haresfur

A coworker from NM flew back to our DC office with a carryon cooler of frozen Hatch chiles. Dedication that's almost up there with my parents flying from Winnipeg to Halifax with a suitcase full of frozen beef roasts. I can't imagine what the baggage handler thought of the blood dripping out at baggage claim.

My parents had a half-dozen carefully kept scallop shells for baking some sort of scallop au gratin for dinner parties. Wouldn't be too surprised if my brother still has them.

Online order since I was out of Benedictine, homemade Pimento Dram, and (heaven forbid) low on Fernet Branca.

I read something ages ago about it having more nutrients if you don't wash it, but now mostly because I don't see any starch coming off and can't be arsed.

My rice is grown in Australia, we don't use night soil although I'm sure there is a little bird and kangaroo poo. I'm also confident they clean it before packaging and certainly any white rice won't have anything that may have landed on the bran. We used to sing a hymn in church when I was a kid to teach us about people in the rest of the world, "Planting rice is never fun, bent from dawn til day is done"

I don't wash my rice. Sorry if that is offensive.

Am I the only one bothered by all that plastic packaging? Tomatoes that look like that here come loose.

You had my hopes up. Too bad the name Bloody Caesar is taken.

I will never again wonder why my taste buds don't seem to react to cilantro because I bought Italian parsley for the salsa instead.

Do they froth the tea like matcha in Japanese tea ceremony?

Well, contrary to our experience last time and contrary to what Asko told us, all it took was cycling the power off for >30 seconds so things would reset. 🙄

I will never again buy an Asko oven because it will often throw an err 06 code and stop working after a power failure. This has something to do with the self-cleaning interlock and requires a repair person to come out and poke at it with a screw driver while reciting magic incantations. I'll try to watch more closely this time. It required multiple calls to the store we bought it from, to Asko, and to the repair company to get them scheduled to come out and I'm not happy about going 2 weeks without an oven because of a power glitch. Aside from that and some stupid design of the controls, it's a nice oven and holds temperature spectacularly well.

Hellman's and Best Buy are the same, the one you get depends on where in the US you live

Interesting, I have done pretty well with terracotta. Although my grass trees haven't grown into tree form and are just low spiky bushes at ten years old. They are committed to the pots because the roots are extremely fragile and don't transplant well. The pot the tree was in wasn't as porous as some because I made it out of a terracotta with sand clay body and fired it to a slightly higher temperature to make it frost proof. But it still has some porosity, unlike the glazed pots. Weirdly, I haven't had great luck with my raised beds. That may be mostly due to the earwigs.

I posted in the gardening thread about my limes which refuse to fill out to a reasonable size The only thing I could figure out to do with them was to make lime marmalade, which I have never tried before. I cut the limes, squeezed out what little juice they had, and got rid of the tiny seeds. Sliced the peel in about 0.5-1.0 mm slices because it looked better for the small size and because my new gyuto was awesome for it. Did a mind-meld of a couple of recipes. Had a bit of trouble hitting the pectin setting temperature because my digital thermometer was bouncing around a lot, even with continuous stirring. Went ahead and boiling water processed three pints and had a little left to go into the fridge. The flavour doesn't seem quite right, I think because there was so little juice. Probably could have added some lemon juice. Or maybe the Rose's marmalade we have been eating contains weird shit. I think it will be nice enough to eat, anyway, although Jazzy was not too impressed.

Speaking of root bound. I have a dwarf lime that will actually set fruit but they remain tiny. Someone at the farmers market suggested that it might be root bound. Yeah, it had been in the same pot for 5 or more years. I nervously coaxed it out of the pot because it was in the best terracotta pot I ever made. But it came out well. I trimmed the roots around the edges, thinned the branches, and took off most of the limes. Put it in a half wine barrel. We shall see.

When I lived in Canada we called it Krap Dinner. Now I call it Mac and Sleeze Sometimes home-made doesn't cut it and you just crave KD

The floods in the northern East coast of Australia have wiped out a lot of the vegetable crop, particularly lettuce and the ground has been too wet to plant more. So we get widely varying prices of different veg and probably some gouging - a friend posted a picture of of snap peas from China that were going for over $30/kg. It reminds me of when the banana crop was wiped out by a cyclone and bananas were up to $19/kg. I went on a trip to the US and went into Costco to buy 3 lbs of bananas a $0.39/lb, then sat in the parking lot and ate as many as I could.

I think I'll try the syrup in a collins next. The flavour isn't overwhelming which is why I didn't want to use too assertive a gin. I hope I don't find anything really great to do with it because I might be tempted to harvest the rose hips again. The infection was pretty freaky. It seemed to be clearing up on its own but my Dr. put me on antibiotics for something unrelated and that knocked it out.

Came up with a drink to use some of my rose-hip vinegar and syrup that wasn't too bad and decided it should be immortalized in Kindred Cocktails for posterity. Besides I'm proud of the name, Floribunda, because it is a rose shrub. Rim-shot, Ba-dum. Might up the gin next time.

Made Massaman curry with some goat "curry pieces" at 60 C for about 30 hours. The sous vide was mainly to get them tender and not too goaty. I de-boned and took the meaty parts out for a fine dice. Then threw them in with everything else and cooked as normal. The meat ended up pretty good although the yield was low. The dogs should like the scraps that weren't too fatty.

I discovered a bottle of the Maidenii I bought at the farmer's market during lockdown and then stashed away to be forgotten. It was better than their amaro but a bit citrusy. My second attempt at matching it worked pretty well. Used Four Pillars Gin and Castelvetrano olives. Four Pillars is the best Australian gin I've found so far.

I thought about letting people know this popped up when I was doing a search on risotto, but decided I'd let you have a guess 🙂

The All Clad pan is my go-to for tenderizing chicken.