gfron1

A follow up. I ended up with the Breville Sous Chef. First, as was said - no 20% discount allowed on it unfortunately. Price was still okay. I'm happy with it but let me roll out my gripes/concerns. First, it has a slightly larger footprint than my previous and so its taking more space on my counter than I like. The bowl is sturdy - but its taking time to get use to aligning the top to make it close and operate. That's partly because it has a rubber gasket, which is a great thing for liquids, but I'm used to a cheaper to that's faster to put on. The smaller bowl insert allows things to fly out the top pretty easily unless there's a part I've missed. That's it on the negatives - most of which aren't negatives at all. On the positives. Great, easy to read markings on the side for volume measurements. Motor feels very sturdy...time will tell. All sorts of parts and attachments that I'll never use. I'm happy. Thanks for the suggestion.

The building hasn't sold yet, but an opportunity has come up that will allow us to make the transition. The Quat business will close...all potential buyers are looking at the building and furniture.

They're killing me with kindness on Facebook. I'm having to avoid it just so I can have time for myself right now.

The final day of the Curious Kumquat will be Saturday, June 4th. Final week schedule is posted on our website. St. Louis, here I come!

The other thing I wanted to share this morning is my hunt for blurbs...that's what the industry calls the back cover quotes. And while only a handful go on the cover, we want many more because they get used in other promotional material. In my case, because I am so isolated, I don't have strong connections with other chefs or authors so I only have a small handful of known names. A week or so ago I realized that I had connections who would know people, including some long-time eG friends. I'll hold back on saying who has agreed to write blurbs until we have them in hand, but its been really fun having chefs agree to do them. I think its part of my nature to assume that a stranger wouldn't want to help me but just the opposite - most are excited to get an advance copy of a book that maybe of interest to them. My editor send out official requests once I've made the initial contact, and I'm assuming her email includes legal stuff.

Here is my editor's response about the "1 inch" issue, but more importantly, a description of what is about to come:

Today I am working on the Index. My contract allows me to do it, or they can take some of my advance to pay a contractor if I prefer. This is really hard work! And after I take my stab at it, I may turn it over to a professional to make sure it's done right. But I like learning new skills so I want to have a go at it first. I understand the role of Indices for finding things in the text, but I'm also wondering what role they have in web searches/boosting linkages/boosting sales. For example, I mention Ruhlman's Charcuterie in the book. Therefore, it is in the Index. Does that then show up digitally somehow in a way that let's the book be better noticed by Google? FYI: My Starting Point My Ultimate Guide

