The name sounds ridiculous but the kom kom miracle tool is kinda of fun to use. The Thai company, called Kiwi Kom Kom produces really affordable and sharp knifes and cutting tools. (If you’ve been visiting this blog for a...

The BBC has a fascinating video inside a frozen pizza factory in Naas, Ireland. It's amazing how few people are needed to run the place, which turns out 2 million pizzas a week.

It's all very Laverne & Shirley intro, minus the wacky charm of human beings.

When the pizza "bases" are topped with to-mah-to sauce, it'll sort of remind you of the Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop.

And the pepperoni stick machine—looks sort of like some octomonster has been caught in a trap. [via Tien Mao]

Even though it's a bit more flavorful than its cousin chicken, turkey is still a relatively blank canvas when it comes to food matching. In honor of Thanksgiving, Epicurious presents the top turkey-friendly wines.

Shenjian bao - Fried soup dumplings
Originally uploaded by AppetiteforChina.

The holy grail of dumplings: FRIED soup dumplings! These look amazing. Hoping Appetite for China will blog all the details...

Check out my Top Ten list of Not So Ordinary Food Blogs on Blogs.com.

The rice cooker giveaway closed last night at midnight with 934 entries. Thanks to everyone for entering and sharing your excellent rice-related tips, recipes and ideas! They make excellent reading to help break you out of a rice rut.

The lucky winners according to the random.org drawing are Carolyn (comment #712) and Kathy (comment #863). I drew three numbers to have a runner-up (#490) in case I drew one of my own comments, a comment without a rice-related tip, or someone unable to supply a U.S. shipping address. Carolyn will receive the Zojirushi 5.5-cup rice cooker with Induction Heating (US$350 value) and Kathy will receive the Panasonic 5.5-cup rice cooker with fuzzy logic (US$150 value). Congratulations to you both! I’ll be e-mailing you shortly.

FURTHER READING:

• Rice cookers: Not a one-trick pony
• Tip: Use cookie cutters as molds for onigiri rice balls
• Speed bento technique: Making & freezing grilled rice balls (yaki onigiri)
• All Product Reviews on Lunch in a Box
• Bento FAQ and Biggie’s Top Speed Tips

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Having a small Thanksgiving? Lucky you. According to this 2007 article, a small holiday meal is where the fun starts.

Start with sweet Dungeness crab folded into a salad with crisp apples and bitter greens and all of it bound with a lovely lightly curry-flavored mayonnaise. Then serve little game hens brushed with orange butter and stuffed with kale and walnuts before roasting. Round out the plate with a side of deep scarlet wine-glazed cipollini onions. Finish with a showstopper of pumpkin pie ice cream, spicy with ginger and cloves and studded with crunchy pralined pecans.

Alex spent the day yesterday helping out a friend who is Chef de Cuisine at a soon to be opened restaurant, scooping parisians of foie gras, and plating  hors d'oeuvres for a major party. I was sorry to miss the spectacle. It's always fun to get an inside peek into other people's kitchens. Tonight he's speaking at a dinner meeting for the New York Institute of Food Technologists. I helped him put the speech together, but it's still not the same as being there. I guess that I'll just have to get used to that for a little while.

On the bright side I have the evening to myself and a plethora of books to occupy my attention. Tonight I'm leaning towards On the Line, by Eric Ripert. It's the sleeper of the batch and not because we weren't expecting it to be great. It's just that with so many anticipated releases this fall, it seemed to get a little lost in the shuffle. Now that we've had some time with it, I'm so glad that we were smart enough to buy it early. The book really does give you a glimpse behind the scenes at Le Bernadin, a bird's eye view of what goes on in their kitchen. For those of us in the business it's fun because of what we know, for those of you who aren't in the business it's fun because it shows you a side of things you wouldn't normally see. The photography is quirky and well done, and the book itself has great personality. Le Bernadin is one of those iconic restaurants that we've only visited once, years ago. Reading this makes me want to go back and see what the experience is like today. Until I can afford to do that, the book gives me glimpse of what I'm missing. It reminds me of the things I miss most about working in professional kitchens, the inspiration, the camaraderie, and of course, the food.

This cooling rack is quite possibly the best $20 I have ever spent. It allows you to stack and cool four half sheet trays worth of whatever you like. It's sturdy, easy to clean, and it folds flat for storage. In a home kitchen with limited space it is indispensable, especially if you like to bake. Of course it also puts your cooling cakes and cookies at eye level for any stray cats wandering around, but every gadget has a glitch or two. We bought ours about a month ago and it has gotten a serious workout. It just makes my life a little bit easier.

(Photograph from the King Arthur website.)

We have debated long and hard about our first run in the world of self published books. Unfortunately, the rising production cost of the 172 page, all picture book has made the book too expensive for us to continue to happily sell it as a printed document. The book is still available as a downloadable PDF of all 172 pictures for $15.00. The dishes and pictures represent a year of our cooking. And for those who never new we published something, perhaps now is the time to take a look. The link on the side bar takes you to the Ideas in Food bookstore. You may also follow this shortcut.

