Smithy

As I understand it, not all fiddleheads are created equal. How do you know which are the right ones to pick? (Ours are just popping up now too, along with - finally! - the ramps.)

I second the reference for Fine Cooking magazine. I've learned a great deal from it. Over the years their features have seemed to come in cycles (how many issues for 'the perfect roast' have I seen around Christmas?) but they always have good articles and they continue to innovate. For instance: in nearly every issue they now have a "Create Your Own xxx" feature in which they show the techniques and proportions for some food. It might be chili, or ice cream, or macarons, or Chinese stir-fry. Their web site has the create-your-own items as interactive pieces, where you can select your ingredients from their list, set up your recipe, and print it. Another recent innovation is that if you're a print subscriber, you can also get the digital editions delivered (no extra charge) to your tablet or phone. My other favorite cooking magazine is Saveur. I think they're a very happy combination of food porn and travel guide; their articles are interesting, photography is great, and I learn about other parts of the world and their food habits. They also have recipes and a good web presence. I don't learn as much about technique from them, but every once in a while a gem turns up: how to make baguettes, for instance.

The variety, apparent quality and sheer quantity of food are astonishing. What happens to any leftovers? Do you know? Thanks for the extra stories. I suppose with a 2-year-old, the expediency of a beach bucket may be better than the alternative. ;-) I'll bet you've come away with 'chaos' as the new slang culinary term. :-D

As the others said, you can never go wrong with cookies. By the way: welcome to the eGullet forums!

Wow! Thank you for the photo of the peacock fish; words don't do it justice. I think I'll have to leave that one for someone else to do. However, the drunken fish recipe(s) sound promising, and I'm always looking for new ways to do green beans. I appreciate the additional notes on Shaoxing wine and the type of soy sauce needed.

Let me add my "Welcome, AnnieLo!" to the others'. You've asked a great question. There's been a lot of discussion about cooking in clay pots over the years. I have the eG Forums in general and Paula Wolfert in particular to thank for getting me started on clay pot cooking. The comments above about thermal shock are valid; however, I've had (and used) many clay pots for years, with no breakage or mishaps. Those 'pots' include glazed ceramic casserole dishes as well as unglazed fired clay pots, a tagine, and a Romertopf covered dish. You may want to look into the Moroccan Tagine Cooking topic to see some of the earlier discussions about cooking in clay. Despite the title, the comments also wandered into cooking in other shapes of clay pots, and the food is not restricted to Moroccan meals. There are links to related topics that seemed to deserve their own titles, and in fact the topic was generated by a braising course in the eGullet Culinary Institute. You may also be interested in this topic: Cooking with Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, in which members cooked from the book and compared results. Don't be shy about asking questions; come on in and join the fun!

Yes, it's a pleasant surprise to see you here, liuzhou. That's interesting about the tiger skin peppers. My usual way of cooking hot peppers is to blister them, then peel and use the peeled flesh in whatever I'm making. It looks like you're using the skins as well. Do you remove the seeds and veins first?

That's a good move. Welcome, Emeline!

The ramps are FINALLY up! I transplanted some from a road right-of-way to our back yard, and foraged a few while I was at it.

We were out and about today, and decided to go into the local largest wine (and beer and spirits) store: Cash Wise Liquor in Duluth, MN*. We accosted a nice young saleswoman who thought the whole wine roulette idea sounded like a lot of fun. "What kind of wine are you after?" she asked. I explained that it was supposed to be a surprise, but that for price purposes I should probably pick something from, say, the second shelf from the floor. (Are all wine stores arranged this way, where the price gets higher with altitude? Or is that a Minnesota thing?) I warned her to hang on to me, lest I inadvertently purchase many broken bottles. She really got into it. The selection: Another Malbec! I'm sorry now that I didn't keep a bottle of Alamos Malbec, our last wine, for the sake of comparison. I confess I was hoping she'd steer me into, say, some Italian or Spanish blend. Nonetheless, this is wine roulette: totally random. I hope this is a wine readily available elsewhere among the participants! Barefoot Malbec, no vintage year visible, $5.97/bottle, on sale (about $1 off normal price). 1. Disclaimer: we're steady customers of this store, but have no business connection with them. 2. Apologies for the quality of some of the photos. We did this on the spur of the moment, and my cell phone was the only available camera.

You're way over my head on this, but didn't I see numbers earlier for the target aW to be around 0.65? I don't think I've seen any numbers as low as what you posted above.

For what it's worth, the cinnamon I used to get in Egyptian spice markets looked more like the Indonesian cinnamon on the right in your photo. If I asked its source, I don't remember the answer.

