Lindacakes

I am candying my first batch of whole clementines and I'm having some anxiety attacks and I'm hoping someone out there has experience candying whole fruit or can help me -- I candied a dozen at a time. Most of them are plump and heavy and absolutely perfect. That's the Ecstasy. One dude collapsed in on himself. He looks healthy enough, but I'm wondering why this happened. That's the Agony. That and the uncertainty. I pierced the skins with a thin needle. The instructions said "all over" I used a little pattern and poked about six on the bottom, six on the top and a dozen in a band around the circumference. Enough or too little? I'm concerned that the sugar/water ratio isn't strong enough. I've candied before but not with such a high amount of corn syrup. I used glucose from a bucket of sticky-as-shit glucose and I used about a cup of it. I covered the oranges with the required inch of water but some pots are bigger around than others . . . I've candied before, just not whole fruit or pieces this big. The syrup isn't as thick. I'm told to keep them in their syrup. I don't usually do that with candied fruit. Any reassurance you might offer would be welcome . . .

Paneer pasanda. Common enough Indian restaurant in New York City. That particular mix of spices enraptures me. White truffles. First eaten in a simple restaurant in San Gimignano overlooking the Tuscan Hills. Beautiful April afternoon. The smell brings the view back.

What you are looking for can be found, but it doesn't have a brand name. I did a big search for mine and ended up with an excellent stock pot, 10 quart with volume marker up the inside and a very heavy bottom that can be used to saute ingredients before adding liquid. But don't expect to find it with a brand on it. It doesn't exist. I tried. I wish I could tell you the name of mine but it doesn't have a name!

I like mine baked enough to carmelize the sugar, I like a bit of snap to it, not crumbly.

Well, I'm an egg fool. I eat huge amounts of eggs. I love eggs, maybe they are my favorite food. I think some people are more sensitive to individual foods than others, I'm egg sensitive. For me, it's about the smell. There's a smell to eggs . . . I have bought eggs in the grocery store and I think if the hen is free and the egg is fresh, they are pretty good. However, I buy all my eggs at the farmer's market and I have them ranked in my head as to which I think are best. When I get to the farmer's market, I run to my supplier because there is a limited amount of eggs available and I get two dozen at a time. If none are available, I go to supplier number two on down. All of my favored suppliers are very small and I think that's key. These eggs are green and they come from Araucana chickens. I worship these chickens as goddesses. I am an egg fool. Blindfold me!

I have a parrot and he eats them by the grit. There is a picture with grits on his beak on the bulletin board at Falls Mill. Currently I have been buying them from Hoppin' John, though.

It's very hard to choose, but right now I am thinking about a summer evening at home, meaning my parent's house, when I was about ten years old. The sun was a rosy golden color and starting to fade, but coming into the kitchen. I don't remember what the rest of the meal consisted of, but there had been baked potatoes. Only my father and I liked potato skins, and the rest of the family had left the table. Dad and I sat next to each other at the table (I have a whole theory of personality based on where you sat at the family table) and we had a pile of potato skins piled between us. We were buttering the potato skins and chowing down on them. I wish I could go back there, and feel that afternoon again, knowing how my relationship with my father would grow and change over the years and savor that sensual moment again on a higher plane of consciousness.

I suppose I forgot to mention the cheese because I can't think about it. I eat Trader Joe's low fat organic cheese sticks instead of my customary near monthly splurge on cheese and olives. Roquefort . . . how I loved thee, how I pine for thee, gruyere . . .

I eat out only in less expensive ethnic restaurants and I don't do much baking. I also quit eating nuts . . . My dried fruit comes from Trader Joe's. Except the dates, you can pry my plump medjools from my cold, dead hands. There's a weight loss effort working in concert with the tighter belt, of course.

I went back to get some of the bergamot oranges mentioned in the booze thread. I didn't buy them because they looked like someone's grandmother had been accidentally sitting on them all afternoon while she was knitting, but it was a Tuesday and it was relatively early and it wasn't too crazy, so we decided to try the cheese and charcuterie plate with a glass of wine. Also comes with condiments for the cheese and a couple of slices of very tasty bread. Superb, actually, and I'd do it again, but it's stressful.