...we were in Jakarta last weekend. And ate the most wonderful sate.

On our last stay in the city (July) we had work to do and not enough hours in which to do it. For us, 'work' often means eating so that we can photograph and write about it. It's not a bad gig to be sure, except when you (I) underestimate the amount of time a particular assignment will require, as I had on this trip. There we were, cramming in meals when we weren't hungry and longing for just one opportunity to eat what and where we wanted instead of what and where the story demanded.

At least four times a day we passed Jaya Agung, a sate place up the street from our hotel that seemed perpetually packed with diners tucking in beneath clouds of smoke rising from the sidewalk grill. Crowded local joints - that's our thing! But it wasn't to be. On our last night in Jakarta we were free, but by then I'd come down with a demon of a cold, and all I wanted was a couple of fresh fruit juices and an early bedtime.

I've often thought about Jaya Agung these intervening four months. This trip we finally got our chance to be one of those smoke-saturated diners, and it was worth the wait.

We don't know how long Jaya Agung has been around, but the place looks storied. It's a wide shallow shop open to the street, with a couple long tables outside and inside, a counter that jigs and jags around its corners - sit here and you'll be elbow-to-elbow with stacks of plastic-bagged melinjo and prawn crackers and other diners. The clock on the wall looks fifties-era. Some of the staff do too.

As is appropriate for a shop specializing in sate, Jaya Agung's menu is brief. There's skewered lamb (kambing) and chicken (ayam), a few soupy items including gule kambing (lamb) and various soto, and rice - steamed or pressed into lontong (rice cakes). We did an all-lamb meal: sate kambing and gule kambing.

The lamb soup might more accurately be described as a curry - it's hearty enough, at least, to slosh over rice. Rich and meaty, sweet from caramelized shallots, spicy in a way that makes the back of your throat tingle just a little, the meat drooping off the bones. Well enough good, but we devoted most of our attention to the sate.

                               Sate kambing, good and close

Talk about char. How do they cook the meat so thoroughly, yet insure that it stays tender enough to slip right off the skewer onto your tongue? And yes, that's fat you see nestled amongst those cubes of lamb. At one of the tables out front of Jaya Agung sit the Skewer Brigade; they're charged with threading lamb and chicken fast enough to fill the steady stream of orders. In between the mounds of lamb and chicken on their table is another of cubed lamb fat, to be alternated with meat on the skewer. Talk about self-basting.

 

Jaya Agung's a convivial place. The proprietress, who rules from an old wooden desk out on the sidewalk, gave us the hairy eyeball when Dave pulled out his camera but quickly softened, and even beamed and said 'Thank you' ('Thank me?' I thought. 'For what? Thank you!') when we left. Other patrons nodded and smiled. Dining here is like being welcomed into a sort of family, however briefly.

Jakarta residents are incredibly warm and gracious (are you surprised? we admit that we were, on our first visit), and they love to talk. Our neighbor at the counter mused that Jaya Agung must be a place with some history. He couldn't know firsthand because he'd recently arrived in Jakarta from Papua to work in the Forestry Department.

'What are you doing in Jakarta?' I asked him, half-jokingly. 'There are no forests here.'

He picked up a skewer of kambing, slid a piece into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Finally, he answered: 'That's a very good question.'

Jaya Agung, Jalan Wahid Hasyim No 56C (just up the street from Starbucks), Jakarta.

I love the idea of Sunday Suppers; about a year ago I was smitten by the Sunday Suppers at Lucques created by by Suzanne Goin in Los Angeles, which led to her book of the same name). Of course,...

If you've been to Thailand, you've seen those fried chicken carts at practically every street corner, with the giant wok smoldering like a witch's cauldron filled with dark, smelly oil that seems as ancient as the broken down cart itself.  What those carts produce are the bright, bright gold, impossibly crisp, mind-blowingly flavorful pieces of fried chickens, so good you willingly suspend all your hygienic concerns.  Who cares how long those chickens lingered in the tropical heat with only the dodgiest "refrigeration", who gives a damn about how many times the oil has been re-used.  I'm going to take a big bite and let that crisp, garlicky, chicken-y goodness shatter into a million little pieces in my mouth and just die happy.  Wouldn't you?

Luckily, you won't need to hop on a plane - or get a special dispensation from your doctor - before you can eat one.  I've figured out how they're made.  And it's so very simple.  The trick is, let me just come out and tell you, rice flour.  You dredge the chicken pieces in rice flour, that's what give them the crispiest skin.  I also marinate them in a paste made with garlic, oyster sauce, and fish sauce to give them a bit extra kick in the flavor department.

