haresfur

I looked into Acacia a while ago because it was one of the few ok looking end grain boards I could find near where I live. There are a huge number of Acacia species but it sounded like the boards were likely rather hard or maybe have some silica in the wood. Don't quote me on that last bit. But the internet opinions ranged from probably ok to you can probably do better

You could try Wondra flour, but on advice from an Asian cooking show, I've stopped using corn starch and use potato starch. It's very forgiving and I plan on trying it for other non-flour thickeners. Make a slurry in water and stir in.

I will never again take a pack of frozen pierogies, handmade in a small community outside Winnipeg, and thaw them before cooking. The instructions said to boil from frozen but we were going to fry without boiling. Anyway, I didn't read the instructions and we now have a gooey mass of dough and cottage cheese to fry up.

Oooh. I didn't realise this is the season. My parents always cooked lobster for New Year's. It does kind of remind me of the time our prospectors went out early one Sunday morning and we had er, poached salmon for dinner. 😉

I take no joy in this, nor in the media and social media frenzy. I strongly suspected her guilt, without hanging on every word from the trial, so I suppose this is the better of the possible outcomes. At the end of the day three people are dead and one was nearly killed and had his life upended.

I read that Chinese black cardamom and Indian black cardamom are different. Do you know which you used?

With good timing for this topic, The Cookup With Adam Liaw played a past episode where guest Victor Liong made Biang Biang noodles. We get the show every day and it is hard to figure out which are old episodes and find them on line. This one was Season 6, episode 36 for those of you who can access SBS on demand. It was really good to see the process of making the noodles and the rest of the dish. He emphasized that it possible for the home cook. Watching the noodle making was a blast and the other guest was really excited to try. One of the hints was to press a chopstick into the log of dough before stretching and then pull it apart along that line. Looked like a second set of hands helped with that.

I consider chopping and grinding to be very different processes, and that's the point. Grinding tears the meat fibers apart whereas even finely chopped meat has intact pieces so the texture is better in this dish. If I recall, it is usually recommended to chop steak tartare rather than grinding hamburger. Gordon Ramsey says even using a food processor doesn't produce the right texture (whether or not you consider him an expert...)

For what it's worth: I can't seem to find the episode on line, but on Adam Liaw's The Cookup, chef Jerry Mai prepared the chicken for Larb by chopping it finely with a cleaver and said it made for a much better dish than using ground chicken. She used some sort of Vietnamese chook.

Absolutely. I make the best sleazy at-home fast food. If you can't be bothered to clean a rack, put on baking paper on a tray but it gets a bit soggy. Do what you like. Cook lower if you don't want char.

I just marinate boneless chicken thighs in bottled peri-peri marinade overnight. More surface area than bone-in. Beerenberg if I can find it, otherwise the ubiquitous Nando's (chain restaurant who also sell their sauce and marinade in grocery stores). Put on a wire rack in the convection oven and blast at oh, 210 degrees until done. I like the char.

A few thoughts. The database is what recipe Gullet might have been but it always was clunky and pretty much withered away. Too bad imo. I agree it is important to be able to cite the source. I think a good model to look at is Kindred Cocktails. It compiles a vast number of cocktail recipes, searchable by name and/or ingredients, links back to sources (a number of which point back to eG), and does a pretty good job of capturing variations on ratios etc. You can also have the KC team "curate" recipes and rate them. I just had one curated, kind of by accident, and it was an interesting process. i.e. turns out there was a cocktail of the same name, slightly older but completely different (that wasn't in their database). We ultimately agreed to avoid considering them variations with the same name, because they were different drinks and slightly modified the name of mine. It was a neat thing to go through, but of course requires a dedicated group running things. Another really important feature is that the users can keep their own "cocktail book", including their creations and ones they like added by other people. Saves a lot of repeating searches. For food, it would be nice to integrate my cookbook recipes with my motley collection of bookmarked websites. Which brings us to AI. I guess I'm a curmudgeon, but that would probably be enough to keep me from using your search engine. At this point I feel AI has lots of issues and frankly, I don't want to help with training it. So far I feel AI needs me more than I need it. Good luck with your project

I like this idea and think you could also do rice with salt, rice with sour, rice with sweet to show that none of those cover the umami flavour and that the umami dishes have more in common with each other than they do with the other tastes

Christmas lunch. Clockwise from top left: sangria with nectarines and orange, prawns fried in Korean chili oil, gravlox, savoury biscuits, soft blue cheese, Camembert, smoked ham, Swiss cheese, bresaola, homemade fermented pickles, marinated artichoke hearts, olives, marinated eggplant, sun dried tomatoes. Didn't even break into the Camembert, much to Dalmatian Jazzy's chagrin (she loves Camembert but still made out ok). We were stuffed so are having Pavlova for tea. The noisy miner birds ate my ripe blueberries so only mango on the pav.