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My first go at this one with a ‘boys night’ at my place. So so good- perhaps the best KK cook ever. Thanks @Troble for posting the amazing recipe and tips. A real winner. IMG_7767.MOV

That is a Beautiful spread @tekobo!!!! I know I would have been blown away if I was a guest………and I have an intimate knowledge of all of the hard work & love that went into that……….I’m sure your Fiesta will go down in the archives for you and your guest as the best NYE dinner ever!!! Congratulations!!!

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.

Beautiful! I'm sure everyone was blown away.

WOW 👍👍

Happy New Year. Nice looking spread @PVPAUL. Looks like we both had a good taco night. Tacos are much less common here in the UK so our friends were surprised and blown away by the food, particularly as most of them have nothing to compare my skill level with! First the tortillas. With me rolling and pressing and a friend cooking, we made 308 tortillas in 2.5 hours. I don't have any pics of the process but we had four going at once on my large heavy weight griddle. We covered them over but after six hours waiting the top tortillas were a little curled up, as per photos below. We managed to revive them on the comal and they came out well on the night. We have some left over and I am looking forward to seeing how they perform after being frozen. The friend who helped me is in his late seventies and had never seen a blue corn tortilla before. His first question was "how are you going to turn that into something edible?" We went from that to him comparing the tortilla to a mould (he used to be a university lecturer in biology). He was finally converted by the beauty of watching a pink tortilla rise on the griddle and once he tasted a taco al pastor he became a fully fledged taco evangelist. And here is the spread, ready for people to dive in. We learned lessons from parties past and didn't put all the food out at once, replenishing bowls as needed. The tacos al pastor stole the show, right behind the crispy chicken skin. Everyone loved the home made crema Mexicana, made simply by mixing double cream and buttermilk and leaving in the dough proofer for 36 hours. Best wishes for the New Year to you all and thank you for all the help and advice over the years.

So yesterday was our early NYE gathering with some close friends and their kids and my family so we had a total of 13 of us. A pic of my sweetie helping to press tortillas outside in about 34 F weather…pretty mild end of December evening here in SE WI. A couple pics of the taco spread and one finished taco…..I thought they turned out great but then I’m tooting my ow horn I guess. Our friends sister was a professional in the food industry with a high skill set in confectionary / baking. This is a pic of a coconut cake……..many years ago my wife and I enjoyed going to a Chicago restaurant called “Heaven on Seven” a New Orleans themed restaurant that make an excellent coconut cake. This cake was as good as the cake or better than we used to get at Heaven on Seven! Today we are taking it easy before we head to Mexico where other good people can make great tacos for us!!! Good luck @tekobo and Happy New Year to all the good folks here on the KK Forum,

so i spent christmas in Cappadocia and maybe its because its massively touristy here, but i ordered the manti and i can say for sure the one i made at home tastes so much better than how they make it here. will try this dish again in istanbul but i have doubts it will be better…

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.

Meal prepped for the week. Salmon and smashed golden potato’s on the left side indirect, veggies on the right direct heat.

You're scaring me with that report. I need rotator cuff surgery in the near future. Trying to grin and bear it right now. Glad to see you're over the worst of it and glad to see you're making how to's again.