haresfur

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.

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