kelautz

Yeah! Vegeta added to Costco rotisserie chicken skin and bones makes superb chicken stock, and you'll never run out of pulled chicken or fragrant, golden chicken stock with this method. One carcass and one tablespoon or so of Vegeta, water to fill a 5 qt saucepan. What else do you use Vegeta for?

A wonderful story / science lesson, Dave, thanks. For years I cooked on a 26" GE electric coil stove, and did just fine, thank you very much. A heat source is a heat source is a heat source, and one merely adjusts to the situation. Now I cook on an O'Keefe & Merritt white enamel and chrome 50's era gas beauty. I love the burners, they're the best gas burners I've ever used. The burner adjustment valves are exquisitely sensitive and variable, for one. I have many other verses to the song of praise for this particular stove. I would not purchase one of the wildly popular "commercial style" gas ranges designed for home use. The ones I've cooked on have terrible burners, especially if they are sealed burners, are really hard to clean, and in general are way over-rated, IMHO. However, in contemplating my next kitchen, I think I'm going back to electric of some sort for three reasons: efficiency, safety and cleanability. (Not coils, though). Now here's what I want, four burners, two halogen and two induction, all in the same flat surface. Does anyone know if such a beast exists?

What a great contest and an evocative story! Is there another EG thread for latke variations somewhere? I'm a food processor shredder myself. Too lazy to grate by hand, and I don't like the pink stuff. Here's my two variations/tips for y'all's general consideration. When squeezing out shredded/grated potatoes, collect the liquid in a bowl. When finished, pour off the liquid on top and scrape back into the potatoes the starch that's settled at the bottom of the bowl. Hey, it was in there to begin with! Less matzoh meal/flour required. To cook five at a time, which is what my 12" standard Calphalon skillet holds, I press my Chinese condiment saucers into service. Each saucer gets a measured amount (1/4 cup, I think) of latke "batter" flattened into it, all arranged and ready to go. When good oil temp has been achieved, just slide those five little suckers out of their saucers into the pan, one at a time, quick, quick, quick as can be! (This system will work for other quantities, too. :-) Wallah - they all cook nice and even, all done at the same time, and each one has the proper amount of latke juice, no big puddle left at the end in the bottom of the bowl. Also, its easy to scoop the next batch into the saucers while the prior batch is cooking. Non-stick skillet for latkes? Never! Doesn't work. Other notes: I'm a peanut oil fan myself. Although I haven't measured the oil temp in the past, thanks for the tip about 300 degrees. I agree, creme fraiche is the way to go. And applesauce, ah, nectar of the gods. Applesauce is a breeze to make in the pressure cooker, and the farmers markets have a wonderful selection of apples about now. Applesauce is a winter staple in my refrigerator. Hmm, just changed my dinner plans for tonight. Latkes it is!

Wonderful thread with lots of good ideas. Here's a suggestion I haven't seen here yet. In Japanese cookery, the flesh of animals is marinated briefly in a small amount of sake. Something about the enzymes in sake make the flesh more delicious when cooked. Anyone know anything more about this reaction? I've been known to add a sprinkle of "sun dried garlic" to the sake marinade. After 30 min or so, pat dry and cook as usual in any style. I keep a square aesceptic (sp?) packaged litre of cooking sake in my refrigerator door at all times. It has many uses.

Well, they are funky little ovens. Not impossible, though. A couple of ideas: Get a small pizza stone, and leave it permanently installed on the oven floor. That'll help the excessive bottom browning, believe it or not. It evens out the heat. Preheat thoroughly at a lower temp for best results. Try "flat bacon." Lay out bacon strips in a small rimmed baking sheet (the night before, refrigerate) then cook in a slow oven. Get back under the covers while the interior of the motorhome warms up. You can even start with a cold oven. Drain as per usual. This method cuts down on bacon grease all over the tiny space, and makes great bacon, practically unattended. On another group, fellow RVers are raving about silicone bakeware for the small RV ovens. Easy to store, too. Haven't tried it myself, though, but it sounds reasonable. Try baking the brie in a silicone cake pan set on an airbake sheet. Make gingerbread in the same cake pan (not at the same time). Seems to me a wet cake batter like gingerbread would work well in a small oven with heat distribution issues. Kathy

