Blether

Right now, no-one is paying to be listed against >Perth Scotland restaurants< for example - so you'll be first and it'll be as cheap as it can be. That search also brings up a number of places online you might start trying to get listed: Perth City, Perth Directory, Restaurant Guide, Taste of Scotland etc.

That's a bit reductive, isn't it ? I mean, you could always shunt them all into a big hole in the ground and bury them. Or reduce healthcare cover and let them die of their "self-inflicted" health problems. Or any number of other things. It's fair to say - as I know from the hard-won experience of a mis-spent youth - that one surefire way to render yourself unable to shit is to eat all or mostly McDonald's for a week. Does the medical profession have statistics for the link between coronary seizures and constipation ? Ultimately, the best way to influence people's eating habits is to fix in their minds that link: McDonald's... and shit.

Hot weather and lovely spring vegetables turned my thoughts to Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce with Olive Oil & Chopped Vegetables, which with a chopped mirepoix added raw to the tomatoes at the start of cooking, without pre-frying, gives a fresh-flavoured, crunchy result that's a world away from the old tomato-and-onion standard, much more than the sum of its parts. I made up a batch last night: - and having gone out for capellini, came home with a pack of spaghettelli (!), which I boiled up this morning and shocked-and-chilled-briefly in a bowl of ice water. Topped with some of the sauce straight from the fridge, and served with a two-egg parmesan omelette:

As Bachman-Turner Overdrive said, "you ain't seen nothin' yet".

Well, if you're a health group, what else do you do ? They have a point - as we who know food know, McD's menu doesn't present an overall balanced diet - it's heavy on frying & salt & low on roughage. I know how often I think it's OK to drop by for a sausage muffin. The Japanese school system teaches kids a whole lot about nutrition - the importance of eating a variety of foods & that in balance; which foods are which and what health implications they have. Back in the British school system we never had that or anything like it - you only really studied anything about eating & cooking if you took the option of 'Home Economics'. What percentage of the American public understands applied nutrition, e.g. how to eat to be healthy ? And what percentage of kids are born to parents who don't ? If mass marketing mens "everyone goes to McDonalds", then what better way to improve the public's eating habits than by pressuring them about their menu ? It still sticks in my craw that they never even offered such a thing as a salad until, what ? Ten years ago ?

You're in a big farming area too - have you promoted yourselves heavily to farmers ? Have you seen "Scotland on a Plate" features in Farming Scotland magazine ? I see they also have farming event listings for the year, and a table of ad rates online if they won't run a feature for you.

Oh, and get your trout from Drummond Fish Farms, but ask them only to give you fish from the loch.

Which papers do you mean by 'local' ? The PA ? Courier ? There's probably a higher circulation, locally, of The Scotsman, for example ? As far as anyone reads newspapers any more, anyway. You're not even excessively out of range of Edinburgh, and on that road you're a good stop for lots of trunk route journeys, so again worth publicising nationally. Have you taken a look at "google ads" ? Surprisingly easy to understand & use, and you only pay (a matter of pennies a time) when someone actually clicks through to your web site - you'll choose whatever search terms you'll be listed against - say "Perth restaurants", "Perth gourmet" and so on, and be quoted a price for each one. You'll find it through a normal Google search and you can get set up & running right there online without ever even having to make a phone call.

Hmm. It seems that a single-component liquid has the same bubble point and dew point. I'm deciding I like the definition of boiling here, "The phenomenological definition of boiling is the existance of sustained bubbles that break free of the surface".

Because boiling point and bubble point are different ?

It's an ashtray.

Looks great. Over here, first bechamel since the nuclear accident, and first pancakes (British Shrove-Tuesday style, aka crepes) in a year or more - pancakes stuffed with a cheese leek sauce. And a flat camera battery (not stuffed). Seven 20cm crepes out of 1 egg and 2 ounces of flour.

