Blether

Meanwhile I own a single-burner butane-canister stove that ages ago I spent maybe 40 bucks on, and today in the store I noticed single-burner IH plates (set heat level or temp to hold) between 60 bucks and 100 bucks.

Hi, Percy. I've enjoyed your blog. What makes up the body of the white sauce in this dish ?

:laugh: what a good sport

Ironically, a gentle simmer - once the pot has reached it on the stovetop - is very conveniently maintained in an oven at 170C. It even frees you from stirring. If you don't have a PC, you *could* still go to the trouble of going on cooking conventionally till the meat's tender.

On your advice, I've been roasting peppers (with my butane blowtorch) for various uses, and I like the results. I've been roasting to "black-speckled" and using the whole thing, no peeling.

Very nice. Do you peel off most of the blackened skin ?

Recently a good old lentil soup from the carcass of a roast chicken; today, having a leek & some peeled potatoes to hand, I headed towards vichyssoise but in deference to the un-reduced stock leftover from my bomb factory, instead of plain salt I followed a side-road marked 'miso' and ended up with misossoise. Very good, in fact, if also tending towards the yellow.

The saltiness and the slicing thinly go together. Also just eat it with good bread and butter - fancy fixing isn't what prosciutto needs.

I guess I'll take away from this, that exploding chicken stock isn't all that common. It's a very normal, straight-sided Aluminium-bottomed pot; the first batch of stock had gelled a bit but much, still being on the weak side, and the second time apart from being violently stirred once the combined stock had sat about for the best part of an hour; not much fat on the stock and not much in the fixings (no skin, this time). There isn't really a "routinely" here, though, since the PC's still quite new. I have to say the way it went off - like a geyser - was more like some kind of super-saturated gas release than any ordinary boiling, though what/how I can't imagine. I did have fun reading up on osmazome. Thanks for that, Sam.

After life made such fun of me, I've barely the heart Procedure: - Buy usual-sized chunk of frozen chicken carcasses & necks - about 2kgs - bring it home to discover the new pressure cooker is enough smaller than the stock pot that it'll have to be two batches - make one batch last night, taste & find a little weak, refrigerate - make second batch today, strain, wash pressure cooker - return strained stock to PC, add refrigerated stock from yesterday. At this point, PC is 2/3 or 3/4 full. The lid is off now, of course - put on high gas flame, walk away across room for like 20 seconds - stock erupts violently, puts out flame, forms expanding puddle on floor, inundates under-stove cabinet - clean floor, cabinet, stove, etc.. Pot now half full.... (wait for it) - put pot on stove again while finishing washing up - after about a minute it happens again - clean etc. - stock not concentrated in flavour, but reduced enough to fit not in the planned 2 containers, but only one. With room to spare. - put thin stock in fridge and give up cooking forever tonight 10 o'clock on a Sunday night - you think you'll just cook that stock down before bed, then suddenly it's midnight, you're sweating like a pig in the unseasonal heat and you've gained as much as you would have by throwing your stock out of the window. Sweet.

There are some beauties there, but for me the 'eggs & noodles' photo stands out. Publishing quality.

Yes, the Japanese do that too - oily fish chopped up and PC'd in soy till you can eat 'em bones and all. By the way, I think top right is hot water, and the 'meat' one is 'meat/chicken', guessing from the Japanese equivalents.

So what's this thing where you put a half-full pot of strained chicken stock over a high flame so you can reduce it, and after a couple of minutes, without warning it violently boils all at once and 3/4 of the stock throws itself all over your stove and kitchen ? Is this sort of behaviour USDA approved or what ? I am now officially pissed

Hey, another way of looking at it is, if you carve something with it, it's a carving knife. Anyway, who told you 7" is 'big' ?

Ah, the santoku (lit. "three specialties") multi-purpose knife you posted upthread. I have two carving knives, one of 10" and one of 12". (I got an aesthetic fright when I saw the long one, and backpedalled). "Carving knives" as far as the term makes sense to me, are long, shallow-bladed knives, often or usually without a heel. As slicing knives they'll typically have a finer edge than choppers, of course. There's definitely value in a longer blade for cutting consistent, clean slices. And I've even come to recognise how practical the dead-straight edge on my 12" carver is, again for consistent slicing. Don't we have a design called "carving knife" for a reason ?