(Rambling thoughts since I can't quite make it coherent today) Thanks for the comment about me above Deryn, and I accept it with restraint. I'm fortunate in that I'm a one person show in the kitchen for my dinners, so I do know the source of everything that I hunt, forage and grow. However, as I've sat on this article for a few days I've decided that there are three culprits: 1. Chefs who like to tell a good story; 2. Chefs who have been forgetful; 3. Chefs who lie. I look at the motivation of each before judging. I'm not defending the outcome, just the motivation. I am certainly guilty of any or all of those at some time. And I suspect all chefs are at some point whether its knowingly or out of ignorance. I want to share some known examples that I've had in recent months. a. Met a couple of foragers last weekend on holiday, who work with a handful of big name chefs in a large midwestern city. Big name. They told me story after story of a chef asking for a specific item, and how they would head down to the bank down the street and snip their flowers (pollution and theft), or go to a private farm and glean the edges of the field (pesticides and theft) only to have the chef claim that "he foraged" the ingredients. So much wrong in this scenario. b. A local chef responds to a negative TripAdvisor post that he flies his seafood in daily, as a means to explain his prices. We are 3 hours to the nearest airport. We have a regional airport but they do not fly his seafood in. Outright lie. c. A local chef (Me) runs out of 4H lamb for 3 days before I butcher my next, and serve lamb from the grocery store. Didn't re-print the menu. No bones about it - its a lie. d. Same local chef (Me) just last night harvested lettuce from my greenhouse for dinner, but we had a bigger turnout than I expected. I mixed a tub of organic grocery greens in with my greens. No explanation was given to the customer. Nowhere do we claim it all comes from the greenhouse, but I think my customers assume, as the article points out, and accept the story blindly. So here are four very different examples, all of which have different motivations behind them. Should I have caught the menu error - absolutely. Should the first chef be claiming that he foraged the items when he hadn't. and that foraging might mean from unacceptable sources? I'll let him decide that for himself. The lying chef is just outright lying. But, I don't know that I say any of these examples is better than the others. And lest you think this doesn't include the biggest of the big names. I know a forager for one of the top chefs in the country, and same story. He's a bit vague in how he describes who does his foraging and where ingredients come from. I would be surprised if anyone is immune. Like I said, chefs love a good story. None of these is acceptable. But running a business...I can at least understand how it happens. So...When I read this, I sat down with my staff and we talked about what was found. I asked them for things we've done, and the list started growing. Most fell under the "didn't update the menu," while others were more serious such as a week when we ran out of elk and served bison and I didn't change the menu, and servers didn't notify guests. (side note, bison is more expensive than elk so it wasn't working in our favor). I asked how we can claim the high road (as we like to do) when we let little (or not so little) things like these slip by. All were known to someone at some level. Someone or everyone should have opened their mouths. I get it, we're tired; we're busy; we're human. But we agreed to dig deeper and hold each other to a higher level. First thing I did was delete the part of the menu that listed sources. If I can't/won't maintain it for accuracy, then it shouldn't be there. Personally, I printed the graphic from the cover of the article and made it my desktop on my computer, and posted it at my work station in the kitchen. Token action, but hopefully, next time I'm tired or don't want to reprint the menu and am willing to ignore that minor fib...I won't when I see that graphic. Random - I remember reading how Canada is much more aggressive in finding lying menus especially around wagyu and such. A final thought. I disagree about the value of the article. I found it well researched and powerful. She should be immensely proud of what she did and hopefully the lasting impact it has on the industry. We all deserved a good kick in the ass.

ahh. I thought it was a continuation of your previous comment about the ginger.

I'm not sure I understand what your concern is. Maybe you can state it more directly to help me understand. Ginger is not marketed any different at your store versus mine. You grab a piece out of the bin that suits your needs. Those pieces in the bin (which others have picked through already) range from small nubs to large hands of ginger. So if a recipe calls for "1 inch<tab>Fresh ginger, split in half," I can only assume that a cook would grab whatever size they want for a week's worth of cooking, and cut it to size. You also aren't seeing the next phase of the recipe where you find out that the ginger is for flavoring and will ultimately be removed - hence the split, and nothing more refined. Am I misunderstanding the concern? Please remember that the image was put up to show the design. it's a low resolution image that even lead one of my friends to ask if the recipe called for dOrk mustard.

Thanks Tere - someone mentioned that above. Its just a matter of page splits for the galley proofs. The rest of the recipe shows up on a different page. And Anna, the ginger thing...there a number of choices that the editor made for accessibility when common sense would keep flavors in line with the intention. So I'm assuming referencing a 1" ginger versus a whole quarter pound one. The actual recipe calls for 1" of fresh ginger and its something I need to double check when the proofs come back to me. That was a double edged answer - until I see the final proof I don't know if that was a choice they made or an editing error.

They asked me to place photos (they choose among each recipe's photo), so they will correspond except in the beginning which are ingredients and nature pics. And not sure what you mean about red and green. If you mean the code at the top, yes, there is a key at the beginning which makes it really obvious once you see the code.

Yes, I too only toast nuts in the micro. I'm wondering if there is a cultural difference between the OP and the majority of eGullet participants. When I get in an Indian cooking spree, I am much more likely to go through a lot of seeds and nuts, and thus want to toast them. Day to day, not so much in my American diet. So a device like this feels unnecessary to me. As a way of helping...what if it wasn't a new device but an attachment to an existing device. Kind of like the pasta add on for a Kitchenaid.

