Mjx

YES! I was wondering whether or not that might work, and will give that a go. Thanks

If dulce de leche breaks, is it salvageable? After reducing for about two and a half hours, water was added to it (it was intended as a favour, I don't want to go into it), and it is now has a very granular consistency. Can this be saved? This took a quite a while and is a big batch (started from 5.25L milk), so throwing it away out of mere frustration does not seem the ideal way to go.

I always head to Yasuda, the moment I get back to NYC; I literally head directly there from Grand Central, luggage in tow, and order takeaway. I haven't been back for about a year, but I've always enjoyed what I got there. I've heard a lot of enthusiasm expressed for Blue Ribbon, but have never gone there (the queue put me off). I definitely recommend hunting up some of the other discussions of sushi in NYC, too, which also give a sense of the track record of many of the best-known places.

Yesterday, we neatly ducked the entire food preparation question by dining out, after gnawing (or not) on random odds and ends before leaving the house. Today we are ducking the question in a different way, with an actual duck (one of several my boyfriend's father recently shot–while hunting, that is, not while casually strolling past a farm). I have more or less disposed of the rava. I managed to make this as poorly-planned an exercise as possible, since my mental hardware seemed to not cope well with the whole polenta concept. I began by making polenta a couple of days back. Recipes were easily found, but the stuff always strikes me as not only needlessly gritty, but aggressively bland, so I looked at spices. As usual when I'm lacking any inspiration, I grabbed numeg. Also turmeric, for no immediately apparent reason. After adding both, and mixing thoroughtly, I stopped and stared at the now-garish-yellow mass, and wondered what had possessed me to do this (the answer came unbidden: little as I care for polenta, polenta=yellow, and in my rather scattered state, I reflexively made it look 'right'). I fiddled with the lights so that the colour was less disturbing, spread the stuff on a baking sheet, let it cool, and cut it into diamond-shaped gnocchi. We had some for dinner with some of the braised duck, and they were okay. Not good, not bad, just ragingly mediocre. I ate another round of them for lunch today, then snapped. I hauled the whole mess upstairs, tipped it into a bowl, recklessly cast in a lot of sugar, black pepper, cardamom, cloves, and yet more nutmeg, and squished it vigorously (=I preferred not to give myself too much room to consider what I was doing, so I dived in with both hands). There were yellow bits everywhere. I patted the mass onto a baking sheet covered in parchment, scored it into small rectangles, baked it, sprinkled half with sugar, broiled three minutes, and looked at the results. I ran for chocolate, and went nuts with that. They're... okay. They have chocolate on them, and smell spicy, so they will be eaten. The Splendid Table has at least one recipe for really pretty, almost-certainly-tasty cookies that I only remembered when I was sprinkling sugar over my less-than stellar efforts, so i tried to not think about that. UGH. Polenta. Nyet. Next: I assault powdered milk.

What reliable, small temperers are on the market today? This would be for home use, so even a tiny capcity should be fine. We're in the EU, so European brands are definitely an option. Thanks!

Tamarind pairs really nicely with ham of almonst any sort, so if you can get your hands on some, definitely consider adding some to your glaze.

What you describe sounds a bit like what is discussed here: http://forums.egullet.org/topic/101377-help-cocoa-butter-sticks-to-chocolate-molds/?p=1393641 Until one the resident experts weighs in, this may give you something to go on.

Hm. A bit hard to tell how the liquid is behaving in this case, since the Dutch oven is covered most of the time, but when I do open it, there's no apparent movement of the liquid (that temperature works out to 257F, actually a bit below the temperature recommended by Cook's Illustrated for this particular recipe). When I use meat that has at least some fat/collagenous connective tissue, the results are lovely and moist, but the big selling point for these particular cutlets is that they have next to no fat (the big selling point for me was that they were DKK40/kg, about USD3.25/lb ). That's about all that can be said for them (okay, the quality is fine), but broken up in a tasty sauce, they're excellent over rice. And that was, in fact, yesterday's dinner: Braised pork over rice, with tiny bell peppers. Not yet sure of my kitchen access today, but I'd love to have a crack at making gnocchi. Either the braised duck or braised pork would be really good over them.

