oil outright ignited in flame when they got dripped on the burner... that would be problematic for some households.
(Anyway, it probably would minimize some stress with an air fryer... but still)
So when I was cooking this I used a temperature laser and the actual burner said over 500 degrees, but the oil in the fryer pan and the pan itself only said like late 200s temperatures... this surprised me why there was such a big difference? And this is why I asked about this? Do you target the pan being that hot or just the burner?