Shalmanese

Anothing nice, easy thing to do is to keep a bunch of frozen fruit in ziploc bags and then just whirl them in the blender with some milk, yogurt & honey for an icy cold fruit smoothie.

Ah, I see, what you were doing was making a simple caramel sauce. I would reccomend against making a dry caramel if you're inexperienced with sugar. My guess is that after you added the water, you cooked the solution too fast and for too long so too much water evaporated which left it hard. If you haven't yet thrown it out, you can fix it by just heating it up again until it melts and then adding a bit more water before cooling it down a bit. Can you post the entire recipe? Sugar and water by themselves can't really make an icing.

Brr... decided to embrace what looks like the real start of fall with a huge bowl of warmth: Sausage & White Bean Soup with Potato, Carrot, Leek & Cabbage It just totally made my day. I've pretty much started getting into a regular routine here and theres just a whole bunch of little differences which makes moving into a new town so exciting. Americans seem a lot more in love with smoke, it's rare that you see smoked foods in Australia but here you have smoked salmon, smoked bacon, smoked sausage etc. I love the richness it brings. The lemons here are much more floral than Aus, I love them, and I'm pretty sure the ones I'm getting are normal lemons. Meyer lemons are meant to be even more fruity. Berries here are soooo much cheaper it's not funny. The cheapest I've ever seen raspberries in Australia was maybe $10USD a lb and here they are around $2 - 3. I had fresh berries maybe twice a year max. It's odd thinking of fresh berries as just another type of fruit rather than some exotic delicacy. Bananas, when I left Sydney, Bananas were still $4 a lb. nuff said. Bag your own cereals and grains: hundreds of choices, get as much as you want, always fresh. I love the concept. Heirloom tomatos, Decent canned tomatos, Bread Flour, Chilli Peppers, these all seem to be inexplicably hard to find in Australia so it's amazing to have the range over here. Australia gets some great vine ripened tomatos but the whole heirloom fad didn't seem to take root down there. It looks like I've missed the end of the season but I look forward to trying them again in spring. Canned tomatos in Australia were always way too sour and San Marzano tomatos were an impossibility to find. You could only get one type of plain flour, AP. If you wanted bread flour, you had to buy bread mixes with yeast and "improvers" mixed in. Chillis in Aus were limited to mostly thai chillis and one or two fresh mexican ones. Here, you have 8 - 10 fresh chillis and over a dozen dried not to mention canned and the like. I still haven't started to fully explore them yet, I'm just sticking to the jalepeno for the time being. Two Buck Chuck (actually $3), love it! It's a great cooking wine which you can actually drink. I'm going to stock up On the other hand, here are some of the things I miss: Apples: Oddly enough, for a state that grows so many of them, I've yet to sample a decent apple and I've tried the produce store, Whole Foods, the farmers market, everywhere. Maybe it's not yet the right season but none of the apples seemed up to par. Nearly all were too tannic, some were just far too sweet and they were all too mushy without that crisp snap. Little shops: I loved the individual butchers and greengrocers and fishmongers. The tiny produce shop near us is great and vastly cheaper than the surrounding stores but it doesn't compare to this: Homemade Stock:I'm just not set up for stockmaking over here so I'm living with the carton stuff and it just doesn't compare. I just finished a carton of Whole Foods chicken stock and it simply just wasn't as aromatic as the homemade stuff. Trying some trader joes next, lets see if that's any better. Luckily, Whole Foods has some frozen, no-salt chicken & veal stock so I can still make demi-glaces at a pinch. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good? An electric kettle: One is on order but I don't know how Americans can cook without an electric kettle. Stovetop ones just seem so primitive and boiling water on the stove feels like waiting for Fidel Castro to die. Lamb: I miss Australia lamb sooooo much . My porch: There is a nice backyard here which should be great in the summer but nothing compares to the ambiance of that porch . Yogurt: I might be missing something here but is it not possible to buy flavoured yogurt in large tubs instead of individual serving size containers? I still haven't hit the International District yet. If someone has a car and is willing to play chauffer for the day, I would love to have a shopping buddy. I can show you some of my favourite asian stuff to buy and how to use it and you can save me from having to lug it all home on the bus . PM me if you're interested.

Hang on... I might be reading this wrong but it seems like you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the recipe. To make burnt sugar aka caramel, you need to first dissolve the sugar and then continue cooking to drive all of the water out and caramelise the sugar. The sugar should turn a light amber to muddy brown colour depending on how far you take it but it should definately not be clear. Once the caramel is made, you need to add other things to it to make it spreadable. Otherwise it will just cool into solid sugar.

You're just not going to be able to get the density of flavour with fresh pineapple at this time of the year, especially in vancouver. You could try just a touch of citric acid to amp it up a little bit but, IMHO, your best bet now is to use frozen pineapple concentrate.

