Smoked my turkey as i always do. My probe said 159. Smoked it for 11 hours, it reached about 155 and stayed there for about 3 hours. You can see the little pop up thing never even popped. I do not trust those things. They're probably there for people who can't cook and safety reasons.

Made a bad ass stock with the carcass and trimmings. Then made an awesome turkey soup.
Also, salt water brine for 12+ hours is the way to go.

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I picked up one of these probe-type thermometers a month or two ago:

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The controls are extreme non-intuitive if you want to set your own target temperature manually, but once you've figured it out it's a great little unit. It alarms when the target temperature is reached, so you don't have to keep checking on it constantly.

beef at 170°F wtf.

Hence the need for custom settings.

I had a genuinely transformative experience today.

Take some gnocchi. The kind you buy "dry but moist" in a vacuum-sealed bag from the grocery store. Toss it in some olive oil. Bake at 425° for about 25 minutes.

Top with literally any savory, saucy thing you can think of. (One example might be chicken, zucchini and bell pepper in marinara sauce, with a bit of Asiago on top. But that's just like, my opinion, man.)

That's it. End of recipe. Just go and do it. I've never dry-baked gnocchi before, What an amazing texture combination.

Interesting. We usually keep a bag or two of those on-hand for lazy evenings. And typically super-simple, she will boil them, make a sage and brown butter sauce, top with fresh parmesan.

Well, now that I've gained 10 lbs thanks to the holiday gluttony, time to get back on track.

No pictures yet, save for this one, taken at the airport on my may back home.

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They ain't lyin. And it's kind of them to have this notice available for the tourists.

I'd still put ketchup on my hot dog. they can't tell me what to like.

Also I made a bread.
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it's a 40% wheat loaf straight out of Flour Water Salt Yeast. The first one came out overdone, so I put a heat shield (two layers of foil, shiny side exposed) under my dutch oven and it really evened out the temperature and prevented the direct radiation of the element from ruining my bread.

Also I enlisted some child labor to make some pasta (egg and flour only):


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^ Looks nice.

I bought a silicone mat like that one for my mother recently, as her very old mat (which was made of a semi-rigid material) finally split. She describes the new mat as being virtually a revelation. Nothing, including the super-sticky, pastry-like dough used to create Pastel de Medianoche, sticks to it.


The very first computerized video editor I ever used was a CMX-3600, developed in the early 1980s and to which I was introduced around 1995. This was a curious system, in that the video never actually touched the computer itself. Instead, a DEC PDP-11 computer controlled external VTRs, the switcher, the CG, a DVE (if you were lucky enough to be at a station which had one), the audio console, etc., to allow you to do precisely repeatable multi-layer edits with frame-accuracy. From a workflow perspective, it was more like the Dykstraflex stop-motion camera control system which was used to create the visual effects in the first Star Wars trilogy than to a modern nonlinear system such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You spent a lot of time setting up what you wanted to do, generated an Edit Decision List, and then let the computer run that list to make all of the machines do stuff.

This was the keyboard:

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(Yes, the bottom-left key does in fact say "LIST MAGIC." Engineers had the sense of humor then as now. Magic, in that context, was a combination of effects that you wanted to happen all at once which exceeded the physical capability of your switcher / DVE to create in a single pass, so the machine would break them down into groups in the order which minimized the number of generations required to produce the whole effect, and then automatically run multiple passes of the machines in the proper sequence while you went out for a cup of coffee. It was also smart enough to figure out the exact frame number at which various limits were exceeded and then subsequently un-exceeded, and do insert-edits as needed so that the base video was kept as clean as possible, with only the complex-effects sequences having a higher number of generations. Like I said, It was very much like doing composite special-effects on film in the 70s.)


One thing which I remember clearly was that this system had a sort of copy-n-paste function (this was not a common idea in the early 1980s), which worked backwards relative to what we are accustomed to today. You specified the target of the command first, and then the source. In the parlance of the CMX software, the function was called "make THIS be like THAT." (Yes, that's actually what they called it.)



So, in that spirit, make this:

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be like that:

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The mortar & pestle remains the only civilized way of dealing with dried rosemary, which along with a dash of salt and pepper, is the whole spice load. And olive oil, obviously.


So that goes into the oven at 425° for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, we've thawed a couple of Tilapia fillets and coated them very lightly in flour. This isn't a battering process, I just like that little bit of added texture. After the timer goes off, put the fish into the oven and set the timer for ten more minutes.

