TdeV

Mitch, all those dishes look lovely. Sigh. How do you get the duck fat so clear? Or is it broth?

Saturday night's Wine Zoom Event. One plate per person. Bottles decanted and delivered. From 12 o'clock going clockwise: Rougette Bavarian Red Triple-Cream from Germany Tangerine Fig Almond Cake from Valencia, Spain Bergader Basil Smoked Bavarian Semi-Soft Cow Cheese from Germany Membrillo Casero handmade Quince Paste from Valencia, Spain Bruschette toasts from Italy (centre) Boar's Head Spicy Traditional Pepperoni (pork & beef) Butternut Squash crackers from Greece Green and black olives Pepperoncini Bosc pear Ines Rosales Savory Olive Oil Torta with Rosemary & Thyme The pear was treated with lemon juice to slow browning. And the wines . . . The Duckhorn was tasty, but disappeared entirely with any of the more flavourful foodstuffs. The Gascogne had a nice middle and back fullness and a citrusy quality. This Scherrer was fresh and crisp, just like its colour. Scherrer Winery is not open very often, and if you ever have the opportunity to go to, sieze it! We may have discovered this wine at a Barrel Tasting in Sonoma County in Northern California. We walked in, received a glass and a pour. While we were thinking about it, our server told us to walk across the room and pick up a couple of olives. What an experience. So, many times in future years, DH and I supped on olives while drinking iterations of this wine. On Saturday, it held up to every tidbit. We're members of the Peterson Winery Zin Club in which recently delivered the Sogno. Velvety and smooth, lots of fruit. I was so darned impressed with it, DH got some more which included the Vignobles. A good time was had by all. 😎

Truly lovely. How do you do your halibut?

Sadly not available in US.

Lovely looking dinner, dcarch. I also have plenty of hosta. Please say again how you cook them. Are there any hosta varieties to avoid?

I would happily eat 2 eggs, sunny side up, on homemade bread toast every day. In fact, some years ago, I did. As a child we sometimes had fried eggs and chips for dinner. I love runny yolks!

Tell us more, please!

Last night's dinner, simple and very late, because the plumber was still working under the sink. Avocado, lime, cilantro, oo, garlic, sous vide sausage, pasta. The dish was designed to use fresh ramps which a friend brought over, but weren't used (because I forgot).

My friend is bringing me some fresh ramps. Other than Momofuku (no kewpie mayo), what should I do with them?

Which blade, Kay?

Sadly, more and more, I'm finding this to be true too.

Your dinner looks outstanding, @liamsaunt ! What are the textures of these latkes? The veg are raw, right? Add any spices?

There were too many disasters to have meaningful data about this. The plan was Urvashi Pitre's Butter Chicken. I did start with just the rice for 10 minutes high pressure, stop it, no slow release. Then I put in the cut up boneless chicken et al. Then up to pressure again but for some reason the pot kept spurting steam and never went under pressure. I cancelled the program, looked at the vent to see if food was stuck, and started up again–only for 6 minutes high pressure this time. DH thought dinner was good, I thought it was merely okay.

@Raamo, those photos are divine. I immediately looked up the recipe and . . . I have to make it . . . soon!

If one is cooking a dish (high pressure) in the Instant Pot where the chicken will take 10 minutes but the brown rice will take 22 minutes (using pot-in-pot), does one cook the rice 12 minutes, open the pot, sauté the chicken, close the pot, cook another 10 minutes at high pressure? If not that, then what? And the 10 minutes rest, does that happen on the first cook cycle and the second cook cycle?

@DiggingDogFarm replied to @Bernie So true. There's a myriad of things whizzing by in this thread, so I would like to add these points: When I got started with Evernote I used a sheetfed scanner which automatically does optical character recognition (OCR) and saves files in .pdf format. OCR means that those notes in Evernote are SEARCHABLE. So, it helps to learn a little about SEARCH (which will further assist your interactions with Mr. Google). Scanners can be had for a couple hundred bucks. Using a sheetfed scanner you put in a stack of pages and it feeds them automatically. I did several thousands of pages of documents in a couple of weeks. A weblink for a favourite recipe is useless if the page is deleted from the website. Evernote has a web clipper which will copy the data on the webpage. Once in Evernote it is fully searchable. Evernote will remember where it copied the recipe from. One drawback of being able to search for words in any note (originally document or website) is that if, for example, you're looking for how long to sous vide eggs to get them perfectly soft-boiled, searching for any presence of "egg" will return many, many results. Enter "tags" which can be attached to any note. The hardest part of my scanning documents adventure was figuring out my structure for classification. In Evernote there are tags which are an advantage when searching for "Eggs Boiled Soft" which is performed using " tag:egg* " (without quotes) which won't produce results for every dern recipe with eggs in them One of the interesting things about tags is that one no longer needs a "top down" structure of classification. For example, you could have a tag for "grill" and an unrelated tag for "eggplant" which happens to be a sub-tag of "vegetables". Fortunately, the structure can be modified anytime, so you can figure it out as you go. If anyone is interested, I will ask Chris if we can have a thread for discussion of using Evernote for recipe management. Say so if you want to explore this further. What this method doesn't solve is searching through one's printed cookbooks (as mentioned previously). I also keep my Diaries on paper (in binders) e.g. Sous Vide, Instant Pot, etc.

