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Chris, great looking curry that. This was one of the first things I made out of MC and was blown away by it - the cucumber salad is as phenomenal as it is easy to make. I worried about the uncooked dahl too, but have to say they added a really nice crunch to the salad. Not something you'd want in larger quantities but just a few little bites here and there was actually quite good. Still not sure if it is intentional or a mistake, if it's the latter then it's a good one!

I think as long as the pan isnt so big that the bottom isn't even covered by your carcass/veg it would be ok to fill it until the bones are just covered. I used about 2-3litres for the one carcass plus veg/bacon. Yesterday was a different (less flavourful) chicken and I didn't brown the bones as much but the stock is still pretty good. I guess the worst thing that happens if the pan is too big and you find it a bit dilute is you reduce it down. Give it a go.

Over the past few months I've become a bit slack at cooking properly during the week. Through a mixture of laziness and being horrendously busy at work I was only cooking decent food once or twice a week. This was starting to get me down, so last week I grasped the bull by the horns and forced myself back into making a proper weekly plan and doing most of the shopping in one go. I do this every now and again and am always so much happier when I do (I wish the lazy bit of my brain could remember this!). The slight twist this time is what made me decide to write this post: I love having homemade stock to hand and even bought a MASSIVE stock pan a couple of years ago to make big batches. Even so what I always find is that I make up a batch, go through the whole straining, sometimes clarifying, reducing, freezing process and then just burn through it all in a few weeks. I got a pressure cooker last year and have made a few stocks in it, I've always been very very impressed by them - definitely far tastier than even my best slow simmered ones were. So last week I decided to try and build a pressure cooked stock into my weekly routine - it worked brilliantly, so much so that I'm doing it again this week. It was such a success I thought I'd post about what I'd done in case there are any other lazy midweek cooks out there who find it useful. Day 1 (Monday for me) - Dinner tonight is a simple roast chicken with bread and salad. My absolute favourite way to do roast chicken is following Thomas Keller's recipe from Bouchon, it is so so simple but has never failed to give me tasty, succulent chicken, it's even better that it's quicker than my old way of doing it too! The "recipe" is so simple I'll detail it here: I just take a smallish chicken (about 1.4kg/3lb works best for me), let it come up to room temp for an hour or so, sprinkle it liberally (and I mean liberally!) with coarse salt then roast it in a very hot oven (230C/450F) for around 45 minutes. While it's resting (for a good 15 minutes) I make a sauce using herb infused white wine vinegar and a small amount of chicken stock from the pan juices. When we've fought over the oysters and picked all the meat off the carcass I break what's left up a bit and pop it back in a 230C oven to brown a bit more. I chop up an onion, half a carrot and a couple of celery sticks and get them a bit coloured in the pressure cooker then chuck in the browned chicken carcass and cover it with cold water. 2 hours at full pressure gives about 3 litres of really deeply chicken-y stock. Last week I actually added a couple of rashers of smoked bacon which was great too. I'm now set up for the week, I've got enough stock to do a soup and maybe a risotto and I've guaranteed myself three really tasty meals without having to commit hours and hours of slaving or having 20 litres of stock simmering away for days (possible *slight* exaggeration!) on end, losing most of its flavour into my extractor, admittedly the kitchen doesn't smell as nice as it used to with the traditional stock method but the food tastes a damn sight better! Day 2 - using a good helping of last night's stock I made a great italian soup, some fried onion, garlic, celery and carrot, a couple of bay leaves, some cannellini beans, a few tinned tomatoes and some fresh herbs all cooked in 30-40 minutes and tasting great. The bacon in the stock really helped with the flavour of this soup I think, one of the best minestrones I've made. Day 3 - Homemade pizza day, not having a wood burning oven I've spent ages trying to get the best pizza I could, my stand out favourite method is this one from Serious Eats. I have a big black iron skillet which I get nice and hot on the gas while my broiler is getting up to temperature, I shape my dough and lay it in the skillet, sauce it quickly and put it under the broiler, once it's nice and charred on top I simply move back to the cooktop to finish the bottom. Quicker and better than my old method of using a pizza stone, definitely the nearest I've got to "proper" pizza at home. Just thought I'd throw this one in here even though it doesn't have much to do with my pressure cooked stock - it's just so good! Day 4 - Risotto made with the stock let down with some water, not much to say about this one, just made in the normal way but, wow, was it tasty. I liked it so much last week I'm doing the same again today, chicken will be roasting in a couple of hours then the stock will be used to make the Cannellini bean and leek soup with chilli oil from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg book. I've not tried this yet but I suspect it will be superb using the stock. I'd always let myself believe that I needed several chicken carcasses to get any useful amount of stock but with this new pressure cooked variety it's obvious that a single bird will do.

Here's a tip, don't do what this couple did! (link to the first of 5 parts as EG won't let me post them all in one go) went to all the trouble of cooking it for 24 hours to a perfect medium rare... then sliced it into steaks and cooked them to death!

The things I'd look for are a lot of photos - at least one picture of every dish, plus more for some. Also a good, personal description of each dish - how it came about, memorable times it's been cooked, the key parts to the recipe, etc. As someone has mentioned I'd definitely have a look at the photo printing companies - have done a fair few from photobox.com recently for holidays but they are phenomenally good value considering how professional they look.

Must admit these, along with "erbs" instead of "Herbs" are the three americanisms in food that really grate on me.

Great, thanks for the response, will try it directly in the PC.

I remember making one of Jamie Oliver's roast veg recipes a while ago, it called for a whole bottle of balsamic vinegar, he even mentions the seemingly large amount and says to "trust him". I did. It was rubbish. Taught me to trust myself a bit more though, so not entirely wasted.

