Be Excellent To Each Other

How come I'm not very well up on breadmaker etiquette? I've no idea, I didn't know there was any for a start.
I just noticed you'd cut a slice from the bottom of the loaf and it seemed a bit weird, but I just wanted to know if I'd been getting it wrong all this time.

The Guardian website today has recipes for 'proper' Salt Beef and Pastrami

I'm pretty certain that the Salt Beef will be next on my list of meat feasts.

This looks amazing! This is corned beef as the Jewish Americans understand it.

There's a similar German recipe I've been meaning to try where a piece of brisket is marinated in vinegars for 5-7 days then slow-roasted. I ate it in Indiana and it was delicious.

Edit -- sauerbraten.

Wow. That's made me feel hungry and I've only just finished a sausage sandwich

From the Guardian article:He's wrong to get sniffy about the naming. The traditional Irish dish of "corned beef" was salted (and later brined) beef, roasted or braised and served sliced. The practice of then mincing that and setting it in jelly, which only the British call corned beef and the rest of the world call bully beef, came later. This is one of the times the Americans kept the old terminology and we changed it around.

Except that the etymology of bully beef makes even less sense - because it comes from the french word meaning 'boiled'.

So both are boiled, and both are salted - so you could call either of the two things salt beef, corned beef, or bully beef and be just as accurate.

Here's something that's been bothering me for a while and perhaps you greedy bastards super brains could answer;

If I cook something, say a beef chilli, on a Saturday and then refrigerate any leftovers the same day - how many days would you leave it in the fridge before you considered it unsafe to eat?*

What about cooked meats like a joint or a chicken?

Rice and pasta I tend to bin rather than save but I awlays make bucket loads of food on a weekend with the intention of eating the leftovers throughout the week. Should I still be eating the chilli on say, Thursday?

*Assuming I'm heating through properly in a pan or microwaving untilthoroughly heated.

To finely dice peppers, I'd slice them into "hoops" as you probably have, pile them into the middle of the board and then do the old hand on top of the knife "rocking" chop motion with your chef's knife until they're tiny little bits of spicy mush.



(About the 1:40 mark)

Everything in our house gets eaten the next day or frozen once it's cooled down. Pans of soup can be kept out as long as you heat through once a day, again though it's usually gone after 3 days at the most.

I find that with something like a chilli, you can leave it in the pan (covered), and re-heat it the next day or even the day after and it'll be fine. Obviously freeze it for any longer than that. Obviously other foods need more careful storage, but a beef chilli isn't going to grow deadly mould and bacteria after a couple of days.

In fact, I usually make a chilli the night before and leave it in the pan overnight, before heating it up to eat the day after. Tastes much better the day after!

I tend to leave it cooking overnight, too.

I'd say 3 nights later is the maximum for me.

Phew! I put myself out there for a minute. Was half expecting a "health police" bashing. Glad I'm not some sort of filthy fungus muncher.

Bulletproof constitution, me.

Only because of the size of your pans though.

No, but your Mum is.

She did mention your genital hygiene problems.

Clean as a whistle now though, she's like an oral Oxpecker.

I'm making ratatouille tonight.

Finally, someone has put a bit of daylight between me and Zardoz's frankly unbeatable comeback. Also, pics Gaywood, pics. I'm giving this a go later in the week:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010 ... chees.html

Simple, but it should be very nice.

That does look good. I made an authentic alfredo at the weekend. It was very good, if a bit rich even for me.

I properly love Serious Eats.

Yeah it's great! Even if you don't plan on cooking, the pictures are nice to look at. But yeah, I've tried a few of their recipes now and they're always good. And I chuffing love Alfredo sauce. So simple. Only trouble is, much like carbonara, it's very difficult to get the balance just right. Sometimes it'll be too rich as you say, and sometimes a little bland. But when you pull it off!

I've never been accused of being light-handed with the butter or cheese, is my problem.

Yeah I should clarify that by "sometimes bland, sometimes rich", I really meant "usually always too rich".

Is anybody planning to go to the masterchef live expo thing in London in a couple of weeks? I shall be there with Mrs Trooper

I have some friends coming for dinner in a couple of weeks and I'm debating what to make for dinner.

I was going to do slow cooked belly pork (marinaded in cider for 48 hours, then dried and the flesh side coated with fennel seed for 24 hours before being cooked slowly for 5+ hours on a bed of apple slices and some cider to baste).

This is really quite delicious as I've made it several times before, but it can be quite rich and I'm debating what to make with it. I was toying with the idea of doing gratin dauphinois and maybe some green beans, but wasn't sure if the potato dish might be too rich to go with the pork.

Should I do something to balance out the richness of the pork, like some kind of lentil dish?

Suggestions?

No, but we're going to the Christmas one a couple of weeks later.

http://fscked.co.uk/post/1472415748/din ... atatouille

Turned out too wet. I thoughtlessly stirred it after adjusting the seasoning and then realized I'd just burst all the damp vegetables. It tasted good though (and the vegetable stock collected in the bottom of the pan tasted great with a Sainsbury's pain de campagne smothered in garlic butter dunked in it).

Next time I'm going to be a bit more controlled about how I add stuff to the pan I think. I fried each veg off separately to try and keep the flavours a little more separate, which worked ok. I think it'd benefit from a small amount of marinara sauce rather than raw tomatoes too, maybe.

Looks lovely! I find that if you're using tomatoes/tinned tomatoes, it takes a good 30 minutes of simmering to sweeten them up and release their sugars, which would negate having to use marinara or similar. Assuming the sharp tomato taste was the problem!

No, the taste was OK - I added raw sliced tomato to the pan as it went into the oven for 40min or so. Using a little marinara would richen it up though. I might actually have a go at the fancy dan thing that Thomas Keller invented for Ratatoullie; it looks doable.

Invite me.

It all sounds bloody great.

Red cabbage with apples is made to go with belly pork.

It's a helluva long way to come for dinner.

Red cabbage you say. Hmmm. Hmmmm, I might try that.

The apples are VERY IMPORTANT.

Based on Masterchef's incredible fashion-led ingredient choices: celeriac puree.

But would you get that depth of flavour you expect from fine dining?

I'm outside.

Cooking doesn't get any tougher than this! Unless you're a single mum with five kids and £2.34 of dole money left to last a week. Or someone's stolen all your pans and knives. Or you've got no arms. Or it's only the first round and, in fact, there are six more rounds of escalating difficulty infront of you.

Or wasabi mash.

No problem, you can get good new knives for £2 each you know.

Don't worry, I've been cooking too long to make a rookie mistake like that

Unlikely, given that celeriac tastes of nothing at all.

Untrue. It tastes faintly of celery, something I dislike.

Yes, but about as much as something that's just been sat next to a stick of celery in the fridge drawer.

I think your last comment was a pinch of salt away from perfection.

I don't like celery either and I would have to be threatened with bodily harm before contemplating eating it raw. However, as a base, finely chopped for quite a few recipes, it's awesome.

I don't disagree with this. I still use it in stuff. The cookbook I'm reading just now (which is excellent) suggests running over the outer edge of the celery with a swivel peeler to remove some of the stronger bitter tastes without sacrificing the celeryness you're trying to add, which if true sounds like a good idea.

Celery is fucking awesome. Try it with chili hummus or soft blue cheese. Mmmm.