Katherine

Does that mean that people like me who live in a culinary backwater and rarely eat out are part of the solution?

Microbrew and sparkling wine on tap!

Ok, fifi, your prayers have been answered. The wireless temperature sensing device is last millenium's technology. My fantasy kitchen comes with a maid and handyman.

Unfortunately chocolate chips are formulated differently, so they probably won't work in a recipe calling for regular chocolate without some major reworking. Please tell me the chocolate "squares" you're using aren't Baker's brand? That stuff really isn't worth eating in any form, and isn't even particularly cheap. Even Hershey's Special Dark or Ghiradelli would be better and should be available at just about any supermarket. I used squares to diferentiate between chocolate chips and other chocolate. No I'm not using bakers. Ugh. But I do have trouble getting proper baking chocolate here. I can get Ghiradelli chocolate chips and cocoa and milk chocolate, but so far no semi sweet or unsweetened baking chocolate. Lindt's maybe? CI recently taste tested bittersweet chocolates, and amazingly enough, Hershey's Special Dark was a high scorer, especially in the cooking test. Although I've always liked it, it's been more for availability and price, as it seemed to have a chalky texture that prevent melting in the mouth. Then next time I was in the baking section at my local supermarket, I noticed that Special Dark now comes in chip form, while the bars in the candy section are officially out of stock and temporarily unavailable. The chocolate is much creamier than it was in the past. I am convinced that there's been a manufacturing change that substantially improved the eating quality, perhaps merely by the new owners bringing manufacturing methods into the 20th century? Also, I recall a test where it was shown that almost all unsweetened chocolates (except for one, which one I can't remember) are of greatly inferior quality to eating chocolates, as though manufacturers figure that only Americans use this, and they bake with it besides, so who can tell? I stopped using unsweetened chocolate in custards and hot chocolate, as I was tired of crud settling out, which never happens when you use bittersweet chocolate. I think it should probably improve my favorite brownie recipe were I to adapt it from unsweetened to bittersweet, but it would be nice to have a high quality unsweetened chocolate available to buy.

Bourbon and Moxie?

Oohh! As a Woman Who Loves Power Tools and Fire, thanks for the suggestion! I have a mess of anaheim's I want to roast, and this certainly seems like more fun that the broiler! Snowangel, get yourself a propane torch with an automatic igniter button. Those things are fun, fun, fun!

No, Miracle Whip is not food.

Awhile back I bought a jug of mushroom soy, but after a while I realized that the attraction was the deep, rich color. I couldn't seem to add enough to give food any soy sauce flavor. Now I buy nama shoyu in the natural food store. It's worth the extra money to me.

We always gnawed meat off the bones in my family. My MIL used to boil chicken until the meat fell off the bones, then pick it off and put it into chicken pies, leaving the cartilage for the wary to pick out. At that time, my daughter declared that her favorite part of the chicken was the knuckle. She does not remember this, and it's no longer her favorite part.

I find it easier to work with the other way around: I put the water in my KitchenAid stand mixer bowl, and add the dry ingredients. If it's still weeping, I can add more gluten flour. It's harder to incorporate more liquid into a lump of hard rubber. I start with 1 cup of water, and add 1¼ cups of gluten flour for very soft seitan, to 1½ cups for seitan which is firmer than I like. Doing it this way, the dough is never sticky. It goes from soupy, to mushy, to soft wet spongy, to soft rubbery without ever getting sticky, as bread dough gets. YMMV While I use a mixer to mix the ingredients, the consistency is generally moist, rather than dough which needs kneading. In at least one reference I read that your finished product will be tenderer if you don't knead, but I'm nowhere near testing that supposition. Actually, I needed to let it rest in order to make the handling easier. The more you work it, the more strong-willed it will be. The braising liquid you talk about, soy and onions, is what I'm trying to get away from. It's what most people think of when they think of seitan, and I'm trying to break out of the box, or at least make the box lots bigger. I did sauté them and braise them immediately. I may try boiling first, also deep-frying, but my feeling was that I just wanted to set the surface. At no time did I have more than ¼" of water in the pan. I just kept an eye on it, flipping the "steak" and adding more water as needed.

What is "too old"? My miso keeps forever in the refrigerator-it's very high in salt, which acts as a preservative. Just keep it airtight, and it'll outlive you.

