beccaboo

It wasn't that--it had whitish seeds, and thinner walls. I looked at much of the Chile-Head database, and the one I found that looked the closest was the Aji Chombo. It really was very hot.

I got a pepper at the farmer's market that looked like either a really big habanero or a smallish, bendier-than-usual red bell pepper. I wanted it for a garnish for my gazpacho, so didn't want something really hot. The person I bought it from assured me that it was a sweet (I took that to mean 'not hot') pepper. I cut the top off to pull the seeds out, and took a big bite of the stuff around the stem--flesh with some seeds and white pithy stuff--and it was incredibly hot. Way hotter than a jalapeno or a serrano, so I think it must have been a habanero. I ended up cutting it into very fine dice and using it on my gazpacho, warning the wimpy-tongued to leave it off. I'm not one for super-duper hot stuff, but I think I could have eaten the whole thing without fainting or anything.

I bet it's the yeast. I keep my instant yeast in the freezer in a little jar, and after about a year and a half it suddenly stops working and I have to get a new bag. It's happened a couple of times, and it really is sudden--one week my bread will rise as usual, the next it barely rises at all.

We have a 30+ year old one, and whenever I'm visiting someone with one of the new ones with all the safety features it's awful! I guess you'd get used to them, but they seem very counterintuitive.

I don't think the dip-and-sweep method's really that new. I learned to cook from my mother's 1960s Betty Crocker cookbook, and that's what Betty told me to do. Now i have my own 1950s Betty crocker, and it uses the same method. I prefer to weigh now, but usually 'dip-level-pour' (that's what Betty Crocker calls it), fluffing the flour first, when measuring by volume. My cups weigh about 4.7 oz that way.

I have a French book somewhere that says to make 'a volcano' of your flour--I've always thought that was a better description than 'a well.'

The Green & Black I like isn't the baking bar (I don't think I've tried that) but the ones more like big candy bars. I really like the Mayan Gold, but that probably wouldn't be good for truffles.

I just Googled it, and the closest-looking recipe I found was in Italian, on a website of Calabrian recipes. There was a button to click for the English version, but that took me to a cabbage recipe!

Zucca Agrodolce is one of my favorites. You just slice your pumpkin/winter squash about 1/2 cm thick and fry it on both sides in olive oil. Lay it an a platter, at most two layers thick, and season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with chopped mint and garlic sliced paper-thin. Add maybe 2T each (more if you're making a lot of zucca) red wine vinegar and sugar to the pan you cooked the pumpkin in, and cook till the sugar's dissolved and it's a little thickened. Pour over the squash. Serve at room temp.

I have 313 altogether in the 'Food' folder of my bookmarks, but many are things I bookmarked once and never returned to. My favorites, or at least most-used, are the newspaper food sections.

I have used parmesan rinds, kind of like you'd use bay leaves, and it works pretty well. The celeriac stems won't poison you--they're just like tiny celery stems.

I have an Italian recipe for rice soup with carrots plus their tops. It's got celery, onion, and garic, too, and some parmesan sprinkled at the end. You only cook the carrot leaves for the last 5 minutes.

I like Dagoba and Green & Black. I've never made anything with Dagoba, but 's good for eating plain.

Fake, cow's-milk romano is less sharp than the sheep kind, as well as less nutty-tasting than parmesan.

Beet sugar isn't filtered with bone char, so it's all vegan. Some cane sugar is okay too, at least in the UK--I don't know about US brands. I made some nice vegan truffles once with chestnuts, chocolate, sugar and some kind of liqueur. I can't remember the particulars, though.

A food mill works for my blackberries. They might have bigger seeds than yours, though. I've used a sieve before, too (I don't remember why), and it was a lot more work than the food mill but turned out fine.

Peanut butter and honey sandwiches, not peanut butter and jam. I like whole wheat toast with peanut butter, Vegemite and onion, though, so I like my peanut butter on the savoury side.

I sometimes add it to my hamburger bun dough (leaving out the rest of the salt, of course). I've even put it in my fluffy-sandwich-type bread--it makes a nice peanut butter sandwich!

I read once that, of the commonly drunk milks, donkey's milk is the closest nutritionally to human milk, i.e. fat/sugar/protein amounts. So some people must drink donkey milk! And humans are omnivores and babies like their milk. It's probably just that herbivores are more placid, thus easier to milk.

Further info? ← I can't find it now, but three years ago when I was deciding if we should fix the Waring yet again or get a Vita-Mix I read that in a few places. I think one of the troubles is that the frozen fruit can get stuck under a blade, causing it to bend. One time our blades broke, and another time it just got bent in a way that made the blender unusable.

When we broke our Waring's blades making smoothies I looked into it and found out that frozen fruit is very hard on blender blades--far worse than ice--and ended up getting a Vita-Mix. It was really expensive--I think it was on sale for $250--but worth it. We call it our 'hippie blender' because it's so nice for things like tofu-making and grinding grains as well as smoothies and things. I have a Bamix that I got at a junk store to replace a Cuisinart immersion blender that died, and, while it seems a lot more powerful than its predecessor, I don't think it's the best tool for smoothie-making.

Mouldy cheeses can get other, icky moulds, but usually they look different. I don't think cheese moulds are terribly dangerous, so it shouldn't hurt to taste a little and see if it's still good.

A Vietnamese guy told me that balut are popular with newlyweds--I'm not sure if it's to improve their fertility or their libidos. I used to get regular duck eggs all the time when they had them at our co-op, and liked them for everything but scrambled eggs. I like my scrambled eggs more dry/fluffy than creamy/slimy, and duck eggs don't seem to lose their sliminess.

I put pepper in cookies and on strawberries, and cumin in my hot cross buns. I make garlic jelly, too, but that's not really dessert.

I made a fig and blackberry galette a couple of days ago, and had a layer of almond meal, sugar, and flour on the bottom--that'd be kind of like crushed amaretti, but without the bitter almond taste. It worked well at sucking up the juices and preventing sogginess (sp?). I was in a strange kitchen without a baking stone, so couldn't try that, and my crust ended up not very crispy.