WHAT ARE YOU EATING TODAY?

[moose eater]

Hey Moose,
Cullen skink is a classic winter warmer in Scotland, haddock it self is very popular over there.
Cod would be very popular here. Boring white and flaky usually comes encased in batter and is rather bland.(codling) its either in batter/breadcrumb or smoked, usually for a reason. Halibut is a fine bit of fish, I wouldn't see that often, expensive as well.

Sounds like your building some really nice flavours man, i wouldnt call for the acidiness either from the juice.. Chicken thighs are fantastic, full of flavour and always retain their moistness levels compared to the breast or leg I find.. When making curries the thighs is all I use (meat based)
Feels like Christmas reading those ingredients, I can only Imagine the aromas escaping from the kitchen.
Are you all hands on when it comes to food Moose? Would her goodself be allowed into the kitchen when your in the mode, maybe a helping hand with the condiments or afters..Rounding the evening of with pecan pie sounds perfect, Keto or not..

I have a strange relationship with oysters, my good woman has no issues scoffing down a half dozen of them when we are out, I usually drown them with lemon juice and hot tobasco before necking them. Last time when visiting the UK we dropped into the famous Sweeney & Todd pie shop, I tried the beef & smoked oyster pie and herself went for the wild game pie. The pies were excellent, I left them a good review.

That steak and Stilton cheese pie was phenomenal. I'd bet a beef and oyster pie would be tasty, too. Scots and their crusts, eh!

 

[superx]

I have never sampled crane breast or grouse nor seen them. I bet the juices make an incredible stock.. Rich and full of depth and flavor. With baking and pastry i find there's a certain level of science required and the same with patience, most pastry chefs I know or either single/divorced and drunk 5 nights a week. Usually the first one in and last one out lol

Sounds like you guys have it worked out nicely
The village not far from us does a really nice chowder, usually smoked coley/salmon/prawns/mussels and calamari no cream or white wine, its prepared the same way as making a vegetable broth combined with fish broth and when served up resembles vegetable soup, you can get the hints of fennel and mint..
They sell a lot, the farmers love it, different from the cream based one or the tomato Mediterranean one.
I was thinking King crab might of made its way on to your festive menu, maybe the new year...

 

[armedoldhippy]

raw, or battered and deep-fried, I can inflict some damage on a bunch of oysters.

i haven't found a way that i didn't love them. oysters rockefeller were near top of the list, right behind slurping them straight out of the shell. lol.

 

[moose eater]

i haven't found a way that i didn't love them. oysters rockefeller were near top of the list, right behind slurping them straight out of the shell. lol.

I haven't tried oyster stew in many years (decades, even), so maybe I'd change my mind. But my memories of it were not great. Who knows, though?

Otherwise, seafood, in general, is in grave danger once it enters my door.

 

[armedoldhippy]

I was thinking King crab might of made its way on to your festive menu

this is something lacking in my diet. i loved snow crab, blue crab, stone crab claws. can't find snow crab after population collapsed.

 

[moose eater]

I have never sampled crane breast or grouse nor seen them. I bet the juices make an incredible stock.. Rich and full of depth and flavor. With baking and pastry i find there's a certain level of science required and the same with patience, most pastry chefs I know or either single/divorced and drunk 5 nights a week. Usually the first one in and last one out lol

Sounds like you guys have it worked out nicely
The village not far from us does a really nice chowder, usually smoked coley/salmon/prawns/mussels and calamari no cream or white wine, its prepared the same way as making a vegetable broth combined with fish broth and when served up resembles vegetable soup, you can get the hints of fennel and mint..
They sell a lot, the farmers love it, different from the cream based one or the tomato Mediterranean one.
I was thinking King crab might of made its way on to your festive menu, maybe the new year...

I had a Dungeness crab chowder at Pike Place Brewery many years ago that was IN-FUCKING-CREDIBLE!!

And neighbors in Homer, Alaska in the later 70's, maybe as late as 1980, were crab fishermen (some of them in that house, anyway) and they did a fresh (not brined and processed) crab feed one night, including a huge pot of crab fondue (the fondue was mostly Dungeness, but there were steamed fresh king crab legs from back when a king crab on the larger size could be up to or over 21 lbs.) Decadent, for sure.

I processed a LOT of crab in the later 1970s, before they 'shrank' in size due to over-fishing.

The king crab are 'butchered' with a stand with a crude giant arrowhead shaped blade pointing toward the abdomen of the butcher, and when the butcher thrusts forward, holding the king crab with its shell against his thick (think like Kevlar) apron, it bisects the king crab, and each half of the crab is then tossed to one side or the other of the gilling and processing table. The shell is discarded into the grind bin.

