Have you ever tried pounding your mayo together? I have. Not easy. Have you tried whisking your mayo together? I'm sure you have, but again a terrible bore dripping it bit by bit and whisking till it all emulsifies.
I've always read that you have to do it by hand and not a mixer cos the heat of the motor impacts the flavour. I've never been brave enough to try it though. If I'm going to be using all that oil, it better turn out right. I hate things not working out and having to throw food away. That just seems wrong in my eyes.
These days though, my aunt and everyone else (including David Lebovitz) seems to be talking about blender mayonnaise. All you have to do is use the whole egg instead of the yolk. Fair enough. With enough victories and testimonials going around, I thought I'd try it out. You could also use a hand blender, I don't own one, so I went ahead with my trusty Molinex.


Ingredients

1 whole egg
1 tbsp mustard (I squeezed it out of a bottle, you could use powdered too)
1 tsp white wine vinegar
2/3 cup refined oil (you could use half olive oil, but I feel it overpowers the whole thing)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

Method

1. Break the egg into the blender bowl
2. Add the mustard and start blending till it has mixed in.
3. Keep the mixer running and slowly drizzle in the oil a tablespoon at a time slowly while the blender works its magic
4. You'll slowly see it all thickening and building up volume.
5. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Mayo made this way will be bulkier because of all the air whisked in, not as dense as the other techniques. The addition of the egg white also impacts the texture considerably.

PS: I've heard that a hand blender gives a completely different consistency. It's thicker and fluffier. I can't vouch for it, because, like I said, I don't own a hand blender.

I love jam making. It's like everytime I make jam, I'm bottling up a bit of summer, a bit of the season, to be enjoyed for a long long time. If last year, I was the liqueur baroness, this year I am the jam begum.
I made three kinds of orange marmalade, jams, preserves, conserves and so it goes. I'm not sure what I was trying to achieve, but I wanted all kinds of fruit in bottles in my fridge.

While I don't have exact recipes, and I do play around with flavours quite a bit, here are some things to keep in mind while making jam

The story goes, I wanted to make popcorn cake. And that calls for fresh popcorn. Do you know how difficult it is in this day and age to get fresh popcorn? All you get is the microwavable stuff.
I could do with that, but I so did want to do everything from ground up and I wasn't sure the packaged stuff was the best way to go about it.


Chembur market is a treasure trove of fun stuff. After almost 6 years around this place, like Barney, I have a guy for everything, especially when it comes to Chembur market. Surprisingly though, I didn't know where to get popcorn. Even more surprisingly, I really didn't have to go anywhere. Right in front of the local station was this guy popping corn who was happily willing to part with his share of unpopped corn for next to nothing. Though he did warn me as uninitiated as I am to the whole process, popping corn might be a little different than what I expected. Of course it would be different I thought; I'd never popped corn, microwaveable or otherwise. Little did I know, the whole shaking the bowl shebang is a little tiring not to mention that even after all the shaking I didn't end up with a whole lot of popped corn. I had a whole bunch of unpopped buggers at the bottom of the bowl.

I have a theory that if you are writing down a recipe, you better write it down the first time. Or by the time you get around to writing it down, you've played around with the original one so many times that you've completely lost the plot.


This is my case for poaching pears. The first time I poached pears, I measured water, I measured wine, I measure orange juice, I counted cinnamon sticks, I basically had everything in hand. These days I throw everything in together in saucepan and pray it does the job. Almost always it does, which goes to prove, yes, sometimes you don't have to be that perfect and creepily crazy about everything.

The miracle answer is: ONE (or you could say Neo, since he's The ONE) OK. Bad Joke.

But seriously, One? like One?  like only One? YES! That's all there is to peanut butter if you make it at home.