Suction.

keychris, Chocolot, thank you! I'll be giving these a bash, and report back. By the way, I picked up a packet of the caramels I'd mentioned previously, and as I suspected, gum arabic is in there, so structurally, they're an entirely different sweetl. Might be worth investigating, at some point.

What sort of functionality do you need from the app? If it is very minimal, you can use the Notes app that is native to the iPhone, simply adding the items you need as you think of them.

That is an excellent idea. Not sure how much of it it will use up, but it should make a decent dent. The rest I believe will become dulce de leche, or possibly caramels. I have no idea why, but this sort of stomach upset makes me feel combative, so I've been eating the exact opposite of 'mild': broth, heavily spiked with cayenne and vinegar, and coffee, heavily spiked with cayenne. Not enormously nourishing for the offending interlopers, and seems to make a difference. I admit to not being much of a porrdge person; I don't dislike it, I just cannot seem to work up the level of enthusiasm required to actually make it! I have dug up a bunch of recipes fot rice polenta and polenta gnocchi (although no 'rice polenta gnocchi', as such), and am really gunning for those. Yesterday involved no breakfast or lunch (although there were intermittent cups of coffee and broth, used as vehicles for cayenne pepper/vinegar). For dinner, braised 8 pork cutlets at 125C for three hours, and they were still dry, which didn't matter, once they were broken up and mixed with sauce, pretty good, in fact. And now, there is shredded braised duck and pork to see us through until Monday. Today will involve vegetable shopping, and if I can occupy the kitchen for long enough, I'll have a go at rice polenta gnocchi. I also need to make bread, since we're clean out.

Thank you! David Lebovitz's caramel recipe involves first cooking the syrup to 310ºF (155ºC), then adding a cream mixture, and heating this base to 260F (127C). If the temperature is increased by 10-15F, to which step would that temperature increase apply? Possibly both? Regarding maillard caramel, how does that differ from a caramelized sugar caramel? Do you have recommendation for a reliable online source for a maillard caramel recipe? I searched in the eG database, but didn't find anything. I know I can find plenty of recipes online, but my lack of experience with candy-making means I wouldn't necessarily spot the duds, so site suggestions would be tremendously appreciated. Thanks, and I now realize that I really should investigate the sweets my friend was thinking of. The ones she mentioned are a commercial product that I really should hunt up, so I can take a look at the ingredient list. Just because they're apparently caramels doesn't exclude the possiblity of the ingredients/production having much in common with traditional caramels or toffee.

@ Vlcatko: Thanks, it could be a lot worse And yes, the rice rava is semolina, and I'm getting kind of fired up by the idea of making gnocchi from it. Although there will be an awful lot of them. @ Beebs: If you're passsing through Denmark anytime soon (hey, people do..!), I would be overjoyed to make you a gift of the milk powder (N.B. it's whole, not skim, however). Because my stockpiling chromosome is clearly a dud, I have nothing to draw on, apart from the rava and milk powder, so I've been shopping all along, but differently. Yesterday, I found frozen duck legs and pork cutlets very impressively marked down, so I got both. The duck was braised and turned into a large batch of sauce, and the cutlets will also be braised; there's no fat on them, and my experience of these is they tend to be dry and flavourless when prepared most other ways. I figure we'll have two of the cutlets tonight, and the remaining half dozen will will be incorporated into various other things. Wish I could get some chestnuts, but haven't seen any, yet.

Thanks Kerry! What I'm looking for is not toffee (as I noted, it lacks toffee's brittleness), but a very hard, yet plastic caramel. Think 'consistency of a very hard rubber' (yeh, I know, way to make it sound super-appealing), and you'd about have it.

Thanks, pastrygirl! The recipe already demands 260F, and it probably went a bit over, since I forgot to pull the pot off the heat when the syrup hit the right stage. For this recipe, the result was my idea of perfect caramels, firm and chewy, but not hard. Would reducing the relative amount of dairy accomplish the desired result?

