Chris Hennes

Next stop, Oklahoma Joe's:

Food is here!

Waiting for our food at BurnCo...

Reports are here:

As planned Here... The line at BurnCo starts early... We arrived at about 9:50 and are tenth:

Fingers crossed, it looks like the weather should be cooperative tomorrow for the event! Rain is arriving here in Norman in a couple hours and should be long gone by drive time tomorrow.

Because I made it myself and it's my baby . It was a ton of work and I'd really, really hate to knock a chunk out of it.

I don't think I was being unduly vigorous with it -- I was chopping up a chicken carcass for stock and gave it enough force to cleanly cut through the backbone in one blow, but not a whole lot more than that. The cleaver weighs quite a bit, though.

What kind of cutting boards do you all use with cleavers? I've never owned a cleaver before, so made the rookie mistake of simply using my normal polycarbonate "meat" board the other night and literally shattered it in one blow. There's no way I'm going to use the thing on the custom-built end grain maple board I use for non-meat ingredients. Is there an inexpensive option?

I disagree---I think the analogy here is more like making a sandwich. If you have access to good bread, go ahead and buy it, but there is something viscerally satisfying about making your own. Plus, something like grenadine is simply not that difficult to make (hell, depending on the recipe, it's exactly as simple to make as simple syrup, given a bottle of pomegranate juice). I wouldn't suggest starting by making your own bitters, but I don't see any reason to discourage making your own flavored syrups if you enjoy cooking.

Yangzhou Fried Rice (p. 258) This is a fairly complex fried rice, with nine inclusions plus chicken stock and Shaoxing wine. I omitted one of the inclusions (the chicken) and increased the amount of pork to compensate. I also used a homemade Lonza as the ham product, which was great, but sort of stole the show. Overall it was a good fried rice.

So the idea is that you plate the noodles "naked" then just give them a quick dip in the soup? Or do you drop them entirely into the soup and then pull them back out with some bits of whatever else is in the base? What's the advantage (or just the appeal) of serving like this?

Peas with Dried Shrimp (p. 153) Sweet and Sour Zucchini (p. 218) Both of these dishes were fine, but not particularly exciting. I think I'd be inclined to skip the soaking step on the dried shrimp so they contribute more of their flavor to the dish. The zucchini dish has very little "sweet and sour" sauce to it, which on the one hand is good (too much can be gross), but honestly with as little as there was it was pretty close to being just stir-fried zucchini. Good in its own right, but not the flavor I was expecting from this dish.

I don't. Hence my request for the recipe.

Ars Technica has an interesting piece today about eating insects: This could be the food of the future—if you can handle it

Could you post a recipe and some details about making your own ramen noodles? Sourcing good ones is a problem here in Oklahoma, I'd love to have a go at making my own. The only noodles I've ever made before are the Italian variety, though.

Can you explain the numbering scheme?

I haven't, I always make my own. One bottle of Pom makes enough grenadine to last me a year (or more!).

The Ultimate Rich and Creamy Vegan Ramen With Roasted Vegetables and Miso Broth J. KENJI LÓPEZ-ALT (Recipe at Serious Eats) First, thanks to @shain for suggesting this recipe. It's a beast---maybe not Modernist Cuisine-levels of complexity, but a far cry from insta-ramen packets. I'd say it took 3-4 hours total, and probably about 2 hours of active cooking. It's one of those recipes where you have to enjoy cooking, or be a really dedicated vegan. The final product is superb, you absolutely don't notice that it's a vegan dish. There is no lingering regret that you didn't use a meat stock as the base, for example. But it takes a lot of work to coax that level of flavor out of vegetables alone. I recommend it wholeheartedly if you like finicky cooking with lots of steps involved, or if you have a staff.

It's available for pre-order here.

Our very own Katie Loeb (@KatieLoeb) has an excellent book on the subject. I'd definitely start with grenadine, since the homemade is far superior to any store-bought that I've ever found.

Clay Bowl Chicken (p. 52) Bo bo ji This is another cold chicken dish that's in my regular rotation. I particularly like the roasted peanuts. I normally add the optional bean sprouts, but I didn't have any today, so instead I sauteed some cabbage and served that under the chicken. Obviously, there is no clay bowl involved in mine. I think this one is definitely worth making--it's a bit more involved than the Cold Chicken with a Spicy Sichuanese sauce, but it's still a very fast prep, taking basically just the amount of time it takes to make rice.

In the US we have Cereality, started in 2001, when one of the founders said he was "inspired to create a home for cereal, away from home for the 95% of the American public who claimed to enjoy it."

Wow, you're not kidding. I definitely think this is worth a try, if only for the challenge!

I cook from this book all the time, but tonight for the first time in a long time I made something I had never made before: Rustic Steamed Squash with Spicy Black Bean Sauce (p. 222) Xiang cun nan gua I liked it quite a bit, I think I'll add it to the rotation. I served it alongside the Cold Chicken with a Spicy Sichuanese Sauce (p. 48), which is another of my favorites (in part because it comes together in five minutes if you've got cold chicken in the fridge).