Jump to content

balmagowry

legacy participant
  • Posts

    1,482
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by balmagowry

  1. balmagowry

    Making Vinegar

    I gave up on my white a few years back - just wasn't happy with the flavor. But I've got a long-established (about 30 years) kick-ass red if anyone's interested - these things keep reproducing, and mine is just about ready to eat Babylon. And I still want to know if you ever made the chess pie of your dreams!
  2. Too many eggs? It's certainly eggier than mine. I use twice that amount of AP flour and half the amount of milk. (Uh-oh - don't remember whether you guys still use the imperial pint - I'm basing my measurements on the 16-oz pint.) Works perfectly every time, and produces plaudits I'd blush to repeat. Other factors: Ideally the batter should be well chilled before being poured into the hot dripping - dunno how feasible this was in the old days, but the more contrast in temperature between the two, the more dramatic the reaction. Size of pan. I honestly don't know what would happen if your pan were too big (batter spread too thin) or too small (batter crowded); my best unscientific guess is that erring on the too small side is better than the other way. But then again, I can imagine a contrary logic - someone more scientifically inclined will have to address this. Anyway, it may be moot - temperature and composition of batter may solve the problem. Try it and report! EDIT: Dang, shoulda saved my breath; as usual, Adam has it right and is more succinct. Leeds it is.
  3. [EDIT: this was in response to Ned's post, now two up-thread.] Not sure I buy that. I've always understood that one of the defining factors of a popover is its shape - hence the special tins. Like madeleines - if you didn't make 'em in a madeleine tin, would they still be madeleines? Nope. (Conversely, if you make something else in a madeleine tin, that don't make it a madeleine - gotta have the shape AND the substance.) And Adam - with all due respect to Delia, I like a lot of dripping to my Yorkshire pud. If you think about its origins and the amount of dripping wot dripped as the roast roasted, seems only reasonable. Besides... it's so GOOD.
  4. Don't be ridiculous! Why is it that people always issue this sort of modest disclaimer about their most interesting posts? You do it, Mongo does it, I do it... oh. Well, anyway, I would have remained glued to it if it had been twice as long. It is marvelous of you to be able to explain this so frankly; it puts your whole Montignac series in context. Not that it wasn't fascinating already - after all the response there's been you don't need me to tell you that. But now we have a better understanding of the place it occupies in your life, and I don't think it leaves any room for speculation as to whether the diet might possibly be a frivolous endeavor (as such things are for some people). Obviously for you it is a real matter of both physical and mental health, and this makes it much easier to understand your serious dedicated approach; your realistic assessment of your own body and circumstances. Hmmm, that came out a bit lacking; I know you would take a serious dedicated approach to any culinary project you undertook. Not sure how much of that reverence for your food and your surroundings was already part of you and how much has been enhanced by living where you do - a combination of those factors, I imagine. I agree with Raisab's remarks re BMI, and am fascinated and pleased to learn how many of us here subscribe to my look-right-feel-right-clothes-fit standards. Seems to me a healthier way to live than constantly having to worry about some arbitrary number. (And I know from earlier discussion via PM that you too fall into this category to some degree - at least that that's part of what trigggered the present effort. The social pressures you are under because of your locale - boy, does that put a new spin on it all!) I find I have to take ALL conventional numbers/measurements with many grains of salt. The reason that statistics rank below damned lies is that they necessarily average out the factors that apply to each of us individually and that make all the difference. For me it's ballet, for Raisab it's weight-lifting, for you it's genetic predisposition; whatever it is that your body and your instincts recognize as the thing that swings your results away from the norm. All these studies that say women should be this that or the other thing by the numbers would be a lot more plausible if they allowed for such variations, because everyone has some sort of special consideration that is bound to skew the curve. That said, please don't think I'm indicting your pursuit of a particular BMI - I know you have too much sense to discount the evidence your body presents you with, and I recognize that in a situation like yours it is very necessary to have specific goals even if there is something arbitrary in their composition. For the most part it probably all comes out in the wash, I suppose. I'm NOT going to apologize for length, but I will now give one small self-deprecating nod to my own preachiness and climb the hell down off my soapbox. Yes, I love Precious Ramotswe too. But hey (oops, back on soapbox again for the moment), "traditionally built," like any other description, only works for you if you feel comfortable with it. When you don't - time to do something about it. BTW, it's only the snotty small-boned-minded French who could fail to love Lucy for her body as well as her mind. In these parts, in real life, I have it on reliable authority that she'd be considered "a babe." Most men like a woman with a little meat on her bones, after all - fortunately Lucy will always be that, even after she hits her target.