Oh, what a dangerous thread, combining cooking and RV "camping". I have a 22 ft. Lazy Daze Class C. (Lazy Daze is a cult.) I loooovve to cook in the motorhome kitchen-so efficient. Every time we hit the road I'm amazed how well we can eat with such a small refrigerator, and small scale appliances. A gourmet RV rally. Perfect. An eGullet pot-luck by the campfire? Ooohhh. I'd love to take my rig to Burning Man, but my SO won't go, phooey. I'm in the Bay Area. Anyone else around here cook/"camp"? Kathy

Nobu, that crafty devil, is laughing all the way to the bank on the strength of an old housewives and frugal fishmongers well-known trick. Fish that didn't sell was pickled in miso for use in the next day or two. This is an old and common practice in Japan. Everything is "miso-zuke"ed given half a chance. Nobu no more invented this dish than he has flown to the moon. It was just new to us. (Sorry if this has already been mentioned. I'm just starting to slog my way through this thread.) Kathy

OT, but I love the Tokyo Gas commercials. Oda Nobunaga time traveling, along with Sen no Rikkyu, what a riot. And who are the people sitting at the table in the background? Wish I could see one of those talking cooktops in the flesh. What a perfectly layered, hilarious story in 60 seconds The ending commercial of slow motion stir-frying and the incredible soundtrack is stunning. Somehow I can't see PG&E matching that caliber.

Ara, sugoi, ne! This is fantastic. I guess all of the past shows are no longer available, desuka? Haven't had time to check if there's an RSS feed, but if there is, I'm all over it! Thank you and I'll be checking up on this again. Any more good Japanese streaming video cooking shows out there, that you can steer us to, Hiroyuki-san? Domo, "Rautsu Kyasarin" (that's Japanese for Katherine Lautz)

Keep in mind, these heads have already been frozen once, and are certainly now frozen again, in a big block. (I was busy, or I might'a IQF'd them.) Jambalyle, got a recipe you can share? JayBassin, thanks for the tips. Maybe when the shrimp stock-blocks are nestled in the freezer, next to the chicken stock-blocks, seeing them will inspire me to make some of the dishes you suggest. I think your observation that shrimp stock is more useful than crab stock is a good one. Dungeness crab season is in full swing here. My household is in for a feast, real quick. Shalmanese, I think I'll add a pound or so of butter to the stock, and make some butter, too. And just for fun, I think I'll reduce some of the stock to a glace, which if I remember correctly, smells like a fishing village at low tide, but boy does a little dab of it add good flavor. That is, if my household will tolerate the aroma. Will defrost the suckers tonight, and make stock/butter/glace tomorrow. Save a few heads for chips. then check back in with y'all. Thanks for the inspiration.

Ooooh, hadn't thought of that! What a good idea.

Was pressed into service catering an event recently. Corner Chinese meat/fish market sells frozen farm raised shrimp $16.50 for 4 lb box, with heads. Three boxes later, I now have 2 1/2 lbs of lovely shrimp heads in my freezer, awaiting a suitable use. Stock, obviously, but then good things to use the stock for might be...? Shrimp risotto, cioppino base, shrimp butter (rich stuff), shrimp bisque. That's the extent of my ideas. I need some inspiration for this icy shrimp-head treasure. Would you make a rich stock, or a mild stock? How long will it keep in the freezer? Seems to me I dimly remember some fish glace from cooking school-wierd looking stuff but great for finishing sauces. Help me out here, folks. Thanks.

Well, this is morphing into an electric skillet discussion! Any heat source has its uses. Cooking is merely "apply heat to raw ingredients" right? If the skillet looks good enough for table top cooking, hang on to it. Sukiyaki is a great company dish, and a little safer than tempura on the tabletop. However, if you have a bar that guests can sit at, then you can play tempura chef and cook and serve to your guests a la minute using the same skillet. My old stainless steel Farberware electric skillet is my favored implement for cooking any type of meatball dish. The (old) Joy of Cooking has a wonderful recipe for Koenigsburgerklops that I like to serve with spaetzle. Mmmm, chopped pickles in the gravy, how yummy. Who needs capers, anyway!

Although Gourmet was the last to go, I'm now down to zero cooking magazines. After awhile, there just isn't anything new under the sun any more. For a few years, whenever a Gourmet came in the mail, first thing I'd do is sit down with a sharp tipped paring knife. Slice the Index page, and the Table of contents page out first. Then just slice out the articles of interest. Discard remaining three quarters of the magazine. Finally, get down to analyzing articles, recipes, menus, etc. File by month, then in March, looking for inspiration, there'd be just the meat of several March issues all ready for priming the pump. After awhile, even this got repetitive. My eaters like to see their favorite dishes often. Received a plaintive request for meatloaf, mashed potatoes and peas the other day. Now that the weather is cooling off, it will become appropriate to turn on the oven soon. Although they'll tolerate experiments they do like to see their favorites reappear on the dinner table with a certain regularity. If I need inspiration, I surf the forums at eGullet!

