McAuliflower
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Posts posted by McAuliflower
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I thought holiday egg nog was always made with rum. Nice recipe, though I'd add some freshly grated nutmeg or at least some cinnamon.
ditto on the nutmeg.
I've been steeping batches of bourbon, vodka and rum with vanilla beans since September. Our holiday eggnog testing revealed that I like the rum version better and live with one who considers rum to be inferior in this use!
I'm surprised to see an eggnog reciep that doesn't call for cream or make use of the eggwhites (though I do like my nog best when it has become less fluffy...).
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I'll bet Chocolate Mice would love Velveeta Fudge!
It's discussed on a recent eG Thread.
SB (resisting using the old Mice en Place joke)
Ouch, nice velvetta mention!
Making fudge with white chocolate works really well for color application. I've made a rainbow of fudge colors this way.
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I get the blocks of tamarind pulp mixed with seeds. I put a chunk - say, walnut-sized - in a small bowl, pour about a cup of boiling water over it, and let it steep with occasional stirring. The concentration can be adjusted, of course. The liquid can go into all kinds of things, and this treatment is my main use of tamarind so far.
this is also how I use tamarind. I find that the blocks last forever this way.
I've grown addicted to drizzling this over my curries and pad thai.
There's a local restaurant that makes frozen tamarind margaritas. oddly, I'm not crazy about it... too tart and looks like a pile of wet sand!
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Without exception, every item on the menu is a sweet of some sort.
Wow, I feel dirty... this totally excites me!
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I seem to recall a thread on Fizzy Fruit some time back ... apparently it is still popular with kids!
thanks for the thread reminder, I hadn't seen it before!
I just asked to be put on the press release listing for Fizzy Fruit's next Oregon school introduction
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Will your mom adopt me?
I think she would
thanks for the reminder for me browsing for recipes!
For topic relevency:
- Deborah Madison: Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone has become my reference book for cooking times and suggestions for vegetable.
- the CIA's Techniques of Healthy Cooking has many helpful procedures and recipes, especially for this resolution time of year.
- the Artful Vegan, fresh falvors from the Millenium Restaurant I definitely recommend for vegan's looking for help seeing the breadth of gourmet vegan recipe options. I appreciate the level of detail given to each recipe: nutritional info and plating instructions.
Oddly, i don't consider my self vegan, vegetarian, or obsessed with healthy cooking! Go figure.
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from Oregon State University's Website...
Third-grader Alex Martinez, left, enjoys Fizzy Fruit on Dec. 9 at Sunrise Elementary School in Albany while classmate Uriel Zepeda tries another grape.“It’s good, and tasty,” said Alex Martinez.
“No,” replied Uriel Zepeda, who was sitting right next to Alex. “It’s perfect and bubbly.” [food technologist] Ling has been testing the Fizzy Fruit on his sons the last few years, but the children’s reactions were important.
“I feel great as a food researcher to see so many smiling faces when these kids are enjoying this fun and healthy fruit snack,” Ling said. “This is really the best reward for us who worked on this innovative food product in the last several years”
I haven't tried Fizzy Fruit brand carbonated fruit, but my home tests with dry ice have yielded fun results. The taste of carbonation in fruit is almost tangy to the tongue. I was surprised that carbonation had a taste at all until I was reminded that I like to enjoy my beer on nitro vs carbonation.
Perhaps Fizzy Fruit will yield fruit on nitrous?
make your own carbonated fruit: RecipeGullet entry.
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There is a problem, though, with oysters and other bivalves: They eat by filtering large quantities of water. Whatever impurities there are in the water get multiplied by a large factor in oysters and the like, and when we eat them, we are eating those impurities because we are eating their filters. So there could be a reason for people to limit their intake of bivalves unless they're really sure the ones they're consuming come from areas with very low levels of heavy metals and so forth in the water.
