Smithy

Thank you for that reminder! Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot TM Cookbook is sitting on my Kindle bookshelf, thanks to this article some time ago, but I don't think I've cooked anything from it except the Butter Chicken. (That was excellent, by the way.) I need to organize my Kindle collection by topics more narrowly defined than "cookery" so that I can remember and retrieve these books more readily. The article itself is an entertaining one. What especially sold me on the book was the series of stories about traditional Indian cooks and eaters who say the recipe results are authentic but much quicker and easier than by traditional means.

That's a nice solution. I tried roasting some blah peaches recently, tossed with sugar and a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar. They came out semi-dried, with a nicely peachy intensified flavor, but it seems I needed more liquid to get results like yours. They're good snacks, anyway.

I wonder whether I have any fish powder in the jumble that is my pantry. Hmm, may need to do an assessment. How different would the results be if shrimp powder were used instead?

That's a terrible shame about your apple tree. Is its crop cyclic also? I hope the tree recovers. I appreciate the thought(s), but I'm not crazy about applesauce except as the occasional fat substitute. I'd like these best, I think, if I could keep the crunch. I've considered a relish, chutney or salad. I think they'll be good cooked in a small tart. As it happens, today was utterly consumed by non-food tasks, so nothing more has been done since this morning's optimistic post.

So, yet a third method. Thanks for the link. One thing that puzzles me about this is the note about proportions: she says 4 cups of water for 1 pound of pasta, then says that for a different amount of pasta one should use "just enough water to cover the pasta" in the pot. It seems to me that the amount of water to cover will depend on the size of the IP as well as the configuration of the pasta. I guess I'll have to do some measuring and testing. Hmm. Has anyone tried the pot-in-pot method for pasta cooking?

Y'all have forced helped me add to my cookbook collection. I think both of these books are going to be fun. I especially like the fact that there's a glossary in the back of each books, describing and giving alternate names or spelling for many items.

One of the crabapple trees a mile or so down the road produces delightfully tart-sweet, crunchy fruit every 2 or 3 years. This year its crop was especially good. I came back from a walk or two with a couple of quarts' worth. The only problem with them is that they're labor-intensive to get the seeds out...and I'm not a fan of applesauce so they can be cooked down without coring. They'll be going into litle hand pastries, I think.

That's a point well worth exploring. A cooking class I took about a year ago asserted that mole is defined by having finely-ground (and, I think, cooked) nuts in the sauce. However, I don't recall a requirement that the food be cooked in that sauce. Is that a significant and defining difference between mole and curry?

Thank you for that. She, in turn, links to an article at Hip Pressure Cooking that gives additional information. The especially useful bit that Laura Pazzaglia adds is that low pressure is the better cooking option if available on the machine.

How does one determine the proper amount of liquid to add when cooking pasta in the Instant Pot? Twice now I've cooked a pasta dish based on the Pressure Cooker Chicken Bacon Penne Pasta from Pressure Cooking Today. The first time I followed it fairly closely; the ingredients include raw chicken and bacon, both of which need to be cooked, so using the IP (or another pressure cooker) makes sense. This week I was really jonesing for macaroni and cheese with ham and broccoli, and used the same recipe as a template for times, although the only thing that needed cooking ahead of time was the garlic. (Um, please ignore the fact that this recipe is more nearly an Alfredo sauce than the bechamel for a proper mac and cheese. I did. I won't again. ) The recipe says to add enough water to cover the pasta, then pressure cook for 3 minutes with rapid release afterward. The first time, the pasta was slightly overcooked. The second time it was nearly mush. I don't disparage the original recipe, because the flavors as it is originally written are quite good. However, the pasta/water/time ratio seems too vague for me. Has anyone worked out a weight ratio for pasta/water for pressure cooking? What about time? Next time I'm going to try 2 minutes, rapid release and hope that's enough to cook the chicken.

That looks good, and a better result than I've had for country-style ribs in a very long time. What temperature did you use at the sous vide stage? What were the finishing steps that produced that glaze?

The food and the scenery are all beautiful, and I'm enjoying this virtual trip. Have you discovered any foods or cooking techniques that you intend to add to your home-cooking repertoire?

I also wouldn't have been able to resist...especially at that price. What beautiful and delicate colors! Please tell more about not having matching dinnerware. Do you mean that each person would typically have a different color/style, or that different stages of a meal would have different patterns as well as shapes? This also made me laugh: Sing it, sister.

The skills and imagination are amazing. Was the top cake - the one that looked so much like cameo jewelry - from one of the 7 - 12 year olds?

I think it looks delicious, @Wolf. What do you think, now that it's had a rest? Will you do it again? Thanks for reviving this topic.

As far as navigation goes, I usually find the Index, or the Table of Contents, helpful for getting what I want out of a cookbook. Often the ToC has live links to each chapter; in my preferred Kindle formats, each chapter in turn has a live-link ToC. The Search engine helps too, especially in combination with Eat Your Books. All that said, I still don't find the Kindle books as satisfying or user-friendly as the physical books, with the sole exception of portability. @Toliver, I too am impressed with your postings about book deals, even when some go off sale too quickly. My credit card bill is a regular testament to my level of appreciation.

