Smithy

As far as navigation goes, I usually find the Index, or the Table of Contents, helpful for getting what I want out of a cookbook. Often the ToC has live links to each chapter; in my preferred Kindle formats, each chapter in turn has a live-link ToC. The Search engine helps too, especially in combination with Eat Your Books. All that said, I still don't find the Kindle books as satisfying or user-friendly as the physical books, with the sole exception of portability. @Toliver, I too am impressed with your postings about book deals, even when some go off sale too quickly. My credit card bill is a regular testament to my level of appreciation.

I keep meaning to try those marinated mushrooms, and forgetting to do so. Thanks for the reminder, @HungryChris. (For those who don't know, his recipe is in RecipeGullet, here.)

I had in mind a specific recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's Step-by-Step Cooking:Over 150 Recipes from India and the Far East, Including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. Of all things, it includes cucumbers with the shrimp, and I have a lot of lemon cucumbers to use. Thanks for the suggestion on the red. I didn't see this until the dish was already completed, but there will be a next time. Again, I didn't see this until too late. I may actually have some dried coconut, but I ended up doing some wild substitutions instead, as you'll see. I appreciate the instructions on how to make coconut milk, though. I'll use that trick in the future. The recipe in question is "Spicy Shrimp and Cucumber Curry" (p. 71 in the book) and it's a Malaysian curry. The ingredients include said cucumber and shrimp, along with onions (or shallots), garlic, ground coriander, ground fennel seeds, ground white pepper, ground cumin, ground turmeric, hot red chilies, whole fennel seeds, sugar, coconut milk and vegetable oil. I looked at the ingredient list and compared the spices to the above-shown outdated jars of curry paste, and opted for the Patak's Mild Curry paste. What ensued after that bore little resemblance to Jaffrey's recipe, except for the inclusion of the cucumbers and shrimp. Patak's jar calls for the addition of tomatoes to the chicken curry on the label, and it sounded like a good idea. In a true cross-cultural moment, I added: In place of the missing coconut milk I combined half-and-half with unsweetened almond milk. I omitted the onions because for once we have none in the house. Yes, the whole thing probably was a travesty, but it tasted pretty good anyway, served over rice. It would have been prettier if I'd garnished with fresh cilantro or parsley, or chopped green onions. My darling thought it needed a bit of sweetening, and fine-tuned his bowlful with Worcestershire sauce. We were surprised at how well the cucumbers worked, but he thought a green vegetable would have been a fine addition as well. Two things I noticed: the sauce was gritty as it came out of the jar, and never smoothed out. I'm guessing that's a trait of the Patak's paste and its not being finely ground. The other thing that happened was that the sauce separated, with a layer of spicy oil exuded from the rest of the sauce. I've read about that happening but don't remember why it happens. Would the coconut milk have acted as an emulsifier?

Ha! A kindred spirit! Here's what I've unearthed from my cabinet stock so far, and it's all older than yours. I've found some good-looking recipes for shrimp curry and was planning to try one tonight; unfortunately I don't seem to have any coconut milk in the house. Since I'll be taking liberties with the recipe in question anyway (I cannot let the shrimp wait longer) I'm going to take a shortcut and use the jarred curry paste rather than starting from scratch with the spices.

Welcome! It sounds like you'll fit right in here. What's a typical meal for you to cook? How about your daughter, with her more elaborate preparations?

Prairie Homestead's web site talks about clabbered milk, why it's an unfamiliar concept to many people nowadays, and how it's used. No nonsense, just good old food history: 20 Ways to Use Sour Raw Milk. It has bonus information: finally, I've read a plausible explanation for the brand name of Clabber Girl baking powder. I still remember my grandmother saying things along the lines of "when I saw you up that tree, my guts just clabbered". By the time I came along, milk was pasteurized and clabber was a thing of the past - but it was common during her childhood.

It's interesting that what we call Ranch dressing is called American dressing in Europe, according to that story.

Welcome to eGullet, @Wolf, and thank you for that information! The Lika Schnitzel sounds excellent. Is this something you make at home, or is it more a dish to be found at a restaurant?

Those look delicious @Okanagancook! Have you written before the time and temperature you use for this? Are these starchy or waxy potatoes, or does it matter? I cooked up a batch of premade crab cakes yesterday and am convinced that my air fryer cooks items much more quickly than my oven for the same temperature. (This may be true of all air fryers, but I only have the one to go by.) The instructions for these crab cakes are to preheat the oven to 400F, put the crab cakes on a baking sheet in the oven, and cook for 24 minutes or until 160F in the center. I checked at 15 minutes or a little before. They were already quite brown and the interior was at least 160F. The rest of dinner wasn't done, so I reduced the temperature to something fairly low - 175, maybe - and turned the machine off at 20 minutes to prevent overcooking. I've never appreciated or used the 25F automatic offset in my full-sized oven using convection mode, but based on the quick cooking in this little air fryer I'm going to try that 25F reduction whenever I'm following standard (nonconvective) baking recipes. It appears this little unit has much more aggressive air flow than my oven. The crab cakes were done perfectly. We won't get this brand again, but we'll cook crab cakes in the air fryer again. I'll try potatoes again, too.

The post above was more expensive than usual for me. Good thing I'd already purchased Deep Run Roots (electronic and hard copy) some time ago, or it would have been even worse. I have lots of fun reading and cooking ahead of me!

