Shalmanese

Ah, it wasn't clear that you already had the pricing. From the OP, it seemed like you wanted us to come up with a price for you which is crazy. $125 strikes me as a completely fair price and maybe a little on the bargain end. I would say $180 would be the highest it would be reasonable to go, $140 is about the mid range and $110 is the low end.

You can hold a 3% brine for as long as you would keep meat refrigerated. I would recommend bringing for at least 24 hours. For Keller's brine, holding for even an hour past the recommended will likely oversalt your meat.

This is the nature of any new movement. There will be misguided fools, charlatans, geniuses, unsung heroes, the whole works. People who don't want to immerse themselves in study & just want dependable food that they know they'll like eat the traditional stuff. The people who are enthusiastic about molecular gastronomy/avant garde cooking/progressive cooking are the ones who are willing to do the research and separate hype from reality and deal with their fair share of disappointments. It's what they signed up for. Don't worry about what you call yourselves, worry about putting out a good product to a discerning & jaded audience. Let word of mouth spread. It doesn't matter what you call it, you'll survive on the quality of your food. Another Aussie living abroad checking in . 3 years in in Seattle so far & counting.

Cup measures always seemed dumb to me for brines. Here's how I do it: I put the meat in the container I'm brining it in and then, using a 1 litre measure (metric makes this significantly simpler), I pour water on it until it's wholly submerged, keeping track of how much water is used. I then measure out salt as a percentage by weight of the water. 3% for a medium brine, 2% for a light brine, 4% for an aggressive brine. If you're using non-metric, for every 4 cups of water, adding an ounce of salt leads to approximately a 3% brine. I usually also like to add brown sugar at somewhere between 50 - 100% of the weight of the salt. Take the meat out, dump in the sugar/salt, stir until dissolved (even in ice water, a 3% brine has no problems dissolving with 30 seconds of stirring), then add the meat back in. Depending on the shape of the brining vessel & the shape of the meat, the volume of brine can vary drastically. Apart from cookbook authors fearing their readers are bad at math, I don't know why this isn't the standard brining technique.

Given the same amount of total flavor, would you rather have an intricately prepared and technically perfect jus, reduced down to a scant tablespoon to be delicately sauced over your food or a big ladelful of yummy gravy, thickened with flour or cornstarch and poured liberally until it covers everything? I have to say that, while I can appreciate the technique and flavor of a great jus, I'm a gravy boy at heart. There's just something about abundant amounts of gravy that make me happy.

Mine has two small holes at the top which allow oil to drip in at the perfect rate.

Half and half seems like an American invention but it's easy enough to make from cream & milk (plus, as far as I can tell, the majority of half & halfs have all sorts of weird stabilizers & gums in them). Double cream is far more available in Australia than in the US. Sometimes it's called Devonshire cream.

Sounds perfect for stock making.

In the latest Top Chef Blog, Tom Colicchio states: This is something I've never heard of before. Is it true that before nouvelle cuisine, the custom was to serve family style or tableside as opposed to individually plated dishes?

I'm a big fan of avant garde and hate techno-emotional. Blech!

It's a tool for accurate sous vide cooking. It's also known as a convection steam oven.

I was lucky enough to attend a talk nathanm gave at the University of Washington on his new cookbook and, by all appearances, it's going to be amazing. We got to sample his pistachio ice cream afterwards (made by emulsifying pistachio oil into a cream so there's no dairy in the ice cream) and was wowed by the technique but kind of underwhelmed with the result. Oh well.

I liked it. It was goofy & irreverent but the personalities on there were fun to watch.

I believe that dense, tight texture comes from dunking the chicken directly from the poaching liquid into ice water.

I ended up serving 11 people but there was enough left over for another 3 or 4 meals so I counted it as 15 people for budget purposes.

