redfox

I want fizzy fruit! It sounds magical and neat. Does the fruit otherwise keep the same texture?

I have had some delicious yellow squash, though the standard variety, whatever it is, is often flavorless. I think the key is to cook so as to minimize the liquid. Cut to maximize surface area to volume ratio, and cook by grilling, frying, or roasting. Nothing where it's covered and steams itself, or where it is stewed, god forbid. Garlic.

Hooray for another fascinating blog! Thank you for spending the time and effort for us. I am glad you've been talking specially about the rice bran style of pickles. I've read about them but had trouble imagining what the setup could possibly be like. In that one photo, the bran looks positively rosy -- is that just a funny thing with the light in the picture, or is the bran actually pink? If so, what causes that? (Edited because I can't punctuate!)

Today made up a nice large batch of pizza dough (enough for four thin-crust pizzas) with three pizzas' worth to be refrigerated pre-proofing for later. Tonight's is with goat and mozzarella cheeses, toasted walnuts, and caramelized onions.

I too love the cheapest ice-cream sandwiches, but not crunchy. Instead, in my view, the proper way to eat them is to lick around the edges, then press down gently and repeat until you've reduced it to about half its former stature. Then you may begin taking bites, alternating with the occasional return to the lick-and-press approach. Mm. I also miss It's-Its very, very much. I had far too few of them during my Northern CA period. What was I thinking? Weren't Klondike bars originally an Isaly's product?

Don't assume that all vegetarians are ill mannered. The only ones you'll ever notice are the ones that cause a ruckus. Same as with anything else. Ha! When I read that original comment of Soba's, I immediately assumed he was referring to all the people who are rude to vegetarians. (I guess you're right, though, and probably he was not.) This just goes to show something or other about only seeing what fits in with one's previous experiences.

Er, "vegetarian" is not the same thing as "herbivore."

Helen's rendition of household chaos is the best!

Mm, that does sound good. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that the kernels of almond and peach pits contained cyanide -- presumably not much of it, but that's put me off trying to use them in food in the past.) You've got me feeling eager to branch out, quick. The pectin box is indeed a good place to start! I have a brand called "Ponoma's Universal Pectin" that is specially designed to work well with lower-sugar batches, and they have a good chart and step-by-step basic procedure included in an insert. Works like a dream.

I just whipped up a couple of jars of fairly basic apricot preserves, with on-sale apricots. I like apricots quite a lot in theory, but supermarket (and even farmer's market) apricots are often insipid and disappointing. Preserving them is a good way to get them to taste like themselves -- adding some almond extract is good for that, too. Preserving in small batches is so easy and fun. I can see how it would become addictive. Now I want to branch out into more exotic combinations, not that we will ever eat our way through all of it. I suppose that's what gift-giving occasions are for! Don't wait, ElfWorks -- you can do just a few jars' worth at a time, and what's more important for a small kitchen, you don't need a canning pot. You can sterilize and process the jars in a 250 degree oven. It's very very easy, and it works beautifully.

They are also very good chopped in a frittata. I never thought of grilling them -- I'll definitely be trying that with my next batch.

Salad: yellow tomatoes, basil, feta, pepper, sea salt, olive oil with juices being caught by shards of toasted pita accompanying Barley pilaf with white wine and garlic scapes, topped with Chickpeas with caramelized onions and escarole, topped with Greek yogurt mixed with garlic and lemon juice The latter combination was the best-tasting thing I've made in a long time. AND there are leftovers, the gods be praised.

In defense of Liam, having your food be missing a critical component is one of the worst "service-ee" foodie failures. It is so sad to have been looking forward to eating certain things together and have to either wait until the one that did arrive on time to go past its prime or eat the foods out of their harmonious union!

Eeeeee! What swine do that?

Your point about the heat is well taken. But on the other hand, cold rice has a very different texture from warm rice, which I think is good for ordinary fried rice, at least, if not chahan. I like the sound of the emulsification technique -- I'll have to try it. A related thing I like very much is rice and eggs, where you add plenty of (definitely warm this time!) rice to scrambled eggs as they are just beginning to set. I like quite a high proportion of rice to eggs, which makes it more like chahan again, though of course there is still more egg to rice in this dish than in chahan. In the end it is sort of like chahan inverted. A good seasoning addition is a little cumin, which I wouldn't have guessed just for myself, but it is delicious.

