origamicrane

Hi ever had a really bad dining experience? i'm sure we all have, unfortunately. So did you do anything about it? Did you go and harass the chef/waiter? Did you write a letter to the manager or chef? Did you camp outside the restaurant with a placard warning people not to go in? If you did, do tell us the story But basically i'm in need of a few biting gastronomic put downs for a chef or restaurant manager. The more insulting and traumatised i leave them the better. I'm looking for a weapon of mass destruction type put downs something that will hit them to the core of their catering soul and leave them shaken I'm sure it will be a useful addition to anyone's arsenal of put downs. especially if you have a partner that is a chef hehehehe!

laksa yeah thats the bone tea thing only know what the cantonese name is and its "pi gwut char" spare rib tea taste ok but not with dong gwai in

well i think its mainly for women to drink in herbal soups etc. probably for anaemia or low blood pressure I drank it a few times as my mum made some of malaysian bone tea thing within 20 minutes i was feeling very ill and short of breath guess i must be allergic to it :) good as it taste nasty!

thanks melonpan might give that a try :)

hi all errr.... anyone able to provide a translation of one of the recipes from melonpan's post??

hmmm.. i was just thinking about mushrooms has anyone tried one of those grow your own mushroom kits? saw this grow your own morels kit online looks interesting any first hand advise on growing them would be appreciated i think by all mushroom lovers

If you want a trained personal chef and waiter to come to your house and cook for you try one of the cooking schools. I know Leith's cooking school definitely has that service and it might work out to about the same price as a good meal in some high end restaurant. Give them a call and tell them what you want. As to restaurants in town, what type of food you like? as lots of variety if you haven;t been try the Ivy, it will take you a few weeks to secure a table

ermmm isn't there a few really nice vegetarian place in neal street ? "food for thought" and inside neal's yard behind the cheese shop there a south american veggy place that i remeber did this really tasty rice with veg thing. also belgo has the most delicious mushroom aspargus and cream sauce in a puff pastry case and its huge

well the suckling pig was about the size of a medium chicken so don't think it be too heavy ;) i tried freshly cooked suckling pig once and it was amazing ;) really crispy skin yeah probably right not something you would try at home but might just try it with a pieve of pork belly.

hi guys just watched a tvb cooking program where they filmed a chef making suckling pig by hand grilling it on an open stove flame. the guy on the programme has a whole suckling pig on a metal pitch fork and was holding it above a flame and turning it until it was done. well it looks like a challenge anyone got a recipe and instruction on how to do this? how to prepare the pig, etc, etc. thanks in advance

cool when you do post the details and a review of it I might be in dublin later in the year and in need of some good fish

don't be scared all those things hanging in the window would have been freshly cooked that day. And your gut reaction is right they look delicious and they are delicious They are hung there as a window display to show how fresh and tasty the food is, if it didn't look good they wouldn't hang it out right? Hanging allows the meat to cool down as chinese roast meats are usually served cool on a bed of warm rice. Hanging allows more grease to drip off and retains the crispiness of the skin as soon as you put it in a fridge the crispy skin would absorb moisture and become chewy. like any restaurant food you buy it best eaten asap

let me stick my oar in on this one. Theres a few reasons why HK fast food culture has become so much stronger of late. 1. Hong Kong remeber has a massive population in such a small area. Almost everyone lives in apartment blocks where the average kitchens are tiny!!! literally a mouse swinger!!! I mean less then 3 sqm of kitchen space. This was the original reason why HK had such a strong fast food culture that, convenience and price. 2. SARS - since the outbreak last year Hong Kong has gone on a hygiene blitz the streets are a lot cleaner the back alleyways that used to be rubbish areas have been cleaned up. But when SARS was still present many people chose to stay at home rather then mingle with others at restaurants. Naturally the streethawkers and smaller family run eateries would be the first to be hit as they don't have a branding or reputation people can trust nor do they have the finances to weather the storm. A lot of these places closed down leaving the chains. 3. Food scares - Hong Kong people are generally superstitious and also have an overly cautious attitude ie: they scare easily. There have been constant news reports this year of food poisoning scares coming from mainland China some have been due to negilgence other have been deliberate poisoning. There have also been several reports of counterfeit food!! Were cheap below grade food has been repackaged up then sold on as a branded product!!!! With these factors and probably others you can easily understand why people are going to chains more not because they taste better but because of price, conveninece and reputation. Big chains regardless of taste are competitive and have rigorous quality standards in place that the public can trust.

Now going on a cooking course is all well and good but there is one very big disadvantage. it makes your own kitchen feel very inadequate!!! Since finishing cooking in a proper kitchen the domestic kitchen seems greatly lacking. I have a overwhelming urge to go on a spending spree and refit my kitchen with an industrial strength stove and oven, to have at complete set of copper pans, to have a kitchen aid with all the attachement including the pasta one, to dump my mechanical scale and get a electronic one,to get a complete set of baking trays and tins, to get a full size magimix, to get a baking stone, to get a full array of professional knives and chopping boards, to get a proper ice cream machine, to get muslin and J-cloth!!! Its just taken me twice as long to bake a cake as it did last week because my oven doesn't seem to have the umpth!!! sigh!! i need to remortgage!!

you know all guys can cook but we only do it when we want something

of course if any of you want the best ice cream machine try www.pacojet.com but then again at almost US$3000 it bloody should be!!!!!! I have tried the ice cream/sorbet from this machine and it is pretty amazing!! The coconut sorbet had the creaminess and texture or ice cream!!!!

