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

I have the Instant Pot Ultra, and one of the things it offers is full control over the temperature of Saute, I believe even while it’s on. But the thing is, I have no idea what the temperatures on my actual stove are in Fahrenheit, which is how I would set things in the Instant Pot, and it seems like the defaults are too high, at least compared to what a non-Instant Pot recipe thinks is going to happen. I hadn’t considered putting the pot on the stove - that might be the way to go.

The ATK book mostly translates well - that chili required zero modification and turned out great (well, I guess they thought I was gonna salt soak the beans, suckers), and Saute temps aside, so did the risotto. But yeah, do NOT thicken the liquid prior to pressure.

Okay, that is different than mine then. I believe on mine, saute is just one click and one setting. Either way, it’s a stainless vessel with a multi-clad bottom. I’ve used mine on the stove several times, either pre-pressure saute, or post-pressure for things like warming up something I made previously but left it in the vessel and put it in the fridge once it cooled (aka when I’m lazy about moving it to a storage container.)

I suppose this should probably go in the youtube thread, but I’ve figured out @ArmandoPenblade secret:

I mean that’s basically it…

I’m always interested by the language spoken by Indians, how it’s a bunch of english, but then it has other non-english words thrown in.

And then consider that there’s like half a dozen major languages across the subcontinent. In addition to making learning ingredient names a little difficult from my cooking-centric perspective, this does mean that more often than not the most ridiculous and financially successful “Bollywood” movies will actually wind up coming out in 2-3 different versions (wholly different versions mind you, not dubs) over a period of a few years as they spin up Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, etc., variations. . .

I remember in my old mechwarrior unit, we had a guy who played with us from Singapore. I had asked him once, “What language do you guys normally speak in Singapore?” and he was like, “English.”

To which I replied, “Yeah, I know you speak english, but what is your native language?” And he’s like, “English.”

But the thing is, Singaporean english is… really weird sounding to my American ears. Not just the accent, but even the gramatical structure is slightly different, words are dropped, etc. It took a while to really understand that their native language was just a different version of english.

Interestingly enough, after moving to central PA, I learned that even here they have dialects with different structures. Central PA has a lot of Pennsylvania Dutch (German) influence, which results in weird changes to the sentence structure in certain ways. Like, folks drop “to be” from sentences. Instead of saying, “The dog needs to be walked” or “That thing needs to be done”, they’ll just say “The dog needs walked” or “That thing needs done.” Or they’ll drop “gone” from a sentence, saying things like, “The milk’s all” to mean “The milk is all gone”.

Language is weird. In philly we say things like “yo” and have an accent I guess, but I don’t think we actually had any major changes to how the language worked like I’ve seen with the Dutchies.

Yeah, regional linguistic variation in a lot of ways is kinda withering in the face of an increasingly interconnected culture (per my linguist gf), but there are definitely pockets of it still thriving (and cultural variation is alive and well! Damn Gen Z’er memespeak). Little odd to me that some of those same “to be” droppers in central PA are probably also railing against those “damned blacks” and their slang, but that’s probably a bit P&R for the cooking thread ;-)

I am sharing that video on my work WhatsApp group, since many of them are Indian. It’s great.

For big ones it’s more or less simultaneous. I know when I was there any given movie had 2, usually 3 versions playing at different times. Where I was it was Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam for about half, and English for imports. So watching, for example, Thor, you needed to check the show time to make sure it was an English one, not Tamil.

Singlish

I was thinking more in terms of the remake culture of Bollywood films, e.g., 2014’s Hindi-language Queen getting full on remakes in Tamil (Paris, Paris) and Telugu as Queen Once Again

See also Chinese language movies, where movies (at least in Singapore) generally release in Mandarin, but pretty much all Chinese media features (Chinese) subtitles, so that people who speak various dialects can still watch them.

Singlish is fun, yeah.

I need me some gigi paste. I sometimes just throw garlic cloves + ginger into the food processor and let it go for a bit, I guess that’s close enough…but if there was good ginger/garlic in a tube, I’d consider it.

Laxmi isn’t bad as a brand. At least I’ve enjoyed using it. It’s jarred though, not in a tube.

I mean, I also have jarred ghee, but I’ve had homemade as well and it tastes better. Sometimes you just don’t want to go through the hassle.

My go-to is about 1/2 cup chopped ginger, 1/2 cup chopped garlic (roughly in particular for the garlic), 1 tbsp of vegetable oil, and 1 tsp kosher salt in my mixer-grinder’s smaller cup, blend to a fine paste on high speed. It lasts a week or two in the fridge and is enough to make 5-6 big recipes of curry.

Which reminds me to answer this.

So my Preethi brand Indian Mixer-Grinder is fuckin magical. It’s ludicrously powerful, has two blending cups and a bunch of blades and shit, and wasn’t very pricy at all. On the other hand, it has exactly zero safety features. Press switch, blades move, no questions asked.

So I had made myself some chicken tikka masala. And as I put my stick blender into the pot to blitz it smooth (gf hates to find onion or tomato pieces in her food) before adding the chicken, I realized my stick blender was broken.

Curry’s barely below boiling hot, it’s already like 8PM, and gf is hungry and cranky. So am I.

So I slop it all into the big cup of the Preethi. The lid just fits on with a thin cheap rubber ring to stop most leaks. But it’s just push on/pull off. Not exactly the tightest seal.

I recognize this is stupid. I recognize it’s phenomenally stupid. So I toss it in the fridge for five minutes to cool, wrap a towel completely around it, and then push the lid down with my full body weight while turning the switch. Surely that’ll be enough!

Of course, it is not enough. A rising torrent of boiling hot curry, half liquefied, comes swirling up the sides of the mixer-grinder, forces the lid partially off, spraying the towel and quickly me with a jet of pure lava. Shrieking, i fall back, barely managing to flip the switch off, but not before the lid just comes rocketing off as a tornado of curry hell swirls up, skyward toward my vaulted ceiling. Doesn’t quite make it there, so it settles for lazily spiraling outward to coat every fucking surface within 8 feet instead.

Chef pro tip: turmeric-laced curry stains carpet like a motherfucker (I was doing the blending on the gigantic island between my kitchen and living room areas. Never had something spray 3 feet clear across it before).

Good to know the towel is completely useless in these cases. Thanks for taking one for the team.

Just going to go make a mental note here to never fill above the half way line.


Still working through the pulled pork

Fish Tacos.

Looks absolutely gorgeous, @Nesrie and @MattN. Tragically, Chicken Chasni Balti isn’t nearly as photogenic (especially when the mint chutney you add is ludicrously overgreen and kinda stains your chicken green, too).