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Thanks - 'borrowed' from my MIL's BBQ - she got cast iron and stainless steel grates...did not even bother with the cast iron. Time moves far slower at the cottage, my guess is it has something to do with that.....and the jugs of sangria!

It is boggling how rampant and unapologetic recipe plagiarism is. I took a cooking class from a noted San Francisco woman in 1980. I had just purchased Marcella's new classic Italian book. Our instructor passed out copies of the recipe we were making. It immediately looked familiar to me, and checking when I got home I found to be verbatim from Hazan. Shameless.

@ElsieD rest Id treat it as any other dried yeast, which you use to make a starter . then use that starter to make bread. use just a little bit of the dried yeast initially , and keep the rest sealed, for future attempts. at the same time , use the dried yeast as you would any dried yeast in an Rx for Pinsa.

I think it's for uniformity in texture and color.

I just beat Henry to the first ripe Early Girl tomatoes. More to follow

Charlie has been painting the living room and dining area so the table is covered with a tarp, rollers, buckets, etc., so we have been eating wherever we find the space. I have done nearly nothing with the smoker this summer. I feel like I need to experiment with different foods and recipes. I did a chicken today and got some ideas for where to go next. I just seasoned it with a rub and sprayed it with a fat for the last hour to help crisp the skin. it took two hours.

I recently purchased dried lievito madre. Does anyone know how to use it? I expected that it would come with directions but it did not. I want to make pinsa.

It's made in MEX from goat milk. Not uncommon in Central Mexico.

Yes, 100% on that. Sorry you had to chase pirates to protect your own work!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/larry-olmsted-real-food-fake-food-new-book-investigates-fraud-labels/ Turns out there's a lot of mislabelling around. Larry Olmsted's book was published in 2016 and has LOTS of instances of misappropriated food labels. I found it a fascinating read. Edited to add that I have no idea if this is the case here.

When I replied above, I assumed “hard enough to grate” was a bit of hyperbole but I agree with @rotuts that fromage fort may indeed be the best use if this is truly the case.

I dont' understand this either. By definition, camembert (the cheese) is made from cow's milk in the village of Camembert, in Normandy - France. Are they just calling it camembert but it's made in Mexico, or was this french camembert exported to Mexico?

Raspberry apricot cakelets with almond flour, a half recipe of “Little Summer Fruitcakes” by Yossy Arefi. Delicious little cakes that were as good on day two as they were on day one.

I have had goat camembert in Mexico that was dry. Is yours from goat milk?

Leftover potato crema with shrimp, shiitake mushrooms, roasted Poblano chiles, and corn. Soup base was yellow potatoes and garlic, simmered in chicken stock and whizzed up with the immersion blender. Next time I would include the corn in the soup base.

I'm confused too. I've never encountered a brie or camembert that was gratable, yet you say it's common. How old are these cheeses?

@Nancy in Pátzcuaro I would enjoy seeing pics of the cheese you mention then we all can work from there. at a minimum : you can make Fromage Forte a la J Pepin https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=0zq5wv8kG58&t=4s

I don't understand - are they hard because they haven't been aged at all or because they've dehydrated through sitting around? I've never seen a hard camembert, but all the ones I've seen were either in a well known NYC cheese shop that does its own affinage or in France.

it's definitely true that recipe plagiarism is nothing new. Back in 2018, I had just written a book for the then brand new Ninja Foodi (the first pressure cooker/air fryer combo). I was looking around on Amazon to see what other books were out for that appliance, and I stumbled across a couple of books that had stolen dozens of my recipes. The weird thing was that the stolen recipes were from my first pressure cooker cookbook. In some cases, the recipe titles were changed, but the recipes themselves were copied verbatim. I let my editor know, and my publisher got Amazon to delete the books, but new books kept springing up with the same recipes copied. it turned out that someone had printed the whole text of my book online, so it was easy for anyone to steal from it. Once my publisher got that taken down, the problems stopped. In a way, I was lucky that the idiots stealing the recipes didn't change them, so it was relatively easy to prove they were stolen. With so many food blogs out there now, it's sad but not terribly surprising that unscrupulous authors steal content. It does surprise me that the publisher (Penguin in this case) didn't respond better to the accusation.

The camembert should still bake nicely as long as it's not too far gone. Letting them both get to room temp for a day or so should give you an idea of whether they'll recover.

I’ve had decent success coaxing a bit of ooze from a firm cheese, assuming it’s whole, not a wedge. I’d go with a cool-ish room temp, if possible. Cave temp, if you will.

I received, from a friend who was leaving town, a couple of containers of brie and camambert, but as is common with these cheeses, they're both hard enough to grate. No nice oozy, creamy, spreadable cheese. Is it possible to get them to ripen further (or at all)? They're in the fridge right now, so if I take them out and let them sit on the counter for a while, still wrapped in the paper they came in, could they become something more "brie-like" in time? This is grocery-store cheese, not something from a good cheese merchant. Thanks for your advice.

Can't edit to fix: Why are there instructions to cut off the bread crusts (and discard) when making breadcrumbs?

After having some lunch, walked over to Essex Market, and my favorite cheesemonger. The Tour de France just concluded (today) their stages in the Pyrenees, and Formaggio Essex had just gotten in a delivery (which also included my favorite potato chips from Spain)... The Comté - delicious as always. The Pyrenees' cheeses are just fantastic.

When I used to do a lot of Thai cooking, HTK was the first go-to. I'm a big fan. I'm not a huge fan of the Huy Fong "rooster" sauce, but I get the Shark brand (made in Si Racha in Thailand) in the Thai store in Chinatown - it's as close as what I had in Thailand as I've found.