chromedome

...and I'll be happy to offer them, as soon as I can read the article. I'm planning to do these at work, sometime during the fall, so an improved recipe will be a bonus. We have a next-door "sister store," a wine shop, and the manager there is Portugese. I plan on surprising the heck out of her with these. I initially found your site, btw, while researching recipes for "Iberian day" at school. It was a pleasant surprise to find you here at the Gullet, a few months later; and to read your how-to on food writing.

I could see perhaps using transparent rice noodles instead of sliced gelatine sheets. Maybe soak them in a light syrup, or poach them, as needed. That would probably work. I've made a chocolate "ravioli" consisting of thinly-rolled cocoa shortbread, cut into squares and laboriously hand-filled with ganache. I served them warm (not hot) from the oven with a vanilla anglaise and some raspberry coulis. They were pretty good, but not really "pasta" I suppose. Just a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile, so to speak. My wife's grandmother, a Mennonite, makes dessert varenike (perogies) from the normal dough, but filled with cherries or plums according to what's in season. They're served in a simple sauce of reduced cream, with a sprinkling of sugar. Damn, they're good! You've got me thinking, though. I expect that if I was to make a basic egg pasta, and used confectioner's sugar instead of flour for the rolling, it would probably be sweet enough to do the job without mucking about changing the recipe. Perhaps I'd fill them with fruit purees, or fresh fruit lightly poached (blanched, basically) in a light syrup then drained. Hmmm. Lots of possibilities. Gonna have to give this some thought, there's a competition in April that I'm thinking of entering. That might be a fun dessert to do...

I found this spreadsheet on an artisan-baking site. If you enter the original recipe into the "basic meth" section, you can then use the "scaling" feature to reduce the recipe to a size you're comfortably with. I'd say that the passionfruit are probably your most-limited ingredient, so perhaps use them in lieu of flour as the "100% ingredient" to scale from. If you live anywhere near the Canadian border, lemon gin is not hard to find at liquor stores here. Otherwise, perhaps just infuse whatever neutral spirit you have with some lemon zest.

Years ago in Vancouver, I was at the table next to this exchange: DINER: I see this stuff mentioned all the time, this..."ratatouille." What is it, anyway? WAITRESS: (face squinched up in a look of disgust) It's some kind of a vegetable stew, with, like (shudders) eggplant in it, or something. [pregnant pause] (then, brightly) It's supposed to be really good! The diner, oddly enough, did not order the ratatouille.

My night job "pools," but it seems to be on a different basis from what's been discussed here. Each of the servers surrenders up a percentage of the night's tips, which are shared out to the bussers and kitchen staff according to a fixed arrangement recognizing tenure and hours worked. We're a small place with low turnover, and (amazing to me) everyone gets along well. I've never worked anywhere that I could say that, and I've had a varied 20+ years in the workforce. Nobody takes advantage of the system, and if the tips are insufficient to cover a share for the back of the house, the chef/owner ponies up the difference. They feed us well, too.

I tend to go through more rice than most white guys, considering a family of four and no ethnic pre-disposition. I mainly buy Indian or Thai long-grain rice in a 20kg sack, and Pakistani Basmati in a 10kg sack. I've been meaning to get into some of the sticky rices, but haven't as yet. American rices are widely available in the supermarkets and are generally aggressively-priced, but I find them much harder to cook successfully. I am assured that there are numerous premium American rices, so perhaps it's just a matter of which ones are available to me here. At any rate... I always rinse my rice thoroughly, which I find is one of the biggest keys to making it non-sticky. With basmati, because of its longer, more delicate grains, I soak it for at least 30 minutes and preferably 2-3 hours. This makes it less prone to breakage. I make rice in several different ways, depending on what I plan to do with it (leaving aside risottos, which are a whole different thing entirely). I generally cook rice on the stovetop, in a 4L pot with a nice, tight lid. For long-grain rice cooked plain, I'll go with about 3 cups of water/2 cups of rice. For basmati, because I soak it, I'll cut back the water to 2 1/2 cups. This seems adequate to properly hydrate the rice without turning it to mush. The 2:1 ratio given on the label of many rices is just asking for trouble. If I am cooking an elaborate meal and need my stovetop space, I'll throw the rice into my oven once it's come to a boil. Rather than take the lid off to stir, I just give the whole pot a good swirl with the lid on; then into the oven it goes. I find that a 250F oven does the job nicely, and it won't have to cool off very much if I need to use it as a platewarmer. When I'm making a pilaf-style dish, I invariably fry the rice in my cooking fat for a few minutes first; then add the water/stock/whatever. Generally the rice gets added to whatever aromatics and spices I'm using, and stirred until it's well coated with the flavourful oil. The business with a towel between the lid and the rice is widely used; I came across it in Najmieh Batmanglij's Persian cookbooks. When I'm making Iranian food I do the rice her way: cook the basmati uncovered at a full boil for just a few minutes; then drain and rinse. Place it back in the pot, gently mounded into a cone-shaped pile; add some saffron-infused water, then cover with a towel and lid and let it steam. In Iran, as well, the crusty layer at the bottom of the pot is highly prized; their rice pots are designed specifically to ensure a crust. When cooking large quantities of rice, it is important to reduce the amount of water used. This sounds counter-intuitive, and I have no idea what the mechanics of it are, but I can assure you that it's a factor. Even stepping up from two cups of rice to four means that I need to reduce the water I use. I find that omitting about 1/4 cup of water for every two cups of rice is a good rule of thumb, but bear in mind that I don't have a pot capable of dealing with more than 6 cups of uncooked rice. I'd have to dig up one of my textbooks to see what the recommendation is for larger batches. The cool-down period, as noted above, is also important. Your rice may be cooked perfectly, but if you pop the lid off of just-cooked rice and start plopping it onto plates it's going to be sticky. That's just the way it is. Leaving the rice rest for 10-20 minutes allows the starches time to "set up" nicely, ensuring that the individual grains regain their firmness. Duguid and Alford used the analogy of a loaf of bread fresh from the oven, which will always seem damp and doughy compared to the same loaf after it's had time to cool. Allow yourself adequate time for the rice to sit, and your problem is half-solved.

