Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

@ ladymarmalade -- yup i make rumbledethumps but usually with savoy cabbage and to accompany haggis.

in general kale is my #1 choice for stir fry. i steam it for a bit before hand with maybe some butternut squash or sweet potato and then in it goes in the stir fry along with garlic/ginger/chillies; tofu; shitake mushrooms a seasoning of dried basil, tamari, rice vinegar and toasted sesame seeds. all on top of fluffy brown rice.

it's the classic crunchy granola stir fry from my college daze.

i was just interviewing my ma about her childhood memories of food (she grew up in the philippines during the war). she mentioned this sausage, but the breakfast of champions for her was some salty dried fish with a champorado. champorado is a rice porridge with chocolate and coconut milk. she loves the combination of sweet and salty.

i'm intimately familiar with the binders and file folders stuffed with scrawled recipes or recipes torn from newspapers and magazines. i also have had to deal with an ever growing collection of back issues from the two food magazines i subscribe to. and i have at least two document folders of recipes on the computer.

to stem the flow i started using Recipe Center 5.2.
what i like about it:
it has a great autofill function for ingredients
ability to create your own keywords
ability to create and save menus of groups of recipes
handy ingredient printing list (but see what i don't like below)
ability to attach photos of finished dish
range of printing format options

what i don't like about it:
search functionality is minimal -- you can't search on more than one keyword for instance
the shopping list output doesn't add up all the ingredient quantities into 1 entry per ingredient.

i'm going to stick with it now that i've put over hundreds of recipes in it.
i've been using a scanner to slowly tackle the binders and use pretty decent OCR to generate text from the scan. then it's just a matter of copyign and pasting into the recipe database, choosing some keywords, and it's saved!

i tried this one a couple of months ago and it was wonderful:

http://www.burgundytoday.com/gourmet-traveller/chefs-recipes/beef-burgundy.htm

when i used to live in harlem at 126th and madison, the best fried seafood place was just down the block from me. it was called A Taste of Seafood. they had really good red velvet cake.

thanks for posting this recipe -- i've always wanted to try it myself

(http://travelswithmyfork.blogspot.com/)

yep. we had one, albeit with a twist! you can read the lowdown and see some great pics here:

Burns Supper with a Twist

for really cold wet days we go for scotch broth with a beef bone thrown in for extra flavour. my partner and i make our batches differently -- she cooks a big chunk of neep in the pot and then mashes it to thicken the soup. i cut everything into the same size dice. she thinks i put too much pulse in mine; i like mine nice and thick.

do lentejas count? they're not really a soup, more of a stew. i posted a pic of the one i made on sunday in the serious eats flickrpool:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23472838@N00/2206213945/

i'm planning on making ribollita in the next coupla weeks cos i'm craving some of that cavolo nero.

thanks all. re: tempering the eggs -- is that the part where you add the infused milk back to the beaten eggs and egg yolk?
when i did that i did it really slowly and the egg/milk mixture ended up really frothy (i used a whisk not a beater).

or is tempering heating it all back together? i think i'm going to get a bunch of eggs and figure this thing out. will try the ice bath trick too. from your comments it sounds like the trick is do this part really slowly and with an eagle eye. i'll also experiment with the arrowroot and thicker cream suggestions too.

thanks all!

i got an ice cream maker for xmas so first it will be mastering a basic custard (i tend to leave it too long and it turns to scramble!) and then a panoply of flavours to experiment with: basic vanilla, blueberry, coffee, choc mint, and green tea are first on the list.

other than that, i posted a while back about the murder of my sourdough starter by yours truly. so i want to start another one and be more loving and kind to it.

and finally, i'd like to make some confit of duck legs and use it in a cassoulet.

what's the diff between popovers and yorkshire pudding? i don't think there is one is there?

except maybe that yorkshire puds use really hot dripping instead of butter

mine are:
1) fried egg on top of rice, with a good shake of soy sauce or hot sauce on top
2) toasted cheese sandwich
3) ginger ale

this year it's just me and my beloved partner. i'm fixing her favourite breakfast -- banana cornmeal pancakes with warmed maple syrup and toasted pecans, crispy streaky bacon, and lots of hot coffee (spicy eggnog flavour from green mountain coffee).

i have been CRAVING bialys for months now. does anyone know if they're available in the UK? i'm in scotland but would gladly go down to london if i knew i could find them there....