After that times goes off, withdraw the fish and baste lightly with a mix of
Then put both pans onto the top rack and broil on high for a couple of minutes to brown them up a tad.

And that's it. Plate, and bon appétit.


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My old one split too. Target had the silicone oxo one so I bought it. Works well. I might also consider making a dedicated bread board, but those don't roll up so well.

Sidebar:

I love shopping at the grocery store where I can't read any of the labels.

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Pro-tip: the staff are usually quite happy to assist yankees with translating, and also offering culinary tips and historical anecdotes about how their great-grandmother used to prefer this thing or the other back in the Stalin era.

And it also imparts a sense of dark irony, in knowing that one stands before a bountiful plenty of Russian-made goods which would have been unimaginable to the average Russian citizen just a few short decades ago.

That's great. My boss is a huge tea snob and only drinks loose leaf, Chinese tea. He took me to this monster Asian supermarket I had no idea existed last year.

The wild variety of ingredients was pretty astounding.

uh joe
the fuck is that stuff? google kept suggesting that the stuff was in tomato sauce but kept showing it as BTOMATHOM COYCE. close enough.

beware the twittering!

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So you can fit an entire pizza in a single gallon ziploc bag. But you can't fit 10 pizzas into 20 4 year olds and a few parents. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2 large pepperoni and one large... actually i don't know:

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This photo is a hugely delicious Shrimp Tempura with Creamy Spicy Sauce (Nobu makes it with Rock shrimp, but again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
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I made it by setting my stove on fire a little. No harm done, just embarassed myself a tiny bit.

Luckily the hand visible in the picture helped move the pot off the stove while I fanned the flames. That hand belongs to the guy responsible for all your privacy notice updates lately and for representing Apple in the FBI phone unlocking case a few years back. He did enjoy my shrimps.


He also enjoyed our evening's cocktail: The Foghorn.
2 parts Gin, splash of lime juice, 4 parts ginger beer, and a dash of bitters garnished with a lime wedge. The featured gin was Citadelle, which is a favorite of your loving admin @Braineack

other dishes served: Nobu's miso marinated black cod, wild rice pilaf with sake sauteed shiitakes, and scorched green beans.

Looks nice.

(The shrimp, not the pizza.)

I feel as though I've been neglecting this page of late. Been working long hours 7 days a week, so I haven't been doing much culinary expression. Lots of quick-n-easy fajitas and such. I did make a nice little pizza yesterday, but didn't document it as it was nothing special.

Pizza.

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A precariously thin crust, a simple sauce, ricotta and mozzarella cheeses (I love ricotta so very much), finely-sliced onion, anchovy (just four thin strips; a little goes a long way, flavor-wise), mushroom, and sliced cherry tomato. A sprinkling of Parmesan towards the end.

One of the nice things about pans with metal handles is that you can start a dish in the oven, then transfer it to the stovetop to give the underside a nice char without over-cooking the top.

Today is my girlfriend's birthday, but we celebrated over the weekend (my dad was down here as well). I've told you gent's before about the amazing Oklahoma onion burger, so we took my dad out to El Reno to go to the place for onion burgers.

Robert's Grill. Opened in 1926, 14 stools. The building and burger are humble in looks, but so perfect. You can't buy what that old griddle imparts flavorwise in the burgers. Their chili and homemade coleslaw are also outstanding.
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Then last night for dinner Alli had a special request, but I forgot to take more pics of cooking after getting the short rib. Made a Guiness braised short rib served over white cheddar mashed potatoes.

2+ lbs of grass fed, bone-in ribs. Sear and remove from pan.
Add in diced yellow onion, 4-5 cloves of garlic and cook that down for a couple of minutes.
10oz baby portabella's sliced and in for 4-5 minutes.
tomato paste, cook it out for a minute, add just more than two cups of Guiness, 2 bay leaves.
Return meat to dutch oven, make sure it's down in the liquid, cover, into a 250° for 5 hours.

Boil 2 lbs Yukon potatoes.
4 tbls butter, 2/3 half and half, 1 cup sharp white cheddar*

*They happened to be sampling a white cheddar at Whole Foods when I went in. Deer Creek cheese out of Wisconsin. Insanely delicious. What's left is likely going on grilled cheese with sourdough and stone ground mustard for lunch.
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