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I'm pleased to report a modest success. Last night I smoked a chicken breast in the GE. For wood I used a sweetwood blend. For a rub I used an Oaxacan Ancho Coffee Rub from The Spice House, being careful not to overdo it. Smoking temperature was 135C. Pull temperature was 71C. Time was about an hour and ten minutes. The meat was lovingly tender, and I could slice it remarkably thin. I could even chew it. For someone who finds chicken breasts impossible to cook I was impressed and pleased. It would be interesting to cook a chicken breast in the Anova at the same temperatures but with steam.

Fried basmati rice with chorizo, dry-fried Shiitake mushrooms, roasted chile Poblano, and an egg. Shallot, garlic, cilantro leaves and stems, bird chiles, and fish sauce for flavor, plus a dollop of crushed tomato and coconut milk that needed using up. Spicy!

I let my niece choose the menu last night, and she wanted sweet and sour cauliflower, peppers, and cashews with rice. I cut the sugar in half and it was too sweet for me still, but she was happy.

Neither an article nor a link, but you can find it easily enough.

We have a friend here for a few weeks before he heads out to Alberta, and he's helping us with some projects. A ramshackle shed on the driveway has been revamped with a new floor, vapour barrier, and insulation, and today the doors are going on. That's going to become the new year-round home of our quail, which will get them out of the chickens' enclosure where they currently live. We've also repositioned last year's chicken coop, and added a three-nest nest box to one side of it. We commissioned that from a local carpenter. We've also added a new chicken door in what used to be the back of the coop. Soon we'll be moving the chickens' enclosed run downhill by about 15 feet and turning it at right angles, so it runs away from that side of the house rather than parallel to it. The side of the run will be pressed right up against the coop, and we're going to cut a hole in the wire so they can use the chicken door (the wire will be secured to the coop, so there's no way for chickens to get out or predators to get in). The old, full-width door opening remains in place, and I'll be able to use that to clean out the coop without having to actually go in and work around the chickens underfoot. That old coop has also gotten insulation and a vapour barrier. Last year I McGyvered it by simply putting silverboard insulation (1/2-inch foam inside a protective/reflective foil coating) over the outside walls and roof, and holding it in place with screwed-down straps. Now it's properly insulated on the inside, and we've put in a simple "ceiling" consisting of a couple of wooden slats, a tarp stapled firmly to the slats and the coop's walls, and more silverboard sitting on top of that. Last year, the only heating the coop got was from the chickens' body temperature and a heated water bucket, and its interior temperature hovered around freezing even when the temperatures dipped to -20 and -25 (call it roughly 0F). This year, with the insulated ceiling and fewer gaps in the insulation, it should be even better. We've also moved/removed a few remaining pieces of the old pool deck, the pool house, and the little shed and oil furnace my father-in-law had put there for warming the pool's water. The pool house and shed were screwed together, and had been laying on their side for the past year and a half, since the pool deck had mostly been dismantled. It turns out some rats had been nesting there, attracted inevitably by the chickens' (and quails') food. The chickens had been watching us idly, in their typically gormless, pop-eyed manner, until the rats began to emerge. Then, like a switch had been flipped, they went into full "raptor" mode. Three of them darted after one of the rats and surrounded it, pecking at it viciously as it shrieked in pain and terror, until it made a desperate panic-dash (past Wembley, who'd been noisily waiting his turn) and found cover in the pile of scrap lumber left from the pool deck, where its nest-mates had already found refuge. Wembley and the chickens patrolled that pile of lumber for a solid hour afterwards, trying desperately to get at the rats, all but one of whom survived. I don't know if it was the one the chickens had drawn blood from, or perhaps another that had gotten injured in the course of us moving the structure; it's hard to say. Though it did rather forcibly remind me of a discussion we'd had here recently about whether chickens could be considered a predator.

Hi everyone! I am so excited to be a part of this forum! I joined in the hopes that I could pick your brains! I’m exploring tools that allow restaurant managers to create digital floor plans and assign servers to specific sections in a visible manner. I’d love to hear what platforms you’re using and what works best for multi-location operations. Any recommendations or lessons learned?

They are everywhere. My nearest is just across the road and there are two others nearby. They are open 7 days a week. The idea of a weekly shop is unthinkable to the Chinese mind. They demand absolute freshness.

How far is the vegetable stall? Here my family goes to the grocery store once weekly (sometimes twice) and, in summer, to the farmers' market on Saturday. So that's vegetables once weekly. All trips by car, travelling several miles.

The 2012 eG topic is here.

Thanks, @rotuts, I remember that! Here’s a gift link to that NYT obit for non subscribers. And here’s the eG topic on her viral Olive Garden review: My two favorite bits of the NYT obit:

