Blether

A few cloves of garlic fried in olive oil, a couple of trays of maitake mushrooms cut up & added, black pepper, the stock from the other day's grey mullet; a few tomatoes crushed in & fresh-picked oregano leaves. Simmered just long enough to slice & toast the toast: New breakfast lighting effect courtesy of yesterday's washing still hanging on the line.

In the Stroke demo'd on the EdgePro DVD, the stone sweeps a width of edge that's more than the width of the stone. And why would a flat traditional sharpening stone be a better bet for a round edge than a flat EdgePro stone ?

One shot each vodka, Drambuie, Cointreau; make into a long drink with 7-up. Or, put it into chicken, ice cream or pancakes.

I'm not familiar with Eastern European pickled herring. From what you say, it's milder - you might get closer to your goal with rice vinegar or apple / fruit vinegar.

As for sausage, Kim - Scottish sausage has its rainbow of variations. In British sausage, watch out in particular for rusk, used generally to keep some of the melted fat inside. In the square sausage pictured are beef & pork 50/50 commercial mince, home-minced pig heart, breadcrumbs, wheatgerm, a lot of white pepper, nutmeg, and salt.

Yes, that bacon. 　And strawberries and peaches ! If raspberries make them Melba, the strawb version definitely deserves a name. (PS Kim, have more faith in your in-laws). Lasagne deconstructed for summer: - Marcella's pink shrimp cream sauce, Marcella's tomato-with-olive-oil-and-chopped-veggies again, and Valle del Sole's capellini, all straight from the fridge in 30 seconds flat, so I've a whole half hour to squander on the net before pointing the Skyline at Shonan and work. Focus failure included free of charge.

Then you and Marumoto have a difference of opinion

使用例 (Usage example) | 1人分使用量 (portion / amount for 1 person) みそ汁のだし (1人分 150cc) (miso soup type dashi) | 1g 吸物のだし (1人分 150cc) (clear soups) | 1g めん類のつけ汁 (1人分 50cc) (for dipping sauce for noodles) | 1g めん類のかけ汁 (1人分 200cc) (for pouring sauce for noodles) | 2g おでんのだし (1人分 200cc) (oden type dashi) | 1g

I took my 6" chef's to 14.5 degrees, total 29 (Edgepro 320 grit), and it's been good for over a year - it's just recently gotten to the stage it needs sharpening again. I use it a lot, too. In the time since that re-profiling I've kept it away from anything like bones that would over-challenge the edge. The maker told me they're made of Cr13 C0.45/.55 and heat treated to 53/56HRC, and that the heat treatment happens in a

Spoon fed. I bought & butchered this handsome 1.5kg/3.3lb grey mullet late last night, giving two skinless fillets of ~10oz each: The debris made a good volume of fish fumet. The fish itself turned out to be quite muddy - a thick, black, oozing sort of mud when i opened it up - but I'd pre-empted that by reading up in Jane Grigson's Fish Book, where she points out that this is a common enough phenomenon with this fish. I gave the fillets a double salt-and-vinegar-water rinse as she recommended, and the smell freshened up nicely. I froze half and cut the other half up and concocted a Fijian cocoda - salt, lime (in my case lemon) juice, chillis, onion, then after a wait, coconut milk. I also added a little of the fish stock. No cooking. Which brings us to breakfast: last of the curried lentil soup, bread & butter, and cocoda:

Big difference between dry heat and wet heat. Wet heat - you sweat, it has nowhere to go except trickling down your body and soaking into your clothes, which remain wet (& warm). Mmm-mm.

The hardware store assistant who sold it to me was adamant I should keep it out of food-related applications.

Cold food in general, really - roast beef sandwich where you might have had a steak, say. And buy in the roast beef. Why even switch the cooker on when it's hot ? The Japanese eat grilled eel for the summer heat, and of course anything of the uri type - cucumber, melon, bitter melon - as well as cold noodle dishes like banbanjii and zaru-soba. I survived one Tokyo summer without air-con. The biggest all-round factor I've noticed for heat tolerance, is general aerobic fitness. When I've been in the pool regularly, the heat gets to me only about a quarter as much, and it gets to be fascinating watching others sweat. On the alcohol front, Ricard well diluted with 7-up. Non-alcohol: calamansi juice.

Then it's the "Tantarosu Koosu" or "Jirashihoudai".

