DerekW

If you end up short on the duck fat then supplementing with [home-rendered] pork fat is a reasonable fix. I seem to remember Paula Wolfert mentioning a 50/50 ratio but that might be my goldfish-like recall rather than a reality. Breaking two ducks usually gives me enough fat to confit one duck's worth of legs. I often do half the breasts pan-seared for dinner and the other half as 'prosciutto'. The latter keep their fat, the former have much of it rendered out gently at the start of the cooking; that stuff is usually clean enough to make it into the confit supply. Last weekend half a dozen of us sat down to a variant on the 'beans in Madiran' recipe from Ms. Wolfert's [excellent] book; confit of home made sausage, some rather ancient goose breast transformed into tasty goodness by the confit process, and a couple of duck cuisses, slow cooked overnight twice before a third day reheating for service. The crust colour was more rosewood and ebony than mahogany, and the wine-cooked beans converted at least one avowed non-bean eater.

While they're not my 'supplier of choice', I've seen both white and black truffle oils on the 'fancy food' shelves at Homesense. They have a couple of stores in Montreal. If you get stuck perhaps Gourmet Warehouse in Vancouver [who carry a range of truffled-up products including oil] could post something to you, but there are bound to be local suppliers. cheers Derek

Today I was in a store whose cookware section specialises in selling end-of-run and manufacturers seconds. They had a pan bearing the inocuivre induction logo pictured above. That pan at least was an aluminum pan clad outside with copper, and inside with stainless. It also had an encapsulated base, the first time I've ever seen a clad pan treated thus. The pan I handled [and put back] was certainly not the copper construction lined with stainless familiar to me from the Falk pans. The copper cladding on the outside was a 'for show' thickness. I had no mic with me, but I'd estimate the aluminum as about 2mm Caveat emptor. cheers Derek

You might find further information by trawling Google for 'Butterkäse'. The recipe for 'Paraguayan Polenta loaf with Butter cheese' I found that way didn't seem wildly exciting, but maybe you'll be more persistent than I was

That URL didn't work for me [extra http]. Let's try a revised link

[hijack] Kerry, When you sort out your bean situation, please post a note here [or in the Vancouver / Western Canada section] saying what, from where, and how it worked. We brought a pound or so of Tarbais beans back to BC from a european summer vacation and intend to try planting them in the spring, but meanwhile, what to use? The conift's aging, the homemade sausage is waiting, the weather is definitely saying cassoulet.... [/hijack] cheers Derek

Tarbais beans for cassoulet, in Vancouver? cheers Derek

Yeah, I thought about that, but wearing my trusty pedant's hat, I'll stand by Beergar [or beeregar, if you prefer that spelling]. If Chappie's recycling commercial product then it's almost certainly hopped. Probably best not to get into 'gruit'. Discussion of the appropriate name for the unpleasant product likely to be produced from 'lager' may be similarly unhelpful, although there's a low pleasure to be had in saying "lagereger" repeatedly

All too easily. The home brewing fora are full of "My beer tastes of vinegar" posts - Acetobacter is quite happy in beer. Google will find you sources for bacteria cultures for doing the same thing deliberately. You raise my curiosity. What else would malt vinegar be? Depending on what beer you use, the result will be more or less like the commercially produced malt vinegar. The bitterness imparted by high hopping rates while attractive in beer would probably give an unpleasant edge to your 'beergar'. I've thought about doing this since I brew anyway, but the hassle of running a physically separate process to avoid contamination puts a stop to it. The best beer would [i think] be a heavily caramelised, lightly hopped one. Not the sort of thing I'd normally be brewing to drink.

If the only coconuts you've opened up until now are the usual dark brown husked ones, then you're probably in for a bit of a surprise when you get inside the fresh ones. What we think of as the 'flesh' of the coconut, the white fibrous 'meat' will be missing. Instead, you will have a full coconut of tasty drinkable 'milk', and a thin layer of somewhat slippery flesh which can be peeled out of the shell using a spoon. Be prepared to catch the milk - open the coconut over a clean bowl. At this point my mind starts to drift off in the direction of drinks involving rum. The flesh, meanwhile gets snacked on, as is. Sometimes it gets added to 'Thai' pomelo salad I do using lots of crispy shallots and garlic with a coconut and chilli sauce and some shredded chicken. cheers Derek

Little nibbly paper thin shavings of duck prosciutto....

