jgm

This sounds like a riff on apple dumplings. They are a major comfort food for me. Why don't you look for an apple dumpling recipe, and then do a search for pear pies or other pear desserts, and just kind of adjust the seasonings accordingly? It might require a little tweaking over two or three tries, but for the most part, I'd think it would be close to a straight-across substitution. And don't forget how wonderful cardamom is with pears. . .

WOW...I'm speechless. That was a very well done and DETAILED way of putting the taste and texture of a gigantic seal eyeball into words Eww...well if a man can place his fear aside to do something so disgusting (to me) for a woman, he is well worth marrying! ← The divorce comes when he finds out it wasn't an Inuit tradition at all, but he married into a family of practical jokers.

I find it hard to believe I'm the first to post on this topic, but a search on "Keller" didn't produce it anywhere else, so maybe that is the case. Moderators are welcome to combine topics if I missed something. A story on Bloomberg.com. indicates Mr. Keller has a few expansion projects in mind, including his own line of frozen food. Frozen food? Thomas Keller? It'll be interesting, if nothing else. Are you having as hard a time believing this as I am?

I'm strictly a home baker, but I thought I'd throw in a recent experience. I use Crisco in my pie crusts. (That's the way my grandma taught me, and that's what our family is used to.) About a year ago, I tried the new trans-fat-free Crisco, and found it soft and difficult to work with. Then someone told me to refrigerate it first. So a couple of weekends ago when I made 2 pies, I refrigerated the Crisco, and used it direct from the fridge. I had a pie crust that was much easier to work with than any I've ever made. It rolled out beautifully and was a dream to work with. I am extremely happy with it. Flavor was fine. Flakiness and tenderness were excellent. Interesting comment about the fully-hydrogenated oils. I didn't know that, either. One of these days, I'm going to try to do some crusts with all butter, and some with part Crisco and part butter.

As a compromise, how about a page at the back, or the front, giving conversions? In other words, something like this: "For those who would rather measure by weight than by volume, here are conversions I have worked out for the recipes in this book: 1 cup of flour = X g 1 cup of sugar = Y g 1 medium egg = Z g, weight of contents not including shell" etc. You'd have to make sure every ingredient used in the book was listed, but it would be a way to compromise, if you could get the editor to go along with it. Do you think you could sneak in just one page?

The October 2007 issue of Gourmet magazine has a recipe for "Sophisto Joes" that I'm going to have to try; it contains canned whole tomatoes, an onion, garlic, unsalted butter, a chopped carrot, a celery rib, ground beef chuck, chili powder, ground cumin, dry red wine, Worcestershire sauce, and brown sugar. It's served on kaiser rolls. It's on page 177, with morsels tumbling out from between the two halves of a bun, for those whose taste buds became erect after reading the list of ingredients.

I would buy a long, trough-shaped mold that I could line with plastic wrap, for molding logs of cookie dough. I could probably cut some PVC pipe and accomplish that, but then I'd have to figure out how to make it not roll around on the counter. . . I need a master database. I want it to read the bar code on my cooking magazines and cookbooks, and from that add in the names of all recipes and ingredients, so that I could enter an ingredient in a search field, and it would tell me all of the recipes I could use with that ingredient. The bar codes would make it perpetually update-able, and would customize it to only the references I have, so I wouldn't be pulling up recipes in publications or books I don't own.

I'm glad you posted this. A local grocery has recently turned into an upscale Super Walmart, and has an imported cheese section. Along with the cheese, they have several selections of fairly expensive crackers I've never seen before, but I think it does include this brand. I will look for them. Every now and then, it's nice to drive over there on my lunch hour, purchase a cheese I've never tried before, plus some fruit and crackers, and have a light lunch. Beats the heck out of Burger King.

In addition to weight measurements, how about cooking time? Saute' for 2 minutes? On my regular burner or my high-heat burner? In which pan? So many variables can be introduced, that any time measurement is meaningless. Tell me what to look for, and what I'm trying to accomplish! Of course, this specifically doesn't apply to pastry and baking, but the same principles apply when cooking a filling or something similar. Many recipes are pretty good about saying things "until the mixture returns to a boil", but all too often I find much more vague descriptions.

