All Activity

Yummy breakfast, pancakes with smoked salmon and a dollop of whizzed up avocado.

I jumped on board the current viral Aussie trend and made "Centrelink Oysters" Kilpatrick for the boys. It's a Dimmie / Dimsim ( Think they may be a uniquely Aussie Chinese dumpling fast food thing ) with a sauce presented like an oyster 🤷‍♀️. ***Salt by the way .. the flavour is just salt 😅

There's a cleaner called Diversey.

Corned beef or also known as silverside with potatoes, carrots, broccolini and a mustard sauce. Fresh small dinner bread rolls were also on the table.

Detroit-Style Pepperoni Deluxe from Peter Reinhart’s “Perfect Pan Pizza” - white flour dough (bread flour, instant yeast, salt, water, olive oil) refrigerated for 18 hours. Then put into the pans with his “panning and dimpling” method over an hour, added first half of cheese to dough and second raise for four hours. Pizza is topped with crushed tomato sauce (flavored with oregano, basil,garlic and red wine vinegar), pepperoni slices, more cheddar cheese, pickled pepperoncini and a last layer of pepperoni slices. After baking, finished with a little bit of his secret sauce (pureed red bell pepper, pickled pepperoncini (and some of the brine), garlic, red wine vinegar and olive oil)

Once again, authorities are warning against foraging for mushrooms unless you really know what you're doing. 21 people in California have been poisoned by Amanita phalloides, death cap mushrooms, leading to one death and the others with severe liver damage possibly requiring liver transplants. These are the same mushrooms used in the recent 'mushroom murders' in Australia. Amanita phalloides, death cap mushrooms. Photograph: Vladyslav Siaber/Alamy How many times do people have to be told? California officials warn foragers after person dies from poison mushroom | California | The Guardian

Twice-baked potato, roasted vegetables, smoked salmon. After I took this picture I topped the potato and vegetables with shredded cheddar. White wine. Christmas dishware!

There's a take out place near my home which only sells what they call 'wraps' in Chinese, but are identical to burritos but with Chinese fillings. They are larger and fat and come with a large variety of filings, of which my favourite is the the Sichuan chicken and vegetables. I don't know how many they must wrap each day. I've eaten dozens of them (usually about one every week or two). Only once had whose wrapper had split. I ended up eating it with chopsticks.

As always, thank you! I enjoy this thread every year.

Thanks for those comments, and believe me -- I take no offense! I'd be offended if I sat down at a restaurant and got a burrito the size of mine. 🙂 I'm trying to come closer to the take-and-eat-on-the-road burritos I've gotten on my travels in New Mexico and southern Arizona, which (last time I was there) cost about $3 and NEVER threatened to come unclosed due to overstuffing. But although not large, they were a bit bigger than what I've made, and still didn't ooze out the sides or fall apart. I just checked my package, with 1 remaining tortilla. It's labeled "burrito" as opposed to "burrito grande" and the tortilla seems to have a 10" diameter. Next time maybe I'll try the "grande" size, which I think are 12" diameter. I'll try another brand, too, unless I decide to try making my own. I certainly had choice of size and ingredients in Yuma, including tortillas made with lard, flour, water, salt and that's all. The pickings seem to be slimmer up here.

Thanks for those ingredients and comments, SLB. Can you shed more light on "gluten flour" please? I thought all wheat flour had some gluten content. Is this supposed to be vital wheat gluten, or a high-gluten flour?

You might want to check some specialty produce suppliers; here in Boston we have Sid Wainer/Chef's Warehouse that is known to stock hard-to-find items (they were the only place I could find baby kiwi aka kiwi berries). They have fresh bergamot, a 10# box is $101. If they only sell to the trade, see if they can suggest a restaurant or caterer they supply and perhaps they'll let you buy from the restaurant. You can see if an online purveyor can ship to you; maybe Goldbelly? I found this place in CA: https://www.pearsonranch.com/collections/buy-bergamot-oranges?srsltid=AfmBOooU6VUZYheRZGqMmNvR8iSdZZye3hsAtd2G3skFQfTlcYb-28gC

Pakistani recipes tonight, from 'Curry Cuisine' Special chicken curry (Desi murgh): Slowly saute sliced onions until dark golden brown, remove, and puree. Saute garlic and ginger paste, crushed tomato, Greek yogurt, cayenne, turmeric, cumin seed, ground coriander seed, cloves, black cardamom, and curry leaves (sub for bay leaves). Add chicken thighs and water and simmer. When the chicken is done, uncover and simmer until the oil separates. Finish with cilantro. Mixed vegetable curry (Subzi curry): Saute onion, garlic, crushed tomato, turmeric, cayenne, and cumin seed. Add cubed potato, cauliflower florets, and water, and simmer until done. Finish with cilantro. Recipe should have had ginger slivers but I used it all up on the chicken. Oh, well, it was popular.

