Tri2Cook

I'm going to admit to being jealous. The thing I miss most about my previous job was doing dinners like this. The restaurant was closed on sunday and monday, we used it once a month on a sunday night to do a dinner for invited guests. Sort of a supper club type thing. Send out invites, get a head count, do the dinner. The restaurant was on leased land, the owner grew tired of continuous hassles from the town (the town owns the land and the better the business was doing, the more they tried to bleed), sold everything and moved on. Where I'm at now is much more pedestrian and the owners have no interest in venturing into catering or private dinners. Small, remote town with not a lot of options, bills to pay... sacrifices had to be made. I miss it though.

Nice site but it was the bike mention that got me to take a peek at this thread. I bike for local transportation, exercise and for fun. Mountain and road. There are a few months during the winter where the roads are unsuitable for biking due to snow and ice, I walk most places during those months. The car only sees action for going out of town or if I need to haul something too large to carry. I'm pretty certain I haven't spent over $150 on gas in the past 12 or so months combined. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you blog here.

Chef Rubber has it in 500ml and 1 liter bottles.

It's nice that somebody is making them available in smaller amounts for those wanting to test the waters or just try a few recipes. The activa in particular if it was properly packaged from the manufacturer as the pictures suggest. That would be handy even for those who work with it regularly. If you really get into working with those ingredients and start experimenting and playing around with your own ideas, you'll be buying the bigger packages of some of those things in short order though. Some of them go much more quickly than you might think. Tapioca Maltodextrin, for example, is really not worth buying in small packages if you're going to do more than follow a single recipe that calls for it. 50 grams might work for one smallish job but it's $6... a pound of n-zorbit is $10 at willpowder so in this case I'd seriously consider going with the larger.

Kerry, I don't know a lot about this cocktail stuff but one thing I finally figured out through reading here and on cocktail-related blogs about "boozy" drinks without citrus, sodas, fruit juices, etc. is that I was being way too delicate with the ice and stirring. I've started being much more generous with the ice and the stir than I was initially. The drinks and my enjoyment of them seems to have benefited greatly from this. It took me a while to accept that the dilution was part of the drink. I'm not suggesting you aren't already aware of this, just thought I'd mention it in case. A lot of drinks I wasn't thrilled with initially were nice when revisited with a proper stir.

They're not waiting 2 years to air it in Canada this time but we're running 3 episodes behind the U.S. so I guess I'm going to have to stay out of this thread now.

I use El Dorado 6 year silver and Havana Club Anejo Blanco for most purposes. I'm not a rum expert but they're pretty tasty to me.

I really like that drink. It's a perfect match of name and taste... pleasantly bitter.

#@%&... now I'm searching google for a place to order Chinotto in Canada. That sounds right tasty!

Okay, I'm going to call that one a lack-of-sufficient-sleep induced lapse in attention span, so please ignore it. Either I completely missed this part... ...or The Big Cheese can edit without the tattle-tale "edited by..." note. Seriously though, I'm still not sure how we can determine which fat is best for a given purpose but a range of fats could be suggested as best suited for a specific purpose and, from that point on, it would come down to the specific dish and personal preference.

Exactly. Even if you remove personal preference as a criteria (and that should be criteria #1), there are way too many variables to adopt a standard.

I almost hope we can't generate some criteria and guidelines. If a person prefers butter, eat butter. If a person prefers olive oil, eat olive oil. I really don't want it to come down to someone else telling me which I should prefer. I can figure that one out for myself.

Agree 100%. I'm a firm believer that everyone should eat and drink what they like without concern for what the person at the next table or next chair at the bar thinks about it. If somebody enjoys potted meat or vienna sausages, have at 'em. I won't be looking down my nose at them... I just won't ask for a bite.

Stumbled across, tried and enjoyed this one while browsing the Jeffrey Morgenthaler blog... Caneflower 1 1/2 oz cachaça 3/4 oz oz Aperol 1/2 oz St. Germain Stir, strain, generous twist of lemon.

