dcarch

This is how shrimps should be served and enjoyed. No tails attached. dcarch

It only happened once. That was once too many. Pasta sauce prayed all over the ceiling. The pressure cooker safety relief valve failed. Major kitchen cleanup afterwards and repaint ceiling. That sound ! I will never forget. dcarch

Here is another idea: Scrubbing is a pain for anyone. This is what I do: I know I am abescent minded and burn food often. I am also a messy griller with BBQ baked on grates. So I have a good size plastic bin outside the house. The bin is filled with water and the water has a few table spoons of sodium hydroxide (Amazon, cheap) dissolved in it. Any cookware with thick grease, burnt on food gets thrown into the sodium hydroxide solution. The next day I can just wash the baked on stuff away with a garden hose. No scrubbing needed. Of course I make sure to wear rubber gloves and eye protection to do this. Also, you cannot do this to aluminum cookware. dcarch Note: Sodium hydroxide (what makes Liquid Plumber work) is highly corrosive. It's powerful enough to clear clotted plumbing lines. Do not have around if you have children in the house.

Many ideas for anyone, whether you are having problems physically or not. Just ideas to make work more pleasant. I will post more when I have more time. 1. Some one gave me a mobility scooter because it was not working well. All I did was replaced the batteries with lithium batteries. Scooters are fast, variable speed, go forward and backwards. So much easier to go from one end of the garden to another, especially with tools and supplies. 2. I got a rechargeable tire inflater (Amazon, $20) and installed a tire air nipple on a 2 gallon garden sprayer ($0.50? whatever you call that thing where you inflate a tire). You know how annoying it is to have to pump, pump, pump and pump to spray ? especially on a hot summer day? No more. The pump is very small and digital, just set a pressure, that's all. dcarch

You can use your cell phone camera to view and enlarge. dcarch

Thanks! Travel step #1 - covid test. Negative. But Is that good news? If test positive, having been vaccinated, probably just minor symptoms. I can back out and not travel. No cooking! Now tested negative, I will have to deal with the nightmare of big time fancy cooking for many people in someone else's kitchen and in a different city. HELP!!! dcarch 🤪

My bad. I exaggerated "all". I showed the package to a Japanese friend. He said the Japanese writings do not say "ramen". The writings say "small noodles" {meaning thin noodles?) I also trust Duvel's cooking method for ramen. I am just not sure those are ramen noodles. Happy Holidays to all. Packing to the airport. Got a ton of cooking to do. dcarch

In Wikipedia, they seem to call it : Sōmen (Japanese: 素麺), somyeon (Korean: 소면; 素麵), or sùmiàn (Chinese: 素麵) is a very thin noodle made of wheat flour, less than 1.3 mm in diameter. The noodles are used extensively in East Asian cuisines. Japanese sōmen is made by stretching the dough with vegetable oil, forming thin strands that are then air dried for later use. This is distinct from a similar thin noodle, hiyamugi, which is knife-cut. In Japan, sōmen is usually served cold with a light dipping sauce called tsuyu. South Korean somyeon may be eaten in hot or cold noodle soups. Sōmen is typically high in sodium.[2]. I think they label all Japanese noodle ramen for Western buyers. I don't think ramen noodles are white because the alkaline treatment. dcarch

Staff note: This discussion has been split from the Dinner 2022 topic. I think what you are looking at is not Ramen noodles. So the ramen noodle methods of preparation should not be used for this kind of noodles. Different material, and different process in their making. I think what you are looking is wheat flour, and ramen is kansui water treated wheat flour. What you are looking at is air dried and Ramen is fried. dcarch

👍 dcarch

At least 1.412 billion people in China. Any cooking method to cook will work. dcarch 😄

Yes. Head, feet and gizzard all used for stock. Very flavorful stock. dcarch

We all know regular sous vide is temperature controlled moving water. "air SV" is basically kind of like a temperature controlled slow moving air dehydrator. I made a temperature hot air cooker using a aquarium controller dri9ving a small fan and a 20 watt light bulb. dcarch

One of the many dishes for the big Thanksgiving dinner was a roasted chicken. I felt that the chicken should be special. I went and got a Buddhism Exemption chicken. The best tasting chicken you can get. 1. Seasoning spread under the entire skin, including the drumsticks, and the interior for two days in the refrigerator. 2. The chicken was "air sous vided" to 145F, 100%, no cold spots in and out. 3. Then the chicken was roasted in a rotisserie to get all the skin roasted. No soggy skin. Temperature in the rotisserie was controlled to be 165F. 4. When the interior got to be 150F, hot chestnut stuffing was stuffed in the chicken. 5. A smoke tube was introduced in the rotisserie for two hours. The chicken was plated and served. dcarch

Thanks. That wonderful bread was store bought. Delicious and not too expensive. It does not show up regularly, only once in a while. dcarch

Still BLTs. Just Sungold was giving the last of fruits in the garden. Sungold is a very different tomato in flavor and texture. So I made bacon bits and used Turkish bread. Not bad end result. dcarch

As far as I know, there is no machine to harvest figs. It is not easy to harvest by hand either. The other problem is figs do not all ripen at the same time. dcarch

Not a fig ment of your imagination. dcarch

Thank you. That's balsamic glaze and mayonnaise.. Thanks. Let hope for a better tomato year next season. dcarch

B.L.T. = Better Late Than never Bad bad year for tomatoes this year. Weather, diseases, critter damages ---------. Still, got to have BLTs. Not too many days left for BLTs this year. B.L.T. on pizza bread. dcarch

I do want to point out one thing with my sous vide setup. It is a very good and practical large scale sous vide system. An ice chest cooler is not expensive, very well insulated and everyone may already have one around. The sous vide setup requires no modification to the cooler. But you do have to watch out for one thing. Many coolers have a drain plug for you to drain water out. The drain is plugged with a rubber plug from the outside. You need to find a way to plug the hole from the inside out. The rubber plug is not that secure, and the plug can get soft with high temperature. Combined with 48 quarts (my cooler. yours may vary) of water pressure, it is not pleasant to have 48 quarts of hot water all on your kitchen floor in the middle of the night. dcarch

Actually the water is not as dark as the picture seems to show. It is just the way lighting worked. You can tell the water on the other side of the insulating foam. Same water, much lighter. dcarch

Custom made racket to separate bags. Another custom made device, an adjustable sous vide cooker holder for many types of water containers.

Everything went well as planned for all the parties. All except one thing. I never considered how much time I had to spend to explain to guests what is "sous vide cooking". So there was no time for taking pictures. 😛 dcarch

The board divider is a great "invention" by me. If you use a 48 quarts of water cooker, that's a lot of water to heat up for some shorter items for sous vide. The board is a 1" thick foam board, a very effective insulator. It is adjustable depending on what you are cooking. For instance what you are looking at is the whole bone-in pork butt, which is very big but short. Sous vide ribs is also a must for me. I don't understand "falling apart tender". Falling apart only makes meat chewable, not tender. Sous vide makes meat tender. This sous vide setup makes it possible to sous vide 4 full length back ribs at the same time. The water is dark because I used the same water for almost the whole summer season. Too busy cooking for many parties to keep changing water. All the bags were sealed well so no problem for the food, and some cooking were done at relatively high temperature, so nothing was growing in the water. So far so good, this summer. By the way, the pandemic is not over. All people to the parties were tested negative before coming, and I equipped my air conditioners with home made HEPA filters. dcarch