I keep meaning to try those marinated mushrooms, and forgetting to do so. Thanks for the reminder, @HungryChris. (For those who don't know, his recipe is in RecipeGullet, here.)

I had in mind a specific recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's Step-by-Step Cooking:Over 150 Recipes from India and the Far East, Including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. Of all things, it includes cucumbers with the shrimp, and I have a lot of lemon cucumbers to use. Thanks for the suggestion on the red. I didn't see this until the dish was already completed, but there will be a next time. Again, I didn't see this until too late. I may actually have some dried coconut, but I ended up doing some wild substitutions instead, as you'll see. I appreciate the instructions on how to make coconut milk, though. I'll use that trick in the future. The recipe in question is "Spicy Shrimp and Cucumber Curry" (p. 71 in the book) and it's a Malaysian curry. The ingredients include said cucumber and shrimp, along with onions (or shallots), garlic, ground coriander, ground fennel seeds, ground white pepper, ground cumin, ground turmeric, hot red chilies, whole fennel seeds, sugar, coconut milk and vegetable oil. I looked at the ingredient list and compared the spices to the above-shown outdated jars of curry paste, and opted for the Patak's Mild Curry paste. What ensued after that bore little resemblance to Jaffrey's recipe, except for the inclusion of the cucumbers and shrimp. Patak's jar calls for the addition of tomatoes to the chicken curry on the label, and it sounded like a good idea. In a true cross-cultural moment, I added: In place of the missing coconut milk I combined half-and-half with unsweetened almond milk. I omitted the onions because for once we have none in the house. Yes, the whole thing probably was a travesty, but it tasted pretty good anyway, served over rice. It would have been prettier if I'd garnished with fresh cilantro or parsley, or chopped green onions. My darling thought it needed a bit of sweetening, and fine-tuned his bowlful with Worcestershire sauce. We were surprised at how well the cucumbers worked, but he thought a green vegetable would have been a fine addition as well. Two things I noticed: the sauce was gritty as it came out of the jar, and never smoothed out. I'm guessing that's a trait of the Patak's paste and its not being finely ground. The other thing that happened was that the sauce separated, with a layer of spicy oil exuded from the rest of the sauce. I've read about that happening but don't remember why it happens. Would the coconut milk have acted as an emulsifier?

Ha! A kindred spirit! Here's what I've unearthed from my cabinet stock so far, and it's all older than yours. I've found some good-looking recipes for shrimp curry and was planning to try one tonight; unfortunately I don't seem to have any coconut milk in the house. Since I'll be taking liberties with the recipe in question anyway (I cannot let the shrimp wait longer) I'm going to take a shortcut and use the jarred curry paste rather than starting from scratch with the spices.

Welcome! It sounds like you'll fit right in here. What's a typical meal for you to cook? How about your daughter, with her more elaborate preparations?

Prairie Homestead's web site talks about clabbered milk, why it's an unfamiliar concept to many people nowadays, and how it's used. No nonsense, just good old food history: 20 Ways to Use Sour Raw Milk. It has bonus information: finally, I've read a plausible explanation for the brand name of Clabber Girl baking powder. I still remember my grandmother saying things along the lines of "when I saw you up that tree, my guts just clabbered". By the time I came along, milk was pasteurized and clabber was a thing of the past - but it was common during her childhood.

It's interesting that what we call Ranch dressing is called American dressing in Europe, according to that story.

Welcome to eGullet, @Wolf, and thank you for that information! The Lika Schnitzel sounds excellent. Is this something you make at home, or is it more a dish to be found at a restaurant?

Those look delicious @Okanagancook! Have you written before the time and temperature you use for this? Are these starchy or waxy potatoes, or does it matter? I cooked up a batch of premade crab cakes yesterday and am convinced that my air fryer cooks items much more quickly than my oven for the same temperature. (This may be true of all air fryers, but I only have the one to go by.) The instructions for these crab cakes are to preheat the oven to 400F, put the crab cakes on a baking sheet in the oven, and cook for 24 minutes or until 160F in the center. I checked at 15 minutes or a little before. They were already quite brown and the interior was at least 160F. The rest of dinner wasn't done, so I reduced the temperature to something fairly low - 175, maybe - and turned the machine off at 20 minutes to prevent overcooking. I've never appreciated or used the 25F automatic offset in my full-sized oven using convection mode, but based on the quick cooking in this little air fryer I'm going to try that 25F reduction whenever I'm following standard (nonconvective) baking recipes. It appears this little unit has much more aggressive air flow than my oven. The crab cakes were done perfectly. We won't get this brand again, but we'll cook crab cakes in the air fryer again. I'll try potatoes again, too.

The post above was more expensive than usual for me. Good thing I'd already purchased Deep Run Roots (electronic and hard copy) some time ago, or it would have been even worse. I have lots of fun reading and cooking ahead of me!