haresfur

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.

Pork tenderloin with fennel and apples (and onion) I was going to sous vide the pork but found this recipe that roasted the tenderloin on top of the fennel and apple and decided to give it a go. Not too bad. They had you keep the root end on the onion to hold it together, but I don't think that works. I went a bit heavy with the rub on the pork, which was seared before roasting. Roasting the fennel tones down the anise flavour. Maybe would make again.

Finally named this drink and had a couple last night so decided to repost Viva Maria! 1.5 oz tequila - recently I've been using bianco but reposado should work 0.5 oz green walnut liqueur - made by a friend so I assume it is equivalent to nocino 2 tsp Benedictine 7 drops Xocolatl Mole bitters I serve over ice but you could stir and strain. A lemon twist wouldn't hurt. First was per spec with silver tequila and my friends homemade green walnut liqueur that I really need to use up. Nice but too sweet. My advice is to make your nocino less sweet if you are planning on mixing with it. Second was with reposado and my nocino. Balance was better but I think the silver tequila works better. A lime twist didn't really work, although it would be in keeping with the Mexican theme. Will have to try a lemon twist sometime. I am overly proud of the name because of the Benedictine, because, well you really should see the movie (incidentally is not as good as I thought as a teenager watching late night French-Canadian tv, which had much more liberal content policies than the English channels). Still worth a watch.

It looks like one of my cucumber plants might survive but I don't have my hopes up. My dill is getting rangy and flowering, so I decided to start fermenting some pickles using over-packaged, over-priced "Qukes." They are marketed as a snack for kids, which I suppose isn't a bad thing. It probably would have been cheaper to buy Polski Ogorkis. Started with a mix of black pepper, allspice berries, and brown mustard seeds along with a grape leaf and 6 small bay leaves. I mixed up a 4% brine including the cucumber weight. About 6 lightly smashed garlic cloves (not shown) And some dill Trimmed the blossom ends of the cukes. Hope I cut enough off to prevent the pickles turning to mush. Turns out they didn't pack into the 1 liter jar so I had to repack them into a 2 L, which was a bit of a mess. and I spooned out some floating spices, Added more brine and topped with a plastic bag full of brine as a weight. It's been hot and humid here so the house is warm so I tucked everything into an evaporative cooler to try and keep the fermentation temperature down. Now I wait.

Looks like you could have bought one for next year, too

I've had worse turkey than the 1 kg boneless breast thing that came in a foil baking tray and I've had worse gravy than the packaged chicken gravy heated in the microwave. Roasted carrots were decent, but the fennel fronds that were in with them were inedible and didn't really flavour the carrots. Mash with roasted garlic and jarred cranberry.

This is such a shame. I friend took me there a few years ago and the baked goods were a level above anything else I have experienced Customers 'heartbroken' after fire closes Sub Rosa Bakery for 'foreseeable future'

My vegetarian sister's tradition is to cook Indian for Christmas. I can get on board with that. Is making paneer difficult?

Beautiful bowl! Nicely filled.

Welp, I'm embarrassed to admit that I totally forgot that I had planted some white onions. No wonder most of the elephant garlic looked weird. Very nice on burgers tonight.

Pavlova is traditional Christmas dessert in Australia and New Zealand

I was actually thinking of starting a topic on how to break down a chicken because I do it quite differently from what's described in Ad Hoc at Home. I remember seeing an Italian cooking show where a housewife did it entirely with kitchen shears. I'm sure everyone has their own preferred method.