I'm looking for a recipe that yields caramels that are chewy, but quite hard. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting with friends, and one of them was in a candy-making mood, so we decided to make some caramels and marshmallows. I suggested David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel recipe, and from my perspective, the caramels were an unqualified success, but although my friend did like them, she said 'They're good, but too soft'; she had in mind a sort that is popular in Denmark, which approaches toffee for hardness, but is still unquestionably chewy. These may have a special name, although I don't know of one. I believe that reducing the amount of cream/butter mixture would do the trick, but would prefer to start from a reliable recipe, if anyone has one to recommend. Thanks!

Victor, head on over to the ongoing discussion of compressors, Air compressor kit for spraying moulded chocolates.

Web pages in general I save as .pdf files, then sort them to folders (many of which have a lot of subfolders). Works pretty well.

Honestly, when I saw the title, I assumed this would be a discussion of ingredients like fresh intestinal tract for sausage-making that specified needing to rinse it clean of feces and parasites, or possibly lists with 'fat-free'/'sugar replacement' everything. Those are seriously offputting. I'm pretty sure people stipulate 'organic' and related qualifiers to demonstrate how aware, and therefore enlightened, they are, but I inevitably tune them out (and I'm 100% behind sustainable, ethical production). If I can get my hands on organic/grass-fed/whatever versions of something, I'm using them anyway, and if I can't find these alternatives, well, that happens sometimes. 'Nourishing' was what grabbed my eye. If traditional Thanksgiving foods were built around chalk, or wood chips, or grass, or other things humans cannot get nourishment from, it would make sense, but this is such bullshit. It makes no sense at all: a given food, whether laced with toxins (e.g. pesticides) and the product of unethical methods, or produced as cleanly, sustainably, and ethically as possible will, all other things being equal, also be equally nourishing.

YAY. I have food poisoning..? Something, anyway, which is making me less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about food. Yesterday involved a restocking of cold meat for sandwiches (something it never seems a good idea to keep around for long, so it's generally a weekly purchse). We had dinner with my boyfriend's brother's family, so I didn't cook, and didn't prep. anything, either (not pure sloth, this time, but more deadlines). I also identified two ingredients that are sitting about unused, confounding my creativity: a bag of rice rava, and a bag of whole milk powder. I got the former because it offered intriguing options, and to use in place of cornmeal, and the latter when I had to rig up a substitute for evaporated milk (which you cannot find here), which I needed for a test recipe for a Wellesley chocolate cake. The kitchen situation makes me reluctant to have a crack at the really good ideas for the rava, but I've held on to it for the day that we have our own kitchen; using it as a cornmeal substitute hasn't happened because I never actually use cornmeal. Still, If I pull myself together, I should be able to come up with some sort of attractive idea; I'm thinking gnocchi, along the lines of polenta gnocchi. Has anyone successfully pulled off sometthing of this sort? The milk powder really confounds me. I doubt I'll be making that chocolate cake again, since I was never that in love with it, owing to its tendency to induce a prolonged coma after consumption (it would be the perfect birthday cake at party that included many small chidren with violent tendencies; the most violent thing they'd be able to do after eating a slice of this cake would be to snore while napping). Besides, it didn't use much of the milk powder. I'm not a huge fan of dairy, and have no use for it at all in savoury dishes, so I'm looking for sweet solutions. Is there is some way of making dulce de leche, or something similar, starting from whole powdered milk? Some sort of candy, possibly caramels? A caramel sauce?

That's what I'm doing (i.e. planning more), although the way I'm planning is to prep./cook large batches of central component(s), then build around this, since (often unexpectedly) circumscribed kitchen access reduces flexibility at a day-to-day level. Having a central element in place gives me room to improvise, should I have the inclination/option, and to accommodate an often-unpredictable schedule. Today I baked a raisin and rosemary bread, which used up the last of the sifted spelt flour (our default), but the loaf should last to the end of the week. Breakfast was coffee, and so was lunch, then I remembered the carrots in the refrigerator, and a had a couple of those. Almost had the edamame, but other things that needed to be taken care of kept popping up, so I didn't get arond to that. Dinner wil be more of the frikadeller (these came out remarkably tasty), rice, and baby carrots. I need to have a good stare at the cupboard, to see whether they hold the elements of complete, acceptable meals.

