Posts by Ben Chapman
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I've tried to recall my earliest experience of curry – apart form the sausage/sultana Edmonds Cookery Book variety – but I can't pinpoint it. All I know is that it was during the era when curries came in "chicken", "beef" and "vegetable".
There is more variety in Indian curries now, but they still seem terribly homogenous. In Wellington at least, every Indian restaurant seems to have the same menu. There was a Kashmiri restaurant for a short while many years ago, but it didn't last long.
We have a South Indian restaurant in Newtown (and it is really good), but even that seemingly has to include the whole range of familiar North Indian dishes on its menu.
Are things different in other cities? Are there regional Indian restaurants?
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
There’s something to be said for butter chicken. For many New Zealanders, it’s their first Indian experience. It has a safe English name involving two ordinary Pakeha ingredients and serves as a delicious introduction to the world of curry. A gateway drug!
It is often all that is listed when an Indian restaurant's menu has a children's selection.
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I seem to recall sultanas being de rigueur in my granddad's sausage curry.
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Regarding ticket prices, I recall there used to be a tradition at the Basin of a family day where general tickets were half price and kids were free. I remember a match against South Africa where the Basin was packed and people had to be turned away. It was the best day. The cricket was good, but being part of that crowd was incomparable.
I had a practice of always attending at least one day of each test at the Basin, but I gave that up when the prices went up so much last year. Since discovering the priority pricing, I've given a lot of thought to getting a match pass for tomorrow's test. However, I have a 3-year old with me most of the day and the thought of paying $10+fees for her to attend every day has put me off.
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I found the game too tense on the last day. I had to stop following it with India 150/2 as I knew there would be hours of anxiety ahead.
Got a text later in the day after the match finished from a friend asking "Are you breathing?"
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Back at the beginning of the millennium, Deirdre and I were living in rural Japan while I was on the JET Programme as an assistant English teacher. Every year, each of the town's assistant English teachers could request one thing for their apartment. For reasons I can't remember, my request for my year was a cushion. My predecessor was far more ambitious. Tired of his little griller that was useless for anything other than supermarket pizza, he requested a new cooker. He was given a top of the range multipurpose oven, the size of a microwave but able to bake, microwave, grill, defrost, etc. However, the instructions were all in Japanese, so the only thing he ever worked out to do with it was grill supermarket pizza.
It was a great challenge working that oven out using my little electronic Japanese–English dictionary and some experimentation. We lived on the output of that oven for a year. The high-point was producing a braided challah for our local gaijin Christmas pot-luck.
Actually, the challah wasn't the thing that gave us the most difficulty that Christmas. We managed to make a pavlova, that ended up all of 2cm high. We had difficulty finding a beater or even a whisk in our town. Well, we did find one that ran on AA batteries, which proved insufficient to the demanding task of beating egg whites. We were reduced to whipping eggs with a fork. Despite all that, the pav was a hit.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to BenWilson,
I don’t know either, whether it’s linear or something else. But I do know that the steam temperature will probably follow some variant of PV=nRT.
I think for the liquid, the boiling point is defined by the Clausius–Clapeyron equation.
Even assuming that the ideal gas law applies to confined steam above boiling water, the temperature of the steam won't necessarily be the same as the temperature of the liquid (except at the interface presumably). Am I right? The temperature of the steam is determined by the pressure of its environment, though collisions with other steam molecules. So I don't think we can infer the boiling point of the water from the temperature of the steam.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Many a suit for false advertising was filed in vain.
Though in NZ, marinara usually contains seafood. Am I right? Isn't a tomato sauce called 'neopolitan' in NZ pizzerias?
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to BenWilson,
This is true, but the pots are venting so I don’t think the pressure can rise much. The upper limit is presumably the pressure exerted downwards by the lid divided by its surface area. For a 400g lid with area of 255cm^2, I get a rise in 154Pa is enough to lift it, which is around 1.5% of one atmosphere. So maybe it can get to 101.5C if you crank it up full bore to the point that the column of steam coming out the vent is screaming and the lid begins to lift? At that point, for around a 5 fold increase in the wattage I’m pouring into it, I get a 1.5% temperature increase. So it’s cooking the food maybe a tiny, tiny bit faster, and making a very large volume of steam.
Is my reasoning wrong there?
I was being facetious when I made my point about pressure and temperature.
However, having a quick scan of your working, I think the increase in boiling temperature is going to be much less than 1.5°C. Firstly, your figure of 154 Pa is actually more like 0.15% of atmospheric pressure (101 kPa). And I don’t think that %-age of pressure above atmospheric is going to convert directly into boiling point temperature. You have to use a vapour pressure chart. According to this calculator, you would need to increase the pressure to 104 kPa or so to increase the boiling point by 1°C.
Not quite sure where you get your 5× wattage figure. Assuming a perfect seal between your lid and pot, you’ll reach the higher pressure using the lowest setting on your hob, when the lid starts rattling.
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My life is bedevilled by two modern dilemmas:
1. I often find myself not having a 1/2 cup of cooking wine on hand when wanting to make risotto or bolognese.
2. When D and I have a glass of wine with dinner, there's typically about 1/2 a cup left in the bottle that often goes undrunk.My solution to this problem has given rise to a third dilemma: how to distinguish between cubes of frozen chicken stock and frozen white wine.