beccaboo

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?

I have a Magafesa and two Kuhn Rikons, and like them very well. I've seen the WMFs at the store and they look nice, but I've never heard anything about them. Get the biggest one you have room for--you can only fill it 2/3 full, so you'll want a big one for stock.

All we have out are the Kitchenaid mixer and the Vitamix blender on the counter (they're too tall to fit in the cupboard) and the microwave on top of the refrigerator. The rice cooker, food processor, immersion blender, Sumeet grinder thing, and tea kettle are in a cupboard, and everything else (waffle iron, crock pot, deep fryer, things we don't use much) is in the basement. We have hardly any cupboards and not much counter space.

I make a Pennsylvania Dutch potato soup recipe that has something like a really low-fat roux. You rub a small amount (like a tablespoon) of fat into a lot (like 1/2 cup) of flour, then toast it on the stove. After it's browned, you whisk it into the rest of the soup. It tastes good and thickens well. You could try it in place of your normal roux and see how it works: I think the trick in this case is thoroughly rubbing in the fat first.

I have all kinds of burn scars (I have one in progress right now from when the back of my left hand touched the broiler element), but I've never done anything too terrible with a knife. One time, though, I was peeling some kind of really hard winter squash with my new peeler and somehow my hand slipped and I peeled off half of my thumb knuckle! I had to go lie down for a while, so as not to faint, and then my mother the nurse made a nice dressing for my thumb so I could finish fixing dinner. We were having visiting-from-out-of-town relatives over, so I couldn't just bag dinner. The scar's not too bad now, but for a couple of years it looked kind of like a pink extra knuckle pasted onto my thumb.

Use bread flour for a thick, chewy crust, and lower-gluten (cake or pastry) for a thin, crispy crust. And be sure your oven and baking stone are thoroughly preheated.

Bread crumbs and sage, haggis.... That's all I can think of right now.

Soldier and yellow eye beans are good, too, but harder to find here in Seattle.

I've read that 'arugula' is 'rucola' in some Italian dialect, but haven't heard anything more specific than that. In Lombardy it's 'arigola.'

The peels do have flavor--sometimes when I've made a pie or something and have lots of apple peels, I make myself apple peel tea by simmering them for five minutes or so, then adding a little sugar. Red apples of course, make more attractive tea (or jelly). I'd use the cores, too, for making jelly, as they also have pectin. Just take off the fuzzy blossom end stuff.

If you try the recipe as well as the baking technique, you should know that there's not nearly enough salt in it. When I make it again I plan to at least double the salt.

The only time I've ever gotten bread with the thin, brittle crust I think you're after, I followed this recipe (it's a Word file). It breaks all the rules for nice crust (no steam, start in a cold oven), but the crust was just like those little Vietnamese baguettes!

Asian grocery stores (the Viet Wah in Seattle is where I get my rice flour and tapioca flour) have lots of different rice flours. I just get the plain (not 'sweet' or 'glutinous') rice flour, and it works for most recipes. Mochiko's cheap there, too.

1 C rice flour 1 C pastry or cake flour 2 t baking powder 2 C water 1 T yeast 1 T wheat malt syrup or 1.5 t sugar 1.5 t salt 4 C AP flour, approx. You make it pretty much like normal bread--mix everything up, knead, let rise, divide into 8 pieces, rest, shape into mini-baguettes, rise, bake on baking stone with steam @ 425F for about 20 minutes.

I haven't actually made these, but a reliable book (Home Baking by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid) has a recipe with 1 cup of rice flour, 1 cup of pastry flour, and 4 cups of all-purpose. There's some baking powder, too, in addition to the yeast, and a little bit of malt.

Here's an egg substitute that works really well in cookies and things where the eggs funnction mainly as a binder: Flax Gloop Yield: a scant cup, about 5 eggs worth Ingredients: 4 t flax seeds 1 C water 1. Let the seeds and water soak together in a little pan for at least an hour, or overnight. 2. Simmer for 20 minutes. 3. Let cool for a while, then pour everything into a cheesecloth-lined funnel and squeeze the gloop out into a jar. 4. About 3T gloop equals an egg.

I can't really remember--I just know that when I've used atta flour my breads don't come out as well as when I use $.99/lb "durum flour." The durum flour looks really different, too--it's a creamy color, while the atta flour I get is speckled with brown. I don't think they're the same thing.

Is that atta flour? It works well for chapatis and things, but not so well for yeasted Italian breads. At least not in my experience.

I just made the saffron peach and, with your experience in mind, used about 20 threads of saffron instead of just 15. It's still subtle, but you can taste the saffron--sort of a pleasantly musty flavor that you might not realise is saffron unless you already know. Maybe Ferber uses fancy Kashmiri saffron instead of the cheap Spanish stuff I have? I think her spicing tends to be overly-mild--last year I made the peach and raspberry jam with cardamom, and you couldn't taste the cardomom at all. And I used nice, freshly ground cardamom!

I'm in full darkness in regards to the diastatic malt sources. I live outside of North America, so King Arthur is not available to me. Does anyone know where possibly can I find it? Otherwise, is there any other product that contain the right enzymes, and could replace the malt in that respect? ← I've heard that you can get it in shops with beer-making supplies, though you have to be careful to not get the stuff that's mixed with hops. Do you have home-brew shops in Tel Aviv?

I figured it wouldn't be the same, but I wondered. She has so many recipes calling for vineyard peaches, it's too bad they only exist in France. They sound good. My jam turned out well though a little over-seedy. Every year I pick blackberries from the same bushes, and sometimes they have huge, crunchy seeds while other years they're barely discernible.

Does anyone know what 'vineyard peaches'--called for in many of Christine Ferber's recipes--are? I just made some peach and blackberry jam using nectarines instead of vineyard peaches, and I am wondering how much my jam will differ from Ferber's.

I cut it into fingers, marinate it for a while in something that'll go with the rest of dinner, then fry till crispy. I also use it in place of the meat for 'spag no-bol' (my daughter's favorite spaghetti).

My oven, with its digital controls, has 170F as the default temperature for "warming." I usually keep things at 145F, though (that's the lowest it'll go), and it works pretty well.

I've seen seeds for it--it's babies of a particular variety of corn.