The intent is to do more planning, to be more aware of what I'm deciding to make, be less automatic, especially at the shopping phase. It will involve more prep. work, but an hour spent turning a kilo of vegetables/meat into match-sticks/strips takes care of an entire week. Scheduling considerations make food that is ready at very short notice extremely desirable, so dishes that come together quickly, or can be made in advance and held (e.g. sautéed, pan- or stir-fryied, braised) tend to be top choices. I doubt there will be an uptick in the amount of cooking involved. Dinner is the only cooked meal we have every day. We prefer light, cold breakfasts and lunches, and the items involved are more or less fixed, since I don't consume them (I often skip both; my boyfriend has a couple of Wasa with laks for breakfast, and packs his lunch, which consists of three slices of bread with cold meat). I bake the bread we use, but apart from that, we don't bake much; I'm a fiend for baked goods, and unfortunately, starches do lousy things to me, so I keep a lid on my intake of them. We cover most of the food groups (starches and dairy not so much), although the coverage fluctuates, depending on season and mood; that won't be changing much. I love beans, since I grew up in a region where they're really important, so they show up quite a bit. There is a been and kale soup that I love and have been thinking of making (the recipe yield 3 litres!), but I'm not so sure I could run that by my boyfriend repeatedly for several days without his becoming a bit gloomy. The stuff also packs quite a blast radius, as foods go. No grocery shopping today. Breakfast was coffee and one of those chicken skewer things you get at 7-11 (we were in the centre of town today, and my boyfriend noticed I was beginning to look vaguely homicidal and decided food would be a good idea), and I'm thinking about having the rest of the edamame for lunch, but mostly, I'm looking forward to seeing how my chicken frikadeller come out this evening.

Mostly, it seems like a good idea for us to stop splashing money around thoughtlessly. Pretty much everything I cook is from scratch, but the situation had reached the point that we were eating things like the most expensive steaks several times a week, since shopping for, and making them is a speedy no-brainer, and as I mentioned, we've been feeling stressed by our living situation, and inclined to baby ourselves. The thing is, when I managed to scrape time from my schedule to make more complicated things from less expensive ingredients, the results are always so good, and we realized we missed the variety of dishes we enjoyed previously. We were also spending 50 to 100% more on food than we used to. We don't have a stockpile of stuff (the 'special' bottles and things I listed we actually use rather a lot of, on a regular basis); with next to no storage space, we're fairly selective about what we buy, and I'm a bit uptight about getting stuff we don't need, anyway. If I see something we use a lot of on sale, I'll get plenty of that, if it's something that will keep. Today was... unimpressive. I restocked on Wasa and laks, which get a heavy workout around here (and would have bought before starting this, if I'd noticed how low we'd run), and also got a bag of (inexcusable, if cheap) frozen edamame, half of which I ate as dinner while staring at my computer and typing with my other hand (I'm hammering my way through a heavy workload, and my boyfriend is having dinner with some colleagues). And I drank a lot of coffee. And had a small apple, and a whole bag of gummi bears, because when I'm not making careful decisions about food, I eat like an unsupervised child.

Popular sadist Chili Klaus disagrees (klik/kik her)! So do I. And, prompted by this topic, I recently had this discussion with my boyfriend (incidentally, also Danish), and by way of demonstrating that chilies do have actual flavour (and that their heat often masks flavour nuances, which are difficult to discern when your head is in flames), halved one of the eleventy-zillion arbol chilies from our insanely prolific plants, stripped out all the seeds and white membranes, and snipped it into small pieces. Although still distinctly hot, eating this is an entirely different experience than that of eating pieces of the whole chili. I recommend giving this approach a go, since you'll very likely find a great new range of flavour, while tempering the heat. Worst case scenario, you hop around for a quarter of an hour with your eyes and nose streaming, cursing me and the chilies, and get to say 'I TOLD you so!'