hearth

How do food bloggers do it? How do they cook and take photos at the same time?

Here's my attempt at documenting the roast meat process.

1. The meat

Why is beef so expensive? This cost as much as my entire week of groceries if I eat mostly vegetarian. Gonna stick with pork shoulder in the future, which is half as expensive.
And yes this is preciously little counter space, I miss my kitchen back in Toronto ;_;

2. Cut and brown

This is the most time consuming step, firstly because I have dull knives that barely slice through the meat and secondly because you just gotta be patient while browning meat. I've finally learned my lesson to pat the chunks dry with a paper towel lest I want to be hit in the face with splattering oil. Be prepared for oil to splatter regardless.
Also browning the meat is not essential, it's a low taste payoff for how much time it takes. 

3. Cook spices

Trying some gochujang this time, but otherwise the cast have not changed from previous times (1, 2 opps forgot to label the sichuan peppercorn).
Side note: got some spices from Penzey's, their indian black pepper is amazing (probably just fresh).

4. Braise
Add just enough water to barely cover the meat and braise on low heat for at least an hour or so. The time varies depending on how large you cut your meat, but you want it tender enough to easily poke through with a chopstick. This time it took around 2.5 hours. Then I'll add my vegetable component (potatoes this time) and continue braising on low until the vegetable and meat falls apart without much resistance when poked.

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Side note on the sudden image size increase: I no longer want to downsize my images so much since it messes with the sharpness. So the blog layout is now wider to accommodate larger images.

To continue on this aside, I started to manual focus and it's made as big of a difference as when I learned to manual aperture and shutter speed. *pats self on the back* This photo has 27 predecessors before I was fed up with auto-focus, though I'm not entirely happy with the current one either. More practice is definitely needed.

Later edit: the focus in this photo is better

These deli containers are one of my best kitchen purchases.

The biggest challenge of lazy cooking for one is trying to finish eating the big batches before they go bad. I use to freeze in bulk half of what I make, but the second half ends up sitting in my fridge for a week after defrosting and goes bad anyways. Freezing in individual portions should eliminate this problem.
The containers are also great for storing dry bulk items, soaking grains/beans, etc etc. Gonna stock up on more before going back to Canada.