Smithy

Oh, this made me laugh! I go exactly the opposite way: start out with grandiose plans, then as the time approaches and reality sets in, find myself scaling back. I've never quite ended up serving crackers and cheese as the dinner party, but I can imagine it. I admire your gumption in adding more!

...and following up on that, I hope someone will explain where clabber fits into the mix, as in clabbered milk or clabbered cream. (I can still hear my grandmother saying "it clabbered my guts when I saw you up that tree!" but I'm not talking about clabbered guts! ) I think clabber is closely related to creme fraiche. It might even be exactly the same thing, echoed across the pond. But I'm not sure. And is clabber just thickened milk, or the beginning of sour milk?

Yay, Klary, you're blogging again! Add my thanks to the others' thanks - I love your posts and photography, complete with recipes over on the Dutch cooking thread. It's neat that you take the trouble to celebrate an entire birthweek. Thanks for sharing it with us! Nobody has mentioned the waterfronts yet. When I think of Amsterdam I think of the canals and the harbor. Are the canals only near the central part? Are you near there? Some water shots would be nice. I'm fascinated by the old (older than this country) houses along the canals, complete with tilting facades in some cases. I don't know whether you're anywhere near there, though. At any rate - whatever you choose to show us during this birthweek will be charming. It already is.

That's beautiful. I love the extravagant growth of ramp leaves, compared to their cultivated cousins. It's even prettier in the woods, judging by your photos. What kind of soil and conditions do they like? I understand they grow in northern Minnesota but I'm not sure where in the forest to look (high and dry? swampy? sun?). I haven't gotten around to asking our local extension agent yet.

How about creamed eggplant? Basically, you make a bechamel sauce and mix that roasted eggplant (with a bit of lemon and salt) into it, then stir until the eggplant "melts" into the sauce (that step still amazes me), add grated kasseri cheese, and stir all until creamy. It's wonderful, with or without spiced lamb stew over the top. You can see photos and discussion of the process, interspersed with discussion about the lamb dish and other extraneous items in this post from my food blog. Scroll about halfway down that post until you see the eggplant, then you'll know you're in the right area. Edited for spelling.

A sorrel risotto, eh? What a timely suggestion that is: even as we type, there's a risotto cookoff under way. I'm so glad that sometime I have the good sense to print out a recipe and save it someplace where I can find it again. The recipe for Pecan-Crusted Salmon with Sorrel Sauce is on Epicurious' web site. The recipe was originally printed in Bon Appetit. Cook's note: An immersion blender is a wonderful tool for this sauce.

That's funny. The first time I made this at home I used pita bread, fried crisp. This time around I actually read the directions and tried something with more body, as I'm pretty sure shamy bread is a thicker flatbread than the Egyptian baladi (pita). Both versions came out pretty well as far as texture goes, but you're right that it makes a difference. I don't know how this is served outside restaurants, as that's the only place I've ever had it. There, it's in smaller bowls for an individual serving, but yes, they're deep-ish. I do think there's a bit less sauce over everything in the restaurant version, and I know it's runnier. Again I think that's because I baked it to warm everything. Next time we go (insha allah) I absolutely must not be dissuaded from ordering this again, just because we ate too many appetizers!

That's the recipe I referred to up here in my earlier post. My link goes to The Splendid Table's recipe files, which carry Lynne's "adaptation" (I don't know that that means) of Jerry's recipe. I'm glad this got bumped up, too. I hadn't seen it the first time around. Rampaging sorrel, eh? I'm just pleased to have something that will overwinter without having to be brought inside.

It works well in a panade, too. You don't have to do anything except tear our the biggest veins if the leaves are big, and the army drab color isn't an issue.

I'm envious that y'all are talking about sorrel already. The snow is just now gone from my flower bed. I am seeing chives, at least, so there's hope. I hadn't thought of cutting the whole thing down in the summer; I'm so terrified I'll lose it all. Maybe I'll try that this year. I generally use sorrel in sauces to go over things like pecan-crusted salmon, or sauteed chicken. The salmon recipe isn't mine but it's a fine treatment, both of salmon and sorrel, with the one drawback that the sorrel turns that dreadful army drab color. One could probably garnish with something brighter green to make it look better. The flavor is terrific. I'll look around and see if I can find that recipe link. As I remember my chicken goes something like this: brown chicken pieces in a pan with oil and garlic; remove the chicken briefly; deglaze the pan with a neutral white wine; add cream and chopped sorrel; return the chicken to the pan, cover and cook until done (turning periodically); at the last, uncover the pan to reduce the sauce until it's the consistency you want. Add seasonings as you like. I'm always throwing nuts into things like this. The chicken should be well coated with the sauce, but there should also be extra sauce for the serving. Serve with (in our house, that means "over") rice. I did learn last summer that if you're using big leaves you really need to devein them for this recipe. I chopped whole leaves and ended up with little tight spiky tubes where the veins had curled in on themselves during the sauce cooking portion. Bits of sorrel chopped into a salad are great. Somewhere on this forum, Andiesenji posted a sorrel soup recipe. Sorrel and fish, sorrel and chicken, sorrel and eggs are all good combinations. Sorrel and cream are downright synergistic. Hmm. So far I haven't found the pecan-crusted salmon with sorrel sauce recipe, but here's another fine-sounding recipe: Smoked Salmon Benedict with Sorrel Sauce. Bless Lynne Rosetto Kaspar, she's the one who turned me onto sorrel in the first place.

