tekobo

Not one to be outdone, I started to look up avocado plants that might survive the UK climate. Pulled myself out of that rabbit hole when I remembered that I probably eat no more than 2 avocados a year and that increasing my intake by the magic of shopping might be a better option.

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Wow, that's great @Troble. I remember when you were first planting your garden. Fresh home grown avocado. I think I need to move to warmer climes!

Good looking chook @Wobster. I am really glad the video is still here and still helpful. 2020? Wow, doesn't time fly?!

I see what you guys are doing here. Return of the @Pequod has triggered some competitive KK Shopping Channel activity. RFX, Combustion Predictive Thermometer. Get thee away from me, I will continue to guess and hope for the best until.... P.S. Pigs with wings seem like a cheaper option!

That cook made me hungry @Mark Jacobs. Yum. Hey @tony b, let's see your chops!

Looks like a good time was had by all @jonj!

Chicken dinner, cooked indoors. Tasted good but not as nice as when cooked in the KK. Roll on spring!

I bought a whole hogget (slightly older lamb) from a farmer friend of @RokDok's last weekend. Knowing that I had asked for lamb's kidney's, the farmer decided that I must like all other offal too. So...he gave me a bag full of lamb's hearts and a couple of lamb's livers. Aaargh. I am squeamish about hearts and much prefer calf's liver to any other liver but I did not want to waste any of the meat I had been given. What to do? Yeah, I know, take the highest risk option and feed it to 20 of my best friends, that's what! The organs were very clean and tidy so I just had to cut off the hard bits of fat and arteries at the top of the hearts, cut them open and clean out the blood before mincing them with a bit of breast meat to introduce some fat. I know, at this stage you are probably shouting, "that looks like what I feed to my dog" but have faith, things get better. I had gone for a Turkish theme so the minced heart meat was mixed with herbs and onion and formed into kofte kebabs. Easier said than done, keeping the damp meat on the skewers even after chilling them in the dry ager. It would have been helpful to grill them using a fish basket but I didn't have one, so they were grilled on a hot plate in the 23 and @RokDok did a sterling job of keeping most of them from crumbling. On to the liver. I sliced it thinly, soaked it in milk and then, just before deep frying, Mrs Rokdok dredged the pieces in a delicious spiced flour. The lamb shoulders (my saving grace if the guests revolted) were cooked for 8 hours at 130C in the 32. The good news is that lamb three ways was a roaring success, even though lamb's liver and heart were new to many, including me!

Belated update. Watching the SuperBowl in an Italian bar was indeed good fun. Our Italian friends were surprised by how much they liked buffalo wings and blue cheese sauce. I had to admit to having used a French cheese, Roquefort, to make the blue cheese sauce but they liked it all the same. The best compliment was seeing the, normally very critical and conservative, bar owner mop up some of the sauce with a piece of bread. And I enjoyed the result of the game too!

Prepping for Super Bowl tonight. We are in Italy and our friend is going to open his bar so we can watch the game from 00:30 tonight. I will be introducing the Italians to Franks Hot sauce and blue cheese dressing. Not brave enough to try to get my KK 16 down in the lift and down the road to the bar and so we will be using their professional oven. Here is what 5kg of wings, neatly prepared by our local butcher, look like. Dry marinade applied, now waiting in the fridge. Fly Eagles Fly!

Thank you @Tyrus!

Those look really tasty @Tyrus! Care to share the recipe?

Nice looking recipe @Tyrus. I turned the second half of that humungous squash into four different sides and my husband used the very last chunk to make soup but he did not have the benefit of your recipe. I will see if I can outdo his efforts when I break into one of the much smaller squashes from my harvest. Depending on how it turns out I might back your wife's silverware for the win!

I used the squash in the picture above. I had a lot of squash to get rid of! A friend who had tasted the dessert on a cruise came home and told me about it. I normally ignore people's requests for ice cream flavours because of the challenge of making something that tastes like what they remembered and loved. This time, with my huge squash sitting in the basement waiting to be eaten, I thought I would give it a go. It was a triumph. The roasted pumpkin seed oil was essential.

Ha ha. No bread but I did make squash ice cream for 50. It was divine with a squeeze of pumpkin seed oil.

I love, love, love lamb ribs @qundoy. A local Turkish grill house does them beautifully but I have never been able to find them to buy and cook myself. I tried with a supplier in December and he said to wait until after the Christmas rush to place a special order. Your cook has inspired me. I will be following up right now....

I managed to use up half of this 22kg squash (galeux d'Eysines variety) for my New Year's party vegan dish When I piled it all into my double bottomed pan in the 32, I started to regret not having bought a 42. Luckily it all cooked down nicely and, with the addition of some cooked grains and romesco sauce, it was a real hit on the night. Meat eaters found solace in this pork paella, cooked in my greenhouse to stay out of the wind. And yes, @tony b, there was soccarat!

