andiesenji
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Posts posted by andiesenji
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Today's email from Leite's Culinaria was headed with a note about "The Fat Lady" and clicking on Fat Lady took me to Jennifer's Blog.
Heading it is the post about her new cookbook coming out in September.
For those who do love "The Rest of the Animal" this looks to be a great addition to a cook's library.
I discovered that I have other books by this author.
I've long been a proponent of "natural" fats (as have many others in this forum) and I'm surprised I had forgotten the "Fat" cookbook, which I purchased some two years ago and managed to shuffle aside with a stack of others books acquired about the same time.
I also have "Bones" and found it after reading about roasted marrow bones in another thread on this forum.
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I've been re-reading Dorothy L. Sayres' "Lord Peter Wimsey" mysteries, which contain a lot of descriptions of interesting meals.
So I pulled out my copy of The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook to refresh my memory of how some of these were prepared.
There are quite a few "Culinary Mysteries" which have become more popular in recent years and I will be re-reading several of these which I came across while searching for all the Sayres' books.
The next batch is the series by Diane Mott Davidson, as each book contains recipes as well as a good mystery.
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I miss the Good Trader Vics. I also miss Swedish smorgasbords.
In L.A. on the West side, it was Kelbo's Tiki Bar & Restaurant, on Pico Blvd. There was another on Fairfax, across from CBS "Television City" but I preferred the other.
They had the best ribs I have ever tasted. Not only meaty like candied pork.
And the coleslaw was addictive.
The bar was very popular, especially with folks who traveled often and would stop on the way home to the Valley from LAX.
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I keep a couple of jars of these Goya products in my pantry in case I don't have the time to put a traditional one together.
The red is "Sofrito" the green is "Recaito" that is based on cilantro.
The method I was taught takes some time for the flavors to develop.
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A & W Root Beer stand with the real "Draft Root Beer" and the root beer floats.
Loved their hamburgers and "steak" fries with the potato skins on.
There was one three blocks from where I lived and they had "house" accounts so the kids could eat there after school and I could pay at the end of the month.
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My friend was making a drink, sort of like eggnog, with protein powder &etc., because she had been ill.
Her doctor had given her a potent antibiotic but did not tell her that it might affect her taste and smell.
She kept adding nutmeg because she couldn't taste it and probably consumed more than half a teaspoon before giving up and just drinking the stuff.
Less than an hour later she had a seizure and fortunately was rushed to the ER because she was in cardiac distress. Her husband told them what she had consumed and she was warned to avoid more than small amounts of nutmeg. She was told that some people are more sensitive to it than others and she could have died if not treated immediately.
Her husband said that she reeked of nutmeg for a couple of days afterward but she still could neither taste nor smell it.
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I miss the shows that I liked on Food TV in the '90s.
John Ash, Curtis Aikens, David Rosengarten, Two Hot Tamales.
And I really miss Julia.
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Leaving aside the dose aspect of this...
Don't leave the dose issue aside! We all have tiny amounts of all sorts of "poisons", "toxins" and "carcinogens" in our bodies all the time, but below certain dosage thresholds, they are "harmless." (OK, they have such a small impact, if any, that it is statistically undetectable.) Botulism toxin is the most deadly toxin known by weight. But doctors around the world inject it into millions of people every year - Botox. The dose is so tiny that it "kills" local nerve activity temporarily, but doesn't have any other negative health effect, except in very rare cases. Clearly, dose matters.
The same holds true for things that would be beneficial above a certain dosage level. Something might be great for you, but unless there's enough of it in your system it doesn't have any detectable effect. (Yes, I am saying that so-called "homeopathy" is Woo - aka "gobledygook") Highly dilute solutions and/or tiny does of some chemical or other do no good, or harm, for that matter.
The one potential positive effect from tiny, culinary amounts of herbs and such would be the placebo effect. If you're receiving (real) treatment for cancer, and you take the action of adding such-and-such to your diet because you believe it will help you, it just might. You may be so uncomfortable from chemo that you can't eat much, but you're eating a few blueberries because you hope that the anti-oxidants will help you heal. The actual dose of anti-oxidant chemicals might be "meaningless", but your choice and action to assist your healing can have some influence to stimulate your body's ability to heal itself. It may be "Dumbo's feather", but if you get better faster (or survive at all, for that matter), then great! As long as you don't eat anything that is actually harmful (which some "natural remedies" are, as are some foods with certain health conditions), and you aren't wasting money on some "homeopathic preparation" or "super-vitamin" or similar woo-junk, then if it helps to induce the placebo effect, then all the better!