I just made a batch of this for lunch on the boat yesterday.  They were still a little crisp (and still dee-lish) even after a few hours in a cold box.  I'd show you a picture but we devoured them all before I could get the camera out from the cabin...

Thai fried chicken, or, the crispiest fried chicken ever

8-10 pieces of chicken, drumsticks or thighs, or both (a little over 2lbs or 1kg)
4-6 cloves of garlic, peeled
about 1 tbsp of chopped cilantro roots (or just the bottom part of the stalks)
about 1/2 tbsp ground black pepper
1 tsp kosher or (large-grained) sea salt (If all you have is fine salt, skip it.)
3tbsp oyster sauce
1/4 cup fish sauce
Enough canola oil or other high-temp oil to fill about 2-inch from the bottom of your cast iron pan (or a deep frying pan)

In a mortar or a small food processor, pound or chop the garlic, cilantro roots, kosher salt into a rough paste.  Transfer the paste into a large bowl, add the oyster sauce and fish sauce and stir to mix well.  Rinse and dry the chicken pieces thoroughly, then place them into the bowl.  With your hands, toss and rub the chicken pieces all over with the marinate mixture.  Cover the bowl with plastic and let marinade in the fridge for at least 3 hours.

When you are ready to cook the chicken, place your pan over medium-low heat, fill it with enough oil (I used Canola) to cover about 2inches from the bottom of the pan, or about half way up the side.  Let the oil come up to frying temperature, about 360F or 180C.  Meanwhile, put about 2 cups of rice flour into a large plate (a pyrex pie plate works very well for this.)  When the oil is ready, take the chicken pieces, one at a time, drop it into the flour plate and coat well with the rice flour.  Shake each piece once or twice to remove excess flour and place them, gently, into the hot oil.

If you don't have a thermometer, make sure your chicken pieces only gently sizzle in the hot oil.  Just listen to it, you should hear the oil just softly sizzling.  You should also see small bubbles around the chickens as they cook.  If the oil is too hot, you'll be able to see and hear it too.  There will be a lot of large bubbles blowing up and spitting viciously.  It will make a lot of violent noises and your chicken will brown up in just a few minutes, but the inside will be rare.  That's no good.  Just keep the flame low, and, when in doubt, turn the heat down just a little bit.

Cook the chickens until brown and crisp all around.  If you're not so sure if they are cooked perfectly, cut one up and see if it's cooked all the way through.  If you see a little blood, no big deal.  Just warm up the oven to about 225F or 100C, place your fried chickens on a cake rack over a cookie sheet and let them sit for 10 minutes to finish cooking.  (Don't forget to lower the heat on your frying pan so the rest of your chickens take a bit longer to cook!)  It's a good idea to heat up your oven to that temperature before you begin frying anyway, you can put your cooked chicken pieces in there while you fry the rest.  The oven will keep everything nice and warm, not to mention super crispy.

Store-bought crust and quick-cooking ingredients takes this pizza from the refrigerator to the dinner table in about 20 minutes. Use store-bought rotisserie chicken or any leftover you may have in the fridge.
See Recipe

Oatmeal in the breading adds crunch to these chicken tenders, which are sure to be a hit with adults and children alike. Serve with commercial honey mustard or light ranch dressing for dipping.
See Recipe

Make the most of fall produce like butternut squash and kale in this hearty vegetarian soup. Pasta and beans make it especially filling.
See Recipe

Braise your way to goodness in this one-pan dish seasoned with two types of mustard and fresh tarragon. The lamb emerges richly flavored and tender after only 30 minutes on the stove.
See Recipe

Ancho chile powder is made from ground, smoked, dried poblano peppers, and it gives this rub a subtle smoky heat. For a milder flavor, cut back on the ground black pepper or ancho chile powder, and omit the ground red pepper. Total time: 32 minutes.
See Recipe

The savory coating of Dijon mustard and dried herbs also tastes great on chicken thighs or beef fillets. Herbes de Provence is a combination of several dried herbs--including lavender, thyme, rosemary, and basil--that evoke flavors from the south of France.
See Recipe

Finally, after the eyeball and a horrible cold/cough that followed it, I can concentrate on the marketmanila.com feeding program for 2008. In a post a few weeks ago, I asked you how many would be willing to continue to support the feeding program that we started last year, and which has so far provided approximately 20,000 meals for undernourished public school children in Manila and Cebu. Even though I was hoping to receive pledges for 500 Christmas ornaments at PHP500 each, I realize economic times are really rather challenging, and readers have so far only signed up for 200+ ornaments, roughly half of the reader response to last year's charity effort. Never mind, I have decided to pursue the program anyway, and have ordered 300 ornaments and will cover that part of the feeding program in a separate post in the next few days. But one of the areas that readers have always lamented was the lack of ability to simply send or transfer a donation or gift to the beneficiary schools without having to come out of the woodwork and make it to designated drop-off points. So I have some good news in that regard: