Smithy

Greek! Heresy! Ha ha Looks very tasty, actually. We had "grown up" grilled cheese and tomato soup: The soup was chickpea tomato rosemary, the sandwich was prosciutto & taleggio paninni. Looked really cool but I didn't feel like fussing with the camera, especially with the spouse hovering over the stove, waiting to be fed. ← My husband has yet to be subjected to my photographing the dinner before we tuck in. Boy, is he in for a surprise! But your dinner sounds excellent. Why "Greek"? Is it just the white sauce on top, or is there more to the distinction? FoodMan's moussaka looks good, and not at all like mine (except for the white sauce). Mine tends to be obvious layers of eggplant and the tomato-meat sauce. FoodMan, what is in yours? By the way: if the answer to "why Greek" belongs more properly in the Middle Eastern forum, feel free to answer over there...

What kind of mandoline did you get, finally? And what do you think of it? I'm still trying to decide whether and which one...as we discussed in the mandoline thread...

I don't recall if there's a specific reason for peeling the chickpeas - I guess to make the soup smoother? Anyway, it is a very simple and delicious soup - the only ingredients are chickpeas, leeks, water, a bouillon cube, pepper I think - and parmesan. Half gets pureed and put back in, so it also has a nice texture. ← Several of my cookbooks recommend peeling the chickpeas because the peels are going to come off during cooking and they look strange, or they slip off in one's mouth and feel strange. Then the books blithely list the easy method: rubbing the soaked peas in one's hand in a bowl of cold water so the peels "slip off" and "float to the surface" with the naked peas dropping to the bottom. Easy peeling, they say. Humbug and harrumph, I say; the water doesn't sort them out as advertised. I decided after a few tries that peeling isn't worth the extra effort, and adopted Madhur Jaffrey's attitude: the peels provide extra roughage. In a pureed dish (like hummus) it hardly matters. In a soup or a stew the peels add visual interest. (How's that for a rationalization? ) If the finished dish looks strange, I'll turn down the lights and light a candle.

Aha! A new excuse for buying a new tablecloth! Thank you! I *want* your countertops. That's a great color, and you need not apologize about being a slob cook; they still look great under all that food-in-progress. I also *want* your screened porch. Very Florida-looking (my mother comes from Delray Beach, and I still have kinfolk there). Unfortunately, that screened porch wouldn't be much good up here any more this year. It's the fireplace for us, now. I'm so glad someone else asked about Toast Dope so I didn't have to!

One additional bit of information: there are also recording thermometers that plot the temperature right onto a chart for all to see. They're more expensive than the data logger slbunge mentioned, where you plug into the computer to plot the data, but some people are happier about looking at a live graph than about seeing some mumbo-jumbo come out of a computer. That terrific site (thank you, slbunge, for a new source!) has both types available.

For about $50 you can get a motor attachment for your Atlas machine that will also leave both hands free. I just realized, we're all going on about how handy the motorized system is, when the original question specifically said "hand crank is fine"!

Oh yes, you must tell the story! I have visions of some poor passerby getting beaned by a flying pot roast under your window! Ex-boyfriend was a no-fat no-cholesterol freak, and a control freak at that. Butter instead of margarine? Horrors! And couldn't I get used to 2% milk in my coffee, instead of half-and-half? We fought over many control issues, and food was among them. As a sidelight, I should add that neither of us was overweight or had any known health problems. Here's an occurrence that foreshadowed our split. The scene: the dinner table, with friends over for a casual dinner. Main course was a beautifully broiled chicken with crispy done-just-right skin. Him: "Smith, you shouldn't eat the chicken skin. You know that has all the fat in it." Me: <stuff all the skin from my chicken into my mouth, savor mightily. Swallow. Smile. Grab the rejected skin from his plate, salt heavily, repeat the performance.> My friends, who never liked him, still laugh about that.

