The food thread

I'd vote for the lions. I think UK would be better with Wolves and bears back.
My son and daughter-in-law and their brood of 3 have spotted mountain lion on their driveway. They have a few variety of raptors in the air and rattle-snakes on the ground (right next to Jack London State Forest in Sonoma County) so the kids walk in the back yard with thick boots. They rarely see deer.

With Hurricane IAN in Florida, there will be plenty of alligator to shoot (taste like chicken?).

Here are some racoon recipes:
 

Attachments

  • Racoon.jpg
    Racoon.jpg
    161.1 KB · Views: 40
I am thinking of making a batch of chili with the next one.
I made chili once with venison a friend gave me (actually we were going on a fishing trip together and I made the chili for the trip, so he didn't exactly give it to me). It wasn't ground, I just cut it up into cubes and cooked it with onions, beans, and spices. It was very good.

I always remember a chili "recipe" published in Gray's Sporting Journal, by A D Livingstone in his "Campfire Cooking" column:
In a large pot place several pounds of meat, preferably venison, preferably with bones.
Add some salt and a handful of crushed dried chili peppers
Add water to cover, bring to boil, simmer until meat is falling apart.

After all, "chili con carne" only has two things in the name, neither of which is beans.
 
Interested to know how they work out for you…..ive had my eye on them for awhile now, price was the deciding factor. Now if you come back with glowing reviews i might just have to pry open the wallet. :cool:
First test tonight. I had a couple of pieces of chicken (a leg and a breast) in the freezer, which I thawed (shout out to LG who make a microwave oven which, when you tell it to thaw chicken, thaws it without partially cooking it). I got some charcoal burning in my cheap little BBQ, let it settle down a bit one it was lit. Seasoned the chicken bits, put them on the grill, waited as few minutes to turn them, and by that point the coals were nice, so I inserted the Meater probe into the breast, started the app on my tablet, started a new "cook", selected poultry -> Chicken -> breast, selected "medium-well", and let it rip. It took a few minutes to figure out the internal and ambient temperatures (no surprise since I had the lid off the BBQ to insert the probe, then partially closed the lid so the ambient temperature was rapidly changing), and projected time until done. It started making little noises as "time to done" shortened, then when internal temp matched target temp it alarmed and said to take it off the heat. I removed the breast from the BBQ but left the leg on. Then it told me to wait while the meat rested -- not sure if that is driven by temperature or just time, but eventually it said it was ready. I pulled the leg off at that time, assuming it would need a little more time than the breast. The result was excellent, the chicken breast was cooked perfectly and not dried out. Could I have achieved that result without a thermometer? Probably, because I know what a cooked chicken breast feels like, but I would be more likely to overcook it.

So after test #1 I give it an A while acknowledging a small learning curve on my part.

If you are cooking on a steel BBQ, you might want to get the "plus" version with extended range. When I brought the tablet inside it lost the connection, though I was able to find a spot inside that worked. I gather they have some sort of bluetooth->wifi extender thing as well.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
There will always be an argument about what makes a chili. When you enter the chili competitions, if you add beans you're disqualified. If you use ground meat, you are laughed at.
I never won one but I still think that's because I used more cumin than the judges were looking for. Me? Can't get enough. That's why I keep it as Jeera and only grind what I need, when I need it. Just like coffee.
 

PRR

Member
Joined 2003
Paid Member
Heres what we do with sugar cane
Bagasse!!

It is mentioned in many of my old machinery handbooks. I can picture it as kid-chewed but not as a mass byproduct; but there it is! If fed to the fire raw it has about zero heat content because it is wet. So they would gather as many waste-heat sources as possible to pre-dry the stalks for firing the boiler. Probably still do, any scale bigger than that man.
 
Bagasse is watered twice in sugar mills here, to extract as much juice as possible after two regular crushing stages.
It is then used as fiber for paper making, particularly school note books, or a fuel for the boilers.
There is normally enough waste generated that the sugar mills are independent from the grid, the boilers are used for steam turbines apart from process heat, and the waste heat is used to dry the bagasse.

The wiki article covers much of what I said above...
 
As a person located in lovely Portsmouth, UK, I have been considering if there is a better place to live...

So far, negative. I am sticking around here.

Latest Local experiments involve growing Mexican Chili Peppers:

S7 Red Hot Chilis.jpg


So far, so good! If a bit slow growing.

Can't wait to add them to one of my Curries!
 
Well it is Canadian Thanksgiving. I have some very welcome American relatives visiting, and they are vegetarian and insisted on making our holiday dinner, so I had my first experience of "Tofurky". I will be cooking real turkey next weekend. I appreciated the effort they made, and enjoyed the time together in the kitchen, but the food was, to me, lacking. I feel like I could have made a better vegetarian dinner without resorting to fake meat.