Smithy

Last night we tried the Chicken Thighs with Salami and Fennel recipe from JAZ's Ultimate Instant Pot® Cookbook for Two. This is a very nice flavor combination. I tend to be leery of fennel because of its association with anise, but the sweetness of the bulb comes through and the licorice flavor doesn't. I need to use this vegetable more.

That should be somebody's tagline. (Maybe I'll change or augment mine!) If nothing else, it characterizes a great meal!

I just went through the "I hate lamb!!" drama again, followed by the discovery that the protestor doesn't really hate lamb. Thanks for another delicious treatment!

What seasonings do you use with that curry?

Yes, it does. In small doses it just adds a nice depth to the flavor, without being obvious. The first time I tried using it, I used it exclusively to saute some vegetables, and the smokiness was overwhelming. I liked last night's lighter touch better.

We bought massive pork steaks a few weeks ago ... big enough that one steak would serve two people with leftovers. In a moment of laziness, I purchased a bag of chopped broccoli, cauliflower and carrots, and then wondered what to do with it. The lot came together in two roasting pans tonight. The vegetables were chopped more finely and tossed with olive oil and mesquite-smoked olive oil, then roasted in the oven. Near the end, they were mixed with jarred roasted red peppers and returned to the oven. The finishing touch was to toss them with balsamic vinegar. In the meantime, the single giant pork steak was breaded and put into a roasting pan, thence the oven. I've written elsewhere that my darling thinks there is one, and only one, way to do pork steaks. "Why mess with perfection?" he exclaims. I've caved. There will be no experiments on this cut of meat! (Well, we do both like the results...I just don't like the constraint of doing the same thing every time.) The plating looked better before we started eating. I remembered the picture after we started eating. The pork steak and breading were predictably good. I'm really more pleased with the vegetables, because they were an experiment that turned out well.

Diana Kennedy, currently aged 96(!) has donated her collection of notes, slides, recipes, scrapbooks, books, and so on to the University of Texas at San Antonio. Rather than entrust the documents to mail or messenger service, she made the 800-mile drive with two or three others, including Tejal Rao. Rao wrote a delightful article about the woman and the trip for The New York Times, here: Road Tripping with Diana Kennedy. I hope it isn't behind a paywall. She sounds like quite a character. Rather than focus on some of her funnier quips, though, I'll quote this bit that shows what she's accomplished, and why she's so driven:

That's an amazing video. Not only is the machinery beautiful, but as pastrygirl and teonzo point out there must be quite a learning curve to learning to handle the material. I was especially interested in and surprised by the early stage on the slab, where the maker grabbed a cooling batch, lifted it, poured the inner contents back onto the slab and then set the outer skin onto it to remelt. It looked for all the world like he was pouring the stuff out of a cellophane bag, but then the entire "bag" (outer skin) went back into the mix! I also think the splash guard made of dominos is cool.

I tried Kumatos once. I've seen them a lot in grocery stores. They were a very dark reddish purple, as cdh described. I was unimpressed. I strongly prefer bright acidity in tomatoes. Campari tomatoes I like a lot. The Kumatos were blah. Now, if I were to see some Cherokee Purples or other heirloom dark tomatoes at a farmers' market, I'd try them again.

I made a batch of bread yesterday using @Ann_T' instructions for baking bread with a new sourdough starter. The starter in question was the starter above. It showed a bit more activity yesterday than it does now, but not nearly as much as in the first photo shown above, so I used yeast to help it along. The flour was a combination of King Arthur bread flour and the special Barrio Blend flour mix I bought last spring in Tucson. I really like this flour blend a lot. Whether it was the sourdough starter, the flour, or a combination of the two I don't know, but the flavor is excellent. What I'm not happy about is the shape. This dough was more slack than I've have expected at 75% hydration. I made the biga on Thursday night and the dough on Friday morning, then baked Friday evening. I can think of several possibilities of where I went wrong with regard to making a nice, round, well-puffed boule. I used the stretch-and-fold method, but maybe I needed to knead it a lot before I started that process. (Does anyone do that? It seems to me that doing more kneading than necessary to get a good mix would be unnecessary.) Maybe I needed to work it more during the shaping. @Anna N once posted a link to a video showing how to get a really tight skin on the boule, and I still don't seem to have the technique. (Actually, my dough didn't look very different from what's shown in that video, but I'll bet his puffed up more!) Or maybe my oven wasn't hot enough (preheated to 450F for at least an hour; baking stones on bottom and top shelves; bread went onto the middle rack, not on a stone). Maybe I needed more steam. Maybe it's all of the above, or something I haven't even considered. I only used half the batch yesterday; the rest is holding, and presumably doing a slow ferment, in the outside refrigerator until tomorrow. What should I try with that half?

