haresfur

One pot pressure cooker white bean and chicken chili. Can't seem to get green salsa here (one of the big grocery chains used to have it). So I used some day-glow green Thai Sriracha. It did the job along with the pickled birds eye chiles I put in when cooking the chook.

The the round area you can see around the burners are slightly raised above the surface. It is hard to tell from the photos. I like that because gunk tends to flow away from the burner rather than in underneath where it will remain forever. The burner assemblies pull out for cleaning. They are a touch finnicky to get back seated properly. No real problem but it can be a bit surprising if they are not correct. I really like the shallow pan and the anodised surface. I confess to not taking a lot of care cleaning the trivets but they don't accumulate too much goo. As is common here, the oven is a separate unit mounted in the bench underneath.

Not familiar with that particular cooktop but it is almost certainly European like all other moderate to high end products here. It seems to be basically a wok burner being used for other high btu cooking. I have moved away from using mine to sear meat because the oil spatter tends to ignite the pan in a somewhat terrifying way. Still good for getting a large canning pot going. Here are a few photos of my Asko. The first shows the wok burner with the wok ring on. I have a flat bottom wok so I don't use that. Also it isn't the highest power burner so I use both rings. It is set up to use either the central wok flame alone or both. I would rather it was set up to use either the outer ring or both so I could adjust the wide heat without having the wok flame scorch the centre. The second photo shows both flames going. Guess I need to clean some jets. The third is just the wok flame. The anodised metal pan below the burners is very shallow and reasonably easy to clean. That is one of the things that attracted me over Bosch and Miele (note we had problems with the Asko electric oven and replaced it with a Bosch.) Last time I was in the store that supplied it, they had a version with a gas wok burner and induction for the others.

I agree. Induction is so much safer, although I developed a bad habit of picking spilled food up with my fingers and throwing it back into the pan. I finally figured out the magic sequence to turn on my Ikea portable burner after about a year of just hitting buttons in random order until something worked. Knobs would be nice but are harder to clean. I think I've said before that the biggest thing for me is to have fine settings for the power level. To me it is more important to be able to control the heat at the low end rather than the absolute power. Also, it is better if it drops the power rather than just cycling it on and off.

I was kind of disappointed at the food in the airport but I wasn't after fancy. They have what is supposed to be a 24 hour "hawker centre" but most of the stalls were closed in the evening. I was probably still suffering from the heat and humidity during the day but had to eat, so probably not the best test. The food I did have was ok - certainly better than Lufthansa.

Overnight frost. Usually no more than a few degrees and not every night but this has been a cold year. So it's put the beds to bed at night and uncover them late morning.

Wouldn't that make it a salad?

I still haven't become used to winter vegetable growing being a thing but I'm making some progress. This year's attempt includes cauliflower, spinach, rainbow silverbeet (chard), a few volunteer mustard greens, garlic, and fennel. Oh and I spread some more parsley seeds under a rosebush to try to even out the boom & bust cycle. I had a little success with cauliflower before - it seems to like the cold and doesn't get decimated by cabbage moths at this time of year. I usually get a little garlic but not great - probably because we haven't been diligent about picking the best cloves to plant. I have some along a fence in the front of the house along with some in pots in a cold frame that may get planted later. I have planted most of the spinach and silverbeet but still have a couple in a cold frame to hedge my bets. I have rigged up some cover at night out of shade cloth, plastic pots, and old patio furniture for the raised beds because of the frosty weeks we have been having. Ugly but so far things are surviving.

It grows in an aquaculture system that uses running water, not a natural stream. And the water in ponds moves, just more slowly than what we usually call streams. It is simply a question of degree. The aquaculture system needs to provide the right amount of flow in the right depth of water over a larger area than you would find on the unmodified banks of running water that you would find in mountain streams.

Kind of somewhere between. It grow in running water but extensively modified from natural streams

I'm impressed that you have a source of flake that you know is fresh and really flake. I tend to avoid it at the fish and chips shop because my understanding is that you often get some other species and because of sustainability issues. Looks good.