I'm not a planner. I tried to be, but I'm not. I wish it was due to some good reason like seeing what looks good at the market, etc. but there are no markets of that type where I live other than the bi-monthly farmer's market June - September. Just a same-stuff-all-of-the-time grocery store. The real reason I'm not a planner is because it never works out. Something comes up at work and I don't have time or it's too late to bother or I just don't feel like messing with it that night and most of the stuff I plan for the week ends up still sitting in the freezer or fridge at the end of the week. So I don't bother anymore.

So a question you might want to ask, I learned this one the hard way a long time ago: do they want everybody to eat in accordance with the one person's dietary restrictions or do they want you to have an alternative for him/her when making something for the group that he/she can't eat? Seems like a simple thing but I didn't ask that question for an early catering job. They were a bit less than happy that all of the food was made to fit within the guest of honor's restictions. They thought it was understood that I was providing options for said guest of honor. I thought the meal was to be designed around said guest. It was my job to be clear on that. I didn't do my job.

In a technical sense, yes... but compared to the stuff in the cans labled simply "potted meat", Underwood Deviled Ham could almost hang out in the gourmet section. As an interesting (to me anyway) aside, Heston Blumenthal did a fancied-up version of Spam for his "70's Feast". He remembered it being part of his school lunches from that time and wanted to do the gourmet nostalgia thing with it as part of the meal. The recipe is in the Heston's Fantastical Feasts book. It consists of a pork shoulder and Joselito ham base flavored with shallots, garlic, thyme, black truffle juice, brandy, ruby and white port and madeira. Sounds like a tasty, albeit expensive, can of "Spam" to me but I haven't tried it yet.

Unfortunately, at least for now, you'll have to do a run across the border to get it. The LCBO doesn't carry it. Manitoba is close enough to be an option of desperation for me but they don't have it either. I've been watching for it for quite a while with no hints at it making an appearance.

Almost anything can become a build-it-in-a-pan dessert with a little tweaking. I did a hotel pan version of Pierre Herme's Faubourg Pave once. It didn't have the visual appeal of the original but it made it convenient for a "drop it on the table and everybody dig in" situation while keeping the flavors and textures of the original. There's the always-popular church dinner classic, the banana pudding. Quick, easy and inexpensive. A giant hotel pan cheesecake is an option. An expensive option with the dairy prices where I live... but an option.

Spam is horrible stuff, 10 million people eating it won't convince me otherwise. I didn't like it when I was kid and it was "eat what's on the table or go hungry" and I don't like it now. I'm not really a fan of Underwood Deviled Ham either. I liked it when I was a kid but now I find it too salty to enjoy no matter what it tastes like. But I would gladly eat both daily rather than eat either of the other two canned meats that were popular where I grew up, potted meat and vienna sausages, monthly. The usual problem for me with canned meats is the salt level. Even if a product happens to be inoffensive or even good flavor-wise, I can't get past the salt. With the potted meat and vienna sausages, dumping in enough salt to kill the taste would be an improvement.

Or Ho Cakes... I'm not watching the new season yet. I'll probably start soon because I don't want to wait 2 years for them to decide to show it in Canada like they did with the first season but I'm holding out a bit to see if that's what's going to happen.

Not sure, the place referenced is called Giligan's but I didn't dig any deeper.

Now I'm afraid. I was browsing some various cocktail-related stuff and came across a reference to a place that serves a "Ranch Bomb". Yep, you sink a container of ranch dressing into a lager and drink up... just reading about that one made me feel a little sick.

Tried this one. I don't have the Miracle Mile bitters so I used a chocolate-chili bitters I picked up from House Made... Clockwork Orange 1 1/2 oz. gin 1 oz. Irish whiskey 1 oz. orange juice 1/2 oz. lime juice 1/2 oz. simple syrup 2 dashes Miracle Mile Chocolate-Chili Bitters Shake, strain, grate nutmeg.

I don't have the books yet but the mac & cheese inspired me to play. Since my mind usually tends to drift towards the sweet side, I've been fiddling with using fruit lambics and other fruit beers or ciders with fruit purees and juices to make fruit-veeta. I'm at a very early stage playing around with it and have more experimenting and lots of refining to do but it's been fun so far. I guess I'd better start building a MC book fund.