Smithy

I want to thank y'all for suggesting the stuffed eggplant route. Last night I had 2 tired eggplants, one tired cook, and a bunch of stuffing that had been taking up space in the freezer when it was left over from making cabbage rolls. The stuffing was ground venison, rice, tomato sauce and a bunch of Cajun seasonings, so this was definitely a non-traditional use of eggplant, but it was darned good. No photos, sorry.

I'm so pleased to see Beatrice Ojakangas get this recognition. "The Great Scandinavian Baking Book" is a beaut. Aside from that, Bea is a lovely person, charming and gracious, who's really done a lot to bring Scandanavian cookery to these shores. She won a Pillsbury Bake-Off oh, many years ago, and has gone on to greater works ever since. Her husband is just as fun and down-to-earth.

You may not be an expert or a chef, but you're surely helping my vocabulary - and giving me some cooking ideas to boot. Thank you very, very much.

Behemoth, that is one impressive sales pitch. Your bread looks gorgeous!

Add another for me: "Food Fit for Pharaohs", published by the British Museum, and I've already forgotten the author's name. Most of the recipes look like something you'd find in a Middle Eastern cookbook, but a few are new to me. The author asserts that the ingredients and cooking methods were all available to Egyptians during the Pharaonic times. I dunno whether that means the recipes are "authentic", but the artwork and hieroglyphs are fun.

I would call them the Marvin of my kitchen repertoire... oh well. I guess it's a generational thing. ← Huh. I never realized the similarity between those two characters, until just now.

Transliteration is a funny thing. The menu at Tabbouli definitely did not write the word as you and Almass have written it (either Em'taffa or Moutaffa), but it has to be the same word. Thank you both for unraveling the mystery and giving me a better way to search for that word. So, basically, moutaffa or em'taffa means that the pan is deglazed and a sauce made from the juices? That's what I envision based on Almass' description.

elhamdulilla! At last, I can sleep again. Thank you very much for the explanation and the language lesson! Now, if I can manage to duplicate that sauce...

Here's my report. What with one thing and another, we had a whopping 1/2 hour to walk around through the North End on our way someplace else, too late for lunch and too early for dinner. So much for my advance plans and the lunch recommendations. That evening, we wandered Hanover Street perusing menus, trying to choose among the mind-boggling selection of Italian restaurants along there. Sicilian? Northern? Southern? We were too tired, really, to even be able to think about what we were reading. An observant and enterprising gentleman popped out of a door and pointed to the Specials posted on a blackboard outside. "This is the best place," he claimed, "right here, and we have the best specials!" We bantered back and forth (I'm a sucker for that eye-twinkling sales pitch, all else being equal) and he assured us that if we didn't like the food he'd give it to us for free. (We didn't believe him, but that's the sort of banter I'm talking about.) The specials that day were veal scallopini wrapped with prosciutto and some other things (told you I was tired) on a bed of spinach, and salmon stuffed with something, with a pesto sauce. We liked him. We liked the look. We went in to give our appetites to il Villaggio Ristorante. We came away just on the uncomfortable side of pleasantly full, having wined and dined at a moderate cost. (It wasn't cheap, but it cost less than the surrounding restaurants' menus suggested they would.) Two of us had the veal special, one had lobster ravioli, one had another veal dish. The salads were fine and meals in themselves. The bread - well, I've had better, but the dipping oil made up for it. Whatever unnecessary appetizer we'd asked for first turned out not to be available, so we were each given a glass of wine (a nice pinot grigio) as compensation; the chianti we later ordered turned out not to be available, so they gave us a bottle of more expensive chianti at the same price. As we chatted with the waitress we learned that neither the staff nor the owner of this Italian restaurant is in fact Italian, but it didn't seem to matter. The food was quite good, and I'm glad we went. It turned out that the gentleman who'd lured us in was indeed the proprieter, and I wish he'd been around at the end of our meal so we could thank him for his sales pitch. Add Il Villagio, 230 Hanover Street, to your list of places worth visiting. Monday night was slow, but we were told that reservations (617-367-2824) are a good idea on the weekend. Edited for spelling.

I've picked up several AC SS pieces via Cookware & More and like it a lot. I'd never buy the new stuff from a retail store because I'm too darned cheap. I also don't think I'd get a 10-piece set of anything; my needs are too mix-and-match. I have skillets, saucepans and a braiser. The pieces I use the most are the skillets. I think your cooking style may make the difference as to whether you'll like it or not. I do a lot of skillet cooking - brown meat, then build a sauce around it, or saute meat and veggies then build an Alfredo sauce or a pilaf around it. In other words, I do a lot of browning and deglazing in them, and now that I know how to do it I've all but abandoned my non-stick cookware. They clean up easily. I did manage to boil off the liquid in a would-be shallot sauce in a saucepan, burning all the shallots beyond recognition and browning the bottom of the pan badly. It took a lot of Bon Ami cleanser and bad language to get that one cleaned up, and the finish doesn't look the same. The 13" braiser looks lovely and is a great serving piece, but in the light of my new braising knowledge I'm not sure I'd get it again. It doesn't have the thermal mass to make a good braiser. Still, even if I wouldn't buy it again, I'm in no rush to get rid of mine. It make a good extra stovetop cooking vessel.

Pam, I've been skimming your blog in a futile attempt to catch up since I hit the road. This is my one chance, I think, before your blog finishes, to say how much I've been enjoying this and learning from it. The photos are beautiful. As I read in more detail after the blog is closed, I know I'll learn yet more. Add my admiration and compliments to the rest - how you survived the week - well, it's almost another miracle! Thank you, thank you.

