Smithy

A good tamale is a wonderful thing, and a reliably good tamale-maker is a lovely resource. I have lost track of the number of times I've been disappointed by having a huge slug of masa surrounding a miniscule few shreds of meat. The solution, of course, is to make my own...maybe someday.... David, is that the main difference between Mexican oregano and the "standard" (Greek, I assume) oregano, that the flowers are left on? I always assumed it was a different variety. I confess I've never looked into it. Comparing the Oregano Indio (which may or may not be Mexican oregano) that I have from @rancho_gordo with the organic oregano from the grocery store shows a visible difference, I admit. The Rancho Gordo stuff is on the right in this picture.

I am having serious apricot envy out here in Minnesota. Blenheims in the stores? Not a chance. And it's been years since I've been in California during the summer months. Ain't happening this year, either.

Thanks, @kayb. I usually get the fisheye if I try to work squash into our diet, but I may try to sneak some in via this method.

I'll add my opinion to those who went before. I'd agree that American scones seem a bit like southern American biscuits, but firm and not especially moist. I loved scones when I traveled in England and Scotland. It's been a long time, but I remember them as having enough fat and flavor that they were tender - not as tender as a muffin, but more so than what we call a cookie. The scones I have bought here seem more like overgrown and dry cookies. Disappointing. I haven't tried making them, but if I do I'll look for a British recipe.

Recipe links, recipe links. I've just been down the rabbit hole, looking for that recipe and wondering what I'd missed in the last few weeks. Now it looks as though it's an older reference (whew! I'm not losing my mind...yet....) Am I correct in thinking that you used @Jaymes squash recipe for the technique only, then added the crackers to make more of a casserole? I've been poking around @Shelby's writings and found a reference to this recipe of Jaymes' in the Squash Cook-off topic. Your treatment seems to add another step to make it into a casserole. I found this recipe posted by @Mayhaw Man, credited to @Marlene that seems close kin: Delta Delight Squash Casserole. I'm not trying to pick nits; I'm just trying to save other readers some search effort. There are a lot of squash casserole recipes in these forums!

I rarely post to this topic because our breakfasts are same ol' same ol'...yogurt and/or fruit for me; cereal and fruit for him. This morning, I simply couldn't face any more yogurt. Scrambled eggs with cheese, tomatoes, avocado, and some leftover sausage from last night's dinner. We made inroads into a very old package of corn tortillas. That stuff that looks like ketchup is a very-cooked-down salsa that turned thick and sweet from the cooking-down. Hot sauce needed; I have some from Tucson thanks to @FauxPas. (Well all right, the other reason I rarely post to this topic is that other posters' photos look so much better than mine! )

I mentioned earlier in this topic that a batch of our salsa cooked down so much that it's more of a tomato jam. We're into one of those jars right now. This morning's breakfast featured eggs scrambled with cherry tomatoes, some chopped sausage, cheese, avocado and that tomato jam. Nothing crunchy about it as with pico de gallo, but a nice complement to the meal.

Wow! I think I paid an inexpensive $0.75 yesterday for a generous bunch. One wouldn't expect cilantro to bolt quickly in northern Minnesota, but it does anyway. I like the look of David's pot-worth.

Welllll......that's what happens when I try to post before my 2nd cup of coffee. I missed out on the 2 largest ingredients: 16 c tomatoes (cubed) 4 c chopped onions. So sorry! Here is the entire correct recipe, complete with photo of the original family-venerated sheet of paper. Lauri's Cousin's Garden Salsa 16 c tomatoes (cubed) 4 c chopped onions 1 c chopped green pepper 1/2 c chopped jalapeno pepper 2 c white vinegar 12 oz can tomato paste 2 tsp chili powder 2 tsp black pepper 3 tsp garlic powder 2 tsp cumin 1/2 c sugar 1/4 c canning salt Combine all ingredients. Bake at 350F for 2 hours, uncovered, stirring occasionally. May add cornstarch to thicken after baking for 2 hours, if necessary. Load in clean canning jars, observing the usual requirements for sanitation and head space. Process in water bath for 20 minutes. Makes about 10 pints. Thanks (seriously!) to everyone who questioned the original, both publicly and privately.

