Smithy

I use mine for squeezing tamarind juice out after I've soaked a chunk of tamarind pulp in boiling water. I also have used mine for "processing" watermelon to get the seeds separated from the juice. A lot of watermelon pulp also gets through, since the flesh is so porous, but the result is quite nice and thick. I think I did that with an accidentally-frozen watermelon one time and ended up with watermelon ice. Either that, or I juiced the watermelon in my mill and then stirred it up in the ice cream maker. It's been long enough since that particular incident that I only remember the fine results.

By the way, they're absolutely right about the importance of proper field dressing. You'd have to read up a ways to get the discussion about a quick kill, but that's also very important.

Browse is the shoots, leaves, twigs, buds from trees and shrubs. Graze is the herby stuff: grass, for instance. (Do apples and corn qualify as browse? I've never thought about it.) If your hunter wasn't just winding you up, you should figure that there may be a gamey taste. Marinade (but NOT just a vinegar water boil, fer cryin' out loud) appropriate to your final flavor choices will help. Depending on how it smells after you thaw it, you may want to consider cutting it into small chunks first and marinading those, and giving up on the idea of a roast. Somehow this all reminds me of a guy I used to know who swore he had THE BEST venison recipe ever. He went through some long-winded explanation of the cooking process and the sauce that went with it, complete with cherries and rum and who knows what-all. The details have faded with the decades, but I still remember his enthusiastic endorsement: "It's wonderful! You can't taste the venison at all!"

Gaah. Boiled in vinegar water, then fried? That sounds like a travesty to me. I'd go for a good marinade (this happens to be my favorite), then either grilling it in kabobs or cooking it in a pilaf, or doing a slow braise. I agree with dockhl: go look at the One Dead Deer thread for ideas. You could do a nice stroganoff with that venison, too. ETA: Thanks for merging the topics, Susan. Now thecuriousone doesn't have to go looking so hard!

Hmm. I'd be concerned about the grease going off overnight, at least from a flavor standpoint. I also wonder if the meat juices in the grease might encourage bugs to grow, but maybe the hot grease effectively sterilizes those juices so that it isn't an issue. I'd probably try it, after sniffing (or tasting) the bacon grease to make sure it didn't have any off-flavors or -smells. I don't find cleaning cast iron to be all that difficult. My first thought is to compromise: heat the pan gently so last night's bacon grease will flow; pour it out; replace it with fresh grease. If you really want to go hog-wild you can wipe the pan dry with a couple of paper towels before adding more grease. What do you do, more than I just described, that makes cleaning the pan so tough? Or is your pan not well-seasoned yet?

You have become my romantic heroine in one fell swoop, Carolyn. Meatballs roasted on the open carburetor and all. Keep up the good work. ← There used to be a cookbook (I'm too lazy to check but I think it's out of print now) about cooking in your car's engine compartment, developed by a couple of rally drivers who loved to eat well. They had the techniques down: how to determine the proper heat source for what you were cooking, how to secure the packet so it stayed put during the drive, and how to wrap it to keep it from leaking. I think the cooking "times" were even expressed in miles driven. I thought the book had one of the all-time best titles: "Manifold Destiny".

I have that cookbook and have used it a fair amount. It's a lot of fun.

You can try The Salt Traders as a source. I got some Japanese sea salt Japanese Nazuna sea salt from them some time back, and it sounds a lot like what you describe. Edited to correct a misspelling and add this info: I don't see a specifically Okinawan salt listed, but I still think the Nazuna salt sounds like much the same thing.

That's an interesting bit of history. I don't know where exactly the butterstick West begins, but Minnesota is quite definitely in the butterstick east. When I first moved here I was brought up short by the funny-shaped butter sticks: long and skinny. What was up with that? Now, whever I go "home" to visit, I'm brought up short by the funny-shaped, short and fat butter sticks. My mother, originally a Floridian, remembers the same surprise when she moved west lo these many decades ago. JAZ, I now realize I have one of each type of butter dish in my house. Hadn't really thought it through before now.

I'm glad you bumped this back up to the top, lovebenton0. There's been a lot of discussion about cooking in clay since this thread was last active. I'm convinced that clay adds a bit of flavor and character to dishes cooked in them. For starters, it has a good high thermal mass so it's slow to respond to temperature changes - and for those of us with electric ovens and burners, it evens out the cycles to maintain a more constant temperature. I think it also does an interesting flavor meld that I don't get, say, from enameled cast iron. In my Romertopf I've taken to coating and stuffing a whole chicken with paprika and whatever spices I thought might go nicely with that, adding bits of quartered onion and celery and whatnot, and cooking it in the Romertopf for oh, a couple of hours at 375. (So far in my experimentation I've decided that 375 is as hot as I'd care to take the chicken; hotter temperatures seemed to cook it too quickly, and it wasn't as tender. 350F might work better but I haven't tried it yet.) Here's my original post on that discovery, over in the "Paprika: Confessions of an Addict" thread. I do soak the bottom of the Romertopf for a bit, but as someone else noted above, it's just a matter of pouring water into that bottom while you're prepping the dish, and then pouring the water back out. My Romertopf was a $5 garage sale special also, so I've been dishwashing it after most uses. I haven't regretted it so far, and can't taste any off tastes. It's possible I'm missing out on some flavor melds that come from seasoned pots.

A vinaigrette with walnut oil and balsamic vinegar is a wonderful thing.