Now, that raises a new question. What happens if you're an observing Jew and break kashrut, even by accident? Is there some kind of penance you can do to erase the sin, or is that black mark with you forever? Or is it neither, just a slip you have to promise never to do again?

It's funny, I rarely do more with sweets than admire them here in the States (it's nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with weight). But during my last stay in B.C. we weren't far from a Tim Horton's. Much ado was made over that place, so I had to go...and I kept going every day for breakfast. Much ado was also made that I had never heard of the chain and didn't know who Tim Horton was. I'm sure they were wondering who let that dumb Yank into the country.

I'm really enjoying it too, and glad for the education. Thanks to everyone for the answers so far, and I look forward to learning more this week.

Our 10-minute meals are called "leftovers" or "cheese sandwiches". The fastest thing we can do is pasta, tossed with sun-dried tomato pesto (a household staple), olives, some sauteed red peppers and mushrooms if we have them, and garlic (of course). This dish can also have chicken if it's handy and we feel like taking the time to saute it, but the meat isn't really necessary to this dish. The dish so far sounds quite healthful, doesn't it? So then I must confess that often, having taken it that far, I'll build an Alfredo sauce around it all. So much for low-cal. Somewhat less quick, but easy and cheap, is chicken pilaf. Saute cubed chicken, add garlic and let it cook slightly, add rice to brown, then add broth and seasonings. Half an hour later, chicken pilaf is to be had. Quick but not necessarily cheap: saute salmon filets, deglaze with lemon juice and wine, build a mustard and garlic sauce around it. This works with other fish too, and just depends on who gets to pick the fish. The salad can be built while the sauce is reducing.

A drain plug near the bottom of the pan...what a great idea. I never knew until now that something like that ever existed. I've been toying with the idea of buying a "sun tea" jar with a spigot near the bottom and using that to drain the stock off the bottom when I'm defatting it. The spigot's too high off the bottom, though, and would need something food-safe to take up some of that bottom space. This thread is bringing up some wonderfully written reminiscences.

Abra, you're a woman after my own heart.

Do you know what they'd check before certifying it?

Ahh. I thought the Hebrew calendar was lunar, but I didn't know about leap years. So now, Passover will fall earlier each year again until another leap year? And, is spring defined by the equinox? Do the months stay more or less at the same time of solar year because of the leap-year month? Easter is semi-lunar but also tied to spring: for the Protestants and Catholics it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. The Orthodox calendar is a bit different, and the holidays are about a week apart, but I'm not sure of the specifics. I just know they're always a week or so later. Contrariwise, and I hope this isn't too far OT, the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar, so Ramadan moves steadily forward something like 10 days each year (don't quote me on the number of days). That means you may observe Ramadan during all the seasons if you live long enough. (Ramadan in the summer. Yowza.) Oh yeah - and the question about the Last Supper? I believe they were celebrating Passover at the time, but it was just after that supper that Easter was invented, so to speak. Edited for clarity.

Don't forget dancing.

The whole male/female aubergine business was debunked upthread. Still, people are flailing around to find some way to distinguish between what seems to be two different geometries of the large eggplant we find in the U.S. Innies vs. outies?

There's an engineering adage that says, "The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes 90% of the time." Dean, the kitchen is gorgeous. Inspectors or no inspectors, you must be ecstatic. I would be! I've forgotten the details of that magic corner. Do those shelves have an interference fit, so they interleave and you have to remember not to take up all the space between shelves on the door? Or does the interior set retract as the door-mounted set moves in? Lovely, just lovely. Congratulations!

This is really interesting. Please forgive some ignorant questions from this shiksa, but I'm likely to have a lot of them! It surprised me that canola oil isn't kosher. Any idea why not? Or is "why not" a useless question? Is olive oil kosher? And what other oils are acceptable, either usually, or even during Passover? For instance: could you drizzle baked potatoes with walnut oil? The potatoes and no-butter thing got me to thinking about substituting oils for the butter. That can be a good substitute, given the right oil. I hope this isn't too far off-topic, but I'd also like to know about the timing of Passover. It doesn't seem to follow the same timing as Easter, and I thought they did. Sorry for asking such basic questions. I look forward to learning a lot this week. Despite my ignorance, I know enough to be impressed - and astonished - that you're willing to blog this week! Thank you!

Are you trying to show your class that good heart-healthy food can be had when cooked by a chef, or that they can do it themselves? I don't know how it is in Norway, but I think your menu would seem so exotic as to be intimidating for most people here where I live (northeastern Minnesota, USA, small town). You might want to consider at least one dish with something more commonplace - a chicken and rice dish, for instance. I also like the previous posters' suggestions about vegetables. Don't forget that olive oil is supposed to be heart-healthy. You might consider a whole-wheat pasta dish. Mind you, I'm not knocking the menu, but I'm considered rather odd in these parts. That being said, I confess that I'm not that familiar with Norwegian cooking. Maybe what you're proposing is not at all exotic to you!

Dant, now you've got me cracking open my Greek cookbook and drooling, and wondering when I can cook some of its other recipes. Your description sounds delicious, so don't disappoint us! My cookbook, by the way, is "Classic Greek Cooking", 1974, and it lists three recipes for moussaka: Eggplant Moussaka, Zucchini Moussaka (just a variation on the eggplant) and Beef and Potato Moussaka. I have to wonder why it took me so darned long to clue in that moussaka is just a layered baked dish. I noted in an edit to a previous post, but I'll say it again here, that this book calls for Parmesan cheese in its moussaka sauces. I hadn't remembered that. I wonder why my other cookbooks call for cheddar? I still think it's pretty much up to the cook.