The Rabbit Hole

....thunk

= the sound of me smacking my head into the desk.

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hslayer.livejournal.com

I've been trying to guess at the implications of teaching about neither sexual reproduction nor evolution by natural selection. I can't really come up with anything except maybe an entire state resembling the inbred freaks from Wrong Turn.

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Well, there's a possibility they might adhere more stringently to the Bible's bits about incest and then reproductively eliminate any available partners in a couple of generations and die out. But your idea intrigues me. Perhaps we could wall off the whole state for the good of the rest of the country when the inbreeding gets to that point.

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newredshoes

*twitch. twitch.*

In slightly more giggly news, apparently our pups have escaped.

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droidguy1119.livejournal.com

Months ago while perusing the IMDb boards after watching the film, I was told the 4 (and the 3 used for the E) were just there so the title resembles a British license plate.

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I getcha. I must have missed the 3. Well, uh, that's fairly useless, but I guess the Brits liked it.

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edgehopper.livejournal.com

But...but...if you had ranted about that, I would have agreed with you!

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I substituted chicken for turkey, and fettuccini for spaghetti noodles. Next time, I think I'll make the chicken stock stronger by using more bouillon cubes in less water and add a lot more pepper. I've cut down the chicken and the green peppers, too, so the chicken is more in strips than cubes and the peppers more tid-bitty garnishes than bit-sized bits.

*twitch...twitch*

Ok. General rule of thumb, if you have to make more than 1 substitution then it's no longer the same recipe (just ask my sister about the irish stew incident). Turkey has a bit more flavor to it than chicken does, so it's not too surprising that it came out a bit bland. Also bouillon cubes makes for lousy stock. Picking up a can or two from the supermarket would go a long way to add to the flavor (not to mention lower the sodium count of the dish). Strips vs. cubes isn't too big a deal so long has you maintain the same available surface area for cooking (if the strip's surface area is large than the cube then it will behave differently). Don't overdo it with the green pepper unless you like the dish to come out green and a bit slimy. If the taste still seems a bit bland, take a portion out and add a bit of salt to it to see if it helps (you'd be surprised how often this fixes things).

Feel free to give me a phone call if you want any ideas.

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Making substitutions turns it into a different recipe? You're not Jewish, are you? (Just ask my mother about the beef and broccoli incident--my father was rather surprised by his plate of chicken and red peppers.)

Depending on personal tastes, you might also consider subbing in a little white wine or sherry in place of some of the stock. And for the record, I think your bouillon plan is fine (I never thought canned stock was worth the trouble of carrying it home).

And...green and slimy? I use green pepper in lots of dishes, and I don't think I can ever discribe them as coming out green and slimy. What do you do to them?

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First off: Explain the beef and broccoli incident? This sounds about as hilarious as the time I used sweetened condensed milk in a curry casserole (one word: evil).

Second, the recipe actually called for cooking sherry. I used it in the proper amount. Perhaps I will endeavor to add more? I'm still thinking of making more concentrated stock to use on top. Perhaps more flavorful white wine?

Green peppers weren't at all slimy or anything like. The sauce was made on the stove and they were the last thing other than the chicken to go in. Then the whole thing was baked. It was still pretty good, only I think the green pepper taste was too strong, so I'm putting less in next time. I might switch to red peppers if I make the recipe again after tonight.

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My father, working in Manhattan at the time, calls home around lunchtime and asks my mother what she's making for dinnher. She replies, "Beef and broccoli." When my father gets home, he learns that, while my mother set out to make beef and broccoli, she'd run out of beef and substituted chicken; and had no broccoli so instead used red peppers. My father was understandably perturbed.

In short, I come from a household where all of the named ingrediants were once removed from the dish; small substitutions don't faze me.

Using a different wine instead of the sherry or stronger stock will give you more or different flavor, just be careful about changing the total amount of liquid, because that'll affect your texture. You might also consider adding more of whatever spices (garlic, rosemary, thyme, whatever the recipe already calls for) to give it a bolder flavor.

From:

bigscary.livejournal.com

"the same recipe"

This statement has zero meaning.

Seriously. Pick ANY recipe that wasn't DESIGNED by a KNOWN PERSON in the LAST TWENTY YEARS, and I can find you at least two WILDLY divergent recipes that will produce a recognizable result. Yes, she made Chicken Tetrazinni, but there's no HARM in that. It's still fundamentally the same thing.

But you're right about stock and salt. Just make your own at home, for the former, it's terribly easy and cheap. For the later, I used to be wary of salt, but remember: Salt makes things taste more like themselves.

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Make stock? Like as in boil chicken bone for a day and a half? No thank you. Besides, I bought boneless breasts for just that reason - no bones to mess around with.

And on the subject of salt, should I use kosher salt instead for more...erm, saltiness?

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Actually about 1 1/2 - 2 hours is usually fine for chicken stock. You can go longer, but you don't get too much more return on the energy put into it.

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Making your own stock never works as well as advertised. Unless you're making chicken soup (in which case you'll still need to add some salt or bouillon to get a good flavor, but boiling the carcass makes it easy to get the meat off of it), I wouldn't bother.

