Thread by @MariusHollenga, Trying something new. For every "like" this tweet gets, I'll add a [...]

Trying something new. For every "like" this tweet gets, I'll add a tip about making/cooking food, until the likes dry up, or my knowledge about food does.

If you're making/following from a recipe, follow it to the letter the first time, read it a few times beforehand, and then get going.
Experimentation starts when you make it for a second time.

When preparing vegetables, if you're preparing them in water, use a small amount of water, steaming preserves taste and nutritious value, just keep the lid on the pan and let it go.

A roux (the binding agent) can be vegan, substitute butter for an oil. A dark/brown roux made with butter will be a disaster anyway. Cajun cooks will tell you as much.

If you're making a sauce or stew, and you're using dried herbs and spices, cooking them out with your mirepoix (other sauce bases are available) will greatly enhance the flavour, and will prevent your sauce being grainy or a bit sandy.

If you're looking for a nice alternative way to eat avocado, make a nice beer-batter with some herbs and spices you like, and deep fry them. We're millennials, we're not gonna be able to afford a house anyway, so we might as well eat a lot of avocado, and eat it well.

Food is important to staying alive, so if you're feeling awful and depressed, do not feel bad about eating "unhealthy" food, you've gotten some food in you, good job, you'll be around to fight another day, you incredible human.

Cabbage is a wonderful ingredient, slice it into ultra thin ribbons and stirfry it with rice and some good spices, and you've got yourself a meal that'll make you happy.

Eggs are great and good for you, and there's been a discussion about wether or not they should be kept refrigerated that I won't get in to, but I always say: Do as the Arabs and North Africans do, and poach them in a good tomato sauce.

Parsnips, lovely things, remove the skin, and then slice the rest of it into really thin strips with a vegetable peeler, and then deep fry them, you'll get really exciting crisps.

This may be contrarian to the thing I said about following recipes earlier, but hell, experiment, chuck stuff into a pan, oven, fryer, whatever, see what happens. Some of the greatest stuff happens by accident.

Onion and garlic go together incredibly well, and loads of dishes have them as their base, a lot of recipes suggest adding them at the same time, I advice against this, garlic has a much lower smoke point, and will turn bitter WAY before onions become tasty. So add them later.

A roux is a binding agent or thickener, it's basically equal parts of a fat and a flour. And for a litre of fluid, you'll need about 100 grams of roux.
That's the baseline.
1 litre of soup or sauce, is 50 grams of oil or butter and 50 grams of flour.

Garlic and ginger are great, to make them even greater, before using them for whatever your plan is, crush them with the flat of your knife, it brings out all the smell and flavour.

Bruising things also works well with bay leaves, lemongrass, etc.

It is not a secret that Miso is one of my favourite ingredients, for those that don't know, it's essentially a fermented soy-bean paste.
Also, Miso-mayo is a GREAT condiment.

10 tablespoons of kewpie mayonnaise.
2 tablespoons of Miso.
2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Lovely.

Hashbrowns, easy to make, get some potatoes and onions, peel them, and run them through a box grater, and then form them into small patties and chuck them into a hot skillet. The natural moisture and starch will keep them together, season with a nice spice blend, bam, breakfast!

A ton of food cultures have a sauce base, probably involving onions, and then some supporting players, and they're names you hear in a ton of cooking shows: Mirepoix, sofrito, smazhennya or zazharka, suppengrun, the holy trinity.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

I'm particularly fond of the holy trinity, mainly used in Cajun and Louisiana Creole cooking, it's an equal mix of onion, bell pepper and celery, with a supporting cast of chile's and "the pope", garlic.

If you want to make tomato sauce from scratch, remove the skins of the tomatoes. Easily done by making some surface cuts and then putting them in a hot oven or boiling water for 5'ish minutes.

When you're making pasta carbonara, before adding your egg mixture, turn off the heat below your pan, or you'll get scrambled eggs in pasta, which is delicious, but not carbonara.

That said, I don't really react well to obsessively sticking to tradition in cooking, respecting tradition is good and proper, but making variations is the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to cooking.

Now one of the most important lessons in cooking. Always underseason, you can put extra stuff in, but you can't take it out. You can fix things that are bland very easily, the opposite is much harder to fix.

If you're going to thicken a sauce/soup, and you're intolerant to wheat gluten, corn or rice flour will work wonders, if you're working with rice-flour, add a bit of water to it before adding it to your dish, as if you're making putty.

If you want to make a great vegan stew, just buy a kilogram of mushrooms, cut half of them to shit in a food processor, and make big chunks out of the rest.

Add a few onions, some garlic, smoked paprika powder, fresh thyme, 3/4 peeled tomatoes, some cumin, and 1 litre of stock.

Also, add 3 tablespoons of rice, wheat, or corn flour to this, and stir it until all the lumps go away, and you've got yourself a meal. Serve with mashed potatoes.

If you're going to make a marinade for meat, fish, tofu, tempeh, or whatever, overseasoning is the key, you're gonna lose part of the flavour during the cooking process, so be brave and confident when making your marinade.

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