True. There are federal programs to monitor the waters and oversea poluiton issues:
To protect consumers from contaminated shellfish and shellfish with paralytic shellfish poisoning, an extensive federal/state program called the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference (an organization of shellfish-producing states, the FDA, the shellfish industry, and NMFS) was established to monitor shellfish-growing waters. Those waters that become polluted are closed to commercial shellfishing. Also, under this program, shellfish must be traceable to their source from the moment they are harvested from a bay, river, or estuary to when they end up in a restaurant or market. Each container of shellfish must have a tag or label approved by the appropriate state shellfish control agency that bears the information necessary to trace shellfish, both to a specific area and to a particular harvester. Inspectors can then verify if the shellfish came from approved waters. If the tags are missing, the shellfish are removed and destroyed.from University of Delaware Sea Grant Marine Advisory Service
this is probably preaching to the choir though
too bad we can't post our comments on the lists themselves!
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Chocolate Carbonated Banana
Serves 1 as Dessert.
I was watching an episode of Good Eats one day when the idea of using dry ice in the kitchen presented itself. Alton was looking for a way to fast freeze strawberries in the kitchen. The faster the freeze, the smaller your ice crystals inside of the fruit.
I thought this was really cool, as I am always looking for more excuses to play with dry ice at work. Our lab often has spare dry ice left over from incoming shipments of frozen chemicals.
I headed out to the Farmers Market and bought strawberries and other fruits to bring back to the lab to freeze down just to munch on. I ended up tossing a couple strawberries and grapes in, because frozen grapes are an entity unto themselves!
Through out the day I couldn’t help but notce a zip on my tongue when eating the grapes. Not all of the grapes exhibited this phenomenon, but some of them had something going on with the tip of my tongue! Playing throughout the day we discovered that you can only “taste” the zip when the fruit is thawed. This zip is carbonation from carbon dioxide being taken up by the fruit when its being frozen.
If you want to play with carbonating/freezing your own fruit, dry ice can often be obtained from ice cream stores. Dry ice cautions are detailed below in the following recipe.
- 2 lb dry ice
- 1 banana
- 2 T chocolate sauce
image of chocolate carbonated banana
First ready your container of dry ice. The dry ice should be stored in a small cooler to slow its evaporation. I used a small styrofoam box with a lid rested on top.
Dry Ice Info and Warnings:
Handling dry ice is something to be approached with caution- it hurts! Use gloves to protect your skin if handling the ice itself. If you are deciding to get all crazy on your ice, go ahead and put on safety googles (ski goggles work too). Getting chips of dry ice in your eyes is yucky!
Be aware that dry ice creates carbon dioxide gas as it “ages”. This means that pieces of dry ice in a sealed shut container are effectively creating the conditions for a non-flammable bomb. If the build up of gas is great enough- your container will explode or burp. Burping vs exploding depends on your container volume to gas ratio:
* (tiny sealed container + big chunk of dry ice = explosion)
Freaked out yet? If you are, go get a rubber balloon, toss a couple of chips of dry ice in it and tie off the balloon. This will give you a nice visual of what gas building forces you are dealing with. The off gassing of the dry ice will inflate your balloon for you. Cool!
Never, say never, but there are chances of suffocation around dry ice. This would occur if you stuck your head down in your ice chest full of dry ice and decided to hang out and breath in the vapors for awhile. Remember the carbon dioxide that dry ice gives off? This pushes oxygen out of the way in your ice chest- thus creating an oxygen deficient pocket. So, only supervised contact around kids please.
Now, on to the fruit.
Remove the peel from half a banana, length-wise, leaving the remaining peel to act as a dish for the banana. Make slices across the banana fruit to help facilitate easier removal later. Place your half peeled banana on top of your dry ice and lid your container. Allow the banana to freeze completely (5-20 minutes), removing to a dish when solid. Thaw the banana before attempting to eat! You don’t want to damage your tongue with your super-frozen banana. Besides the carbonation effect comes forth with thawed, not frozen fruit.
Thawing your banana is a tricky step- if you let it thaw too much, you will get a dark brown peeled puddle of banana goo. I like to wait for it too just become unfrozen by watching the ends of the fruit, which will thaw first. Drizzle chocolate syrup across your fruit and enjoy!