I wonder if it's more of the freshness than thickness. I haven't been to a Chipotle in a while, but I remember their tortillas being quite thin - and certainly tender enough so that when you bite into one that's bigger than your head, all the fillings don't try to squish out the other side. Or maybe it's the fact that they haven't been refrigerated.

Yes, diversol sanitizes as well. @TdeV any brewing supply place will have it. That is where we buy it, sorry, I don't know where else you night find it.

Hi everyone, I am back about a 10 year hiatus. I am baking Fruitcake this weekend. Still deciding on the recipe. I'm off to buy some butter and eggs. The fruit has been soaking in brandy for weeks. If you have a favourite recipe, please provide any recipes or suggestions. I have made Nigel Slater's Xmas Cake twice in the past 3 years. I made a Black Cake once, with the help of eGullet many years ago!

good points next time you are @chipotles you might notice their tortillas are probably larger than the generic or so you get at a supermarket , thus a factor in how they fill them one can heat up a flour tortilla in the microwave , just a few seconds then go from there , w what you have ; or look for the larger ones next trip.

I get what you're saying about heating/warming the tortilla. AND maybe the ones I use are subpar (they probably are) but when I do that they fall apart, tear, I poke a finger through etc. I guess that would mean they are too thin to begin with.

Please, take no offense @Smithy but my local burrito joints, and even a national one like Chipotle, would be crying at those burritos - all of mine would put a LOT more filling in each one. They add enough filling so that you can just barely close the burrito. One thing that helps is to either heat the tortilla on a flattop or briefly steam it - it will make it a lot more flexible and easy to handle. Similar to when wrapping something in a banana leaf, the leaf is commonly passed over a gas flame or burner. ETA - also, one can't undersell the importance of experience and muscle memory. Obviously, people who make 100 burritos a day will be a lot better at it than someone who does it on occasion.

If you can’t find it, you might consider Powdered Brewery Wash (PBW), another stain removing cleaner available in home brewing supply places. It’s kind of a fragrance-free, extra strength OxiClean type cleaner. Quite good at removing tea stains from mugs. I believe Diversol also sanitizes but PBW is primarily a cleaner and stain remover.

@Smithy very fine everything here. BTW : peeling a potato : tastier w the peel ? even mashed ?

Amazon didn't find this, Elsie. More info, please?

You, sir, are a very smart person! Thanks so much for explaining. What would I do without all of the smart people around here???

Consider pickled jalapenos instead of salsa. I know it's not the same, and definitely no sub for tomatoes; but it can add enough taste to suffice as a work around. And FYI, in Diana Kennedy, The Art of Mexican Cooking, there is a recipe for the very best flour tortilla I've ever tasted, "Tortillas de Harina Integral." It's at p. 386. The list of ingredients is as follows: rounded 1/2t fine ground salt 1/2C warm water 5oz AP or bread flour 3oz whole-wheat flour 1 heaped tsp gluten flour (optional) 2oz shortening. I grew up in flour tortilla country, and I don't care for them generally although I appreciate their utility. This one, however, was so good none of them ever made it into the freezer. That said -- I only ever used leaf lard instead of vegetable shortening, and the whole wheat flour that I use makes the best tasting everything, it's from a small mill called "Kenyons" [which I can't really recommend for mail order anymore due to gobsmacking dysfunction in that part of the business] But that flour does taste dramatically better than anything else I've used on the whole-wheat front, so that might have something to do with it.

Should work exactly the same. A PC works because the higher pressure enables the boiling point of water to be higher than at sea level. So my pressure cooker has 2 positions - the first is 1.5 Atmosphere (0.5 atmospheres higher than normal), which equates to a boiling point of about 230F; the second is 2 Atmosphere (1 atmosphere higher than normal) which equates to a boiling point of 248F. So, when suspended on a rack above the water line, you'd be immersed in 248F steam.... So, setting the steam boy to supersteam at 250F should do the same thing and take the same amount of time.