Chris Hennes

Yeah, make sure you check out the DIY Microwave Popcorn topic.

I kept them in there, it didn't seem worthwhile to strain them out.

I have a very similar device for paint cans, it works very well on them. Seems like it ought to work fine.

Are you trying to reduce the fat, or change the flavor, or texture, or what?

I played around today with a "new" way of extracting the flavor from the morels, borrowing from a Modernist Cuisine technique for infusing cream: I took four big morels, washed and chopped, and added them to about a half cup of cream and vacuum sealed it. I infused that sous vide at 185°F for 4 hours, and then used that as the cream for making a pasta sauce today. It was really effective, it amped up the morel flavor incredibly. I also used tarragon instead of thyme today: a nice change of pace, though to be honest I think I prefer the thyme all else being equal. (Ingredients in the sauce were morels, morel-infused cream, cognac, and tarragon.)

I haven't yet, but since I have so many, perhaps tomorrow. The tarragon is huge right now anyway, I need to find a use for it!

I'm not sure I can say it's my favorite, but an excellent way to use morels is in an omelette. Tonight I made a sauce of morels, thyme, cognac, and cream (I think it's one of Peterson's, but I'm not sure of it).

Morels are starting to pop here in Oklahoma, after this week's heavy rains and warm weather: here is today's haul, about a pound and a quarter Anyone else out hunting?

Hummus Royale indeed! He just kept adding stuff! So, it's only kind of a mortar and pestle: same idea, but much, much bigger.

Here's how I used the first half: Just cooked the rice is the liquid, then added sautéed carrots and asparagus, plus some of the leftover lentils. Delicious.

I'll add to the chorus, I think that Ciabatta looks just about perfect.

Good call, that stuff was intense.

Mortar and pestle, I'd imagine, no? Sounds an awful lot like "work."

I've used a couple different beers as well as just water, trying to match the flavor of the cheeses to the liquid: I don't think I'd do white wine and cheddar, personally, but maybe gruyere?

At this year's eG Candy & Confection Conference eG member tikidoc pointed out that there is another use for heat guns besides melting chocolate: roasting coffee. Has anyone else around here tried this? What have your experiences been?

Same here: tentative on me and my +1.

What cheese are you thinking for the white wine M&C?

That's a lot of flour, and a long baking time, almost more like biscotti than bars. Still, the flavor combination sounds like a winner.

Dave, I think 350g is probably the right serving size, I think I got four salad-sized portions out of it when all was said and done (I also have a lot of leftover lentils, I think we'll eat this again this weekend). So, this is the closest I have come so far to actually making the recipe as written: Note first off the omission of the foie gras cherry: I didn't feel like dealing with it today. Second, I only had sour cherries on hand, so anyplace the recipe calls for Bing or Ranier they were swapped in. Last, I couldn't find green hazelnuts or chervil, so omitted them. I used red radish instead of black. I couldn't find chamomile essential oil, so omitted it. Phew, that's a long list for it feeling like I got pretty close! Well, the upshot is that this is a fantastic-tasting dish. The flavor and texture combinations are spot on. It's not actually that tough or elaborate, either, compared to all the other stuff in V5. If you like lentils I'd suggest making this, even if you have to omit some components (don't omit the cherry vinaigrette, though, it's great).

Four fried chickens and a Coke?

I'm doing final assembly here, and ran into another glitch: the recipe calls for 175g of vinaigrette to 350g of lentils. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that one of those numbers is a typo. I'd swear that last time I made this it was something like 10g of vinaigrette, but I can't find where I got that number. Does anyone recall seeing it anywhere? I'll just go by taste here tonight, but this will drive me crazy.

Tonight for dinner I'm making the lentil salad from Modernist Cuisine: as a byproduct of cooking the lentils sous vide with a massive sachet of vegetables, I have about 500mL of absolutely delicious cooking liquid leftover. I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for what to do with this lentil stock, it's too delicious to throw out.

The next component of the dish is a hazelnut brittle: nothing modernist here, just a standard brittle with hazelnuts and cherries. I've never had a hazelnut brittle though, and I love it. A note about preparing it, though: make sure you chop your hazelnuts really fine, the larger chunks will prevent you from rolling it thin enough. Obvious, I know, but of course I still screwed it up and had some pieces too large.

Right, though I still wouldn't be surprised if your guess is correct and they intended fresh blossoms, just given the fact that the dried blossoms basically absorbed all of the water and it had to be pressed out of them.

Well, I think it ought to be pretty potent in this case: this liquid is used to dilute sherry vinegar in a ratio of 3:1 vinegar:tea, and then gelled into tiny little cubes. So it's a seasoning element, and the chamomile needs to cut through the vinegar. What I ended up doing was pressing on the tea to extract as much liquid as I could (I got about 30g), then I made a half batch of the gel (using 25g), so that my agar:liquid ratio was still 1%. That seemed to work well, and I wound up with intensely vinegary little nuggets that still had a clear chamomile flavor to them. I think these will probably end up working very well in the lentils: