Smithy

I haven't weighed in on this because I don't have any manufacturer's recommendations, or sources. I do have one practical suggestion, though: if you're into haunting estate sales and auctions, you may be able to land a wonderful old set, with its evidently superior workmanship, at a bargain price. That's how I got the silver service that I'll use until (and if) I inherit my parents' set...and even then, I may keep the stuff I have now. It takes patience, though, and may not be your thing.

That reminds me, I have jars as well as freezer bags with zest collected from oranges and mandarin oranges when I get fresh ones in the winter. I haven't tried candying them. They make nice additions to sauces, but all too often I forget they're there. Corn cobs! I haven't tried that! My poor husband...

I was taught years ago that most of the "heat" in hot peppers is in the seeds, and that one can reduce the heat somewhat by leaving the seeds out of a dish. That has matched my experience: after blistering my tongue when I sauteed just a few chili pepper seeds in oil and then cooked with the oil, I learned to saute just a few sections of the pepper itself. Recently I read somewhere (probably on EGullet) that this isn't true, along with an implication that it's been debunked for some time. Have I been living under a rock all this time? Where's the heat?

Mr. McGee, please allow me to add my thanks and welcome to all the others' on this Forum. Have you done any research on the raw food movement, or its underlying principles? If so, what do you think of it/them? I've read the assertion that enzymes needed for digestion start to break down above 118oF, and therefore we shouldn't eat things heated above that temperature. I remain skeptical, both because it doesn't sound like much fun and because it seems to counter almost everything in the human experience. I'd be curious to know your take on it.

<looks around for waffling emoticon> Well, my favorite onion-and-sorrel panade DOES call for a flameproof casserole dish... ← BWAHAHAHAHA! Did I mention up-thread that the cast iron gratins are without equal? When I got one at Jeffery Steingarten's urging in his essay on potatoes daupinoise, I fell in love with gratins. You know the old saying... "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." For a while there, I was gratining (is that a verb?) everything in sight. ← <Fifi sets the hook> Damn, that's what I've been cooking lately! I discovered some great gratin recipes recently, and the only thing that's been getting me away from it is the Cajun thread.

<looks around for waffling emoticon> Well, my favorite onion-and-sorrel panade DOES call for a flameproof casserole dish...

Tuna oil for mayo...what a great idea! What the heck is schmaltz? I always thought it was a musical term! I too am too young to be a child of the Depression, but I am a child of two children of the depression, who passed those habits along. As a child of the West, I tend to be a water saver, as well, although I'm far more profligate with water than I used to be.

Yes indeed, and everyone else's responses so far too! I'd forgotten about saving cheese rinds - unfortunately I save some of them, then forget that I have them . Bread crumbs I hadn't thought of.

I recently heard that during WWII, when food rationing was in force in the USA, cooks were urged to save any unwanted grease for ammunition. The Good Housekeeping (or Better Homes and Gardens, I forget which) magazine said, at the time, to save every drip of grease for re-use, and if you had more than you needed, to pass it on for the defense. It was used to make glycerin. That reminded me of our growing-up days, when we purchased vegetable oil and Crisco (never olive oil, which was exotic and expen$ive) for new uses, but also saved bacon grease in a jar or pot. The bacon grease was used instead of Crisco for everything except pie crust. The bacon grease pot disappeared from our household, and no doubt many others, when the word 'cholesterol' entered the public awareness. (Now that trans-fats are considered suspect, I wonder if bacon grease is ok again?) Me, I save some bacon grease (not much, because I can't use much, and I've learned to render lard). I save snips and scraps of celery and onions for soups. I save random scraps of chicken, as well as whole carcasses, for broth. The wonderful thick gel (I call it demiglace but it probably really isn't) from chicken cookery gets saved. Our freezer has an area more or less devoted to these random elements, much to the dismay of my husband. He's of the look-for-something-edible-now school of thought, and got himself into deep trouble not long ago for throwing out my cooked chicken carcass with all that lovely thick gel that I'd been saving until I could make broth. How about you? What things do you save to go into later cookery? I'd also like to know any further historical bits like the grease-for-ammunition, if anyone knows some.

I'd like to try using vermouth, but I don't think I've ever bought it, let alone cooked with it. Therefore some dumb questions: 1. What kind should I look for for cooking? 2. Can you use it as a 1:1 substitute for white wine? 3. Will it keep after opening (unrefrigerated)? ← I use dry white vermouth, Martini and Rossi. It keeps forever in the cabinet.