Please make the blog title Booze, beer & baloney.

Bin Laden ? Bin busy. A nice box of yellow plums at the neighbourhood mom'n'pop greengrocer yesterday => plum crumble today with raisins to soak up some of the juice - as well as flour, butter & sugar the crumble has rolled oats and both sliced & ground almonds: Super nostalgia here - I haven't eaten a plum crumble in more than 20 years. Served with scrambled eggs anglaise, swept under the photographic carpet.

It's great that you're happy with it ? What kind if carving knife do you have ? How often do you find yourself actually carving ?

I liked the bit about the root canal.

Ha ha Yes, held cold - in the fridge, or on ice if you're old-fashioned. You've caught me with my Jane Grigson's Fish Book (thoroughly recommended, especially living where you are) packed in a box out of reach. Ummm... the flavour improves <imagine more detailed reply here>. It's quite a local species, and living this far from the Le Manche I've not had chance to practise and refine this particular nugget of wisdom.

I've been a kind of detached admirer of char siu (I've liked eating it when I've had it, and it's common enough in Japan), but had never made any. I made a 1.5kg cut of boneless pork loin into char siu style roast loin of pork, leaving myself casting about for thoughts of different ways to use it. A chunk of it went into baked char siu bao from jackal10's recipe: - click here for the full post, on page one of this topic. I'd have liked to steam them, but I don't have stacking or otherwise high-volume steaming kit, so I chose to bake. I've never come across baked bao before. The recipe yielded 16. Xian: - I chose to dice the meat fine, about 1/16". Dough: - I used 11.3% gluten flour, Kitanokaori brand. The volume measurement weighed 400g and my two eggs weighed 96g without their shells. I thought the dough was stiff, and added a total of 25ml more water to get it where I wanted it. I was looking for the fluffier bread as seen in Japanese steamed nikuman (Japanese name for meat (char siu) bao). I gave it 5 or 10 minutes kneading on the breadmaker's pizza cycle (in fact xian and dough went together on the same night, and I assembled the following day, from which the above is the first picture). Assembly: - again I had in mind the nikuman shape (same as for steamed char siu bao, with the joints on top). I didn't check the style book for the baked version until after, so my bao are unorthodox, I think. Neither did I try to exactly recreate the steamed bao form. Lined up for rising: After 2.5hrs at room temp (about 24C or 25C at a guess): - I would have let them keep rising, but a friend was coming over and for convenience I got them in the oven after 3 hours. Brushed with a casual piggy squiggle of beaten egg that didn't hold its definition and baked per the recipe: By a mysterious Sino-caledonian alchemy I'd created "batch bao". - the filling was moist but could have done with being a little looser. I'll know what I'm looking for in the frying pan next time. Having fully pre-salted the char siu (4-day marinade in soy measured to give 0.5% w/w of the pork), I was wary of the 2 tbsps of soy, but put then in anyway and left out the salt. I'm glad I did. I'll bring the soy back to 1tbsp next time. Cold a day or two later:

Surely, which is why they're a good choice if you're looking for up-close-and-personal hunting weapons. Seriously, though... carving cooked joints of meat is a different game. They don't cut back, do they ?

You started out by telling me that what I said wasn't correct, which is a little more than that, isn't it ? I hope that's there's room for both my general observation and your personal experience to be valid. If you don't mind my elbowing my way into your conversation with Jaymes, it's the privilege of the world's dominant people to be disliked by all the others, unfortunately. "Your turn in the barrel" as sailors say For my own part, I have no animosity towards Americans in general, and take you as I find you individually, same way I take everyone else. Even social scientists, underclass though some may consider them.

Oh yeah ? And since when was California the barometer of white western culture ?

I find that for pretty much all braised & stewed meat dishes, they need zapped once, left for a few or quite a few minutes, then zapped again. It needs the wait for them to heat through. Under the reality heading, though, even as immature, irregularly-scheduled students we managed to co-ordinate a shared shopping & cooking regime for dinners. What on earth are your folks doing to you two ? "You can stay with us... but you won't be able to eat" ?! Jeepers. Solution #457: buy in top-quality take-out for yourselves every day till their spirit breaks.