Konbu ponzu / kombu ponzu. Well, Konbu / kombu is kelp, a kind of seaweed, and it's one of the backbones of Japanese cooking. A standard Japanese stock or dashi is flavoured with kombu and dried katsuo (skipjack tuna). Kombu is recognised for its natural glutamate-based savouriness, just like tomatoes and anchovies. Ponzu is a generic Japanese sauce featuring mainly soy sauce and citrus juice (strictly speaking, ponzu is the citrus part, but the soy/citrus mix has come to be known by the single word ponzu). Ajipon is the sine qua non of contemporary ponzu, and it's a commercial product you buy & keep in the cupboard like worcester sauce. There are a number of different kinds of ponzu - kombu ponzu features the added savour of kombu. Like soy itself but more so, any of these makes a killer combination with butter, but konbu ponzu with oil as a salad dressing, on its own as a dipping sauce for gyoza / pot stickers, as a deglazing sauce per the above... you'll understand after you try it. I love buttering some foil, adding mushrooms, seasoning with black pepper and ponzu then closing and baking hot for 10 minutes, as has everyone else I've tried it on.

Here we are agin. Nearly all of Hanamasa's seafood last night was Chiba-landed. Unusually I found myself prowling the aisles of Marusho again. Marusho supermarket - having been originally a fishmonger - has great seafood (Hanamasa kicks their pants for price, if you know what quality looks like) - and even this late in the season they had a wee yari-ika from Aomori, stickered at 300yen and, that late at night, reduced by half. A head of garlic, each clove sliced lengthwise in 3, browned slowly in peanut oil. Black pepper, the squid, a head of chingensai (~bok choy) and a few tablespoons of konbu ponzu to deglaze, stand in entirely for salt, and reduce to a coating sauce. Microwaved basmati rice from the fridge. - well, you could eat cardboard if you sauced it with konbu ponzu. Please sir, can I have some more ? Photography in homage to you, Kim Shook. Solidarnosc, sister !

Thanks, RRO. As I'm sure you know, 5 - 10 buck lunches are ten-a-penny in this city. Cheap dinners are (or always were) another story, and when the fanciness of the set isn't necessary you can make a good dinner here - a curry and rice - for just under 900yen. Mind you, cheaper meals are getting more and more common now - in the third photo there, that's a bowl of soba noodles topped with a big tempura fritter of "cherry shrimp" for 390yen. Dinner for 390yen !!!

I stopped using Canola for frying because of the thick, sticky residue it leaves in the pan (sorry about the love, eh ?). Now the weather's warming up, though, it's coming into its own and I've twice used it this week to dress salad leaves, for which I think its neutrality (and cost-performance) are a good choice.

Oh yes, and... it doesn't apply for breading, but a while back I tried making deep-frying batter using vinegar instead of water - that was successful, and with 100% vinegar, nicely tart rather than the acrid result one might fear.

How about amchoor, that is, dried sour mango powder, a staple souring agent of the Indian kitchen ?

Again, your plating is good. As dcarch said, this is off-centre. Kinda uncomfortably off-centre. If you always shoot things dead-centre your photos will lack tension & drama. But this far off-centre, with that large gap on the right ? Have you heard of the golden ratio / golden section ?

I have three, but I'll still do it, absent-mindedly. Probably once again very soon, too. There's planning and there's doing, and there's "how hard can it be ?"

I'm with BadRabbit - carry board, push off with knife or hand. Now & again when I've worked myself into a corner (chopped item stacked on left, chopped item stacked on right, just-chopped item in the middle and needed now), or for some other reason I'll pick up in handfuls and transfer that way. Sometimes for complex preparations I'll be chopping and transferring to bowls of various sizes.

Mushy is a problem at temps more like 65+ Of course, shallow water temps / surface layer temps can vary a lot from the average.

I'm not sure these count as riffs - more like a little extra tremolo. These two are (rough, experimental) riffs.

I like your style. There has to be a whole topic there, "Workshop tools in the kitchen".

Chicken liver curry from 1000 Classic Indian Recipes; buttered basmati. Like many of the recipes in this book, it takes a sense of humour to interpret the method.