Okanagancook

Gfweb, wonderful looking meal and table! Complete with candles too.

Chris, I agree about all the peanuts in the chicken dish. Having said that I always like making the recipe as written the first time trying it and then making adjustments second time around. Sometimes one gets surprised. I LOVE pot stickers and have always made my own dough. But, yes getting the thickness the way you like it takes some practice. Not sure how you rolled out the dough. A pasta roller works well and I use an empty can from canned tuna with both ends taken off to punch out my rounds. The dipping sauce is one part white vinegar and two parts soy sauce then we add chili oil mixed with chili flakes for some heat. These are definitely the realm of 'my last meal"

Well, we shall see. I am looking forward to the gardening section for sure.

Organic Life is James Oseland's new magazine. I just got a two year subscription for $30 Cdn with free shipping. Must be an introductory offer. Here is the website. Looks very interesting. http://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/organiclifemagazine/index I subscribe to BA but I am growing tired of it. Not a lot of interesting content besides recipes which I already have plenty of. I also get Fine Cooking which I am or a fan of the reasons rotuts mentions. I used to CI but now I just have a couple of their books on Meat, one on Poultry and one of the 'Best New Recipes" which work well for me. Before I got Eat Your Books I had trouble finding recipes in magazines but with EYB it would be a breeze.

Hummingbirdkiss.... lovely to read about your gardening endeavours. You must be in California or somewhere like that. We are just north of the US/Canada border in one of the mildest climates in Canada (save for Vancouver/Vancouver Island). The rest of Canada is under snow cover. Our ground is warming up slowly. There is wild asparagus around the orchards and we have a little patch that came up by our raspberries. It is starting to poke out too. I have tried to grow fava beans here but they get black mould/ mildew on them every time. So I have given up. The sea kale looks interesting but have not seen any seeds or plants in the garden stores. With regard to regular kale and swiss chard I always get a worm that nests in the leaves so have given up on that too. Even my beet tops get that worm. I plan on buying these from the wonderful farmers' market we have in Penticton. I have also tried to grow okra but I don't think it is hot enough for long enough here. My husband is going to try a couple of plants in the greenhouse to see how they go. We have good luck with tomatoes, potatoes, peas, carrot, leafy greens (with a shade cloth over the top), peppers, squash, corn, onions and eggplants. Smithy, looking forward to trying the Cherokees. From the TV show It's a Chefs Life, they look fantastic. I was thrilled when I saw the seeds. I looked for them last year in the stores but they did not have them. Happy gardening everyone.

Nice. I've got my seeds in the germinator. So far I'm trying some new tomatoes for us: Cherokee. Recommended by Vivian from "A Chef's Life". I also have some other favourites going as well as my peppers. I think that's a good idea about having some peppers in the green house. I usually have cucumbers (the lemon cucumbers seem to do well in a well fertilized/watered pot) as well as sweet 100 tomatoes. Both of which we get early fruit from. I have also started a tray of micro greens. Supposed to get something in a week or so. My arugula and other greens are poking out of the ground. And those garlic plants are really doing well. The ones that were a little yellow are now all green. I have a few that have come up from where the garlic was planted last year so I think I will harvest them as 'spring garlic'.

Today was a potato pancake made in the waffle iron, eggs, mushrooms and a baked tomato.

Sous vide pork leg (from What are you cooking sous vide today thread) topped with mushroom gravy, Modernist Cuisine polenta and steamed veggies. Delicious pork. The 2.5 lb roast was cooked at 135F for 4 hours and the final temp was 133F but we were hungry. Luckily we liked it that rare and it was so juicy and tender.

Followup to my previous post. The pork leg roast was cooked for 4 hours at 135F. The internal temp when I took it out was only 133F but we were hungry. It was beautifully moist and rosy and extremely tender. Served with Modernist Cuisine at Home's pressure cooked polenta (without the cheese.....on a diet), mushroom gravy and steamed veggies. Delicious. So for my dinner party roast which is a little bigger I think we will go with 6 hours at 135F so it is not quite so rosy (guests may not like it that pink). Thanks for everyone's feedback. The first picture is the butcher 'sock' that I took off only to find the meat was in one piece so I did not need to glue it together. I brined it in 2.5% salt brine for 8 hours and as it turned out we thought it a tad on the salty side so next time I will use a 2% brine for 3 hours.

Rick Bayless Tortilla soup with a salad.

Shelby, your pizza is me kinda pie! Did you use a stone and baked with the broiler on to get the nice golden top? And nice touch with broccoli....looks like it's raw? Even better.