I'm a purist. The simpler, the better. I have the set in Andisenji's photo -- stainless steel, unbagged, at 12:00. I have a set of measuring spoons of the same make. I'm all about the sound of a spatula scraping across those things, a flip, and a sharp tap on the bottom to empty it. Tut, tut! I need a baking uniform. With those admiral brush things on the shoulders. I have a one cup Pyrex measuring cup, very anal that it has a handle that loops so I can hang it on a peg even though I no longer do that in my current kitchen. I also have the Wonder Cup and I can't live without it. I recently picked up a nice vintage 2 cup Pyrex measuring cup with loop handle at a thrift store. Very nice but it sits in my drawer. I have a set of one cup glass bowls I use for mise en place, I measure the ingredients in order of messiness and put them in the MIP bowls. Tut, tut, salute!

A & W drive-ins is the first thing that came to mind. Hough's Bakery in the Cleveland area, but local bakeries in general. The ones in my Brooklyn neighborhood have been wiped out and "replaced" with a hipster joint or two where dry crumb topped muffins or a slice of bad pie can be purchased, but you can't buy a loaf of bread and have it sliced. Even though I miss the bakeries, I also miss the generic coffee rings and date bars that were available in any grocery store. And those jelly rolls . . . I miss flavors that are rare now, but not in my house: lemon, black walnut, molasses, buttermilk, ginger. Mickey's snack cakes, particularly Mickey's Banana Flip.

Perfect! You could even load the whole dinner in there, and while you're having cocktails, your guests could oggle the courses.

The grilled cheese with a pickle is my personal favorite. What I'd really like, though, is one of those rotating cake display gizmos that have four shelves and slowly rotate the cakes so that you can make a selection. That would look very nice in my kitchen.

I like to go through my cookbooks and make lists of the recipes that interest me, and then I stick that in the front of the book, generally never to be referenced again. I went through all of my indexed cookbooks and set up several favorites lists -- Recipes I Want to Try, Recipes I've Tried and Recommended Recipes. While I was doing this, I thought, wouldn't it be cool if my I Want to Try list could peek at your Recipes I've Tried list? Which is when I discovered the star rating for individual recipes. If you rate recipes that you've tried, other people can see your ratings (and, as Erin pointed out, your notes purportedly to self). I emailed the kind EYB peeps and asked them if they could advertise the favorites feature so that the software would become more useful to us. They said they would in some form that escapes me -- newsletter, I think. In short, rate recipes! The more the better. I bought a cookbook (The Complete Asian Cookbook) because someone here (I think it was Chris Amirault) recommended it and then I see that his favorite recipes are rated -- now I know what to cook from the book. An excellent system, I think, if you know how to work it. Also, now, if I search by ingredient, I can see if one of those recipes is on one of my lists. I haven't tried the talk forums, but I think being able to cross reference each other's books would rock.

Jesus. Heath bar bits.

Hmmmm . . . that list . . . I like Ping's.

I read Saveur cover to cover and then "process" it -- I cut out whole articles that I want to keep, individual recipes that I want to keep, and any pictures or notes that I want to incorporate in other notes and files. I have several years worth of Gastronomica, but I'm thinking of processing them, too, maybe most of them through eBay.

Poppyseed cake on the Solo poppyseed can. Cafe Expresso cake from the back of the Domino 10x box. Apparently, there's a good chocolate cake on the Hershey's cocoa can. I've never made it.

Sorbet.

:laugh: :laugh:

Where do you get these vacuum packed mussels? I'm hoping these mussels were prepared before packaging for their fast . . .

Excellent, thank you. I usually decrease the amount of sugar called for in date recipes as dates usually don't require any help!

Yipes, this thread is making me want cake, seriously bad. Danish Cake, Burnt Sugar Cake, Black Walnut Cake, Molasses Cake, I want them all. Please share your recipes! (Thank you for the Molasses Cake recipe!) I love angel food and the Solo poppyseed can poppyseed cake. Coconut cake with seven minute frosting. My own Red Velvet that has cream cheese frosting. Buttermilk cake with chcolate frosting. Thick cake with thick frosting. Yes.

The new Chelsea Trader Joe's? I've been shopping there since it opened and I buy a lot of frozen fish at Trader Joe's. I've bought enough "fresh" fish that wasn't fresh that I don't have any trepidation about buying frozen. I have to make a low-calorie breakfast and a lunch in the morning and I don't have the luxury of being too picky about how that's accomplished. I like the shrimp, the langoustines, the Japanese scallops and the mahi mahi burgers best, but I've tried a lot more and I can honestly say there hasn't been any fish that I didn't like. A rinse in salted water helps, and cooking with butter helps, and using the fish as an ingredient in a fuller dish helps. I'd rather be sitting on a dock in the Keys eating something that just came out of the water on a toasted bun, but here we are, us and the snow.