Katherine

No question, my favorite cake of all time was a Heath Bar chocolate mousse torte I designed for my daughter's birthday. It had coffee praline buttercream, and, of course, crushed Heath Bar chunks embedded in the ganache enrobing it. I made it a couple of years, and then one year I had a bakery make it, when I was busy travelling. I had to supply them the Heath Bars, they didn't stock those. Yum.

Golden delicious have a nice flavor, and are a little bit firmer than Granny Smiths. Braeburns and Fujis both cook up nice and firm. Besides pre-sauteeing them, you can poach in a heavy syrup (use apple cider instead of water, and spices, if you don't care about them turning brown. This is especially good if you're making apple dumplings, where too much liquid can ruin the project.) My mother used to use red delicious, back in the days before they bred all the taste out of them. She quartered the apples, and the pies stood incredibly high. I wouldn't take red delicious now if somebody gave them to me. My ex-MIL always used Macs for her pies, and they were always a soupy, mushy mess. I never acquired a taste for Macs, either for cooking or eating, but I'm sure the finished product could have been greatly improved by thickening (which the family rejected, preferring the pies soupy) and tinkering with seasoning.

I speak as a person who has never used imitation vanilla, but my opinion has always been that the effects of the chemical soup that is often used in products labeled as using "artificial flavoring" are exacerbated by the fact they they use so much of these flavorings. I guess most people want the most intense flavor they can get, and don't care about the foul aftertaste in Otto Spunkmeyer cookies, or flavored coffees.

My daughter, 20, had the flu and went to a doctor, who ran a panel of tests to see if she had mono. When she went back to find out her results, already feeling better, they wanted her to wait and talk to the doctor. It turns out a number of her results were a little outside the normal range, and they wanted to talk to her, to make sure she wasn't anorexic, and hadn't been starving herself for the past month. Because her cholesterol was WAY off. It was 87. They're talking about studying her.

Oyster of a chicken? What, exactly, is that? When disjointing the chicken thigh from the carcass, if you cut the meat straight down the back, you would miss the tip of the thigh meat called the "oyster", and leave it attached to the back. To remove it in one piece with the thigh, it is necessary to carefully cut along the back and hip bone of the chicken. I saw this on Julia many years ago.

You wouldn't enjoy it for long, when no one was buying them. yea, that's probably true. why i'm not a pastry chef. Actually, when I used to bake, it was my BOSS who would get tired of selling the same things over and over again. She'd stop making them, even though people wanted them and were willing to pay $$$ for them. It never bothered me to give them what they wanted, but give them the best they ever had. I'm sure that, for that type of restaurant, it was just the thing that should've been done, if they'd really wanted to stay in business.

A while back I made a "starter" by making a white bread dough with 1/8 teaspoon of yeast per 3 cups of flour. When it rose, I put most of it in a pan to bake into a loaf, and mixed the rest into a dough again. After about 2 weeks of repeating this procedure, it was starting to get pretty sour. After another month or two, it got so sour that it no longer leavened. So if I wanted to use this as a leavening, I'd have to make it up fresh occasionally. But it made ridiculously good black seeded pumpernickel.

I think the price for a rack of lamb is prohibitive, too. That's why I buy whole leg of lamb when it goes on sale for $2.79 a pound. I bone it out, roll up a small roast with garlic, rosemary, and black pepper, slice some nice thick steaks to freeze separately, and cut the rest up for stew or kebabs. The bones make a nice soup stock. Then, I pull out a steak when I'm hungry, give it a quick thaw at 50% in the microwave, sear it on the outside, nice and red on the inside. My daughter came up and I pulled some out, thinking they was beef. After it was cooked, we realized what it was. Really good. When I went to New Zealand, we were walking up a little hill, and as we approached a pub, we could smell roasting mutton. If only I had not just eaten. It was the best thing I'd ever smelled... Suzanne! Lamb steak!

Lamb has too much character. Typical American food is characterless, so it doesn't fit in. Plus, the cuteness factor. I dined once with a guy who went all "Mary had a little lamb" on me when I chose roast lamb. He was the most annoying type of dining companion, and each time I dined with him, he would come up with some different way of being annoying. I think I buy a couple of legs of lamb each year on sale, bone them and turn them into a variety of little roasts, etc. They sell lamb in all the stores around here.

