jrshaul

Someone's birthday is on Thursday, and I'd like to make them a cake. Can anyone make some suggestions for a sheet-pan-appropriate item that's pretty good? I have a particular loathing for "box mix" style cakes, but I'm not a particularly good pastry chef either.

Toothpaste isn't technically a kitchen ingredient, but if you need an extremely mild abrasive it works very well. I've used it to buff minor scratches out of various plastic items on multiple occasions. Works great on copper, too.

Capers. Gotta have capers.

I was under the impression that, if placed in a sealed container, no additional humidity could enter: just wait until the ganache hits room temperature before opening. Also, refridgerators are generally quite dry. For my next batch, I'm going to heat both cream and chocolate to 90F in mason jars and then dump one into the other. I knew I built the sous vide rig for something...

Ms. Campbell: I live in a 215 square foot apartment. The majority of my personal posessions - even excluding the car - were purchased secondhand, usually broken, and then reassembled with sticky tape and hammers. I cook for a huge crowd of hungry, hungry hippies twice a month. Sometimes, I end up serving bolognese with quinoa. The bolognese is made from the wrong ingredients and, while fundamentally authentic, the ingredient list resembles the original in the manner of a cheap iPhone knock-off. The quinoa came in a little cardboard box. I'd hesitate to call it "dishonest food". It certainly tastes good. Besides, I can pull off a trick you likely can't: I know the origin and means of production of almost everything I own, mostly because I have at some point repaired it. Do you know where the subcontractors that assembled parts for your computer - say, Kingston or Foxconn or Asus - are actually based? And, if you can't, should you then refrain from owning a computer? He's right, but for the wrong reason. 90% of environmentalism is a moot effort, simply because the participants don't have the required engineering background to understand the problems in the present system. There's nothing "eco-friendly" about buying locally-sourced tomatoes and then keeping them in a chest freezer for six months.

Well, I made a huge pot of bolognese this past wednesday. Due to a combination of shoddy equipment and crass stupidity, the whole affair ended up with me being in the kitchen for about seven hours. On the other hand, it was pretty tasty. I started by browning the ground beef and big pieces of pork shoulder, then making a basic mirepoix in the grease from some finely-minced bacon. The mirepoix was blended and added to the meat with some red wine, and then I added some water and a little milk before cooking for a few hours. The pork was removed from the sauce, shredded by hand (this was more difficult than I had expected), and returned to cook some more. At this point, I remembered something important: I haven't actually had an authentic bolognese in several years, but that's mostly because I don't like it very much. Also, the meat was all wrong anyway (3lb beef to 6lb pork + 1lb american bacon), so what the heck. I then went quite mad and added garlic, some reconstituted ancho chilis, the liquor from some reconstituted chipotles, and the most tiny hint of about half the spice rack. And then I cooked it some more. The end result was very good. It had a very strong untified meaty flavor, with no elements really protruding heavily. Despite the completely berserk ingredient list, it was pretty conceptually true to the original. Nothing mind-blowing, but it had positive reviews. I also made some pasta i con fagioli which wasn't very good because the beans wouldn't cook and the tomato paste is crap, though the vegetarians didn't care much. Also, a lack of pasta meant that quite a lot of people ended up eating their bolognese with quinoa, which was surprisingly good. (Up until a peruvian guy demonstrated the wonders of quinoa with meat, I had sort of regarded the stuff as finely shredded cardboard for crazy hippies.) I also whipped up a pot of rice pudding. A purchasing mishap meant that there was nearly a dozen cans of coconut milk in the pantry that were, in reality, 25% coconut and 75% water. I dumped about eight into a pot, added some sugar and seasoning, and simmered to infuse the flavor from some orange zest before making rice in the normal fashion. For a gluten-free vegan kosher halal mormon-friendly dessert, it's really, really good. And doesn't taste particularly strong of coconut. Also, my camera went kablooey, so you just get cell phone pictures. Sorry.

Here's a few more suggestions: 1. Rice pudding. I've found a formula of (roughly) 2 parts coconut milk to 3 parts rice to 4 parts water gives a nice texture, sweetened to taste. Simmer the diluted coconut water (you don't get much coconut flavor) until the sugar dissolves with some orange zest, maybe add some cloves, allspice, and nutmeg, add the rice, and cook until the rice is done absorbing the water. IF you have the wrong kind of rice, just add tapioca starch. 2. Tea-poached pears. Basically, just put enough brewed black tea (earl grey is nice) in a saucepan to cover some peeled pears, add sugar, and simmer for 30 minutes. Then crank up the heat, boil like crazy, pull the pears when the water no longer covers them or they get soft, and then continue to reduce until you get a nice sauce. Thicken with tapioca starch. (I love this stuff!) 3. Tarte l'alsace can be made very quickly - it's possible in a bit over an hour start to finish. Sadly, I'm not very good at it. Yet. 4. You can make a fairly simple custard using milk, sour cream, sugar, vanilla, and eggs. Bake it in an oven until the top gets golden. Eat. Takes less than five minutes of actual work. 5. I can eat an entire bowl of italian merengue.