Thanks for that additional information, hiuray. I'm not surprised to learn that there are many varieties of "Asian" eggplants; there are also multiple varieties of the fat round eggplants. Unfortunately, in my part of the country the labelers generally satisfy themselves with "Asian", with the default "Eggplant" occasionally modified as "Globe" or "Italian". I don't know what they'd do with the small, round eggplants that are about the size of duck eggs. :-)Thanks also for the confirmation that sweet and sour pork is a genuine Chinese dish that's been corrupted in the USA. I'm looking forward to trying the real thing; I'm betting that it's a more nuanced dish than what you so aptly describe as gloopy, sweet and vibrantly orange. I've always thought the stuff I tried was too polarized: the culinary equivalent of a teeter-totter that just won't stabilize.

We certainly would! What kind of sauce, if any, do you like with them?

You've gone to a great deal of work. In addition to the work of translation, thank you for providing a single document that can contain all the updates and corrections. One of my dilemmas is that I frequently don't know which ones to ask about. If it sounds very familiar then it may not provide much education for me; if it's very unfamiliar-sounding then it may contain ingredients too exotic for me to find: sea cucumbers, for instance, or even fresh bamboo. Ginger and garlic are easy to find. There are a lot of eggplant recipes listed, and I'm always looking for new ways to prepare eggplant. Am I correct in thinking these are the long, thin (what we call 'Asian') eggplants instead of the more round globe eggplants typical of Italian cookery? A few of the recipes that caught my eye, largely because I don't know what their names indicate, are these: 烧汁铁板茄子 Iron Plate Eggplant /499 金牌烧汁酿广茄 Gold Medal Braised Eggplant /500 三鲜烧味茄 Three Delicacy Roast Flavour Eggplant /500东北茄段 North-Eastern Eggplant /527 天津茄泥 Tianjin Eggplant /527 京酱八宝茄 Beijing Eight Treasure Eggplant /527 If you'd care to describe some of them, or else select one of them at random and translate that recipe, I'd be delighted to try it if possible. I'm intrigued by this recipe. Preserved egg? For how long? A description of this would be nice:Tiger Skin Preserved Egg /387 What are these like? Jinsha Green Beans /341 Drunken fish and Mandarin fish sound interesting:Shaoxing Drunken Fish /379Peacock Mandarin Fish /574Grandmother's Family Style Drunken Fish /393 I could go on and on, but I don't want to be *too* greedy. I'll stop at one more, for now:Sweet and Sour Pork Tenderloin /484I ask about this because I've always been disappointed in what passes for "sweet and sour" dishes in Chinese restaurants in the USA. It may be because my tastes just don't run in that direction, but I'm prepared to think I've just never had a properly balanced sweet and sour dish. I'd be interested in reading more about any of these dishes; I eliminated nearly a dozen others before posting, lest I discourage you from responding.

Right you are. Bake the bottom crust, bake the top crust, cook the filling; assemble and serve.

I think the idea is that it's stiff enough after baking to fit over all like a crisp cap. I've never thought of cooking an apple filling separately from the crust, much less cooking both crusts separately from each other. Bless Shirley Corriher for her innovations, but it seems a lot of complication compared to my family's standard apple pie with crumb crust. I'll happily try it if someone else makes it! ;-)

It has been a beautiful and exciting series of reports. Thank you all for sharing the fun with the rest of us!

Unusual, no: not in this company, anyway. You may not want to tell your neighbors and/or dinner guests.

So: Who else wants to play with the Malbec? and Who wants to start the next round?

Welcome, Liz! It sounds like you'll fit right in here :-)

Huh. I can't recall seeing "Degrees" used as a measure of chemical concentration before. What's wrong with %, ppm, ug/L?

There should be some way to associate bacon with early August. Sir Francis Bacon, alas, was born in January.

In my part of the country they celebrate St. Urho's Day on March 16. (It is not a coincidence that it's the day before St. Patrick's Day.) St. Urho is, according to the story, the Patron Saint of Finland because he drove the grasshoppers out of Finland and saved the grape crop. (Finnish wine is highly esteemed to this day, yes?) The locals - those would be the residents of Finland, Minnesota and the surrounding area - have a big parade and festival, with lots of food and partying. There is rumored to be a dance involving a stomp, waved hands and chant, in Finnish, "Grasshopper, grasshopper, go home!" The official colors are purple and green, for the grapes and the grasshoppers. Strangely, the official foods are most likely to involve beer and Polish sausages, but one can't have everything. Perhaps it's time to go national with St. Urho's Day.

He'd have to be measuring into a bag or small container first,which is why the fishing scale might work as well but be less, well, fishy. I have the same question as others here about the need for such precision and accuracy, but this may be a case of "one wants what one wants".