I've never owned or cooked with LC. The white enamel interior has scared me off, because my experience with enamel cookware has been that it sticks. Terribly. Browning meats = brown spots all over the bottom, and deglazing doesn't help. I think this has been my experience even since I learned really how to control the cooking temperature and deglaze the pan afterward. Now, Anna N and one or two others have referred to a similar problem, but many more of you have referred to the ease of cleanup. I'd like some more info here, from any and all of you. What exactly are you cooking? Are you browning meats (or onions or whatever) in the same LC for your stews and braises? Are you living happily with brown stains on the interior of your pans? When you say "ease of cleanup" do you mean "compared to cast iron"? How would you compare the ease of cleanup of LC to ease of cleanup of a stainless steel interior pan? Is the mass of the cooking surface a factor? To be fair, I may never have cooked in a *heavy* enameled pot; I know that our only enameled pot at present is a lightweight thing suitable (IMO) only for boiling water and looking pretty atop the cabinets. Translation of the above: I really don't need any LC. Thanks to this thread I'm now intrigued, but still leery. Fifi, you're gonna have to work a bit harder to suck me in on this one.

My. tongue. is. hanging. out. You've barely started the week, and it's going like gangbusters! This is wonderful! What was that soup called? It's gorgeous! I agree with Snowangel; the memories and good food and love that come out of a kitchen are far more important than its looks. You may not like the way it's laid out, but you certainly seem to make the most of it. Great decorations, by the way. Besides, your dining room makes up for the kitchen! Nancy

It's a little less horrifying to me to see the locals jamming into those chain restaurants: they're going out for foreign food, in a sense, just as it was exotic for our family to go to a Chinese restaurant when I was growing up. That's the one hand. The other hand, of course, is that junk food is being encouraged as "nutrition"...and oh why oh why, are these sorts of thing among the USA's largest exports!? It sure doesn't help our image!

... Great sorrel input, thank you so much. I know what you mean about the color... The last time I made the fish and mashed potatoes and sorrel dish, I put the sorrel in at the very, very end, and it kept the bright green color. It was great. We want to try your Zuni Cafe Cookbook recipe. Yes, oh what a case for turning the lights down low. ← I'm glad this topic hasn't been locked yet, because I realized this morning I'd forgotten a crucial ingredient in the panade: shredded (or grated) fontina cheese. It's layered with the other solid ingredients and gives the dish a wonderful creaminess. For precise instructions you still have to go to The Zuni Cafe Cookbook - a cookbook I recommend on many counts - but if you're winging it, you need to know about that cheese! Great blog! Sorry I'm adding on so late, but I'm glad I could correct my earlier post.

That finally came to me as I was cooking dinner tonight. I'd forgotten the Germanic influence, but the Scots-Irish (and, as you note, English) who make up most of my stock were no great shakes either. Mind you, I love visiting those countries, but I don't think they spent much time - at least not a couple of centuries ago - trying to make fancy meals. (The other thing that came to me, between posting that last post and dinner, was, "Why didn't I change the darned light switch before I logged on last time?" I remembered the job as the sun was going down. I finally ended the job 'hot' so the adjacent room's lights, on the same circuit, were available. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Got away unscathed, but still dumb. Y'all are a wonderful resource and terrible distraction! )

I just finished rereading this entire thread, and I'm amazed and delighted by the breadth and depth of information. Thank you, all! One thing that strikes me is the assertion, made by many of you, that the Cajun cuisine took common food - whatever was available and affordable - and made it uncommonly good. I think that's an excellent attitude, well worth promoting in any cuisine. Unfortunately, judging by other threads on people eating junk rather than taking the time to make things good, it still seems to be an uncommon attitude. I am also taken by the fact that my paternal kinfolk came from a similar subsistance (farming and hunting) background, in Oklahoma and Tennessee, yet their food as I recall was pretty plain. Mind you, it was tasty, but it was your basic meat, potatoes (or rice, if there was gravy to be had), vegetable, fruit salad, and some damn fine pie. I'm curious as to whether the more basic approach to cooking was a regional thing - as y'all seem to be asserting - or just the approach my particular kinfolk took. This may be one of those imponderables, but I'm enjoying pondering it. You know, if I'd gotten this sort of perspective in school, I'd have gotten a lot more out of history and literature than fuzzy memories of Evangeline.

The duck a l'orange post gets the pre-packaged cake prize! I knew someone in college who refused to cook because he hated to do dishes. He lived off-campus, in an apartment, and he ate out. Every single meal. I am floored by people who go to Cairo and Luxor (Egypt) for two weeks and want to go to McDonald's.

I loove Staff Meals! Great recipes! I also have Simple to Spectacular, but I think so far all I've gotten out of it is a serious case of drooling. Same thing for the Pie and Pastry Bible...really, it's too bad I live with someone who rarely eats baked goods! Does anyone have an opinion on Pepin's Fast Food My Way? I'm hearing it pushed a lot this week as a premium on my public radio station's fund drive. I already pledged and claimed Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but for a bit more (far more than the book costs, of course) I could get both.

I was making a pilaf one night for dinner and dumped in a container of frozen chicken stock, since I hadn't thought to thaw it out ahead. I usually freeze that stuff in containers of various sizes so I'll have a selection, and it's rarely labeled because the contents are obvious. This was a yogurt cup. "Funny," I thought, "I don't remember this stuff being so yellow when I made it." When it was far too late, I realized I'd dumped in 2/3 c. worth of Meyer lemon juice. Can you say "pilaf pucker power"?

YES! YES! YES! YES! (I'll have what he's having!) ←

A truly ripe navel orange, fresh off the tree. Peel it and watch the oils from the rind spurt mini-rainbows in the morning light. Glory in the sunlight just peeking into the valleys of the Sierra Nevada, off in the distance. Be thankful that there's no fog, so you can see those mountains, and no need for fog that morning because the night was warm. Take a section and savor it: juicy, tart, sweet, full. Who needs candy? Weep that this flavor can't reach the grocery stores, so more people might know how an orange is supposed to taste. Or maybe, just maybe, it's the sharper tarter sweetness of a satsuma mandarin, much shorter period of ripeness on the tree. Which do I prefer? I've never known. Or maybe the first walnuts and pecans of the season. Avocado, hashed and mashed, with lemon and Spike. (I know, it's a seasoned salt. Tough.) Fresh baked bread, sliced, oozing with butter. Barbecued steak, medium rare, smoky from the grill, marbled with smoky fat. Melts in your mouth. Homemade peach ice cream. Or plum ice cream. Or nectarine ice cream. Freshly made lemonade.

I hope someone answers your question. It was Eula Mae's Cajun Kitchen (cookbook) that got me started on the whole question of what makes food Cajun. She's the cook for the family there at Avery Island, and apparently has been for just about forever.

I've had quail, but never the eggs. Do they taste different than chicken eggs, or are they just smaller (and prettier in the shell)? The sorrel discussion is so timely for me! I'm trying to use my sorrel before it all freezes for the winter, and had been planning to post a question asking what people do with it. My favorite recipe for its use comes from Judi Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook. She has a chard-and-onion panade recipe with a sorrel variation. It's a favorite dish at our house. Basically it's sliced onions, cooked down until almost caramelized, layered with leaves of sorrel and chunks of bread that have been tossed with olive oil and seasonings, then chicken broth poured into the casserole and the whole lot cooked. It puffs up beautifully and tastes terrific, and the sorrel's unfortunate army drab color doesn't matter a whit. The color of cooked sorrel generally puts me off, so I'm always on the lookout for recipes that will disguise the appearance while preserving the flavor. I make a sorrel sauce for use over pecan-crusted salmon (I forget whose recipe) and it's very tasty but looks horrid. Another dish for turning the lights down low. I actually took my first meal photo this weekend, and I'm now in a position to appreciate your photos even more than before. Your comment about how difficult it was to photograph your meal made me grimace in appreciation. Great job this week, youse two!

Ha, I did that to myself! At some ripe young age - I'll say I was around 9 - I STOLE A PIECE OF BUBBLEGUM from the local grocery store. Nobody suspected. It bothered me terribly, though, because I'd certainly had all the lessons taught to me, and was old enough to have a conscience (although obviously not old enough to have spine enough to fess up right then). Years later - let's say I was 13 - I slid 2 pennies to the checkout clerk without a word of explanation. She probably thought I was tipping her! At any rate, that blot on my soul was enough to put me on the straight and narrow.

Bavila and Fist Fulla Roux, thank you for the extra information and the resources! I'm so pleased at all the information that's coming my way, both from the practical aspect and the historical perspective! Tonight I made a chickpea stew with "Cajun" (from Northern Minnesota, but I like the seasonings) sausage and the trinity (red peppers instead or green) and lard for the fat, just as an excuse to see what it's like, and smoked paprika. Came out darned good, but a bit on the thin side, and I thought "that's why they start with, 'make a roux'! " Fist, I'm glad you've outgrown your cultural embarrassment. I think the diversity of this country is one of its strengths - at least, it should be (recent electoral events make me wonder) - and without it, this country really will degenerate into a tiresome unending series of suburban strip malls. Thanks, everyone, for terrific and thoughtful answers! I'd love to read more! For instance: Why not fresh hot peppers? Why only pepper sauce? ...and by the way, I'm glad to hear it doesn't have to be blisteringly hot. The pepper heat in most of the "authentic" recipes I've tried has overwhelmed most of the other flavors. Maybe that's just the author's preference.