Smithy

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

Yes. In case it isn't clear, ours have had heavy use: in the car, in the trailer, sometimes even in the house or the hot tub. I have other travel mugs I keep for sentimental reasons (corporate logo from my former job, for instance) but never use them any more because they don't hold a candle to the Contigos.

We've been very happy with our Contigo Autoseal mugs. We chose mugs with handles, as shown in the link, but they also come without handles. The mugs hold temperature better than any others we've tried. I learned about them from a friend who took hers on a backpacking trip around Europe: she'd fill it with boiling water in the morning, and have hot water for tea a few hours later. It didn't leak. Here's a picture of one of ours, not-leaking. Clockwise, from upper left: coffee inside; lid on; tipped over (for more than a minute); righted again. No leak. The only apparent age issue is that the outer coat of the mug, which once matched the lid, has worn off to reveal the stainless steel below. Note: I discovered, while making this photo series, that our other mug DOES now leak around the lid's rim; the gasket must be wearing. I think they're 4 years old. They didn't leak on our boat trip last year.

Nice pun! My mother, a born leftie and forced ambie, thought so.

Based on this recommendation, I took a look and also bought the second one.