Wasn't saying dose doesn't matter, but that if the active compounds in something have deteriorated/been degraded, the dose would be beside the point (e.g. if you boil the hell out of orange juice, you can drink it by the a gallon, and you'd still get zero vitamin C).
And I'm not clear as to whether you're talking about "poisons", "toxins", "carcinogens", and "homeopathy", or actual poisons, toxins, carcinogens, and homeopathy.
I have a friend who became very ill from consuming too much nutmeg.
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How did all you abalone-eaters prepare it? My husband spent time in California when he was a kid, and he has memories of gathering abalone with his Dad. He said it was awful - like eating rubber tires. I can only assume they overcooked it, and his Dad also pounded it on a cement sidewalk pre-cooking to "tenderize" it.
I've never had it, and am curious as to what it was like when prepared well.
I pounded it with a cast iron skillet and marinated it overnight in buttermilk as that was the advice I got from a cook at the Albatross restaurant that used to be on Pacific Coast Hiway in Malibu.
(He said to use the "Lizzie Borden" method - forty wacks on each side.)
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I like your pan Chris.
I have one that has little ridges on the bottom that has worked much better than the traditional pans.
News about eggs on a local station just a little while ago.
Less Cholesterol and more Vitamin D
info on egg cartons will be revised.
I keep telling people that eggs should not be vilified but some do believe all the "bad" hype.
I love eggs.
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Don't forget Abalone- man I used to love the wild harvested stuff. Not that there is any left around these parts alas.
OK you got me- off the rocks on Catalina Island and grilled with butter on the beach
Yep! And it was cheap too if you had to buy it. Best enjoyed with some Mateus Rose- another blast from the past mentioned upthread.
You really got me with abalone. It is one of the few seafoods that I can have. When I lived in Canoga Park in the '70s, I had neighbors who were licensed divers and brought me buckets of abalone. Not only did I cook a lot of it, I also polished the shells and used them all over the house. I still have a few but sold most of them years ago.
The poaching that decimated the abalone population along the entire Pacific coast wasn't taken seriously until it was too late.
The first time I had abalone was at the restaurant in Marineland of the Pacific when I relocated to southern Cal. in 1959. I miss that too.
Oh, I also miss Van De Kamp's bakery/restaurants.
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For years and years I was a strict recipe-follower - longer than most cooks ever are, I think. These days I'm overwhelmingly cooking 'from the hip', and more and more I enjoy picking out the best things on a visit to the market (or selecting from stores when I'm busy) and improvising something good from them.
Andiesenji, you reminded me that I like to cook classics from a recipe. As to voice memos and Word, did you ever try a program called ViaVoice, or similar ? Might save you some transcribing.
Helen, Buri & banana ?
I have a speech to text app but I type faster than it and without errors.
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andiesnji, you can also do this reliably and rapidly in the type of pressure cooker designed for home-canning botulism prevention. Same type used routinely for safe canning of non-acid foods. It's distinct from the more common home pressure cookers that simply speed up ordinary boiling or steaming. Friends have been doing this, and are happy with the flavors.
Thanks for the advice but I really do know a bit about it.
I'm almost 72 years old and have been canning since my twenties, having grown up on a farm where everything was canned, including meats.
Even pressure canned foods can be affected by botulism if care is not taken.
Many years ago when the possibility of irradiation of foods immediately after harvest became available I spent a lot of time writing to the various government agencies because this would certainly remove completely the possibility of botulism.
Unfortunately some people believe that this is bad and they have a lot of political clout so we are still in the dark ages on this subject.
I have the largest pressure canner made by All American (41 quart) but I need help when using it and no longer have a live-in housekeeper. I also have a smaller one that holds 7 pint jars and this is the one I use when canning the garlic in oil.
Just canning it does not give the "roasted" flavor that I want.
