andiesenji

There are exterior pipe insulation "tubes" that look like pool noodles only they are black or gray instead of bright colors. The ones sold here come with stainless "clips" that look just like the bicycle clips to keep pant legs out of bicycle chains. They are easy to install.

I received a box of Welsh Cakes from The Welsh Baker. I have already consumed two, along with some lovely hot tea. They are very good. I do have a gift card which will probably be used on kitchen or food items.

I initially cooked the boar meat - off the bone - in my largest old electric roaster (26 quart) water to cover with a couple of large onions cut into quarters, handful of garlic cloves, bay leaves, cumin, whole ancho peppers, quart of beer. I turned it on and let it cook until the water was mostly gone and only the fat that rendered out of the meat remained. I began shifting the chunks of meat so that which was on top was down in the fat. I checked the temp in the larger chunks to make sure it had reached over 140°F. I then transferred the meat to the sheet pan and into the oven at 250 for 3 hours. And this was the way it came out. Tender but with a nice crust.

I had some African ironwood and carved a "bowl" from it. I actually wore out an inshave carving the hollow. I had never understood when people told me that Africans COOKED in ironwood vessels, heating rocks in a fire and dropping them into the vessel to heat stews. I don't know to this day how the hell they hollowed the pieces of a log out enough to make a cooking pot. That stuff is HARD - similar in fact to cast iron...

Exactly, rotuts! I used to make my own frames for my artworks, often with exotic woods - my clients were willing to pay - and the very thin varnish would require at least 24 hours of drying time, sometimes more, especially for some the woods with variable porosity. Zebra wood is notorious for that, and some woods resist varnish that is too thick - in the '70s, when Koa wood was still legal, I would sometimes have to do 8 applications of varnish to get that depth of clear finish that best enhanced the red color. With my cast iron, the "newer" stuff that did not have a ground finish, often took a dozen or more applications to get a smooth coating of seasoning.

For many years I used lard (home rendered) and it worked great for me. However, for the past couple of decades I have friends who are Muslim, Jewish or vegan and out of respect for them, totally cleaned my cast iron and re-seasoned them with oils that have a vegetable base. Except for my antique griddle, which I still grease with bacon skin - one of the reasons I buy slab bacon from time to time. That griddle has a surface that looks like black porcelain. And I only use it for my own food.

I don't know where they got their figures for flaxseed oil but that polyunsaturated percentage is really high, considering there is only 19% Oleic acid. Rice bran oil, which I have been using in recent years because of the high smoke point, has 38% Oleic acid, and that component is an important "drying factor" that promotes polymerization with heat. When a friend got one of the high output burners and a new wok last year, the vendor recommended he use rice bran oil and even gave him a small bottle to begin seasoning the wok. It's not cheat put I have found a little goes a long way. I use it in my baking a lot - in yeast breads where I want a fine, even crumb and this oil contributes to the quality I want.

This is a photo of the wild boar carnitas. That is a full-size sheet pan. The meat is from a hind leg - what would be a ham and shank. It was a very large boar.

There are a couple of threads with excellent advice about Carnitas here on eG. I highly recommend the "recipe" by Jaymes on page one of the original Carnitas thread. I posted about a batch of carnitas I made with wild boar meat a few pages later in the thread. There are other recipes, techniques, methods, etc., including pressure cooker carnitas, later on in the thread.

It's a small William Bounds grinder adjustable fine to coarse. I set it on fine. They are not cheap. The adjustable ones cost about $25.00 now but they last a very long time. I've had this one for at least 15 years it's in a photo I took in 2001. Not had a problem with the size of the allspice.

I have Epicntre Herbes de Provence and the Peru spice blend, both were gifts and Aleppo pepper and Long pepper. Frankly, I have not used the blends much. Yes. The Ras-el-Hanout blend is whole spices just like in the photo. I think they explain on one of the pages that their belief is that whole spices, ground just before use is very important. I agree. I rarely buy spices already ground. Even cinnamon - and I have three different varieties, whole, I grind fresh, sometimes in large amounts if I am going to be doing a lot of baking in the next couple of week. Same with nutmeg, allspice (I have a pepper grinder just for allspice), cloves, cardamom &etc.

Yes. And I have a giant aluminum "Texas tack" actually supposed to be a tent peg, that I place in the center of stuffing when I put it into a bird. It is extremely efficient at transferring heat right into the center of the stuffing so it cooks in the center and in fact, gets really crusty around the insert. I nuke my baked potatoes now and finish them in a hot oven so have no need for the nails but I still have them. It seemed so funny that Connie would recall something Aunt Maude said, when I, with my "great" memory for things like that, had so throughly forgotten it. In fact, I barely remembered the visit. It came at a time when I was going through a divorce and trying to work things out with my ex - he asked me to keep his daughter, who he did not want to go with him and who was just 15. He was worried she would get pushed into the foster care system. Aunt Maude stayed a month and to me it is mostly a blur. I did get her to write down some recipes in a little book that I still have but haven't opened for years. Now I have to find it.

I have some spices from Epicentre and a couple of blends. I think you will find the Spicetrekkers blend, which you can grind as you need, is very good. You can, if you wish, add a bit of other spices to it, for a particular application. I have toasted and added some black cardamom to the blend for a stew I make with goat meat. Goat meat is somewhat sweet and the addition of some black cardamom with its smokiness, elevates the flavor.

