Tell us what you have cooked lately (that's interesting)

I guess parsing amazon links is broken now?

https://smile.amazon.com/Gold-Medal-Prod-Flavacol-Seasoning/dp/B004W8LT10/

I use Flavocol, and not just for popcorn. The fine consistency works really well for salting fried foods since it sticks so easily. I just hate that the containers and amount to order is so darned huge.

What kind of air popper are you using that takes longer than four minutes? Notwithstanding that my air popper is primarily a coffee roaster, when I use it for popcorn it never takes more than a minute or two.

Huh. Can’t imagine wanting to make my home popcorn to taste like theatre popcorn. The whole reason I’m making it myself is that it tastes better.

Theater popcorn is one very specific profile, very salty and oily with strong artificial butter flavor. Some people want to replicate that, and using coconut oil and flavocol achieves that goal. There’s more to it than flavor, we associate tastes and smells with memories, and that can be very powerful.

Also flavocol with olive oil, thyme, and lots of black pepper may not taste much like theater popcorn but it is goddamn delicious.

Honestly, I feel like it takes longer for a normal air popper to make a bowl of popcorn than 4 minutes, from the time you turn it on… but even if that’s how long it takes, the microwave bowl cuts that in half, and only costs 8 bucks.

Stusser may have isolated what makes it good… it’s quite thick, so I guess that helps it work.

All I know is that it works super consistently.

Don’t you have to clean air poppers? Can you just throw them in the dishwasher or wash them in 30 seconds? Most kitchen devices I own are rarely worth the cleanup required so only come out for special scenarios.

Yeah, you eat the popcorn out of the same microwave bowl so it minimizes cleanup. Not as much as microwave popcorn bags, of course, but it’s a far better and cheaper product.

Maybe I have a super high-power one, but four minutes is a dark medium roast for most of my coffees, and that’s up into seriously-charred temperature territory for popcorn.

The microwave one is neat, though, and if I didn’t have to have an air popper on hand for coffee anyway, I’d give it a look. This thread has a pretty good track record.

Not really (at least, not mine). There’s no washing at all. Corn kernels go in, popcorn comes out. Add butter/oil/seasonings of choice in the bowl. (Granted, the bowl allows you to pop with oil, and most of the current air poppers decidedly do not. There’s a grate at the bottom, then a fan, then the heating element; oil seems like a good way to set it on fire.)

One thing I’ve learned here is that you can use an air popper to roast coffee, which I had no idea about.

My unroasted coffee supplier and general reference for all things home-roasty is Sweet Maria’s.

Further discussion belongs in the coffee gadgets thread, but I’m always willing to talk coffee roasting. The trouble is getting me to stop.

I literally have never cleaned mine, and can’t imagine why I would. I only add the salt and butter post pop, using corn we get from my wife’s grandparents farm.

Yes, it was perfect. I would use that mix again, easily.

OMG agh so annoyed right now.

I was making dal makhani–a creamy lentil dish with small black urad dal and red kidney beans mixed into a spicy, buttery curry base. After soaking a mixture of the dal and beans in water for 8 hours, then boiling them for a solid hour afterward, I discovered–as I was pouring the cooked lentils+beans into the curry base–that some tiny percentage of the dal–maybe 2-3%–had never softened at all. We’re talking little rock-like pellets of lentil hate, solid black and unmoved by the action of water and heat alike.

Which then meant I got to spend an hour meticulously sifting through the curry to find 71 tiny uncooked lentils mixed into it. I look forward to finding #72 with my teeth :( :( :(

Anyway, here’s dinner. At least it tastes good.

Wherein Armando makes a mistake and yet still makes way better food than most of us, and even the mistake itself is of the time wasting variety rather than dumping the food in the trash kind.

Realistically, should have dumped it; not gonna be a lot of fun to bite into one of those things :-/

I volunteer as tribute.

Man, I’ve done a similar thing…
I’ve made gumbo or something with a big ham hock, and the edge of the bone were rough, so it had a few tiny chips of bone in it.

After realizing this, you’re then left with that decision… do I throw away all of this awesome food (no), or do I just warn people, and then end up eating it super gingerly, trying not to bite down on little sharp bone rocks.

Yep; in my case as well, I was planning to serve it to friends, so I warned them about it. And them promptly only one guy ate any of it :-D


Pics from board games yesterday. Of food, not the games, of course!



The last plate there features nearly everything we had on the menu: dal makhani in the top-left, then continuing on with egg curry (anda masala), palak paneer, and the cauliflower-and-cabbage stir fry, all over brown basmati, with a healthy serving of fresh veggie pakoras drizzled in tamarind chutney.

I didn’t have any of the tikka masala that day, so I corrected that for lunch today :)

Do you have a good egg curry recipe? I used to get a great hard boiled egg curry from a place by my office, but haven’t seen it anywhere else. It wasn’t even actually on the menu there, just a weekly special.

Unfortunately I have no idea what region it was from, aside from it being kind of red-ish, and not creamy. The one you have pictures seems like it may be pretty similar.