Tri2Cook

They've played our blueberry festival as well. Prepare to have your socks blown right off... I buy my cooking/fryer oil in 16 liter containers through our supplier at work. Just over $20 if I remember correctly, I don't have to buy them often so it's been a while.

I wouldn't have thought so... but he was playing a blueberry festival in a tiny little town just slightly south of nowhere. The year before Tom Cochrane was Honeymoon Suite.

How aged are we talking on the balsamic? Not a lot of options for balsamic vinegar where I live but that drink sounds pretty tasty.

Our annual blueberry festival starts this Friday. It goes on for 10 days which is about 6 too many for the number of events so it kinda starts to drag on after a bit. It would be much better served to tighten up the schedule and run it Friday - Monday of the upcoming weekend with the civic holiday on Monday. It used to include a concert/street dance complete with beer garden that always brought in bands/musicians that were big in their day but are now reduced to the festival and club circuit. It also brought in a lot of people and their money. But one year a bad decision from the organizers to not include a rider in the event insurance policy to cover certain specific circumstances combined with an ill-timed power failure the evening of the concert that lasted until late in the night resulted in the concert having to be canceled and Tom Cochrane still expecting to be paid since he was here. They lost their ass on that one and their hasn't been a concert/street dance since.

Not necessarily. I don't think there's a whole lot in there that one or both of you wouldn't already know at this point but for a 14 year old with an interest in food and cooking, she could pick up a lot of information even if she never did a single recipe. It's what I liked about his In Search of Perfection books. The recipes were somewhat insane, completely over-the-top for what they were. But that was just the end result. What made the books good was all of the how and why stuff leading up to the recipes.

No need to be sorry. Certainly no offense taken on my part. I wouldn't make a good preacher though, public speaking is not one of my strengths. Anyway, we probably should let this steer back on course to the discussion at hand. I didn't mean to distract from that.

Yeah, what she said.

That's a shame. Even for someone not interested in doing the type of food he does, there's a whole lot of good cooking information in that book. I like the book more for it's how and why information more than for it's recipes.

One day, all will cast aside the vain search for theory and rules of man regarding chocolate work and pay heed unto my words that the Chocolate Gods either smile on you that day or they don't... and on that day, my church will be born. Of course, there are basic procedures, commandments if you prefer, that must be followed to appease the Chocolate Gods and increase the odds of them smiling upon your work. But in the end, you can do everything right and they can still say "not this time" and leave you frustrated, confused and second-guessing everything you did. I never claimed the Chocolate Gods can't be jerks sometimes.

I told the kid a while back that she was going to be my designated Oompa Loompa. That she doesn't even have to help with the chocolate as long as she sings the song any time anybody stops by. She was less than impressed with the idea.

I'll trade post chocolate session messes with you any time you'd like. I've pretty much decided that the only way I'm going to improve is by melting a ridiculous amount of chocolate for the job at hand so that I don't have to try to dump any of it back into the melting container when I empty and scrape the molds. That seems to be where it all goes bad.

I have no idea how it's done, not even a guess, but I'd sure like to find out. While everybody else is pushing forward gathering the unique and complicated techniques, I'm plodding along a couple days behind picking up the easier stuff that was tossed aside for something more fancy. It'd be kinda nice to pick up something that looks like it was tossed in the easy pile by mistake.

And they look amazing to me in those pictures.

I can't be helpful on that one. While I haven't done anything anywhere near that amazing with decorating, getting good, or even decent, pictures of what I do seems to be an impossibility for me. I have one of those commercial fry warmers, basically an adjustable-height aluminum frame with two fixtures for heat bulbs, that a friend from a local restaurant asked me if I wanted because he was getting rid of it. My first instinct was to say no, don't need more clutter. But then it occurred to me that maybe I could use regular bulbs in it instead of heat bulbs and use it for lighting for pictures. So we'll see if that helps when I get around to trying it. With heat bulbs, it could also function as a warming station if I ever found myself doing any kind of sugar work... not that that's in the plans. Worst case, I can just find it a new home if it doesn't prove useful. Even if that home is the dump. Edit: and it just occurred to me that sitting under the lights might be a handy place for bowls of chocolate to stay a little warmer during the winter as well.

Probably my fault for that confusion... I thought that was the Premier site.

I see the small drum is now available on the Premier site. I think I'm going to end up grabbing it sooner rather than later. Information on formulations is hard to find and I haven't yet developed a knack for tasting a nib and knowing where I want to go with it. Large batches of experimenting with percentages is a bit costly so I'm starting to think a way to make really small amounts is more mandatory than optional.

Gotta have a tour rider... makes sure they don't try to stick you on the small couch in the little private grief room near the ICU with a pillow and a blanket.

I thought Moon Pies were basically two cookies (more like graham cracker) with marshmallow sandwiched between dipped in flavored coating. Chocolate, vanilla and banana are the flavors I remember but I haven't had them in a whole lot of years so I wouldn't be surprised if there are others. There's a similar product in Canada called Wagon Wheels.

I prefer baby back for exactly the same reason, with me being on the other end of the rib as far as fat content preference goes.

It is time well spent making my own chocolate. I enjoy the process and I enjoy seeing how different a chocolate made exactly the same way each time using beans from different locales can be. But I agree it's not everybody's time well spent making their own. If I didn't have an interest in doing the bean to bar thing and was only doing bonbons, etc., it wouldn't be worth it to me either. I don't think I'd enjoy making chocolate by just mixing together cocoa powder, cocoa butter and sugar and I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to make that the mandatory method for pastry and chocolate schools and classes. But if, as Jamal12 has intimated is his situation, that was my only way of getting chocolate to work with... sometimes you do what you gotta do.

I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing. I honestly can't remember if the ones she used were smoked or not. I just remember eating green beans, cottage ham and potatoes until I could barely move any time she made it.

For some reason, it's never occurred to me to research it. It was just something grandma cooked with the beans from her garden and potatoes. But a quick google trip reveals that it's a brine cured and smoked boneless pork shoulder butt. So making my own is now on the agenda.

So that's the problem... I have to learn to stop picking small, middle-of-nowhere places to call home.

My grandmother used to do exactly that other than she didn't peel a strip of skin from the potatoes and in the pot with the beans and potatoes was a hunk of meat sold as "cottage ham". I have no idea what that actually was other than tasty. She lived in a heavily German populated area, not sure if that has anything to do with that particular piece of meat or not. I've never found it in a store anywhere I've lived and when I've mentioned it to people in the meat department at any stores I've lived near over the years, they've just looked at me like I had a horn growing out of the middle of my forehead.

if the marshmallows you're eating have no real flavor of their own, then you're eating the wrong marshmallows.