Nice report. I think it is important to keep the sauerkraut completely submerged. I never have enough liquid come out of the cabbage and top up with brine. I just gathered up the courage to check a batch I started a couple of months ago. Bad timing for here but It is a balance of finding cabbage at a reasonable price and getting too far into winter. I was going to do it in quart jars but the maker of my fermenting lids said to use larger ones and I didn't have any. So opted to use my crock - which was only about 1/3 full. With the cold house, I was worried about it not bubbling much. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised that the liquid surface was very clean with no strange things growing. The cabbage tasted more or less like sauerkraut but not sour enough. I opted to leave it and see if it improves with even more time. Decent crunch. I may have added too much caraway seed.

The one fennel plant that survived last summer never developed a bulb. But now it is sprouting pups. Trying to decide how many I dare keep.

The young woman at the Deli counter asked if it was ok if she snapped the kabana in half. Order has been restored to the universe.

If you go, try to pick up some wasabi leaves, too. I haven't tried them but I read they are interesting greens with some of the wasabi root snap to them.

I bought wasabi from a grower in Tasmania but that probably doesn't help you. They would only ship the rhysome by express post

Love the haresfur bowl

That chook looks perfect

Not something that interests me but I'm always impressed with Breville engineering. Price is relative. I mean there are people who will spend as much money on a chef's knife that I'm sure will do as good a job. Probably slower but easier to clean.

An update on this. We are well into winter, getting several nights in a row of frost and above freezing days. The experiment is going very well with more tomatoes ripening on the vine enough to bring indoors to complete after they start changing colour. These are on the south side of the house, which is the shady side in this hemisphere and don't get a lot of sun at this time of year but may get some tempering from the brick wall. They aren't the best tomatoes but that may be due to whatever the seeds came from. You can see the grey water overflow that happens when the pipe to the back of the property backs up, which is how I assume the seeds arrived. I'm sure it isn't a design that would be allowed these days. I was going to take a new picture but someone decided to harvest.

The little bit of vinegar from my birdseyes doesn't seem to make much difference, for what that's worth. You could always add some baking soda.

I think it helps the bean flavour, but by the time everything is put together it is hard to tell. I have to say I haven't noticed that dull bean flavour you sometimes get. I do the black beans in water. No Rancho Gordo here.

I add a spoonful of pickled birdseye chiles to the cooking water in my stovetop pressure cooker but don't usually soak. I don't know how instant pots work, but when pressure cooking it is important to let the pot cool and release the pressure naturally, otherwise the beans boil inside and turn to mush. When I make chicken and white bean chili, I add the birdseyes to the water when cooking the chook, take the chook out to shred, then cook the beans in the chicken stock. Black beans turn out better cooked in my La Chamba pot on the cooktop, though. Still add the chiles

I was going to put this in the Australia and New Zealand forum but I wonder if it is unique to us or cross-cultural. New to me Australian subculture - snapping the kabana. Apparently kabana originated in Poland but somehow became common here. I now know a kabana is a long skinny Polish sausage, kind of like a non-spicy pepperoni. Somehow I had missed that and that Australians have embraced kabana. When you buy one at the deli counter, they typically snap it in half to wrap it. According to the internet, only a mad person would want their kabana whole, but supposedly deli workers are trained to ask before snapping in case they encounter such a person. I, of course, had to buy one. The clerk snapped it in half without asking. I was very disappointed. Tastes good, though How do you eat kabana? Do you get it snapped in half when buying? Do they ask first?

Welcome. Many years ago I went to a Sri Lankan restaurant in Minneapolis. The food was amazing. The menu had strong instructions to people who hadn't eaten there before not to order hotter than medium and that they would bring you condiments to adjust the heat upward. These were indeed hot but also had exquisite flavour so I ended up eating very spicy food, just because they were so good.