Tee hee. Popped back to take a look at the forum after a bit of an absence. Good to see you are all as silly as usual! Best of the season to you all.

Boy, that looks yummy @Franck!

We spent a week away with @RokDok, Mrs RokDok and a bunch of other friends to celebrate my husband's sixtieth birthday. Here is the great steak spread that @RokDok conjured up on his trusty Weber kettle (not being able to transport his 32 KK to a cliff top in Cornwall). We also upped our paella game, with the addition of a great big gas burner. Yum!

From what Dennis said, he has to send a whole container full so that is a LOT of cocochar. Depends on if @DennisLinkletter can actually ship the stuff to the UK and if Ilya @Komodo_Kamado_UK wants to stock it. I would be interested in buying some even though I have to admit to having a huge stock pile of the stuff that I normally use, having bought a couple of pallets a couple of years ago.

It was delicious and I have since had thicker hand sliced portions. The difference between super thin slices on a machine and thicker slices cut by hand is like night and day. The former is much more like charcuterie, light in the mouth and a bit more of a snack while you get much more of a chew and, I think, more of the meat flavour with the thicker slices. I like both. To respond to @Tyrus point: Yes, sous vide doesn't give you much sensory fun. And you are limited by the size of the water bath. I am pleased to have been able to keep the KK at such a low temp and might try to simulate other sous vide cooks in the future.

Well, the experiment turned out great. The cook was for a party yesterday hence the delay with getting back to posting. A good time was had by all. Now, down to business. First let us talk about temperatures. My MEATER kept dropping off so I don't have a temperature trace to share with you but I took these three photos within a minute of each other. The two thermometers on the side of the joint in the KK were measuring 73C while the one in the top was measuring 81C. The KK dome thermometer was measuring about 73C too while the grill grate thermometer was showing close to 100C. In some ways, the actual temp of the KK was not critical, what was more critical was getting the meat out when it was close to hitting the 55C target internal temperature. The KK was great, keeping a steady temp for the whole of the approx 3 hour cook. I found this really thin needle temperature probe that my Husband bought years ago for poking into sousvide bags to check the temp of the contents. Here is the reading on the sous vide joint after about 5 hours in the water bath. A check on the KK joint showed a range of temps from 57C at the thinnest end to 52C in the centre. The good news is that the internal temp was consistent across the joint, staying the same as I pulled the needle from the centre to the edge. I rested the joints over night in the fridge and only cut them just before we had to serve them to the guests. Nail biting! Here are the two joints. The right hand one was cooked in the KK. It did have a faint smell of smoke so we did get some smoke into it from the smoke pot, even at that low temperature. And here are the results. KK joint on the right. Sliced up the sous vide joint was consistently pinker (lower pile in the pic below) but I suspect I could have got closer to that result in the KK by going for a slightly lower target temp. Learning? Sous vide is easier. Set and forget the water bath temp and get your meat out when you are ready. KK is more fun and does almost as good a job without having to buy extra equipment. Also have opportunity to introduce smoke when using the KK and I could have used the cold smoke generator to get a more pronounced smoke flavour. All in all I was very happy with the results from both methods and our guests loved this, new to us Brits, Italian method of cutting roast beef.

The Italians make a mean roast beef. They call it Rosbif and it is cooked rare or medium rare, cooled and sliced thinly on a meat slicer. I ran into problems on my last visit to Italy when I asked a friend for his recommendation for the best rosbif in town. He took me to a horse butcher and could not understand why I thought it was funny that the "bif" in rosbif didn't mean beef but just any meat that Italians think is tasty when roasted rare! We are back home in the UK and I want to roast a couple of veal joints for a party tomorrow. Heston Blumenthal has a recipe for slow roasting beef in a 60C degree oven for about 6 hours until it hits 55C internal temperature. I have made it a few times and it gives you an edge to edge consistent pink meat. Today I had two joints and I decided that it would be easier and more energy efficient to achieve the same effect in my sousvide water bath. Here are the two joints. I seared them on a very very hot griddle and managed to avoid greying too much of the meat. Here is the first one seasoned and ready to be vacuum packed and go into the water bath. I decided to try cooking the second joint in the KK, knowing that it would be tough to keep the temp as low as 60C consistently. I used fresh cocoshell briquettes to reduce the chance of any hotspots and I put my cast iron smoker pot over the coals to shield the meat. I thought I would get a little smoke but it turns out there is just not enough heat to get the woodchips going. Here is the KK joint all wired up to the MEATER block. The problem I now have is with connectivity. The good news is that the MEATER seems to be staying connected to the thermometers and so my job is narrowed down to trying to bump up the wifi signal to that corner of the garden. When I last connected up the KK was at 80C so I dialled the top hat down just a little to avoid snuffing out the fire. I will report back tomorrow when I have both joints sliced for the taste test.