Ooh, sorry about the thumb! This can be avoided by holding the onion in place on your cutting board with a "flying hand." I think this pithy little description comes from Barbara Tropp. Just imagine you're a little kid flying your hand through the breeze out of the open window of a moving car. Heck, I havent seen "little kid" for decades, and I still fly my hand out the car window! The part of your hand in contact with the onion is the palm side of your knuckles. All digits should be held above that contact point. Hold the onion down lightly, or you'll have trouble working your knife through the onion. Use the full length of your knife (heel to tip) to make one slice/cut. Avoid sawing back and forth. It goes w/o saying that for best results, your knife should be extremely sharp.

Okay, I got one for ya. You know all this hoo-ha about putting roasted red peppers in a bag, or under an upended bowl or something so that the charred skins get loosened by the steam? Baloney. I roasted some peppers and just left them out on a plate to cool one time. They peeled just fine, no difference. Try it, you'll see. Same goes for the calumny that you can't roast red peppers on an electric burner, only gas. Sure you can. Just put a little rack over the electric burner then the peppers. I use a cake rack. Works just fine, better, even. An electric coil provides even heat across the entire diameter of its size. Gas burners tend to be hot in a ring, so you have to move the peppers around more.

What a lovely tale of what must have been a rip roaring event! Did your mother's interjection into your speech bring down the house? Or was this a private joke that you later so evocatively shared with us? Flat bacon! I love flat bacon! Went RV camping with a bunch of Clampers. One of our contribution to a communal breakfast was oven roasted bacon. A slightly hung over Clamper picked up a slice, examined it quizzically along its length, and finally in wonderment proclaimed "Flat bacon! How'dja do that?" Ever since, that's its name. However, I never bother to preheat the oven for flat bacon. Just stick it in there cold. You put bacon in a cold pan, don'tcha? In fact, I often set the oven temp at say 250 or 300 because then I can start it early, leisurely go about other breakfast tasks, and minimize the risk of burned flat bacon due to forgetfulness brought on by say an extra mimosa or good company. If you're in a hurry, 450 works great. All it takes is a couple of degrease sessions, and the flat bacon is nice and fresh when you are ready to eat.

Panko is useful for binding because when it gets wet, it turns into an old fashioned panade. I like panko for almost all breadcrumb applications because of the uniform size of its granules, and because it doesn't contain any pesky bits of crust. The proverbial "oriental markets" will have large bags of panko for a good price. Does anyone know how they manufacture panko? That would be an interesting search! Oatmeal is not my favorite binder because I think it gives a slimy texture to whatever its included in. For instance, meatloaf w/ oatmeal is slimy, but with panko, not so. Am otherwise fond of oatmeal for breakfast, and in cookies and cakes. Binders and extenders cross over into each other's territory sometimes. Binders are often for making a little bit of something seem like a lot of something.

Hmm, your story about the pork balls reminds me of a trick for potato pancakes. When squeezing out potato shreds, I always squeeze the liquid into a bowl, let it settle a bit, then decant off the top pink liquid and add the potato starch that collects in the bottom back into my pancake mixture, along with the other usual stuff in potato pancakes. Potato starch, then, for starters.

I use my cast aluminum double sided griddle/grill to defrost flat things all the time. Works great, esp. for pounded chicken breasts (paillards, some folks call them) and hamburgers. The food has to be flatter than it is round. Helps to flop the food over on its other side now and then. Hence, I am careful when I freeze things, to freeze them flat. Dinner can then be ready fast.

This cook's vote goes to the vintage gas ranges. I've cooked many years on a coil electric stove at my previous home. I've taught years of cooking classes on a high end professional style range (which shall remain nameless). Then I moved to the house with the O'Keefe & Merritt. Wow! For home cooking, especially in a smallish kitchen, the OK&M wins hands down. The oven is the most accurate I've ever used. The burners rock! They're 12,000 BTU, according to the repair guy I had out to hook up the broiler. Once I started to use the broiler, I figured out why the previous cook didn't use it - its too hot! Its like a restaurant broiler and it is scorching the cabinet above the vent. Wait'll I get a good vent hood. Its 12000 BTU burners (four of them) are more than enough for everything I want to do at home. Much more often than not, I find myself turning the flame down, rather than up. It simmers beautifully. We're remodeling the kitchen next year (no more cabinets over the stove, thank you), but the OK&M is staying. The money saved is going toward top notch refrigeration, but that's another topic.