My 2 cents on the process. I was more concerned by the viscosity effect of the sweetened condensed milk than the gelatin. I used silver and recipes tend to not specify, but I might back off a sheet, but that's not the issue I felt. It was that milk is so viscous. Also, I've always struggled to take my mirror glazed cakes off the rack without damaging the edge. Any tips there are appreciated.

Okay, did this today. For those of you reading my story in the OffTopic:Chipmunk, today I brought a high school kid and his friend in. He's been saying he wants to learn new things and recently showed me his tie dye cake which were from boxed mixes: Well, that wouldn't do, now would it. So I said, let's make it from scratch and cooler! He was very excited. So he and a friend came in. He was more interested in the finish so I prepped the cake. We did Pierre Herme's cocoa cake (3 layers), brushed with caramel sauce, alternating layers of peanut butter curd and caramel ganache (his chosen flavors), and encased in a chocolate mousse. The cakes were then frozen to prepare the cake for the glaze. We prepared the bright colors according to Drewman's recipe above. We each picked a color - turned out to be the primaries sort of. Then I had the kids stir to cool down the base glaze which they colored black...cuz that's what kids do to perfectly good pastries. Yes, i fed them my chocolate chip cookie dough so they could be a professional chef like me and eat like I eat! I had made 4 individual cakes. And then we poured the black glaze kinda heavy like in the videos. The kids then drizzled the colors. I said "less is more" and they clearly have a different understanding of that phrase I didn't remember the airbrush so I tried blasting with alternating blow torch and freeze spray but that didn't really work. But, a mirror glaze is still a mirror glaze. The kids were ecstatic and couldn't wait to take them into work at Sonic to show everyone what they had made. We're set for another date to re-do it using LESS color and the airbrush.

I just read about a bonbon made by sweetening lard with honey...this is new to me but apparently not new at all. She called them the Mangalitsa bonbon which apparently is the breed of pig that gave the lard. Another person referred to it as a Mangalica pig. May come from Hungary. Someone swears that you can find them in Chicago. The conversation happened HERE. As the person who made the elk's blood chocolate, I'm fascinated.

Over on facebook people asked where the rest of the recipe was. This is just a design sample. There are two more pages to the recipe. Right now they're just trying to lock down the template before dropping in the manuscript.

I may have to revise my previous answer. Guys, look at this! We're trying to figure out how to designate recipes by season, difficulty, etc, and I gave them some hints from a Spanish cookbook I have (I think its Fluidita), and the designer came up with this. I gave the some feedback but conceptually I love what they've done. My eyes are not fully glazed over yet. I love how they want me involved in the design, and one of my goals is to push the limit of design in American books v. what I've seen in some European books. So much fun having a publisher who is willing to try new things. Acorns_icons.pdf

Ha! My very first thought...if I'm being honest...was, wow, that font they chose for my name doesn't really work. Yeah, I've glazed on the cover. I'm excited about the inside which is coming soon. I'm also getting scared because now the I have to sell it. That's going to be a lot of work and for a long period of time. Interesting side note - they bumped my contributing author and moved my photographer to the cover. I think is appropriate but that was a decision they made. I assume its because my contributing author has 4 pages of the 275 versus the photographer who has 40%. Makes sense.

I would love to go there. Its a part of the world that I know nothing about.

idk, but they are aware of my move.

Today I received the ARC cover which will be sent out for pre-review. Not the official cover as you can see the dj doesn't wrap around. Its digital distribution only.

I thought you went brown, not dark. I would think about other neutral greens that can get a quick blanche to keep the color lighter. As for the citric acid, think about when you cut apples and store them in lemon juice. Its slows oxidation. Same idea here plus generally its a good idea to have tartaric or citric acid to counter all the sweetness. I've not done kiwi so its just random thoughts.

I would add a bit of spinach and a strong hit of citric acid and see if that gives you a better color.

I knew the book was going to the designer very soon so i asked my editor about back cover quotes. Here is her reply: As always...interesting process. I've reached out to a number of friends who are much better connected than me, asking them who they might know - but, without calling in favors. I also reached out to a high level chef friend overseas, but the book is North American-centric so I'm not sure how good that might be. We'll see what comes back.