Gonna throw a few random, haphazard updates in here at odd moments through the day, just to catch up a bit. Belatedly dealt last night with a cohort of rabbits that had been ready for processing 4-6 weeks ago, but life has been too busy to circle around to them. Ordinarily, when I get them done at the ideal 16-week age, they average about 7 lbs live weight and 3.5 dressed weight. I didn't get a live weight on these ones, but the dressed weight averaged around 5 lbs so I'm guessing they'd have been 10 lbs or thereabouts. We've been negotiating with a couple of local vendors to get sausage made from our rabbits, just to give my poor sweetheart (who, remember, can't eat most red meats and especially pork) something that she can eat in breakfast wraps, on pizzas, etc. It's not that I can't do this myself, or haven't in the past, but the meat grinder and sausage-stuffer attachments on my KitchenAid are just not up to the task of doing anything like that in bulk. Also, there's the time issue (which never goes away). So I may or may not splurge on an upgraded meat grinder and/or sausage stuffer, depending how much it costs us to get this batch processed. This batch of rabbits seemed ideal candidates for the purpose, given that they're oversized and also likely to be tougher than those harvested at 16 weeks (their legs were perceptively more sinewy than usual). So after I cleaned them and broke them down, I deboned everything except the forelegs (we jokingly call those "wings," and treat them like chicken wings; they're a bit fattier and richer than rabbit meat in general). We're also going to have several pounds simply ground up for us, because ground meat is a really useful/handy thing to have for all kinds of purposes. So, of the nearly 50 lbs/20+kg of dressed rabbit, I got a total of 12.4kg deboned meat (27-odd pounds), 3.2kg of forelegs (7+ lbs), and the rest went to bones/carcasses which I roasted off for later processing into rabbit broth. It was a big project, we started at around 3 and I wasn't finished until after 10. Ordinarily, when I'm not deboning the bunnies, I'd have been done 1.5-2 hours earlier.

quite some time ago , even here on eG , a review of the O.G. caused a bit of a stir. I did search for that thread , and could not find it NYTimes , Today : https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/dining/marilyn-hagerty-dead.html ''' Marilyn Hagerty, a food columnist who startled the online world with an earnestly detail-oriented and nonjudgmental appraisal of a North Dakota Olive Garden, and who was startled in turn when the review racked up more than one million page views, bringing her national media attention and a book contract, died on Sept. 16 in Grand Forks, N.D. She was 99. Her death, in a hospital, was from complications of a stroke, said her son, the journalist James R. Hagerty. Ms. Hagerty had been writing The Eatbeat, her restaurant column in The Grand Forks Herald, for 26 years when, in early 2012, she filed her report about the opening of the city’s first Olive Garden outlet, part of a local branch of a national Italian restaurant chain where the warm breadsticks never ran out. The Olive Garden’s menu was enormously popular but also routinely mocked for taking starchy, cheesy liberties with the cuisine. Ms. Hagerty did not engage with that debate. Her descriptions of the restaurant and its food were direct and matter of fact. “The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day,” she wrote. “The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.” '' When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.” etc, etc, for review purposes.

@ElsieD Ive used the RB40 technique several times in the distant past , on nice looking marbled NYstrips supermarket choice . rubbed a little on each side , a Tbs or so , absorbed by the meat , then refrigerated on a rack for air cirvulation 2 - 3 days , then SV'd 130 F , ( forgot the # hours , y0u would have to search for that ref ) I used that meat for RB sandwiches and it was very tasty , mimcking a dry aged steak. the meat was loosely covered to prevent too much drying out. If I had a well marbled choice steak ( Prime , if you can find it , is not very ' prime ' these days , and way over priced ) Id do the meat this way again. the fishy flavor disappears w heat

I have never bought Shio Koji but, I have used dried koji rice to "dry age" steaks, similar to this. https://blog.thermoworks.com/koji-aged-steaks/ We enjoyed it each time and I will do it again. I've made Shio Koji and used it with vegetables, sauces and marinade to good effect. I can't remember exactly which book or article mentioned that the commercial Shio Koji varies in quality. Making Koji and miso etc, seems interesting and is on a list of things to try.

牛肉豆芽炒粉 (niú ròu dòu yá chǎo fěn), beef and beansprout fried rice noodles. Nicely spicy。

I appreciate the help.

I honestly don't know. I can read every word and none say it's koji. Sorry

amazon sold it to me as koji maybe it isn't?

Bizarre. I can't work out what that is. It mentions shio (salt) but I cant see the word koji anywhere on the container. It does however say it's for grilled food, simmered food, Japanese food, stir fried food. Sorry.

Today’s late lunch was a fast food burger - rather a curiosity for me. I don’t do fast food much except for road trips and airports and even then, I look for other options. But this morning, the local news informed me that today was National Cheeseburger Day. Who knew? They featured some great looking burgers. None were from spots in my area but they got me in a burger mood so after running a bunch of errands, I remembered a USA Today poll that picked a Habit Burger as the best fast food burger. A low hurdle, to be sure, but I’ve never had one and figured I might as well observe the national day so I got a double char with cheese from Habit. Two chargrilled burgers, caramelized onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles, mayo, and cheese on a toasted bun: Not bad. Too heavy on the mayo but the charred flavor is detectable. I’d prefer a bigger burger that could take more char vs the two stacked patties but I was pretty hungry and it wasn’t bad at all. Lettuce was fresh, tomato tasted like one. The most embarrassing part is that my errands included picking up my weekly fish share (live, local oysters) and the local farmers market where I chose two varieties of passion fruit to make a mignionette for the oysters and I still stopped off for a fast food burger 🙈🙈🙈

Previous conversation Doesn't look like any of us actually tried it then, but there are more links to articles.

here it is

There is certainly a sweet koji (甘い麹 - amai koji). It does not contain sugar but the sweetness comes from the processing of the rice turning the starch into glucose. Maybe that's what you accidentally bought.

In my hands, I put the meat in a ziploc with a tbsp of soy and a tbsp of Red Boat 40. I put it in the fridge and turn it occasionally for a few hours. Brother @rotuts may have improvements.

How does this work?