Keywords: Dessert, Fruit, Easy
( RG1567 )
- 2 lb dry ice
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I just received a copy of Saveur and noticed they have an article regarding the Time Life cookbooks--no wonder I can't find any in the thrift shops anymore and if I do they are more expensive than they used to be....
What was the article about specifically? yea on the series?
I just was gifted 3/4 of the series from my Mom
I didn't take all of them (could only carry so much!)... left the American, German and French ones at her place.
I have found memories of sitting on the kitchen floor pulling these cookbooks out and looking at all the pictures. I didn't appreciate the spiral ones at that time
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I too had noticed a lot of people mentioning risotto, as well as starchy dishes in general. For what it's worth, this Wikipedia article says that some people think carbo-loaded dishes provoke some kind of opiate-like effect in the brain. Mind you, Wikipedia articles sometimes vary widely in reliability, and I don't necessarily want to wander *too* far off into a discussion of the properties of carbohydrates in the diet, but still, I thought the point worth presenting.
there are also those tasty casein opiates from cheese... yum
my adopted comforts:
- I kiss the earth for showing the way of Chilaqueas. My favorite style is made with masa and skips the tortilla chip part of the process. When served up as a thick slab with sour cream, I always think of it as a sort of savory cake.
- I know its not a particular food, but dim sum is an amazing comfort food group for me.
- pad thai, its a wonderful marriage of sweet, and crunch, and salt and tang. Pad thai was also my gateway drug to tofu, especially when fried up.
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How about a thinned out pate' piped in between or maybe an onion jam
boursin or mozzarella melted for the glaze....hmmmm
pick up a copy of the sureal gourmet
tracey
I too was thinking of the Surreal Gourmet (Bob Blumer).
He has a fake eggs with peach halves that is cute.
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I had a brief professional career making ceramics... looking at tableware and then deciding you can make it easier (and cheaper) than buying it is dangerous!
So uh, yeah, add me to the list.
favorite self made ware that I could never find (hence why I had to make it)...
spikey cups
"dog collar" cups
There is a Portland OR area potter who makes pirate themed plates and such- its sucha hoot!
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I'm working on an April Fools menu, and one of the things we're looking at is making fake eggs out of pie crust (I have half-egg shaped baking molds) and filling them with a hollandaise like sauce to be cracked open at the table.
So the question is how do I glue the two egg halves together. The sauce needs to still be warmish, so I can't wait for something that needs to dry, and it can't need to cook to set either (unless a butane torch would do the trick)
I was thinking something like a cream cheese frosting, but savory would work well. I can certainly wing it on this, but if someone's already got a working recipe that would be fab.
Likewise does anyone have ideas for a hard drying whitish glaze like one pours on bundt cake, but savory? I'm blocked on how to make this work since sugar is integral to the sweet glaze...
maybe try egg whites as the glue?
So... given hollandaise and frosting: is this a sweet or a savory dish?
I could also see making this out of chocolate using candy making techniques... kind of like DIY cadbury eggs.
Also, I swear I just read something about DIY eggs in a liquid nitrogen thread that was cute.
looking up thread... Liquid Nitrogen mock egg idea (sugar and alcohol)
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There are several ideas in the marhsmallow thread. One suggestion there was to dip the marshamllow in chocolate and then roll it in graham cracker crumbs.Otherwise, my suggestion would be use chocolate marshmallows (homemade, or stir some sort of chocolate flavorant into Marshmallow Creme) and white chocolate, on graham crackers.
I love the idea of chocolate marshmallows and white chocolate ganache!
Excellent amccomb!
After being inspired by the marshmallow thread I made mini smores tarts, with a baked butter/sugar/graham cracker crust, a thin swipe of chestnut puree (jam would also be great), a layer of ganache, then topped with freshly made marshmallow.
They are very sweet and best served in small wedges. I played with toasting and then cutting and vice versa. Still not sure which method I prefer. It's tough getting a clean cut.
To toast on site- use a blow torch fromthe hardware store. Very easy to opperate and gives great results.