The gillers take the whole section of king crab and run it gently under a motorized drum with dull block-like blades on it that runs in a horizontal plane and removes the gills. It's an art to get enough contact to remove the gills and not harm the structure of the section the gills sit on top of.

Then two cooking cages about the size of a bale of BX Pro-Mix are joined to a hanging inverted T shaped item on a chain so that when the hoist picks them up, they more or less balance each other, and they're lowered gently into a cooker tank, with the chain pulling them along, and by the time they emerge at the other end, they're cooked.

(*That's the moment when, if you're going to pilfer a freshly cooked, unbrined set of legs, to grab such. Many a time we shoved what were truly giant whole upper leg pieces of freshly cooked, minimally processed legs into our mouths and hid behind one of the tanks to gobble while the cook folks looked at us with a wink and a nod). The crab tails we were allowed to keep for ourselves through the shift, then rinse and cook in a cage when we were done for the day(s)....

The phase after the cooker is what more or less ruins store-bought processed king crab. They take the cages that were paired and hanging, that have just been brought out of the cooker tank and run them into a brine tank that holds enough salt to still be liquid at -10 degrees Fahrenheit to quickly freeze the goods. After that, though still tasty, it'll never taste like truly fresh caught king crab again. Which is one of the biggest reasons why we rarely if ever buy store-bought king crab legs... or claws. Etc.

That, and the fact that on sale here we're paying all of about $25/lb. as a rule, and for premium processed frozen legs by the case, we're paying $35 to $40/lb. Out-fucking-landish.

Snow crabs (also known as Tanner crabs) are processed much like king crabs.

Dungeness crabs, however, are typically loaded live into those same cooking cages, typically on their backs, and stacked until the cage is full and ready for the cooking tank. You can hear them crunching each others' shells quite audibly.

All of these species are typically kept alive in what resemble crude concrete indoor swimming pools (we had 6 huge pools inside the work area back then, maybe 8, but I think it was 6), and no dead crabs could be processed.

If there was a question about a crab's vitality, you held it close to the concrete floor and gently dropped it on its back from an inch or so above the concrete. If the mandibles moved, it was good to process, if it didn't move in any way, it also went to the grinder bin.

King crabs are a deep-water crab, tanners can be deep or intermediate as a rule, sometimes shallower, and Dungies are a shallow water crab, similar to a Blue Bay crabs. They all tend to acclimate to the pressures they exist in, so deep-water crabs move VERY slowly at sea level, like they're on Quaaludes. Conversely, dungies act like they're on meth much of the time. wired and fast.

We used to tell people that if you were processing king crabs and one got you, you were truly not paying attention. They're -incredibly- SLOW. But the king crabs also tend to be the stronger grip of the three. OUCH!!!!!

The indoor concrete holding tanks we had were quite sizable, and one night while doing some decent acid/LSD at work, we crawled into a tank that was stacked about 3-4 ft. deep with Dungies once the water was drained. Wall to wall lively crabs, and us on acid!!!!

It was like what I suspect being at the Alamo might've been like. First thing was to work a spot until you were standing on concrete with some room to move. Throwing live crabs up into the troughs that had water current in them, delivering them up to the next room where the processors were working. Talk about a 'hostile work environment'!!

In retrospect, though fun to talk about now, if someone inquired, I'd advise against such antics while on acid.

 

[moose eater]

My wife is a bit Norwegian, and she's my finish carpenter, thus I refer to her when speaking to others as my Norwegian finish carpenter.

She's currently making her Thanksgiving batch of Norwegian lefse (potato flat bread) on her lefse griddle (which doubles wonderfully as a pancake griddle or grilled cheese sandwich griddle as well) and simultaneously decanting a couple of 1-gallon and 1/2-gallon growlers of her homemade blueberry-watermelon wine into bottles, and then corking them...

I'm just now getting my outdoor chores done as the Sun sets, including torquing the alloy rims I put onto one of the vehicles Friday, for which the shop that dismounted the tires and swapped rims obviously had an airhead newbie doing the work, as noted by the fact that, despite my leaving a quart zip-lock bag of dedicated alloy rim lug nuts in plain view on the front seat, they used the inappropriate steel wheel lug nuts they'd just taken off.

Idjits abound these days. another moment of paying someone to do a job, only to have to do their job for them after the fact. Fuckers.

So, after the glass of test wine, it's out into the relatively warm +14-degree f. air to dig out a torque wrench and a 21mm deep-well socket, and make sure they didn't over-torque, or miss something else... With idiots there needn't be any actual malice involved. They can kill you just as easily with things they didn't even know they did.

I'd have not noted the use of the inapplicable steel wheel lug nuts but for my honed sense of distrust for the average human, resulting from many years of dealing with people who collect a paycheck, but can't be paid enough to actually pay fucking attention.

"Humans; can't eat 'em, can't live with 'em...."