mkayahara

Made my first-ever batch of flour tortillas on the weekend. So easy and so good. The recipe I used called for a touch of baking powder (1/2 tsp to 500g of flour); I assume that's just insurance to help them puff. And puff they did! I cooked up some chorizo and eggs, and made some pico de gallo, and served with avocado slices and sour cream. Best brunch I've had in a while.

Thanks, patrickamory, good to know. I saw several different rhizome vegetables at a local Asian market recently, and I think they were ginger, galangal, krachai and turmeric. I'll ask next time I'm there.

I lucked out on the weekend and found some coriander with fully intact roots at the farmers' market, so I'm looking at making a curry paste this week. I'm debating between the jungle curry (I'm pretty sure I can get krachai, based on the photos I've been looking at online) or the basic red curry.

Fastest roast ever, today, under 20 minutes to get all the way through first crack with a half pound of beans. I was working in full sunlight, and it's fairly hot and humid out. It's amazing the impact weather can have on this technique! I'm still not completely sure just how dark I'm actually roasting the coffee; some of the distinctions seem to be pretty fine (and some of the batches are a little uneven), but I've been greatly enjoying my recent roasts. They're greatly improved over my first attempts!

I strongly recommend visiting the Marché Jean-Talon! Look for the "Les Cochons tout ronds" stall for charcuterie, and poke your head into Fromagerie Hamel for cheeses. Liquor in Quebec is all controlled by a provincial monopoly (the SAQ), so the selection isn't drastically different from one store to another. I like the store at 440 De Maisonneuve West for the most part. If you're on a budget, you won't be shopping at their "Signature" store on Ste-Catherine St., since it' mostly devoted to prestige products, and priced accordingly, but it can be interesting to browse nonetheless, especially if you're a cognac or single malt fan. It's been too long since I spent enough time in Montreal to be able to recommend restaurants, unfortunately. On my last visit, I went to DNA, which was very solid. Not sure that I'd call it "budget", though, and if you're going to splurge on your first trip to Montreal, it should definitely be on Au Pied de Cochon.

As far as fluid gels, I made the sage gel in Alinea on the "Pork, grapefruit, sage, honeycomb" dish... come to that, I made the whole dish. Recently I made the chorizo in Rick Bayless' Mexico One Plate at a Time, which calls for rehydrated-and-pureed ancho chillis. I've also made the pork and potato tacos with guajillo sauce from the same book. In both cases, the chilli-based sauces were far easier to puree, with far less waste, than when I made the red mole from that book using my old blender!

Find any excuse you can to make an agar-based fluid gel. After struggling with them for years with my old blender, I made one in my Vitamix: in, buzz, out, strain. It was brilliant. Also, any Mexican sauce involving pureed dried/rehydrated chillis.

Well, I suppose what I mean is that I thicken "to feel" with xanthan. It may hydrate further over time, but I've never noticed much of a difference in texture after time has elapsed. The successful alginate baths I've seen have been marginally thicken than water, but not much. Maybe approaching the texture of a 0.25% xanthan solution.

In my experience, xanthan doesn't need to hydrate overnight, so you can tweak as you go. What source of water are you using for the alginate bath? The bath itself shouldn't be all that viscous, but if you're using tap water that has reasonably high levels of calcium, it may be pre-gelling. I strongly recommend demineralized water when working with alginate (and gellan, for that matter).

Agreed! I've been thinking about doing the Thai fried rice from the book, and I think it just moved up the priority list. And patrickamory, if you end up deciding to sell it after all, I'd be happy to take it off your hands.

Thanks! I didn't get this reply until yesterday morning, and had put the rice in the fridge overnight. So I took it out first thing yesterday morning, and left it at room temp over the course of the day. Last night, having received delivery of my new Weber grill and checked all the gas fittings for leaks, I made the grilled beef salad. I used tri-tip instead of the recommended sirloin, which may have accounted for some of the chewiness. (Or maybe that was my cooking.) I served it with Bibb lettuce, cucumber and blanched garlic scapes. I really loved the way the black pepper played with the rest of the ingredients in this. I also served steamed sticky rice alongside, which I cooked in a Chinese bamboo steamer. It was OK, but not great. I'm not sure what was lacking... variety of rice? Cooking method? Cooking time? It just seemed a little bland to me. If I do it again (which I probably will at some point), I think I'll steam it for a bit longer.

I generally work on the principle that you gain an additional 1/3 volume from melted ice, so if you start with 3 oz of ingredients, you'll end up with a 4 oz drink. The recipe you outline is, indeed, extremely small.

So I'm thinking of making the sticky rice tomorrow to go with the grilled beef salad (since my new Weber grill arrives tomorrow), but I have a question for those of you who have cooked such things before: when soaking the rice overnight, do you do so in the fridge, or at room temperature?