The grinding function would probably be enough to earn it a name of its own. dictionary.com gives a derivation in English from the French word, and that back through a vulgar Latin term meaning 'cooked poultry innards' with a possible root in an old Persian word for liver. Who knew? Thanks for prompting me to look it up

It's a small thing, but.... when I'm living & cooking away from the herb garden, [far too much of the time] I'll buy the supermarket fresh herbs sold as "poultry mix" rather than buying individual bunches. One package contains Italian parsley [for my bastardised sauce Grenoblois for fish], Thyme which often ends up along with Moroccan olives and home made bacon in fritattas, Rosemary which might go into Olive oil and Rosemary bread, into soup or on top of steaming cauliflower, and some sage which might find its way into a pork prep. Someow it feels more like real food to me when there are fresh herbs around.

Interesting, thank you. Is there an explanation offered as to the 'why' of drying the herbs bofore making the 'Soup herb spirit'? I would have expected the alcohol to have prevented any mischief taking place, and the fresh herbs to have perhaps tasted, well, fresher. Perhaps a bottle of vodka needs to be pressed into experimental service.

Have you checked out the Confectionery course in the eGullet Culinary Institute?. Low cost ingredients, end-product which can be nicely presented and will keep unrefrigerated.

...and yet, we do exist

We dried a copious harvest in the smoker a year or two back. Those are real pick-me-ups for all sorts of things. They seem to keep for ever, and the fruitwood smoke goes well with the Habanero peachyness.

Lunching at the side of the grand square in the middle of Brussels recently, I ordered a pot of mussels, pretty much Moule Mariniere. As I guzzled my way through them I came across one which had little white strands poking out from inside the 'seam' of the mussel's flesh. Thinking 'infestation' I gently tugged at one of the little white thread like things and retrieved a baby crab, entire. The body might have been 3/16" of an inch across. Placing the mussel aside I ate on, only to encounter another, and another. Building a 'Sydney Opera House' of mussel shells, I arrayed the ten or so little crabs as a chorus line. Needless to say after a few crabs had appeared I started eating the mussels in which they had been concealed, to no ill effect - the mussels all tasted really fresh. In a spirit of enquiry I tried eating a couple of the crabs, but as far as I could tell they were all shell. When our waiter happened by I showed him my little diorama and he appeared a little nonplussed. When pressed he said that the crabs were a not uncommon occurence, although they weren't often found in any quantity. How about it? I've never before had mussels arrive with little crabs inside them. I'll emphasise; the crabs were for the most part found inside the fleshy envelope of the mussels, not just inside the shell. Are the mussels trapping and digesting baby crabs? Are the crabs attacking the mussels? Enquiring minds, and all that....

Into the little endive boats goes a layer of well caramelised onions, and atop the onions goes shredded confit of duck. Very simple, lots of contrasts, but rather relies on having the duck confit to hand.

Hi gariotin Can you offer any explanation or description of the processing used to produce "Moroccan olives"? The ones we get here are bulk, with an intense rich [and salty] flavour, pit in. Just about the opposite end of the spectrum from those tinned processed faucet washers In truth, I'm a little scared that you might tell us something I do not want to hear, but boy, do the 'Moroccan' olives taste good...