That's excellent news! Thanks for the update!

*bump* OK, I've figured out how to do the fatta shamy and show it, without violating copyright issues. I've done the work. I've recovered enough to post about it. I am not an efficient cook, but even having done it recently and been able to plan it better, this was a big undertaking. I've decided that it's either something for a big party, or better still, something that several people work to made...like the village operation DianaBuja mentioned upthread. Fatta Shamy - my interpretation of the recipe printed in Flavors of Egypt: from City and Country Kitchens, © 1992, Susan Torgersen. This particular recipe is credited to Hella Hashem. The writeup, interpretations, comments and photos (and errors!) are mine. This is a layered dish with several separate components. I'm going to describe it that way, with photos as necessary, instead of in the usual recipe fashion. 1. Boil a chicken. This will produce a chicken's worth of cooked meat and broth. You'll need all the meat and some of the broth. The recipe calls for cooking the chicken with an onion and a bouillion cube added for flavor. The recipe goes into more detail about the process, but most people here know how to boil a chicken and separate the cooked meat. Save the meat and the broth (separately); dispose of the skin and bones. I defatted the broth as a matter of routine, but it doesn't actually say to do that. 2. Cook up some rice, unless you have some leftover rice from another dinner. You only need a cup's worth. 3. Dice some bread and fry it in butter. The recipe calls for 2 shamy breads, broken into medium-sized pieces. (I'm fuzzy on how big a shamy bread is, and I didn't want to make any, so I cut 4 or 5 leftover dinner rolls into chunks for this step.) Set the fried bread chunks aside on paper towels to drain. 4. Slice 2 medium onions into thin slices. Fry them in oil until golden brown. Set them aside on paper towels to drain. 5. Another layer is made of 5 thin green peppers and 4 -5 tb chopped garlic. I confess, I substituted thin green onions for the peppers. I must not have been reading well at the time. Anyway, what you do is you chop them finely then mash them together with a bit of salt until you have small pieces, but not a paste. I used a food chopper for this step. I feel really silly that I read "green peppers" as "green onions". 6. Finally - and what started this whole conversation - you make the sauce. Here are the raw ingredients for the sauce: 5 tbsp tahina, 1/4 c. vinegar, 4 - 5 lemons, salt and cumin to taste, and 3 c. yogurt. The instructions say you mix the tahina, vinegar, juice of 4 lemons, 1/2 c. water, and mix well, adding more water if necessary. The mixture should be thick. Then add salt, cumin, and more lemon or vinegar, to taste. The instructions caution that there should be enough lemon for you to taste it at this point, because the yogurt still has to be added. Then you start adding yogurt. There's an interesting instruction that says you keep adding yogurt (mixing well as you go) until you can't tell whether the sauce is brown or white. Here's my photo of the mixing process: OK, so now here are the layers, ready for assembly: Fried bread, caramelized onions, heated broth, cooked chicken, tahina/yogurt sauce, rice. I forgot to include the peppers and garlic in this photo. Start layering as follows: Bread, dipped in hot broth, and layered on the bottom of the pot Cooked chicken next Sprinkle with the garlic/peppers (I cannot *believe* I misread that as onions! That explains a lot!) Tahina sauce next Fried onions on top of that Then the layer of rice, and another layer of tahina sauce. Garnish the whole with chopped parsley. (Oh yes, that's another layer.) What's especially interesting about this is that there's no indication that it's supposed to be cooked afterward. I did cook it at about 325*F until it had set and all the layers were warmed through, since the chicken had spent a night or two in the refrigerator by then. I garnished it with parsley after it came out of the oven. As I look over both my fatta shamy recipes, I see that neither seems to indicate cooking the final assembly. You cook the layers, you throw them together, you eat. How one does all those steps before the chicken gets cold is beyond me. That's why I think this must be a group project. Anyway, here's what the finished dish looked like this time around, after cutting into it so the layers could be seen: The flavor was not as good as the last time I made it. The tahina sauce steps threw me: I added water, then realized the whole sauce should be thick, so added a lot more tahina to thicken it up, then added lemon until I could well and truly taste the lemon. I gave up on adding enough yogurt "until I could no longer distinguish whether it was white or brown" because I was about to overflow the bowl and I was out of yogurt. I think I shouldn't have added the water in the first place (I didn't, the first time around) because the brand of tahina I used is runny anyway. The lemon and tahina flavors shouted down the yogurt as a result. Still...with salt, or extra yogurt on the cooked dish, the strong tahina and lemon flavor is tamed, and the dish is good. I think it would be better if I'd used green peppers instead of green onions; those are pretty strong. Actually, I think last time around I used red bell peppers and liked those immensely. Compared to the restaurant fatta I've had in Cairo, this was firmer. That may be because they really toss everything together while it's hot and don't cook it afterward. I wish I'd had it this last year so I had a more recent memory. So, there you have it. It's a good dish, but the more I read this recipe the more I think I've taken accidental liberties and not done it properly. Even done properly it would be a LOT of steps. Still - it's worth it for the right crowd. We've certainly been enjoying the leftovers. I'd appreciate comments (polite and helpful, if you please) from anyone who knows how this dish is usually made. Anyone else is free to ask questions or provide suggestions. Oh, and I apologize for the size of the photos. I thought I'd saved them to a smaller size. At least they aren't huge pixel-wise, so maybe they won't take too long to load.

