Chris Hennes

So Amazon says my preorder date was July 16. Dare I hope that was early enough to grab one of the first 500?! Fingers crossed...

Vogon poetry indeed: "(caution: with to high Brühen blatzen the sausages)." Priceless. That recipe has eggs in it, and "1 EL of the Green pepper": anyone have any idea what's going on here?

Ah, excellent info all (Ruhlman's book spells them "Jagerwurst" in the recipe and "Jaegerwurst" in the index. Doh!). Oliver, what are the two books you are looking at? I don't suppose you want to give the article an editing pass?

I was working on the WikiGullet Project article on jagerwurst this afternoon and was unable to find any good information on it under that name: the only stuff in Wikipedia is called "Jadgwurst" but it sounds like the same thing. Does anyone know for sure if that is the case? Also, in the Ruhlman Charcuterie book it's a pork sausage, but the Wikipedia article seems to indicate it's beef and pork. Naturally, neither the WP article nor Ruhlman cite any sources for this info. Does anyone know anything about it? Have you ever made it? What are the seasonings you think exemplify it?

I agree about the green beans: I had some timing issues trying to get the noodles and beans on the plate at the same time, and so undercooked the beans (unnecessarily, it turned out, because the noodles took much longer to deal with than I expected). Re-reading the eggplant recipe it seems like it does call for larger pieces of eggplant, but I'm not sure that's the change I'll make next time. I liked the size of the pieces, I just need to cook them less.

Right: that's the reason I have to buy seeds every year. I don't want to be creating inadvertent hybrids, and the separation distance needed to prevent it is quite large. Larger than my entire property, in fact. So there's no way to avoid it.

Hope springs eternal... and the weather is fabulous right now, it's hard not to think about spring. The OSU extension page on peas suggested planting them in late November or early December so that they come up right away in the spring and beat the heat. This is the first year I've tried it, so we'll see how it goes! I order my seeds from Tomato Growers Supply Company.

Twice-Cooked Pork (hui guo rou) (pp 194–196) Fish-Fragrant Eggplant (yu xiang qie zi) (pp. 285–287) Dinner was kind of a bust tonight, neither of these dishes was very successful. The pork I just though was one-dimensional: it tasted like fermented black beans and little else. The eggplant tasted great, but I overcooked them. No fault of the book's of course, I just let them deep fry too long, they wound up a mushy mess on the plate. The eggplant I'll be trying again, but the twice-cooked pork is probably not going to make my list. Does anyone have a better recipe for this? The writeup in the book makes it sound like a real classic dish. The pork: The eggplant:

I added a bunch of articles on charcuterie based upon their Wikipedia cousins: Soppressata Nduja Sobrassada Capicola Bresaola I think some of the info in them is still wrong, and they aren't very well referenced.

Well, we had our three weeks of winter here in Oklahoma: it sucked, but it's over now. (Right? RIGHT?!) I put peas (the Thomas Laxton variety) in the ground in December, so those should begin to germinate in a couple weeks here. My tomatoes started germinating (indoors) yesterday: this year I'm taking a different approach to selection and focusing entirely on varieties that claim very good heat tolerance. My theory is that any homegrown tomato is better than a supermarket tomato, even if it's not a fancy culinary variety. So this year I'm trying Viginia Sweets, Sioux, Florida 91 hybrid, Homestead 24 F, Arkansas Traveler and Porter's Pride. I've also started some Verde Puebla tomatillos. Last year my peppers did really well, so that's where I'm focusing most of my garden space this season: I went a little crazy with this year's seed order because I couldn't make up my mind. I've got seeds for three varieties of sweet bell peppers (Early Sunsation Hybrid, California Wonder PS, Better Belle Improved), and nine (!) different hot peppers (Poblano L, Chile de Arbol, Ancho San Luis, Pasilla Bajio, Jalapeno M, Aji Red, Long Red Slim Cayenne, Habanero, Serrano). So, other reports? What edibles do you all have planned for this upcoming season? (I know, most of you are still buried under like ten meters of snow... but spring is approaching!)