If you want an old standard with a new twist, think about doing something with a pumpkin roll. I'm just a home baker, not a pastry chef, but people love those things. Personally, I've always wanted to try a gingerbread roll; the combination of spicy gingerbread and cream cheese would have to be a winner. And if you could work some chocolate into that, so much the better. Or how about some sort of riff on gingerbread, with a chocolate covered apple slice as a garnish? I've never tried to coat apple slices with anything, and don't know how long they'd last, but if you can get it to work, it would be a combination people don't see all the time.

I found bits and pieces when I Googled it. It's supposed to be available after October 1. I, for one, can't wait to see it, and will undoubtedly give it a try. I have the larger vacuum system and while it performs well, it's a pain in the butt to drag out and use. Which means I don't use it as much as I would like. Wasting fresh vegetables, due to spoilage, is a real issue in our house, and I'm hoping this will help.

moosnsqrl introduced me to Lillet about a year and a half ago while I was visiting Kansas City. We had it straight up, on the rocks. Lovely stuff. I will always have a special place in my heart for her, just for this! I had forgotten that I had a little bit left in the bottle.

I have a feeling this has already been covered in another thread, and the moderators are welcome to do whatever they think is best about it, if that's the case. I just finished Jacques Pepin's memoirs, and was my interest was piqued by frequent comments he made about not throwing away anything. In fact, he said that the profit from his mother's restaurants, when he was young, was largely derived from making dishes from what others would often have considered to be scraps, destined for the trash. Recently, I drained a couple of 28 oz. cans of San Marzano tomatoes, and was left with almost 4 cups of "puree" that I didn't know what to do with. I didn't want to throw it out, as I usually do. So at the suggestion of another cook, I reduced it, to use over pasta another time, except now it's really salty, and I'm going to have to deal with that. I just think we throw away way too much, and I'm intrigued by using the last bits of stuff, such as the deep green parts of leeks, that would otherwise get thrown away. I need to know how to keep these items -- in other words, freeze them if possible; it's just my husband and me at home, and there's only so much we can eat in one week. I'd love to hear what you do in your kitchen with food scraps, instead of throwing them out. And if anyone knows of any cookbooks or other references that discuss it, please let me know!

The only brand of bags I know of, is made by Reynolds; they also make aluminum foil and similar items here in the US (and perhaps elsewhere?). Here's the website. To quote: "Reynolds® Oven Bags are heat-resistant nylon oven bags for cooking warm, hearty dinners without basting or tending." To commit heresy: my family usually uses these to roast the Thanksgiving turkey, and despite the fact that to do so is to commit a sin against Gully, it actually turns out quite well.

A friend of mine takes a Tylenol every day, under the direction of her physician, for exactly this reason. However, I don't know if that will work with every substance. But I think it's worth checking out with a physician, given the circumstances. I've also experienced food allergies as transitory things. Earlier in life, I couldn't eat cooked onions in any form, without being in digestive distress for several days. Eventually I began to realize that I no longer had the problem. If the desensitization idea won't work, maybe time will help.

As a home baker, I occasionally have to chop up chocolate bars to make chocolate chips, chunks, and dice small enough to melt eaily in hot pie fillings. I found out that my food processor isn't much help. It just rounds off the corners of the pieces as they bounce off the blades. I usually get out my chef's knife and just start trimming off corners until I work my way through the whole thing. Any tips, hints, or tricks for making this job easier?

This is enough to get me to try stock (instead of just broth), finally. I'm a frequent broth-maker, but I've always wanted to try stock. Questions: Leftover carcasses from other chicken projects can be frozen until stockmaking time, right? If so, I'd like to dismantle the frames, since storage space in the freezer is not readily available these days. Should I do that at the joints, or can I just break up the bones wherever?

This weekend, I made the Cook's Illustrated/ATC chocolate cream pie. Excellent, but I didn't like the crust. The filling is creamy, dense, chocolatey and wonderful. Maybe I'm just not much of a fan of crumb crusts. I felt it was way too sweet. Next time, I'll use a regular pie crust. But the filling recipe -- definitely a keeper!

This episode will air several more times this week, for those of you who want to take notes.

