Yeah I’ve got a cabinet dedicated to my spices. Everything needs just a little more garlic. And maybe some cumin. Oooh! Herbs de Provence! Hmmm needs something … cayenne?
My mother, on the other hand, thinks moo goo gai pan is “exotic”. Fish in our house was plain white fish with a dash of pepper and a lemon wedge. Cod is an exceptionally boring fish with nothing on it!
There was this hole-in-the-wall Mexican place by Mr. Bells’ old office that had won all kinds of “Best of Los Angeles” awards. We used to have lunch there a lot. Once, I tried the daily special - I can’t remember what it was now. It was delicious, but painfully spicy. I figured I was just too much of a gringa to tolerate it.
Then one of the workers came running out of the kitchen apologizing. Turned out, in some comedy of errors, all three cooks assumed that the dish hadn’t been seasoned yet and each one had added the full measure of spice. So it wasn’t just my white-girl status!
By 2 minutes! 
It really is, your marbling must be awful!
(yep, still creeping myself out, thanks!)
being a new englander I will take issue with “cod is boring”. NO MAAM NO IT ISN’T!!! 
I do love cod, and it is such a versatile white fish. My kids especially love pan seared cod wrapped in potato with a light tomato water pan sauce.
I was born in Boston and I repeat: cod with nothing but a dash of pepper and a lemon wedge is boring. fite me.
FITE!!! I get it. I love mild white fish like cod, so for me…simple cod or haddock with salt and pepper and lemon with a nice ritz cracker topping is comfort food for me.
I can believe it.
To this very day, I cannot abide by meatloaf, sauerkraut, pot pies, and any vegetable that has been canned.
i forgive you because you have never had my homemade chicken pot pie which has stock enriched with a pound or so of chicken feet cooked into it and seasoned with thyme, parsley, white pepper, bay leaf, black pepper, shallots, and fresh sage along with an adequate amount of salt made into a gravy. the chicken is accompanied by fresh sweet corn kernels cut off the cob immediately before cooking as well as carrots, potatoes, and green peas.
as for canning, if your garden produces more than you and your family and your neighbors can eat you must either can the excess or waste it. or were you talking about picking them up in a can at the local store?
More than likely this. The only canned products i buy is tomato sauce, paste, or crushed/diced tomato. Tuna or Sardines, and the occasional canned oysters because i’m a glutton for smelly fishy food.
You’re right. I apologise to all the other Brits out there. I’ve been outside the U.K. for a while, and rarely here Worcestershire pronounced well. If I were back on the island, it would be different. But everybody at home seems so crazy these days, I’m happier putting up with a few Worchesters, I guess.
I accept your forgiveness, but even in the unlikely event we should ever meet, I still never will.
I’m just ruined for some food dishes, no matter how well prepared they might be.
Pretty much every vegetable I ate as a kid came from store bought cans or a frozen bag.
each year the garden produces more tomatoes than we can use immediately so i generally end up canning 12-24 pints of tomatoes along with 8-12 quarts along with 20 pints of my salsa in mild, medium, and hot.
Feel free to send me some. I do love me a good tomato or salsa.
It does look wonderful, if that’s any consolation…
this is about as close as you’re likely to get–
“this is what you want” proved to be the most popular name for it so that’s what i label them all with now.
But that’s the right way to serve it. Maybe without the lemon. Like many fish, cod is subtle, and doesn’t need dousing in spice. Let the fish shine.
Best cod I ever ate was from a fisherman in Iceland. I was cycling. Or trying to. He picked me up in the dark, gave me a lift, and explained in ferocious terms how the Icelandic fishing fleet had beaten the British Navy in the Cods Wars (I’m British). When he dropped me off, he insisted on giving me a piece of cod, fresh off his boat. I fried it on my Trangia with nothing but salt, pepper and oil (man, was that hard to clean afterwards!), and had the best meal in a long time. Then I went to register at the campsite, not realizing my face was completely black with mud. The nice lady on reception looked somewhere between amused and terrified, and I had no idea why…
You are missing out. Fresh ground pepper is the tits.
“woost-oost-air-chester-shire” sometimes there should be a couple extra “oosts” and a cackle or two in there.
Try a cheap coffee grinder. Fewer chunky bits for tooth chipingly hard spices like achiote.
If she knew anything based on good eats she’d know how to cook. Alton Brown is the most significant thing to happen to culinary education since Julia Child. Dude made a career out of teaching deep, deep, technique instead of providing “easy week night recipes”.
And food network rewarded him by turning him into a game show host.
LIES. Salt is the just about the only thing you can put on meat that will pennetrate beyond a few millimeters into the surface. Chemical magic brings it into the muscle fibers where it partially denatures the proteins. Its an integral process for curing. But for fresh meats what it does is allow the meat to stay moister by preventing those proteins from over coagulating and squeezing out excess moistness.
An unsalted turkey loses significantly more weight due to water loss than a brined turkey. But curiously a brined turkey loses almost as much weight to water loss as a salted turkey. Even though the salted turkey has no added water. Because its the salt doing the trick. The brined turkey will shed almost all of that added water. Which is why it fucks your drippings up. Its just gonna purge a shit ton of highly salted water into the roasting pan. The salted and air dried turkey doesn’t do this and stays just about as ■■■■■, while not fucking your pan sauce or becoming disconcertingly wet. The un-seasoned turkey cooked the same way will be dry as shit.
Since seasoning = use of salt. Seasoning is critical to that heavily censored bird.
Source: Modern food science and empirical testing:
I’d point you the the same above source. Salty, watery, drippings with little browning are an established problem with brining. Because the meat/bird purges most of the water it takes up along with a hell of a lot of the salt. If you aren’t seeing the issue you may not be using a strong enough brine to really get the job done in the first place. Or you may simply be lucky.The other major problem with brining is that the small amount of excess water that does remain in the meat tends to make things sort of wet, hammy, and dilutes the flavor of the meat.
Its not so much long lost. Woooooosterchoostershire is its direct descendant. And from what I gather from people who have made Garum using old roman recipes its not materially different from South East Asian fish sauce.
Several magazines and websites have. California Olive Ranch typically comes out on top for affordable olive oil brands. There’s better in the world but your going to a specialty shop and paying through the nose.
Americas Test Kitchen has always been a bit shite. J Kenji Lopez-Alt who writes Food Lab used to work for them. Left for various reasons but apparently lack of rigor, unwillingness to update their methods and other problems were part of it. I don’t watch the show. And won’t pony up for the website. But I’ve been gifted the magazine for the last 10 years running. They frequently make obvious mistakes. Advocate things that have not been true for some time. Insist everything must be an “easy weeknight meal”. And as of late have chiefly focused on re-publishing slight variations of Lopez-Alt’s recipes and techniques as if they themselves had discovered them. IIRC they themselves have acknowledged the issues with brining and published instructions for dry rubbing a turkey.
I have a pepper grinder, it doesn’t really do much for me. I do use it on occasion but i much prefer other spices.
