Blether

Yes ! Mashed potatoes; clapshot; mashed rutabaga with a little butter.

You can get good use from it anywhere that you'd apply salt and savouriness - think anchovy substitution, for example. In Japan it's mixed with other seasonings and applied to fish before grilling/baking. It's also good to go with drinks, mixed with seasonings, spread on a flat wooden spoon and grilled.

Typing's a chore, but funnily enough that recipe lives in the endpapers of the said Complete Cookery Course, which is just on the shelf by my desk here: Thank Audrey, whose surname actually ends -ie. Oops. One could surely use home-made liver sausage; even here in Japan I've found one that works (Nisshin World Deli). Of course it needs to be the soft, spreading type. ETA: oh yeah, start with 1tsp curry powder and adjust from there. ETA2: and the Philly needs to be room temp - from the fridge it's hard/impossible to mix properly. (Boring local detail: In truth I buy that fairly often and have it by itself on toast &c - they want more than 4 bucks 50 for a half pound (well, 200g) of Philly round here, don't they ? If I was going to Costco more often it'd be more practical. They have a good 500g cream cheese for, what, 7 bucks ?)

I have stashed away, a family friend's recipe for a luxury pork liver pate, which uses pork liver sausage and philadelphia cheese, in about equal proportions IIRC, with worcester sauce and just enough curry powder to give a great flavour, without being recognisably 'curry'.

Good stuff, RRO. I'm reading with interest, and hoping to hear more about what establishments / kinds of establishments you had each of the pictured dishes at. I'm also here to ask shamelessly if you've time to say something about the katsu there in Tonkatsu (dining), not least because I've been woefully lax about adding more myself.

It's a shame you'll miss carbonara, but egg dishes, in general, I'd say. Or strawberries, if you get them in winter as you'll remember having done in Japan. Otherwise, one of =&chefs[]=&programmes[]="]these ?

Do salt in advance - long in advance (a couple of days anyway, for a piece that size) if you can, aiming as a starting point for 0.5% by weight. (I can't get my head round using the word 'brining' for salting. A brine is water with salt dissolved in it). To my mind brining is a lot of unnecessary fuss & difficulty, compared to salting, but as you like.

(With a little help from the administrators, after the edit deadline for the post had passed - thank-you, administrators - I'm reposting this with more conveniently-sized photos). I took my usual trip to Phuket, Thailand in December. I love the food there - the Thai food as well as the selection of European & British food that isn't available in Japan. So... some photos and commentary, in chronological order. First shot, in Kata Beach: - well , it says fish, so more-or-less on topic. Next up, street market at Cherngtalay: I was on my way to stay at someone else's house, so I wasn't buying. We had a lunch at Ceramic Kitchen, again in Cherngtalay. I posted about this soup at the time, in "Lunch - what'd ya have" - see that post for a taste report: Festive & other menus at restaurant Les Anges, Yachthaven marina: Launch-your-own-lucky-lantern, Phuket King's Cup evening party, on the beach at Mom Tri's Boathouse, Kata Beach: Longtail: Thai biker gang, Kata Beach; and Karon town hall: Kan Eang Seafood, Ao Chalong: - those are steamed lemon fish, garlic prawns (chosen from yon tank) and sashimi. Good sashimi, but not up to Tokyo standards. Excellent fish & prawns. Then there was this year's King's Cup special, the stranded yacht: - ouch ! Next up, we had dim sum for Sunday breakfast at Mala Dim Sum. This place is on the inland side of Kata Beach, on the main road between Karon and Ao Chalong. The whole place, from serving area through dining room and onto the bathroom, is scrupulously clean, even the waitstaff are in hairnets, the food is quite delicious and cheap as chips. Strongly recommended. The photos are so-so because I was still a bit woozy and left the aperture jacked open from the Saturday's night shooting: - this is a view of what was being infused, in the teapot after we'd poured it empty. Back beachside, dinner was the hit of the trip, Massaman Chicken curry at Kata Mama's Seafood, Kata Beach - for the fifth or sixth time this trip: - indescribably good. The flavour so perfect, the rich nuttiness of the sauce, and maybe above all the exceptional juicy tenderness of the meaty pieces of chicken. I took a whistlestop tour of the kitchen a couple of days later - the head chef is Burmese. Dinner next day I took alone at Capriccio, Kata Beach - pizza schiacciata, prosciutto crudo, insalata pomodoro, e un bicchiere di rosso: - and came away with enough prosciutto left over for a couple of breakfasts. I couldn't believe the portion size - that'd be a starter for 3-4, normally, and it was only like 15 bucks. I don't think I can even buy prosciutto that cheap, retail, in Tokyo. Anyway, good food and just what I wanted, though the tomatoes themselves weren't anything special. The following night, dinner was Thai barbecue, near the Arita (?) hotel on the Karon side of Patong. This is the build-your-own som tam (green papaya salad) station, with Thai-style mortar & pestle, whole chilis, garlic & so on: ... and this is our table laid out with the ingredients we chose from the communal platters, and with a fresh charge of charcoal delivered by the waitstaff: - who even knew such a thing existed ? With that upturned-jelly-mould kind of vessel, it's almost a cross between shabu-shabu and yakiniku, with meats grilling on the perforated mound in the middle, and the juices and fats running off to add to the moat of stock where you can cook other stuff. A revelation, and again, cheap & delicious. It was the waiter's idea that he be in the act of pouring stock when I shot that last photo. Breakfast next morning at the Petit Boulangerie, Kata Beach. This place is owned and run by a French family, and is just a minute's walk from an inn / restaurant / ice cream parlour run by an Italian couple: - charmingly rustic croissant baked on the premises, tooth-achingly sweet patisserie that was like eating an enormous lump of butter icing. I was glad of the coffee, which I know from previous trips is one of the best cups on the island. Later in the day we made a trip to Phuket Town, and I took some pictures in the old town, along Thanon Thalang (Thalang Road): ... and found this spice shop (there's a shingle hanging outside that says "oldest herb & spice shop" or something of the sort): - I took home a good quantity of cinnamon, black pepper and saffron. On the way back to the car I walked past: - extra virgin coconut oil ! You saw it here first. Side street off Thanon Thalang: We stopped at another street market, on the outskirts of Phuket Town on the way towards Ao Chalong. Mango porn: Lastly, hitting Baan Chom View restaurant on the mountain above Kata Beach just in time for sunset: "Broody merry". It's the economy, stupid. ... and a final beer the following evening at Kata Mama's, on Kata Beach:

