Smithy

Oh, another of my favorites: Steam cut-up broccoli, then toss with toasted pine nuts, chopped sun-dried tomatoes and some oil, and a vinegar or your choice to adjust the flavorings. Balsamic vinegar works well. I've seen this done with raisins in the mix also, but I forget to add them about half the time.

Sun-dried tomatoes in oil are one of my standard, must-have condiments for easy food preparation. I don't know specifically about the Costco brand, so take these as general ideas. One note first: I almost always chop these, if they haven't already been chopped. Otherwise they tend to pull out of whatever filling I've put them into with a single bite. It's messy for the eater. 1. Brown and/or soften (as appropriate) chopped onions, chicken, garlic, and a green vegetable like celery or asparagus if you've the material and the inclination. You can use the packing oil for this if there's enough, or use it to supplement the cooking oil. Throw in the tomatoes (chopped) and toss all with cooked pasta - I generally use butterflies for this but I think any flattish pasta would work. Finish with chopped parsley. This is a wildly variable - that means flexible - dish. You can add shredded parmesan, or not. You can put cooked artichoke hearts (not marinated, but grilled if you can get them) in the mix. The possibilities are myriad, and that's why I like keeping roasted (or sun-dried) tomatoes, packed in oil, on hand. 2. Keep things simple and meatless. Toast some nuts, soften some garlic, warm the tomatoes, and toss with pasta. 3. Chop the tomatoes into small bits. Mix with herbs of your choice (parsley, rosemary, thyme, etc) and softened alliums of your choice (can you detect a theme here?) and bread crumbs or egg for binding, then roll up some flattened chicken thighs or breasts around it. Brown them in a pan until done. Use a little chicken broth, with or without wine, to make a pan sauce around those. 4. Alternatively, forget about stuffing the chicken. Just brown it in a pan, preferably with some of the tomato packing oil and flavor ingredients of your choice, then add the above-mentioned wine and/or broth and let it cook down. Toss some of the tomatoes into the sauce as it cooks down so they can be used as a topping for the chicken. 5. I'm on a chicken kick right now but these tomatoes can also be used with pork, beef, lamb or an assertive fish if you like the fish/tomato flavor combination. I've added them to the filling for a rolled pork loin and they're pretty good. I should note that if you're using them in a filling you need to drain them to get the filling texture right. 6. Use them to augment jarred spaghetti sauce, if you like, or to boost a pallid lasagne filling. 7. Put them in stuffed eggplant or stuffed peppers, along with ground meat, flavorings as noted above, and hefty amounts of bread crumbs and/or eggs, with a good cheesy topping. 8. You can use them to augment Mexican food too; although I think that would take, say, enchilada sauce into a nontraditional direction, it would still be good. By the way - you don't have to use an entire jar at once. I think for any given dinner, cooking for two with (theoretically) leftovers, I'll use around 1/2 to 1 cup's worth. The rest can be stored in the fridge - make sure the tomatoes are still covered with oil, and if necessary you can add more olive oil. I don't know how long the food safety experts would say you can store this safely in the fridge. If you worry about that (I do, some) you can also portion it into smaller containers and freeze them. The oil congeals rather than freezing, but there's no fear of bacteria growing over the course of months. I'm being vague about proportions because I kind of wing it on these things. If that's a bit too vague, let me know and I'll try to be more specific! Enjoy those tomatoes! I think, once you see how much they add to your cookery possibilities, you'll want to keep them on hand.

I like the idea of getting trapped air to expand and help push against the stopper, but I'd be leery of subjecting glass that old to actual boiling water. Along those lines I suggest gently heating the bottle only - not the stopper - in warm liquid. The trapped air will expand gradually. In addition, as the bottle warms the neck should expand in diameter. If you can keep the stopper cooler than the bottle you may get that joint to release, or at least loosen enough to let Andie's glycerine trick work.

That's my favorite method as well; alternatively I preserve the chillies in oil -- though apparently the topic starter looks for other methods. Welcome to eGullet, fvandrog!How do you preserve chilies in oil and be sure they're safe from, say, botulism? Or is that not an issue for chilies as it is for garlic? Edited to add: Welcome also to Liz Ayers! What a great first topic!

Is this one of those tubes specially marketed for the purpose? Or have you found some common household item that makes a good tube? I've been intrigued by the "garlic peeler" tubes but - despite my love of gadgets - reluctant to let this particular specialty item take up space in my kitchen unless it got a resounding review.

I've tried it, and it worked pretty well. I don't recall getting 100% success out of the deal, but I think it got at least 80% of the peels off in a short time.

Well, FWIW, I'm not intereswted in minced garlic, just the whole cloves. I've always been disappointed with jarred, minced garlic. ... Shel Ah! I misread "jarred, peeled" as "jarred, minced". Never mind...