And there are plenty of purists who'll harp about one salt versus another (sea salt, kosher salt, etc), but I've always used standard table salt and have never seen a difference.

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Seriously. Pick ANY recipe that wasn't DESIGNED by a KNOWN PERSON in the LAST TWENTY YEARS, and I can find you at least two WILDLY divergent recipes that will produce a recognizable result. Yes, she made Chicken Tetrazinni, but there's no HARM in that. It's still fundamentally the same thing.

Actually that's why it then becomes a variant recipe or "my recipe". I have no issues with someone taking personal ownership of a recipe when they make changes, but it is no longer the same recipe. Case in point my sister, at my mother's instance, ended up substituting goat for lamb and scallions for onions in an irish stew. The end result was not an irish stew (all involved in the incident can testify to that). Single substitutions are generally allowed when one says they're following someone else's recipe. Once you move towards the second or more substitutions though you start to change the interplay of the ingredients of the recipe turning it into a vastly different beast. For example, replacing black pepper and onion powder with white pepper and garlic powder greatly changes the nature of the dish to which you are seasoning. Such changes can no longer be called the same thing, despite coming from the same foundation.

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bigscary.livejournal.com

I'm talking about the four different but good and "authentic" recipes I have on hand for Beef Gulyas. Ditto Lecsos. Ditto Cold Cherry Soup.

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Cold cherry soup, you say? I'd be interested in trying that one.

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jethrien.livejournal.com

Wait a sec. She's not claiming to be making a specific recipe for Turkey Tetrazinni. It's not like she's saying, "This is Emeril's Turkey Tetrazinni." Fine, I'll grant that if you use Emeril's recipe and change two ingredients, it's not longer Emeril's recipe. But she's not claiming that this is Turkey Tetrazinni from Emeril, or Joy of Cooking, or whatever. I think saying it's still a Tetrazinni recipe with chicken is totally legit.

Just because you know of one instance in which someone made the wrong substitutions and it came out badly doesn't mean that you can issue a blanket rule that you can't fiddle with recipes. If I'm making a recipe for chili that calls for black beans and carrots, and I use pinto beans and onions, does that mean it's no longer chili?

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Ok, while there are some instances that might hold true. I've suffered through for more cases than the "Sister's Irish Stew Incident" that has reinforced my notion (I've said it before and I'll say it again, when you add tomatoes to a irish stew or shepherd's pie it is no longer an irish stew or shepherd's pie). So I tend to look at recipes as a type of chemical formula. I accept that a person can use a base recipe to come up with the dish, but as changes are made it is no longer the same recipe. Of course this notion of mine may also be due to the fact that I view recipe names as a descriptive term as well.

...and I've never said that one cannot fiddle with a recipe. After all I do that all the time. But when I do, I say I use that recipe as a base and then describe what I did to alter the recipe. But I don't view it as being more than a distant cousin of the original recipe unless I made an effort (and succeed) to maintain the many properties that give the dish it's characteristics. Even then I say that it is a variant recipe.

So from my perspective she made a chicken tetrazinni dish using a turkey tetrazinni recipe as the base. Simple and straightforward. It takes nothing away from the dish that she made, and gives a perspective by which the dish can be interpreted.

PS: ...and you know who's to blame for all this? The food network. It's made many of us into damn food critics =-þ

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Uh, well, since I don't know your sister, feel free to tell the story yourself, if you like.

Thanks for the offer of help, but I've got it pretty well covered. It doesn't need much more done to it than adding a crapload more of pepper and salt and a little more seasoning. I might buy some seasoning to play around with another time.

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Long version of the story:

Well one day (back when my mother and sister were living in the same apartment with me) I had come home ready to make a stewed goat dish. Coming through the door my sister greeted me and told me that she made Irish Stew with a rather strange look on her face. Knowing that it was unlike my sister to run up to the supermarket, and a few quick sniffs of the air, I asked her where she got the lamb from. She told me she used the goat I had bought instead. I then asked her what she was thinking using goat instead of lamb in a Irish Stew. Then of course she said the qualifying words of "It was mom's idea". *sigh* For the record my mom only knows how to make one or two dishes well, the rest is rather bad.... and I mean BAD!!!

So I walk over to take a peak at this stew....... =-O It wasn't even the right color of consistency. My sister then explains to me how mom told her that scallions would work as a replacement for onions. I responded "...and you believed her?" My sister hung her head in shame realizing how foolish that was.

I'll spare you the actually description of the dish, it really wasn't too good looking. Needless to say that it ended up rotting in the fridge since no one wanted to touch it (2lbs of goat meat down the garbage chute, literally). My sister has since always come to me for cooking advice since my mother's words could not be trusted.

From:

bigscary.livejournal.com

Oh, and as to google? They satisfied the ACLU's concerns, and anyone's privacy concerns early on. The problem with the subpoena at issue is not intrusiveness, but rather burdensomeness -- privacy is not at stake, lots of annoying work and production on google's part is.

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slackwench.livejournal.com

Chicken tends to be more bland than turkey. It also cooks slightly differently. I'd try the original recipe before making substitutions, to get a feel for it.

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