I dunno, when I think of PUDC, I don't want something "challenging" or "sophisticated". I just want a rich moist cake with lots of tart pineapple flavour and a rich gooey sauce. The whole appeal to me of a cake like that is that it's self saucing. You flip it out onto a plate and watch the golden liquid slowly slide down the sides. Having said that, an idea could be that you could do individual cakes in ramekins and have a modern "twist" be that you first freeze the sauce to make it solid and then put cake batter on top and bake it. Or, you could make it a liquid centered cake by making something like a pineapple-cherry-rum caramel and freezing that as ice-cubes. Same principle as frozen ganache in molten chocolate cakes. Hrmmm... have you thought about using frozen pineapple concentrate? Theres a really stupendous recipe in The Cooks Book for Pineapple Zabligione using pineapple concentrate & Moscato D'Asti. Unfortunately, I don't have the book in the US but if someone is willing to share it, it could be a nice thing to incorporate into the dessert.

Green Salad or Chicken "Ceaser" Salad (actually thai flavoured with crumbled up ramen noodles) Pasta Salad or Potato Salad Bread Roll Fried Chicken Bread Roll Rotary club dinner.

Went to the pike brewery today with a bunch of Commonwealthers (UK, Aus, NZ, Canada) & Assorted European UW students. Their ruby ale is actually quite decent but I don't know who's bright idea it was that 11:30 pm seemed like a good time for closing. Came home and made this: Lamb Chop with Cumin & Chilli

In this case, 1am party grub because someone in Seattle had the bright idea of making last call 11:30 pm on a Sunday night. I mean seriously... WTF? Lamb chop with cumin, chilli, onion, S&P. Didn't even bother defrosting the lamb. Just seared it and bunged it in a hot oven for 15 minutes, deglaze with some flour, a bit of wine & milk. Reminded me a lot of the lamd sticks you get at street vendors in China and it REALLY hit the spot. Mmm...

Whatever you made there, it wasn't puff pastry. Puff pastry is a laminated dough which involves thin sheets of butter folded between a flour based dough. What you made is some kind of bastardised folded pie dough.

Instead of cooking your tomatos, roast them instead. Put them halved on a sheet pan with some olive oil and put them into a hot oven. About 30 minutes before they are done, scatter on some onions and whole garlic cloves. Then run the entire thing through a food mill and you have a intense, slightly smoky, very flavourful tomato sauce and no little red splotches all over your kitchen.

I make a great rustic soup using spinach or kale. Chop up the stems and leaves of the spinach seperately. Saute the stems with some onions, add garlic, white wine, chicken stock and cubed potatos and simmer for 30 minutes. Puree with a hand blender, add some milk and some cooked white beans and puree just a bit more to break up the beans a bit but to still leave some whole. Throw in the spinach leaves and let it come back to the simmer just to wilt the leaves. Garnish with a good sharp cheese, lots of pepper and some peppery olive oil and dive right in.

Picked up some mince from whole foods yesterday to make spaghetti sauce and man... your cows are quite possible more obese than your people here. I used to be puzzled with american recipes involving mince that included the step "drain any excess fat"... now I know. Back home, I always picked the "3 star mince" which was the cheapest mince possible and had the highest fat content. Even then, barely any fat pooled at the bottom of the pan once browned. Here, I picked the second leanest mince since it was on special and by the end of the browning, it was swimming it a pool of grease. I had to get the colander out to drain off all the grease which I've NEVER done before. Beef in the US also seems to be quite a bit blander that in Australia but far more tender. I'm guessing it's just the difference between grass and corn fed. Whats really disconcerting is theres none of that whiff of barnyard funk which I didn't even realise was there until it was missing. I guess I'll have to experiment with some dry aged stuff to try and get back some of that flavour. People keep on going on about the link between HFCS and obesity. Perhaps the link is really between the rise of corn fed animals and obesity instead and both just happened around the same time. Something to think about. Anyway, I made a big batch of spaghetti sauce today and froze the leftovers in ziplock bags. Also slow roasted a pork butt for 5 hours. Was going to BBQ it but the weather chose today to turn freezing and rainy. It was tender but not at the shredding consistancy. About 1/3rd of it "accidentally" fell off the roast as I was letting it cool and so I had to eat it before it got cold . About 1/3rd is going to be sliced for sandwiches and the remaining 1/3rd is going to be cubed and slowly simmered tomorrow in some orange & lime juice, cumin, chilli powder and red kidney beans to top some tortillas with homemade guacamole, sour cream, lettuce and some sort of mexican mozarella I found at whole foods. Mmmm...

Can't you use salt pork instead of bacon?

Mmm... Recipe for the Kulfi please? I think it's something I can manage to make from ingredients on hand.