Snowangel, I'm so jealous. I made a special trip into town today, thinking they must surely have arrived at the Whole Foods Coop by now. No such luck. The produce manager said a couple of weeks ago that they were due - just about now - with my luck, it'll be while we're out of town.

Yah. You get the feeling that they're really, really unhappy with the product? I wonder if FireSlate's customer service has started paying attention yet.

I'd have explained about the flame temperature being much lower than the teflon breakdown temperature, but jsolomon beat me to it. I keep a pan lid on hand for fire control, rather than a wet towel. Slapping the lid on the pan if the flames get too high is a bit less messy and at least as effective.

Well, you could try starting such a thread. There's a thread titled FREE cookbooks, if you want to add to your collection that has worked more or less like that. It wasn't as active as some of us expected, but it's still helped a number of cookbooks find good homes.

I have a motor for my Atlas. I love it. As a relatively inexperienced pasta maker, I find I'm forever trying to find a third hand if I'm cranking by hand; the motor takes that problem away. I can't compare the product of the Atlas vs. the KitchenAid since I haven't tried the KA. I do have their mixer, though. If the Atlas motor ever gives up the ghost I might try the KA instead.

Welcom to eGullet, Trentinla! Please tell us more about the book Zov. Where is it from, where is it published, and/or how do you know about it? Maybe everyone else knows about this book already, but it's a new one for me.

By all means, please post the recipe!

Thanks for that extra information. I know the stuff you're talking about: they market it as broken wild rice. I bought some once in a fit of misplaced thrift. I don't remember what I finally ended up doing with it; it wouldn't even soften up in soup. How nice to have connections like yours! I raid people's trees whenever I go back to California. Same idea.

When you buy wild rice try and avoid the small black shiny grains you see used in packaged foods and fancy restaurants. It's actually burnt, takes forever to cook, and really doesn't taste like much. It's used mainly for "looks". The wild rice the natives prefer, (and keep for their own use), is larger and grayish green in color. It will cook up in about 30 minutes and some of the grains will curl and explode. Even most of the hand harvested wild rice crop is commercially parched (roasted). Less than 2% of the crop is hand parched in the traditional manner. This is what you want, if you can find it. SB (has a friend who rices every year) ← Where would you get the hand parched rice? Buddy carries wild wild rice (as well as cultivated) but I think it's all commercially parched.

*bump* Hey, I've found another walleye recipe for you, and it might not seem to chi-chi for your impending visit! The Duluth News-Tribune published an article yesterday about a local chef who cooks with wild rice. One of the featured recipes is for Wild Rice Crusted Walleye, and it sounds pretty good. This link to the recipes should be good for about a week. After that you'd have to be a subscriber to get into the archives. If you don't get this in time, PM me and I'll send you the recipe if I still have it. You'll have ample opportunity to buy wild rice on your drive north. I like the guy in Two Harbors (Buddy is this gentle soul who always closes the sale with "have a rice day") but there are other places too.

You can also just run them under some hot water! Of course, then you have to dry them ← You can also pick up a plate warmer. I think they're still made commercially, but if not, keep an eye out at estate sales and on eBay. Basically, they're narrow electric blankets with folds that go over and under the plates. Each plate stays warm (but not hot) until you're ready to retrieve it from the stack in the blanket.

Those are nice-looking pans, Brooks. Makes me wish I needed new ones. Are there things you don't use them for? Gumbo, for instance? Or are they heavy enough for that?

I think what you're discarding is what someone else referred to as "duck jelly" - or perhaps "duck jello" - sometime last year. It's good in sauces. Think of it as a demi-glace. Edited to add: here's the beginning of the discussion about duck jello, in the Confit Duck thread. Farther along you'll find where someone calls it "duck jello", but beginning with my pointer people talk about how to save it and how to use it.