Smithy

Would you please tell more about your pickled green tomatoes? A recipe would be welcome, especially if it were to go into RecipeGullet where people could find it easily. I have been playing with fried green tomatoes lately, but I think a pickled version would go over well in our household.

Following the idea above, I started with this very pretty assembly of tomato slices, onion, garlic, and jalapeno with a bit of oil drizzled over it. It didn't seem to need vinegar at that stage, so I hadn't added any. I cooked it, stirring once or twice, in a 400F oven until it had browned and collapsed. The final product before blending doesn't look as appetizing, but it was delicious. It's now sitting in containers to become pasta sauce or some other lovely accent note. I also found time to try this recipe for Oven-Fried Green Tomatoes. As usual, the photo by the professionals and my results are wildly different. We dipped the FGT in remoulade sauce or ranch dressing, as we pleased. They tasted good - much better than they look (which is not nearly as appealing as the picture on TheSpruceEats page) - but nothing as good as what I've had in restaurants. I have a very few green tomatoes left. I may try deep-frying them, just to get them off the counter and this FGT bug out of my system, or I may try one of TicTac's other ideas instead. That first relish is really great!

I've missed Lisa's voice since the holidays, and I'm sorry I won't be seeing her here again. She was clearly and patently a teacher: happy to answer questions and provide clear instruction. I learned a lot about knife skills from her, and a new and unusual technique for making hash over a campfire. I'm thankful for her presence and years here.

You've missed out, and I recommend that if you ever see Ferraro Rocher confections in a store you pick up a few to try them. They turn up, especially during the holiday season, at a variety of USA stores: Walgreens, probably WalMart, and I think even some grocery stores I've visited. They're light, airy, crunchy, and a pleasant blend of chocolate and hazelnut. I can only imagine what Kerry's version is like.

Do you mean you didn't care for the flavor, or you didn't see the point of using Marmite to get that flavor? It looks good!

Were the quince growing at the Herculaneum? If so, what was the connection? If not, where were they growing?

Got a recipe for that? I'm thinking about making a green tomato relish with some of these babies.

I made my first attempt at fried green tomatoes last night. We had friends come for dinner, and I warned them in advance that dinner would be a series of experimental dishes. (These are truly good friends!) I sliced the tomatoes about 1/2" thick. I dipped roughly half of the tomato slices in an egg/milk wash then dredged them in corn meal. The other slices I simply fried, with no coating. At the table we had choices of a remoulade sauce and a buttermilk ranch dressing. It was interesting to see how some of the tomato slices fell apart, I suppose because I let them get too soft. @TicTac, thanks for the idea for trying some uncoated! We all liked the uncoated slices with that caramelization. I have to admit however that we preferred the coated tomatoes for the contrast in texture. The coating fell off of some, and we spent some time discussing ways to make it adhere better. The accidentally-uncoated tomatoes weren't as good as the deliberately-naked TicTac tomatoes. In poking around these forums and reviewing this earlier topic on Fried Green Tomatoes I found a link to this great-looking recipe from The Spruce Eats for Oven-Fried Green Tomatoes. I want to try this recipe, too: I really hate pan-frying in the house because of the cleanup. I have a lot more green tomatoes with which to experiment. I had asked the farmer for a dozen, if he could spare them, and by the time picking rolled around he couldn't remember, so he brought me a box!

I was imagining tomato "hammocks" made of netting that allowed them to swing without bumping into each other, or compressing each other from weight, with said hammocks strung across a frame in a box. I think the pantyhose / tomato snake idea is more compact and might be more effective.

Your food always looks so good and so inventive that it both shames and inspires me! Most of all, it tempts me to buy a Kansas hunting license and come join the next party! Although I might have company...as noted above you're likely to get a bunch of us crashing it next time, licenses or no.... Many thanks for blogging again!

Mandarin peels scraped lightly, finely chopped, and dried make a very nice addition to breakfast cereal (oatmeal, for those who can stand it, or dry cereal) or fruit salads or vegetable salads. Heck, I've thrown them into pilaf to great effect. Once dried, those small chunks of peel last a long time if they're stored in a dry environment.

Maybe I've never had proper Lebanon bologna. The stuff I've had from grocery delis (all west of the Mississippi, I might add) has left me cold: not nasty, but too...too...garlicky? Bland? I don't know. What defines Lebanon bologna? As to the shrimp vs. octopus **yaki I am utterly ignorant of it all, and glad to see/read anything you care to share about it. I don't even know what the -yaki means; I know it from sukiyaki (sp?) and that clearly shows how little I know. No, you definitely aren't talking to the wind!

Those bierocks are the brightest stars in a sparkling layout...it all looks so good! Thanks for the tutorial on the bierocks. I have to download this page and save it to try.

This little gizmo is providing me a great deal of vicarious fun. It makes me wish we had a "Whee!" icon. I'm so glad you're playing with and posting about it!

It's tough to have too many of those!

Directly on the pan from the A4? Pretty handy, if so!

Well, you're saying from experience what I thought I'd read about the circulators with a built-in clamp. The pot's rim can't be too wide or too flared, because then the circulator won't clamp properly. If the pot is too shallow the circulator won't be able to clamp to the side and still sit above the bottom of the pot. Thanks for the confirmation on both those points.

I didn't know that either, and I'm still puzzled as to how you do it. More information, please?

Did you make the cookies, @Kim Shook, or use the Pepperidge Farm version? I never realized, until your great photo above, why those are called chess cookies.

I'd do that if I were interested in investing "a ton of money" (she isn't, yet) and if I had a place to put it. Running out of space in the overflow pantries, and not ready yet to give up the guest room!

We might need to see some specs on the circulator before being able to answer. Is it this one? If so, then its 1200 watts sounds like a pretty good deal, but you can get it for $49.99 on Amazon and that's a better price. If it's another one then you might be better served spending an extra $30 for the Anova Nano which is only 750 watts but isn't restricted by the built-in clamp of the NutriChef. (@Shelby has a Gourmia? iGourmia? circulator, I think, with such a clamp. Maybe she can say whether it's a nuisance.) That vacuum sealer price is a good one if the unit works, but I must say that I don't use my vacuum sealer much for sous vide. As often as not I use Ziplock-style bags that I can seal, wash thoroughly afterward and reuse. I admit that I find it absurdly fun to use my FoodSaver and watch the air get sucked out of the bag, but for sous vide purposes I generally use the displacement method: squeeze out a fair amount of the air, close the bag most of the way, submerge it while keeping the opening above water, let the water compress the bag so the rest of the air comes out. Going without the vacuum sealer is even more money saved. Incidentally, if you intend to sous vide something with liquid (a marinade, say, or oil) inside the bag, the liquid will almost certainly get sucked into the vacuum sealer and wreck it. That's another reason I've gone to the displacement method. Edited to add: while I was typing this, JoNorvelleWalker raised the same question I did about the wattage. As her post indicates, the Nano hasn't gotten much love around here. It is, however, the least expensive of the Anova line.

@Franci, what is the knotted white object near the upper right of the photo?

What a brilliant mantra that is!

Based on that WebMD article, @Paul Bacino, I'm glad you didn't try much of that brew. Too bad about the honey...it all might have made a wonderful dye!

Huh. WebMD says it's poisonous, but in the article to which heidih linked above, Edna Lewis wrote I'm trying to reconcile these two articles, which I think are both from reputable sources. Do you suppose that in the early spring poke "sallet" the pokeweed toxin wasn't concentrated enough to be a problem? Not that I plan to try it, mind.