Abra

That's a cool-looking item! I have a Brinkman electric, which used to work well when I lived with ambient temperatures above 90 in the summertime, but here it never gets hot enough to get near the "ideal" temp zone on its little temp guage.

There are three places to sit right on the water. Two are good. Bainbridge Thai is, of course, Thai, and very nice, with great outdoor tables right on the harbor. Up the street a little further is the Pub, called the Harbor House oficially, I think. They have a lovely deck over the water, and better than decent food. On the way to the Pub you'll pass Doc's. Keep on walking. Don't go to Nola unless you have a masochistic love of horrible service. BI Sushi is not near the water.

The fact sheet is a bit scary, although not surprising. I'm thinking the Wendy cake, made with cake flour, and a butter/powdered sugar frosting with a little banana flavoring (and possibly a little starch) is as close as I'm going to come. Even if I were willing to use shortening, this client wouldn't touch it. In fact, I've sent her the link to the fact sheet and she's bound to be upset that she likes it so much, shortening notwithstanding. Don't you hate it when something tastes good until you learn that it contains an ingredient that you'd "never" touch?

I keep loving your pictures - hope you're not getting tired of hearing that yet! The orange chicken looks like my kind of dish - can't wait to try it. When you make wattleseed ice cream, do you just infuse the cream, then strain? I have lots of wattleseed left from making pavlova, and am always looking for new uses for it.

You guys are wonderful!

Thanks, Trish, that really helps. Ok, so Wendy's cake made with cake flour it is. Now to figure out that icing. I'm not sure that it could have had fresh banana in it - that seems unstable. So probably a little banana flavor? And what would make it tan? I'm starting to remember that sort of icing, from way back in my childhood food memories. I have no idea how to recreate that.

The pictures are wonderful! I'm dying to go to that date shop. About your flat bread recipe - you can post the list of ingredients straight from the recipe, and then you need to re-word the directions. Then it's ok to post, and I also beg you to do it. I was planning to make a focaccia with dukkah on it this weekend, but your flatbread would likely be a better match.

Sorry, ChefDan: nee-swahz. Portugese is really daunting. Although I speak French, and have a tiny bit of Spanish, German, Swedish, and Hebrew, as well as a few words of Russian, I find Portuguese pronunciation to be more difficult than any of the above. For that reason alone I'm dying to go to Portugal!

I do velveting cuz I know it works - what I don't know is WHY it works. Is anybody here a food chemist?

Ok, I gotta ask this. I speak French with a good accent - people don't know I'm American in France, more they think I'm German, for some reason. Vin is vin, right? And even in tastevin, the vin is still pronounced like vin, right? I don't get the vei stuff myself. Is that just for people who don't know how to pronounce vin, or are you saying there's a different pronunciation for this word only? And waaay back in the thread, with millefeuille. I hear the "l"s a little myself, when I say it. I sure don't say mee-feuille, but I hit the l lightly. Isn't that how everyone says it? Like in mille neuf cent, you still hear the l. Non? Now pronouncing Thai and Vietnamese dishes, that's what I think is really hard.

Woohoo for you, rooftop, you're a better googler than I, and I always claim to be the best. I bow to you! Vegetable shortening is a no go for this client, but I suppose I could sub butter. That looks like a very standard cream cheese icing, whioch doesn't square with TrishCT's recollection. Hmmm. Annie's Wendy cakes look beautiful and yummy. Thanks for the photos! The crumb is an issue here, I think. Now I wonder which one to try. Trish, when you look at those two recipes, can you tell which would be more SL-ish?

I haven't tried Wendy's cake, and it does look good. Annie, have you had the Sara Lee one? Can you compare them, after you try Wendy's? This looks like it might be richer and denser than a SL product, which I think of as sort of fluffy.

Since this has popped back to the top, I can't resist reposting this link Hilarious Food Safety Songs Some of them actually are laugh out loud funny.

As some of you know, I have a personal chef business cooking for people in their homes. I often bake for my clients, simple cakes, pies and tarts, muffins, biscuits, stuff like that. Now I have a client who has asked me if I can duplicate the Sara Lee banana cake, which is apparently not being made anymore. I googled for a copycat recipe, and even emailed Sara Lee, from whom I never got a reply, unsurprisingly. Does anyone have a recipe that turns out like Sara Lee's? If I've ever eaten it myself it was eons ago, so I have no clear idea of what she wants.

Parsnip spice cake??? That's a recipe I'd love to see! Kevin, did you make those lovely bites with Whey Low, or regular sugar? I don't have a fallback. I always take bringing dessert to be an excuse to try something new. Actually, I don't often get to bring dessert (hope there's no correlation with my propensity to experiment!)

I agree, the photos are fab - but all the signs are in English! What's up with that? I hope you will be able to post a few recipes, and it would be fun to have a little cook-along so we can taste what your local food is like. It's one cuisine I've never seen at all here. We do have Lebanese, so I know what that is, but I'm assuming that there's a lot of variation from that theme.