Yup, LEDs. Your local model shop may be able to provide an 'off the shelf' solution, but if you can solder, or know someone who can then you can probably come up with something cheaper and more effective. Most folk involved in servicing computer or audio equipment would be able to do what's needed in minutes. In the last couple of years, white LEDs have become commonplace cheap as cycling lights. This one from the Mountain Equipment Co-op is about three bucks and you would certainly not need an array of them - the single LED would be all that each stadium light required. Similar lights are sold in dollar stores &c. The LED in the 'turtle light' will be soldered onto a small circuit board. It can be unsoldered, and attached to the end of a pair of wires which are in turn soldered back onto the circuit board. Suitable twin wire can be readily stripped from the side of computer 'ribbon cable'. It's important to preserve the relationship of LED legs to circuit board holes, but if your friendly local tech is doing the soldering then they should already know that... Pictures of the finished result are of course obligatory

Salt in the porridge, treacle [molasses] on the porridge. Just enough milk to allow the porridge to be consumed at otherwise mouth-burning temperature. If the porridge is runny enough to actually absorb any of the milk, well, you must be doing something wrong That's what they fed me growing up in Scotland. Oddly, I like it much better now than I did then...

That's what I'm saying. Rootbeer smells to me just like the pink ointment of yesteryear, and that certainly wasn't minty. Maybe Germolene smells different now. This was back in the days when Germolene arrived in a round tin, not one of those newfangled tubes.

Although born and raised in Scotland, I've spent the last decade living in British Columbia. Windsor Packers on Vancouver's Main Street would likely be too far for you to send for pluck If on the other hand you have a good butcher to recommend I'd love to hear about them - my family still live in Scotland, and they've been unable to locate a supplier for hanger steak... cheers Derek

With the arrival of summer and grilling weather I asked the butcher if he could provide some lamb’s heart. Skewered as brochettes with chunks of home cured bacon and served searingly hot accompanied by harissa and robust red, the heart would have made a fine evening indulgence. All the heart available that day was cryovac’d with the remainder of the pluck, as the lamb’s internals are known. That prompted an altogether different notion. Do not be stayed by naysayers who have never tried the real thing. Good haggis is a rich and savoury pleasure. Of course it is offal, but as transformed in the preparation those odd innards lose their possibly disconcerting form and texture. All my previous haggis experience had been of the ‘eating’ as opposed to the ‘fabricating’ variety but I’d been eyeing a recipe in Fergus Henderson’s "The Whole Beast" for a while. With a few days notice the same butcher was able to provide fresh lamb’s pluck, and that’s what’s shown here. As delivered, the pluck was still interconnected by its plumbing The liver is seen on the left, with the lungs at centre; the heart lies atop them. The windpipe is still conveniently attached. Once the pluck had been washed and trimmed of excess fat it was brought to a simmer in salted water. The instructions talked of water ‘to cover’ but having done this a couple of times I’m convinced that it’s impossible to submerge lungs other than by placing a sizeable weight on top of them. Attempts to use the denser organs as sink-weights didn’t work for me. That windpipe is led out of the boiling pot and into a collecting vessel with a view to gathering anything untoward that might froth out of the lungs as they cook, preventing contamination of the broth. Most of what can be seen in the catch pot is material skimmed from the stockpot surface. Latterly the lungs did blow some bubbly white froth, but not the unpleasant outflow I’d expected. [When doing this with pluck missing its windpipe I’ve just discarded the liquid and substituted light stock]. While the pluck was boiling for a couple of hours the remaining ingredients were readied. Pin-head oatmeal was toasted in the oven, and some onions were gently fried in butter. Salt, black pepper and allspice were ground. Once the pluck had been removed from the pot it was trimmed and chopped then fed through the meat grinder. Missing from the picture of the ingredients is the beef suet, still in the freezer at this point. A splash or two of the cooking liquid from the stockpot was added while mixing all together. I aimed for a consistency which would hold together, without getting sloppy. At this point the mixture would traditionally be sewn into a bag made from the sheep’s stomach. Lacking a convenient bag I stuffed the haggis into sausage casings. This had the advantage of allowing for easy ‘portion control’ - haggis freezes fairly well, and five or six pounds of haggis will feed quite a lot of people, even when the people like haggis. Since the oatmeal swells significantly when the haggis is heated for serving, the sausage casings were deliberately underfilled. To serve, the haggis-sausage can be steamed, poached or even microwaved. Traditionally served with mashed potatoes and ‘neeps’ - mashed turnips or rutabagas, it need not be Scotch that washes it down. Ale makes a perfectly acceptable alternative. Far from elegant plating; solid peasant fare this. "Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face...."