KennethT

When I was a kid, astronaut ice cream was all the rage...

Last on our odyssey.... ETA this was last night but I was too exhausted to post it. 1 hour flight on a budget airline.... Sweet roll filled with chocolate.

Continuing the airborne buffet... SIN-Bali, Singapore Airlines economy: Singapore carrot cake with prawns. Prawns were perfectly cooked.

And in the airport as we had only a short time.... I had never tried bakwa, basically pork jerky that is brushed with a sweetish sauce and grilled. Damn that stuff is addictive...

About an hour before landing.... Quite pleasant.

A snack.... Sambal ikan bilis bun... Filled with spicy sambal and small dried fish.

"breakfast" .... Nice warm and flaky croissant. Also, the mango with yogurt parfait was good as usual. Black pepper ground pork with noodles (from the regular menu).

On the road again.... Singapore Airlines JFK-SIN, Prem. Economy.... Menus... Poke salad with avocado. The tuna was seared, but raw on the inside. Quite nice. Braised E-fu noodles with chicken (from their Book the Cook menu). Those chillies tasted really hot. Unfortunately the Chinese broccoli was cooked beyond recognition. Otherwise really tasty.

It's Poulet de Bresse! Of course it's expensive!

Thanks... although I don't think the advice given by any of these takes cooking SV into account, especially since the target temp is the same as the bath temp, so overcooking the exterior is impossible. Also, when companies give this kind of advice, a lot of it is "cover your ass" as they don't want to be sued if someone defrosts it by leaving it out on the counter, gets a lot of bacterial growth and someone gets sick. Their advice is the same as the FDA, but none of it takes SV into account.

@Shelby In general, I agree with everyone but I don't know if the others have considered one thing - I had always thought that lobster becomes mushy due to enzymatic action when not frozen. That's why you're always supposed to either buy it live and kill it just prior to cooking or buy it frozen. I worry that defrosting overnight in the refrigerator will leave it for a few hours unfrozen and allowing the enzymes to do their thing. I don't know how long it takes for the enzymes to work to mushify the lobster meat. So, I'd probably cook from frozen and add say an extra 15 min. or so to account for defrosting at temp. I'd be curious as to what everyone else thinks about this... @weinoo @gfweb @rotuts

I had a thought recently about making beef for roast beef sandwiches. My local Wegmans supermarket commonly has shaved beef slices - I guess to use for stir fry or for Korean BBQ? I was thinking - you could put a bunch of slices in a ziplcok bag and SV at like 120F and have easy, thin sliced roast beef for sandwiches - but they just wouldn't have the maillarded edge. Thoughts?

To me, that level of rare is just perfect. Beautiful.

Do you have space indoors? Growing chillies indoors is really easy and contrary to what a lot of people on the internet say, you don't need hot weather to grow chillies - what dictates their heat level is genetics and ample light. I use a couple LED grow lights and my chillies taste just like I was there. I actually just cut down my rawit plant today as we're planning to go away in a few days and it was getting unwieldly large. I have probably harvested at least a full gallon ziplock bag full of those little pieces of plump, juicy dynamite, now happily IQF'd in my freezer. If you have the space and desire, let me know - I'd be happy to send you a few seeds of the rawit and/or the keriting chillies - send me a PM if interested. They are the most commonly used in Indonesia/Malaysia. Quite a few sambals are "fried" like that. Dabu dabu from North Sulawesi and sambal matah from Bali are both made that way. What's interesting is that a common Javanese sambal - sambal terasi (means shrimp paste) - the ingredients are pretty much exactly the same as the sambal ulek (I dont' think it uses palm sugar though, just a bit of white sugar to balance), except it is a fried sambal and it is ground very fine (like in a blender or really worked over by hand in the cobek).

Interesting - most of the recipes/videos I've seen of people in Indonesia making sambal ulek (aka ulekan aka cobekan), the chilli paste is made in the Indonesian mortar (cobek) and rather than being a fried sambal, it's typically spread in a thin layer across the cobek (which is almost flat, rather than deep like a Thai mortar) and smoking hot oil is poured over the paste and then mixed through thoroughly. I just made a batch a couple weeks ago using some of my home grown cabe keriting (curly chillies) and cabe rawit (often translated as Thai chillies, but they're actually different - more plump with a fruitier flavor, but just as spicy). I used a lot more rawit than normal and jeez that stuff is spicy! But really tasty. Keeps really well in the freezer and when defrosted is just about impossible to tell the difference. Most recipes/videos I've seen use only the rawit - I added the keriting to make it less spicy and it was crazy hot even still. So maybe using those Fresno chillies rather than the Holland spur chillies wasn't so far off! But everything looks great! I find it funny that the book calls the pickles "acar kuning" - (kuning meaning yellow). I've only seen it called acar without any other descriptor - it's always got turmeric in it!