Shalmanese

Excellent story. I too love the process of planning a huge dinner from scratch just by wandering around a market and letting inspiration guide me. Inevitably, the meal is always missing an element or two and off kilter due to forgetfulness but it always turns out to be more genuine and fun. I too experience the feeling of not being hungry after intense bouts of cooking.

The bread was a French Loaf from QFC. Nothing special. I haven't found a bakery yet although looking on google maps, there are 3 east of my house which I should check out sometime. I'm hoping I can pick up some decent bread at the farmers market on Saturday. The sauce on the potato salad was just some leftover homemade mayo. edit: Boy, they wern't kidding when they said I caught the tail end of summer, it was freezing this morning.

Apples and Porkchops obviously. Apples and Venison also works quite well.

They seemed pretty open to me . Still in the process of settling into my new home. I'm experimenting with shopping european style (buy what you cook on the same day) for a while and seeing how that goes. Still getting into the rhythm of the new kitchen and so mainly cooking fairly simple foods with really fresh ingredients. Apologies for the quality of the earlier shots. Finally got the tripod setup tonight. Yesterday: Heirloom & Vine Ripened Tomato Salad with Mozarella, Basil and Balsamic Steamed Salmon with Shallots & Mayo, Balsamic Glazed Green Beans and Leftover Potato Salad I'm glad I managed to arrive to catch the tail end of Tomato season and Salmon season. Apparently, from Thursday onwards it looks like all rain and dreary skies so I'm desperately taking in the last of the summer produce before the cool weather starts. Tonight: Sashimi of Salmon with Tamari and Spring Onions. Still can't get enough of that Wild Salmon, so different from the Tasmanian stuff we get in Australia. This is much more buttery and supple whereas the Tasmanian Salmon has that minerally edge to it. Vine Ripened Tomatos, Basil, Mozarella, Romaine Lettuce & Bread Salad. I didn't have bread for the last few days so all my salads were very soupy. The addition of bread soaked up those lovely juices wonderfully. Chicken Pasta with Onions, Bell Peppers, Capers & Sour Cream, Steamed Broccoli with Lemon. I was walking past University Seafood on the way home today and picked up some Chicken for about half the price of what the supermarkets around me are selling it for. Looks like a great place to visit after the weekly farmers markets. Seared some chicken hind quarter pieces and then slowly cooked a tangle of onions, yellow, red & green bell peppers in the chicken fat until they got nice and soft and slightly brown around the edges of the onion. Added the garlic and chicken back into the pot, deglazed with a bit of white wine and let it steam for 10 minutes. Added in a dollop of sour cream, some capers and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end. Ridiculously simple but really good. Also, I've made some gravlax and some plum/strawberry sorbet but I haven't been taking pictures of those yet. Still not used to portioning food for one person (especially salads which always look so skimpy for 1) so I've been to full after dinner to eat any dessert. I still have 1 1/2 peach/plum galette left which I've been having pieces of for breakfast. Also been making smoothies for breakfast and to take for lunch in a thermos along with leftovers of dinner. You would not believe how good it is to actually have bananas again after 6 months of doing without!

My local Whole Foods has a big sign up saying they don't carry Italian Proscuitto due to then not being able to find an importer who meets their standards. American proscuitto is available and on display.

Hey! Great minds think alike. I already have Dill on tonights shopping list!

Peach & Plum Galette with Custard Sauce

I will never again put anything meltable near the vents of my new electric stove ever, ever again. Unfortunately, I had to learn this the very, very hard way with a not 9 HOUR old Magnum Pepper Grinder:

Oh yes... you definately don't want to do this. You especially don't want to do this with a $40 Magnum Pepper Grinder you bought just 9 HOURS AGO!!! . NOT HAPPY!!!

Until very very recently, good restaurants had real problems scaling. Once a good chef tries to create an empire, it's very hard to keep up the same quality. What this means is that it's hard to leverage talent. There might be 1000 chefs who have the business side of things done really well. But they are only managing 1 or 2 restaurants each which means the majority are probably sub-optimally managed. This is unlike, say, retailing where you only need 1 Sam Walton to drastically change the entire landscape.

Kiwifruit sorbet has a really nice, sticky jammy texture. I like to serve it with another fairly clean sorbet as well like orange or lemon to really get the contrast. It works really well: Kiwifruit & Lemon-Mint Sorbet with Dark Chocolate Kiwifruit & Orange Sorbet. What you don't want to make is this

Wow... it feels so GOOD to be cooking again. I've been living off greasy restaurant food for the last month and it's good to detoxify with some nice bacon and butter . Invited my new landlord to eat with me. Decided to make it a fairly simple meal as I was still unsure of the entire setup of the kitchen. Happened to pass Mrs Cooks on the way there so I went in for a wander and came out with a whole bunch of more esoteric cooking utensils. It happened to be their birthday sale with 20% off everything but even before the discount, prices were competitive with amazon. Anyway, dinner was really a celebration of local produce. Grilled some Wild Sockeye Salmon, made a potato salad with mustard, home-made mayo, sour cream, green onions, celery seed, S&P and bacon and made a sort of salad/salsa of heirloom & grape tomatos, avocado, sweet corn, basil, lime & EVOO. Finally finished it off with a simple pan sauce of white wine & butter: Apologies for the not-so-good picture but the food tasted so good after not cooking for so long. For dessert, I made a Peach & Plum Galette with some custard: Store bought pie crust as I still don't have a rolling pin. Or, for that matter, flour. Still have an entire half of salmon left, any suggestions for cooking? Made friends with the new neighbours as well. They were out on their patio grilling so every 10 minutes or so, I would send out a little plate of something for them to taste. They seemed to appreciate it.

According to this place, BSCB = 1.2% fat, BSCT = 4.6% fat, skin on thighs = 14.6% fat. I imagine that if you cut up your own chickens and trim them at home, you can get the number for thighs a bit lower as supermarket trimmed thighs still have lots of little pockets of fat.

Try Salvatore's on Roosevelt. A bit off the main strip but it's pretty decent Italian fare at quite a reasonable price. I had the wild boar fettucini when I went and they make a really good fresh pasta. edit: Salvatore Ristorante 6100 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA (206) 527-9301

I don't think anybody from egullet went last time either. Way too overpriced.

Got the room! Moving in on Sunday. I'm really starting to fall in love with the neighbourhood. Theres a funky bookstore, I'm literally right on the busline to UW and theres plenty of good food stores. The fruit market is a bit run down and run by hippies and the quality is a bit variable but it has a lot of charecter. Theres a QFC 2 blocks from the house as well and it seems reasonably well stocked and clean. The whole foods actually seems surprisingly reasonable pricewise compared to the other two and the quality is exceptional if slightly plasticky. None of the other people I'm sharing with are big cooks so I basically have the kitchen to myself. Theres a gas stove so I should be set. Slightly less prep space than I'm used but I guess I'll have to adapt. Look out for some good food pics to be coming up soon!

I don't really bother for domestic flights but Some cheese and cured meats makes the ubiquitous bread roll on international flights more tolerable. Grapes and apples travel well. I like to cut up some carrot sticks and take a little plastic takeaway container of homemade hummus to dip it in. The hummus is thick enough that even if the lid comes off, it doesn't make too much of a mess (although I suppose this is illegal now). Instead of bread, tortillas and wraps make sandwiches much more convenient. Pack the stuff seperately and assemble on the plane. Mixed nuts are great, so is dried fruit. Whenever I fly through SFO terminal 1, I bring along a whole bunch of fixings, but a baguette from bouchon bakery and make a nice sandwich before my flight. And I always carry a pack of gum for decompression purposes on descent.

Any decent chinese restaurant should have fish so fresh it's still wiggling at you when you decide which one you want to eat.

The reason you see more "fringe" stuff than traditional stuff is that the fringe is just inherently bigger. Theres really only so much you can say about roast chicken or mashed potatos and the existing threads are a great resource. Most people are perfectly content reading and don't have all that much new to contribute. On the other hand, fusion stuff, alginates and the like are a huge field and a lot more of what people do is noteworthy or interesting. So even though we might cook 100 roast chickens for every tilapa noodle, we're going to be talking more about the right ratios of transglutaminate. Same thing in the Dinner thread. I know I don't bother to photograph or document a lot of my day to day mundane dishes. It's only when I do something relatively interesting or tasty that I'm going to be sharing it. So the dinner thread naturally skews towards the "fringe". It's a perfectly natural trend. And if you think we don't document our failures, you obviously haven't checked out the Dinner II thread.

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If you want to be really geeky, you could refer to the aformentioned coffee & doughnuts dish as "coffee in a coffeecup" since, in topology, doughnuts and coffee cups are the same thing. I've been thinking about this a bit more and here are some of the things I would like to see done: A Alinea inspired "hot tomato, cold tomato". A cold ravioli or either tomato water or gazpacho in some sort of hot tomato soup. You could even go campbells tinned soup if you want to play around a bit with nostalgia. The entire thing is assembled tableside by dropping the chilled tomato ravioli into the soup, garnishing with a bit of fresh basil and a sliver of good parmesan, and then eaten like an oyster. "Eggs and Toast on Bacon". I don't know how one would go about making liquid toast but if you could, take a quail egg yolk and place it in the centre of a frozen toast liquid sphere, aliginate it and then cook it sous vide until the egg yolk is soft boiled. Serve on a piece of crispy pancetta. Ravioli within a Ravioli. Same sort of principle as the egg dish. First make a ravioli, then freeze it inside another liquid and alignate that to make a two layered ravioli.

I don't cook with BSCB often but I think they have a legitimate place in cooking. I love giving them a dry rub, pan frying them and then tossing them into salads. I poach them at 70C in salt water and then make cold curried chicken salads and chicken slices for sandwiches. Pounded thin for schnitzel, they make some of the most tender meat I've ever eaten.

I've been thinking... since you can freeze things for spherication, has anybody tried doing anything but spheres? Doughnuts, mobius strips and other topological oddities. How would this affect the eating? Could you do a riff on keller's coffee & doughnuts with a doughnut shaped, doughnut flavoured ravioli and then a spherical coffee ravioli on top?

Just got into Seattle. Staying at the Eighth Avenue Inn just north of downtown, near the tower. Going to be looking for a house and settling in over the next week. I'll keep this thread updated about how I go. Any reccomendations for some decent, not-to-expensive food around this area? If anybody wants to catch up, PM me.

You need to keep the oil temperature at around 45C for 20 minutes IIRC. The easiest way to do this is to just start it at 40C and put it in a 50C oven, when it hits 45, take it out and wait till it drops back down to 40C and then put it back in the oven. Keep on doing this for 30 minutes and you'll have fish at your desired temp.