Tag: om nom nom

SWFF: One Year Later

Sherwood Forest Faire (see previous post) is in the middle of its second season, and I’ve been back five of the eight days they’ve been open so far. (They are open weekends through April 03, plus Friday, March 18.) While not without blemish, my experience has been a whole lot of fun, and in many ways an improvement over their great inaugural season. Read on for specifics:

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Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities

A little over a year ago, I posted regarding the dragon as represented in the medium of cake. While I didn’t have any plans to revisit that topic, the recent Smaug cake by Maria Campos instantly made me reconsider. My first encounter with this work was via Cake Wrecks (in the Sunday Sweets section, of course!), which linked additional images in Sugar Madness’ Flickr photostream. More details of construction can be found on the artist’s blog, The Cakerator.

Additional images after the jump.

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Sous-vide Cooking

My love of gadgets is, I think, already well-established on these pages. I love food just as well, so it was probably inevitable that I’d decide to take some food and Do Science to It. And takes pictures of myself doing it. And put up a blog post about it.

Say you want a steak cooked perfectly, edge to edge. That means bringing the internal temperature of the entire thing to exactly the right point. It’s hard to do with a grill or a pan or a broiler, since those heat the outside more and the middle less, and you have to tightly control both time and temperature vs. the cut of meat.

The idea of sous-vide cooking is really simple: put the meat in an airtight, watertight vacuum bag. Plunge it into a water bath that’s exactly the temperature you want. Leave it there for a few hours — an hour plus or minus makes no difference. The devil, as usual, lies in the details — after the jump.

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