  5. Wot? Ain't there even steam coming out your ears from the mighty intellectual effort? Is from mine.
  6. Ah, but the two ain't mutually exclusive - in fact, YP is particularly glorious with a hefty slather of gravy in its vicinity. I make a point of always having enough dripping for both. Popovers cooked in bacon fat - now there's a sublime Yorkover or Popshire concept.
  7. Fish looks beautiful. Too tired to follow link right now, so will save questions until I've looked. Tomorrow's Glasgow Herald crossword includes an anagram of TS Eliot. I don't know how you do it. Still waiting for big surprise and translation of sig....
  8. I seem to remember it being a bit eggier, though - no? also that it's eaten with powdered sugar and lemon, which gives it a whole different feeling. Yum.
  9. No, no roaster, and I salivate at the thought of such a beautiful hunk o' maganalite turning up someday, but folks seem to hang onto the bigger pieces. The Rose Bowl.............garage sale mecca. That would be worth some pictures, andiesenji, my friend. Hee hee, I gloat. I found the big one at a garage sale some years ago... and I already had one, and so did my mother, so I gave it to a friend who's also a Magnalite fiend. Cost me $15, if memory serves. I couldn't believe it. Woman was selling her dead mother's stuff, and she wasn't a cook and she had no clue. it looked pretty grubby... but that was easily taken care of. You shoulda seen the look on my friend's face. That's also how I came by my copy of the Larousse Gastronomique. Different garage sale. Late in the say. They threw it in for free with something else I was buying.
  10. Zowie, Nero, you're really up on this stuff! I'm impressed. Not only do you know it, but you can deliver it in a concise and comprehensible manner. Full marks. And yes, "set point" is exactly the term we were looking for.
  11. Me, me! (waves hand, jumps up & down, eager to showcase ignorance) I think I actually know the answer to this one. Lentils (of all kinds) are a subset; it also means other dried legumes - peas, certain beans, etc.
  12. Oh, Lucy, I had to laugh at your cherry disaster! Laugh entirely in sympathy, that is, because of my own similar story. Stands to reason that the cherries would produce more compote than the strawberries - cherries are denser than strawberries, less water, I'm pretty sure. Oh yeah - once you've adopted me you'll find you have no difficulty disposing of all that extra compote.... Redfox, fromage frais is just about the easiest thing in the world to make, especially if you have a convenient source of liquid rennet. I've never made a 0% fat version, but the process should be the same as for full fat. (I'm planning to do some in the next couple of days because I'm still hankering for the fromage blanc à la crème that Lucy showed us a few days ago.) hathor, the notion of being genetically predisposed to a certain weight is... well, it generates mixed feelings. I think most people do stabilize in the general ballpark of a certain weight/bulk - I do, anyway - though I'm not entirely convinced genetic predisposition is the only reason for that; one's lifestyle must have SOME effect. But there are other factors to account for and I've never been able to figure out quite how they fit. One is that thing about the size of fat cells - the gist of which is that they expand as needed when you gain weight, but even when you lose fat the cells themselves don't shrink, so they are just lying in wait to refill themselves at the first opportunity. Another is the muscle mass factor - muscle weighing more than fat, that is. So that in theory if you work out enough you may get thinner and yet gain weight at the same time. In my case I find that my metabolism is such that I stabilize around one size when I'm dancing and another when I'm not (the former being vastly preferable to the latter), no matter what happens with my eating habits, which are often a bit of a train wreck. All that being as confusing as it is, it will come as no surprise that I deliberately and officially gave up weighing myself about 25 years ago. (Even in the doctor's office I instruct them not to tell me - and cover eyes and ears to make sure I don't find out by accident!) I figure, if I feel good and look good and my clothes feel right, I don't want to know if the scale's verdict is at odds with that 'cos it'll only upset me for no good reason; conversely, if I don't feel and look the way I want to, a favorable result from the scale is not going to help with the underlying problem. But the next time I find myself not feeling and looking right, I'll become a charter member of Lucy's Hôtel Montignac. I wonder if she'll give discounts in return for some help in the kitchen....