Ha ha ! Giving up the the ceramic bowls for steel & plastic has been quite liberating - and I get many more stacked in the same space. I'm still wavering over using cyanoacrylate to mend the salt pot. Cyano... cyano... something to do with Bergerac ?

Breathtaking as always, dcarch - and beautiful garlic, well captured. The tandoori chickens went into the oven straight from the fridge, due to time constraints (in the normal run of things I prefer to bring to room temp first). Ordinary electric oven (of a microwave / electric combi) at 200C, but I think I'm going back to 190C, same as I use for plain roast chicken. The marinade base was 250-300g yoghurt, 1/2 cup oil & juice of 3 lemons, and I like the consistency like this. The birds are 1.1kg / 2.4lb size and took 1 hour, with a little hot water in the tray from the start to stop the yoghurt drippings burning. Hey, my kitchen's not so bad - in turn I'm trying to picture the grill you used for the steak. That index finger looks like it must have been painful. What happened ?

What's this about sausage skins being impermeable to water and fat ? There's a great big hole in the skin at both ends for one thing, puddles of fat & fond left in sausage pans for another, and visible beads of fat on the skins of many sausages cooked dry. Saying that, I am mildly intrigued by the Hayward oil bath method...

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Traditional Scottish square sausage on fresh breadmaker white - shown just before closure: - and served with the obligatory tea. I take the sausage from the freezer and put it straight into the frying pan. As for offal sausage preparations, certainly by the time of Burns-led jingoism, the industrial revolution that brought the explosion in Scotland's sheep population also meant that Glasgow, at least, was one of Europe's largest trading ports. The earliest Scottish recipe I've seen (see p. 355) (1828) for haggis, specifies "a high seasoning of pepper, salt & and cayenne". No-one in modern Scotland would recognise anything that's less than strongly peppery as haggis. I suspect that offal-and-grain sausage-like and forcemeat preparations have existed for far longer than that, all over the world. I have my doubts about the extent that peasants in Europe enjoyed the luxury goods that were exotic spices, in the older days of trade by sail. Tommy Lipton was the fella who "mass-marketised" tea in the West, in the 19th century - when did pepper and nutmeg move from luxury to commodity ? Balkenbrij sounds like something I'd like to try - my recent foray into faggots took me into England on the first step in what could be a long journey Where does the name Balkenbrij come from, Deus ?

Those look light-as-a-feather - is grandma Sweeney's secret to remain a secret, Andie ? Over here, lentil soup. Stock from the two tandoori chicken carcases; a couple of onions and a couple of carrots sweated in fat rendered from the skins; the leftover tandoori marinade added and boiled hard for 5 minutes, then the stock and a couple of handfuls of lentils. Simmered for 40 minutes and finally the last couple of tablespoons of cream tandoori gravy added: With breadmaker white, and tomato salad to follow.

That looks delicious. Haven't you tried making your own ghee ? Is the stuff you buy genuine 100% cow-butter ghee ?

It's the season again, so: house pizza. Ineptly shaped, laid on baking parchment on a room temp. aluminium baking sheet, topped with Marcella's tomato, onion & butter pasta sauce and placed in the top of a 250C oven for 7.5 minutes.

A lazy, semi-experimental meal. I roasted two tandoori chickens yesterday, and held them in the fridge: - along with the juices and spices you can see in the roasting tray, which I heated up again today and tempered with some cream, leftover from pasta-sauce making the other day: I heated some peanut oil and infused it with currty leaves, strained & cooled it and added some fresh-picked chives and a little black pepper to dress some chopped tomatoes, and pressed a pizza's-worth of pizza dough into service as a leavened, grilled flatbread. Then I tried to arrange the plate to hide the fact that midnight munchies last night left one of the chickens reduced to less than half:

Yes, frozen fresh and held properly, oily fish should be as good 3-6 months after freezing as they were fresh. PC's approach sounds good. Over here, I like to prepare cutlets of yellowtail 'gremolata'. Do you know 'gremolata' ? It works beautifully with this fish.

UHT milk (120C or 130C for 2 - 3 minutes) is the standard in the Japanese market. Pasteurised (65C for 30 minutes) started to become available in Tokyo about 15 years ago, and availablity has waxed and waned somewhat since then. In the same way you note for ganache, Kerry, UHT is good for yoghurt-making. I prefer the taste of pasteurised in all applications, though I notice it most as a drink on its own and probably least in bechamel, (as a splash in) tea and coffee.

A hammer is really the only appropriate tool for breaking nutmegs.