well if you just want functional and cheap the ikea kitchen section is very cheap in all senses of the word. Although i have to admit i haven't found a cheaper electronic scales anywhere http://www.ikea.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/se...productId=12154 ORDNING electronic scales at a knock down price of £15

There's only one reason why your sorbet didn't freeze and its because it wasn't cold enough. You know the inner freezing container has to be literally rock solid frozen through stick the container back in the deep freeze and turn the freezer to its coldest setting and leave it in there for at least 12 hours if this doesn't solve your problem might mean you need a more powerful deep freezer. Also the ambinent temperature of the room and the sorbet mixture temp might effect it. Once you made the sorbet liquid stick it in the fridge and allow it to cool completely. Then pull out the freezing container and make you sorbet it should work then. Also if your kitchen temp is too high the bowl temp will start to rise as its churning if your sorbet hasn't frozen within 15 minutes it probably won't. If that happens just stick the whole lot into the deep freeze wait until its frozen then stick the whole lot into a blender.

isn't there meant to be a fish market in dublin?? as very sure i saw it mentioned on the net on a search for dublin fish market?

hi all i had a quick look and don't seem to be able to find a thread about recommended places to buy cooking equipment. So sure you will find this all very useful let start a list of where to buy kitchen stuff specifically for UK but if you got links to worldwide places that deliver to the uk bung them in too We should have both consumer outlets and trade outlets that deal with consumers and a short description. let me start the list http://www.divertimenti.co.uk/ 2 branches in london, online shop, nice selection, expensive http://www.pagescatering.co.uk/ london trade shop selling to public large show room http://www.typhooneurope.com/ online stylish accesories show Leon Jaeggi - Shaftesbury avenue london trade shop selling to public

how about fugu? So some japanese guy was lazy one day and served the fish raw and they liked it. So then they went into the sea and decided to chop up more fish. Then they picked up the puffer fish chopped it up , ate it , and died. So what do they do? hey!! lets go back and try it again!??? Now the starvation theory i can understand but i can't believe that this would be true of fugu as its not something you can just pick up in the forest. Someone had to have set out to sail and caught a load of fish chopped it up and fed it to some unlucky sod.

hi there i tried a very interesting ice cream recently made from Tonka bean. It was really nice, like a very strong type of vanilla but more aromatic. Naturally i googled the recipe straight away and found out that the extract from tonka bean can be carcinogenic!!!! It seems that in Mexico they use tonka bean as a vanilla substitute so not saying don't buy mexican vanilla just if it looks too good to be true it probably is. ciao

Eating at night myth 'exploded' here an interesting news aricle just to show eating at night is no different to eating at any other time if you are a female experiment monkey in the USA.

yes it was quite educational no afraid no photos of the foie gras as its been sliced up and half eaten now very yummy it is too. The ravioli i made were just square so nothing particularly interesting there. But i will post some photos next week of my attempts to recreate some of the recipes i made on the course.

Day 5 Evening session practical. so for the final practical session did: 1. bakes our Gateau Pithivier 2. Goat choose ravioli with tomato and basil sauce. 3. check the foie gras so we started the final session by taking our pithivier out of the fridge and then egg washed it on the top surface not the sides. Then put it on a thick baking tray and bake the pithivier for 35 minutes in a preheated oven at 220C. 35 minutes later the following came out of the oven yah!! it looks good and tastes lovely, not too sweet and the pastry was lovley and puffy. In fact my one was pretty damn good as in it prebaked state it looked very amateurish as it wasn't completely round and a little lopsided. Also i had lost count of the roles and folds for the puff pastry and it wasn't squared off properly! Some of the others in the class had exploded pithivier due to air bubbles under thei puff pastry or had beaten too much air into the filling. So i was pretty happy with my attempt think i will definitely be making puff pastry again. 2. Making the ravioli filling. Usng goats cheese, cheddar cheese, chives and chicken mousse. The chicken mouse is made by blending up a thigh of chicken in a mixer and then forcing it through a drum sieve thats sitting on a cold bain marie!! this is not fun or quick.!! Once the chicken is sieved, we mix it with some double cream until it is just smooth like a paste and then mix it with the chesse. Making the pasta, 200g OO flour, 1T olive oil, 2 eggs trickled in a blender until it starts to form pea size lumps. Then ball the dough, flour a surface and knead for 3 minutes and pass it through a pasta machine to form sheets. cut the sheets into squares, fill with the filling and seal by using a damp brush. Brush the lower sheets edges and place another sheet on top and squeeze edgees together, remember to avoid making air bubble in the ravioli. Finish off by trimming with a pastry cutter. 3. Finally the foie gras............... YES ITS OK!!! it taste fine!!! not over salted at all!!! when cut it holds it shape and has a smooth texture and a strong taste. So everything was fine!! the foie gras was ok, the puff pastry was fine! and the only write off was the brioche So I have had a very entertaining, educational and tasty week ;) I would hihgly recommend this cooking course for anyone that just wants to have some fun, take a short culinary break or just wants to learn a few spectacular techiniques to wow their mates. Due to the short length of the course this is purely aimed at confident home cooks that want to move on into move complicated cuisine and just want a healthy boost of confidence. It not for serious cooks who want to bolster their CV. I imagine everyone that finished this course will spend the whole of next week just repeating the dishes they done just to prove to themselves it wasn't a fluke. I know i will be. So I would just like to thank the people at Leiths for runnig a very smooth opration and my workmate Rita for being Italian hahah i mean being funny, interesting and very helpful. So hope you have found this post interesting and entertaining if you got any questions concerning this course or the recipes drop me a line or post a message here. thanks for listening ciao