chromedome

The one on the right came up in my GF's facebook feed the other day, and she swore she'd get it for me. I'm the kid who read his encyclopedia cover to cover because nobody thought it necessary to tell me that wasn't how most people use one.

I make a batch of creme brulee every so often, by popular demand, so I always have extra whites hanging around and often use them to lighten waffles or pancakes.

I would guess it's a 20-oz imperial pint, given the context. IIRC a number of pubs in British Columbia got into trouble a couple of years ago for selling 16-oz American pints, rather than 20 oz pints. We're officially metric here too, but the 20-oz pint remains the standard for beer.

Canadian AP flour runs in the 12% range, give or take.

...$999 for the 325-watt mixer? That's some serious marketing chutzpah, right there...

For any non-Anglophiles reading this, "corn flour" in the UK context is what we call cornstarch in North America.

Chilling and slicing is just a convenient way to handle a soft, high-fat dough. As with spritz cookies, the end result is very delicate.

You have to toast the chickpea flour in a dry skillet until it smells, well...toasty...otherwise you get a distinctly "bean-y" flavor in the finished cookie. The flour will get a little bit browner, but your nose will tell you when it's done. It goes from smelling rather leguminous to aromatic and fragrant, more or less all at once. Stir it constantly though, or it'll scorch.

Salted and unsalted butter seem to be the same price in the US, but they're predictably $1 apart anywhere I've lived in Canada. It seems to be a circular thing: We buy less because it costs more, and it costs more because it's not as popular. I don't think shelf life is necessarily the issue because a lot of stores keep it in the frozen section. As for method, I just cream the sugar and butter and then add the flour. It's kind of a "don't overthink it" recipe. Years ago I was looking for a gluten-free "shortbread," so I tried an Iranian cookie made with rice flour and an Indian cookie made with pan-toasted chickpea flour. I found the Iranian one gritty and the Indian one too earthy, but then had the inspiration of doing half-and-half with the rice flour and chickpea flour. That worked pretty well (I used brown butter, for extra flavor) but it was a long time ago and I have no memory of the exact recipes I used.

I've bought stackable cooling racks with folding legs from places like Walmart over the years. They can lie flat as a conventional rack, or stand 4"-5" high if needed.

I understand that brands of butter vary in their salt content, and that in large-scale recipes it can be the difference between things tasting "right" and tasting salty. For a home-sized recipe using a cup or less, I think it amounts to (as they say in the Canadian military) "picking fly-shit out of the pepper."

The thick, pressed-into-a-pan style of shortbread is usually somewhat crumbly, though recipes vary in their degree of crumbliness. Individual, thinner cookies need to be sturdier so they'll hold their shape and not break into fragments when handled, so the proportions are different. FWIW, I've always used salted butter in mine. Primarily that's because a) I usually only keep salted on hand, which in turn is because b) salted is cheaper by about $1/lb and I'm usually unwilling to spend the difference (we can blame that on my Scots heritage, perhaps). The ratio I use in mine is 1 part butter:2 parts sugar:4 parts flour (by volume, because that's how my grandmother did it), which makes a pretty good cookie. Spoon the flour into your cup and swipe to level it, otherwise you'll get too much flour and the dough will be stiff and dry.

It is sometimes available in the frozen case of Mediterranean or gourmet grocery stores, alongside the phyllo. I've seen it occasionally, but never when it was practical for me to buy some and play with it.

All righty, then. My first take was that it was a bit short for a carving knife, but I suppose that'd be carving as differentiated from slicing...you'd want something a bit nimbler for working around joints and such.

The shape strikes my eye as oddly old-fashioned, like something out of my great-grandmother's kitchen drawer. What would be its intended use?

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. The article is now completed and submitted to the client, and should be "live" on the site at some point in the next week or so (this client is quick to publish, one of my others has just now published an article I wrote back in November). Dave said it would be fine to post a link, for the satisfaction of everyone who chimed in with suggestions, so I'll do that at some point in the next few days. Not everything made it through to the final version of the article, but often following one suggestion led to something else that *did* work out, so everyone's input was of value. The tricky bit with this particular client is having to find demonstrable, linkable online pricing, which many supermarkets just plain don't have on their sites. Even when they do (eg, WF) it's often behind a paywall and direct linking doesn't work. I had to do screen grabs and submit them to the editor along with the article, which was something of a PITA. Every occupation has its own trivial irritations, I suppose, and those are mine. Looking out the window at the howling blizzard -- again -- I think it's a pretty fair trade-off for not having to commute anywhere for work.

It's always the first thing I show people in hands-on cooking classes, as well. "Grasping a tool by its handle is obvious, intuitive, an in this case completely wrong."

That sucks. I took a pretty good chunk out of one of my fingers with a mandoline once, during service. Fortunately the owner's "niece-in-law," a registered nurse, was on hand and bandaged me up very professionally. I had to wear the glove for everything for about three weeks, until it had healed up reasonably. It took about two years to get back full sensation in that fingertip, though.

That was what I suspected, but thought I'd ask anyway.

The crust at the bottom is desired in some cultures (Iranian, for example) so some brands of rice cooker are designed specifically to create a generous "ta deeg."

That's maddening. It happened to me once when a building I lived in lost power. The rest of the neighbourhood came back up but our (newly and hurriedly constructed) building stayed inexplicably at a brownout level. I went down to the electrical room and listened to the electricians gazing in morbid wonder at the dog's breakfast that was the wiring, trying to make out the name of the inspector who'd signed off on it and speculating loudly about how much he'd earned thereby. From that I concluded I wouldn't have power any time soon, so I called a restaurant up the block and begged the use of their ovens. They agreed, so I left them a loaf. It was a good investment...I ate there a couple of times, later on, and was treated like royalty.

For those who know more about the technology than I: Would it be possible to cobble up something with a dimmer switch or (potentiometer of some sort, anyway) to act as a secondary, analog controller for the induction unit?

It was leftovers chez Chrome, too. After four hours of shovelling, then three hours at my GF's former marital home attempting to turn the water on so it can finally be sold (turned out ex-hubby had not, in fact, sent someone to winterize the place, so pipes have burst and I have to go back again tonight with the plumber), we got home somewhat past dinnertime and ate leftover roast chicken and mashed.

I've done a similar thing...sliding the over-cooked article off the active burner with a curse, only to realize belatedly that I'd slid it to a burner I had used earlier (on my flat-top stove) and forgotten to turn off. Opening all the windows for smoke-clearance is not a happy scenario in mid-January in Atlantic Canada.

It's not really cooking, but this one floored me... https://youtu.be/0ED7WMGCKmQ