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eternal

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Everything posted by eternal

  1. I think living in Seattle has helped boost my interest as well.
  2. Really? I thought the homecoming party was pretty good. THat seafood chowder looked amazing and I plan on making that sometime in the near future.
  3. they alll seemed to phone it in on that last challenge. I'm sure there's a bit of "i just don't want to be last so lets keep it simple"strategy going on. also, it looked like the challenge started at about 6am. probably not a ton of creative juices flowing that early. still, i'd be sad if i was one of the producers of the ingredients, excited for an amazing meal and then got that.
  4. Shrimp and Grits! http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2011/09/shrimp-and-grits I've done this recipe a number of times and it is delicious
  5. Made the pistachio pesto tonight. Meh. I agree with an earlier poster. I'll go back to just throwing pine nuts or walnuts into a blender with raw garlic, cheese and basil.
  6. Has anybody thought about doing their turkey in the spirit of the roast chicken in the book? I was thinking of dunking the turkey in boiling water and shocking a few times tonight, injecting the brine and then roasting at 205 but I'm a little concerned about how long this might take. My turkey isn't giant (12 lbs) but could still take an awful long time. Sorry, I've done the turkey leg confit approach before and didn't really care for it.
  7. Any thoughts on brining versus injecting? After making the roast chicken in mc@h I think I might follow the path of injecting brine and then drying the skin out in the fridge
  8. Made a few things over the last week including the Roast Chicken (it was pretty awesome), Pressure Rendered Chicken Fat (worked like a charm), Brown Chicken Stock -> Chicken Jus - > Home Jus Gras (lot of work - would probably just start with store chicken stock next time if I didn't have any homemade stuff on hand) - but delicious - hard to measure .8 grams of something too but was able to approximate and adjust), Apple + Parsnip soup (easy and tasty), Garlic Confit (i destroyed this somehow - it came out dark brown and burned), Rice noodles (finally a way to get some bite to my noodles!) and I think that's it. I think I'll invest in a jeweler scale soon to help measure the chemicals.
  9. Made me want to poach cod in chili oil. Every once in awhile you actually learn something from top chef
  10. It turns out that finding chicken skin at your butcher isn't always so easy. I've got some at home that I'll try to render as much fat from as I can but in making the Home Jus, does anybody have a recommendation on what to replace my chicken fat with? Butter or a neutral oil just sounds weird.
  11. It seems like if you're going for the Home Jus, you could combine the chicken wings, thighs, and ground meat into one big batch pressure cooker batch along with the veggies and herbs and shorten the amount of cooking time almost to half of doing the two recipes (brown chicken stock + chicken jus) separately. Anybody see any reason why that wouldn't work?
  12. No pictures but have made the baked eggs with anchovies at least three times and they are delicious. I just can't seem to time it right so where the whites have solidified but the yolks are still runny...
  13. Im on the flight home from Austin and ended up eating at Franklins, jMueller, backspace and moonshine. The last two were because my friend arranged it and the other because she worked there. Franklins - Arrived at around 11:30 and waited about an hour. When I left the line was probably only 15 minutes long and they still had meat. it was a wednesday. The brisket is seriously delicious and tender and tasty. It was worth waiting in line for. The pork ribs were also really good though a little too "fall off the bone" for me. Compared to the BBQ I'm used to where there's really a lot in the rub and sauce, the seasoning here accentuates the meat and doesn't play cloy with sweets. The sausage, well, I didn't actually like it. Sadly. Right now I have 2 pounds of brisket and ribs in my backpack along with sauce. I guess TSA thought the sauce was a toiletry JMueller - After the meat fest the day before I cut back on my order and just got the beef short ribs. This was the best food of my trip. The rub seems to be mostly black pepper with some brown sugar and really. Short ribs?! Amazing. I'm going to try and replicate when I get home. Why isn't anybody else smoking short ribs?! backspace - cool little italian pizza joint. Nothing particularly awesome but the restaurant week deal was pretty good. $54 for lamb and pork meatballs, a good pizza, awesome cheesecake in a mason jar and a bottle (yes, a bottle) of red. We had a good time. moonshine - across from the convention center selling comfort food. yes, your meal comes with steamed broccoli and roasted carrots but the green chili cheese grits were outstanding and so was the pecan-crusted catfish with homemade hot sauce. I dug it
  14. Can you share the basics of the pasta recipe used here? Looks awesome.
  15. This turned into a BBQ thread, which I get, but I'm wondering if anybody has any suggestions for a nice dinner. I plan on eating Franklins one day and Mueller the next so maybe a meat heavy dinner might be a bit much. Is there anybody doing something emphasizing local ingredients (that's not BBQ ). I'm not interested in sushi or Asian food in general for this trip. I see WInk, Congress and the Driskoll grill get decent reviews on yelp and might fit the bill. Anything else you could suggest?
