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Post by onlyMark on Feb 28, 2024 21:23:38 GMT
pus
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Baking
Feb 28, 2024 6:13:38 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 28, 2024 6:13:38 GMT
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 18:42:10 GMT
fumo, nice to see the old electric switches there. I hope the coffee machine doesn't overload your circuits.
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Baking
Feb 27, 2024 18:39:23 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 18:39:23 GMT
Blasphemy. Lime marmalade is my preference.
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Baking
Feb 27, 2024 15:29:45 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 15:29:45 GMT
I'll be trying Cheery's cheese scones soon but in the meantime, and not strictly baking but it is a recipe I pointed Cheery to some time ago, are my first try at crumpets. Texture is good, taste is good, getting them the right size, appearance and handling them is inconsistent. Nevertheless, some salted butter and I'm pretending they are calorie free so I can indulge a few more -
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 13:04:17 GMT
Good for you then.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 13:01:01 GMT
Thanks bjd for your positive endorsement of my personal preference and choice that affects nobody but me. The biggest selling instant coffee in France is Nescafe so I must be in good company. You mention having a kettle, but no coffee machine? Is it kept in a cupboard? I don't have one. It's that space I use for my egg cooker. I have a Colombian friend who calls Nescafe, anti-social coffee. It's the coffee you serve to guests when you don't want them to stay very long. I'm quite happy with that idea.
Edited to add - thinking I know in France instant coffee is frowned upon so I ended up disappearing down the internet. In 2023, 32.88 million kilograms of instant coffee was consumed (compared to 178.13 million kg's of roast coffee). As each cup of instant uses 1.8g (according to Nescafe themselves), that works out as 18,266,666,667 cups. If you take the population of France to be 68 million, that is about 269 cups per person per year. As the majority don't drink it, then some people are drinking a hell of a lot. Conversely in the UK our instant coffee consumption is more as expected but not too much more because we substitute tea when others may have coffee. We consume about 305 cups per person per year. Not as much difference as I expected.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 8:17:34 GMT
I'm interested in internet privacy enough to wonder about my footprint and especially where my image can be seen. It's curiosity far more than paranoia. At some time I bet a lot of us have googled our own name to see what comes up. Mentioned in places you'd never think of. No good with a common name though - but your/my face is different. An image search would pull up the same image only so it would take a facial recognition AI to recognise the face in different poses and after 25 years of being on the internet I wondered what would happen. I used a passport photo and also with Mrs M for comparison. I noticed this AI seems not to be able to access private areas on forums and things like private groups on facebook. That's a good thing and my image had no hits. Mrs M's though had a page full. None personal though, purely business related. Some she didn't even realise had been published. I think you get ten free attempts before you have to pay and also have to pay if you want to see the full website address of a hit. Passed an interesting half an hour. pimeyes.com/en
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 7:47:45 GMT
Forgot to mention the egg cooker is able to do up to four poached eggs as well which I use quite often. That's a far easier process than doing it 'by hand'. In gentle disagreement with Bixa, I have need of a toaster because in our household and being English, it is an absolute necessity. The kettle is used for regular drinks but I notice mainly for boiling water in a more electrically efficient and easy way for cooking. I don't put a pan of water on the hob to boil. Just put the kettle on and walk away. I've no need for some style of coffee machine taking up space either/anyway. If we have guests then the cafetière comes out. If not, then the king of coffee, instant Nescafe, is used.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 7:24:25 GMT
My counter tops have just a toaster and kettle on them because I don't have a big kitchen. I do though have sufficient cupboard space to put these things in. No need to have them out all the time. I don't have a microwave and as useful as some may find them, I don't have much need for one and don't really want to take up the permanent space for the little use it would get. I also cook and eat very little meat, do cook and eat bacon though but less and less as in Germany you can't get a good British style, so I'll eat eggs in one way or another reasonably regularly. If I've ever bought a kitchen device it's because I will use it. That is apart from the hand cranked salad spinner though.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 27, 2024 6:32:58 GMT
Egg cookers use less energy and less water than on a stove top and, if I can get the water thing sorted which is a downside at the moment but I'm getting there, it's less faff. There's certainly wiggle room for making hard boiled ones and that's not a problem. I get it right every time. Dead easy. It's getting a good soft boiled that requires more precision that is not so easily repeatable. Can't get that link to open Bixa. My browser rejects it. If I made a lot of rice I'd get a rice cooker. At one time I needed to make a lot of bread, so got a bread machine.
Making a stew or dishes of that type that take hours, why not just keep the pan on a low heat on the cooker? No, I have a slow cooker because it uses less energy by far and is plug and play. Plus, as with the bread machine, there is a delay function to when it comes on which is handy in different circumstances. Used to wake up to freshly made bread or be out all day but set the slow cooker up to be ready for when I got back. Luxury.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 26, 2024 11:08:14 GMT
That was actually snot.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 25, 2024 13:31:35 GMT
After some delving into the internet I found a theory as to why it is more water for less eggs/less water for more eggs. It says, "But once the water is turned to steam, it condenses on the shells and drips back down into the boiler tray, to be recycled. So with more eggs you have more surface area, therefore more condensation dripping back down and a longer cooking time for less water." Yes, well, I'll keep trying to find the perfect balance.............
