When David Bowie sang Under Pressure with Queen, I’m fairly sure he wasn’t thinking of negative pressure, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about today.
Continue reading “Under (Negative) Pressure – Flash Pickling”
Home-made Maple Syrup in the big city
A few weeks ago I heard on the radio that the annual Elmira Maple Syrup Festival (yes, an entire festival dedicated to that sweet delicious goo made from tree sap) was coming up and I got to thinking…
Years ago, when I was a wee lad living on a farm, we tried making our own maple syrup. Not knowing what we were doing, we headed down to the Co-Op for some supplies, tapped some trees, collected the sap, and boiled it down to syrup. How hard could it be? Well, had we the foresight to boil the sap outside and not in our kitchen, things would have been much easier (after all, at a ratio of 40:1, that’s a lot of sticky steam all over the kitchen). But worse was the fact that in late March, when there are no leaves on the trees, none of us suspected that two of the seven +80-year-old trees, all in a row, weren’t even Maples. So in the end, we ended up with a very sticky kitchen and some sweet, but strange tasting, cloudy, syrup that no one really wanted to eat. Continue reading “Home-made Maple Syrup in the big city”
Updated cooking temperatures guide.
A while ago I stared a chart of internal ‘doneness’ temperatures for beef, pork, chicken, and fish. You can find the original post here.
In addition to several useful doneness temperatures, I’ve also included a very handy Celsius/Fahrenheit scale that you can use to convert from one temperature scale to another, that covers a range of -30°C to 370°C (-22°F to 700°F)! So I guess if your freezer goes lower than that, or your oven goes higher, you’re just out of luck.