I don't know if you've ever seen a bluefin tuna but theres no way that's going to happen for those at least.

Picked up a loaf from the Tall Grass Bakery booth at the farmers market today. Thanks for the tip.

I'm going to start easing up on the posts after today. I've pretty much settled in and have started cooking like I did at home so theres not going to be too much seattle specific stuff here. I'm semi-systematically moving my way through American seafood and tonight was Pacific Snapper. Very different from the Red Snapper I'm used to which is firm and very savoury. Experimenting with the new spices from world spice, I made a seasoned flour mix with rose petals, anardana (dried pomegranite seeds) and sumac. Fried the filets in lots of butter, added some shallots to the pan and then some frozen peas and tomato. Topped it off with some parsely and the rest of the spice mix. No pictures as dinner was far too late for me to bother. The snapper was very flaky and moist but very mild. It seems like a great blank slate for sauces and rubs. I got mainly the sumac on the fish but the tomatos have a lovely, redolant aroma of rose which added just that hint of exoticism to quite a plain dish. Having more of the Plum/Peach sorbet for dessert. Man that stuff is good. edit: I also rinsed off the gravlax today and I have to say I'm not a fan. Never having had gravlax before, I don't know if mine was done right but is it meant to have that wierd, gummy texture?

link to the article

Yeah, I had a feeling one of your type would show up. Some Vietmanese grandmother is producing the most amazing food you've ever eaten over a patch of beaten car radiator and so it therefore follows that any piece of kitchen equipment above $10 is pretention wank. Theres nothing wrong with cast iron except that it's heavy, takes ages to heat up, has low responsivity, can't be put in the dishwasher, needs about 5 years of regular seasoning to reach peak performance and has a black surface which makes it hard to judge browning. For the price, it's the best type to buy. But ignoring that there exists better alternatives for some purposes is absurd. Thats because restaurants are a business and every penny matters. Home cooks have the luxury of buying stuff just because it makes cooking funner. Restaurants have to turn a profit. Stainless produces perfectly good fond. It's only really teflon that produces awful fond. Properly lined copper has no health concerns. It's only unlined copper and copper lined with tin that has worn off with which copper ions might leach into the food. Sure, $200 might seem expensive. But if it lasts you 10 years, then it's cheaper than that $20 teflon pan you have to buy every year because the old one wore out. With all due respect the bike would beg to differ

It could be perfectly reasonable that the writer for the LA times is a habitual foodblog reader and reads dozens of blog posts a day. That phrase stuck in his head somehow and, several weeks later, when writing about the same winebar, the phrase popped backing into his memory as if it was an original thought and he put it down. I know it's certainly happened to me before completely unintentionally and the furthest thing from my mind was that I was plagurising someone. Unless the rest of the article took substantially the same tack, I would just brush it off as something too minor to be worried about.

For berries and other small things, there was an eG thread a while back that suggested tossing them with a tiny bit of vodka which sterilises them and can keep them going longer. Haven't tried it yet but it sounds intriguing.

If you fold beaten eggs into nearly boiling water, you will solidify the egg immediately before it would mix in with the water. That would become egg drop soup. My guess is maybe mix the beaten eggs with water first, then microwave it instead of steaming it? ← I think he means doing it the other way around by tempering the eggs with boiling water. That should bring the mix up to around 60C and you only need to go up 10 or so degrees to reach a custard.

The scanpans are just copper coated. The copper is so thin it's essentially aesthetic. Simon Johnson have 2.5mm copper pans for an absurd amount of money. Something like $1000 for a saucepan. Peters of Kensington have 2mm copper Mauviel but not the 2.5mm AFAIK. Theres an ebay store called Lara Copper based in Tasmania which does tin lined copper for quite reasonable prices. Best however is to probably just buy them overseas and bring them back after a holiday.

The landlord spotted a 2 for 1 NY Strip Steak deal so I got a free steak. Cool! Taking a cue from the Dinner thread, I had steak & fried eggs for dinner. Tomato, Romaine & Bread Salad with a fried egg on top Steak, potato, broccoli. My spices came in today from world spice. Quality looks ok but not great. They have some cool stuff though like asfoedita and edible rose petals so I'm looking forward to experimenting with this. After this stuff runs out, I'm going to try an order from penzey and compare the difference. Made a italian herb rub on the beef of bayleaf, rosemary, oregano, and basil. Found an awesome cast iron pan hidden in the back of the pantry. It must of belonged to the landlord's mother because it's ice slick from use. Removed some crud off it and I'm in love. Had a bit of the plum/peach sorbet & blackberry honey sorbet for dessert. Wow, it's so soft and supple and the fruit is so intense. This waring pro is just ridiculously more powerful than the breville I had at home. I could never get it to blend this fine at home. I'm definately a convert now.