Blether

Is it for a cookbook, Maureen ? To me, it will depend on the book's style. Elizabeth David, strict academician that she was, would have used 'cuttlefish', but of course she headed each recipe with the French followed by the English. The English is strictly accurate regardless of market naming or "eww" factor. If you're going for the more modern, casual approach Squid is not a bad choice. I haven't lived in the UK for 20 years, but as I remember whilst there was 'squid' in the shops from time to time, I never saw "cuttlefish" advertised. If you go with "cuttlefish" as a title, then the less-experienced cook who relies on recipes - and agrees that strict standards in language are important - may well skip over that recipe with an "oh, can't get cuttlefish here". In the end, you either do the strict-with-detailed-explanation approach or the more casual one. Depends on the audience and the book's purpose. inductioncook, the label implies to me that the jar's a mixture of both.

Nice timing, though it's not prescriptive if your life experience hasn't given you a good familiarity with the Japanese diet - What Americans don't understand about weight loss.

Grated (hard !) cheese mixed w Mayo & maybe some vinegar makes a good sandwich.

Isn't it one of those seafood things, with squid used as the market name for both ? My copy of Grigson's Fish Book is still in a packing box, so I can't look up her take just now. There are even significant differences among squid species - witness the tenderness of yari-iks (spear squid) compared with surume-iks (common squid), that I've posted about before.

I've neither prepared squid by weight, nor measured the ink yield, but from a squid whose body is 6" or 7" long, the ink sac gives up maybe 1/4tsp. I'd want 2 of those per person, which would make 2tsp to serve four. Estimating small amounts and multiplying up is of course bad practice - it could easily be more like 1/3tsp or nearer 3tsp total, or even further off. In your shoes, I'd want to clean a kilo of squid & check. Especially if I had Italian markets to go and play in. I'm guessing 2kg of squid in the Italian recipe means 2kg uncleaned weight ? I suspect the meat yield / whole weight from squid is even less than for fillets and whole fish. It's good to see you taking the trouble to do it right.

There's an article here that clumsily misuses the term 'arbitrage' but identifies (see the chart that's a few screen-heights scroll down) a link between McRib availability and the market price of hogs.

Toasted cheese. And soup.

Egg noodles with roast duck and crispy pork: - my crappy photo doesn't do it justice. Absolutely wonderful ! As soon as I finished it I ordered another one. Crispy pork displayed in the window: At Prachak Restaurant in the Silom area of Bangkok:

Your method is very practical. If I'm not mistaken, the % hydration in a traditional bread recipe is the ratio of water to flour, so 2lbs water to 3lbs flour is 2/3 or 67% hydration. Where there's some yeast, salt, a small amount of fat, you don't figure those into the calculation. What your approach covers you for, in addition to varied amounts of different liquid ingredients, is the variation in the liquid absorption of different flours. Stronger flours need higher hydration to reach the same dough consistency. For someone like you who has the experience to judge the dough consistency by eye and hand, there's no anxiety about whether it will develop and bake out as intended. Where bakers are talking about a standard flour, or about using flours that conform to an understood (gluten) strength standard, it is useful to discuss hydration percentages as a shorthand for the targetted dough consistency or 'wetness'. Though you are happy with consistent resuls for your 'usual' bread mixed to your 'usual' wetness, different levels of hydration do allow for desirable, and desirably different, results. Have you tried baking from a noticeably wetter or drier dough to see how it changes the bread ?

The more times (and the more thoroughly each time) you knock the dough back, the finer-crumbed it will be.

What kind of ghee is it ? 100% pure butter ghee ? Or is it one of the ones with things like cottonseed oil blended in, and so a bit like Crisco crossed with butter ?

Ah, those are swivels at the sides. I get it. Thanks. What a great tool.

Nice ! What's the pastry ? And is that a purpose-made bowl or a private inspiration ?

I forgot to say that I also used 2% sugar. I made up my own spreadsheet. Because I'm a perfectionist, I calculated the salt, sugar & nitrite amounts using the formula (meat & water weight) * (1+(tgtpct/((1-tgtpct)/1)/1)) to ensure the percentages were accurate to the total final weight rather than the initial weight of the major ingredients (the meat & water). (I mean tgtpct to mean 'target percentage'). The spreadsheet shows this most clearly, but to illustrate simply, if you have 100ml water and you want to add enough salt to make a 5% salt solution, then if you add 5g of salt you end up with 5/105 = 4.76% salt. You need the more complicated formula above to calculate how much salt to add so that the salt is 5% of the total of the added salt and the water. At least, it seems that way to me. Spreadsheet available as a download here.

My curing salts arrived and I just sliced the first few pieces of my first batch of nitrite-included bacon, wet-cured in an equalisation brine (3% salt, 200ppm sodium nitrite) for 7 days: I think 3% & 200ppm is a heavier cure than i will settle on, but I'm happy the result is this good.

Nyet problem. LAmb shoulder. 0.5% salt by weight, sprinkled over the lamb in a plastic bag. Held 4 days in the fridge. Roasted straight from the fridge (by accident more than by design, not that it makes so much difference low & slow), fat cap upwards, starting at 140C, reducing to 130C after 2 hours because it was already so well browned. Roasted 6 hours, judged by piercing with a skewer to feel the resistance. Gravy by the usual method - pour off all but a tbsp or 2 of the fat, stir in some flour, add water ( in this case 50/50 water & white wine) and stir over heat, scraping up / dissolving the fond, till hot & thickened. Next time I'll wipe the meat dry before roasting, because the gravy was verging on salty. If that doesn't do it the %age'll need to come down.

After looking at too much pulled pork on here lately, and because whilst it's getting easier to buy kebabs around here the choice is only ever beef or chicken, I pulled a chunk of lamb shoulder. Pre-salted, of oourse. 6 hours at about 130C: It made a gravy of the most perfect colour: and I pulled it apart with forks right enough: Ridiculously good. As I write this I'm on my third helping.

I'd vote for ginger ice-cream.

It's a big celebration. Break out the saffron, kewda & nuts on the poultry, if you can. Twist the Christmas pudding with some cardamom.

Scone rhyming with gone, in Scotland, also the home of Scone, rhyming with soon.

Patrick, it may be that I was just cack-handed with my blender, but Marcella's prawn-cream pasta sauce was a revelation with the Millser, getting the prawn meat ground up properly.

You use that hard plastic 'lid' with all jar sizes. In its bottom rim is a little tang that activates the recessed micro-switch that runs the motor - all very failsafe-designed. In Japanese this is known as "sefutii faasuto".

Or we could take the footwear angle and have a Pork High-top... or the Pork Jordan ! So many choices.

Kind of like a poor man's Wellington, isn't it ? A recipe for which you do sear the meat before encasing it; and which uses a layer of pate (pork liver pate ?) to give richness to complement the lean meat. Isn't that nice, rotuts ? Great minds thinking alike

Some catering establishments use frozen, cooked bacon. The same stuff is available retail here, laid out painstakingly in individual rashers on greaseproof paper that's stacked layers-deep in a ziplock bag. You quickly reheat it under a grill (broiler). So, I surmise that refrigerating it cooked at home is possible. Now you've asked the question, though, yes you have to the share the story around why you want to.