Tri2Cook

Fresh baked and buttered biscuits loaded with muscadine jelly just might qualify as a last meal for me... throw a couple good sausage patties and some grits on the side and I know it would.

Last night was Massamam beef curry. I've seen this dish with so many spelling variations of the name that I have no idea what is considered correct.

Nice! I miss fresh figs. A friend where I used to live made strawberry fig jam every year... I could eat an entire pan of biscuits when I had that jam to go on them.

That pretty much covers it. I've been working under option #2 for almost 6 years now. I actually feel option #3 is the best option when possible but the options for places to cook aren't particularly wide or varied where I live and I don't have plans to move any time in the near future.

Yeah, I suppose it would at that. Personally, I think an extremely thin slice of fresh lime is more pleasant to eat than any I've been able to do in a regular dehydrator. But I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe I just didn't do a good job with them.

Congratulations Rob. You've worked so incredibly hard to get where you are now from where you were when I first met you here on these forums, it makes me smile when I get to read about how all of that hard work is paying off for you with your restaurant and now with this book. I look forward to it's arrival. Edited because apparently I can't form a proper sentence at 5 am.

Any pickled shrimp I've had has always been on the chewy end of the shrimp spectrum. I think it just comes with the preparation method. You could do a carefully timed acid bath that doesn't allow them to reach that point but then I'd say you were just making the shrimp ceviche you mentioned, not pickled shrimp.

I've done syrup brushed and dehydrated lime slices and never managed to get them to a point I was happy with. They never got the crispy texture I was going for using a standard dehydrator and they were incredibly bitter... but that part could have just been the limes I was using. I wonder how they would turn out using a freeze dryer?

Yesterday's farmer's market had Thai chiles available and I just happened to have some fresh local walleye on hand so I introduced them to each other via crispy fish with spicy garlic sauce. According to the recipe, "pla kapong keemao" should involve using a whole fish... but I didn't. The sauce consists of the chiles, garlic, scallions, cilantro, basil, kaffir lime leaf, fish sauce, lime juice, palm sugar and black pepper. Regardless of the liberties taken with authenticity, it was tasty.

I made a batch of homemade breakfast sausage on Saturday, got up Sunday morning and made sausage patties and biscuit dough, tossed the biscuits in the oven and sausages in a pan on the stove and ~15 minutes later realized, when things weren't going as they should, that I'd left the baking powder out of the biscuits. I've never done that sort of thing before... it stung a bit. I made cream biscuits and used all of the cream I had in the failed batch so it was sausage and toast instead.

I tried the mint version that are coated in chocolate and liked them. The local store brought them in one year around Christmas, got me hooked and they've never brought them in again. I'm semi glad about that... I really don't need them.

I haven't made the local farmer's market yet this year. It's every second Friday from 10 am - 2 pm... not very well thought out for drawing maximum customer saturation in my opinion. There's one next Friday and the last one for the year 2 weeks after that. I don't see any way of getting to either of those so I'm going to recruit someone to go for me. I mainly just want a few things from the lady from the elk farm. In addition to her own products, she also brings cheeses from a semi-localish cheese maker. I'd like to peruse the veggie selection but if I can get my stuff from the elk lady, I'll be happy.

I don't have the book but I'll follow along... ...and this time I won't try to participate. I don't want to be responsible for killing two good discussions.

I don't have the book yet but when I get it, I'll take a peek at them. Seafood beyond the most basic stuff is rarely available where I live so if it goes beyond shrimp, scallops or lobster, I'll be of no help.

Regardless of a person's opinions of high end restaurants and what they do, I agree with Rob that it doesn't warrant the person going out of their way to trash them for it. It really is as simple as what he said...if you don't like it or don't think it's worth the cost, just don't support them with your money. At the same time, I think it should apply to both ends of the scale. If I want to go pay $3 for a crappy burrito at Fred's Burrito Emporium, I don't really need people telling me that I have no taste and don't appreciate good food because "that place sucks". Good food is the food you like to eat and "too expensive" is an entirely individual scale that doesn't have anything to do with another person's scale.

They've certainly left themselves room to negotiate up if they want to. It sounds kinda like the only thing you really have to gain with them is their contacts... but sometimes that's a valuable commodity.

Those particular baskets are made by Cuisinart. They're normally ~$22 each (amazon Canada) but I tossed them in my cart and watched them for while. At one point they dropped to just over $15 each and I hit "buy". I'm happy with them so far.

I used rice. Something I've never done as an alternative to breadcrumbs but I liked the texture it provided. It's something I'll adapt to other meatball recipes in the future. I kinda freestyled it a bit on that part too... I chopped the rice, garlic and mint together in my mini processor. Just pulsed it until everything was chopped, not pasty. Also, the "as written" above was a bit off, I actually doubled the entire recipe.

I love cooking but there are times, especially after a particularly busy day/week at work cooking for other people, when the last thing I want to do when I get home is cook for myself.

Chris, your enthusiasm in this thread inspired me to try the recipe for the chipotle meatballs. I don't have the book so I had to hope it was one that was shared online somewhere and I found what claimed to be the recipe. I followed the recipe as posted on the site with the exception that I cooked the meatballs in meatball baskets on my grill. I thought the charred bits and grilled flavor would work well with the dish. I have no idea if it was the actual recipe from the book but it's a recipe I'll hang-on to regardless because I really enjoyed it. It may even be enough to get me to spring for the book. The fairly generous amount of mint in the meatballs, which struck me as a bit odd when I read it, was perfection in the finished dish. They just went on in this pic but I did give them a good brown exterior with some charring before I took them off.

I was going to ask if the sandwich of store-bought fish sticks with tartar sauce on white bread I ate earlier meant I was a bad cook. Then I realized I didn't actually cook anything... so I couldn't possibly be a bad cook because of it.

I agree with Drewman. 8 hours is a lot to ask of most non-heated containers that are going to deal with the volume you're talking about. If I had to go 8 hours with no way to restock at the mid-point, I'd probably look into the permit for the burners. Keep half in a hot storage container and when it starts dwindling, heat the other half, which is being stored in a cold storage container (ie: cooler with ice) in a pot on the burner and dump it into the hot storage container. Extra work but no electricity needed and better quality than the product sitting in a pot on a burner for 8 hours.

What he said. I generally use the gelatin method for stocks because I'm not usually doing them as a last-minute thing but the agar is definitely faster and tends towards a better yield. Most of the time, I don't need to add gelatin to the stocks. The naturally occurring gelatin from the stock making process usually provides more than what is really ideal for the technique which does reduce final yield a bit. The benefit of agar, besides speed and yield potential, is that it doesn't take up space in the cooler/fridge for a few days like a large batch of the gelatin version does.

I'm still a fan of syneresis filtering but it does require planning ahead for it. Not as much when using agar as with gelatin but still not a last minute technique.

Yeah, I hope it works out for them. It's doing better than I would have guessed with the kickstarter. I had it pegged as already having missed the peak for restaurants doing that sort of thing and overkill for most people doing it at home. My mistake may be in underestimating the home market for gadgets. I should know better than to do that... I'm very often guilty of gadget envy myself.