Smithy

Well...I've never had carnitas either, but mine (also not well thought-out) happened tonight too. Since sous vide was not involved, I posted about it here. Based on what I've read, your duck carnitas were much closer to the 'real deal' than my pork!

*bump* Without having worked my way through this entire topic, I'd say I have a qualified success to report. Qualified, mind you: flavors could stand adjusting next time, but there will be a next time. I started with 2 pounds of a pork shoulder roast - a nice, fatty-looking porky shoulder with a Duroc Heritage Pork label, which may or may not have made a difference. I more or less followed @Jaymes' instructions here, along with the discussion that followed about stirring from time to time and not throwing away the peppers, onions, and (in this case) celery. It was looking pretty good. But it was also getting late, and the meat was quite tender already, and I was none too sure about dirtying up a sheet pan to spread this stuff out in the oven and brown it. I left the whole shebang in the Le Creuset Dutch Oven in which it had started, kept cooking it down to brown and caramelize until I flirted briefly with burning stuff on the bottom (but managed to rescue it all), and then turned off the heat. Here's a collage of the process. In the meantime, I tried my first-ever pot-in-pot batch of rice in the Instant Pot. 1c basmati, 1.5c chicken broth and water, 6 minutes on high, natural release for 12 minutes. Success on the rice! Results: I think the method of simmering the pork until it's done, then crisping and caramelizing it, is probably genius. I got as far as simmering until the liquid was boiled off. The texture of the meat was excellent. The flavors left something to be desired. I didn't measure as carefully as I might have, and as much as I love citrus I think I'd have done better with more tequila and less lime. There were also chicken broth and a touch of apple juice in there, but I couldn't taste either. We both grabbed for the salsa to adjust the sweetness. We both wished for more liquid with the rice. Next time, I'll keep the meat and the vegetables separate and try to crisp the meat. I'll also be more careful with the citrus flavor. I may even plan to put it all into tortillas. That actually had been the plan tonight, but in the end the bowls seemed easier.

Welcome, MaryLouise! Capetown is a beautiful place - at least, it was when I was there a few years ago before the drought situation was so dire. I liked the food there too. Keep in mind that the Cook-Offs are always open and additions to them are welcome, no matter how old. If you get your gnocchi to your satisfaction, you may also wish to help revive the Perfecting Gnocchi topic.

The Instant Pot Ultra is now on sale at Amazon (and, through tomorrow, at Sur La Table) for $99.96. I keep looking at that adjustment knob and wondering how much temperature adjustment it provides. (We're still looking for a slow cooker with more temperature control than low/med/high.) Has anyone tried the Ultra yet? If so, can you comment on how much temperature adjustment the knob provides? Got any other comments on this latest version?

I bought a small pork shoulder roast for the purpose.

How are the Del Rio Carnitas made, please? I've been reviewing the Carnitas topic, trying to decide where to start with a small pork shoulder roast I bought for the purpose.

That's prettier-looking than it was on the website. The team effort has had a beautiful result!

@ElsieD, that loaf is flat-out gorgeous. Congratulations!

If you'll check out and try this topic on carnitas, I will.

Apricot trees! Oh, lucky you!

I meant to ask also whether you think the leftover food is thrown away (as is legally required in the US) or goes surreptitiously to someone fortunate. You may not have a way of knowing, but if you do, I'd be curious to know the answer. As for the rest - yes, it sounds almost exactly like what we've experienced.

I was going to ask whether the good bread in Vietnam was due to the French influence, but it apparently isn't that simple. Is the bread in Vietnam generally better than in China, or only in some larger cities like Hanoi and Saigon/HCMC?

That meal at Nahm IS a lot of food for two people! It looks delicious. I'd be waddling when I left, and then have more than the usual difficulty avoiding the traffic. Those street scenes, and your descriptions, remind me of Egypt during the years we went. The specifics are all wrong, of course - goods, people, vegetation all very different - but the essential congestion and cheerful disregard for anything like traffic rules seem to be the same. The colors of the food and the scenery are so vibrant, and the food looks so fresh, that you make me wish to put Thailand on a travel itinerary. Thank you for bringing us along.

@HungryChris, I just tried making quesadillas with some tequila chicken I'd cooked and some cheeses I had around. Looking at your photo, I wish I'd opted for crunchy taco shells instead. Those tacos look delicious.

Escalators in a grocery store. That means a multi-floor grocery store. My world experience is sooo limited.

I grew up calling them tangerines also. We had a pet satsuma tree due to a nursery mistake when Dad planted his grove. We always called it a tangerine tree, but when I was old enough to understand Dad said it was really a satsuma mandarin orange. Satsumas and clementines are two varieties of mandarin orange. There are more, and of course there are hybrids. I think the word "tangerine" has fallen out of favor; at least, UCR (University of California, Riverside) doesn't seem to recognize it. Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking, 2004 edition, p.375) wrote that the satsuma, the Japanese variety, appeared by the 16th century, and the "Mediterranean types" that appeared by the 19th century were collectively called tangerines for Tangiers, Morocco. The current thinking is that the mandarin orange is one of three specific citrus fruits (the other two being the citron and the pummelo) from which all others have sprung. For more specific information, the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection web site has some good references. This page is specifically about mandarin varieties.

See this topic: Adulterated Olive Oil Fraud

There you go! Thanks for playing, Kerry and Chromedome!

Wrong preposition. Think of another word for hide... ...and are you a Cole Porter fan?

So close! eta: try for a song. This one is stuck in my head now.