With all due respect to Cook's Illustrated, I disagree with their findings regarding jarred minced garlic when cooked. I decided years ago that it never measured up to the fresh stuff, even after cooking. Perhaps the stuff has improved since then, or I was using a substandard product. I don't know about canned or frozen brands, but Amore makes a concentrated roasted garlic paste that comes in metal tubes that roll up like toothpaste tubes. (Refrigerate after puncturing the seal!) I like their products: sun-dried tomato paste; basil pesto; anchovy paste and roasted garlic paste are all in my convenience-food stock.

I find it very difficult to document as I go, unless there's a period when something simmers, rests, or otherwise gives me some down time. Otherwise I have to wait until I'm done, then write it down to the best of my knowledge, then write impressions and suggestions for change the next time around. My husband has a good palate and often has suggestions for additions or changes. Since our flavor profile preferences are slightly different (he'll add sweet, I'll add sour) we end up with a pretty good balance.

Make a roux and add it. Use tapioca flour as a thickener. 1) There's a really good discussion about seasoning cast iron pans over on the Kitchen Consumer forum; although the title refers to "re-seasoning" the discussion comes around to seasoning as well. I think one of the best posts actually points to a blog post that's especially enlightening - sorry if this looks like a runaround - but the link to the post on this forum is http://egullet.org/p1903103. 2) Another possible way to thicken a stew - this is how I typically do it - is to dredge (lightly coat) the beef chunks in flour before browning the meat at the beginning of the stew cooking. I usually end up with a good thick stew as a result. <Edited to add: wish I'd realized before posting that the original question was from 2004!>

Not at all. They were thick chops and were slightly pink in the middle when I cut into them. Yes, they were still mostly crispy. But I found the snow white crumbs a little too stark for my liking. I guess I was expecting them to brown more after baking (darn you Shake 'n' Bake for skewing my expectations after all these years! ). Thanks to all the responses. I will give some of the suggestions a go the next time I bake more chops. Toliver, we use about the same temperature and time for our pork chops - actually it might even be 375 for 25 - 30 minutes - and get the good results you describe. As far as the browning goes: another possibility is to coat the chops as you describe and then give them a squirt with an olive oil mister, or with Pam. I don't know for sure that it would work - our chop coat involves corn meal as well as panko and seasonings, so I'm not sure we've tried your method - but the "squirt with oil" technique has helped us crisp a few things.

Thanks for that link, Kerry. It's an excellent article and fascinating reading! I learned a lot from it.

You might reconsider the liver bit. I was surprised to find that it thickened the sauce and improved the texture without shifting the flavor noticeably. When I say "surprised", I mean pleasantly so.

I'm not sure that the butane has lead contaminants in it; the way the California law works, that warning may apply to the butane canister and not the butane itself. I can't think of a reason for butane to contain lead, whereas steel can have lead added to improve its properties for some applications. I looked at a couple of Material Safety Data Sheets for butane and did not find lead listed as a trace contaminant. I admit that may mean I didn't look hard enough. Suppose there is lead present in the butane. If it's in elemental form it'll be solid in the canister, and probably stay there - or else get spit out via the nozzle without igniting. You asked whether heat does something to lead. Basically, it can make it change from solid to liquid to gas. Lead melts at 327C / 621 F and doesn't turn to a gas until it gets up to 1749C / 3180F. Your canister is at room temperature and the released gas doesn't start getting hot until it ignites in the outside world (hopefully in the torch flame!). In turn, that flame may be getting hot enough to melt lead - I'd guess that it does - but it can't be turning the lead to gas without incinerating your food in the process. I think it's very unlikely that you'll get lead contamination of your food via that mechanism, even if there's lead present in the butane. The paragraph above describes what would happen to elemental lead inside the canister. I haven't been able to find a listing of lead compounds that might be gaseous and present in butane. Again, that may mean I haven't looked hard enough. With all due respect to California's interest in environmental health and safety, I think they went overboard with the current system of warnings they have in place. As Baselerd notes above, pretty much everything has a warning of some sort to satisfy the state's regulation. In my opinion it dilutes the utility of the warning system, a la The Boy Who Cried Wolf. In the interests of full disclosure: I have investigated and thought on this topic for, oh, about an hour. There may be someone who works or has worked in the field with better information; if so, I hope he or she chimes in.

Thanks for that explanation about the glaze and crazing, haresefur. I have to admit that I'd only thought about glaze in terms of porosity and lead content; I hadn't thought about the glaze acting as a moisture trap for the internal pottery. Furthermore, I had no idea that crazing was due to a difference between the thermal expansion coefficients of the glaze and the underlying clay. Fascinating!

What do you mean exactly? I mean that you described at what point you'd have the PID controllers call for "on" but you didn't state when they'd call for "off". Without setting the "off" parameters you'd have an overheat. It might have been an oversight in your description instead of in your plan, of course!

I wonder, what does the vinegar do, and why? Does it work on all potato types, or only the waxier potatoes? WOW. That sounds delicious!

Have you allowed for upper limits on each of the PID controllers?

No offense intended (I'm probably missing something) but the pitcher of smoke sounds like an unnecessary step to me. Why not put the plate of material to be smoked inside the pot that contains the smoking material? For instance: put the chips or tea leaves in a foil packet on the bottom of the pot, then put the food to be smoked in a steamer over the pile, and put the lid on the pot? Sally Schneider advocates something along those lines for smoking in a wok. Edited to add the pot lid.