I don't like the flavor of raw garlic infused in oil which is why I roast it to begin with.
I consulted the Farm Bureau office in my city when I first moved up here in '88 and was given a stack of printed materials about all facets of canning, including botulism and etc.
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The most recent email from Kitchen Contraptions had a link to these outdoor grills.
Very futuristic designs. Kitchen Contraptions suggested they look like they came from Star Trek.
If one needs something that is fairly "portable" I can see these being a focal point in garden/patio design.
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Long ago I posted about the oven-roasted garlic in oil that I prepare in large amounts and can in jars so it can be stored at room temp.
I only use the peeled garlic cloves sold in the big containers at Sam's or Costco or Smart & Final, not garlic from my garden.
I stab one of the largest garlic cloves with the probe of my thermometer/timer with it set for 250° F.
I cover it with two liters of olive oil and put it in the oven at 325°to 350°F. It will take quite a while for the thermometer to sound the alarm, meanwhile the entire house (or neighborhood) will have the "aroma" of garlic.
I have also tried doing this in a deep fryer but did not like the texture of the garlic, it cooked too rapidly and was hard on the outside. The longer oven cooking produces a much nicer result.
I have also tried speeding up the process by heating the oil partially before pouring it into the deep roaster but I think that can be a bit chancy unless one has a very steady hand. (I no longer do.)
When the alarm sounds, I set the timer for 15 minutes and at the end of this I turn the oven off and allow the stuff to cool a bit.
I then transfer it to pint jars, some garlic and some oil in each one, cap them and let them cool completely.
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My local health food store carries a nut-free muesli which is quite crunchy and holds this crunch in baked goods.
I use it in cookie bars and have used it in frosting for "German chocolate cake" for people who have nut allergies.
I'm pretty sure I have seen it at Whole Foods, although it has been a few weeks since I visited the store.
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I get most of my eggs from a local person who raises "fancy" chickens and the sizes vary somewhat so I weigh them before I select the ones for use in particular recipes.
I use eggs weighing 2 ounces each (the large size noted in your chart) for MODERN recipes.
If you have a recipe that was developed prior to about 1910, you have to take into account that the eggs were probably smaller before the development of "egg mash" commercial feeds that gave hens more nutrition in a food that was easier to digest.
When I began collecting old "receipts" I noticed that some of the old ones called for eggs by volume, i.e., a "gill" of eggs, a "pint" of eggs or even in one case a "quart" of eggs.
Measuring eggs this way allowed cooks to use eggs of all sizes as long as the volume was correct.
Some recipes specified 3 to 4 eggs, however the directions in many cases are minimal. I think they expected most cooks to know enough to add the three eggs and look at the result and add another if needed.
The eggs I get vary from what I would consider medium, all the way to jumbo but most fall between the large and extra-large size.
I use the bigger ones for eggy dishes that don't require precise measuring, omelets & etc., and those that fall around the "large" weight for baking but I break them into a cup and actually measure by weight - assuming 2 ounces per egg in the recipe.
I use the small and medium eggs when I have a recipe that specifies weight or total volume.
Sometimes he will bring me a basket of nothing but bantam eggs and I generally poach or hard boil them.
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I would like to see the last of the InSinkErator Evolution Pro Excel 1 HP Garbage Disposer I had installed when my Hobart dishwasher was taken out.
I was talked into getting the optional "cover control" which is a PIA of the first rank.
It is a great disposer, it grinds everything, including chicken bones, pineapple tops and other stuff that won't go through most disposers. It is also quiet.
But I absolutely detest that cover control. I'm the only one that usually uses it, no children so it is not necessary for safety. (Unless I become senile
)After I got it I remembered that 40 some years ago I had an InSinkErator that had the same control (I didn't want my kids sticking hands in the damn thing) and I didn't like that one but had totally forgotten about it.
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Andiesenji, I know you don't have a recipe for the coconut cake with the coconut-water syrup that you mentioned earlier, but just curious, I was wondering if you recall, was it a sponge type cake or maybe a butter cake that you had when growing up? Was there grated coconut in the cake batter or was the coconut rather in the filling and on top of the cake instead?
It was a fairly dense white cake, almost like a pound cake, the cake itself was flavored with vanilla and the syrup that soaked into it after it was baked.