Some years ago we arrived at my husband's daughter's house for the Labor Day weekend to find boxes of tomatoes, various peppers, and onions, accompanied by premeasured spices. "Nancy," said my DIL, "I know you love to cook. Our cousin has a bumper crop in his garden, and he brought over stuff to make salsa, according to his recipe. Want to help?" We had to go buy a few supplies: large roasting pans to cook the stuff; canning supplies; cheap white vinegar; tomato paste; gloves to handle the hot peppers. We had a lot of washing and chopping and conversation as the work went along, and we had help as friends dropped by and got involved. The results were so good that the next year, when no free bumper crop materialized, we went to the local farmer's market and got the necessary supplies. It's become an annual tradition. We can quarts of the stuff, in various jar sizes, for our families and friends. There are more pictures of the event in the What Are You Preserving, and How Are You Doing It? topic. This is a very forgiving recipe as far as proportions go. Over the years we've experimented with adding more or different hot peppers, or more onions (or both). We're careful to label the "extra hot" jars. We have learned that the style of cooking it down matters. This salsa is cooked down in a large shallow roasting pan, in the oven. When we tried it over the stove top in a stockpot, the surface area was too small for the salsa to cook down efficiently; it took a long time and a lot of stirring to get more or less the consistency that came without effort in the oven. Last year I learned that if you cook it down too long you can end up with a rather sweet "tomato jam"...still good, but thicker and sweeter than we usually like. Oh, one final note: this is one of the very few times I use the dreaded green bell pepper. Can I taste it in the final result? Not that I can tell. Does it help with the texture and color? Yes. Lauri's Cousin's Garden Salsa See note below! 1 c chopped green pepper 1/2 c chopped jalapeno pepper 2 c white vinegar 12 oz can tomato paste 2 tsp chili powder 2 tsp black pepper 3 tsp garlic powder 2 tsp cumin 1/2 c sugar 1/4 c canning salt Combine all ingredients. Bake at 350F for 2 hours, uncovered, stirring occasionally. May add cornstarch to thicken after baking for 2 hours, if necessary. Load in clean canning jars, observing the usual requirements for sanitation and head space. Process in water bath for 20 minutes. Makes about 10 pints. The salsa in the roasting pan, before mixing, then after roasting: Some of the bounty: This sight makes us feel very good about our work! Note: the recipe as originally posted omits 16 c tomatoes (cubed) and 4 c chopped onions. The recipe is forgiving, but not THAT forgiving. I've corrected it in a follow-up post.

This looks to my inexperienced eye as though it is a soup concentrate for noodles (or whatever) and that it does not contain noodles in the packet. Am I reading that right?

I know what they meant, but I think this is very funny advice on how to keep my yogurt fresh.

I've had white whole wheat (King Arthur) flour go off. I can't comment on the gumminess because my own results are much too hit-and-miss for me to think I know what I'm talking about...but I think the off flavors could easily be due to rancidity. I doubt you've done lasting damage to your starter. According to my reading, a mature starter is pretty robust. You might want to refresh with known good flour sooner than you'd normally do so.

I just now followed your link. What a beautiful book - selling what would (to me, under our current living circumstances) be only a beautiful illusion! In fact, the first house I bought in northern Minnesota had a brick outdoor fireplace built very much like the one shown in one of the sample pages. It was falling apart, and I never repaired it. Now I want to build one here. It's a fantasy that we'd use it enough to justify its existence, but I can dream! Thanks for that link.

My new-used copy of the aforementioned Sunset Cookbook has arrived, bringing my Sunset library to a total of 3. I mentioned the "Easy Basics" cookbook before. The fish cookbook is something I picked up at a garage sale a few years ago. I've been poking around the new-to-me cookbook and think the salad section alone will be worth the purchase.

Yes, I wish I lived near enough to @andiesenji to come help! Although I'm certainly no paragon of organization - faaar from it - I could shift things while she pointed. @scamhi, I envy your cupboards; one could actually find something in them! One can find things in my pantries too, provided one knows to look for them in the first place. That means my Other Half asks me rather than looking. Here's our in-house mess, as opposed to in-the-garage mess (a refrigerator and freezer) or in-the-trailer mess (more dry goods). Spices, oils, vinegars, live on a turntable: More spices, a few canisters of bulk-buy items: Crackers, cereal, things like panko and bread crumbs: A cupboard of mostly canned goods we regularly use: The unopened stuff, and more bulk purchases, and the home-canned goods that will fit all go into what we call the Armageddon Mini-Mart: Alas, the Mini-Mart is now overflowing so there's more stuff in an adjacent bedroom with extra cookware and most of my cookbooks. There's half a flat of last year's salsa sitting in jars in there. And then there's the aforementioned garage. No, I am no paragon.

