tekobo

Looking forward to you getting your grill. It is always such a lot of fun to try out things you never had the chance to with a conventional indoor oven or barbecue. I can imagine a nice, soft, hot naan but have never got around to trying it. The race is on, subject to what happens to the Singaporean port U bend.

Yup, I think it would be fun if it worked. Worth trying.

I have the water heater pan for soaking my 23 ultimate grates but was wondering what to do with the grates from the 32 big bad. Found this post by Bosco. Will head off to the trade section B&Q when they open again after Christmas to see what I can find.

Didn't eat anywhere as much as normal yesterday. In fact, I felt so virtuous that I ended the day with a passionfruit margarita, inspired by your choice @Braai-Q. Here's to many more Christmases. Thinking we need to start a rib tradition here too.

Bit of a contrast at our beach today. 4C. Mad dogs. And Englishmen. Taking a dip in the sea.

This sounds good Tyrus. Going to try this for my next chicken wing cook. Soon....

Breakfast is the new Christmas lunch. Here we had a Spanish tortilla flavoured with crab.

Waiting for her Rapicca gloves to arrive.

Beautiful planting @Troble. Looking forward to seeing you eating the fruits of your labour and to seeing the ornamentals mature.

I got the 17 inch gloves Mac. They didn't appear to have the combination of medium size and 14 inch. I thought the 17 inch arms would be too long but I am very happy with them. I did not go for the small ladies size because I guessed they would be too small.

Hey there troble. Work is a bit difficult to describe. My last official job title was programme director but I now do freelance work for government departments, making stuff happen. I was working on buses and in health when the pandemic struck. Both have been busy and challenging in different ways. Thanks for the compliments about my allotment, I love growing stuff. Asparagus crowns need to be in for about three years before you can start to harvest them regularly so get on with planting yours! If you manage to get hold of Stewart's Purple asparagus or similar then plant it. It is delicious.

Work has been full on all year. So much so that I was kinda jealous of those people who had been furloughed. That said, it was great to have something meaningful to do while the world around us further and further out of our individual control. Visits to our allotment (veg plot) were allowed under our lockdown rules. Looking at these photos make me hopeful for the new year.

I am loving my 16TT. Yesterday: Scallops for lunch. They could have been prettier but, for some stupid reason, I took advice from the internet and oiled my food and not my grates. Duh! I throttled back the heat and slow cooked some skinny ribs through the afternoon For dinner I cranked up the heat, rested my smoke pot (with apple pellets and loose leaf tea) on the coals in the firebox and smoke-grilled a duck breast for dinner. The cast iron pan meant no flare ups. The 16 did all this with less than a full basket of fuel. It was so easy to commit to barbecuing given the easy clean up and a sensible scale for cooking for two. I am a believer.

Returning to the topic of this thread... Yes, @Tyrus the best fries are those salty ones stuck at the bottom of the bag. It's its own special thing in a time and a place. I wouldn't ever try to replicate that in a home fried chip.

Thank you to @Sir Bill for recommending the Netherton Foundry. Their website said they would not deliver any new orders before the new year but they must have been working overtime. These arrived today. They are achingly beautiful and robust and functional. I can't wait to use them. Paella pan with lid on Paella pan Tortilla press The Husband was going to surprise me with the Rapicca gloves but I had already ordered a medium sized pair direct from the company in the US. Just as well. He hadn't paid attention to sizing and had bought an XL pair! We have sold them on to the friend who bought my old 21. I am very happy with the gloves and I have found them very handy(!) in the IDK and ODK.

We sorta feed an army. We usually have two big parties a year, catering for 100 people each time. We also cook and feed friends a lot. None of that has happened this year and so I end up delivering ice cream to friends' houses in an effort to turn over our "stock". The big bonus of having this freezer was that we never had any reason to raid the stores when lockdown hit. As the husband said: without knowing it we had been practising for a pandemic for the last ten years. You've outed me Brian. Someone is going to be at my door soon, wanting to investigate an un-British addiction to excess refrigeration.

Hi Ron, sorry to hear this and I think I feel your pain. I hurt mine in the gym too - lifting a barbell incorrectly over the back of my head about nine years ago. Similar to you, I've seen specialists, had scans, had physio, all will limited effect. This latest work with the chiropractor (inspite of my surgeon friend calling chiropractors quacks and charlatans) is the first sustained improvement that I have had in years. The chiropractor says it won't work without me improving my posture alongside his work with the massage gun and dry needling. Only time will tell whether he has had a lasting impact but I am happy so far.

I was just about to respond to Troble's question when I realised that I have no idea what type of freezer we have. The Husband is in charge of procuring equipment. I just ran back up the stairs, feeling a little ashamed about quite how large my freezer is, when I saw bgrant's message. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound... The freezer is commercial, that much I know. No branding on the outside but a label on the inside says it is a Gemfrost. It looks like this. Those trays are two deep. And full.

Fries, or chips as we call them here in the UK, are too important a side not to have their own special thread. Please add your favourite recipe to this post. I love chips. We are told that Wallis Simpson said, "You can never be too rich or too thin". A good friend and I were regular visitors to a French bistro in Leeds (Sous le Nez) and she always said "You can never be too rich or have too many chips". I am going with her version. I grow potatoes and, every year, I end up with more potatoes than we can eat before they all start to sprout. The easy way I have found to process them is to turn them into chips and freeze them. Rather than waste a life time triple and double frying chips every time I want a good chip I simply halt the process part way through, freeze and then pull them out of the freezer and fry when I need them. This is my method: Chip the potatoes. If the skins are not too scabby I leave them on. Briefly wash the chips in water to reduce starchiness. Deep fry the chips at 130C in small batches for five minutes. I use a half and half mix of goose fat and olive oil. This stage is to cook the chip without colouring it. If you wanted to eat them the same day then the next stages would be to cool the chips down in the fridge and then fry them at 170C until cooked and coloured to your liking. What I do instead is lay the chips out to cool on paper laid on large baking trays after the 130C cook. Then I remember to take the paper out from under the chips (essential) and put the trays into the freezer so that the chips freeze loose and flat. When the chips are frozen I shake them off the trays and into vacuum bags which I seal loosely so that that chips are separate and can be shaken out when you need them. In the old days I would have cooked the chips in the deep fat fryer after I retrieved them from the freezer. Now I use my air fryer. I hated the concept of an air fryer but now I embrace it. It cooks (pre prepared) chips really well and you are never cooking in old fat. Having said all of the above, frozen chips or sweet potato fries from the supermarket cut out all of the work and taste fabulous cooked in a deep fat fryer or an air fryer. You just need to try a few different brands until you find the one you like. For extra information see this article by Felicity Cloake. I like her and her books because she tries out a number of different recipes for a particular ingredient and guides you to her view of the "perfect" recipe. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/may/20/how-to-fry-perfect-chips. I don't parboil or triple fry my chips because I ended up with a fine matrix of potato that carried too much fat. The Husband didn't like them and wouldn't eat them. I do a big chip pre-cook and freeze twice a year to match my harvests and it saves time for the rest of the year. Here is one half of my current stash sitting in the freezer with my bottles of ketchup and BBQ sauce made from the tomato glut.

@Basher, I was going to protest at your wife getting/having the "junk" knives but I now see a potential solution to your problem and my angst. We had a drawer full of knives until a couple of years ago when we decided to pick out our favourites and store or give away the rest. The Husband and I each have our favourite knives that are now the tools of our kitchen trade. Cutting down the number that you have in general use could a) mean that your wife gets some good stuff to use on a regular basis and b) cut down your sharpening task.

Hey (Da do Ron Ron)Ron, I would recommend a (good) chiropractor for your Christmas present. I have had a persistent problem with my left shoulder rotator cuff for years and a local chiropractor has hit it hard with percussion massage gun, dry needling and ice and I am at last finding relief. Ridiculous to be making recommendations when I have no idea what is wrong with your shoulder but, after years of trying out different solutions, a series of short three then two then one weekly sessions over less than two months has made a huge difference to my life.

I read your post out to The Husband. He asked what weight of beer they would consume before carrying out said test. An important consideration methinks.

Ha. You so silly but so right Paul. Height is probably a consideration. You would need six tall heavy people standing closer together than social distancing (or their girth) will allow to replicate the effect of a BB32.

I always smile when @tony b turns up with his safety wagging finger. Particularly when it comes to stray wires from those Kurly Kate steel cleaners getting into your tummy. He can always be trusted to turn up to tell you not to use them and I can be trusted to ignore him and go on using them. I am a little concerned about your balcony though and would not rely on an assumption about the number of people it can carry. A KK represents a heavy load applied over a small area and could be a problem depending on where you put it. Structural engineers are pretty cheap to get an opinion from here in the UK. I would hope that you could get someone to take a look or get your property manager to see if there is any guidance in the maintenance log for the building. Or you could decide it is fine and just ignore me but as a civil engineer I would not rely on someone telling me that a bridge "seems solid".

Hi @AAAsh, definitely worth checking on this. if your property manager doesn't have any official load limits then I would recommend getting hold of a structural engineer to confirm what the balcony was designed to carry, in line with local building code. You don't want to invalidate your insurance or worse still, kill someone, so it is worth getting an official view. All that said, I have just looked on Dennis' KK site and it says that the gross weight of a 32 BB crated is about 500kg. That is 10 skinny people or 6 fat ones. If you can get that many people on your balcony then you stand a good chance of this being OK.