I haven't been comp'd much, nor have I expected to. My first (and maybe only) time at an Olive Garden restaurant, I ordered something to see how it compared to what I'd been making from recipes. I've forgotten the details now, but it had very little of whatever was supposed to be the main ingredient (for instance, very little meat in the carbonara). The waitress asked how I'd liked my meal, after I finished, and I said I was a bit disappointed, and why. I wasn't asking for comp'ing, nor was I complaining, but she asked for feedback and I gave it. To the restaurant's credit, they really tried to make it right anyway - not that I thought there was any wrong to be righted - wanted me to take a dessert on the house, and by all means, to come back. One wildly unexpected comp was when I was visiting a friend in Sun Valley one summer oh, 20 years ago or so. We'd walked to a local restaurant, had a long breakfast that lapsed into lunch, all the while talking and ordering more food, all of it excellent. That evening we came back for dinner and basically repeated the performance. Some hours into the evening, after we'd gone through our bottle of wine, the waiter came out and said, "You two have set a record, and because you've been such great customers, the owner invites you to come downstairs and pick out a bottle of wine. On the house!" I forget what we picked - something in the middle, neither the most expensive nor the cheapest - but we enjoyed that on the spot too, and gleefully purchased more dessert to go with it. We were back for breakfast the next morning. Ah youth! What a vacation!

As I keep rereading this thread (when I should be doing other things) I think Wendy is saying that nothing is wrapped, and that it's her mini-pastries that are getting freezer burn. What I hadn't realized until now is that those pastries are inside a closed cart that has to come out of the freezer before she can pull out any trays. My suggestions, and Toliver's, for smaller trays or silpats or something like that won't help because of the access. If I'm reading this properly now, then the question is why this problem just started a couple of months ago. What's changed? Is the freezer humidity lower than it used to be? Is she opening the cart more frequently than she used to? Wendy, one final question (for now): are you sure it's freezer burn? Can you describe what it looks like? When you first described freezer burn I thought of meat. I don't know what a freezer-burned pastry looks like. Nancy

Welcome, Rehovat! Please tell us more: why, indeed, would one boil beef?! Unless, of course, it's something like corned beef. Could you braise it? Or make beef stew? I do see the Traditional Dish note. Can you manage to tweak that tradition? And what/whose tradition is it, if you don't mind my asking? Sorry if I sound like a heretic. You should see me at Thanksgiving...always messing with those traditions, too.

Steaks with a mushroom-shallot wine sauce; potato gratin from the Balthazar Cookbook ; asparagus tossed in sesame oil, sesame seeds and tamari, then roasted. I was proud of that setup, and we came away full, with plenty of leftovers. I'd have taken a photo for bragging rights if I'd thought of it in time; I was winging it on the steak and asparagus! I'm learning!

Can you use smaller trays so you aren't removing as many mini-pastries and putting them back each time? Maybe put small trays or plates on top of the larger one so you only have to lift 1 tray out? Another, slower (and maybe not practical) way would be to seal them into mini-containers or compartments that will keep them protected from the outside air - I'm thinking of a compartmented box of some sort that holds roughly the number of pastries you'd be needing in a single compartment.

How very cool that your children want your recipes! I'm happy for y'all. I've been doing the 3-ring binder thing for years, but like your setup it's pretty utilitarian. I was going to suggest Office Max or your local equivalent - they have a wide variety of binders, including the ones with plastic covers into which you can slip a cover sheet, but it sounds like you tried that already. Have you looked at photo albums? Some of those come with decorative plastic covers that would look good but endure the kitchen environment better than a fabric-covered scrapbook. I haven't seen Power Point suggested yet. Its template structure may work better for what you need. You can make your own template, including the automatic insertion of your own photos to personalize the recipes even more.

Our family grew up with margarine for economic reasons, and only bought butter when my grandfather came to visit. As a child I thought butter was too rich and inconvenient for spreading - darned stuff was always hard. I discovered half-and-half in my coffee just after college, but stuck with the margarine. When my health-nut-freak boyfriend and I finally split up, I cut loose: half-and-half...even heavy cream sometimes in my coffee!...and butter, real butter. Since then the whole trans-fatty-acids scare has come up and bolstered my suspicions of unnecessarily processed foods. I'm sticking with butter. And chicken with the skin on. And the fatty groozly bits (thanks, Lisa) of the turkey. As others have noted, moderation is the key. I have some mistrust of unnecessarily processed foods, and the trans-fat scare recently goes more or less with my basic philosophy. However, in general I'm skeptical about food studies for reasons noted by other posters: you can find a study to prove just about any food preference. I can't remember whether it was the coffee scare (it's bad for you/no, it boosts your sex life and helps you live longer) or the wine scare (it's bad for you/no, it helps your HDL cholesterol) or the chocolate study (dark chocolate helps your sex life AND your HDL cholesterol) that tipped me over the edge, but by now I usually say "feh" when I read a new study. Before I'll give much credence to a study, I want to know who's grinding the axe. Nancy