Wow! that sounds a pretty effort-intense way of roasting a piece of meat. What kind of timings are you looking at (total time, how long in and out in each cycle)? Still sounds like it would give you a less perfect result than the "sous-vide and sear" approach and will certainly be a lot more faff.

I agree that short ribs are probably your best bet. Hanger, as delicious as it is, is likely to be far too lean for what you want. I've made some great rare/medium-rare steaks from it but think it may get a bit dry with the long cooking you'd normally use for brisket. Interesting that your cheeks have been fatty and full of connective tissue, the ones I've managed to source so far have been about the best cuts I've found for low and slow cooking (up there with the short ribs I've managed to get hold of). Might be worth trying again from a different butcher?

I'm going to try out the caramelised onion soup, I don't have any Mason jars but do have this sort of thing, will that be ok? I notice that in the instructions, it says not to tighten the jar too much, not sure I can do that with these, they are tight closed once you clip them shut. Link to the type of jar

That looks really interesting, what were the other elements? Any chance of a recipe?

Maybe he really liked your cooking AND wanted a McDonalds breakfast... Personally I can't stand their breakfast stuff, but every now and again I do fancy one of their burgers. Enjoying crap food from time to time doesn't stop me liking "proper" stuff.

Red Chilli gets rave reviews from my other half.

Have been pleasantly surprised with how good Rosso is, it's Rio Ferdinand's place near King Street. Great interior and decent, good value food. Loved Sams Chophouse when I went there for the first time in about 5 years last week - we were a party of twenty eight but they managed to bring us all perfectly medium rare rib eyes within a five minute window, very impressive.

Just to resurrect this old thread: We've been in Cape May for a few days now and went to the Lobster House this lunchtime. To say I'm disappointed is a massive understatement (though clearly I should have read this thread BEFORE going!). We started with a pretty decent onion soup and some good calamari, unfortunately things went downhill terribly with the mains, a boiled lobster and a tuna steak were both so overcooked as to be ruined. My other half asked for the tuna to be simply seared, still raw rare inside... what came looked like canned fish from a supermarket. Shame really as it was a lovely looking hunk of meat, I'm sure that with half the time on a hotter grill it would have been amazing. The lobster was the same, far to long in the heat, stringy, tough, thoroughly disappointing. They can't even cook fries there. Had a similarly disappointing meal in Atlantic City yesterday, thank god we had a couple of days in NYC before moving south (and that we managed to find some decent meat to throw on the grill at the house we are renting). Can anyone save the culinary part of our otherwise excellent holiday with a good recommendation for the next few days?

Generally speaking it goes: sparkling>white>red in terms of sulphite content. My mum has a pretty bad sulphite allergy so we've spent a lot of time hunting for drinkable wine for her, there are an increasing number of producers who are able to give you what you need. Stellar vineyards in south africa do a few different varieties which are available in the UK pretty readily (not sure how easy they would be to get in the US though). Oddly enough, I'm on holiday in NJ at the moment and just bought an organic Pinot Noir from Mendocino, CA at a Cape May liquor store. It is labelled as "no detectable sulfites" so you should be good with it. It's from Pacific Redwood (www.pacificredwoodwine.com), not had a look at their website but I guess they may well do other varietals in the same style. I think the biggest issue I've found is that all the sulphite free wine I've had tastes different to "normal" wine. It's not that it's bad per se, I've just not found one that tastes like a nice normal savoury, tannic red (the sort of thing I normally go for). I'll admit I've had limited experience (say, fewer than ten different wines) so there may well be plenty of others out there, but so far I've not really found them. Last thing, I've read that having no sulphites makes wine have a much more limited shelf life, if you're buying a large number you may well do better to fridge them all and just warm up the reds to serve.

Tasteless? Quite.

Wow! Just WOW. I want one of those so much. Wonder if I can get something in the UK like that... Actually, I'm in New Jersey at the moment, maybe I'll try and find a Home Depot, would this fit in a suitcase? How big is it?

Agree completely, it is source of great disappointment to me that some of my favourite cookbooks (bouchon, ad hoc, les halles) have volumetric measurements. Using grams is so much easier, so much better that it's frankly bizarre that cups etc still dominate American recipes.

Tried my first full plated dish recipe from MC today, was doing some cooking with our 5-year old and he really wanted to make curry so we plumped for the Goan Lamb one. It was absolutely amazing, really really deep, interesting flavours with perfectly cooked lamb shank and a stunning fresh cucumber salad. It was all pretty straightforward too, the only things I changed were the amount of tomato puree added to the sauce - the recipe only calls for 60g but this seemed far too dry and would have gone to powder if simmered for 45 minutes. I think I used more like 250g, even then I added a bit of water a couple of times during the simmer to keep it from drying out. The sauce: The cucumber and black-eyed pea salad: The finished dish: It all went down brilliantly, darling son loved measuring all the spices out (using new gram scale that arrived yesterday) and wolfed down his plateful. The lamb shanks were spot on (after 48h at 62C), probably one of the most successful SV things we've made so far. MC is a truly remarkable book, can't wait to make more from it.

It. Has. Arrived. OMG - what an amazing thing this is, truly overwhelmed by the breadth and depth that it covers. absolutely stunning. Just one small problem now... where do I start??

Just had an update from Amazon, looks like we won't be getting it until October now :sad:

had exactly the same is there any news on the UK availability of MC?

It certainly does! was it nice?? We may be going there next year and I wonder if I should start building myself up to trying some of this...