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 25, 2024 13:13:25 GMT
Just let me clarify what I mean by my egg cooker. Maybe I should have done so, sorry. It steams the eggs. The eggs don't sit in the water. It's like this (in fact it is this) - The water sits beneath the egg rack, it's heated to steam. Less water means the water disappears quicker - so shorter cooking time. There is no timer. It has an alarm that goes off when virtually all the water has evaporated. The heating plate somehow detects this. For eight eggs as opposed to one egg I would have thought you'd need more water to take a longer time to boil off as it would take longer to heat up and cook all the eggs. I can only think if the tray is full of eggs you have less space for steam so you use less water and the measuring jug shows the amount needed....... no idea.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 25, 2024 9:26:34 GMT
To me this is counterintuitive. This is the measuring container for the amount of water needed in my egg steamer cooker thing. Going from the bottom it shows soft, middle and hard boiled and the level for the amount of water for each number of eggs of that style. I understand hard boiled need more water than soft so as to be steamed longer - but I don't understand why 1 of any (and I usually do soft boiled) need more water than 8 of them.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 24, 2024 20:40:15 GMT
3. Paul Robeson - Ol' Man River
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 24, 2024 18:52:49 GMT
The Irish didn't breed cattle for beef, they were used for the milk and for labour. When Ireland was "conquered" the new beef market promoted growth in cattle in Ireland for the British to consume. The came a ban (don't remember why) on live cattle being exported to Britain so as the salt tax in Ireland was a tenth of that in Britain, Ireland started 'corning' their beef and selling it to us. Ireland also sold it to Europe and the Americas. There was also some tie up with the Jewish way of salting beef with spices that made it attractive. I think canning it was mainly for military purposes and necessitated changes to the recipe and even though you can get 'proper' corned beef in the UK it never became as popular as elsewhere because of the availability of all the other meats we could have anyway. Something like that.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 24, 2024 16:46:57 GMT
It's thirty years since I was full time in the UK so I understand some aspects of food may well have moved on. I know what I like though.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 23, 2024 17:16:59 GMT
"Bad" is subjective. It tasted wonderful though does look like a dog's dinner.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 23, 2024 15:51:12 GMT
That's what I thought when I took hours slaving over a hot stove to put it together. Or at least twenty minutes in the oven including the time taken to open the can of corned beef. That's also why I posted it.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 23, 2024 14:05:26 GMT
Mrs M has gone away this morning on a business trip so I'm having leftovers for dinner. And I'll be eating it out of the tray as she isn't here to shout at me. Reheated in the oven, mashed potato, fried onions, baked beans, gravy, tinned corned beef added for protein and a soft white roll to mop up the inside of the tray -
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 22, 2024 20:58:31 GMT
If you fell off the top of the Eifel Tower it would take about 9 seconds to reach the ground. The comforting thing is, a fraction before you did so you would reach terminal velocity and wouldn't be able to go any faster.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 22, 2024 7:37:22 GMT
Looks clean and precise. Not red at all like I'd expect from a fresh tattoo. Any particular reason why on the left arm and not the right?
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 20, 2024 15:17:42 GMT
ktyblank
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Birds
Feb 19, 2024 10:28:47 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 10:28:47 GMT
The magnificent and much maligned common pigeon. Source of sustenance, communication and leisure time activity -
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Grief
Feb 19, 2024 10:19:55 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 10:19:55 GMT
The good thing about an after life is if there isn't one, you'd never get to be disappointed.
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Grief
Feb 19, 2024 6:26:12 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 6:26:12 GMT
My conundrum is if both of you are devout enough and worthy enough to ascend to heaven but you hated and the idiot in real life, do you still meet up? Or is it specific to 'loved ones'? And how much did you have to love them to qualify? What if they loved you but you didn't love them, bit of a bugger then if you keep bumping into them........ What happens with stalkers? The man/woman you split up with because they were a bad person but they still 'hold a candle' for you?
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 18, 2024 21:19:20 GMT
Does that mean the designation chaat is for dishes more likely to be found on street side stands or the like? In short, yes. A lot has to be eaten with some form of spoon/fork but there are others, like pani puri (puri is "a deep-fried breaded sphere" and pani means water from what I remember, could be wrong though) which is just served on a plate in the hand and you eat it whole. Then there are the normal samosas, pakoras, toasted sandwiches and many others that you just buy and eat standing up. I rarely eat in a restaurant in India, one reason being I can't see the kitchen, but also there is a lot more variation in street food than restaurant food. But even then there are more dishes you can shake a stick at. Now though there is a growing number of fast food places that there never was that specialise in street food so you can also sit down in a building and eat it. Pani puri. They are about 2 or 3 Rupees each. You'd get maybe up to 30 of them for 1 USD. There is a variation at the end where you just break up a load and add stuff to it then you'd eat it with a spoon. The big doughnut shaped thing is a mildly spiced mashed potato though there are as expected a number of different fillings depending on the location like chickpeas - To finish, this is one of my 'go to' items of street food (or a variation of it). It's mild potato curry wrapped in dough, fried and accompanied by a chick pea curry and 'salad'. You'd get about three now for a USD. Maybe two. It's a while since I've been. Aloo is potato, paratha is the style of bread, chole is chick peas -
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 18, 2024 18:27:39 GMT
Dinner tonight for us (three people) was an Indian takeaway. Was pretty good. There was - Channa Chaat, Punjabi Chaat, Papads/Poppadums, Mixed Raita, Paneer Pakoras, (veg.) Samosas, Butter Chicken, Chicken Tandoori Murg, Alu Gobi Masala and a load of basmati rice. We do have a few leftovers but not much. There are a few Indian restaurants in the town but there is only one that does the chaats, which is my favourite Indian food and what I eat a lot of when I am there. It's very rare to come across a restaurant not in India that does them - probably because they are not restaurant food but street food. You don't find them in restaurants in India anyway.
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Baking
Feb 16, 2024 17:06:59 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 16, 2024 17:06:59 GMT
Making them are on my list. Look good.
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