Thanks for your interest, Red! You're right, those are some big-ass recipes. What's really frightening is that the night bakers are making up batch-and-a-half quantities, rather than what's shown there. We refrigerate the muffin mix in 5-gallon buckets, and scoop as needed. We are a busy downtown office/mall location and the muffins are a constant seller for us. We make up to a dozen kinds of muffins per day, and in quantities of up to 4 dozen each, which amounts to 500-600 muffins per day. This, I'll point out, is during our slow period! We'll do a lot more through the fall when we're busier. The muffins are portioned with a #6 scoop (5.5 oz), so we burn through a bucket of mix pretty quickly (the 5 gal. buckets are not filled all the way, as they'd be unwieldy owing to weight). Currently my night bakers are both rather inexperienced (they came to us from Tim Horton's, where it's just scoop-and-bake). Starting tomorrow I'll be working my Monday shifts with the bakers from afternoon until midnight, so that will give me an opportunity to a) learn their routines, so I can cover when they're sick; b) observe their work patterns to find improvements; and c) find areas where their methodology may be open to improvement. Also some day soon I'll be training additional night bakers, and it would help if I knew what to do! We do currently have "standardized" recipes, but they're a ghastly mess (the phrase "dog's breakfast" springs to mind). I'm going to be porting them over the next few months to weight measures, and generating more-accurate costing from that. Along the way, I also intend to improve the recipes themselves to the extent that I can. Of course, in the quantities we make, I also have to keep an eye on the bottom line; but having more-accurate costs is the first step in that direction. After doing that, I'll be converting the newly-revised recipes into % formulas for my own reference, which will make life much simpler when I want to compare recipes from elsewhere to what I'm using. As for the leavening thing: I'd given that some thought, but the muffins at the end of the batch usually spring just as well as the ones at the beginning of the batch. I'd assumed that this means the leavening is still doing its job. I'm thinking that perhaps these recipes need more in the line of "softening" ingredients; perhaps some additional egg or a titch more oil in the case of the carrot, and suitable substitutes in the oat bran. McDuff: 72 cups is a 5 gal/20 litre bucket almost full. The guys over on the hot side shred one of those for her every day when they're prepping their own veg. And thanks for the methodological suggestions; I use an unconventional recipe at home for small-batch muffins so I'm somewhat deprived of context.

Hello again, all. Continuing to go to school on the cumulative expertise of everyone here, I'm bringing an irritation from my workplace. We bake our own muffins from scratch, and I'm slowly trying to sort the recipes into some sort of coherent order. Overall they're pretty decent muffins, but there are two that I'm not especially happy with. One is the low-fat oat bran, the other is the carrot-raisin. We make big batches of these puppies, about 30kg at a whack (60lbs or so). The oat bran has been pretty crappy. They've been loading it with applesauce and fruit to give it some flavour, but it tends to be gummy and unappealing. The flavour is bland, the colour is blah, and it goes from underbaked/sticky to overbaked/hard & dry in a very short time. The recipe in its current form is as follows: I viewed and printed several low-fat muffin recipes from the internet, by way of comparison, since I'm not by nature a low-anything kind of cook or baker. While there were various approaches, most of them incorporated plain yogurt and/or egg whites. In the most recent batch, I had my night baker add 2 quarts of plain yogurt to the mix. This gave us a much better colour and texture. It was still not what I was looking for (I think it was both overmixed and overbaked, but I'll find out for sure as I work with the night bakers); but it was a big improvement. The muffins browned nicely and had a better flavour and mouthfeel. I'm thinking I'll step up the yogurt to 4 quarts next time and see how we fare. Any further suggestions? Ideally I'd like a muffin that's almost indistinguishable from the regular ones, but that may be unattainable. The carrot-raisin is a somewhat different situation. The basic flavour of the muffin is fine, but I've got concerns about the proportions and methodology (which strikes me as a bit odd, but I've never done muffins in big-batch format before). The muffin tastes good and sells well, but generally comes out feeling tough and overmixed. I know overmixing is not the problem (or not the whole problem), because I've made a batch myself to show the night baker how little mixing a muffin batter takes; those were better but still not ideal. This is the recipe: This muffin tends to have a tough, chewy cap; it usually has that smooth, stretched look that indicates overmixing. As I said above, it comes out looking/feeling overmixed even when it is not. Any suggestions?

Halibut in pistachio crust, served on yogurt/caper sauce, with saffron rice and a handful of mixed veg. Just the way we serve it to the customers; but with a bowl of the boss's clam "chowder" (I'm sorry, I'm from Nova Scotia...if it ain't white, don't call it chowder) on the side. Have I mentioned that they feed us pretty well?

I wanted to show this to my artist/design junkie wife, but I just get "image not found." They were there before!

I went through most of those Edmonton sites before I moved here, scoping out potential workplaces. I knew about Jack's, Unheardof, and Hardware before I ever started. Didn't think I had a hope in hell of getting in at Hardware, which has been borne out by my local contacts. When I got to the Century Grill website, I just about puked. Holy Crap!! I eliminated them from my list of possibilities immediately. Any company that could concentrate such a high level of wrongness on their website was a compay I didn't want to work for (also borne out by my local contacts). I do freelance research, which means I spend a lot of time grubbing around badly-designed websites looking for info. Flash is a personal bugbear of mine. When will people figure out that Flash and usability exist on a continuum? More Flash=less usable. Some major players have been guilty of this. I remember last year one of the CIA Prochef site's "Worlds of Flavour" offerings was just appalling. The menu options were represented by unlabelled, moving (??!!??) photos. To follow your choices, you had to track a photo with your mouse until the rollover text popped up, by which time there was little opportunity to read it - never mind select it - before the photo scrolled off the screen and you had to start over at the other side. Gotta wonder what they were thinking! Website design is a lot like cooking, I guess. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If you don't know what I mean, check out a student cooking competition some time.

The chef/owner at my night job has no qualms about giving away recipes. In fact, the recipe for our ever-popular seafood bisque is even on our website. She just shrugs and says, "If I'm not making it for you, it's not gonna be the same." And she's right.

If you can find a copy in your neck of the woods, check out Edna Staebler's book "Food that Really Schmecks." Although Staebler lives (lived? I dunno) among the Mennonite community in the Kitchener/Waterloo area of Ontario, the food is almost identical to that of the Amish country. In fact, many families have branches in both places. There are chapters on cookies, cakes, pies, other desserts, and home-made candies. Pies are probably the most characteristic Amish/Mennonite dessert, though (often served at three meals a day), so one or another pie seems appropriate. "Schnitz" pie (sliced apples) is a stalwart, but is not noticeably Amish to the outsider. It's basically a one-crust pie of the type we think of as "Dutch apple". The version made with dried apples, perhaps, is a little more distinctive. Sour cream raisin pie? That's a true "damn the calories" dessert! Lotvarrick is a custard pie made with apple butter, that's a good 'un. Gwetcha is a prune-custard pie, and a real hard-core Pennsylvania item. Cottage cheese pie? (good with fruit or maple syrup) "Thick" (slightly sour) milk pie? How about Botzelbaum ("somersault") pie? That one starts off with the pastry on the bottom and the filling on top, and ends with the pastry on top and the filling underneath. Let me know if you can't find the book, and I'll PM you one or more of the above. ISBN on the book is 07-077392-0, if that helps.

My parents did wholesale for the first couple of years that they owned their bakery in Nova Scotia (eventually they decided it wasn't worth the aggravation). One of their customers was a real nutbar. He didn't buy a whole lot, he was terribly demanding, and he was always slow to pay. One day when I was there, he came out to the bakery to bitch. My father looked him in the eye (my father is 5' 6", the customer was 6' 4") and said very quietly, "Get out of my f**cking store. When I was in the Navy I worked with any asshole they put alongside of me, but now I run my own business. And I'm not doing business with you anymore. If you set foot in my store again, I'll kick your ass out the door." The customer left. My father says that every day of the remaining six years they ran the bakery, he'd think of that moment and smile. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That course of action is not universally applicable, mind you.

That's retail, hon...get used to it. There's always going to be some twit who has a problem with your stuff. A friend of mine who worked in a Second Cup in Vancouver had a customer one day who just totally went off on them because of the price of their coffee, and how it didn't taste nearly as good as what he drank at home for a fraction of the price...which turned out to be Nescafe. Go figure.

I made the recipe from Leite's Culinaria for my International Lab at cooking school. They were the hit of the day, hands down. My biggest memory of the day, though, was watching my classmate Abe (who keeps kosher) cook the day's best take on pork and clam stew without tasting it even once. He went by judgement and smell alone, the culinary equivalent of sailing a boat by dead reckoning. The man's got talent!

I have some interest, but won't have the opportunity to get the makin's by the Sept 1 start date. Of course, this means that I'll have the opportunity to profit by your collective experience...

The organic market I worked for in Halifax bought basil and spinach year-round from a local greenhouse operation. They had a rather synergistic approach; they grew tilapia for market in their plant-watering system. The fish fertilized the plants, and in turn helped keep the water system healthy. They're a small company, but they seem to be making a go of it. On the other hand, a much-ballyhooed attempt at introducing large-scale greenhouse growing to Newfoundland collapsed miserably. I don't know enough about it, though (it happened while I lived out West) to discuss where they might have gone wrong.

Oooooooh, please do! The restaurant I went to in Halifax used to serve absolutely amazing dhansak; I'd love to have a good recipe or two.

In "The Professional Pastry Chef" Bo Friberg gives the lifespan of pastry cream as four days; after the first two days he recommends only using it in items which will be baked after the cream is added. I think that's probably a bit conservative, myself, but I've *never* had leftover pastry cream so what would I know?

My artist/colour nut/interior-design-hobbyist wife approves heartily of your decor. I approve heartily of the contents of the showcases. And I like those clear trays too, they're much more appealing than the industrial white ones we use where I work. I'll surely be coming back to those photos for cribbing purposes...

One of my instructors at cooking school had spent several years in Europe with the Canadian Armed Forces. He visited Italy on occasion, and brought back a panforte recipe; which we made for Christmas. I loved it, and made a point of copying the recipe. Plan on making it this year.

I can shed a little bit of light on this. The earliest forms of wheat cultivated throughout the Middle East and Med were very difficult to thresh. In time it was discovered that roasting the grains not only made threshing easier, but made the grain edible without further processing. Various forms of toasted-grain gruels and porridges were common throughout the ancient world, but the resulting grain could be eaten "as-is" if necessary. In the Himalayas, to this day, there is a common meal of toasted millet ground to flour, and with hot tea stirred in to make a paste which is eaten with the fingers. Green wheat (almost but not quite ripened) is still treated this way in various places around the region. Here, for example, is a page showing how they do it in Syria. In Iran, a pudding of green wheat called samanoo is one of the "seven S's" which are traditionally served while celebrating their New Year, Now Rooz (various spellings). Similar foods were common throughout western Europe during medieval times. Loving your blog, btw. Desperately jealous.

Having read the threads cited above, I'm salivating and just about ready to head out to my garden for some beets or beet tops. I always sow mine thickly, because the seedlings (AKA $13/lb microgreens) are one of my favourite things, as are the mature tops. I harvest them like mesclun, a leaf here a leaf there, all summer long. A combination of flavours which I did not see mentioned is beets with raspberries; two of the very best things about summer. Beets and raspberries make an unbelievable mousse; I plan to try sorbet and/or ice cream once I get the appropriate gear. Either shred the beets raw and cook them with the juiced raspberries, or puree cooked beets (roasted work especially well) and strain the juice into raspberry juice. I favour about a 2:1 ratio of beet to raspberry, but to each his own. The earthy sweetness of the beets and the acidic tang of the raspberries are amazing together. Both of my kids, inveterate beet-haters, devoured the mousse in a heartbeat.

One of my personal heroes is Dr. Temple Grandin, a leading expert on slaughterhouse design and the behavior of domesticated animals. Diagnosed in childhood as autistic, she went on to forge a rather impressive career and now operates her own consulting business. Dr. Oliver Sacks interviewed her for his book "An Anthropologist on Mars", which derives its title from her approach to living in the larger world. She cannot comprehend it in the instinctive way the rest of us do; so she applies her intellect to the task of decoding the behaviours of those around her, and deducing appropriate responses. In some ways I think this is analogous to those who have to re-learn motor skills after an accident or illness causes them to lose awareness of their body. Incidentally Grandin was able, while an adolescent, to teach herself how to learn. The methodology she devised for herself is, I'm told, pretty much what is used now by educators working with the autistic population (I'm sure Specialteach can correct me if my information is inaccurate). I don't know how the "special" links to Amazon work, but if anyone wants to throw them in here, she has written a few books which may be of deep interest to anyone who has an autistic person in their life (those of you, of course, who haven't already read 'em).