I don't get drunk often. But when I do, I usually try to make bananas foster. It's a sort of alcohol-induced compulsion. My recipe: 1 1/2 cups light brown sugar (or 1 cup dark brown, 1/2 cup white sugar) 2 Tbsp. corn syrup (prevents crystallization, making this much easier to do when inebriated) 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, unsalted 1/3 cup dark rum. Or, if you don't have dark rum, substitute bourbon whiskey. If you don't have bourbon whiskey, substitute whatever is handy. (You're drunk, right?) 1/2 tsp. cinnamon 1/2 tsp. nutmeg 4 bananas Combine sugar and butter in pan. Caramelize to approximately the soft ball stage (230F if you left your laser thermometer in your coat again like I do), add liquor, and ignite. Stir continuously with a long whisk, and sprinkle spices over the top for optimal pyrotechnics. After fire dies off, add bananas, sliced lengthwise and into quarters, and simmer until soft or you get really hungry. Serve with ice cream. Incidentally, this is fabulous for a big party. I just kept cooking until I'd served about 17. The recipe is dead simple. The only real trick is not losing your eyebrows.

Marshmallow creme is, usually, sugar and gelatin and not much else. Ironically, it's one of the few prepared foods in the supermarket you can easily make at home.

The spices are circulated more quickly than you'd think. In a house of 26, most of the spice collection - including foodservice-size jumbo shakers of garlic and oregano and such - are drained with impressive frequency. There's also a five-gallon jerrycan of tamari soy sauce, which is filled every few months or so. It might be worth replacing some of the more infrequently used spices, though. The basil smells a bit whiffy, and I suspect the cayenne has had better days. The dried kelp smells like wet dog, though this may, for kelp, be an indicator of freshness. Has anyone made a bolognese sauce in a slow cooker? It seems as if preparing the sofrito in a pan and then combining it with the meat in a cooker would be a more efficient production method than monitoring the stove for hours.

I particularly dislike the suggestions of wood fire being more "natural." Let us enjoy the highly natural fruits of firing a pneumatic cylinder through a large mammal's brain, stripping out its' muscle tissue, and denaturing it over the cremating ashes of a large arboreal life-form. Mmm. Denatured bovine. Delicious.

The ingredient selection is a little weird, but there's an absolutely massive spice rack. The potatoes were seasoned similarly to your suggestion - adobo and rosemary - and the only real flaw was that I hadn't made enough. Even odds says I can probably fudge a decent simaraculum of what you recommended, especially if we stop running out of paprika all the time. I wouldn't describe myself as a bad cook, but a lot of the difficulties are tied to limited time and resources - I just can't do things properly in the allotted time. I can't really justify the hours required for proper stock reductions, and the end result was (in my opinion) pretty good for the cost.

Today, I made chicken soup and roast potatoes! (Pictures to come shortly. Camera went kablooey.) It wasn't actually my day to cook, but the guy whose responsibility it was didn't show up until quite late and had intended to serve pasta for the third day in a row. I ended up getting roped into the whole thing, and then proceeded to do something spectacularly stupid: Use a cooking technique I hadn't spent much time on in far less than the recommended time period with poorly defined ingredients. Bachelor cooking in a one-room apartment doesn't make for much time spent on stocks and broth, and I pretty much broke all of the rules on this one. I ended up throwing a pile of (mostly) meatless chicken carcasses and some chicken skin in a big pot of water and boiling it hard for a little over an hour, adding some bay leaves towards the end. After removing the nasty bits and skimming, it wasn't quite chicken-y enough (partially due to the large volume of water), so I added some boullion cubes. I added a big pile of an onion/celery/carrot/garlic sauteed sofrito I had been cooking away to goo in an adjacent saucepan. I then threw in sweet potatoes, more carrots and celery and onion, and a few pounds of chicken chicken I had hacked into individually-sized lumps with a cleaver. After another twenty minutes or so of hard boil and a little salt, pepper, and ginger, the end result was actually pretty good - not perfect, but better than what my mother makes. Adding big pieces of chicken towards the end and cooking it in the broth turned out very nicely, and didn't give the chicken-y rubber often found in many soups. I also discovered that you can completely botch the procedure for par-boiling roasted potatoes and the end result will still be pretty good, and that using a shallow-sided pan does in fact make a difference. More important, however, was the issue of work and pacing - by starting the boiling water for the spuds and chicken simultaneously, I was able to prepare the potatoes during the slow part of the soup preparation and stagger the remainder of the chopping as needed during the cooking process. I didn't stop moving for ninety minutes, but at least they were efficient!

