blue_dolphin

@Nancy in Pátzcuaro, do you have a recipe for lime pickle that you like?

That combination of Middle Eastern flavors is appealing to me, @Anna N! Sharp cheddar melted on toasted whole wheat bread and topped with some of the warm apple and onion relish leftover from a recent pork chop. I was going to do this as a grilled cheese sandwich but was too lazy to get out the pan!

45qts seems pretty big to me, but I'm a single person household and don't need that much capacity. I am using a 10 qt Igloo that I already had. Like @dscheidt said, you don't NEED a cooler, although it would make very long cooking times easier on the instrument and more energy efficient. You can just clip the Gourmia on to a good sized pot. If you do want a cooler, you might want to check one out locally so you can see whether the thickness of the walls is going to be a good fit for your unit. The wall thickness isn't specified in a lot of online listings. I have a cooler similar in size to the one that you linked to and the walls are about 2 1/2 inches thick with just a short 1 inch section at the very top. I checked and I can fasten my Anova to that top section if I really want to try something massive, but I don't think it's likely.

Pesto chicken on toasted ciabatta with mayo and baby greens: Chicken breast, butterflied, spread with pesto, rolled and cooked sous vide.

That is sure to be good!

That looks really good! And I admire your willingness to start off your bean journey with such a big bean. I love beans but I'm always sort of wary of the big ones - I'm working up my courage to cook some of those RG Royal Coronas! If you have any of those guys left, my favorite recipe for Christmas limas is the salad with beets, quinoa and avocado from the RG Heirloom Beans cookbook.

I sort of assumed that they were using the food saver to preserve quality (prevent the combination of dried out edges and waterlogged bottoms) rather than actually extending the safety window. But I will be curious to hear more info.

I'd put them both on the spectrum of moist-heat cooking methods, along with steaming, simmering, boiling, etc. I guess they are well separated from each other amongst that group but I wouldn't call them opposites. I think something like high heat grilling or convection broiling would be the opposite of sous vide. Maybe freeze-drying is the opposite of pressure cooking !

Those little cauliflowers look nice. I will have to look for them. Organic cauliflower in my area was $1.99/lb at Sprouts, $3.49/head at TJ's and variously priced between $2-3/lb at my local farmer's market, where I purchased this nice fellow on Thursday: About 3.5 lbs for $4. I will eat it all! Small bruises caused by me and my veg drawer.

There is a thread from last fall with some ideas, What do I do with so many limes? although many include some sugar, others like salt preserved limes might fit your request. I have a ton of them on my tree and could use some more ideas, too. Does anyone have a good recipe for lime pickle?

Very interesting. As discussed in the article, it's sort of surprising that the curry houses have retained their individual mom & pop family ownership as long as they have, vs. being pushed out by a "fast casual chain" version of themselves. And the fact that 80-90% of curry house owners can trace their roots to a modest sized city in Bangladesh is rather amazing. I imagine it will be an interesting story to watch going forward. Thanks for posting.

In solidarity with Shelby, I also cooked my first sous vide pork - a boneless loin chop. It was 1 inch thick so I cooked at 140F for 1.5 hrs. I seared the top and bottom both before and after cooking per the Chefsteps recipe but could have done a better job with the fatty edge. The meat was a little pinker than it looks in the picture and I might try a lower temp next time but I have no problems with an experiment as tasty as this one. Served with warm apple onion relish, crisped up leftover baked potatoes and a few cubes of pickled butternut squash.

I say you need some Santa Maria tri-tip with those pinquitos, @JoNorvelleWalker!! I used to add salt half way through cooking in an attempt to cut the baby in half WRT bean cooking salt dogmas but sometimes missed my window of opportunity and got bland beans so now I just add it at the beginning. I await my Mixteca bean pot!

That looks great, @chefmd! Would be lovely on some crusty Cuisi-toast!

Up above, PedroG provided a link to a Douglas Baldwin page that has a lot of useful tables for cooking times based on thickness. It's even broken down by whether it's a slab, cylinder or sphere. So you can measure your hunk-o-meat and gauge the right cooking time. I'm sure you can stuff it if you would like. I did that with the chicken breast I tried the other day and it worked fine. Sort of comical that I would be answering a question here!

Based on this, I also ordered a few pairs. They rarely have the small size in the stores so I'm usually stuck with baggy fingers, so nice to have gloves that fit and the quality seems good. Oh, it goes far beyond the cloud soft lining! Notice the embossed wrist detail and lace-like cuff. Even better is the slivery Mr. Clean logo printed on each glove: So, so fancy! I may start wearing them out to special events !

That sounds like some great bread! What I used is indeed sourdough but I can't remember whether I got it from TJ's or my local Sprouts which has recently improved their bread offerings. I know TJ's partners with local bakeries here, too, and they seem to have made some recent changes as well. I slice and store it in a ziplock in the freezer so I don't have the original packaging to check. But the Cuisi steam oven makes such great toast - it's the star of the show! When starting from frozen, I like to give it 2-3 min on steam bake to get it all evenly thawed out and then switch to toasting. Perfect!

Inspired by @Anna N's western posted yesterday. I would like catsup with this but the bottle in the fridge says "best by 6-13-2011" so I subbed in some sriracha.

Isn't it? I woke up wanting this for breakfast!

I just wanted to thank @KitchenQueen for starting this thread and all the other posters for contributing as it encouraged me to pull out the Anova I got almost a year ago and play with it, which has been fun. I know there is a ton of information here on eG, but trying to sort it all out was a bit overwhelming so I did appreciate this suggestion: Based on that, I went to the store and picked up some salmon, chicken breasts and pork chops to play with. The salmon came out beautifully. I butterflied the chicken breast and made chicken cordon bleu yesterday and the pork chops are on deck for today. I noticed that Kenji has a "How to Get Started With Sous Vide Cooking" piece over on Serious Eats and I plan to try the steak and carrots as part of my curriculum while I do more reading and research on the threads here. Why did I have it sitting around for a year? Well I ordered it, thinking it would be a good way for me (a recovering vegetarian) to learn to cook things like those mentioned for my mother who was coming to live with me and was accustomed to more animal-protein-centric meals. By the time it arrived, things had changed and I just put it away, thinking to gift it to my brother at some point. I may still pack it up and ship it off to him but I'll play with it a bit more. If I keep it, I think I would probably use it most often for fish, but we'll see. Anyway, thanks for the nudge!

Yesterday, I spotted an Amazon Warehouse offering (damaged packaging) on the Searzall @ $69. It was gone next time I looked and I decided it was just as well as I probably wouldn't use it that much. But this is good to know in case I change my mind......

My dad used to make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches on toast. He said his mother taught him to put butter on the toast, under the peanut butter, "so it doesn't get stuck going down!" . I bet that sandwich with the artisan PB and Benton's bacon would be superb! I did think of your banana jam, @kayb, when I looked at my bananas this AM but I decided they were still OK for open-face use. I think I'd need to cover up that banana jam with another piece of bread as I don't think the color would be all that appealing!

Peanut butter and banana on whole wheat toast. Grapes, coffee.

Chicken cordon bleu (using leftover holiday ham that will likely last me until summer), twice-baked potato (I'm down to 4 leftover baked potatoes from NYE) and veg:

Ah, I should have noticed that and welcomed you out of lurkdom instead of to the forum! I think I lurked and read eG for about 5 years before I joined and then I rarely posted, too. There seemed to be so many accomplished people here that I was rather intimidated. I know I've learned more by posting, but I'll always be a back-of-the-room lurker at heart!