Tag: cooking

There are many things I don't like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we're living medium-term following our house flood.

But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for "buying a new one where the last one's still more than half-full".

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Close-up of a spice rack containing not one, not two, not three but four tubs of 'ground white pepper by Sainsburys'.

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year's 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

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Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen.

Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button.

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Close up of the side of a toaster, showing an "eject" button (rectangle with an upward-pointing triangle above it).

At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I'm coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.

But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say 'hey, that's cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out'.

Wanted a quesadilla. Didn't have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.

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Two layers of chapattis in a frying pan on a stove, alongside their packaging.

It went... only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.

I tried it, so you don't have to!

I asked the younger child to "help" me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner.

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Dan, a white man with a beard and blue hair, wearing a WordPress-themed Christmas jumper, beats a bowl of batter.

"Well," he began, "I'm going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo..."

I'd never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.

They're both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the slow cooker aims to maintain as low a temperature as possible until the food finally cooks itself out of boredom.

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A seared shoulder of pork rubbed with spices sits in a syrupy cider mix atop some sliced white onions in a slow cooker pot.

Anyway, this is going to be pulled pork in like 8-10 hours. 😋

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).

It worked out pretty well.

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A pyramid of four bite-sized toads-in-the-hole alongside chive mash and carrots, smothered in gravy, on a plate.

Micro-recipe:

1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it's hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?

Here's my planned solution, anyway - teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let's see how it works out...

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Cupcake-sized Yorkshire pudding batter cups, each with a cocktail sausage or two inside, being inserted into an oven.

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can't get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

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Dan, in a kitchen with some kind of tomato sauce on a hob behind him, holds a glass of red wine and shrugs at the camera.

Ah well, what's a chef to do? 🤷🍷

After a morning of optimising a nonprofit's reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I've earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm...

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Gas stovetop.a frying pan contains a tortilla wrap topped with tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, and jalapeños. Beside its a plate containing a completed quesapizza: two crispy tortilla wraps sandwiching their contents.

Do you think the 80s/90s advertisement campaign for Sarson's vinegar - "Don't say vinegar, say Sarson's" - ever worked?

Like: have you ever heard anybody ask you to "pass the Sarson's"?