Smithy

Caroline, I'm so sorry to hear about your mother's passing. I believe, as many here do, that your mother does know about your successes, and is still with you, watching and loving you. Still, it isn't the same. Seeing her when you're asleep, or feeling her presence, doesn't quite have the immediacy of seeing and holding and visiting with her when you're awake. Treasure your memories (and the knife!) and the good times, and they'll comfort you. There's comfort, too, that you still have your father and sister in this life. Congratulations on your successes and new projects! I think the idea of submitting your tribute for publication is a good one. Nancy

I don't know about San Marzano tomatoes, as such, but I've had good luck with freezing fresh tomatoes after I've skinned and seeded them. It's easier in some ways that canning them. I can't see why freezing canned leftover tomatoes wouldn't work - especially if you go ahead and seed them. I wouldn't completely drain them. I'd make sure there was enough liquid in the container to completely cover the tomatoes and fill the voids between them, so they don't get freezer burned. However - if these tomatoes are really wonderful, then maybe your better bet is to make a fabulous sauce with them first, and then freeze it. Freeze it in small batches so you can defrost only as much as you'll need at a time.

[OT] We're working right now to disabuse the kittens of the idea that the kitchen table is a place to play. It's an uphill battle, but when they do it, then the husky puppy figures he has a right to do it, too. I figure this is our excuse to add a dining room with window that go to the floor. [/OT] I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who takes longer than most recipes claim. Do you think it's just that you have to mentally process the instructions before you can carry them out? That seems to be my issue. I have to keep going back to recheck the steps unless I really already know the recipe. It's worst when someone else is talking to me. My husband has finally learned that when I reach a certain frantic stage of racing around the kitchen, it's best to clear out. Recently I was testing a recipe that turned out to be grand fun at a certain incendiary stage, but he didn't dare come upstairs to see what all the whooping and laughing was about. I think the pork and sauce looked beautiful!

I am impressed with the ideas and comments you're getting, and even more impressed that you found a house like that within your budget! I have a question about removing the door to the stairwell, though. In a few years, assuming you have small children running around, will you be happy with a baby gate across that doorway?

That's about what I suspected. I'm pretty good at shifting my pans around on the coil when I overdo the heat, so I can probably save my money for other purposes. Thanks for the answer.

Not too far off-topic, I hope: the other day I ordered a BLT wrap from our local take-out store. When I opened the bag later there was a note saying "we weren't sure whether you wanted lettuce and tomato with that, so we put those into separate containers". Sure enough, there was a tortilla with bacon and mayo, and in separate baggies were shredded lettuce and chopped tomatoes. Ah, life in the North Woods.

My kitchen notebook comprises scraps of paper stuck to the refrigerator with magnets! Eventually I get around to writing things in a slightly more organized fashion, and a few of those have arrived in my looseleaf binder of tried-and-true recipes. But in general, around our house, the notes about our breading mixture for chicken, roasting times for chicken or pork, outstanding pasta dishes that I threw together and want to re-create and tweak, all go onto the nearest scrap of paper at hand, into the general kitchen clutter, and eventually onto the side of the refrigerator. I used to keep my cookbooks pristine, but about 10 years ago I took to treating them like a lab notebook. Every dish I try has a notation: date, results, what I might change, how others liked it. (It's telling, isn't it, when everyone says "ooh, this is good!" but nobody asks for the recipe?) Those few cookbooks I don't want to mark up are littered with comments on Post-It™ notes that can be removed someday.

Wow! I'm coming in really late on this blog, but add me to your list of fans, Rachel. I'm very impressed at your adventuresome approach to cooking. I had cookbooks for years, loving to look at them, but my first years of actually learning to cook were pretty mainstream stuff. You're just jumping in, and doing a right good job of it. I hope everyone isn't sick of the Malt-O-Meal discussion by now, but I'm here to tell you that I grew up watching TV ads for it in California. We never ate it, but I remember the commercials. As for the chicken: how about a nice bed of rice to soak up that sauce? Maybe mix some toasted walnuts in with the rice to give an extra crunch and compliment the apple component of the sauce?

Welcome, designchick88! Stick around and enjoy the fun! I'm glad you posted that. I was starting to wonder whether I'd hulled the seeds and forgotten doing it. (Evidently, whatever it is in pumpkin seeds that's good for you isn't a memory aid.) I think we just ate them whole after roasting. Ours are Jack O'Lantern pumpkin seeds, as there's never another reason in our household to mess with pumpkins. Squash seeds, now, that sounds promising.

All this talk about copper and its quick response time makes me wonder: would that matter on an electric coil stove? Y'all have me salivating for for some of that Mauviel, but I suspect it would be the culinary equivalent of putting a turbocharger in a Ford Pinto.

Ooh, a new ingredient! I can probably look it up, but that's no fun: what's frika? Where might I get some, and how would I generally use it?

