It’s a grill. Grills are meant to burn food. It’s how this universe is structured.
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On one side only though?
They need to rethink the instrument or play only chromatic runs.
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What a great thing, and a really nice read. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I love the idea of harvesting food by wading into a lake and digging it up with my toes then tossing it into the nearby canoe 
In related news, I pre-ordered the cookbook someone posted, the one by a former chef at the DC Native American history museum (which, if anyone hasn’t been, the cafeteria is worth a visit even if you don’t have time to tour the museum exhibits. You gotta eat, right?). It should be shipping in a week or two!
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I made a Chinese roast duck red curry and started with home-made Thai red curry paste. No photos of the curry but I also used the paste in some corn fritters which were pretty good, if not extremely messy.
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Here’s a food timeline
Some of the links are broken, but I’ve been having a fun time checking out different foods and reading the historical references.
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This is the first time I’ve ever seen red Leicester cheese in Japan.
I am over the moon, as they say.
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A friend lent me their Anova sous vide stick thing and now I’m weighing up the cost, both in terms of price and space, because what it does it does really well. This was mid-week sous vide chicken breast with skin on (which suits working from home), with the skin browned and fat rendered in a pan before serving. It was incredibly ■■■■■, perfectly cooked and amazingly tender. I’m not usually a fan of chicken breasts - they’re hard to cook without becoming dry and don’t have the flavour of thigh meat, but these were fantastic.
The sauce was a cross between nước chấm (fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water) and salsa verde, with a lot of dill, some chili and purple shallots. The dill meant it needed a tiny bit of salt to balance, to get it salty enough without the fish sauce being too strong.
Served with stir-fried snake beans and instant ramen, because lazy.
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Oh, yeah, sound like the meal of a lazy person. 
Sounds delicious! How did you handle browning at the end without overcooking?
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Sous vide circulators are great tools for what they do. Trying to make them “more useful” by trying to do different things with them can be frustrating, and I’m not sure why so many people see the need to do so. It’s now the only way I’ll cook steaks or thick loin lamb chops. Mine isn’t very big so it fits on a shelf with some platters we don’t use much anymore.
Sometimes having a tool that does the one thing really well is better than having a tool that multitasks badly. Why try to have your pressure cooker cook dishes that work well in a sauté pan?
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Circulators are entirely worth it. Once you have one a while you start to realize it’s not just in what they do really well. Or all those headline, only with sous vide things. There’s huge labor saving action.
I’ve defrosted whole chickens in around an hour. And since it’s “toss food in, ignore till eat time” there’s a lot that’s just easier if not any better or more impressive. Poaching a dozen eggs at once in their shells for a big family breakfast is pretty low effort. Tossing a couple legs of lamb in there and forgetting about them for the day takes a huge amount of pressure off a holiday.
It is hands down the easiest and best way to cook a ham. You literally throw the thing in, still in it’s package. Heat it to 140f, maybe 145f. Let it burble for a good long while to tenderize a bit. Then just haul it out, glaze it and slap in a screaming hot oven to brown. It takes anything the least bit finicky out of it, and it is easily the best ham I have ever had.
And it’s great for meal prep. You can season, seal and freeze steaks. Then drop them in straight from the freezer. Perfectly cooked steak, with no for thought, and almost no effort. I also sous vide up bags of chicken thighs and freeze them. Then it’s just thaw and brown.
I’m pretty sure you can full on can in there. I haven’t tried it, but I do use it to pre-heat/hold my jars before processing. Which makes boiling large batches much faster and smoother. And I used to use it to heat water for steeping grains to precise temps, and for a big bucket of hot sanitizer back when I was still playing with home brew.
The down side is they’re minimally useful for veg. They don’t really get hot enough to effectively break down pectin for a lot of things. And there isn’t a lot of transformative benefit to be found. Useful for blanching/par cooking, it’s a good way to do a lot of sweet corn.
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A moment of pedantry-if they are cooked in their shells, eggs are not poached. Poaching eggs is defined by them being out of their shells.
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When you have the ability to do it in the shell. It’s defined more by the texture. A consistently soft set white, with a thickened yolk. Plus poaching refers to holding something in sub-boiling liquid to cook, which is everything when you do it sous vide.
The difference from the traditional soft boiled egg, is the softer white. A soft boiled egg will typically stand up more on the plate, the sous vide egg will slump like a traditionally poached egg. The loose white tends to remain liquid. I usually discard it when I crack the egg. It can be tightened up by a dunk in boiling water for traditional poached egg presentation.
Though eggs poached in their shell seems to be a thing before sous vide, it’s one of those things that’s much easier and more consistently done with a circulator. And has become much more popular since they became available.
Consistently referred to as poached eggs.
Weirdly making a traditional soft boiled egg with a fully set white, but liquid yolk in a circulator involves jumping through some hoops. Since you can’t really do temperature gradients in there. So I just do them by burlin.
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Thanks for reminding me. Time to sous vide some eggs again.
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Sounds like we’re talking about onsen eggs:
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The pan was medium-hot, so it didn’t take too long, and the chicken had so much moisture in it, it would have been hard to overcook. Well worth it!
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Thanks everyone. I see a pattern emerging…
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I signed up for a November farm share, not really knowing what I’d get. I showed up, and the farmer had all the foods sorted into bins and a sign that read: 30 lbs of whatever you want, plus 7 apples.
Such a bargain! I felt like a kid in a candy store. Just got done putting away 30 lbs of squashes, carrots, cabbage, parsnips, onions, garlic, celery, potatoes, tomatoes, poblanos, tatsoi and other goodies. I feel so rich right now.
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