I need some starter feedback. I've been following the rye starter instruction here on @Ann_T's blog. It started out as easily as advertised. The second feeding, or maybe it was the third, took off like a rocket. "Oh my," I exclaimed, "this is easy!" I don't remember, actually, whether the photo above is from when I fed it with all-purpose flour, in anticipation of converting the starter, or when I was still using all rye. I do know that the photo was taken less than 12 hours after feeding. The rubber band marks the initial level after feeding. A day or so after that, with regular feedings of all--purpose flour, the starter lost its oomph. I've tried refreshing it again with rye, and it still doesn't have much go. This is it after 12 hours or so: There is a little bit of bubbling, and the smell is fine, but it isn't doing much. I've made a batch of bread with it and a boost of yeast, but that's another post. Here are my questions: What might I have done wrong? It's been sitting in the same place, and all the flours are organic. Should I bother trying to revive it, or simply start over? Starting over doesn't take much material or time, but I'm puzzled about its behavior. If I should try to get it going, what should I do?

Lamb shoulder steaks were last night's dinner. I wrote back here about the sous vide treatment they originally had: packed with my Greek-style marinade, air expelled; 125F for 1:30. Last night I rewarmed them (still in the bag) at 120F for around an hour and a half, then threw them on the hottest grill I could manage to get a bit of sear. It was good, but we both thought it needed a bit warmer treatment at first. Some of the meat was perfectly done, but the fat wasn't rendered quite as much as we'd have liked and some connective tissues were still all too connective. My darling flinches at the very thought of lamb, so I don't know whether I'll try this again - but if I do, I'll try 130 or 135F. The bread, incidentally, shows butter here but also went to good use soaking up the juices. I defatted them but didn't take any steps to concentrate them. There is no picture.

The workshop has begun! Follow the fun here.

Welcome! It's great that you like trying new foods and like a variety of foods. Is there anything in particular that you really, especially strongly, like to make and/or eat? Do you cook a lot at home, or prefer eating out, or let someone else in the house do the cooking?

Luminarc and Arccuisine are supposed to be borosilicate. They're both European but I see Luminarc in some stores. I think I read that Luminarc is the spinoff to Europe of the former Pyrex when Corning spun it off, but I may be misremembering the details.

Did you sear that? Do you do a quick sear now, after your 135F cook?

I used 135F for slightly over 2 hours the last time I tried it, after checking various recommendations (mostly in this topic, starting here). I rubbed it first with oil, pimentón and a grilling rub; after the 2 hours I gave it a quick sear to brown the exterior. I thought it was pretty good, but it's such a lean cut of meat that it needed extra fat. I ended up using most of it for sandwiches, like this: I liked the results well enough, but came away thinking that the meat would benefit from being cooked with something that would add more flavor and a bit of fat. @FauxPas mentioned here that she'd had good success with a char siu treatment of pork tenderloin...but then, that isn't sous vide and she still needed to add fat. Based on my results above, I don't think I'd go hotter than 135F for sous vide, and given its small diameter I might even try a lower temperature: @rotuts had recommended 130F when I asked. It depends on how pink you like your pork, and you can see what I got with 135 and a quick sear.

That is an excellent idea. I know that my darling and I often do exactly as described: go in for a few things - or even a whole list - but still stagger out wondering what happened. At our stores things are itemized in groups (meats together, dairy together, and so on) so we can kindof see where all the money went. The bar graphs and bubble diagrams in this receipt make a great visualization tool. Would it change the way we shop? Well...probably not...but it would be enlightening. It might also help to confirm our suspicions that meat is more expensive at one of the places we shop but produce is more so at another.

Oh, my word...that all looks wonderful.

Me too. I like yogurt and fruit for breakfast...provided I don't look at this topic! I have serious biscuit envy right now.

While we wait for Teo to answer, I'll put my oar in as a non-chocolatier. Here is an example of a 12" x 6" x 3" clear box to which a pump can be attached. Is this too small for production purposes? If so, there may be larger alternatives among the professional sources.

That's a nice flavor treatment, but why leaves the vines attached? At what stage would you detach them (before serving, or let the guests do it)? Please understand I'm not being critical; all the suggestions sound good to me, but this particular instruction puzzles me.

Since it's been a few days, I think it makes more sense to write another post instead of editing my original response. Our final total for this trip was 9,390.8 miles. Not all of that was pulling the trailer; when we're parked someplace for a while, we still need the truck to run errands without pulling the Princessmobile. Up until a few years ago, we drove home (without the Princessmobile) for a month in the winter. That added an extra 5,000 miles, roughly. We've discussed renting a vehicle to make the trek, in the event we do so again, but once again it was not a factor this winter. Thanks again for the comments and questions, everyone! It's been fun sharing our trip with you. (...and yes, @Shelby, I'm still luxuriating in the space of our house!)

The closing paragraph from the above-linked article made me laugh:

It looks like a blast. I've edited your quoted post to focus on just a few pictures. What's in the lettuce wrap near the top? I'm guessing the Gyro / Mary "USED-TA" have a little lamb? (I love that name.) How did it taste? The middle photo is of a dessert - apple something? What did you think of it? The bottom photo is clearly the salmon...I just want to know how it tasted. I've never met salmon I didn't like... Going to the top: what sort of information was passed along during the Q&A session? Finally: did you pick up any ideas, either for technique or flavor combination, that you'll be applying to your own cookery? Thanks for posting about this festival.