  13. Ahhh... well, I figure it becomes mine by right of purchase if not by birth. Good - thank you. Actually I'm realizing that this is less about the pink-inside business than it is about the texture of the outside, which I have come to expect to be a certain way. Seems to me the wise thing is to do it your way first and not immediately adapt to suit my own assumptions until I know what your version is like. (I always TRY to follow recipes pretty closely the first time... but I don't always succeed....) Oh! No, I don't think so. That's way too daring for me. I might be dipping the tip of a toe into Indo-French (Con)Fusion, but New Indian is definitely, um, beyond me. I hope. Dang, maybe I know more about Indian cooking than I thought. Most of my day-to-day cooking fits that description exactly; few of the dishes I produce have the luxury of names. That line could have come almost verbatim from my L&SD lecture - the part about the improvisational nature of 18th-c recipes etc. and the way my mother taught me. Put in some. How much? I don't know - enough. Cook it for a while. How long? I don't know - till it's done. Unlike you, though, I've found it to be a very good way of learning to do something exactly the same way as the teacher, if that's what one wants. Yes, of course I see your point and have certainly also lived it: that the familiarity and comfort you get from learning that way allow you to generate your own evolution of a dish almost without thinking about it. But the dish doesn't have to evolve unless you want it to. I make certain things exactly as my mother did (probably even with the same gestures, to judge from the odd loooks I sometimes get in the process) and it's... well, it's important to me to be able to do that.
  14. Liver curry... drool drool drool. Alas, The Boy will not even consider eating anything with any kind of liver in it, so I will have to wait until the weekend. One thing that surprises me... wait a minute, almost everything surprises me. Not that I haven't ever had Indian food, or at least what I was given to understand was such - I have and have always loved it - but eating it greedily and knowing anything about it are of course very different things. WRM, in answer to the why-it's-popular question, I'll concur with - was it tejon? - who plumped for Door #2, Indian food tastes good! All those other factors have their place, no doubt, but this is the one that does it for me. (I am a simple character, said Linda, generally I laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not.) Anyway, getting back to my question. It seems to me that when working with liver - especially chicken livers which are so delicate and cook so quickly - no matter what's going to happen to them further on in the recipe I almost always sauté them first. Or actually, closer to sear than sauté - to set the outside edges and crisp them a bit, leaving the inside tender and pink. I'm wondering whether it would be outrageously wrong to do something like that for this dish. Where I get off even questioning your cooking, given my proclaimed ignorance, damned if I know - it's just that this is the one thing that made all my culinary instincts cry out, "HUH?" - and when my culinary instincts do that I generally find it best to humor them. I love that you never time your cooking. This is how I cook because it's how my mother cooked, and it seems to me the natural way that good instinctive cooks work. Turns out that this is pretty much how most cooks worked in the late 18th/early 19th centuries, judging from their books, so it was kind of an advantage to us when it came to working with old recipes. (OTOH, the hardest part about writing a cookbook was remembering to write down every tiny goddamn detail! We had to watch each other like hawks. "Did you just put in another 1/4 teaspoon? Did you WRITE IT DOWN?????") God that curry looks wonderful. EDIT: I love this: and will inevitably use it in some context soon. Also... Mongo, don't make us iggerant furriners beg every time: please splain the new sig....
  15. I've never seen it done, but that doesn't mean it couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't be. The only question is, would it still be a popover? The distinctions that define it are the type of fat and the shape of the tin; take either of those away and you end up with a hybrid; take both away and poof! Yorkshire pud. ("Bloody January again!") So you would have a 'Yorkover' or a 'Popshire'? Ah, batter and hot fat is there anything finer. Nope. Oh, bless you and curse you, Adam Balic, you've just added two delicious phenomena to the batter pudding lineup. The Yorkshire, the Popover, the Yorkover, the Popshire, now I want them all. Right NOW.
  16. In my experience, probably not. But then, I always whisk the batter, so it wouldn't. And I don't know why you wouldn't whisk the batter - in both cases you do want it to be smoothly combined. No chemical difference I can think of either, since the batter is supposed to sit for a bit before being poured. I'd bet that the different approaches to mixing are simply traditions handed down from one great-grandmother or another - i.e., old wives' tales. Wide open, of course, to being proved wrong. Anyone?
  17. Precisely so. I like a Yorkshire pud that does both - puffs and crisps at the edge but remains soft and battery in the middle (with heavenly greasy crisp crust underneath). Just as well, since neither my oven nor my hearth is built to accommodate the old-fashioned approach. I've never seen it done, but that doesn't mean it couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't be. The only question is, would it still be a popover? The distinctions that define it are the type of fat and the shape of the tin; take either of those away and you end up with a hybrid; take both away and poof! Yorkshire pud. ("Bloody January again!")
  18. Maybe my recipes are different from yours, but I've always made popovers with a blob of butter in each tin, preheated them and added the batter to the hot buttered pan. So the difference is the type of fat used, not the presence of fat. Ah - true. It's been so long that I didn't remember the preheating part - right you are. But the type of fat still does make a huge difference to taste & texture. And a popover is still drier than a Y pud because of the vertical ratio thingy. EDIT: dammit, now I'm all mouth-watery; I'm going to have to make a batch of popovers soon and pig out on them, I can just tell. Damn eGullet!
