Category Archives: Cook-book

Sourcing those esoteric food needs

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I was interested in yesterday’s SMH Good Living recipe for ‘Tomato and chickpea soup’ and came across this comment:

Finding fire-roasted crushed tomatoes

Q. I am having trouble finding fire-roasted crushed tomatoes for a recipe. What can I substitute?

A. Oh boy, can we relate to that! Just the other day we were looking for some 4.36-ounce, malt-infused, wasabe-scented, sliced-on-the-bias, free-range, southern-Washington-state, line-caught, hand-massaged salmon fillets for a special recipe, and in the end, we just used salmon. We suggest you use crushed tomatoes. (It drives us crazy when recipe writers specify foods that are all but unobtainable — and act like it’s the most reasonable little request in the world, and that your food won’t be worth eating unless you kill yourself trying to do just what they say!)

You could also roast a few tomatoes in a pan on a grill, slip them out of their skins, and crush them yourself. Or try the following recipe from one of our favourite new cookbooks. If you’re competent to follow a recipe that absolutely requires fire-roasted crushed tomatoes, you’re certainly competent to roast a few tomatoes yourself.

Oven-Roasted Tomatoes

From Not Afraid of Flavor: Recipes from Magnoila Grill, by Ben & Karen Barker. Preheat oven to 250°F (120°C). Cut tomatoes in half, toss with olive oil to coat, and place, cut-side down, on a baking sheet. Roast for 1-1/2 hours, until the tomatoes are soft and have just begun to exude their juices. Cool, remove the skins, and pack into a container. These are delicious tossed with roasted or grilled vegetables, in soups, and with simple pastas and risottos. They keep for several days, refrigerated.

http://www.ochef.com/762.htm

Striped Marsh Frogs

Are singing again after the rain last night — a sure sign that summer is approaching.

Striped Marsh Frog (not working — has bombed out and can’t find the original file — will rerecord)

Thursday

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The MacDonnell Range at Glen Helen, Central Australia

The Cook-Book

The draft was reviewed last night by a knowledgeable food and cooking person; favourably. It has now reached the stage of becoming semi-public so I can get further feedback on the layout and range of recipes and chapters. Current problems are:

  • Indexing – the way I have assembled it doesn’t lend itself to automatic indexing but a solution will appear as I get closer to that activity. It would be handy now.
  • Consistency – is a bit of a mish-mash; some items are capitalized in one recipe, lower case in another.
  • Naming – some recipe titles begin with ‘Lamb’, others may be ‘Kebabs with Lamb’ so I need to develop a naming convention.
  • Assembling the components into one document – Word is notorious for falling apart when working with long documents.
  • Page numbering – because the chapters are stand-alone, I can’t get consistent page numbering.

However, I am pleased with this result so far and will continue to improve on it and solve these problems.

Technical Note

I am migrating the cook-book to the web but to get to this there were some problems. Initially, I had intended to use Microsoft Expression on a Windows server that backs-up my music files. When I moved the cook-book files across from my MacbookPro, I discovered the Word documents could only be read in Wordpad – I hadn’t installed Office on this server.

As I have Parallels Desktop on the Mac and can operate a Windows virtual machine, I updated Parallels, Vista and Office and installed Expression. The only glitch so far is not being able to share folders (directories) despite following the instructions in the manual and the support forums. Not a big issue at this stage.

Positives are that Expressions imports Word and builds the pages automatically. Once I design a suitable template, this makes authoring much simpler. Another is that Expression connects, using ftp, to my server in New Mexico so I can upload files directly from the application. I am impressed – and Vista is faster than I have ever experienced.

Climate Change

Some indication of what the Australian public thinks:

“Nice try Penny, but it’s time to take another look”, The Australian’, 14 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/nice-try-penny-but-its-time-to-take-another-look/story-e6frg71x-1225818991552

Before Copenhagen, public support for tackling climate change was strong, with polls showing about three-quarters of Australians backing action. That support will be tested in the next few months as the government moves to reintroduce its CPRS legislation.