Ashen

there are so many varieties it is hard to tell them apart just visually.. Hardneck garlic I like most rocambole varieties.. last year there was a great stand selling " Pink Music" rocambole. I was very sad when I ran out of the last of it in the fall. Rocambole varietes in general will have a pinkish or purplish striping or cast to the skins. You almost never see softneck in grocery stores , but softneck varieties are the ones that are usually braided.

there was a few years that getting even half decent garlic between christmas and the first crop of the season at the farmers markets was next to impossible. Luckily now , we have a few stores that are stocking good fresh garlic even if it is 2 to 3 times the price of the cheap bullk stuff. Organic from argentina, Canada and sometimes from California mostly. luckily the fresh crop from Argentina is starting to hit the stores now.

Just a thought for those that were having trouble using a cast iron pan. I use my findlay #10 cast iron pan which is very flat and smooth, and a wide bench scraper to scrape up and chop into the hash while cooking. It works amazingly well. Another option would be to buy a 3 inch wide putty knife at a hardware store. I had seen both used at diners to do flat top potates or hash and once I had tried it I haven't gone back to a spatula since.

getting home after a 12 hr shift last week I wanted something fast. I did a couple of poached eggs using maggiecats method , over hash.. All I had for meat was a prosciutto end I had bought on the weekend for $2.50. I trimmed and finely diced up a bit of that with the potato and some onion . I even minced in some black kalamatas. I was in a why not mood. seasoned with some smoked paprika , oregano and my homemade hot chile powder mix it ended up being a very satisfing if strange hash, especially with the egg yolks from the poached eggs like a sauce.

you could definitely do a riff on individual Galaktobureko.. make the semolina custard and put it inside twists of phyllo. the cookbook "Three sisters around the greek table" has a individual variation bougatsa that I think you could convert to use as individual galaktoboureko

It looks really good One thing I wondered is , was it wet aged before you dry aged it? Or did you get a fresh butchered primal to dry age yourself? I would like to try this one of these days but don't want to screw up a large piece of meat if I can help it.

Reducing or completely ommitting the fat(olive oil genereally) will bring you to a crispier cracker style. I don't have a specific recipe for you though. My preferred is a thin but more chewy than crispy crust. On that side of things,( much of this is a combo of info I have gathered here and other websites) a high hydration autolyze before mixing the other ingredients and long ferment with a bit of ascorbic acid as a dough conditioner has come the closest to my perfect homemade crust. When summer comes I am going to try hacking my bullet smoker and using a pan on top and bottom with natural lump charcoal and having the stone on a shelf inbetween. I may even see if I can get a piece of thick copper foil to go under the pizza for the first few minutes for subsequent experiments. The best part about perfecting pizza is that most of the experiements are highly edible. )

I love fresh herbs and usually have pots covering my back deck in the summer. In the winter I tend to use more dried herbs and in fact I prefer my own homegrown herbs tha I dry in fall , to storebought fresh. I do prefer storebought fresh over storebought dried though. At the end of the day it is about what your personal preference is.

Used this method again today... A couple of pictures , although not very good ones as the lighting was giving the camera the fits , and more importantly I was hungry. on top of a salmon cake with garlic chilli sauce.

I truly feel that omnivore is the way to go, but that most western diets are unbalanced in their use of animal protein. I do have respect for those who choose to go veg or vegan because of ethical concerns. Being willing to walk the walk, when it comes to your beliefs , whether I agree with your conclusions or not is admirable. One point I would like to make though is that wild game from hunting isn't just free meat. Just ask any serious hunter , and they will tell you that pound for pound after it is all said and done most wild game from hunting usually costs more than just buying freerange organic at the store. I have a friend who is a serious hunter that refers to hunting as "visiting the outdoor grocery store". He broke down the cost for me like this, his time, travel(gas,accomodations occasinally) , processing large animals( most will get a butcher to do their deer or moose for them), storage( he runs 5 chest freezers full of assorted different critters. At the end of the day he figures the cost of a pound of wild game(last time I talked to him he had, bear, moose, goose, duck, partridge, wild boar,alligator,caribou,venison, elk in his freezers) is at least 3 to 4 times what cheap factory raised meat would cost him.

the typical problem is the pressure of the refrigerant in the condenser gets too low for the compressor to work properly.. It may even cause damage, although I have never seen it happen. As to the new refrigerant working better at lower ambient temp range. This goes against everything I know about R-134a , which is the most common refrigerant used in residential cooling tech. Most of that was second hand info from service techs and engineers from when I was working at a Fridge/Freezer/dehumidifier factory . In almost every way it is less efficient than the old r-22 but without the evironmental damaging properties.

They are trying to farm them in British Columbia too..

