Tri2Cook

As Marcella, Giuliano and Mario taught all of us Italophiles early on, the dish is about the pasta; anything else is condiment. All I know is, authentic or not, Italian or Italian-American, a lasagna that has lots of pasta with some sauce and cheese between is much more to my preference than a big wet casserole with 2 or 3 layers of pasta floating inside.

I use 1/2 cup salt and 2 tsp baking soda in a gallon of water but that's numbers I picked up from a recipe that requires peeling eggs that are still in a very delicate state well before hard boiled. I have no idea if there is any science to the ratios but I've done the recipe and had no trouble peeling the soft eggs so I use it any time I'm boiling eggs.

I don't have a lot of experience with authentic Italian but the thing that I like best about it compared to most Italian-American I've had is related to pasta dishes. It seems to me that Italian tends to lean towards pasta with a little something where Italian-American tends to lean towards something with a little pasta. Then again, maybe that's not an Italian vs Italian-American thing. Maybe it's an individual preference thing. I'm really not sure.

Rum ice cream from Migoya's Frozen Desserts using El Dorado 12 with raisins hydrated in Sailor Jerry. I'm not a big fan of rum raisin ice cream but I made that for a friend who is and it got the thumbs up of approval.

So that would mean dropping them into salted water to cool might be more beneficial than cooking them in salted water... now I'm curious.

I'd wanted to give it a try since this discussion started but I've had no luck finding a way to get it in Canada. The .ca version of Amazon doesn't have it and the .com version won't ship it here.

Rubbed the ribs last night, they'll go in the smoker later this morning. Making German potato salad, coleslaw, mac & cheese, corn on the cob and baked beans to go with the ribs. I'm doing a variation on the Estonian Rhubarb Cake (that I remember seeing posted somewhere in the pastry forums but can't seem to find so I'm glad I saved the recipe link) for dessert. Followed the recipe pretty much exactly except I used local wild blueberries instead of rhubarb, adjusted the sugar accordingly and added some lemon zest to the sponge layer.

Looks awesome! Sounds like a lot of fun too.

Wylie Dufresne does his pickled tongue like this. Maybe not exactly what you have in mind but something to get the ideas flowing.

Winnipeg is closest to where I live but I still know almost nothing about it, only been there a couple times for business reasons. Toronto would be doable too. Of course it would probably force choosing between this and the chocolate and confectionary gathering, I doubt I'd be able to get away for both.

That's pretty much exactly the way it worked when I was growing up. Replace "think about my behavior" with "wait for my butt to stop stinging enough to be able to sit down again" and it would be spot on. We were a fairly large family (Dad had 2 kids, stepmom had 3 when they got together. Almost a Brady Bunch. ) with not a lot of money. Eating out wasn't treated as a privilege, it was a privilege and a very rare privilege at that. Local inexpensive Chinese, Korean or Mexican restaurants were about as high-end as it got and good behavior was 100% non-optional.

A 4-martini lunch gone wrong.

They tell you how you should eat because if they're pointing out how you eat they're keeping the attention off of how they eat. I would never preach to others about what they should eat. My eating habits aren't always such that I have any right to judge even if I wanted to. But please don't look out from behind your quad bypass burger and tell me I shouldn't be eating those fries with all the carbs they contain. We had a lady come in a restaurant once or twice a week where I used to work who would order 2 caesar salads with extra parmesan, extra bacon and extra dressing and 24 of our (very large, 24 would completely cover a 15" square pan, and breaded) hot wings and eat every bit of it with lots of ranch dressing. "But no croutons on the salads please, I'm doing Atkins. If people only realized how bad those carbs are."

Yeah, a pot and spoon does work fine and I very rarely even make jam. But if they would replace that "jam/jelly" control with a temp control that reads to the little timer screen, I could do a whole lot of other things with it.

If it had a temp control, I could think of a lot of uses for it.

I should have mentioned that the amounts for the gums are calculated on the total combined weight of the base ingredients. Cream cheese + puree + water + sugar x gum percentage. He doesn't give the percentages in the recipe so I figured them out so I can vary the batch size easily. So, for example... 500 grams cream cheese 500 grams puree 250 grams water 100 grams sugar 9.45 grams iota 4.73 grams kappa 2.97 grams agar @jmacnaughtan: absolutely beautiful job on the V8 cake. @Kerry: you're killing me with all of the baking. Everything looks really tasty and I'm feeling like a complete slacker. @Darienne: blueberry snack cakes sound awesome. Blueberries are coming in full-force here now. The blueberry festival actually kicked off today.

.7% Iota + .35% kappa carrageenans and .22% agar in a base of 1 part cream cheese, 1 part fruit puree, .5 part water and .2 part sugar. Gums combined with the sugar. Thermomix water and cream cheese with heat, add sugar/gums, heat to 190 f, add fruit puree, heat to boil, pour in mold/molds and chill. I can't afford a thermomix and we don't have one at work either so I improvised. It would be less mess with a thermomix but it's easily doable without. I just heated the water and cream cheese, dumped it in a blender and pureed smooth, blended in the sugar/gums, dumped it back in the pot, heated to 190 f, whisked in the puree and heated to boiling. If it's going to be set in individual molds, you have to have them ready to go. It starts setting up pretty quickly.

Recipe test... Johnny Iuzzini's no-bake cheesecake. He did it with rhubarb, I did it with raspberry... I think pretty much any fruit will work. The pre-fried stage has great flavor but I wasn't completely thrilled with the texture. That didn't worry me, frying and serving warm is part of the dish, but it did start me thinking about ways to modify it if I wanted to use it in a cold setting. Shouldn't take much adjusting. Once breaded and fried, the interior is soft and creamy and much more pleasant to eat (in my opinion). Just for the record, he molds them in spheres and serves them on a lollipop stick with a dab of a fruit gel on top. I wasn't going for replicating the dish, just wanted to see if the base itself was something I might be interested in playing around with. Anyway, been meaning to check this one out for a long time and finally got around to it.

Nope, didn't know that. So was it tasty?

It's a little early for the part of Ontario where I live assuming I'm not wrong and can start the serious picking within the next week.

We auctioned off a giant chocolate bar as a fundraiser for an event. I found a storage container with a bottom surface that resembled the surface of an Aero Bar, cleaned it really well, polished it up and used that. Used an entire 11 lb. block of Callebaut for it. Wrapped it in gold foil and made a custom paper outer sleeve so it looked like a giant candy bar and put it on display where the tickets were being sold. It did really well. I realize that's not what you have in mind but it was a lot of fun so I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I've been meaning to try the New Amsterdam Sour one of these days. Genever, lemon juice and simple syrup on crushed ice with a red wine float. I'll get to it eventually.

I bought blueberries from the side of the road a couple of days ago - saw a whole lot of people selling them on the way to Sudbury yesterday. Must be a really good year here. I hope so. I hate those years when you have to plod around in the heat and bugs for 2 hours or more to get one bucket.

Went out scouting, the blueberries are starting. Early for here and it looks like it's going to be a good year. I'd say another week and they'll really be jumping.

I don't have any garden pics. I'm not as diligent as I should be so they wouldn't be much to look at anyway. It's small... tomatoes, potatoes, peas, carrots, beets and a few herbs. The growing season is so short and unpredictable here most years that I don't let myself get too carried away with the amount I plant. Everything is doing pretty well so far other than the carrots are moving slow and something seems to be selectively eating my mint.