Seitan fakesteak for your edification. First I made a batch of brown dough, colored with cocoa, red wine, and beet liquid, and flavored with worcestershire and black pepper. I divided this into 8 blobs. Then I made a smaller batch colored quite red with wine and beet liquid. This I divided into 4 blobs. Finally, I made a batch of uncolored dough. I stretched and flattened each of the eight brown blobs into a cutlet, and sandwiched a flattened red blob between, using a dusting of gluten flour as an adhesive. I trimmed the steaks to even up the edges. I cut the uncolored seitan into strips, which I overlapped and wrapped around the outside of the steaks. Here you can see one sauteeing in EVOO. After the "steak" was brown on both sides, I briefly removed it from the pan and added two cloves of crushed garlic and lots of freshly ground black pepper. After a minute, I put the steak back, added some water and salt, and covered it. For an hour I continued adding water as it was absorbed, then finally, I cooked the liquid down and poured it over the plated "steak". Here it is sliced. The red layer sort of got lost in the middle. Mmm...garlic in oil. As filling as a real steak, too.

My seitan fakesteak is more attractive. And quite possibly tastier.

While drinkable wines could be made using many different ingredients, they would even at their best need to be judged by a somewhat different standard from standard grape wines. I started making wine from an English book full of recipes that used ingredients like these, in various blends with other ingredients. The first recipe I made was for an orange wine. It called for putting the sugar, juice, and additives in the gallon jug, then adding the rest of the water to fill it. Silly me, I didn't realize there was a difference between a British and American gallon. It was so high in sugar it took a couple of years before it was fermented and ready to drink. Strong and sweet. Even if you had proper proportions of ingredients with the potential to make a drinkable wine, they still need to be racked several times and aged in a jug for at least a year before bottling. If you have any standards at all, that is.

At first I was pretty impressed, but I think that was with the concept-that humans should attempt to eat a diet that most closely resembles what they evolved on. The breakdown comes when you try to decide what humans evolved on, and which foods available today should be included. I can understand that the paleo diet wants you to avoid grains and beans, which have only been part of the human diet since the agricultural revolution, but it also has you avoid green beans (descended from beans), all root vegetables, eggs, salt, (as though these previous things were avoided by our ancestors, which is unlikely), and all dairy products. You are supposed to eat lean meat and trim all fat (again, the evidence indicates that humans went out of their way to eat the fatty parts of animals). At the same time, he recommends that we purchase perilla oil and consume quantities of it, as though our ancestors somehow did that. To a great extent, the effectiveness of a diet results from how well people are able to stick to it. But I recall that this is not an all-or-nothing diet, and you are allowed to modify it as necessary when there's nothing else to eat. I'd have to say I was influenced by the concept, but it's somewhat off base. That and I like my cheese.

When I'm feeling lazy, which is most of the time, I just sauté them without peeling, and put the sauce through a sieve to remove the skin fragments after blending. I never ever try to remove interior membrane unless it's holding seeds, which I abhor.

Do you let it set in the refrigerator, or at room temperature? My recipes call for leaving it in the refrigerator to set overnight, as the foaminess tends to insulate the interior from proper chilling.

A proper tuna wiggle does not contain mayo, nor is it served over bread, but rather egg noodles.

Could you give us your ingredients list? All recipes are not equally reliable.

Hey diddle, diddle, distribute the middle, the premise controls the conclusion, the disjunctive affirms, that the Diet of Worms is a Borbetomagic* confusion. Borbetomagus=ancient name for Worms from The Space Child's Mother Goose

?I like chewy, bloody and seared! And flavorful and fatty.

I almost gave a chocolate chip cookie lesson to a Chinese-American woman in her home. While checking the equipment, I found she did not own even ONE bowl.

Mince pie. It's what's for dinner. And dessert.

That's kind of the rub. The end goal is to avoid the splitting. But what I thought was the correct solution (skimming the top of the bottom layer off flat) was deemed unacceptable by Mrs JPW. So, if there is a way to avoid the splitting if the top of the bottom layer is a little rounded then I'm all ears. Or any suggestions to keep the tops flatter (not quite sure what you mean by "baking strips"). Finally, if the only solution is to trim off the top, Mrs JPW has said that she will bow to the collective wisdom of the group. Gloating will then commence. Baking strips are strictly a preventative measure. Too late to prevent a rounded top at this point. You could consider using a filling that's stiff enough to support the top layer, but such a thing might alter your finished product plan. Something that you could sculpt to mimic a flat top, and set up in the fridge before completing assembly, maybe a buttercream or stiff mousse.

Don't want to try it, but it makes me consider eating peanut butter directly from the jar while drinking Coke.