Duck fat. ← Which has the additional advantage of being an interestingly appropriate phrase if you're dyslexic. Forgive me, I've gone off topic again. ← Actually, that wouldn't be from dyslexia; you're thinking of a spoonerism...which isn't so far off-topic after all. Forking, anyone?

I know it's recommended in a number of cookbooks, and supposed to be very chic, but I don't like juniper berries with deer or lamb. I'd rather drink a gin-and-tonic before the meal, than mix them together.

That sounds spectacularly good! What a great family memory, too! Have you ever tried repeating that exercise on a smaller scale? I wonder what could substitute for the clay around my house?....hmmm...we'll be clearing brush...

Describe the "scum" more, please. Does it look fuzzy? Smooth? Is it coffee-colored or a different color? Is it like a glossy hard slick (like what happens to my tea if it sits long enough)? When it breaks up, are the "floaties" little individual particles, or are they little jagged mini-slicks? Finally, does it form in the pot too, or just in your cup? Mind you, I don't know if I have any answers, but the answers may give someone some clues!

I prefer the savory treatment too, and like mushrooms with game. (Unlike some former hunting partners, however, I draw the line at cooking a venison roast in canned cream of mushroom soup. ) As for the juniper berries, I'm with you. That just doesn't taste right to me, although I'm very fond of gin and tonic. One of my near-disastrous cooking experiments involved cooking a lamb roast with juniper berries and something else - it was a recipe from one of the Silver Palate books, and I wanted to see what it was like. I didn't realize at the time that my then-boyfriend had never had lamb before. Neither of us liked it, but I knew it was the treatment and not the lamb. It was years before my darling lost the lamb-juniper association so he could stop flinching when I announced lamb for dinner.

If I'd been a little quicker yesterday I could have gotten a grouse with my pickup. Little guy was in the middle of the road, and we saw each other about the same time. I slowed and was rewarded with that funny run they do: head down so the entire body, head to tail, is a horizontal point, then a quick squirt across the road and down the hill. That's the first grouse I've seen here in a while; the population seems to be at low ebb. I recently heard that in northern Minnesota the grouse population falls in response to the dreaded forest tent caterpillar boom. The caterpillars denude the trees, the grouse can't get cover, the hawks have a field day/year. I don't know how much time I'll have for deer hunting this year, but I have a favorite marinade recipe for venison. It started out as my mother's venison kebab marinade and has morphed into my chicken, lamb or venison marinade - not just for kebab pieces, but also for whole steaks. I'll share if anyone's interested.

Anna, I add my thanks and admiration and prayers to everyone else's. Thank you for sharing your week with us - and recipes, too, especially the lemon ice cream and spicy shrimp! Know that a few prayers for Miss Jess are coming from my direction, and do keep us posted. Thanks for a great blog!

Chicken pox?! Lentils?! Now *that* makes me sorry I asked!

Here we all are, peppering Anna with questions, and she has the telephone unplugged for the evening! Imagine the flood of questions she'll have by morning! Edited to add: but I too think the Friday evening tradition is an excellent idea.

WowWowWow that ice cream sounds good! No eggs? Any chance of telling the proportions of juice to sugar to dairy, or would that be giving away a recipe? Has Miss Jess discovered lemon curd yet? I bet she'd love it. How about lemon meringue pie? Any finally, thank you for even more excuses...yep, it's really wet outside today, and going to be cold tonight. Hauling wood is thirsty work!

At last, I have a new excuse for beer at lunch time! I too love my ice cream maker. I don't use it as often as I'd like because I'm the only ice cream eater in the house (and I shouldn't eat it too often). Still, it's great fun and the results are very rewarding - especially when the stone fruits are available. How did you make the lemon ice cream? I haven't tried that.