Add my congratulations! It's great to see Rancho Gordo / Steve get good recognition for his work and his products!

Glazed tagines may be intended for serving, rather than cooking. That's been the case in the handpainted Moroccan tagines I'd admired. That may be the reason for people paying more attention to unglazed terracotta tagines than the glazed ones. Back in 2005 we had a free-for-all here with experiments comparing the results of cooking in unglazed vs. glazed pots, and heavy vs. lightweight pots. (To start the search, go to the EGCI course titled "The Truth About Braising - discussion and questions" and then follow the link where the discussion split off into the importance of the cookware's material. As I recall, we participants agreed that the massive pots with tight lids were much better for a braise than the lighter pots or pans with foil covers. In addition, a number of us thought that the porous materials - i.e. unglazed clay - produced better results for a lot of slowly-cooked dishes. With that in mind, I've been leery of the enamel-clad tagines - Le Creuset makes them, and I think that's the structure of the Emile Henry tagines although I may be mistaken about that. (If I am, somebody please correct me!) Having said that, I'll also note that I've made a number of Moroccan-recipe dishes in heavy casseroles - no tagine shape in sight - and been very happy with the results. The amount of liquid needed for unglazed clay is different. Hmm. Maybe we should re-open this line of inquiry and do a number of comparisons? I think Syzygies' points above about pan geometry and flavor mixing are good ones. The geometry can be important, and that would account for the tagra shape. (I don't have a tagra and haven't missed it, for what that's worth.) I'm not such a purist that I want a special pot for each meat or each cuisine, but I don't cook fish in my unglazed cookware; that flavor might be with my chicken or beef or pork for a long time. Duck, chicken, pork, beef and vegetables are pretty compatible. Salmon with those? I dunno about that. It seems as though you *should* be able to broil the bottom part of your tagine if it's already hot. On another topic someone noted that they've heard of tagine bottoms breaking under such usage. I think it depends on so many variables - including the clay, and how well the tagine was originally fired, and how hot your broiler gets, that it's difficult to predict the outcome. Remember that the Moroccan "broiler" consists of a plate of coals set atop the cooked dish. That's a lot less heat than a modern oven would produce. Sorry I can't give a more definitive answer. Maybe somebody else can.

I understand and appreciate the reservation expressed above regarding the use of commercially-grown and -packed lemons. Speaking as a child of a California citrus rancher, however, I'd like to add these points: 1. The pesticides approved for use on crops in California (and, I think, in the USA) break down after some period of time - and they must be applied well in advance of when crews would be present to pick the fruit, in order to allow the pesticides time to break down before humans are exposed to them. After the crops are picked they're sent to a packing house where they get the bejesus washed out of them before they're sweated, treated with a fungicide, and packed. Maybe when people object to pesticides they're really worrying about fungicides, now that I think of it. Either way, I wouldn't worry - and I don't - about the trace residuals that *might* be present in the peel. 2. If you are still worried about pesticides, buy organically-grown fruit. According to my friends in the business, the certification is rigorous enough that it should give you peace of mind about the lack of chemical application. When I have a choice I take fruit I've picked myself from the tree, but that's because I think the quality suffers in the packing house - more's the pity! But that's another discussion topic.

*bump* Someplace up-topic, a few people have asked whether there's any use for the brine of the lemons. I use a small amount of brine to add a kick to sauces or vinaigrettes. I also use the pulp in skillet-style dishes (stovetop cookery); the pulp adds flavor and a bit of texture. I don't know why people say to stick with the rind only.

I found the link to the discussion on preserved lemons: it's http://egullet.org/p76944, over in the Middle East Cookery section. Rather than try to point to a specific method or recipe - there are several - I'll let the interested reader go through the 6 pages (and counting) of fun discussion and notes. Having said that, I'll also note that there's a recipe for preserved lemons on page 21 of _The Food of Morocco_ (at least, it's page 21 in my copy) and that there's a 5-day hurry-up version on that same page.

I have the book (as well as many of Paula's other cookbooks) and like it. I agree with most of what's been said here: her recipes work, but can seem a bit intimidating; you can usually get good results - perhaps not the perfection she intends, but still good - without following every single step listed; you can get good results without investing in a tagine right off the bat; and there aren't many specalized spices that can't be used in other cookery. I also agree that the spices can be adjusted to taste, and you have to develop your own sense of what works for your tastes. Incidentally, you can make your own preserved lemons - there's even a hurry-up recipe or three so you don't have to wait 3 or 4 weeks. Depending on where you are, making your own may be easier then buying. I haven't seen the book's bread mentioned yet, so I'll note that recently I tried the Marrakesh Tagine Bread, without benefit of food processor for mixing the dough. It was dead-easy, quick, delicious, and made me wish I'd cooked a tagine of some sort for the bread to accompany. That particular bread is the first in her section on bread, and I'd recommend that for serving with a tagine if you have time.