voidkraken's Profile

@phobos I think the separate green tray is the chillpack that they refer to at the end, to keep the meat/cheese/veg cool.

What can you substitute for the rice syrup if you live in some benighted area of the UK and have never seen such an ingredient? :) (it's the only ingredient I don't recognise well enough to be able to substitute).

Also, is something like rice syrup diabetic friendly?

I tend to try and expand the quantity to use the whole can, or find another recipe to use it up that day, but there's no reason you can't just freeze it for baking purposes. As another poster said, it'll lose it's fizz but that's not an issue for bread!

I'm probably going to draw no end of boos and hisses for this, but I've been using chicken bovril. A teaspoon or two dissolved in a litre of hot water gives me something cheap and chicken-flavoured to use in recipes - to be honest, my primary driving force has been cost, but it works!

I saw this first some months back, and was very taken with the idea - unfortunately I felt it's usefulness was reduced too much by being something you have to plug in. You can't use it when camping, the cable was too short to use for barbecuing without an extension cord (at least at my home), and there aren't many uses internal to the house which call for that kind of heat.

Instead, I purchased a small butane fuelled soldering iron with mini blowtorch fittings - it ignites charcoal just as effectively with the aid of a little kindling or firelighters, and much more portable and self contained for my purposes.

It's not exactly a secret, but it's a food I know I'll never be rid of - Quavers! They're just so damnably addictive!

I think there's one improvement to the basic can opener which is oft overlooked and extremely useful - and rosebud has already mentioned it:

The "safety" can opener. These cut through a different part of the can seal, rounding the cut in such a way that you don't end up with sharp edges (well, they're blunt enough that anything short of deliberately trying to injure yourself on the parts should keep your flesh intact).
I believe most safety can openers also let you replace the lid back on top of the can (mine certainly does), acting as a way to temporarily cap the can if you don't use it all in one go.

If you're in the UK, my wife and I highly recommend using the Sainsbury's Basics (specfic supermarket ultra low end budget brand) dark chocolate, and if you like it (we do) their white chocolate in the same range. Both are really nice, and compare favourably in our opinion to all but the highest end chocolates...and at a ridiculous £0.37 per bar for 400g, dirt cheap too. It melts well, but not quickly, and doesn't seem to lose anything from the flavour in the melting/cooling process. We've been using these, cut into chunks manually or beaten into chips with the food processor in all our chocolate based baking for the last year now!

The microwave requirement makes this one a tough cookie to fill, because I've found that any travel mug which is microwave safe (plastic) generally isn't very good at keeping things warm (poor/cheaper construction is the general cause). I own something like 20 travel mugs of various brands, because I keep trying to find better ones for different circumstances, and in every case I've found that dishwasher safe is usually unecessary (especially for coffee usage - you lose the patina!) and a quick rinse under a very hot tap will do, and microwave safe is also not relevant if it keeps the drink hot enough for long enough!

I'd personally recommend this stanely mug:
http://www.shopstanley-pmi.com/detail/TCL+10-00163-000

It's a bit tall, so might not always fit in cars with an overhang on the mug holder, but it does fit the slot just fine. It's nice and solid, holds a good amount of drink, and here are the big plus points:
1) Heat retention - nothing I've seen compares to this mug. I once left tea, freshly made for my wife, in our car, all day, in -2C conditions (the inside of the car was maybe -1C throughout, and we didn't actually drive anywhere, so we forgot it was there). When I retrieved it 6 hours later, the tea inside was still hot enough to burn my tongue when I took a big gulp expecting it to be colder! On warmer days, it's kept hot drinks too hot to drink for upwards of 3 hours!
2) Totally watertight - When the cap is closed (it's a screw fitting, twist one way to open and the other to close it), it's completely watertight and airtight, so you don't have to worry if you do need to drop it in a bag or rucksack and it's upside down.
3) Travel mug style drink cap - the cap, which as i mentioned screws up and down to open and close, does so by dropping a central block up and down to open and close the seal inside the mug, so you can drink from any angle safely. The mechanism is also totally bombproof, and can be taken apart in seconds for cleaning if you need to.

The only downside of the mug that I've found is the height, it's quite a tall mug...but beyond that I've yet to find an insulated mug which is better than this. At least try and find one in a camping store to have a look at before you try anything else, I'm pretty confident you won't be dissapointed!

It's definitely a nutcracker - I've seen a few of this design in the UK over the last few years. I'm not a fan of this type myself, I find they tend to fire the nut out the top end (with quite some force!) because the nodules are never quite up to the task of holding it in place when squeezing!