KennethT

The other night at a Hunan place - it's not like most Americanized Hunan, but straight from the region - the owners and all employees are from there and are proud to only serve Hunan food... Rice noodles with chicken. I first ordered it spicy, but the very nice young woman at the counter got a horrified look and said that no one would ever eat it that way. She convinced me to get medium, and I'm very glad because it was at the edge of what I could tolerate. Holy crap. Home made shrimp/pork/chive dumplings. These were amazing. Washed down with a hawberry drink.

Absolutely... I forgot about the chicken skin!! But my father always made them with lots of onions... because he loved onions...

My father would call onions cooked in chicken fat "gribenes"... I think I took several years off my life when eating it as a kid...

When I looked at the octopus dish quickly I thought it was a mouse!

I think the "t" in schmaltz comes from the Yiddish.... as well as the notion that schmaltz is associated with rendered chicken fat. There are some kosher restaurants in NYC (in the section that used to be almost exclusively Hassidic but is now more and more gentrified) that has a pitcher of schmaltz on every table - like maple syrup in a diner.

Very interesting - funnily enough, I've never really thought about this... I've always worried about the guy 2 seats over coughing up a lung which will then get recirculated over to me... Do you sanitize the arm rests before you sit down during the boarding process?

or Hotel California

I've read some reviews saying that the Teflon coating on the grill comes off with about a month of use. Can one of the enablers confirm this? Or did these reviewers just not clean it properly? @JoNorvelleWalker @ElsieD @Kerry Beal

You can root in water and immediately transplant into a media just after.... or, you can root in a cube of rockwool - I do this all the time, but I don't recommend it to most people because of availability - it's more of a specialty thing, but it works great. I think the biggest trick to rooting cuttings is to get rid of most of the leaves, leaving only a couple on the stem, keeping light stress low, and keeping the cutting in high humidity environment so it doesn't try to respire. You don't want to stress the cutting before it can take in water and nutrient - until that time, it's basically subsisting on its reserves in the stem. But stuff like basil usually roots so fast and easy, if you plunk it in a glass of water, you could see roots emerge by the next day - at which time you can put it in media, and the plant turns out fine.

I do not need this... I do not need this... I do not need this... I do not need this... om mani padme hum.... but I want this! damn.

You can root thai basil as long as the stem has a node. Use the sharpest knife you have, clean it with alcohol first, then cut quick and immediate dunk the stem into water - you don't want a chance for air to get in there. If you have access to cloning gel or powder (it's a hormone that encourages rooting) that will make your endeavor even more likely.

When I used to grow thai basil and I trimmed it, I would wrap the bunch on the stems in a dry paper towel and then wrap in a plastic bag and squish all the air out - it would keep in the crisper drawer in the fridge for weeks! Just make sure the leaves are very dry.

I don't use holy basil much (because it's hard for me to get!!!)... but thai basil is classic in red curry. Some people will even say that it's not red curry without thai basil thrown in at the end. Thai basil is also a staple in many stir fries and noodle dishes...

thai basil doesn't freeze well - it's usually used just torn in shreds for a really fresh flavor - but making a pesto out of it kind of defeats the purpose... Holy basil is usually cooked (not eaten raw or tossed in at the end), so maybe that would tolerate freezing better?

Very nice fat rendering! Did you render the skin prior to SV or after?

Yikes...

I haven't discussed pacojet stuff in a long time, but if I remember correctly, Pacojet recommended that the freezer was at least -20F if not colder. Most of his "ice creams" weren't desserts necessarily - he would make savory ones out of soups as well - so it wouldn't have been scoopable at 0.

My friend had a Pacojet, but used it only rarely. The biggest problem with a PJ in a home environment is getting the material frozen cold enough.

@eugenep I think there may be a flaw in the logic... meats don't dry out at 140 in SV because they are in a 100% humidity environment. In an open pan, I imagine 140 would be more like a dehydrator. By definition, saute uses high heat, not low heat. Even a thin cut won't get any browning when cooked on a 140F pan. Again, your reference to braising refers to a high humidity environment - this is what breaks down connective tissue. What you are looking to do seems similar to how some advocate cooking a steak, but the method requires higher heat, and you flip the steak every 30s to 1min to cook evenly. No matter how you slice it, I can't imagine getting a good result "frying" on a 140F surface... but don't listen to me - I'm no one of any authority - the true way to know is to try it! And report back!!

I don't think meat would brown at 140F, no matter how long it sits there. Plus, it would take a lot longer to cook through this way since you're only getting heat from 1 side, as opposed to SV where the contact is on all surfaces. As the penetration time goes by the square of the thickness, heating from one side only would take 4 times as long to penetrate all the way to the top side - I think it would be really dried out by that point, as well as spend an inordinate amount of time in the danger zone, bacterially speaking.

I like the idea of the chimney if you're using charcoal, but another alternative is a portable infrared burner. These get extremely hot very quickly, clean up easily and run on a small propane tank. https://solairegasgrills.com/products/portable-grills/

Thai chicken soup

Personally, being from NYC where we have a very diverse food scene, I would consider doing a tour of the "best of" London's British food... so, for example, if you're going to take me to a fish n chips place, it should be one of the top examples of it. I agree with @teonzo that it would be good to offer a few different tours - because tourists from places that might not have any Indian food would love to taste a great curry, but personally, I'd probably avoid it because I can get it from 3 different places around the corner from my apartment.

I agree with @dcarch - everything has a "resonant frequency" - if you match your vibration to the resonant frequency of the jello you will get maximum wobble with minimal power. Otherwise, you will have to tune your jello's resonant frequency (by means of its viscosity) to the phone's vibration frequency which I think would be a LOT harder to do. If part of the art exhibition revolves around people calling the "phone" to make it vibrate, there are ways around that too. You can use an inexpensive Raspberry Pi with a simple Python script to trigger the vibratory motor from a phone call, text or email or other stimulus.

5J is one of the few brands of Iberico Jamon that is allowed to be imported into the US... I think it's just 5J and Fermin. I've bought the 5J here before and have been underwhelmed compared to what I have had in Spain. It seemed like mass production jamon (if there can be such a thing) compared with the small artisanal producers that don't make enough to export.