Try "Good Food of Szechwan" by Robert Delfs, Kodansha Press. Its out of print, but available in used book stores. A slim volume, well written, thorough recipes from before the current mania for deadly dull "exact" recipe writing. There are a lot of helpful explanations for westerners, brand suggestions, *with* the Chinese characters that you can show to a shopkeeper, without trying to butcher pronounciation yourself. I make his Ma-Po Doufu recipe all the time, and I also like his dry fried string (long) beans, and another dry fried dish, the name of which I cannot recall at the moment.

ditsydine, I can't tell what area you live in, but if you live in CA, find someone that has a lemon tree! Grow herbs, if possible. Fresh herbs can elevate the most mundane cookery. They are ridiculously expensive to buy. Nobody's mentioned hash, yet. Breakfast or dinner, a dish high on my list of favorites. Top with a poached egg or two, nail that technique, and feel elegant, to boot. Shop around for a good price on canned salmon and keep a few cans in the pantry. Make like crab cakes for when you get a craving for fish. Suitable for company. Make fried rice once a week. Great way to use up all of the little dribs and drabs in the refrigerator before your grocery shopping day. Get a copy of "The Supper of the Lamb" by Robert Farrar Capon. He's got the right idea, interwoven with some of the smoothest theology ever. Frugal cooks are inventors and practitioners of some of the finest cooking on the planet. Your situation is an opportunity, not a sentence. Pick something that is a real treat for you. Good chocolate, premium ice cream, a fine cheese? Fit one into the budget once in awhile, and enjoy it to the hilt!

"How about food safety?" is just too broad a topic, IMO. Would it help to differentiate between several aspects of food safety? 1.) Food safety as we cook at home. 2.) Food safety when eating out. 3.) GMOs and meta-food supply issues. Of course, these three will overlap in places. For one thing, I find myself compelled to cook at home far more often and eat out far less often, because of contamination issues in restaurants. (I'm HACCP certified.) Salad bars? No thanks! And high-end restaurants can be just as problematic as budget restaurants, I'll betcha. I tend not to eat burgers out. I like them med-rare, and nobody will cook them that way any more. I make my own. I'll buy large packages of ground beef, but not pre-formed patties. Perhaps this is straining at gnats. There's a nice clean little ethnic meat market across the street from where I work, and he grinds beef to order, right where I can see what goes in the hopper. This is good. Reluctantly, I have given up making brown stock. Another nearby ethnic market sells beef neck bones for $.79/lb, and will bandsaw them per request. Ten pounds of these made a great home size batch of brown stock, but because of BSE, I'm holding off. They say avoid the neural pathway. No more oxtails, either, *sob*. The principle I use to grocery shop, my way of "doing the math", is that whenever there is a choice, I purchase the less processed ingredient over the more processed one. I never buy pre-cut vegetables, peeled garlic, much less chopped garlic, etc. Same thing applies to meats. Give me the bigger cuts, whole chickens, and I'll cut them up myself. Its the bulk processing of these items which provides a lot of opportunity for contamination. On the other hand, GMO is something I can't worry about on a daily basis, mostly because it would take far too much work and energy to be sure nothing consumed in the house was GMO. Good sanitation practices for the home and commercial cook are well known, easy to implement and the payoff is unquestioned. Beyond that, there are individual choices to be made on many other issues: raw meats, raw fish, raw eggs to name a few. I would hate to see disagreements about levels of prudence in these matters turn into personal insults on this forum. Food supply politics? GMO? Uh, they're depressing topics, worthy of discussion, but not by me, not today.

Ohhh! What a cute little kitchen. If the pixels don't lie, the cabinets and countertop seem to be in pretty good shape. And watch out, once you get used to that wall mounted faucet, it will be tough to go back to a deck mounted style. And I love that yellow and black tile. Any chance that's a porch off the back door? Big enough for a small reefer for awhile? The side by side in your pictures is a big behemoth. Trade it in for a smaller one and it won't be such a looming presence. Learning to live with/cook with much less refrigerated cubic footage might not be such a bad thing. Find a small reefer, put it in the living room corner and trompe l'oeil a jukebox on it, or something!