  16. This happens to me with long, complicated meals. I think I'm tasting all the time which doesn't help but also the stress of getting everything on the table as it is still warm exhausts me. But maybe that's how some of the best chefs stay so thin...
  17. Agreed. Potlucks are terrible for food. I don't like them. It's the buffet problem - a bunch of random, mediocre food on your plate. I'd much rather just have three or four really good items. I get the community aspect of it and it is a thoughtful attempt but I just don't like them.
  18. Bought the placesetter and then bought a pizza stone (14" Oven Store off amazon) and have made pizza on the old kamado grill the last four weekends with great succes. I get the egg going really hot, loaded with charcoal and then let the whole thing "charge" for 20 or 30 minutes. We've been using pizza dough from Whole Foods and it works great. We make the pizzas on a peel and slide it onto a 450 degrees pizze stone. The whole thing cooks in about 7-8 minutes - I close up the top vent to try and cook the top of the pizza as much as possible and that also seems to work well. After I finish a pizza, I open it back up to reheat the stone. I need to take a picture because the pizzas have just been coming out awesome. I think I might throw some ward on the fire to ass some smokiness as well. I've also been pre-roasting potatoes and sliced tomatoes under the broiler in advance to use as toppings. pre-roasting the tomatoes helps on the water content - keeping it from getting too wet.
  19. My father-in-law picked me up an old, medium Kamado at a garage sale for $50 and I love it. I just recently purchased the place-setter for it but prior to that I had concocted a setup of sheet metal to rise my pork butt off the flames and it worked pretty well. I would start a butt at 11pm at night and cook through to the next afternoon with one load of coal and still have some leftovers (though closer to the 1/4 left as mentioned above). I'm still learning when to vent and how much but even I've been able to keep it in the 220-280 range without much work.
  20. I JUST made tomato soup and wish I woud have read this first. It crossed my mind to use the blendtec but ended up just using the stick (and then didn't use onions, carrots, etc). Anyway, I've used the blendtec to make mole a few times. It is great because you can basically skip all the straining steps. A nice thing to have around for desserts are some frozen bananas and a good way to preserve bananas passing their shelf life. When a banana is about to go bad, peel it, stick it in a plastic bag and throw in the freezer. Then, whenever you are wanting a quick ice cream-like dessert, make this: 2 frozen bananas (peeled) 1 cup frozen strawberries, raspberries, whatever 1 tbs cocoa nibs 1 tsp vanilla 1/2 cup half and half or heavy cream Blend till smooth with ice cream consistency - it'll be thick You might have to adjust the cream ratio a bit I tend to make hummus in the food prc still. haven't figured out the right ratio yet to not get the blades to cavitate.
  21. Here are the pics from our meal at Vila Joya. We both agreed that it was one of the best meals we've ever had. The service was outstanding, the view was amazing, the food was excellent. We ended up ordering ala carte because some of the items sounded better than the set menu. The nice thing was that you still got multiple amuse bouches and other touches. We never saw a wine list but the server recommended different wines for each course, including a 1964 white port at the end and they were all reasonably priced. We had a great time eating wonderful, decadent ingredients and being pampered. Well worth it https://picasaweb.google.com/101315328255807109134/VILAJOYA?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiYiNqN85jm2AE#
  22. The beauty contest mentioned above was def a factor in our decision and we ended up with what my wife thought was one of the uglier ranges. However, once the range was installed it looks great in our new kitchen. Where it looks too industrial/commercial in the store compared to the others in the store, the bluestar looks very nice at home.
  23. I'm going to respond to myself I got us lunch reservations at Vila Joya on the south coast. It is Portugal's only two-star restaurant. I've also booked us to eat dinner at Qunita da cebola vermelha (red onion). I don't think it'll be anything life changing but hopefully very local. I browsed around the NYT site and discovered some places in Lisbon but honestly, they all seem a little fancy. I think we'll stick to wandering around the Barrio Alto and looking for lots of salt code potatoes and sardines.
  24. We're headed back to Portugal for one last trip before the lady pops out our first young'n and hoping some of you have suggestions on great places to eat. We generally love the local, home-comfort type places. We loved DOC in the Douro on our last visit to Portugal. We were less thrilled by Pedro Lemos. We loved the sucking pig we ate in Maelhaeda (sp). We're going to be in Lisbon just a couple days and then onto the Algarve and will wander around. I've done almost zero research on this so far so I'll spend some time doing that too. Thanks!
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