I'm Just Sayin': In praise of "slow" food
01.01.70
When I was a kid, my dad used to make popcorn as a snack many evenings. He'd pour a little oil and a couple of tablespoons of popcorn in a cast iron skillet, cover it and shuffle it across a burner on the stove for a minute or two until the corn stopped popping.
He'd pour the popcorn into a bowl and then melt a little butter in the still-hot skillet, drizzle it over the popcorn and season it with salt. A luscious aroma filled the house. Sometimes he'd share.
I thought about that the other night as I was preparing some popcorn in the stove-top popper that my wife and I have been using lately. It produces popcorn that tastes 10 times better than the microwave stuff our family had been eating for years, and it takes no longer to cook than it does to nuke a bag in the microwave.
I think microwave popcorn is the ultimate symptom of our convenience-obsessed society, especially where eating is concerned. It's not enough that we eat way too many "fast-food"
Source: Post-Bulletin
A glimpse inside some of our favourite restaurants' kitchens
01.01.70
“Then
when we get one on order we caramelise the pork belly in a pan and then
reflash it through the oven so it has a really thin crispy skin and
the pork is cooked and has been cooking for about 20hours at 70C so it’s really, really tender.
“The combis have added so much efficiency to
kitchens — when I was a young chef de partie we had to get all the duck
legs in and cover them with duck fat and put them on the stove. Now we
pop a hundred in the oven and turn it to 70C and take them out 15
hours later and they are perfectly cooked.
“The mini combis are really handy too. We use
them during service, one as a steamer — we steam our fish to order and
steam all our dumplings — and the other one we use for roasting.”
Upstairs, Lambie has his second kitchen, the
prep kitchen where all the mise en place is done for the service
kitchen. It also houses the pastry section and is used as the function
kitchen. It’s a smaller version of downstairs with a second Rational
and a
Source: Australian Hospitality Magazine