We'll be home tomorrow. These are the sights we saw today - and yes, that's ice on a lake at the lower right. We stopped for the night about two hours from home. We're set to arrive early in the morning, when our dirt road should still be frozen hard. It'll be soft and muddy later in the afternoon. I'll be glad to get home. My darling is not crazy about leaving the warmth of the southern states, but he too is looking forward to this journey's end. When we travel every day as we do at the beginning and end of these trips, the garage/dining room stays packed for travel. The remaining living space is much smaller. For instance, here's our "travel" dining table, which folds and stows when we're traveling. It's too small to accommodate a small bouquet and our dinner fixings, but it still takes up most of the floor space when it's open. The sofa to the right of the table, and the door to the back garage, give some scale. I found a final bottle of Lone Star beer in our stash, and the rebus inside the bottle cap is a fun one. Can you read it?

That's a neat trick @rotuts - adding the jus from sous-videing one batch of meat to the sous vide bag for another of that meat. I still have some chicken jelly with citrus juice from citrus-roasted chicken. Do you suppose that adding the citrusy chick jelly to a sous vide bag worth of chicken breast would be a good thing?

That was more or less what I had in mind, but I thought the bags might be more convenient. I was wrong. Thanks for the tip about the Hispanic markets, and looking for "jamaica" as an alternative name.

The successes were largely what start as one-shot wonders: things I make up on the spot, and then may or may not be able to reproduce. I try. I write down what I did as soon as we realize that it's a hit. Sometimes I succeed in reproducing it later. More often, I have v.1, v.2, v.3 and so on, never quite the same. During one of our stops with prolonged electricity I made good use of the Instant Pot and the Joule. I had a B-S chicken breast that had been partly cooked sous vide (1 hour at 149F). It was at the lightly-cooked stage. I pressure-cooked pinto beans in the IP; drained them and then added the chicken (cut into bite-sized chunks, minus the pieces I filched) along with some Hatch green chiles and their juices, some torn-up tortillas (whole wheat, because that's what I had) and some grated cheese. Then I slapped the lid on, closed the vent, and pressure cooked for 11 minutes with a cool-down before natural release. (I had intended 10 minutes of cool-down, but it ended up being about 18.) We were both delighted, although the casserole had a bit more free liquid than I'd intended due to my inclusion of all the juices from those frozen-then-thawed chiles. The chicken was a bit overcooked. I think that with this pressure-cooking treatment the chicken really didn't need to have been cooked ahead of time. I'll try it again sometime, and if I like the results I'll post in the Instant Pot topic. Another success was inspired by the first margarita I've had in years. It was so delectable, and I so like tequila chicken pasta, that I decided to try a sous vide tequila chicken. The juice of a Mexican lime and a Persian lime, a splash of tequila, and half a chicken breast (one of those sumo-wrestler chickens) all went into the bath at 149F for 2 hours, which gives me the preferred flavor and texture of chicken breast. It was brilliant. After the chicken was cooked it went into quesadillas and onto salads. I've done another such chicken breast - a full one, this time - but not broken into it yet. If it works, I'll post about it in the sous vide topic. The biggest surprise - and this one does seem to be repeatable - is what I named "Use-it-or-lose-it" salsa. I had cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, ripe bell peppers, green onions and jalapenos all languishing in the refrigerator. There wasn't much more time to use them. They all went into the skillet (the tomatoes after everything else had begun to soften) until it cooked down. Then I used it with some smoked beef sausage that had been browned in the skillet. The salsa alone was so good that my darling insisted I write down RIGHT THEN what I had done. He also insisted that the salsa was so good it didn't need meat. Indeed, he ate most of the rest from a bowl, as a snack.That didn't keep him from wanting meat the next time I made it, but we both agreed later that the meat was unnecessary. Especially these particular sausage links, whose main attribute is that they're cheap. This one (without the stupid tube steaks) is going into my permanent recipe file. The others, as I've said, I'll post in relevant topics if they are repeatable. If not - well, maybe I'll start a topic about One-Shot Wonders: the meals that can never be reproduced.

I promised a couple of flops, and some other successes. None of the successes is as great as meeting up with another eG'er, but we can't be doing that every day! Although @Jaymes told me she'd gone on a round-the-country road trip one year to meet a lot of eGullet friends in person. That sounds like a fun thing to do. Anyway, to the flops. It's beautiful, isn't it? I like hibiscus tea. I thought it would be nice to have bags of it, instead of dealing with the loose-leaf tea. I brewed 2 or 3 glasses, trying to get the flavor right, and I was baffled as to what the sickly-sweet flavor was. Alas! I didn't read the can carefully enough. I detest sugar substitutes. Once I realized this contained stevia, I binned the rest. It was my fault for reading the front and not the back label. The other massive flop was a combination of what may have been a poor recipe, and my trying to do too much at once. We'd been carrying a package of frozen ground lamb the entire trip, and I'd been jonesing for Merguez sausage. My darling isn't a big fan of lamb but he likes it well enough with this treatment. Just to cover the bets, I used the same spice mix for beef burger. Then life got in the way. It doesn't stop getting in the way just because we're on the road. As noted before, sometimes life gets more in the way while on the road. I set the burgers aside in the refrigerator for a day or two, then fired up the charcoal grill. And got distracted again. It was a totally off-kilter dinner: badly overcooked, but also off with the flavors: the meat was entirely too salty. I'd used Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe. We love cumin, coriander, garlic, fennel with lamb or beef. I increased all those spices and reduced the salt called for in the recipe, and it still came out entirely too salty. Next time I'll leave the salt out altogether...and make sure I have attention to spare for the grill. Can't win 'em all.