Edward J, that's a great idea. Sounds easier than using cheesecloth. But my rice would stick to the diaper material as it does with cheesecloth. The Polyester fabric was perfect for this job.

I'm still here. No funny odour from the material and not ONE grain of rice stuck on it! Success. Love the texture of Thai teamed sticky rice.

Well, I have boiled the cloth in water and then soaked it in vinegar for 30 minutes. It is rinsed and will be used today. Seeing that Darienne is still posting after all those years of use, it should be fine. If you do not hear from me on Egullet, I'm dead!

I recently purchased a Thai rice steamer basket. The first time I used it I put the soaked rice in cheese cloth to steam it and a lot of the rice stuck to the cloth. I was in Fabricland today and purchased some polyester drapery fabric called "voile". It looks like it will work out perfectly since I can cut it to the correct size. Now the catch. The sales person said it will probably have 'sizing' on it which would not be food safe. I have googled how to remove it and haven't really found a definitive answer especially seeing I don't know what kind of sizing was used. I have boiled a piece of it in water for about 10 minutes and think that perhaps I should add some acid to help remove the sizing.???? Does anyone know if I should do anything else other than toss the lot and pay through the nose for a 'jelly bag' which may be too small for my purposes. Help? cheers

If you were to chop it up, any thoughts about blanching the meat and bones first to get rid of all those nasty bits. Just let it dry a little before packaging if you want no water otherwise chuck it in the bag and go for. Or you could use ground chicken meat? I will be very interested to see what it turns out like. I love having concoctions like that in the freezer.

The roasts are bound with that elastic mesh sock that butchers use to keep everything together. I was planning on taking it out of the bag, take off the sock, season with herbes d'Provence and some other spices, then meat glue it together so the slices will stay together when cut. I just made some pork stock and will make a sauce with that and add the bag juices. Thanks for the feed back.

I have a dinner party planned for next week and want to serve sous vide Berkshire Pork Leg Roast which I have not done before. This meat is very, very tender so I don't think I need to worry about cooking it long enough make it tender. (I have two roasts left from our pig and will practice on the smaller one.) The smaller one is 2.5 lbs (1.2 kg) in weight and is thicker at one end: 9 cm (3.8 inches) tapering to 7 cm (2.8 inches) and is 25 (10 inches) long. On the left in the photo. The second one for the dinner party is 3.5 lbs in weight and is about 9 cm thick right the way through and is the same length. On the right in the photo. I want to cook the roast whole and then brown the outside before serving it with a mustard/mushroom sauce and some pork crackling (I have some belly skin in the freezer and will make that separately). After reading all over the forking place, as usual, I think I will try this: 136 F (58C) for 4 hours. I want the meat to be medium-rare but more on the medium side (for our guests who may not be used to pink pork the way we like it). The other option, and the safer one because I have done it before, is to slice the roast, package the chops individually and sous vide at 133 F (56C) for 45 minutes then brown. Any thoughts would be appreciated and I will post my results early next week. cheers

The weather is starting to feel "springish" in the Okanagan. I have my peas, carrots, radish and some greens in the ground and my garlic is quite advanced already. Yup all 240 of them came up! Not all for me and I need bulbs to plant next year. These were planted mid-October 2014 and mulched with about six inches of leaves.

The meat was from one of our grass fed lambs we get up valley. They are very tender animals. I cubed the lamb leg meat into about one inches pieces. They were seasoned with salt and pepper and then given a good browning in lamb fat :-). I took out the meat and browned some finely diced onions with a little fresh rosemary and slivers of garlic. Deglazed with red wine and boiled until most of it was gone. All this went in the Sous Vide bag along with lamb gravy left over from braising some lamb shanks. In the bath at 131 degrees F for 10 hours. Then it was served straight from the bag with grated Romano cheese on top. I did take a picture but didn't attach it the first time 'cause it's not that great but I think you can see the piece of meat I cut open. Poplar Grove 2007 Merlot to go with. It's a local wine from one of our good friends who started his winery way back in the day when there were only about 5 wineries between here and Penticton (16 kms) and now there are over 30 wineries.

Forgot this.

Sous Vide rib eye, grass fed, at 125 for 45 minutes then pan seared in a smoking hot pan while applying blow torch to top. Grilled veggies as a side.

Lamb leg cubes in gravy sous vide for 10 hours T 131 degrees. Lovely. Moist meat. That is the way to make stew.

ElsieD, reminds me of the time I left the flour out of a cookie dough recipe. After about five minutes in the oven my little piles of gooey dough had all joined together and covered the whole cookie sheet. I think I said something like, 'oh, musta forgotten an ingredient. No wonder I never bake.'

LOVE the glasses!