Probably not. This post notes some of his constraints.

@kunalv, let us know how it all goes. Pictures of the result will be welcome, if you aren't too shy. 🙂

Oh, sure - you can assemble in the car. I just don't know how much space you have for doing that. I agree that things will go soggy if you assemble them and then transport. Whether they'll go soggy in an hour I don't know. I don't think any of it will go stale (rancid) in less than a day. The cooked chicken will get into a danger zone of bacterial growth after a few hours, but I don't know really how long you'd have. Four? I hope some of the professionals will chime in here with better information. They may have more practical suggestions, too. Incidentally, this (scroll toward bottom of post) is more or less what I'm imagining, with chicken instead of beef. If you have a different mental image, then we're not talking about the same thing!

Ah! Then it sounds like you need to have them assembled as much as possible before you head out! You still need to make sure the chicken doesn't sit warm for too many hours. Either cook and refrigerate it tonight, then reheat before you go, or cook it in the morning just before you start assembling the tacos. Incidentally, I just looked at the instructions for the type of crispy taco shells I've used. They say that for microwave reheating you should fan them out so they aren't overlapping much (take them out of their package first) and microwave for about 45 seconds.

Hello, and welcome! You can definitely cook those taco shells in the microwave instead of the oven; in fact, I've had better luck with microwave. Unfortunately I can't remember for how long I microwaved them. 30 seconds? if the package doesn't say (mine did) then I'd start with 30 seconds, check, and if they don't seem crisp enough then try another 30 seconds, and so on. If you have a shell to spare I'd use one as a test case to figure out the right way to do it. Does your girlfriend have a microwave, and is it feasible to heat the taco shells at her place just before serving? To me, having them warm is the best way to go. I personally like the contrast between the warm shell and filling, and the cold lettuce, salsa and guac. If you can't reheat anything at your girlfriend's place, then heating the shells and the chicken filling just before you leave and then storing them in something that will keep them warm for transport is the way I would go. (Got a cooler?) You can cook the chicken filling tonight, but if you do that you'll need to refrigerate it tonight and reheat just before you leave, for food safety purposes. The salsa can be made any time. The guacamole is better fresh so it doesn't discolor. The lettuce is more likely to stay crisp if you shred or cut it the day of her party. I have a vision of your arriving with two coolers: one carrying the cold items (quacamole, salsa, lettuce, drinks?) and one carrying the warm taco shells and chicken filling. Assembly at her house is part of the fun. If you don't have coolers or insulated bags you can improvise by putting them in containers and separating into a "hot" shopping bag and a "cold" shopping bag. You have a lucky girlfriend!

Thanks for pulling this back up, @Okanagancook. I have a few Scary Drawers that I should maybe start working through, although I probably won't any time soon. An interesting point is the "when did you last use it" test. We remodeled our kitchen 9 years ago, and that meant completely emptying it out. I put quite a few seldom-used things in a storage bin that went into one of our outbuildings. This summer, for the first time, I found myself retrieving one thing from that bin. Maybe it's time to let the rest go.

It really couldn't happen for me this summer, but I do hope to get the chance sometime in the future.

Very pretty! I'm usually disappointed in apricots, but grilling them might improve the flavor. Forgive me if I've asked you this before, but are there apricots grown in your part of the world? I always think of them as needing a longer and hotter growing season.

That's a fine essay. Thank you for the link. I really need to read him more regularly. As far as the recipe goes, I don't think the orange juice will be acidic enough. As I recall, Navel orange juice has a pH of around 4, maybe slightly higher; lemon juice (Eureka or Lisbon, not Meyer) has a pH around 2.5. (This article says 4.35 for orange, and 2.30 for lemon, and notes that the acidity of both decays with age.) I wonder if you could use baking powder instead of, or in addition to, the baking soda to compensate? I also have my doubts about using almond milk instead of milk. I'd go with the cottage cheese instead, which should be closer to the fat content. Edited to add: got any citric acid sitting around from a canning project?