Canned Tuna

I bought 2 pounds of cooked/frozen crayfish and finally decided to make a soup out of them. This is the first time I've used/eaten crayfish so I'm not sure how to finish my idea. the thought was a sort of creamy/spicy soup with the crayfish meat piled in the center. But I don't think there's enough meat in the tails to remove like that. I made the stock last night which includes: shrimp shells, about a dozen crayfish cut in half, then basic carrot, celery, onion and garlic. A thyme, a little tarragon, old bay and a couple bay leaves, good cup of white wine. So basically, I have about 8 cups of that stock and 1.5 pounds of cooked crayfish. I was thinking adding 1/2" dice potato, maybe a little saffron and a touch of cream, chive and cayenne to make the soup. Then serve the crayfish steamed on the side with toasted garlic baguette? I'm open to other ideas too.

I always stuff the cavity with some sort of aromatics. However, whenever I'm cooking and standing around those aromas for so long it cancells out all the flavor when I eat. The worst is when I'm smoking.

My one and only challenge is a whole hog. I was originally going to spit roast one on a propane roaster I have. Then I decided I would like to pit roast it. Digging a big hole in the yaerd, the wood, the rocks and all.

I had an old set of tongs, like 6-7 years old, where the springs all broke. I emailed OXO and they replaced them for free. If you have any issue with one of their products you might want to contact them about replacement or refund.

Oh Yea, Gravy is a biggie. I went to a relatives house for Thanksgiving a few years ago and they were going to serve turkey with jarred gravy. I looked over at the roasting pan oozing with fond and fat and grabbed the nearest bottle of white wine to start a sauce. I actually just kicked up the jarred stuff since there were no other ingredients havdy but it tasted pretty close to homemade. I don't know what they put in that stuff but it has a distictive aftertaste.

You can divide the food while it's still in the cooking vessel (like a pizza), then plate each portion seperately.

Macaroni and Cheese My Way by Jan Birnbaum.

Same here....actually, I'm lucky to find duck once in a while. I can't imagine my supermarket carrying confit. I completely agree with stock, tomato sauce, bread and fresh pasta. How about soup? Even with canned broth you can whip out a great soup in no time.

Another spherification noob here. I have the basic kit from Chef Rubber. Hind sight being 20/20, I would have ordered the gluco at the same time but it wasn't until my first failure I really started reading about the technique. After failing by following the instructions with the kit I was able to get decent results buy gradually adding the algin to the food liquid by "trial and error" until decent spheres formed. I also began using distilled water (thanks to this thread) at 500ml and 7g of calcium chloride. For the liquor I started with about 1/4 cup of liquid and about 1/2 teaspoon algin and increased the algin by 1/4 teaspoon from there until I had good results. The consistancy of the liquid, creme de casis in my case, was like BBQ sauce. Initially, I 'cooked' the liquid for about 2 minutes but found that after about 4 minutes the spheres were more stable. I'm hoping to get better results with the gluco. A couple things I found were: making caviar, if I held the syringe horizontally I had less of a chance making tails. The caviar I made was a little unstable after it was removed from a water bath so I kept it in a ramekin filled with clean water until I was ready to plate. It took about 6-7 minutes before the spheres started to loose their shape and began turning into one homogenous glob. Anyway, here's my idea, thanks for all the info in this thread! Seared duck breast over wild rice with creme de casis caviar - sushi style