  19. my grandmother used to make a hot pepper jelly (had sugar in it) and she served it on crakers and toast with cream cheese. bleieve it or not it was great. i will look for the recipe this evening If it's at all like the hot pepper jelly a friend of mine makes, it'll also be great on vanilla ice cream.
  20. Not familiar with the Jamie Oliver pud, but can tell you that popovers are identical to Yorkshire pud in their composition, except that they are made without the all-important beef dripping - and the tin therefore is not pre-heated. So the taste and texture end up being somewhat more... tame. A popover, partly because of the lack of dripping and partly because of its smaller size, is generally a bit drier than a Y pud. Lends itself, while still hot, to being ripped asunder and slathered with butter. They're very good - I love 'em - but they're not exactly at home with roast beef. Spose you could make 'em with dripping, though, and that would change the equation materially (though size still does matter...). Spose if I'd done my homework before posting I'd see that this is pretty much what Jamie O has done and therefore most of this post is pointless... but there you are, that's the kind of guy I'm. But even if you did make a popover with dripping, you'd still get a slightly different texture from Yorkshire pud because of the muffin tin. I don't have the physics/chemistry vocabulary to address this in the correct technical terms, but what it amounts to is that because the tin is so narrow, the batter has no place to go but up, so the entire popover is like the puffier edge of the Yorkshire pud; you don't get any of that lovely soft greasy un-puffed bit that you get in the middle of the pud. EDIT: There, see? What Fat Guy said (while I was still typing away) - only less succinct.
  21. A friend of mine smuggled back a bottle of this stuff from Poland for me. You are correct - the herbacious flavor is indescribable and absolutely delicious. Supposedly the "Buffalo Grass" has hallucinogenic properties, so it's classified as a drug and that's why it can't be imported. I never found that to be true, but I'm no chemist, so who knows what the make up of the actual grass is. Anyone here have any clues? Certainly. Your Polish friends were having you on as regards any difficulty in importing the grass: it is native to North America. Its botanical name is Hierochloe odorata, and it is neither more nor less than the Sweetgrass used for smudges in various Native American purification rituals. You can order it online from any number of herbal suppliers. Sorry to come to this so late - got here by way of the Flavored Syrups thread, and couldn't believe there was such a mystery about Bison Grass. I remember something similar when we were researching the chufa plant used in modern Horchata. I kept finding frantic queries on the web, references to it as "rare" and "unavailable" and so on - then I finally figured out what plant it was, and realized that not only is it not rare at all, but it is officially classified as a noxious invasive weed, and it grows all over the U.S., including my back yard.
  22. I wish we'd had that option - with one exciting exception we didn't. This was during that period when our countries were doing all sorts of "cultural exchange" stuff; I was there with a singing group from my high school, touring for three weeks and then singing for Ceausescu in Bucarest at the end of the trip - and we were kept on a pretty tight rein, as I'm sure you can imagine. Pre-planned meals in hotels, mostly - alas. The one exciting exception was a visit to a lady in Bucarest who happened to be a good friend of my boyfriend's family: he and his younger brother and I were given special permission (requiring very complicated arrangements) to spend the last afternoon of the visit with her instead of doing whatever the rest of the sheep were doing. It was a pleasant if slightly melancholy afternoon, chiefly remarkable for two things. The lady (whose name escapes me now) had been a countess, and the tiny apartment she inhabited was actually part of the mansion that had once belonged to her family; the government had permitted her to keep two rooms, I think, and whatever personal belongings she could fit into them. So that tiny apartment was crammed tight with her memories; marvelous furniture and bibelots and so on, everything with some extraordinary history to it. We were enthralled and moved. I wish I could tell you some wonderful food memory - she did her best for us and it was certainly a vast improvement on the pork-and-potato standard - but the lunch was rapidly overshadowed by the real excitement of the afternoon: the discovery that my boyfriend's brother had lost his passport. And this only about 12 hours before we were all scheduled to fly home! Many hours of endless flurry and red tape, and the very real possibility that he would not be allowed to leave the country when the rest of us did. I don't remember the details of how this was resolved at the eleventh hour, only how lucky we were to have a native friend, especially that particular native friend. Though she was a scion of the dispossessed aristocracy she did have certain crucial connections, and it was certainly she who pulled that particular large rabbit out of a very small hat, arranging a temporary passport and somehow getting us all out on schedule after all. Slightly more excitement than we'd bargained for....
  23. The barbe à queue etymology might have sounded a little more plausible - especially given the Haitian origin - if it had referred to goat rather than pig. ('Course, even then you'd want to remove the barbe before cooking!)
  24. Almost certainly yes, on both counts. EDIT: Will let you know fer sher when my copy arrives. Sigh, couldn't resist.That's another for me.
×
×
  • Create New...