Recent content by PBear42

You know what, guys? Never mind. Sorry to have wasted your time. I'm unsubscribing from my own thread and deleting this forum from my bookmarks. I leave it to the mods whether to close the thread. In any event, I won't be back. Have a nice life.

pacanis: The method you describe is basically the one I grew up with. Sure, the eggs are easy to peel. They also generally have green rings. We always just took it as given that that's how hard-boiled eggs are. It was eliminating the ring which started me tinkering. lyndalou & JoAnn: Agreed...

One of my continuing projects is the search for a perfect hard-boiled egg. By perfect, I mean fully-cooked yolks, firm (but not rubbery) whites, easy-to-remove shells and a minimum of green ring around the yolks. Some time ago, I worked out an ideosyncratic method (which I'll describe presently)...

IMHO, the reason to cook meatballs in the sauce is neither to flavor the meatballs nor the sauce, but rather to cook down collagen in the meatballs. At one level, this isn't strictly neccesary. Being made of minced meat, there's no question of their beng tough. Still, cooking down the collagen...

Out of curiosity, college cook, speaking of confit, what do ya'll do differently? To my mind, the tricky part if figuring out how to cure it at a cool-but-not-cold temperature, i.e., about 45 degrees. What do you figure is the key?

To clarify, the cracklings (skin) are done (crisp) at the point where I said to strain. There's another way to cook duck, where you braise it skiin-on, remove the skin, skim fat from the braising liquid and cook skin in the fat to crisp, all of which comes to about the same point as my original...

Yes, you want to render the fat. Cut the skin into bite-size pieces, e.g., 1/4 by 3/4 inch. When you're done, these will be cracklings, which you could just eat as a snack (salt lightly) or use to garnish whatever dish you're making with the duck (heat slightly just before using). Also, cut the...

Sorry about the double post. Not sure how that happened.

VB: Yes, I use heavy cream as well. See Post #40. Half of it I add to the bottle, half I whip lightly just before serving, for the simple reason that I find a light foam on top adds to the overall effect. Rom: By all means, you can do without the second stabilizer. Indeed, I prefer without...

VB: Yes, I use heavy cream as well. See Post #40. Half of it I add to the bottle, half I whip lightly just before serving, for the simple reason that I find a light foam on top adds to the overall effect. Rom: By all means, you can do without the second stabilizer. Indeed, I prefer without...

About cooked v. uncooked eggs. VB is right about the salmonella issue, but that's not actually the reason I cook the eggs. It's a matter of texture. Uncooked recipes generally rely on a foam of the whites to thicken the nog. Instead, I'm using cooked egg proteins for that. Different mouthfeel...

IMHO, for a project that size, Lulu isn't worth the trouble. In particular, there's quite a learning curve getting your material into a format they can handle automatically. I would just produce the book in a word processing program (you'd have to do that for Lulu anyway), print it and...

Chipotle Tom, how big is the book and how many copies?

Three gallons of soup isn't a tenth as risky as a pound of uncooked ground beef left in the sink. Remember, it's been cooked. If cooked thoroughly, we're talking only about spores. So, the difference between letting it cool on the stove v. charging immediately into the fridge isn't huge. That...

It happens - Mollie Katzen was nobody when Ten Speed Press picked up the original Moosewood Cookbook in 1977 - but very rare. As you can see from the books which make it into print, the authors almost always have a marketing hook. From your second post, it appears self-publishing might work...