Smithy

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.

Whoa...I know I want to make them! They do sound wonderful!

Suvir, that link isn't working for me. Would you post the URL, please? Or is the web page dead? I love Egyptian khoushary and have been intrigued at its similarity to mujaddere (the way I heard the Turkish name). Now I learn there's an Indian variant also! I'd like to see how it compares. Slightly off-topic but I'm intrigued at the linguistic connections: Imm Jaddara vs. Mujaddere. Mother of __ vs. person of __? Is that what that means? What's the jaddara part?

Well, who wants metal shavings sticking to the sandwich filling? At least, with a closed sandwich, he can brush it off the outside of the bread! When I looked at that pasta dish you whipped up for lunch, I realized what the next foodblog enhancement will HAVE to be: we absolutely MUST work out a way to get the smells into these blogs! That looked beautiful, and I'll bet it tasted even better.

Oh, boy! Anna, I agree that you have some tough acts to follow, but I've always enjoyed reading your posts. I look forward to hearing more about you and reading your blog. I've been mystified by Soba's notice that the next blog was coming from the "wilds of Canada". When I saw your name on the food blog I thought "but of course!" I hope you're going to explain more about where you are in Ontario? I suppose we'll find out that Oakville isn't very wild, after all... Blog on!

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?