To thicken the plot, the Indian fresh cheese paneer, which strongly resembles Mexican queso fresco and queso blanco, is made using no rennet, but with a source of acid, either vinegar or lemon juice. The curds are then salted, scooped into cheesecloth, and drained, at least as I've been taught to make it. I've made mozzarella before, and it does involve both citric acid and rennet -- in addition to the higher temperature, the other distinction is that you knead the curds in mozzarella. That's what makes it line up in those sheets/strands that are so distinctive in fresh mozzarella. Mm. Alas for the loss of my rennet and my milk thermometer. I should look into replacing both.

I realize this is reaching back in time significantly, but I recently had one of these and thought it was awful: too, too revoltingly sweet. Also, I resent that it has "no added sugar" but has loads of concentrated grape juice, which is, after all, sugar. I'd love a drink that was like this but closer to the ideal presented on the label.

Congratulations on your continuing progress! Cherry compote sounds entirely seductive. Strawberry, sure, delicious, but cherry -- ! I can't imagine you'll have any trouble finding friends to take your surplus off your hands. The bread tastes good, but is alas denser than I would like. I think I may buckle and change the proportions to include some (but not too much) ordinary bread flour, but first I'm going to work on developing my starter to see if it acquires more lifting power. I think this bread would be very good with something like your Cervelle de Canuts -- finding 0% fromage frais may be a challenge, though. Meanwhile my lunch yesterday consisted of no small quantity of potato chips, indicating that I am not very skilled at following your good example.

Highly sweet and rich is not what I want in my OJ! eeeurgh. I want it to taste like a fresh orange of the not-too-sweet variety, and be relatively well strained of pulp. That to me does not add up to sweet and rich. Otherwise, I'll just thin it with vodka, thanks.

I am glad that Carlsbad popped up to prevent me from thinking I had gone totally off my gourd. I wonder if what we have is different varieties of marjoram, like you get with basil, or what. Quite mysterious! Lucy, you have inspired me to bake some 100% wholemeal bread. I don't much care for the dense stuff that is whole-wheat pan bread, and was feeling sort of cranky about all the recipes that insist that you mix your wheat flour with lots of white flour, and then add honey and all kinds of other things that seem to defeat the purpose of the thing. Anyhow, I prefer crusty chewy artisan-type bread, with the nice open texture and gelatinous crumb. I'd been sort of working on messing around with sourdough, so I read around and it seemed like all my long-gathered tricks of the trade might add up to make it work. We'll see! My first two loaves are in the oven right now.

It looks a lot like the marjoram I just bought at the farmer's market, too.

Those herbs look like marjoram in the front, and maybe summer savory in the back? Lovely!

(sorry, confusion over waitlist, now rectified)

I used to work at a bagel shop in Rhode Island, and it was amazing how many different things people meant by a coffee, regular. Customer: Coffee, regular. Me: Cream and sugar? Customer: (looks at me as if I were insane) Yeah, I said coffee regular! Customer: Coffee, regular. Me: Cream and sugar? Customer: (looks at me as if I were insane) No, regular. Like medium. Customer: Coffee, regular. Me: Cream and sugar? Customer: (looks at me as if I were insane) No, black. Regular! Customer: Coffee, regular. Me: Cream and sugar? Customer: (looks at me as if I were insane) No, just cream. Not too white, not too black. Regular! Et cetera. Boy, now I am experiencing some serious semantic satiation with respect to the word "regular."

As McDuff says, oxidizing in general makes the dough whiter and also blander. A common source of excessive oxidation is overworking. That's much easier to do, deliberately or accidentally, with industrial machines than at home, but this is why a lot of artisan bakers like to use methods that involve a relatively short initial kneading followed by strategies like turning the dough to firm it up and finish developing the gluten with less opportunity for oxidation, at least according to the authors of Artisan Cooking Across America (a secondary or even tertiary source, but the one I own). Since fava-bean flour is an oxidant, you have some of the same risks here. If two tablespoons of bean flour is enough to make a significant chemical difference for the purposes of workability, then it's enough to make a significant chemical difference for the purposes of bleaching. There's a tradeoff between increased workability and gluten development and loss of the earthy, wheaty flavor of the flour. That's not to say that you can't flirt with oxidation and still get good flavor! It just makes it riskier. I'm a little skeptical about all these little additives, though -- it seems like you're being encouraged to take bread flavor out and then put a different flavor back in? The cottony, super-white and tasteless "french bread" you've encountered at inferior bakeries is produced by hyperoxidation. (Probably they start out with bleached flour, too, but not necessarily.) Wasn't I just reading somewhere on eGullet itself about the role of oxidation in the history of the mid-century decline of the French baguette? It seems to me that I was, though I can't remember where.