I can also report that 22 hours of confit-ing notwithstanding, there was still a lot of flavor in those duck bones. I tossed them in water when I picked off the meat, simmered them for a couple of hours, then added a big pile of diced parsnip, shallot, sliced shiitake mushrooms, a diced apple, a little herbes de Provence, and simmered until the parsnip was tender. Partially pureed, with the "leftover" shreds of duck piled in the center of the bowl, showered with a little freshly grated nutmeg, it was delicious. If it had been more than a sort of accidental home lunch, I would have liked a little drizzle of something spicy and green, like chive or watercress oil, but as it was it made a lovely, if non-traditional, duck soup.

Beautiful, thank you CB! I think you've convinced me that I don't want to kill crabs, although now I know how to do it if I'm ever out on the Dungeness Spit and in need of immediate sustenance. I'm right in the heart of Dungeness territory, but fresh, beautifully picked-over crab meat is still $20 a lb. However, now that I see how much/little you got for 20 minutes work, I'm starting to think it's not such a bad deal. I've never heard of "brown meat." You fellow Dungenessers, is that something our crabs don't have, or do we call it something else?

Oh no, I'd better start another batch right away! What glorious-sounding dishes, all. I'm dithering about what to make already. I do have some just-picked tender little Brussels sprouts, but I don't have Bouchon. Any hints as to how that preparation was constructed? I also have some really gorgeous mixed braising greens, including some that are bitter, and some apples, and some spare duck shreds that wouldn't fit into my confit container, so that might be lunch. I love star anise, and that sounds intriguing with the duck. What's the ginger emulsion like? And that red onion salad sounds like such a beautiful presentation. CB, are you calling the quartered and broiled onions the pickled onion rosette, or do you do an additional thinly sliced pickled red onion garnish? On Epicurious I also see several pairings of duck with parsnips and shallots, both of which I also have in the fridge. That sounds like a nice mellow combination, especially with some bitter greens on the side. I see a lot of great duck dishes in our immediate future.

Please take lots of pictures of UAE food in its natural habitat! I have no idea of the local cuisine and am really looking forward to learning more about it.

All of my previous forays into duck confit have ended in cassoulet. But now it's almost spring, too late for cassoulet, and I just finished making a bunch of confit yesterday. Well, actually, I finished it this morning, owing to having forgotten it in the oven overnight. So now I can report that if you make culinarybear's recipe from the confit thread, you can leave it in a 200 degree oven for 22 hours and get a very respectable product. Fortunately, I was already planning to pick it all off the bone, because it was certainly falling off, to the extent that a nice presentation of a whole leg would have been impossible. But for shredding, it was primo. So now, what shall I do with it? I've been considering ducklava, or a blini canape, or a salad, but would love to get some new and exciting ideas.

Hey, walk on with them on the Bainbridge ferry, browse around town for a couple of hours, then eat at Bainbridge Thai or the Pub for good food with great water views. Ususally you can eat outside at both places, and you're right on the water.

Oh yum, red cabbage sauteed in duck fat with all those additions, including my own homemade red wine vinegar, sounds delectable. After 5 1/2 hours, the legs have miles to go before they sleep. I'll check again in about 6 more hours.

Good questions, Steve! Good answers, Patrick! Just on one point - Fifi and I both make our own lard, and I don't use leaf fat, just clean white pork fat, and I think that's how Fifi does it too. Personally, I use olive oil for almost everything, except for using Chinese peanut oil when I want that peanut flavor. But then, I'm deep-fry phobic, so I'm only sauteeing or wokking, which is probably a whole nother thing.

Ok, I'm only a month late to this party, and I didn't read past the first post before starting, so I've made just about every "mistake" cited here. I'm not feeling deterred (yet), though. I marinated my duck legs according to culinarybear's recipe. I didn't have enough duck fat to cover them, but I did have home-rendered pork lard which is sweet and pure in smell and flavor, so I added all I had of that. Still wasn't enough, so I topped it off with olive oil. So right there, one could worry. Add to that the fact that my duck fat was rendered from roasting ducks, something I've always done and never contemplated not doing. If there's no burned flavor, and the resulting fat is ivory/pale golden, what exactly is the problem with this practice? Now it's in a 200 degree oven in the LeCreuset, and although I was planning 12-14 hours, now that I've read the thread I'll start testing it late this afternoon. I'm going to be pulling all the meat off the bone, so I'll probably want to cook it longer than I would if I were going to serve whole legs. About those cracklings, if one doesn't just eat them all up (I didn't) what is their highest and best use post-rendering? I have them in the fridge and was thinking of heating them in a hot oven, and then putting them on/in something, but what? I also used a blood orange, that being the only sort I had in the house. I'm thinking that between all the thyme, garlic, and citrus, that I probably won't be able to save and re-use the fat, which in itself was a new idea for me. What do you all recommend? It's a trinity of fats, rendered from roasting in one case, and flavored with assorted aromatics - just dump it?