Smithy

Alas, my goddess has clay feet. 😉

Along the lines of what @kayb is asking: I have a frozen venison backstrap. Its packaging is not airtight and I really need to do something with it. Earlier this summer I sous vided a tenderloin from frozen, and we were both pleased with the results. (This was especially encouraging because my Other Half professes not to like venison.) The biggest problem is that I can't find my notes on what I did: time, temp, or even whether I seasoned it before sealing. If I could find those notes I'd repeat the experiment with this backstrap...but now I'm back to by-guess-and-by-golly. Suggestions? I'm thinking along the lines of cooking it properly, then slicing thinly for tacos or a dinner salad.

That's three of us. I still have one of the smaller pans, but the others are long gone.

It may depend on the recycling program. Ours includes plastic film as well as grocery and produce bags, so I assume it includes vacuum sealer and freezer bags. I'm not sure how widespread such a program is. For this reason I prefer reusable plastic containers to bags although the geometry can be problematic.

Whole bullfrog! I'd have assumed the innards needed to be removed, as with fish. It's so long since I ate frog that I can't remember what my hosts did.

Oh, thank you for that link. It's likely to be a while before I try cooking it, but I can already take pleasure in this sentence:

Staff note: This post and the response to it have been moved from Batch cooking: one large batch, many small meals. Share your ideas! I do. We use, and reuse, and keep reusing our plastic containers until they fall apart. We wash them thoroughly between uses, of course. I think a reasonable test would be to wash the containers, allow them to dry, then see whether they (a) keep a greasy feel, (b) hold an odor or pass along an off-taste to other contents, or (c) *shudder* grow mold. I've never seen any of those things happen. My biggest objection to sous vide and similar boil-in-bag packaging is the waste. I wash and reuse sturdy freezer bags (Ziplock, Glad, etc.) unless they're noticeably grubby with fat deposits or food stains. Such reuse is more difficult to do with vacuum-sealer bags, because they have to be cut open. Our area is beginning to have plastic-bag recycling, but it still isn't easy to find.

I don't remember a difference in the texture between the original and the melted/refrozen concoctions, but there wasn't a side-by-side real-time test. (That woud be a useful experiment, wouldn't it?) When i haven't been satisfied with the texture, so far I've just respun and been pleased. The original chocolate and vanilla recipes did not involve custard, but they did involve a small amount of cream (Neufchatel, in my case) cheese. I was essentially following the recipes in the CREAMi manual, although wasn't very strict aboutt milk vs. cream vs. half-and-half.

I didn't add anything. It was just the mango chunks from the can, with enough of the syrup to come up to the fill line. (I think that was all of it, but can't find my notes to be sure.) I thought they were appropriately sweet, like mangoes: sweet enough, without setting my teeth on edge. I thought there was a faint tinny taste from the can, but nobody else commented on it.

We make burgers in batches also. I didn't really think about those, although we've just finished making and freezing a batch. One of my problems is knowing how large a container to use for saving things like broth. I'm not very good at making soups, for whatever reason, so if I save a quart of broth in one go I'll probably have some left over from the pilaf I make. Smaller containers work, if I have room. Then there's the problem of labels that stay on. My husband probably has forgotten, but I still remember the time I made pilaf with beautiful, golden, homemade chicken broth, only to discover at dinner time that it was actually Meyer lemon juice!

Same here! "Southern Cooking," as I recall.

In our household we make large batches of chili and split pea soup, then freeze them for later use. We'll be hitting the road soon with the contents of those two batch cooks occupying part of the freezer, like the top part of this photo: I look forward to more ideas, and demonstrations of how to do it nicely -- that is, with good results at the end. The convenience of being able to decide in the morning what to have at night, and then simply pull it out of the freezer, is very attractive.

Very artistic, as usual, @dcarch. What did you put atop the tomatoes?

No pictures, but I wowed the family last weekend with the non-dairy Coffee ice cream, a mango sorbet and a blend of the remnant chocolate and vanilla ice creams we hadn't finished before. In that last batch, I had two roughly half-sized containers, so allowed them to melt, then mixed them. I think my grandson will be buying one for his bride as a Christmas present. The non-dairy ice cream was a big hit because my DIL is lactose--intolerant. She went home with my old, large, old-fashioned ice cream maker that requires ice and rock salt, AND with the recipe for that coffee ice cream. I used oat milk instead of the specified rice milk because that's what I could find. We all loved it. The mango sorbet (made from canned mango chunks) needed to be spun 3 times before it looked like sorbet; on the first two tried it had that funny granular appearance. What I'm especially enjoying about this gadget is the ability to freeze many different flavors, have them lurking in the freezer, and pull them out on a whim.

Ham and cheese on toasted sourdough, all warmed in the microwave, topped by the last of the summer's ripe tomatoes. Delicious. Filling. Time for a nap now!

Although I tend to donate my cookbooks to the library (or, more recently, to interested relatives just starting out) I want to call out the topic FREE cookbooks for those of you who wish to share around within this community!

How will you reheat these particular dinners when the time comes?

If you were to try making this yourself, how would you go about it? It sounds marvelous!

Allow me to assist the enablers with an Amazon link! Breville BSB530XL All in One Immersion Blender (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) (Yes, I've been looking. Yes, I'm tempted. No, I haven't pulled the trigger...yet...)

That book looks like a treasure on several levels. Thanks for posting about it! Makes me want to look for it in the used book sales sites, but that wouldn't help with the family heirloom recipe cards.

Thanks! I just found it, over in the India: Cooking forum. Cooking with Camellia Panjabi's "50 Great Curries from India" is the link, in case anyone else is interested.

To be clear: I don't think there was any risk to fingers, knuckles, or other human appendages. I put the cleaver firmly on the bone, then tapped it with the hammer, then banged it with the hammer. I wondered briefly whether a rubber mallet would be kinder to the cleaver, but couldn't remember where it was. That wouldn't have helped the edge anyway. This was all because my husband had insisted on using his radial arm saw to get through the pork hocks in question, and had not cut through all the way. I objected to the radial arm saw idea in the first place because (a) it didn't sound very safe to me and (b) that saw isn't exactly NSF approved. So he did it when I wasn't looking. We both agree that in future we'll ask the butcher to do it!

It turns out that two of the salsa jars didn't seal properly. I know I could have reprocessed them and maybe gotten them to seal, but I've simply put them in the refrigerator instead. We'll go through them quickly enough that I'm not worried about their going off. That leads me to a question, however: with all the acid (vinegar) and the canning salt in this stuff, is there really a need to worry about it developing pathogens if it stays out of the refrigerator?

I feel like such a piker: writing here about abusing a knife, rather than myself. Nonetheless, here goes: I shall never again try to use a cleaver to chop through a pork shank bone, much less encourage it with a hammer when it's clear the bone is too hard. So...can this knife be saved?

It took months for our potted tomatoes to take off, but when they did they headed for Near-Earth Orbit. Today I admitted that I simply couldn't use all the harvest before it went off. Frost is in the air. There are still green tomatoes on the vines that probably won't make it into fried green tomato territory, but I collected all the ripe and mostly-ripe tomatoes. As a rule our extended family makes a 3-day weekend of salsa making on Labor Day weekend, but family issues prevented that this year. Today I decided on a solo salsa operation. The aroma while it cooked down was intoxicating! ...as was the "pop" of those lids as they sealed.