cdh

See you there and then!

I'm wide open as to time... tell me when and where, and I'll be there.

I like the looks of both of them... Spencer looks very pretty, but I think the El Harissa menu is more interesting.

I do love beer, particularly sours. They're what I've been making recently. So tasting through the lineup at JP is high on my agenda. (btw, is there any interest in me toting some beer along? I keg everything, so bottling and travelling with it may not yield the best presentation... ) As to Zingermans, sandwiches are indeed sandwiches... I'm more interested in getting about 2 or 3 slices each of 8 or 9 different obscure cured pork products ... and take the same approach to cheese.

I'm all about lunch on Friday if others are also up for it. I've never been to Ann Arbor before, so having intrepid local guides would be nice... otherwise I'd just end up eating a heap of deli from Zingermans and then sit in the Jolly Pumpkin cafe chatting up the beer geeks for suggestions of what else to do for lack of any more in depth knowledge of where to go and what to do.

We should really have a amazon charity link in this thread so we can fund the place with a cut of the sales made when people from here click through... they do that, don't they?

Prime day seduced me into it. I've got an IP on the way. Now I need to read the whole of this monster topic here.

OK, I'm in Ann Arbor for the 4th and 5th, leaving on the 6th in the AM for Chicago.

Hmmm.. a problem with shad roe when they get far enough upstream into fresh water is the roe starts tasting muddy... test for that with this carp stuff by frying a bit of it in bacon fat and see if the flavor is acceptable. If not, maybe cold smoke it until the mud is hidden by smoke. If a lobe fried in bacon fat tastes good, then you know one thing to do with more of it.

I've put in an Airbnb request for 2 nights in Ann Arbor, the 4th and 5th of August... If that comes through, I'll be around for the Friday evening shenanigans, and will have time to explore all the fun downtown stuff there and meet up with any locals who are around.

Thanks for that! I think those options are quite interesting... Better than driving back down around Chicago...

I could only make it for Friday night... I've already booked and paid for hotel room in Chicago for Saturday and Sunday for the wedding I'm going to. Looks like this set of shindigs is on the opposite side of MI from my relatives' place in South Haven, so combining those two things doesn't seem to work. But if I drive in from PA a stop on the Eastern side of the state could be made to work in all probability. I'd love to see the Jolly Pumpkin brewery and Zingermans and all of what Ann Arbor has to offer by way of good food stuff... I'm thinking of heartlanding even further west and making some sort of run from Chicago into Wisconsin to sample the beers local to there... and then following the lake back to South Haven... Pity the ferries from Chicago to Michigan went out of business.

Hmmm... I have cause to be in Michigan and Chicago that weekend... will have to see if I can pass through.

The functional design of modern appliances is also really bad. The new shiny flat top cooktops with the glass surface and the elements buried underneath? How does such a thing handle a boil-over? You'd think they'd have thought about it. But no. If a boil-over occurs, it floods the control knobs and shorts them out. $300 of parts and labor later, I'd much rather have kept the old coil element stove. But shiny sells.

Wow! I really need to take a trip to Japan some time. Thanks for the masses of inspiration.

I've had my Searzall since the first Kickstartered batch shipped and I've played with it a bunch... Thought I'd share my observations. 1. Food straight out of a sous vide bag is generally too wet for the Searzall to be a quick and effective finishing blast. The whole idea of getting an even doneness all the way through is sabotaged by the need to boil off the wet before the browning even starts. 2. The real value and utility of the Searzall is not in blasting a crust on something that is already cooked through... it is that you can take a steak out of the freezer, unwrap it, salt it, and blast a lovely crispy crust on the outside, then finish cooking it on a low temp grill with a thermometer stuck in. You never ever find yourself in the position of making the decision to leave meat on the heat to get more browned when it is approaching the doneness you really wanted. 3. Same trick works like a champ for salmon. Start blasting a crust on it, and finish it in a low oven to get the middle up to 115F. 4. I've had no luck making anything worthwhile out of poultry skin with this device. Poultry just doesn't seem to benefit from this sort of heat application. 5. This thing is the best grilled cheese tool available.

That really read as /off/ the first time I passed my eyes over it, because "tarama" is the Greek word for fish roe... "taramasalata" is the dish made from it... to say the eggs have no egg in them was jarring. But now I see that "taramasalata" is too long for a word and is shortened to tarama as an abbreviation, rather than as a reference to the egg component... and your point is that there is no chicken egg serving as the emulsifier...

I'm not unique in using the mayonnaise analogy to describe it... http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2014/09/tarama-fish-roe-recipe-spread-taramasalata-taramosalata/

I thought this observation was worth sharing: Oxidation and age improve taramasalata. I have had a long time appreciation of this stuff... essentially mayonnaise with cod roe in it. A Greek usual suspect. And delicious. Last fall I picked up a fresh jar of the Krinos brand... a purveyor in the US market that has got wide distribution on the East Coast, at least. Tasting it initially, it presented as a lot more fishy than expected... kinda funky in ways not expected. More of a fish store funk than I usually expect, so it went back into the fridge and kinda got lost track of. The jar has sat in my fridge for six months, and I just pulled it out. Knowing it is full of salt and acid, and had no signs of mold on it, I was not squeamish about trying it again when it came to my attention this afternoon. And it was the delicious nutty caviar spread I'd hoped for 6 months ago. I think I've learned that oxidation and time improve fish eggs. Does sturgeon, salmon or trout caviar improve with time in similar ways, or is the acid heavy mayo format key to this improvement by aging?

Does baking yeast survive the freezer? Brewing yeasts generally don't, unless you add glycerine to the sample... otherwise the cells burst when they freeze.

Water kefir is fun stuff too.... all the probiotics and none of the opacity!

I know in a Thai cooking class I took while on vacation in Thailand a long time ago, every time shrimp paste was used, it got wrapped in a little square of tin foil and waved over the fire for a bit. If that's what you mean by toasting, I don't ever recall an instance where it wasn't done. No idea if the toast/no-toast is a cultural difference between Malays and Thais, or if the Malays are also toast-always people. It's been a long time and I've never really played with shrimp paste since, so I have no ideas how different the toasted flavor is from the untoasted.

A vocational/trade school that does culinary would probably love to get a pro-level cake making setup. Call the local school district.

Don't bother with the Canada geese. I've had the opportunity to try them, and they're really not tasty. Maybe the bitter unpleasantness is just the wild diet... but it was definitely there.

Are Aldis still all cash only operations? I popped into one a few years back and was unimpressed with the selection, and unable to make the trial purchase I intended to because they process no plastic at the POS.