Between the layers was frosting with freshly grated and sweetened.
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I don't know if this really fits in this topic but a new appliance, combining a pressure cooker and a smoker will be available in a couple of weeks.
Today's email from Hammacher Schlemmer touted "the best two slice toaster" and when I went to the web page there were other appliances, one of which was this.
"The Only Indoor Pressure Smoker."
Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?
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I would imagine that a lot of the Old-Fashioned Cakes we've been discussing were standard offerings under the glass cake domes on Diner counters. (I have two layers of Devil's Food Cake cooling on the counter as we speak. Now that's a Diner classic).
So true. Most diners in the south also offer a rotating selection that usually include coconut cake in its various forms, red velvet cake, white cake baked in a rectangular pan and usually with milk chocolate frosting, banana cake (not banana bread), pineapple upside down cake, German chocolate cake, angel food and chiffon cakes, as well as some local specialties.
When I was traveling while showing dogs, I almost always visited "mom & pop" diners for my meals when in the south and was rarely disappointed.
In other parts of the country I usually stuck to chain restaurants while on my own because diners on the whole did not seem as friendly as those in the south. There were some terrific exceptions that I found when they were recommended to me.
I remember with great fondness a diner outside Columbia, MO where I was served a wedge of a molasses stack cake that was amazing. Of course that was long before I had diabetes - no chance of having that today.
I've owned one cookbook for twenty-some years: Roadside Food by Leroy Woodson and Retro Diner by Linda Everett that I got several years ago.
Both have great diner recipes, if anyone is interested. ABE books has both.
Linda Everett authored several other "Retro" books, I have then all and they are worth having, in my opinion.
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I always get it at night.
But here is the catch, never from anything else but "Pastries/Desserts/Sweets" of any kind, but not from 'Ice Cream'!!
The other catch, never from homebaked or homemade "from-scratch".
So, other than my wife's preparations (or mine), stuff made with apparent 'pre-mixes' or 'storebought' will give me Heartburn after laying down for about 2/3 hours.
Remedy, and I love all sweets and can't always help it not eating 'any', when knowing that I will have some, not "Wolf Lair made", a couple of prescribed, and always on hand, including pocket,
" SUCRALFATE TABS 1GR "
Any spicy or fried or hot or fatty stuff does not bother me !
From personal experience I know that soy lecithin, either liquid or granules, even in fairly small amounts, causes symptoms, especially in baked goods. This is one reason I bake most of my own breads &etc., because this is one thing that aggravates my condition.
I recently found a source for sunflower lecithin and will be trying it soon with hopes that it will not produce the same symptoms.
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What do hickory nuts taste like? Anything that can be described?
Hickory nuts are sweeter than pecans with not even a hint of the slightly bitter aftertaste often found in even the sweetest pecans.
They are not grown commercially because the nuts are extremely difficult to crack so have to be wild gatherd and they are expensive but once you taste them you realize that pecans, while good, just don't have that special flavor.
Hickory nuts have a very high percentage of the desirable fats that are good for the heart.
The pecan is a hybrid descended from the hickory, probably the shellbark variety.
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My Mexican neighbor makes a lovely pineapple flavored cake with a frosting made with the penuche sold in Mexican markets in a hard cone-shaped form.
She grates it coarsely into a sort of cream cheese frosting and it doesn't melt so retains a bit of crunch.
It's nothing like the penuche fudge we used to have when I was a child.
The cake itself has corn flour as well as regular flour in it. It's way too rich for me so I have never asked for the recipe for it or the frosting.
I tasted a piece that was about 1 square inch.
Foods you miss from the 1970s
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted · Edited by andiesenji (log)
I still have two of the "coconut" tumblers made by Malibu Pottery and sold at Kelbo's.
I could still have alcohol at that time and loved their Mai Tais because they used only fresh fruit juices, no mix, no frozen concentrates. And they weren't so strong as in other places.
My most memorable visit to the Fairfax Kelbo's was in the late '60s when a friend and I, she a secretary at CBS, were joined by Jerry Dumphy the popular news anchor for lunch. He was supposed to meet some people but they failed to show so he had lunch with us and kept us laughing the entire time.