beccaboo

Here's an English WWII recipe that looks just like my recollection of my grandmother's wacky cake--the only difference being that she mixed it in the ungreased pan, and made three little wells that she added the wet ingredients to. Choc Cake Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method -------- ------------ -------------------------------- 6 oz plain flour -- (175g) 6 oz granulated sugar -- (175g) 2 oz cocoa powder -- (50g) 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla essence 1 tablespoon cider vinegar 4 fl oz (115ml) vegetable oil 8 fl oz (225ml) water icing sugar (optional) Preheat oven to 190C (375F/gas mark5) Grease (if not non stick!) and line an 8in (200mm) cake tin. In a mixing bowl combine the Flour, Sugar, Cocoa, bicarb of soda and salt. Make a well in the centre of the mixture and add the vanilla, vinegar and oil. Gradually stir in the water. Continue stirring until blended, but don't overmix. Pour batter into the tin and bake for 35 to 40 mins OR until a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. Cool in the tin on a wire rack if possible for 10 mins, then take out to cool completely.

I just fry some smashed garlic cloves in a lot of olive oil, then pick out the garlic and add the cubed bread. I stir it around really thoroughly so the oil gets absorbed pretty evenly, then cook, stirring every now and then, till they're done on most sides. If I wanted them herby I think I'd add the herbs towards the end, unless they were sturdy herbs in which case maybe I'd fry and pick them out along with the garlic.

I make "baker's grease" too, and use equal amounts by volume of shortening, oil, and flour, with sometimes a little extra flour added at the end if it seems too runny. I also add a little bit of lecithin, which I read somewhere makes it so you can spread the grease out thinner and have it still be effective.

Have you ever eaten raw okra? As you chew it it gets slimier and slimier, and the slime grows and grows till you have to stop chewing because the slime won't fit in your mouth any more.

Dill seed or dill weed? If you wanted to use dill seed you could make a seed cake, with dill instead of caraway. My seed cake recipe is just like pound cake, with caraway seed and some chopped candied cherries. Maybe with dill you'd use candied lemon peel instead, or just fresh zest. I think the seed wouldn't be nearly as peculiar as the weed!

Spectrum and Earth Balance non-hydrogenated shortenings are made of palm oil, I think. Not soy, anyway.

Our cats eat my bread, if I leave it out on the counter and not hidden in the bread box! Margie the dog would too, of course, except that she's too short to reach the counter. Sometimes the cats throw things down for her.

I call the fried grated potatoes "hash browns," and call the cut-up-into-little-cubes kind "fried potatoes." I think they're both best started from raw potatoes. For the cube kind I start them out in my big chicken-frying pan,with lots of grease, covered for the first 15 or 20 minutes--this helps get the insides done. Then I take the lid off and stir them around, and let them keep cooking another 20 minutes or so, stirring infrequently.

According to the booklet that came with my giant Staub pan, you can kind of season the matte stuff like cast iron, and eventually it'll get easier to clean. It hasn't worked for me.... I don't think my Staub pan is really any harder to clean than my Le Creuset anyway, though.

Is it still there? The last time I was there, about a year ago, they had signs saying they were moving to Woodinville. I signed up to be e-mailed with their new address when their move was over, and never heard anything more. Later, I heard a rumor that they had a terrible rat problem affecting the nearby yarn distributor.

I think it's too early and cold to plant beans--I usually wait till the first of June, and then they all come up. The squirrels ate my whole garden last year, some I'm not going to too much trouble this time. I got one winter squash (pink banana), one apricot, one quince, no plums, and very few tomatoes! They didn't seem to notice the cucumbers, though.

I make 'poached eggs' with canned apricot halves in blancmange. I make the blancmange with bay-leaf-infused almond milk, and serve it with raspberry sauce. I set the apricot half upside-down in the bottom of a custard cup and pour the blancmange over.

I like sweet potatoes with peanut sauce--maybe for your pasta sauce you could add coconut milk, peanut butter, chile, ginger, garlic, tamarind, and soy sauce, whizzed together, and some coriander and green onion.

You could taste it--plain tastes of flour, while self-raising tastes of flour plus baking powder and (sometimes) salt.

Tea (Pu Erh in the morning, various throughout the day) and bread (any kind).

