Priscilla

Me too, I love this discussion. I'm thinking some nears and dears of mine will benefit from this fount. Tremendously inspiring. (Jaymes's caramel corn alone may smooth some gift-giving bumps burgeoning on the horizon.) Some years ago I potted very small cactus and succulents in Japanese ceramic bonsai dishes as holiday gifts--a contemplative and satisfying endeavor. Some are still going, 10 years or so later, too.

Stellabella that was great, felt like moving through time and space paying no mind to normal physical laws. I like egg similies a lot...and yours is right up there with Tom Wolfe's sloshing egg-yolk brain of the alcoholic British ex-pat journalist in Bonfire of the Vanities.

Mmmm wish Mr. Cassoulet would come to my house. Much prefer Mr. Cassoulet to Mr. So-Called Prime Rib, although I think I'm just about ready to retire that appellation for good. (Roast beef'll do me, in future, I'm thinking.) Mr. Certified Angus Prime Rib, he'd want us not to omit, if we can squeeze that in before the term becomes verboten. Three ribs, about a four-pound roast, not bad. If you like that sort of thing. Nice color contrast between the red red middle and the brown brown outside. Lots of salt and pepper. Horseradish whipped cream, shameless habitual riff on lovely campy Lawry's The Prime Rib's best accompaniment. Yorkshire pudding. Broccoli tossed with crispy buttered browned breadcrumbs.

You are so very welcome. Reviving tableware a specialty. Three-tined is nice. (My forks are plain old four.) You'll be looking at actual antiques, not as dear as one might think, OR an-tee-cue style, which you can find at not-bad prices, vintage or new. There always seems to be some contemporary manufacturer providing the old three-tiners, if you're adamant about new-only. Three-tined forks (ALL forks!) can be particularly nice in the large-scale so-called self-styled soi-disant Continental size, don't you think? A consideration: Do three tines sentence one to "pistol-handled" table knives? Course, if you, like me, got nothing against mixed media, the limits are naught but your own good taste.

Last Wednesday's LA Times Food section had an article about what amounts to plate psychology. Registration is required, I believe, but for anyone interested, here it is.

Last Wednesday's LA Times had a nice article by Claudia Roden on fried Hanukkah treats, touching on, among others, her own Egyptian Jewish tradition. As in her books, I think she always has something interesting to impart. Here it is. (Registration is required, I believe.)

Hey!

I agree, Yvonne, the anti-microwave rant was discordant in tone, quite out of place, in fact, it seemed while reading. Hmmm...breezy? Hope not. Breeziness can be fatal. (And I've got no love lost for microwaves, myself--don't use 'em, but neither do I villify those who do. Like Calvin Trillin said a long time ago, it's just that we like to eat while we're waiting for our food to cook.) Chapter 2 has more cannibal citations than I could imagine being assembled in one place! Riveting, merely from the provocatively macabre subject matter. Flirting with breeziness, perhaps, but perhaps that is forgiveable when dealing with cannibalism in a post-Monty Python world. More later.

Like Tolstoy said about each unhappy family being unhappy in its own way, novice cooks I have known make unique mistakes. Overall though I think a widely-shared problem is, as previously mentioned, a reluctance to jack up the heat. Also previously mentioned, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink.

Scared the living daylights out of my poor cats grinding rice to clean out my spice grinder. They'd only just recovered from the spice-grinding racket of a minute before, and then whammo! Rice is deceptively loud.

That Field & Stream site is great. Thanks, Tighe. Its entry for Steelhead covers the rainbow trout connection--calls it the the anadromous form of rainbow trout.

The comparison to arctic char is a good one, Nick Italian-for-Cats...the flesh was pinky-orange on the alleged wild steelhead, like the char my Icelandic neighbors sometimes give me, maybe a little more tender than the char when cooked. But too the Icelandic char had been frozen. What I have seen in restaurants and fish markets sold as salmon trout has been small fish, with pale orange flesh. The alleged wild steelhead sides I was buying would have been from fish of about two feet long, I would guess. And Jim, that's an interesting thought, that maybe CA steelhead regulations differ...I'll research some more.

Yes, pink flesh. Darker in color than what is sometimes sold as salmon trout. Seemed not to be farmed--good texture, good color, good flavor, and the skin crisped up beautifully--in my experience farmed salmon fails on all these counts. In researching steelhead online at the time, I ran across the rainbow trout information that Jim Dixon mentions up there, how only recently the two fish were designated separate species. The only pink-fleshed trout I have eaten has been called salmon or sea trout...maybe sea trout is another name for steelhead? I appreciate all this information.

Glazed ham, broccoli and cauliflower tossed with a lot of crispy buttered bread crumbs, heart-shaped sweet potato biscuits, honey and butter and cherry tomato preserves.

Jim, sometimes there is something labeled wild steelhead in markets here in Southern California, whose flavor and texture and behavior when cooked seemed just too good to have been farmed. Could it have been large rainbow trout I was buying? Or is it more likely to have been not-wild steelhead labeled incorrectly?

Nina, Margaret Pilgrim posted this classic fabulous Dungeness meal in the Dinner! discussion the other day. (Way down at the bottom of the page.) I love mayonnaise-type sauces with cracked crab--something that seems to me very San Franciscan, I guess because I was introduced to it by San Franciscans. But I almost always offer both a mayonnaisey one and a cocktail-type, as Margaret indicates. Enjoy your crabs...Dungeness season is very exciting.

Again the other night last week sometime. Skinny green beans & pesto swirled in sort of marbelized looking.

Wow way south, your antecedents were from, I'll bet. All the way to Sicily? Very delicious-looking plate o' pasta, too, she hastens to add.

Like Torakris I have never encountered a superdry kabocha, but I am glad you made it work, Foodman...I think its flavor and texture is unparalleled in the World of Winter Squashes. Sometimes I poke some holes and roast it whole, if I want to end up with puree--nice roasty flavor development. Roast dinner last evening: Roast chicken, Jim Dixon's Italo-PNW Roasted Cauliflower (to whose pan I added some broccoli spears, experimentally...not bad but of course not as suited to this treatment as cauli), roast sweet potatoes. Heart-shaped sage biscuits. Honey and butter and cherry tomato preserves.

Tommy, that was just plain lovely. I find my liminal state is when my cooking mind goes 8000 mph.

Yes, the hard liquor at TJ can hardly be underestimated. When I become impatient with the unappetizing overweening encroachment of prepared foods scarcifying shelf space for ingredients, I try to remind myself of this. Currently, (and like all TJ stock, it comes and goes) there is a not-bad Calvados for $10.99, an astounding bargain considering that $40-$50 Calvadoses can be utter, utter rotgut. Seconding the Moskovskaya, a cool $7.99, I believe, for the liter, my favorite vodka at nearly any price, and the Balvenie, which I imagines comes along as the rich older brother of those cheap and cheerful triangular $9.99 liters of Grant's whiskey they also carry.

OK. Received my copy yesterday, a little surprise at the P.O., because I did not get one of those as-per-usual shipping notification e-mails from Amazon priorly. Commencing reading right quick here. How are we all finding it?

Lamb shanks, cut osso bucco-fashion, braised with onion, garlic, carrot, bay, rosemary...and, um, red wine. Red-skinned potatoes cut in wedges and bunged carefully (if indeed something bunged can be said to have been so carefully) into the big oval black matte-finish enameled-cast-iron Cousances toward the end. Nice red-leaf salad. Sourdough bread.

Jaymes I wonder have you ever used Las Palmas enchilada sauce? More than one Mexican cook (here in Southern California) has recommended it to me, and I like it. (Otherwise, it is so Herdez all the way, as I was thrilled to see you advocate elsewhere. Can't really sleep comfortably if there's not at least a single little can of Herdez salsa casera on the pantry shelf.) Well, a wonderful discussion, this has been, and might be the place to offer the great enchilada recipe a friend's Mexican mom gave me years ago, happens to be a flour-tortilla one: Mrs. Acevedo's Potato Enchiladas White potatoes, peeled and boiled in salted water until tender but not falling apart, cut into rough chunks White onion, chopped finely Mild or medium cheddar, grated Fresh flour tortillas Large can of Las Palmas red enchilada sauce oil for softening Soften and sauce tortillas as described by Jaymes. Onto each stack a line of cheese, onion, and potato. Roll carefully, as the flour tortillas can tear easily. (Mrs. Acevedo tucked in the ends as she rolled, ending up with a burrito-like package, and I usually do this too, for this recipe; when I have made them with small-sized flour tortillas as part of a menu, I have left the ends open as in other enchilada preparations.) Place in pan as aforedescribed. A bit of leftover sauce can be poured over, but Mrs. Acevedo did not make these a wet preparation. The tortillas are chili-tomato stained from the permeated sauce, soft and flavorful, but not dripping. A little cheese on top for fancy, for instance over the smaller type I would say. Cover the pan with foil, and 20 minutes in the oven should do it, maybe a little more. Also they benefit greatly from sitting around a few minutes after removal, letting the temp drop and the textures assimilate. In the offiice where I first ate these enchiladas, Mrs. Acevedo's son (she was providing his pot luck contribution) was barred, BARRED, from entering on subsequent similar occasions until he displayed a big pan of these.

Thank you, Torakris. I've used the prefab packets of this type of dressing (purple-and-white striped foil) for spinach, so this is a boon to me.