Leaderboard

A special night calls for a special cut of meat. 1.125kg 42 day dry aged bistecca fiorentina, low and slow until just under rare then seared in the 7th circle of hell. Also some lamb lollipops, chicken skewers and snags for the kids. We started out with yummy negronis. Served with a ‘green papaya salad’ made with green apples. The contrast of spicy, funky and sweet with the rich steak is our favourite. Happy new year!

Starting to prep for our New Year's Eve party, four days out. Today was marinade and sauce day with a little bit of tortilla action thrown in for good measure. I picked a recipe for chicken tacos with chilmole. The recipe said that preparing the chilmole would remove the ability for the air in your kitchen to sustain life, such is the level of capsaicin that would be released when you roasted the 100 arbol and 8 ancho chilies to the level of blackness required to make the sauce. I had a simple solution to that - fire up my 23 KK, get it well heat soaked and "broil" (we say grill in the UK) the chillis in there. I also made the al pastor marinade as per @Troble's recipe. I doubled the recipe. Our sturdy Vitamix had a job on its hands, getting all that achiote blended in! See this post for more about tacos al pastor After all that work I ended up with three tubs of al pastor marinade and one of chilmole. I also wanted to experiment with tortillas. I started off with beautiful purple corn. This is following the wash after nixtamalisation. Some people say to wash a lot, some say to wash a little. This time I washed a lot. Just depends on when I remember that I don't need to slough off ALL of the outside of the kernel. Machine in action, grinding the corn. IMG_4010.MOV Working on my own I managed to make 42 tortillas in under half an hour. I have left them to cool and will test the reheating methods tomorrow. 42. The Answer to Life the Universe and everything. It is a sign.

Way to go @PVPAUL! Will be interested in seeing how yours turn out and in learning about your Mexican green pork recipe. I was very pleased to have hit on a method for toasting the chillis without dying of coughing at the same time! Not the first time my KK has come to the rescue. I need to do my final round of shopping today and I realise I can't do that without knowing how many people are turning up. The problem is, I am not sure how many I invited. Happily, I issued most invites by email so I will tot them up and then figure out by how much I have to over cater. Looking forward to seeing others' taco photos from new year!

Just before Xmas I decided better to cure a pork belly before the temperatures turn really cold after Xmas. Cured 11.7pounds of belly and here it is just after smoking on the KK. Thanks goodness the KK holds nice and steady and I didn't have to go out and check on the Temperature. It is all nicely sliced, packaged, vacuum sealed and in the freezer now except for the one package I gave to friends for their Xmas morning breakfast.

42" Baking Stone for sale Deer Park NY A customer's son wanted a 32" but ordered the wrong size baking stone,. They somehow did not read it clearly being labeled a 42" Baking Stone on the special shipping box which is cardboard outside, plywood inside and lots of foam (because they always get broken by UPS), opened it up.. and even after seeing it's the wrong stone, (it's two pieces not one) threw away the highly engineered original crate/box... Now, I'm now I'm the bad guy for politely telling them by phone call, I'm sorry they could not return it a homemade box. It will probably get broken on the return or going out to a new customer (at my cost). And of course, the new merchandise experience we work so hard on with our packaging would also be lost. He then actually had the audacity to post this bad review about it.. ARGH.. We gladly accept returns but they often need to be in the original packaging.. Especially grills and heavy objects with specialized packing. But I'd still like to help him sell it.