What a great thread! Rien has added some great ideas, and between the two of you I'm feeling much better about the oil and toxins question. Thanks for the eggplant information, both of you. Rien's comments on the eggplant have me just about convinced as to the fate of the oversized eggplant I've sitting in my refrigerator. I've been too busy to cook lately (since just about the pepper-stuffing time) and the eggplant is just sitting there, getting older. Very frustrating. As to what to do with the oil when the peppers are finished, I have 3 plans for it: * Cook with it * Make salad dressing with it * Dip bread in it No way is that wonderful nutty stuff going down the drain. Hmmm. I have some roasted peppers waiting to be sliced and stuffed into oil so I can use them in my cookery. Think I'll add some herbs to the mix. The possibilities are endless, aren't they?

This wine has been one of my favorites for several years. Thanks for the WTN so I can learn the proper terms for what I taste.

My method is pretty much like Cusina's. Wash in a colander to get rid of the slime. (You'll save a bit of water if you first pitch them in a mixing bowl and swoosh them around in water, then do a rinse/flush cycle in the colander.) Drain until at least partly dry. Toss with olive oil, salt, and other seasonings at your discretion. Spread on a cookie sheet and bake at 325F, stirring occasionally, until they start to brown. Remove. Enjoy. They are crunchy, they are delectable, they are digestible, they always make me wish I'd bought more pumpkins. I dunno about "chewy", as such; aren't caramels chewy? But boy, are they good. Much better than the pumpkin, and almost as fun as the kids enjoying the Jack-O'-Lantern. Edited to add: in the night I remembered that I probably roast hotter than 325F... but now I've forgotten: 375?. Meanwhile, gus_tatory posted an even better sounding method, and that's the way I'm going next time around!

Thanks for all the answers, Elie! I appreciate your offer to protect me from myself, but after reading your answer I think I'll take my chances with this batch. OK, here are 4 things I learned making this recipe the first time. They should have been obvious, but sometimes I'm a bit dense. 1. Pick the straightest chilis you can find. Curved chilis are harder to seed and harder to stuff. 2. Cut the chilis short enough to fit into the jar below the neck! (Now really, shouldn't I have figured that out first? I had to cut the top inch off a couple of chilis after I'd already stuffed them!) The corollary to this is, don't bother buying really long chilis unless you have a really tall jar. 3. Do use a spoon to clean out the seeds, as noted in the original instructions. I tried using a knife to cut the web that holds the seeds, and it didn't work as well. I kept cutting the wall of the pepper. A long-handled spoon (like you use for iced tea) worked well. 4. Put enough peppers into each jar that they push against each other without squeezing out their filling. That way they'll hold each other in place when the oil is added. The first time I added oil all the chilis floated to the top because they weren't packed in tightly enough. I had to add another pepper or two to get them to stay in place. By the way, this saves a bit on how much oil you need to do the recipe. If you have nut mixture left over, you can throw some in the bottom of the jar (I think that will taste great) or mix it in with that night's dinner pilaf. I would love to have a preserved eggplant recipe - hint, hint - Edited for spelling

TP(M'sia), I don't think you hijacked the thread too much. Thanks for the idea! I made my first batch of stuff preserved peppers according to Elie's recipe last night, and now I have questions! (I also have comments and pitfalls, if anyone's interested, but I won't bore the general readership with that stuff unless asked. I get carried away. ) My first question is, Elie, how will I know when the peppers are done? Do I just wait two weeks and then start opening? My second question, closely related to the "wait two weeks" bit, is the result of the dreaded mental Food Police who visited me in the night whispering about garlic in oil and anaerobic bacteria and botulism. I hate when this happens! As a rule I think the Food Police are a bit too alarmist for me - I eat rare steak, runny egg yolks, and ice cream made with raw eggs. Still, the specter of botulism makes me ask: will I dare eat these peppers when they're finished? I forgot to put salt into the peppers before I started stuffing them. The filling itself is fairly salty. I added red vinegar at the end (a bit more than 2 tbsp each jar) and watched it all drop to the bottom of the jar, where it of course won't mix with the oil. Will these peppers be safe to eat, and are there things I can do to improve the safety? Shake the jar from time to time to redistribute the vinegar? Refrigerate the whole thing? Start eating them tomorrow? They really are works of art, and I hope I didn't botch the recipe too badly to eat them. Here's what they look like right now, although the photo doesn't do them justice. The green is a more vivid peppery green, almost like jewels under the oil.

Chorizo con huevos. It's ridiculously easy: break up or slice up the chorizo. (I'm assuming this is not the little hard chunky chorizo that won't break up and has no grease to give off.) Start cooking it while you beat eggs with milk or water or whatever your preferred scrambling liquid is. As the chorizo starts to brown, pour off some of the grease if you've a mind, and then add the beaten eggs. Scramble, stirring regularly over fairly low heat until it's all cooked to your satisfaction. The proportions for a hungry sailing crew are (approximately) a pound of chorizo for a dozen eggs. There are more sophisticated treatments, and this recipe could be gussied up with mushrooms or tomatoes or whatever, but this was the first spicy breakfast food I ever learned to love. It always reminds me of the college friend who taught it to me, and our trips to Catalina Island.

