haresfur

Fresh figs are very delicate and don't stay ripe for long so they are probably best for small local vendors. Dried figs still taste ok and are good for cooking. A vendor at my farmers market sells nice caramelised figs which are a happy medium.

I knew about fig wasps but it is surprising how widespread fig trees are around the world given how specialised the pollination is. I have a rather sad fig tree in a pot that gets a few figs a year, even though there aren't that many of the trees around. There must be a lot of unsuccessful wasps.

We go through a lot of winter squash, which we generically call pumpkin here, because we feed it to the dogs, along with their ground meat and brown rice. I usually go for butternut and Japanese pumpkin. The dogs get theirs roasted and may get the chopped up skin. We often put it in a tagine with chicken and red lentils. The red lentils thicken the sauce nicely. Pumpkin soup is nice in limited quantities. We also like pumpkin risotto. A very versatile vegetable.

fucking earwigs!

Yes it can be saved. I put chips at least that deep in the cheap cleaver I inherited from my father. I used a file like I would use to sharpen an axe. This was the first time I used it after repairing the chips he put in it. The hammer marks on the spine are all his, though.

Guess I'm going to have to buy some shiso plants or seeds. Thanks everyone.

I could use some help with herb identification. I planted some micro-herbs that came with my covid-lockdown meal from Masons of Bendigo, reported here. The green shiso survived a few replantings and ended up in a wine barrel, happily re-seeding itself while the lemon balm didn't survive, or so I thought. This spring's crop is coming along well, but when I picked some it smelled very lemony. Hmm. I don't remember that before, but maybe it is because there is fresh growth. So now I don't know if I have shiso or lemon balm. Maybe some lemon balm was quietly lurking with the shiso ready to mount a coup. Unfortunately I ripped volunteer shiso out of another pot so I can't compare to that. Can anyone tell me what this is?

One of my father's standards was fried spaghetti. He would put leftover spaghetti in a cast iron pan with butter on high heat and fry until it was crispy to the point of charring then scramble some eggs in with it. I am far more refined. I use olive oil, don't burn it and usually add oregano, garlic, and maybe even some veg. If you rinse out the bowl and fork used to beat the eggs and serve it in that, then I reckon it counts as a one pan meal. I also don't drop cigarette ashes in the pan.

What happens when a Thai/Australian cookbook author "partners" with Angostura to come up with a dish? You get Lemon, Lime, and Bitters Thai chicken. (Lemon, Lime, and Bitters is a popular drink here). Conveniently I had a chook in the fridge to break down and coriander bolting (already!) in the garden for the coriander root. I made a few modifications due to ingredients on hand and because I wanted to finish off a bottle of Fees Aromatic Bitters. Found I had to reduce the marinade down a lot to use as a glaze for the last step. I thought it was really tasty. edit: I totally forgot the rice

Not a place I was expecting to see in my small city. My partner is overseas and I mentioned to my barista that I should have some duck, since she isn't big on it. He told me about this Korean BBQ in the city centre and said I couldn't miss it. Decided on a duck wrap since I wanted the salad. Not huge but very nice. The skin wasn't crispy, but was ok. I'll have to try the crispy pork (hanging on the far right) next time. I sat at a picnick table outside to eat since it was a rare sunny day for our wet winter/spring and because I didn't want to share with the Dalmatians.

I don't know... a fuzzy-logic rice cooker is very cool and high-tech but a fuzzy-logic controller for a nuclear plant sounds worrisome.

Report back if you die

For what it is worth, bamboo steaming baskets are still used for sticky rice in Thailand and Laos.

Freeze your own cold-brew and add hot water

The duck spent the night uncovered in the fridge and the frosting hardened up. I've never made anything like the fluffy frosting called for in the recipe but it seems like it might not have held up as well. What do you think? The duck was successfully transported to the Kyabram Wildlife Park with plastic wrap and spent the time until lunch safe in the staff's office. They were impressed(?) Well they thought it was lots of fun. Our friends were a bit bemused. I think the book was after their time. We ate from the tail forward to the head and neck and gave the front to the park staff. I'm calling it a success.

TL;DR: Making a Duck Cake is really as painful as it is made out to be and I think I made it sufficiently daggy. The Women's Weekly published a children's birthday cake book, by Pamela Clark in 1980. Children would pour over the book to pick out the cake they wanted for their birthday and it became a cultural icon and a thing of nostalgia. Some of the cakes were particularly difficult to construct and in an interview, the author suggested about one, "If you're picking up this book for the very first time, turn to the tip truck and glue those pages together, and never look back. It's not an easy cake to make. Trust me. I know." Fast forward to 2021 and the children's cartoon show Bluey was becoming very popular and was picked up in Europe and by the Disney Channel. And one of the episodes had the father, Bandit, attempting to make a duck cake at the insistence of his daughter. Now, in various corners of the internet, people are posting their attempts at recreating the duck cake. Women's Weekly has kindly published the recipe with a photo of what it should look like. I don't have kids, but decided to have a go for my partner's birthday/retirement party. She was dubious. I couldn't leave the recipe alone because I don't like cake mixes so I used my mom's quick sponge cake recipe and Betty Crocker's butter cream frosting. I kind of messed up the cake by trying to double the batch, which wouldn't fit into my mixer and the cake ended up too soft and kept ripping up as I frosted it. Carving the head and neck took two attempts and still didn't seem right. Still it was going ok until the tail collapsed. I soldiered on, using many extra bamboo skewers to hold it together. So I present to you my daggy duck cake rev. 1.0: I have a feeling it is not going to survive the hour-long trip to the party venue.

Related: There should be a law against chefs being smokers because that reduces your sensitivity to salt. At the least they should seek feedback from non-smokers rather than saying, "Home cooks always under-salt."

I feel like this topic is devolving into discussing what is considered quick rather than considering what is considered a meal. I mean, I'll spread some corn chips on a plate, throw on some olives, salsa, and grated cheese and microwave for a minute and a half, but if I want a quick meal, I'll just dip the chips in a jar of salsa.

I was confused by this at first because it sounded like you were using graham cracker crumbs to make graham crackers and I wondered if you had discovered some sort of graham perpetual motion. Did some googling and found that people recommend Arnott's Granita buisquits as a substitute for graham crackers in Australia but I'm not sure how well they would work out for S'mores.

I had one of those. The problem was that the lock was loose so I was forever poking my leg or finger with the tip. Even if it was in the lock position there was enough play that I would get stabbed.

Had a dog that took a liking to my patio tomatoes. I was concerned because the neighbours had an unfenced yard and garden. Then one day I saw her standing by the neighbour's back door. The door opened and a hand reached out to give her a tomato.

@btbyrd can probably answer better than I because in my case it means I need to buy more knives to practice my photography. Gives you some sense of how the knife is ground/sharpened.

After using my last purchase for a while, I decided that the blade was way too thick for most things I wanted it for. It will still get some use but for most heavy tasks like cutting up pumpkin there is nothing like the cheap old crappy chef's knives. So I bought this, which I like an awful lot. Ginsan stainless steel.

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.