You can get aluminum polishing kits with buffing wheels that fit to power drills. It's a tedious job, but you can get quite a shine on pitted metal.

I've been mucking about with coconut milk in truffles, and you might have some luck combining one part coconut cream to two parts dark chocolate, sweetened to taste. Coconut milk seems to produce a remarkably dense ganache, and coconut cream - which is the goopy stuff at the top of the can that separates from the fat-less coconut water - is even better.

There's actually just the one. However, the vegetarians are getting pasta y fagioli. To be honest, were it not for the fact that a large percentage of diners will be eating beans, I likely couldn't get away with it.

On a related note, can anyone suggest a method for identifying flavorful garlic? The stuff from the supermarket is almost tasteless - roast it, and it's blander than Doritos - and most of the stuff at the farmers' market is either insanely expensive or unusually fiery.

I helped a co-op resident with his cooking today. (Photos are sadly absent due to camera going kablooey.) I ended up dumping an enormous amount of roasted garlic and caramelized onions in his tomato sauce, which seemed to mellow the flavor a bit. I tried adding a bit of baking soda (1/8tsp) to speed up the caramelization, though I didn't really notice any difference. Due to the low protein quotient of the dinner, I also prepared a somewhat hasty three-bean salad. Actually, because the only canned beans on hand were garbanzo beans, it was a one-bean salad, but people seemed to like it a lot. Next time, I'll prepare it in advance and let the flavors mix a bit, but for something prepared in ten minutes it came out pretty well. I'm still a little nervous on the bolognese ragu for Monday. I've never made a sauce quite like this before, and cooking a pork shoulder in the pot then shredding the pork halfway through may or may not work. On the other hand, everyone really likes meat, and pork shoulder is $2/pound...

No. The pour-scalded-cream-into-chocolate technique I'd been acquainted with usually gets hot enough to distemper the chocolate. I'm re-jiggering my sous vide bath for chocolate, which will hypothetically allow me to combine both at about 90F. Would this help?

I recently made two batches of ganache, both of very different composition. (One used coconut milk.) I put both in the fridge in sealed containers, but even after becoming chilled, neither had really set to any type of hardness. Pegging them as useless, I put them in the back of the fridge until I could figure out how to fix them. However, two days later, I open them up to find some perfectly solid ganache. Any thoughts?

Looks like I'm on the right track. Out of curiosity, has anyone had trouble with the "seeding" technique using less expensive chocolate?

I've done a little metalsmithing, and part of me is staggered at the complexity and perfection of construction. Producing an object with that many compound curves in the required degree of fit and finish is borderline impossible, and the quality should be applauded. The majority, however, was thinking "This is just a $50 espresso maker without the heating element." It's luxury for luxury's sake, much in the same way that an Acura is just a Japanese econobox in a nice suit. However, unlike a Hobart mixer or Robot Coupe, it has no particular emphasis on function.

I have a temperature-controlled water bath for my sous vide setup, and was wondering if it might be suitable for tempering or melting chocolate. Amongst other options, setting the water bath to 91F and letting the chocolate slowly melt should (in theory) prevent it from losing its' temper. I've had a lot of trouble keeping the chocolate I use (cheap Trader Joe's stuff) tempered during use, and was hoping this might be suitable for maintaining the required temperatures.

That's not a bad idea. I wasn't aware that foodservice shopped there.

I am officially in Garbanzo Hell. After soaking the beans for 16 hours, boiling for an hour and a half, soaking some more, and then boiling for another two hours, the beans weren't quite done yet. I ended up dumping them and giving up. Are the two-hour estimates on the internet complete nonsense? I've also heard that some baking soda can speed things up a bit. On a more positive note, I can resurrect the broken Vita-Mix! The mechanical coupling splines have been sheared off and the carafe is beyond repair, but neither of these is particularly expensive. Actually, Jerk Chicken is a very good idea. Nobody else has made it, and mixing together eleventy-six ingredients is worth it if I'm making vast amounts. I'm cooking a week from today, and I'm thinking of making some sort of cheese sauce for pasta. Trader Joe's has some excellent cheese in the $5/lb range, and I figure four pounds of parmesan and asiago should make for a pleasantly strong sauce. (Also, someone asked me if I would.) Beyond making a bechamel with a little garlic and slowly dissolving the cheese, does anyone have any comments?