Just as a side tidbit: modern screw closure manufacturers have developed designs that allow very precise quantities of air to get through the cap. The control is far better than with a cork, with exactly the same benefits. These days the only thing keeping cork enclosures around is tradition and consumer preference.

Traditional Dan Dan Noodles (dan dan mian) (pp. 87–88) Dry-Fried Green Beans 2 (gan bian si ji dou) (pp. 290–291) Tonight I made the other version of Dan Dan Noodles in the book, the one she calls "Traditional": it's still nothing like what hzrt8w mentions uptopic: it's got ground pork in it, and is not at all soup-like. This one has ya cai in it, but is otherwise fairly similar to the "Xi Loaban's Dan Dan Noodles" recipe I posted about earlier. Very spicy, very delicious. To go with it I made some green beans: they were also pretty good, though they would probably have been better if the green beans were younger.

Ruhlman and Polcyn's recipe is all beef, with no added fat at all, so is extremely lean. It works fine if you are making a thin-crust pizza that is cooked quickly, but longer cooking tends to end up with something more like beef jerky on the top. This could be solved, I suppose, by drying it less in the first place, but I have not tried that myself.

Alternately, if you are making pepperoni as a pizza topping, I'd suggest you actually make Soppressata instead: while Rulhman and Polcyn's recipe for pepperone gives a great tasting sausage, its very very low fat content does not give the expected results on a pizza. It's good, but it might not be what you are after.

Wow, to be honest I had not even clicked through that recipe before: I see that it actually calls for saltpeter?! If I was you I would definitely NOT use that recipe. I enjoyed the recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie, which your public library probably has (though it's not at all like the Hormel product that goes by the name "pepperoni").

No, just a quick squash saute. A pickle would have been more appropriate, but I have none on hand.

I think your setup sounds ideal, I'd definitely go for it. And yes, the collagen casings are just fine, in fact many people prefer them for dry-cured applications.

Fish-Fragrant Pork Slivers (yu xiang rou si) (pp.196–198) It's finally warmed up enough to use the wok again (mine is an outdoor model) so I am hoping to tackle a few more recipes from this book this week. First up is a pork stir-fry flavored predominantly with pickled chili paste, shaoxing wine, chinkiang vinegar, and soy sauce. I really enjoyed these flavors, and thought that overall the dish was very successful. I could take or leave the cloud ear mushrooms, though. They were OK, but not thrilling.

Almost all food safety advice out there is anecdotal at best, especially anything you get from the fishmonger at the grocery store: CYA is the order of the day, and mostly based on either bad science, or no science at all. If that fish in the case isn't safe for tartare, it's not safe to eat, period. The temperatures we cook tuna to are far too low to achieve a meaningful reduction in bacteria. (Modernist Cuisine's chapter on food safety is both enlightening and depressing).

Hey Leslie - Yeah, the Rich Text Editor is definitely a work in progress, and uploading images is not really the wiki's strong point to begin with. I pretty much always resort to the old-school editor to add the image the first time. First, go to http://wiki.egullet.org/index.php?title=Special:Upload to upload your image. Then at the top of the wiki article you want to put the image in, type "[[File:MyImageFilename.jpg|thumbnail]]". That usually does the trick, though of course there are a dozen options you can set. You can check out this page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images for more detail than you ever wanted to know.

With that crayfish article there was so much extra stuff I wasn't interested in I simply found it easier to grab a few sentences and jump off from there. But I think individual editors can use whatever approach they want.

Yes, I think I (finally) got that figured out. Of course, time will tell!

We've gotten some reports from people having trouble logging in: the first thing to check is the capitalization of your username. Unfortunately, unlike the forums, the wiki software is case-sensitive (so I have to log in as "Chris Hennes" for example: "Chris hennes" doesn't work). If you have double checked that and are still having problems logging in, please post here so we can look into it.

Indeed, McGee has many pages on rice, though he does not say anything about why cooking it would not work perfectly every time. He points out a number of ways of cooking it, but doesn't mention pot size as an important parameter.

I'm not going until mid-March, but I like to plan my meals well in advance (since eating is most of the reason I travel!). Right now I've got dinners lined up at RDG+Bar Annie, Haven, Stella Sola, and Catalan. I have not even begun pondering lunch...