Please tell more about the eggplant casserole: both what it's like at The Cupboard -- your target, as it were -- and what you've done to reproduce it. I like eggplant and am always on the lookout for good things to do with it. Especially if they're easy.

A simple "like" or "delicious" or "thank you" isn't enough for that tale, @kayb. I know well the pang of letting go the old family place, even when it's the right thing to do, and how difficult it can be to arrive at that decision. I thought perhaps you were going to get a cutting or three from that pear tree to start a new one by grafting it at your current abode. Have you thought of that? At any rate the outing, the harvest and the preserves have the makings of wonderful memories. Thank you for the post, and for sharing your pear preserve recipe.

I like the design on those chop sticks. Tell me about eating the potato salad with them, please: does one have to more or less shovel the potato salad with them the way one would sticky rice?

I tried those chips yesterday. Meh. The initial slicing, drizzling with olive oil and seasoning, then roasting, was very promising. The aroma of those roasting tomatoes drifted upstairs and down, and made the house smell gob-smackingly, drive-you-crazy-to-eat-RIGHT-NOW delicious. Perhaps I should have stopped there. I tried to get the dried crisp texture described in the original recipe, and decided to stop while most of the tomato slices still had some juice because others were getting too dry. Nonetheless the tomatoes looked and smelled delicious before I added the parmesan and put them under the broiler for a brief melt. After that, I had a dubious mix of tomato slices charred to a crisp and tomato slices that were juicy but too tart, as though their acids had been concentrated. I tried a few of both types and was unimpressed. It was especially disappointing because the original smells had been so promising. They didn't go to waste, however. I chopped the lot up with fresh basil, and at the last minute added it to a sheet pan dinner of sliced and roasted potatoes, cauliflower and Andouille sausage, tossed with yet more olive oil (and the pan scrapings) and roasted until browned.The crispy tomatoes gave a croutonesque crunch and the juicy tomatoes added a piquance that livened everything in the dinner. All I can show is a meager portion of leftovers. It looked better in the bowl last night, before the basil had lost its bright green color. So: this treatment of tomatoes wasn't a loss, but I won't do it again unless someone else posts a win on it. The simpler treatment of oven-roasting with olive oil, basil and salt per @ElainaA's recipe seems more foolproof. (And yes, her recipe uses cherry tomatoes but I've used the treatment to good effect with chunks of larger tomato also.)

I made that same recipe a couple of days ago, bacon and all. Our family loved it too. I don't think I had to cook any longer to finish the pasta, but now I can't remember.

Not funny about the credit card alarm, but think of the money you're saving!

Here's the reference, for those interested. I am one of them. Did you do them yet, kayb? My husband's daughter and I spent the Labor Day weekend making salsa. It's our third year doing so, and we're getting it down to a fairly efficient process. Unfortunately, the fellow who got us started on this with his bumper crop of tomatoes, peppers and onions has stopped having bumper crops. We've gone to the local produce farm instead. Buehler's Produce has a barn loaded with tomatoes, squash, spuds, eggplant, a great variety of peppers, and (in the refrigerator) green beans, cabbage, okra, and surely some things I'm forgetting. Truckloads of freshly-harvested sweet corn kept backing up to the building, and customers kept leaving with corn almost as quickly as it came in. Aside from the sweet corn that we bought for dinner, we came away with these fixings for salsa: It's a nice, meditative way to visit as we chop. She did the tomatoes, I did the peppers and onions, with some assistance from her mother-in-law. The recipe calls for roasting it all in an oven pan. We tried cooking it on stove top the first day, and it took forever to cook down. We suspected it would, but the pot seemed more manageable than giant pans on baking sheets, so we gave it a shot on the first batch. After that we resumed oven roasting. The left top pan is before stirring; the right top pan is after. The bottom is what it looks like after 2 hours. We've canned 48 pints of this salsa, with varying heat levels. Sheer gold, I tell you. I'm tempted to do more, but I also want to try the aforementioned tomato parmesan chips.

Thank you for that. Barhi is one of my favorite varieties, but I've only seen them when they were darker. The linked article is enlightening. Thanks!

Please say more about the "dates", @BonVivant. I've never seen them so pale - even the Deglet Noor - and they're rounder (as opposed to oblong) than most I've seen. How do they taste?

That all looks good, but the bacon especially grabs me. It looks perfectly done: crisp, not burnt, not soggy. I could take that and the tomatoes (why do I forget to do tomatoes that way?) and be satisfied.

It worked! I checked the gasket carefully, once I got it out. Couldn't see any cracks or damage. Soaked it in said mineral oil, then wiped it off and reinstalled it. No leaks. Thanks again for the idea.

I agree that the burger-flipping robot in this video leaves a lot to be desired except as an exercise in robotics, but this isn't the same machine. Flippy, the machine in the video link above, is at Caliburger, a restaurant in Pasadena (near Los Angeles). The machine in the first post is at Creator, a restaurant in a San Francisco neighborhood. The Creator article claims that the humans load all the supplies into the machine and the finished product comes out the end, in their containers, all done in a transparent enclosure so folks can watch. It sounds much closer to your vision of a proper burger-assembling machine. No doubt someone will post a YouTube video about Creator before long.

Good question. I'll try it, and report back. Thanks for the idea.

I'd like to see a video of that machine in action. The burgers sound good, and the air quality / worker health aspect is impressive.

Food truck stuck in a freeway shut down manages to make money and help frustrated commuters: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-food-truck-freeway-20180824-story.html