You mean, like my last car?

Ohhh, that hurts. Reminds me of a time in high school when I was putting away the dinner dishes. These were my mother's new dinner dishes, ceramic, to replace the indestructible Melmac with which we'd been raised. As I dried each plate I stacked it on its mates...on the edge of the drying rack. The last plate was the last straw, and the drying rack tipped up, crashing the entire lot into the porcelain sink.

A couple of years ago my husband and I were given a bottle of Davis Bynum Zinfandel, 1996. I'd never been much on zins, but what the heck - it was free, and I've rarely met a free wine I didn't like. Eventually we got around to opening it, and had a genuine WOW moment: so THIS was what all the fuss was about! I'm still learning the terms, so I can't say specifically that there were tobacco or soap or old leather or old shoelaces. Jammy, probably; full and fruity but with a darker, deeper, fuzzier note to it, definitely. (Don't ask me what "fuzzy" means, but to my palate some wines are clear and some are fuzzy. Maybe it's blackberry brambles.) We thought that Davis Bynum Zinfandel was a wonderful wine, and we were sorry to find we can't get it in Minnesota. That episode started us on a search for zinfandels we loved as we had that one. We began with wines from around Healdsburg since that's the home of Davis Bynum winery, and moved out from there. Alderbrook OVOC is a reliable winner. Seghesio is another, although they have - or had - multiple grades. (Our wine group was split on whether the Seghesio Sonoma or the Seghesio Old Vines (Ancient Vines?) was the better; I of course chose the most expensive in a blind test, and I haven't been able to find anything other than their Sonoma lately.) Once I had a Quivera Dry Creek Zin that hit the mark, but I've never found it again. Ditto for a Saugus. The quest continues, and it's a lot of fun, but now I'd like to learn more about what I'm looking for. Not all zins from the Dry Creek area hit the mark, and I think we've had a few that suited our tastes but came from someplace else entirely. Andrea Immer referred in one of her wine guides to a "Dry Creek-style Zinfandel" and cited one of the above loved wines as an example. She didn't define that style. She hasn't listed other zins with the same style so we can know what to look for. I have no idea whether she made that term up or it's an accepted term among wine makers...so, I turn to you experts to tell me. Is there such a thing as a "Dry Creek-style" zinfandel? If so, how would one characterize it? (Help me with this terminology, please!) Finally, how can I know before buying whether a zinfandel will be of that style? Edited for spelling

This weekend, inspired by this thread, I tried roasting paprika chicken in my Romertopf. I stuffed the cavity with quartered onions, put more quartered onions and some celery stalks down as a rack in the bottom of the pot. Rubbed the chicken skin with a mix of pounded garlic, salt, lemon juice and white pepper, and slid some of that mixture under the skin for good measure, then took Fifi's advice and coated that baby with insane amounts of paprika. I started with the Hot Szego, but after tasting it began to fear the results, so I tempered it with the Sweet Szego. (I think the final result was somewhere past 50:50 toward the hot end.) Went off for a walk with the husband and dog, and when we got back an hour or so later, checked in to see what I had wrought. Oh. My. Stars and Garters! We have a new favorite. My approach was very unscientific but the results were spectacular. I thought it was a touch overcooked but Russ didn't; it certainly wasn't stringy, and the bones fell out by themselves. There's lovely juice (and at least a little meat!) left over for some broth or sauce - perhaps to go into tonight's rice and chicken stuffing for peppers. I might have experimented with it at the time, but we were too hungry, and the wine flowed too freely to do much but clean up afterward. Next time: maybe cook slightly less time, maybe try the smoked paprika. Maybe follow an actual recipe written here. Start looking for other varieties to try. I dunno, but the possibilities are endless. Folks, sign us up as new addicts!

Elie, I got the peppers this weekend and thought I was all ready to roll, then realized I hadn't gotten the nuts! Before I trot back to the store I have questions: 1. Should the peanuts be dry-roasted or the more standard, somewhat oily, canned roasted peanuts? Does it matter? 2. Does this work for other nuts as well? I'm thinking walnuts, for instance. 3. How finely should the stuff be chopped?

That sounds terrific. Do you suppose a regular small skillet, or a crepe pan, would work instead of the upside-down wok? Or is the curved bottom critical?

Many thanks!

Andie, was that $69 in 1970 dollars or $69 in 2000 dollars? What I'm really getting at is, which version of the Bron do you have? The one I like the looks of best is, naturally, the most expensive version. I've never seen it for less than $100, and I'd rather have money left over for my next pot.