All in all, it was a big success and a fun challenge. One of the guests is allergic to pork and I just found out a few hours before the event that a vegan was coming to dinner so it was a challenge bringing out big flavors when I couldn't use flavor boosters like bacon, cheese or butter. I relied pretty heavily on onions, garlic, wine & bay leaves to fill out the body but the main goal was to bring out the flavor of the ingredients as much as possible. The Kale was sauteed with some olive oil, garlic & red pepper flakes before going into the soup, the squash was caramelized in a pan and a stock was made out of the guts & trimmings, I made a pretty intense crackling stock from the trimmings of the chicken thighs to boost up the flavor of the lentils and I had used the ferber method to make the strawberry jam so there were large chunks of strawberry and a deep flavor. I'm particularly proud of how I cooked the chicken thighs given I had never done it this way before. I coated the thighs in salt, pepper & paprika and seared them on both sides before splashing them with a bit of sherry vinegar and throwing them in a 275F oven for 2 hours. At the last minute, I used the broiler to crisp up the skin. What came out was amazingly moist, fall off the bone chicken with an intense jus that was a delight to eat. The general consensus from the group was that it wasn't the most amazing meal I had ever made but it was deeply satisfying and quite an accomplishment given the budget constraints.

I overshot my budget by a little bit, it should be somewhere between $1.50 to $2.00 per serving but here is the menu for tonight: Kale & White Bean Soup Butternut Squash & Barley Risotto Roast Chicken Thigh, Warm Lentil Salad Rice Pudding, Strawberry Jam

There will always be a special place in my heart for Thunderbolt Chili Ingredients: 4-5 strips of bacon cracked black pepper 1 pound ground beef 1/2-1 pound ground turkey 2 onions 1 bell pepper 1 fennel 1-2 carrots 1/2 eggplant 2/3 teaspoon curry powder 2 tablespoons crushed red pepper 1-2 tablespoons dried rosemary 1-2 tablespoons adobo seasoning 5-7 garlic cloves 3 tablespoons fig jam 1/2 cup yellow mustard 1-2 tablespoons Thai chili sauce 1-2 tablespoons Hungarian paprika 1/2 cup barbecue sauce 1/3 jar of pickles (with juice) 1 poblano chili 1/4 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons salt 1/3 cup spaghetti sauce 1 cup beer 1/2-1 cup cooked rice 1 handful of baby arugula 2/3 cup cherry tomatoes 1 small package pork rinds (crushed) 1 handful of cilantro unlimited pepper jack cheese (shredded) 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 can kidney beans 1 can pinto beans

Cracklings! Whenever I'm searing a large piece of meat, I first dice all the trimmings and render them off to use as fat to sear the meat in. Those cracklings almost invariably get tossed on a simple green salad with a nice tart vinaigrette to be eaten standing up while the rest of meal cooks. It's a perfect way of taking the edge off the hunger when good smells are in the air but dinner won't be on the table for a couple of hours.

Earlier in the Summer, I managed to score a huge amount of strawberries on the cheap so I could do rice pudding with strawberry jam for $1 or so for the group so I think that's dessert. Here are some other things I think could work within my budget: Lentil Salad Coleslaw Collard Greens & Ham Hock Kale & White Bean Soup Pumpkin Ravioli Pasta Carbonara Polenta with Chicken Thigh

The parameters are I'll be cooking in Seattle, for around 10 people in about 2 weeks.

Celebrating both the recession we are currently in and the depression we just got plunged into 80 years ago, I am planning to host a hobo dinner party where I attempt to cook an entire multi-course meal for $1 person. Is this even possible? What are some great ideas for cheap yet satisfying dishes? If $1 per person proves too much of a challenge, I might amend it to $1 per course which should be significantly easier.

It seems as if it were drafted by a hypochondriac germaphobe.

I've baked extra potatoes for home fries the next day and roasted leg of lamb for my signature lamb fried rice.

Actually, the default is the other way around in the US. Unless you sign a specific work-for-hire contract, any copyrighted works are owned by you by default. cite