'kinds' => 'counts.'[/delayed proofreading]

Is that jelly on top, rather than clarified butter, Ann_T ? How did you make the flowers ?

Jesus. gfweb is so right. O157 is a special case. Ordinary E. Coli from someone's - even your own - asshole can make you sick. So, 4b, food service workers who don't wash their hands or realise how their toilet technique may be leaving them - inadvertently - with shit on their hands. Yes, some people can be annoyingly over-fastidious and uninformed about foodborne illness. Nonetheless, food service health codes exist for a reason. Whoever said auto-immune diseases don't exist in third world countries needs to look up a little-known diagnosis: AIDS. Which I believe originated in the questionable practice of human consumption of hunted simian meat. Singapore or anywhere else, what kinds in this discussion is food hygiene after preparation - that meat & veg 'produce' is going to be washed and/or cooked. C. Botulinum safety has been covered at length here on eG, with input from a number of very-well informed contributors.

That's too funny. Those look very like the CLP's I make, in exactly the same ramekins, except mine are red. A pate like this a pretty common British stabndard since Delia Smith put it in her Complete Cookery Course (in fact, in one of the two separate volumes that it originally consisted of). Howver, the recipe uses a lot of butter (being one of Delia's), melted in the deglazed pan, and no eggs or baking stage. Her flavourings IIRC are brandy, garlic, thyme, black pepper and nutmeg. The nutmeg works well, but not for me every time. I like to vary with raw onion instead of the garlic, and capers are another thing that works. CLP is, yes, wonderful stuff, and when I'm brave I make a batch from the 2kg packs of liver I can get in the market here for like 4 bucks.

Oops, I posted from the bottom of page 1. Yes, thanks for introducing more sense to the discussion, dcarch. I've always supposed one purpose of baking pizzas on stone is so that as a whole, the pie cooks through proportionally more from above, so that the topping cooks properly. A few more comments: It strikes me that, if your aim is to have a hot oven with a very hot heatsink (chunk of stone/al/steel) in it, heating the heatsink in the oven is a peculiar way to do it - heat the sheet of metal over a stove burner and it'll be hotter than the oven'll ever get it, in 5 minutes. You might even get it up to dull red, if you're fixated on a hottest-possible-base for your pizza. I'm bemused too, by a fixation on a 2-minute cook time - won't a pizza cooked from below at, say, 900F, and above at 500, be likely to differ as much from one done from above at 900F with a stone at 500F, as it will from one cooked at 500F/500F for, say, 5 minutes ? The proof of the pudding will only ever be in the eating, DOP-schmeeOP. The top of the pictured pizza in your post, Dave the Cook, looks over-done to my taste. Personally, I'd be looking at turning the broiler down (I'm aware you're posting the picture rather than advocating for any point of view). Wholemeal Crank, you said 'stones store heat and thus the oven temp doesn't drop as much when you open the door to put the pizza in' - that's often said, but I reckon for a typical domestic oven, the air temperature will drop about the same amount regardless - you open that big, full-front door and the hot air flows out upwards in very short order. Strictly speaking, the stone means less stored heat energy escapes, right ?

Yes, and as any cookware designer will tell you, Al is far more conductive than steel, in the typical stovetop copper-aluminium-anything-else descending scale. And still the horse won't move...