The wine tasting event was great, though I didn't hear of anyone finishing their plate. It was so much fun, I'm already thinking of the next one. (I have some pistachio crackers that I forgot to serve). It took me quite some time to select ingredients (either to think of them or browse in the grocery at 6 a.m.). Every time I started on a new ingredient, I washed the cutting board, knife and my hands; I must have washed my hands 45 times. Both Joseph Swan Zinfandel wines from Zeigler vineyard had similarities, the terroir coming through. The 2011 had more fruit, which is my preference, but the 1996 still had fruit and was more complex, which is DH's preference. Once the winery owners, Rod Berglund (winemaker) and Lynn Swan Berglund, came to dinner and brought a 1966/67 Zinfandel from one of Joe Swan's first vintages and IT still had a little fruit! Rich, fruity California Zinfandel is hands down my favourite wine and Joseph Swan (in Sonoma) is my most favourite vintner (I have a few favourites 😄). So, what should we do for the next wine food Zoom event? ---- Edit: With early morning cognition, I realized the above was a misstatement: my kitchen is not sterilized, so every time I touched something other than the knife or cutting board, I washed my hands again (which turned out to be amazingly frequently). When I changed ingredient, I washed the knife and sometimes the cutting board.

The Roussanne was delivered (with half empty bottle) but the Joseph Swan was not.

We delivered picnic plates and wine, one plate per person. From one participant "Thanks for a wonderful, multi-gastronomical, friend-friendly, wine-enhanced picnic-kinda Zoom event!!" From 12 o'clock going clockwise: Edam Cheese from Artikaas, Holland Petite Crème, cows' milk from Marin French Cheese, California, USA Petit Basque, sheeps' milk from Pyrenees Mountains, Basque, France Tangerine Wigwam Ham from Edwards' Virginia Smokehouse Veneto Salami Bedou (from St Louis, MO) Green and black olives Pepperoncini Bosc and Bartlett pear Fig Almond Cake from Valencia, Spain Membrillo Casero handmade Quince Paste from Valencia, Spain Whole grain crackers Effie's Pecan Nutcakes Avocado The pears and avocado were treated with lemon juice to slow browning. The avocado had olive oil as well. The 2018 Roussanne was wonderful and paired well with the food, even though there were strong flavours, including acidic fruits and salty ham. And the pièce de résistance, two Joseph Swan Zinfandels, old and new, from the same Zeigler vineyards. Yum, yum!

Yes, @blue_dolphin, like pressure cooker or instant pot or slow cooker or sous vide.

Last time, I wanted to select for either appliance or cooking method, which can't be done. "Support" told me that I could build my own index. Also, if I remember previous searches correctly, not all ingredients can be searched. Next time I think of a search that Eat Your Books would be good for, I'll keep track. I recognize that familiarity with software makes its use more successful. But I also recognize that some software familiarity is a question of downgrading one's expectations for what the software can/should deliver.

P.S. I don't currently have a good solution for finding stuff in my hundreds of cookbooks.

In this post I mention my use of Evernote. I actually started using Evernote because I was moving across the country and didn't want to move boxes and boxes of recipe printouts, so I bought a sheetfed scanner and scanned the paperwork. That was years ago and I invested the time it took to design (figure out) how to classify stuff. I have hundreds of cookbooks which I read like novels, for entertainment. Others have recommended the site Eat Your Books but it can't answer the questions I want to ask. (I know this because I have repeatedly tested it with my five free books). If I wanted to use Eat Your Books like I use Evernote, I would have to compile custom indeces. If I'm going to compile custom indeces, why do I need Eat Your Books? So, you have to decide, like @teonzo, how much organization you want. And then you have to put in the effort to achieve it. The problem is primarily an organizational one.

Ah, yet another device which I don't own. You are a very, very bad influence, Jo.

I use Evernote (www.evernote.com) which is a note app. Actually I manage my notes on my computer, but I can get to them from my cell phone. One folder is called Food which has a sub-folder called Shared Recipes and I can provide that link to anyone. Here, for example, is my modification of your recipe for Maggie's Shrimp & Corn w Basil. One of the things you can't see is that the original link came from recipecircus.com. On the other hand, here is your recipe for Grilled Chicken Thighs with Bullseye Sauce which came from eGullet. What Evernote actually does is copy your local Evernote to an online database which can be accessed by any of your devices (computers, phone, tablet). You can share any individual recipe with anyone. What you can't do is give anyone a structure to walk through such as Entrées, Desserts, etc. You could, however, create one Note for Desserts which gave hyperlinks to your favourite dessert recipes. Clear as mud, huh? Evernote comes in a free and paid version. I actually started using Evernote because I was moving across the country and didn't want to move boxes and boxes of recipe printouts. I bought a sheetfed scanner. That first month I ran into the ceiling on uploads for the free version, so became a premium user. I don't suppose that I would have run into that ceiling ever after but there are many things in the premium version which are better. It's about $50 per year.