Chufi, I've never made that recipe but I have, long since, quit simmering or cooking fresh lemons with their rinds for any time. I've had too many fish recipes go bitter that way. I think there may be some lemon varieties whose rinds break down unpleasantly when cooked. (I haven't researched lemon varieties to know how plausible that theory is, but I know my empirical evidence.) I've had pretty good success with adding lemon slices late in cooking, and I've never had lemon juice go bitter on me, so I'm inclined to blame the peel instead of the flesh of the fruit for the bitterness you describe. The sour note, on the other hand, might have been from too much lemon flesh (or too long cooking it).

My dad always used to say that there was no point in going to Las Vegas if you were a farmer. I have some photos from 9 or 10 years ago of icicles in our groves. It's a silent disaster, not as uproarious as a hurricane, but a disaster nonetheless.

This weekend I cooked the Oxtail Daube. The taste was fabulous, and right now I'm wishing I had more leftovers. The finished product was deep, rich mahogany in color, and the best way I can describe its flavor is to say that it was equally deep, rich and complex: meaty, almost caramelly. It is not cookbook hype to say that the flavors have multiple layers. Pleased though I was with the outcome, I didn't try to photograph it: the shredded meat in brown sauce would require a better photographer than I to do it justice, even over noodles. The cooking and straining process left me with a question of technique. Step 7 begins with "Strain the cooking liquid, pushing down on the onions to extract all their juices." I chose to do the straining in my china cap, which I'd lined with cheesecloth. The process wasn't very effective: the onions were so soft that my spoon tended to push them around as much as push them down. Eventually I took to bunching the cheesecloth and squeezing it gently to squeeze out as much juice as possible without rupturing the cloth. It was still a long process, and by the end I was beginning to design screen presses and vacuum filters in my head. What should I have been doing instead? Should I have poured the onions and juice into a broader, shallower strainer instead of that deep cone? Pushed with another china cap nested inside, so it would push everything at once to the walls?

This is exactly what my husband, Minnesota born and bred, remembers from his childhood. When his parents got their first deep freeze, his mother and the kitchen were both liberated from having the canning kettle running nearly nonstop during the hottest days of the summer. She never looked back.

Those are just flat-out beautiful, as are the squash. I can't get behind squash as a rule, but I would surely like to know the proportions you use in that relish. Is it cooked before stuffing it in the squash?

<the screen opens on a scene of peaceful condos nestled in snowy mountains...cue narrator's voice>... The crowd anxiously awaits the outcome. Did Barb make peace with her deceptively-advertised and poorly-equipped kitchen? Did she find just the right cookware that she'd never known existed? Are the vacationers groaning with pleasure over coddled pork? Will UPS overload its next cargo plane with her shipment home? Find out in our next exciting episode! ...So, Barb?

The vintage Le Creuset pieces I first picked up from eBay also have cast handles on the lids. I don't know what I'll ever do if a handle breaks, but in the meantime I like the looks of it, and the cost was much lower than for the new stuff.

That is frustrating. My best friend's father owns a condo in Frisco, and from him I've seen the other side of it: he says renters wreck the kitchen gear so it isn't worth putting good stuff in there. OTOH he doesn't advertise the kitchen as "gourmet"... We just know to figure that the knives will be dull. Back in the days before knives were banned from carry-on luggage, I used to pack one. I do remember one summer we discovered a perfectly good, new-condition stainless steel pot in the trash from a neighboring condo! We took it back in triumph and did what little cleanup was necessary, and we've cooked a lotta pasta in that pot over the years. It's probably a bit too much to hope that someone in your condo area will discard a heavy pot this week, though. Do go check at Safeway for a better selection of cuts. Snowangel's idea of ribs is a good one.

I think there's a pottery place in Frisco, there on the main street with all the little shops and restaurants. I'm not sure about that, though. I know there is a UPS shipping center in Breckenridge, so if you find the right pot you can send it (along with some of that excess luggage) home at the end of your visit. Have you checked the Safeway in Frisco for pork shoulder or butt?

Barb, Barb, Barb. You're looking at this the wrong way. Don't ask yourself whether you can substitute a lightweight pan. Ask yourself, instead, what size heavy pot you've always been hankering for. You're on vacation. You need a new pot. The Outlets at Silverthorne, complete with Le Creuset outlet, are only about 10 miles away.

I'm sorry I didn't see how this thread had grown before I cooked those hocks; on the other hand, now I'll have reason to go buy more! Thanks for those pointers, especially to Pontormo, who took the trouble to email me and let me know to check back in. I ended up doing a low slow braise in turkey stock and Belgian wheat beer, after having sweated onions, carrots, celery, and garlic until they were all fairly soft. Anasazi beans (pre-soaked) went into the braise along with a ton of cumin and touches of sage, rosemary and white pepper. The beans came out a bit dry - I don't know beans about cooking beans, and probably had too many for the dish - but with the addition of concentrated tomato paste (me) or white wine Worcestorshire sauce (husband) we had the flavor and texture adjusted to our respective tastes. The flavor was excellent, and the hocks did just what everyone said they'd do: fell apart into tender, unctuous glory. I'll do that again, right after I've tried some of the other suggestions. I love finding good ways to cook cheap meat.

I feel your pain, GG. I've never been much of a cranberry fan until I discovered the cranberry relish recipe with ground-up orange (the whole thing), walnuts and a touch of sugar. Yum! Now that I've gotten some proper oranges, I can't find the cranberries. I hate to think of trying to save some of these oranges from home until next November, just so I can make the relish again.

Y'all are making me very happy I thawed those hocks so I can cook them this weekend. Thanks for the encouragement and great suggestions!

*bump* Robin, I realize we're just coming off the holidays, but I'm wondering. Did you try that lead checking kit? If so, how did you use it (i.e. in the lid?) and what were the results?