Another repeat. The last of the mushrooms; the last of the cream; no more ham. A small, late dinner of champignons a la creme:

- I haven't tried that, but when it comes to canned soups, I pine for the Campbell's Cream of Tomato that's sold in the UK (and other markets ?) but seems unavailable in the US / Japan. That's a good product. Happy to help.

A treat. Canadian-produced bacon from Sofina Foods in Ontario, & fresh tomato, on buttered strong-Canadian-flour breadmaker white, with hot Ceylon tea with pasteurised milk.

I use a 2" deep 'batto' - a Japanese word for a moderate-depth metal tray - in stainless steel, for roasting a 2.5lb chicken (or two), with a low (1/4" ?) tray inside. Turning the chicken once, that gives an even colour all round (if I don't turn it with this setup, it ends up looking like a clumsy sunbather). For bigger things - like roasts in a single piece - I've tended to use sheet pans, if for no other reason than that they need more roast potatoes I'm happy enough giving things a turn when / if I care about all-over crust. Some years ago I bought a 'chicken roasting pan' - oval with a lid - to emulate what I knew from the family home growing up, but have never had success getting it to work in my oven. I'd hopes to save on oven cleaning, mostly. Didn't work 'cos the version from memory was white enamel rather than the S/S I bought ? 'Cos I gave up on having an oven at 250C for the whole roast time just to get heat through the tin ? My oven doesn't have the power ? Don't know / don't remember. Anyway, yes, I'd be wary of 'deep' lest it keeps the (rising) hot air from the surface of the meat. Recently I bought an aluminum batto (1" deep) in the biggest size that'll fit in my oven, so I think I'm repurposing sheet pans back to cookies-and-other-stuff-only, anyway saving them from a future of rapidly-accumulating polymerised animal fats, i.e. going all brown and crusty.

I've been interested in the thread partly because I like cream soups (cream of tomato !! drool) and I know freezing them tends to spoil the texture, too. It sounds like the solution for more-convenient-homemade-cream-soup is to freeze / can the soup base (i.e. the soup without the cream) and add fresh cream after you take it out again. That way everyone wins, since leaving the cream out is a form of condensing, too - and cream soups often being all- or part-pureed, sounds like it makes them good canning candidates. Since we're talking about condensed soups, we were never expecting, say, to reheat them in the canning container. De-canning, adding water and heating is only harder than doing the same with cream by a factor of having the cream available vs running the tap. And think how much modified starch - and always-the-same base stock - you'll be avoiding.

Sounds good ! I've not made ravioli in brodo that many times, but in the book I've mentioned before, published in Italy by Bonechi, The Delights of Good Italian Cooking, ed. Paolo Piazzesi, the recipe for Anolini in brodo says "boil them in a light broth of chicken or beef, as the housewives in Parma and Piacenza do. Serve with lashings of grated parmesan cheese"; and the Pastina in Brodo is small-shape pasta served in the strained beef-and-mirepoix broth it's been boiled in. Use the leftover meat in rissoles, it says. And "It is a known fact that, to extract all the flavour into the broth, the meat must be put into cold water which is then brought to the boil. Hot water, on the contrary, would seal in the juices. So, when we want a good plate of boiled meat, the water is heated first of all". so, err... there's that. A known fact, as opposed to an unknown one.

I'll certainly contest your definition of sanity, Tim Dolan. JAZ, to me, not being a king who dies on the throne (copyright, EP, Memphis) has a lot to do with what "healthy" is.

... and a forethought issue that meant you didn't can beans when they were ripe from the vine, or didn't think you'd need more than you were canning. Circumstances piling up on each other, eh ? Sorry, there you were back on the rails again and I just can't resist keeping on chugging along this siding. I enjoyed your post introducing Jackie Clay &c - clearly you know more about home canning than I do. Are we now waiting for a train to come along carrying someone who does home canning and is interested enough in doing it to cream soups to give it a shot ?

I've watched Subway get its periodical slagging off here on eG and sat here bemused. In Japan it's better than most fast food, IMO, and I'm a long-term supporter, if for no other reason than their always having been set up around a menu that offers a balanced diet. Unlike McDonald's which took fifty years to discover salad. Others in this thread have acknowledged the veggie offering. Yes, the meat 6 cheese can be criticised for not being deli standard, but it seems to me it's like pointing out how crappy the fast-food burger patties are. Here in Japan, Subway is clean, well kept, fastidious and friendly. I was only a bit less disappointed when the most convenient branch closed down, than I was when Wendy's quit the country altogether. And I liked Wendy's.

Canning dried beans... how many years exactly are we expecting to do without any harvest ?!!

I can't vouch for the web site, but something like this should work for you. Feel free to have at it yourself via this Google search. You should be able to find a countertop microwave model that also works as an electric oven. Mine (Japanese model) is a Panasonic with big internal space and two trays for baking big batches. It also broils.