I always have the opposite feeling - that if the head and tail have been chopped off, there's someone in the kitchen either completely fish head phobic, who lays the fish on the cutting board, raises the cleaver high, and looks away before the blow, or who is guessing that I'm fish head phobic, and want my fish to look hacked up. Which I don't. I can handle the fact that fish have heads and tails, meat comes with bones, fat, and connective tissue, etc. Most Americans seem to think that you can grow giant slabs of deli meat in culture vats, with no bones, fat, or organs. Sheesh.

The whole thing seemed like a vanity thing on her part, and poor planning on the part of the Slow Food people, to even consider a bizarre setup like this one. It was as though it was more important to be able to say AW had done the meal than to have it up to standards.

I'll object to that, although I may be told to mind my own business. Please explain. Perhaps not universally, but that's the trend I see. People who munch around the clock have small appetites at dinner, and imagine that they are being virtuous for eating small meals and passing up dessert. They will comment on the size of the meal you are eating, but of course, an hour after they leave they're hungry again, munching on packaged cookies. On the flip side of the coin, it is also true that people who eat at restaurants that serve jumbo portions are less likely to have room for dessert than those who eat at restaurants that serve more reasonable portions. The trend has been toward ever-increasing portion size. Something had to give somewhere. Not that I'd suggest that you would eat at such places...

I always figured that the purpose of sugar in the brine is to satisfy Americans' sweet tooths. When I was in cooking school, way back when trussing was de riguer, we were told that the reason we truss is to make the chickens look less like humans. With their legs stretched/spread out, they can look very human.

A while back I noticed that the supermarket had a number of Splenda-sweetened ice cream products. Reading the fine print on the nutrition labeling, I saw that the carbs were the same for regular and Splenda types. Caveat emptor.

Indeed, desserts have been displaced by between-meal snacks and mammoth-sized appetizers and entrees.

Yes, yes! Canned fat white asparagus, served with great gobs of freshly made mayonnaise. Just as I had them repeatedly in Spain. Here I have to substitute green asparagus.

These are great. I use them in everything. Wonderful pepper flavor, nice color.

That's the way I always make it. I've never had a problem. Yum, it's about that time.

That sounds like the Dutch breakfast to me. When my daughter was doing an exchange in Germany, the only breakfast any of them had was the choice of black bread or hard, cold toast, with butter.

Cut it out, Mom. No, Mom. Step_away_from_the_stove. I know exactly what I'm doing, I have a degree in cooking. She treats me like such a child when I try to cook for us. My mother used to be a good cook when we were all living at home, but after we left, the focus somehow strayed from deliciousness through a series of whacko nutritional pathways. Now everything she cooks is utterly unseasoned pap that my cat wouldn't eat. Yes, I always bring my knives when I visit her. And the Pampered Chef bread knife I bought her for $9 was such an improvement over the dreadfully dull one she'd used all her adult life that she was practically swooning.

Why don't you just try substituting soy milk for dairy in a recipe in advance and see if it tastes acceptable to you?

I suggest you dilute your bleach so it is at one ounce per gallon. This is much safer on your skin than straight, which can burn you, but is still fully disinfecting. Gloves are still recommended if you plan on scrubbing with it, but what you can do is put the clean board in the sink, splash over the bleach solution and let it soak for a while. Rinse in hot water, and allow to dry. Never leave a board on a damp countertop, this will invariably cause the growth of unsightly bacteria/etc on its reverse side. Store standing up on end.

A while back under the influence of a flash of inspiration, I scraped my brownie recipe into a round cake pan lined with parchment, covered it with a double layer of foil and steamed it for an hour. It was the densest, fudgiest cake in the history of the world. Warmed slightly, served with ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and raspberry coulis, it was an ultimate experience. My daughter's boyfriend even remarked on it, and he's not into chocolate desserts.

I use a blend of dried spearmint and peppermint. My "house blend" also adds chamomile and freshly grated lemon/orange rind. If I want it during the day, I mix 1 teaspoon gunpowder green tea with 1 tablespoon dried mint leaves for steeping. I don't much care for fresh leaves in tea, they taste too vegetal to me.

It looks like there's a market for eGullet protective tablewear. I find that oily stains respond well to spotting with Dawn dishwashing liquid diluted 50% with water.