People being unaware or not caring about safe handling in most households probably accounts for most instances of so called "24 hr flus" To the comment that the toxins are already there. There are low levels of them because there are low levels of the bacteria that create them. The higher the level of bacteria , (growth from being left out at room temp) the higher the levels of toxin will be. I have never experienced the joy of this type of food poisoning , but knowing someone who has, I will say it is not pretty . All that considered I would still have used it, as room temp was low enough and the time at room temp wasn't long enough to worry me.

great method.. I have used a few times now , and the results are spot on.. I had to reduce time the first try because I used a room temp egg , but quickly figured out the 4 mins was for a straight from fridge egg. Now I have to start perfecting , making a hollandaise sauce while half asleep, so I can roll out of bed and do eggs benni. I have a couple of months til asparagus season to play around.

we made a palate cleanser course between main meal and dessert on new years day. We swapped out the pink grapefruit juice for fresh squeezed lime juice and used a bottle of Cava instead of champagne. garnished with a few fresh pomegranate arils. personally I think it worked out better than the first time when we stuck exactly to the recipe. I guess properly it should be called a cava lime sorbet, but we have taken to calling it "that slush stuff" *chuckle*

take out extra spicy Hot and sour soup.. I prefer from JF CHEN here in town. Avgolemono .. either homemade or bought from a local greek restaurant. A concoction of miso , benito flake , microplaned fresh ginger,shredded carrots, finely sliced green onions and garlic/ chilli paste. with or without a drizzle of toasted sesame oil. maybe a squeeze of lime. A pretty messed up confusion but I tend to dump anything with flavour in to make up for not being able to taste well. very occasionally my wife will bring home a curried fish soup from her Indian friend at work. The last time it happened to coincide with a mild cold I was suffering though. It helped clear me out and feel better for a few hours afterwards. Real fast and easy.. Rooster noodles ( plain 3 min noodles) , pacific organic low sodium chicken broth, dash of dark mushroom soy, ribbon microplaned carrot and fresh garlic, zest microplaned fresh ginger, spoon or two of garlic chilli paste or sirracha to taste.

http://zknives.com/knives/kitchen/misc/ … sher.shtml very interesting link to an explaination on what a dishwasher can do to a good knife just being run through on normal cycles. There is also an explaintion and data on informal experiment they did with a new Wusthof boning knife made of X50CrMoV15 stainless steel. The knife is unused betweeen washing cycles , average of two cycles per week over fourteen weeks. At the end there is rust pitting on the blade. Great info on why some knives made out of alloys that are considered better quality could fair worse in the dishwasher based on free chromium atom content. What I took away from it is, if you don't really care about the knife that is being washed, the dishwasher once in awhile is no big deal. For a knife you really care about there is no short cut for immediate handwashing and drying.

I have no wiggle room on bacon.. It has to be real, dry smoked pork belly bacon.. No turkey bacon, chicken bacon , tofu bacon.. bleh.. Even the vac packed stuff walks the line of my tolerance.

The short answer is yes you should wait til it comes up to temp , however long that takes. long smoking sessions in cold temps can be problematic unless you have a really well insulated smoker setup. A big green egg or other style komodo smoker can achieve it but with thin steel smokers maintaining temp can be a real challenge. wraping with a welding blanket can be a lifesaver in this situation.

when I was visiting florida I did try an incredible cheese from the USA. Point Reyes Farmstead blue( from California).. raw cows milk, vegetarian rennet and the blue is based on roqueforte innoculation. Fantastic. depending on how far , far means, I love quebec maple syrup over ontario maple syrup. It may just be that we are getting a higher grade because we know people that work at the sugar bush producing the syrup we buy from quebec though. I think we have half a cupboard stocked with it right now .

yep, traditional gratin dauphinois doesn't use cheese, but who wants to be a traditionalist when there are so many good cheeses and so little time.

apparently airdrying is actually the more hygenic option. FDA recommendation for manual dishwashing is airdrying.

gin and chinotto with a slice each of lemon,lime and clementine. Bombay sapphire 1.5 oz over ice in highball the three citrus slices squeezed and dropped into the glass topped with brio chinotto stirred. very nice and refreshing.. Not sure of the name of it but I am sure I have read something about gin and chinotto in the past. Brio chinotto has quite a bite of quinine to it so it works similar to gin and tonic. I think I will grab some italian bitters for next time though as it could benifit from a dash or two

Could it just be habit from when they just had one sink in a kitchen ? I know when I was growing up before my parents redid the kitchen and put in a double sink the only real rinse the dishes got were a quick plunge to clear a spot on the top of the sudsy water before pulling it out and then into the rack and a bit of water poured over the rack afterwards. Once we had the double sink rinsing became standard.

I just buy minced dehydrated garlic or onion now.. If I need powder for a rub or some other reason, I just throw it in my spice grinder , or use my M&P.