I'd love to make the tarts again with
- white chocolate ganache and strawberry marshmallow
- passionfruit marshmallows and coconut ganache
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You could also spread the ganache on cookies or graham crackers and pop them into the freezer. We would do this with frosting as a kid. It gets all chewy firm good!
I've been on a marshmallowmaking binge the last couple of weeks... You could make some excellent 'smores with ganache as your chocolate layer! I'm thinking strawberry marshmallows with white chocolate ganache...
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You mean you haven't made any yet?
(I studdied the whole thread!)
I remember having mallomar like cookies with a smidge of raspberry jelly between the cookie and the marshmallow!
I have to admit, homemade Mallomars in various flavors are begging to be made!
... like passionfruit marshmallow on top of a coconut cookie covered in white chocolate...
:drool:
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"Added a cup of freeze dried berries to food processor with the rice flour and powdered sugar"
Excuse me for the dumb question..but what are "freeze dried berries"?? Just frozen berries ...??
no no no... they are dehydrated berries.
So dehydrated that they are crunchy... cheetos consistency
The brand I have familiarity with is the "Just Tomatoes, etc", website here.
They crumble really easy since they are so brittle dry, hence the fun applications making fruit dust.
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I had fun making a batch of Neil's strawberry with my new Kitchen Aid. And have some good tips to report:
- Rice flour works well in lieu of potato starch.
- Also, I flavored the dusting powder by making fruit dust to add to the powdered sugar/rice flour mix. Added a cup of freeze dried berries to food processor with the rice flour and powdered sugar. Makes the dust a wonderful pink with a touch more flavor. I only had freeze dried raspberries on hand- which I used with strawberry marshmallows- next time I want to do strawberry dust!
chocolate dipped with a smidge of fruit dust. The contrast between the soft marshmallow and the crisp chocolate on a half dipped square is interesting. I think dipping it whole in white chocolate, then half in dark would be great.
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Wow. I've been behind on my eGullet and finding this now is such a reward for checking back in!
My recent favorite...
- dark chocolate with pomegranate
a wonderful drool conjuring chocolate from Eugene's Kitchen Witch (Michelle Lodjic at the Holiday Market) taught me this one
- and thyme with vanilla
via a wonderful creme brulee
McAuliflower-
who digs chocolate with raspberry & pistachio cherry biscotti & lavender truffles
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I too got a stand mixer for Christmas- joy!
I recommend making marshmallows! I made nightscotsman's strawberry marshmallows, right after making some egg nog that is.
I really enjoyed them and being a marshmallow pusher...
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Has anyone noticed that the number of items popping up on many menus seems to be expanding? In the years I've been going to several area restaurants, I swear there's been an exponential increase at some places.
Just last night we were watching one of those restaurant make-over shows (this one wasn't a disaster like the Grapefruit Moon one, euuugh, that designer still gives me the shivers...).
The chef took this restaurant's menu and aimed to minimize the menu offerings. It seems like a good move to simplify and specialize your menu in this way. He used it as a tactic to help cut cost and to help with ingredient management.
It's kind of like good design- you want to distill your goodness, not dilute it in fluff.
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thanks for the scanning feedback! That's definitely something I'm interested in spending some time doing.
No bets on when I'll get it done though! Anyone want to beat me to it? (scanning in their cookbook's indexes that is...)
I have an epson scanner (epson perfection 1250), and haven't touched the software that came with it. I prefer to import via photoshop. I'll try to dig around for free word recognition software.
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Except scans would produce pdf's or images, not word documents. For me the key to the index's is that they be searchable by contained words.
GREENS!
in Cooking
Posted
For Winter Greens
- I like to pressure cooker the heck out of them with bacon bits, brown sugar and vinegar.
- pureed cooked greens with a touch of cream and parmesan.
- cooked greens stired into polenta.
For softer Salad Greens
- Rolling them up in softened rice wrappers with something salty (peanuts), something tangy (good squeeze of lime), something crunchy, and something sweet (mandarin orange slices)!
- I agree in that spinach can be pratically added to anything!