A lot of people would use a pastry bag with a star tip. Here's what I do: put the cheese mixture into a ziploc bag, and squeeze out all the air. Cut the tip off one corner, and use it like a pastry bag. This is how I fill deviled eggs, too. It doesn't do "decorative", but it works great otherwise. To hollow out the insides, there's a gadget called a "tomato corer" (THIS link should work for awhile) that's great for this kind of thing.

If it's been a long day and my head is aching and my soul is hurting, there's nothing like sticking a can of sweetened condensed milk in the oven for about an hour or a little more, and spooning the hot caramel into my mouth right out of the can. I can gauge just how bad a day it's been by how much of the stuff I'm able to consume before it's just way too much. But it's got to have been a really bad day before I'll let myself consume that amount of calories. (I work for a divorce attorney, and all too often find myself trying to explain to people why they do have to behave themselves. )

Yes, but it's hard to imagine that the mail-order corn on the cob (!!! still can't get over that) is a "decent product" by the time it gets to the consumer. ← This type of thing - meats, produce, etc. - is always drop-shipped directly from the supplier, and if it's delivered by overnight mail, theoretically it could be on the consumer's table within 24 hours of being picked. But I still can't see mail-ordering corn on the cob. Perhaps there are areas in the US where corn on the cob isn't available any other way, but FedEx probably doesn't deliver overnight to those places, either.

Not to blindly defend D&D, but this happens with other stores, too. Here in Wichita, at Dillons (Kroeger), I can buy a particular brand of San Marzano tomatoes at $2.99 for (I think) 28 ounces. Across the street, at the "gourmet" grocery, the very same can is $5.99. Same kind of thing is going on with cannelini beans, and probably several other products, if I made the effort to do comparisons. Even Williams-Sonoma has certain items cheaper than the "gourmet" place. I'm actually pretty ticked off at D&D right now. In 1999, when I last worked there, I purchased the small test tube spice rack. They were having trouble getting decent racks from their source, and every one that came in was warped. They looked for the best one they could find for me, but it was still pretty sorry-looking. I accepted it, though, and they told me to check back in a few months, and if they had better ones, they'd swap it out. I put it up in the cabinet, used it from time to time, and forgot all about it. A few months ago, I decided my kitchen had a dark enough spot that it wouldn't hurt to display it, and when I brought it out, realized that the thing really is pretty wrecked. I wrote to them, described the situation, and asked if I could BUY the rack only, and was told "we don't sell them separately." I again explained what the deal was (silly me, I expected them to be reasonable), and offered to not only BUY the replacement, but to also return the old one to them so that they could have confidence I wasn't trying to pull a fast one. "No." was the reply. So I wrote back to them and said fine, I'll display it 'as is', and everyone who enters my home can see the shoddy crap that D&D sells. And as I expected, I received no reply. I understand that after all these years, they're under no obligation to replace a defective product, but I'd thought that since I offered to pay for it, there shouldn't be any problem. I really can't understand why they wouldn't go that far to make a customer happy. Usually, a high-dollar product is accompanied by excellent service.

I can't tell you how thrilled to report that after the remodeling of a local grocery store, I can now purchase a very wide variety of cheeses. When my lunch hour rolled around today, I was really hungry but couldn't decide what to eat; I ended up at the store, looking over the wares at the cheese counter. Simply because I was purchasing enough for lunch only, I bought a small round of St. Marcellin, which I enjoyed with water crackers and grapes. I liked it, but I can't help but think that had I paired some other things with it, I would have liked it more. I haven't yet had an opportunity to peruse the rest of this thread, so if it hasn't been discussed before, does anybody have any recommendations about other things that can be paired with this cheese? At $3.99 for an 80g round, it's a nice lunch option.

I see no reason not to give it a try. I'm wild about the other bread, but if this one has some interesting differences, but is still good, then what's lost? If it's not very good, then I've just lost a few cups of flour and a little yeast. I'm kinda surprised at the reactions. Usually eGulleters are willing to dive in and try just about anything. I should have something to report this weekend. Right now, the plan is to mix it up tomorrow morning before work, and bake tomorrow evening. But there have been too many stupid crises at work this week, to make me to believe I can count on being able to do this. (I may have to start a thread on how to infuse various foods with alcohol, so that I can imbibe at work.)