Interesting, FrogPrincesse! I tried a Corpse Reviver No. 2 with Cocchi last year on a visit to Portland, and that was what drove it from "this might be an interesting ingredient" to "I must acquire a bottle." When I finally got around to acquiring one, one of the drinks I tried was the Brown Bomber, and I found it merely meh - but I'd never had one before, so I had no basis of comparison like I do with the White Negroni. I haven't tried it in a White Negroni yet, but it's definitely on my list.

I have to admit that, while crème de banane has never been high on my to-buy list, I'd be curious to try the Planet of the Apes in Beachbum Berry Remixed.

Last night, I made Dave Wondrich's Weeski with Cocchi. I was curious to see how it would play in a drink that was designed with modern-day Lillet in mind. Naturally, it simply made it better. In fact, if Cocchi were available in my local jurisdiction, I don't think I could ever go back to Lillet...

One of my favourite recipes with dill, and a summer staple in my house, is grilled lemon chicken salad with dill cream dressing, from an old issue of Bon Appétit.

It only works if they're always late by the same margin, though.

That looks good. OT, but would you mind sharing your recipe for the pickled chive buds? Not that it'll help me for this year, but we always end up with way more chive blossoms than I can reasonably use; some way of preserving them would be handy.

But fish, of course, usually takes only minutes to cook under any circumstances (sous vide or otherwise), so you can just start it once your guests arrive.

It's kind of odd to me that, as long as I've been a member here, I don't think I've ever posted in this thread! No time like the present... Lately I've been taking my first few steps in both Mexican and Thai cuisine, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Last night for dinner, I made a couple of dishes from Hot Sour Salty Sweet, but on Saturday, I made a handful of things from a Rick Bayless cookbook. First up, queso fundido with chorizo and poblanos. (I finally found some poblanos!) Bayless' chorizo calls for a lot more ancho than, say, Ruhlman and Polcyn, and I'm finding it makes it hard to sauté: the chillis burn too easily. Still, the queso fundido was delicious. Of course, to go with that, we had to have homemade corn tortillas. To lighten things up a bit, we had some mahi mahi ceviche as well. It was good, but I'm not sure how I feel about olives in my ceviche. They just didn't seem to fit, for me. And of course, what would a Mexican meal be without some salsa? This was a basic roasted tomato salsa with serranos, garlic, onion and cilantro.

I picked up Hot Sour Salty Sweet from the public library several weeks ago, but I've been travelling a fair bit in the last few weeks, so I didn't get around to trying anything out of it until this weekend. Thank goodness for renewals! Anyway, yesterday I made the pomelo salad and the khao soi. I didn't make the red curry paste for the khao soi; although I can get pea eggplants here, I'm having trouble finding dried Thai chillis, and coriander root is, of course, only spottily available. (Let's not even talk about makrut limes.) So I used Mae Ploy, which is a change from our usual brand, and I'm looking forward to comparing it in some of our usual red curry dishes. I really enjoyed the khao soi, but it's hard not to enjoy something with that much coconut milk in it and fried noodles on top! I don't think I've ever worked with pomelo before, and it had easily the oiliest skin of any citrus fruit I've ever peeled. My hands were covered, and there were clouds of the stuff making me sneeze. (Too bad the oil isn't more aromatic and less bitter, or it'd make a great cocktail garnish.) For interest's sake, I started from a whole coconut for the dry-roasted coconut garnish, which was probably overkill for 2 tablespoons, especially when I couldn't really taste it in the final dish. I liked the salad; it was a nice fresh counterpart to the richness of the khao soi, but I found the dressing too salty for my taste. Easily fixed. Next I want to make the spicy grilled beef salad, and one of the laab recipes... plus the red curry paste, if I can get all the ingredients before the book has to go back to the library. This is why I usually prefer to buy my cookbooks!

Got a sampler of Scrappy's bitters today, so I made a Ransom Old Tom Old Fashioned with the lavender bitters, using green Chartreuse as the sweetener. The aromatics integrate really thoroughly, perhaps too much so, but there's a nice floral finish, if you're into that sort of thing. Next time, I'll probably do a Chartreuse rinse and just sweeten with sugar. I could see this working quite nicely with xocolatl bitters, too, if you lack the lavender.

You're having trouble finding sweetened condensed milk in Toronto? I mean, it might be hard to find Eagle Brand - there aren't that many big chain supermarkets in the city centre - but it should be easy to find Vietnamese brands in Chinatown, shouldn't it?

I rarely shop at the FreshCo here, but I'll go and take a look! I know I can get them in Toronto, and assumed I could in Ottawa, but it seems like every time I look at a Mexican recipe, it calls for poblanos, so I really don't want to have to plan that far ahead... and since they're perishable, I can't exactly stock up in advance! Thanks for the tip.