I make mashed potatoes in mine--I peel and quarter them, cook them for five or six minutes (depending on their size) at high (15psi) pressure, then mash them right in the pan with milk and butter and all that. My 7- or 8-liter Magafesa only requires 1/2 cup of water to come to pressure (the Kuhn Rikons are the same, I think), and the 1/2 cup has pretty much disappeared by the time the potatoes are done. Anyway, it's a lot less trouble for me than draining them and drying them out, then mashing them. I make a nice carrot recipe, too--cut carrots into 2" logs, fry them with some bay leaves, thyme sprigs, and sultanas, then add salt, pepper, and enough white wine too make the pc come to pressure. Cook for 2 1/2 minutes at high pressure, then quick-release. And rice, and dal, and soup.... I use my pressure cookers for almost every dinner!

Thank you! They're much smaller than I'd thought--the 2lb one is the size of my "regular" loaf, and the 1lb one is the size of the one I make a little tiny soda bread in.

I thought "porridge oats" might mean rolled oats, and, as I suspected that rolled oats wouldn't do in parkin, I instead used some finer-than-pinhead steel-cut oats. I was afraid pinhead oats would stay too hard, as the batter wasn't very wet. Anyhow, my parkin turned out really well. I should have hidden it, though, as it got eatten up before it had a chance to improve with age. I don't know what the recipes mean by "1lb loaf tin." I guess if they mean a pound of dough rather than of baked bread I'd need a smaller tin. I always guess, and once my dough/batter is in the tin I decide a smaller tin is required and have to transfer everything and wash the first tin.... I thought "1lb loaf tins" and 2lb loaf tins" were some standard sizes--it seems like all my English recipes that require bread or cake to be baked in a loaf tin refer to them that way.

I have a couple of questionas about English terminology: First, I don't understand the differences between all the kinds of oatmeal. There are pinhead, fine and medium oatmeal, and porridge oats, and probably some others I can't remember right now. American oats seem to come in rolled and steel-cut, with steel-cut coming in great, huge pieces ( 1/2-1/3 of a groat) or pretty fine, but without a name to distinguish the sizes. I just made some parkin from a recipe which said it had changed the oats from "oatmeal" to "porridge oats." So, are "porridge oats" rolled, or what? And what about the sizes of "oatmeal?" Second, how big are 1 and 2 pound loaf tins? What are their dimensions? It seems like when I try to guess, I always pick a tin that's too big. I'd like to know for sure and not guess any more!

Except in England, where "a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter."

Have you tried using whole wheat pastry flour instead of regular whole wheat? That's what I do, without otherwise modifying my recipes, and my whole wheat muffins are about the same, texture- and moisture-wise, as my white muffins.

We give our nice plastic containers to the soup kitchen we volunteer at--they use them to give leftovers to the guests. I use the little clementine crates like gift baskets for the jam-and-cookie prezzies I give out for Xmas.

It's just that I always hear about how the Hobart ones are better than the Whirlpool ones, so maybe, 20 years from now, I'd be glad I had the Hobart. Plus it's cute. I'm just really torn. I'll try andiesenji's thing with the thread, and see how that works.

I've had my blue KSM90 300W Kitchenaid mixer, made by Whirlpool, for almost 15 years. It has always worked really well for me--no problems at all. This summer I bought a beige K45SS 250W mixer, made by Hobart, at a yard sale, intending to give it to an under-equipped baking friend for Xmas. Shortly afterwards, when we redid the kitchen, I realised that the beige mixer looked a lot nicer with our new color scheme. I've been using it ever since too see how I like it, and now I have to decide which to keep and which to give away. As I said, I've had no problems at all with the blue one. The only flaws I've perceived in the beige one are: --Its slowest speed is too fast, so it throws flour out when starting out. I can work around that, but it's kind of a nuisance. --The little screw to adjust the beater height seems to be loose--I'm always having to adjust it (like every three weeks, not really always), and I never do with the blue one. What do you all think?

I melted some plastic inside a pressure cooker, and got it off by warming the pot and scraping the plastic with a razor blade. That got it nearly all off, and I got the tiny residue with one if those green scrubby things. It would be harder to do with the pastic on the outside of the pot, of course. Maybe you could set it upside down in a skillet and heat it that way? Or on a cookie sheet in the oven?