I have been making my own Ras El Hanout for years. I have tried many "recipes" or blends with various proportions. One of the most important things is to buy whole spices and grind them yourself in small amounts because some that have elusive secondary flavors, lose these within a couple of weeks. Star anise is one such. I order the whole spice blend from Spicetrekkers.com Buying the individual spices whole - is very expensive because there is a long list. I know, I have tried to order all the individual spices listed in a book of Moroccan cookery published in the 1960s which is almost identical to THIS RECIPE. Finding the "guinea pepper berries was impossible and dried caper berries were non-existent as was the ash tree fruit. Incidentally, I have ordered some of the black peppers from this place - ones that Pepper Passion, my favorite vendor did not carry.

A few days ago I reconnected with person who was my neighbor back in the 1970s - the daughter of a neighbor back then, now herself a grandmother. We were talking about our families and she said she remembered when one of my elderly aunts (great aunt) visited and was telling stories about life on the farm and about the recipes I was preparing for Christmas. And then there was the story about grandma's "thirty-cent nails" which I had totally forgotten. In one of the kitchen drawers, carefully wrapped in wax paper and stored in a muslin bag were my grandmother's "30-d nails" shiny steel, carefully cleaned and dried. I think there were a dozen but there may have been more - I was never allowed to touch them. When the thick batter for fruitcake was placed in the pans, pressed and leveled, each nail would be dipped in oil or wiped with oil and stuck down into the batter, in the center and in a regular patter out to within an inch or so of the outer edge. The theory was that the metal would heat up in the oven and radiate it into the center so the cake would cook more evenly. When done, the nails were removed and that left some holes into which the liquor for "dressing" would readily filter down into the interior of the cake. I can't believe I had forgotten this because now I am reminded, I can recall standing on a kitchen chair, leaning on the table and watching my grandma or the cook carefully extract the large headed nails from the cake and placing them in a pan to be immediately washed, dried and set on the back of the range to make sure they are 100% dry. That was a clever trick and I wonder where it originated. I don't recall ever seeing that in any other method for fruit cakes, although many advise stabbing the cakes with an ice pick or a skewer or ???.

There are several similar units on the market and I think they cost less. (Except for one that is more sophisticated and costs a lot more) I saw one demonstrated at Costco or Sam's last year and while it has some attraction, not enough for me to bite and I am a sucker for "interesting" appliances. Also, I already have a heavy duty deep fryer, several electric cookers, two electric pressure cookers that have multiple functions. (One is a Farberware made twenty years ago when no one was interested in cooking under pressure... The demo included scrambled eggs. They looked fine but were like chewing rubber. They did green beans "almondine" NO THANKS! Cooked skirt steak - SKIRT STEAK IS TENDER no matter how it is cooked!! This was NOT. It was stringy and chewy although the teriyaki seasoning was tasty, it came out of a bottle. We walked away before they opened the one with the cauliflower. We also missed the chicken tenders.

I have fried eggs and baked biscuits on sheet pans on the dashboard in a 1969 Chrysler station wagon that had a long, slanted windshield and a broad, flat dashboard. I was proving how hot it got in the car when parked in the sun to make a point that leaving vinyl albums in the front seat was not a good idea... Eggs took about 2 minutes, biscuits 25, done but not browned.

That's why I like my scrambles - though I use no butter - cooking them IN the heavy cream produces a buttery sensation and they remain soft and creamy even when held in a chafer. I taught a friend who owns a café in a resort area how to prepare them for his Sunday brunches and he says his customers rave about them.

And to think that there are people who pay premium prices for "fertilized eggs" - The last time I saw them at the farmers market, the certified organic, free-range, fertilized eggs were 7.00 a dozen.

I LOVE my scrambled eggs which I have posted about in the past. I always have heavy cream on hand, which is necessary for the method of cooking. NOT to be mixed into the eggs but as a cooking medium. Of course, one can beat the eggs and heavy cream together to make a "puffy" omelet - desirable if one wants to make a jelly omelet... I like eggs in just about any form but if there was a need to choose a favorite, just as-is, I would have to say coddled. I have a number of coddlers, some near antiques, others newer. Porcelain, glass, even a copper one with a glass liner. The truth is, a coddled egg is a "poached" egg without the mess.

If the base was thicker, it would resemble one of my glass "grabbers" that I used to use with heavy slabs of flat glass when I was doing glass artwork. The bottom was a strong vacuum when the arms were depressed.

Looks like my decanter dryer, just more colorful.

I had a similar "overhead burner" type raclette cheese melter with a single tray when I was catering. It did not have a "cradle" for the cheese but a wire frame that held the chunk of cheese in place on a metal tray. I had to have a step-down converter with a receptacle for Euro plug because it was from Germany. When I first started Jurgensen's market on Ventura Blvd. carried both Swiss and French Raclette cheese but when they closed, the only place I could buy it was the Cheese Shop of Beverly Hills or the cheese shop in the L.A. Farmer's Market - but the latter was often sold out or didn't have a whole wheel. (There was a discount if one bought a whole, uncut wheel) I gave it to a friend who was doing some catering in the ski resorts - Big Bear, etc., - very popular for the apre-ski crowd.

They have tea strainers but they are like this and they have them in several sizes from small that would fit in a cup to the size of a quart jar. Probably from a different region.