andiesenji

Yes! I posted the link when I said I had placed the order. I had gotten Madagascar Pepper from Pepper Passion (now Sir Spice) a couple of years ago but I used it up. They were sold out when I checked so I went to my "alternatives" and noted one of the blogs I follow had recommended this place. Here's my collection of peppers from early 2015

I have ordered some things from Australia that were not readily available here. Wattleseed is one. I have purchased it a couple of times and experimented with several recipes. There are various jams, jellies, chutneys, chow chows, piccalilli and other REGIONAL sauces and such that don't seem to be sold outside their areas and are not easy to find online. A couple of years ago I ordered something from New Mexico - an item I had purchased there, enjoyed and wanted more. There was an online site, I placed an order, they charged my credit card, I never got the package. I had purchased the items at a winery near Deming while visiting my dad and I had shipped wine to friends and family and they also had quite a few local products for sale. I dug out my receipt from the winery called them and asked about the vendor. They told me they had just stopped delivering a few months earlier, would not answer phone calls and appeared to be out of business. I notified my credit card company and got my money back but I was really irritated. It was a jam, made from prickly pear and smoked chile peppers, spicy, sweet and smoky. Went great with cheese. I have not found a similar product anywhere.

I just received my order of Madagascar Pepper from Old Stone Market. The company is in Texas and they are great to deal with. Careful packaging and quick shipping. I had a question and got an immediate response. I recommend them highly! It is very aromatic and is very flavorful. My favorite way of tasting pepper is on a buttered saltine (unsalted butter) and so I carried out my usual "test" on these peppercorns. It took me a few tries to get the grind just right for my taste (medium fine) I ground it into a shallow prep dish in segments so I could see the size. Then I moved it and mixed them together, doesn't matter, I ground the pepper directly on to the buttered saltines. The flavor is very assertive and it has similar notes to the Wynad pepper, which I have been using heavily for the past year. I think it will be very good on fruits, besides all the usual applications.

I ordered some. I mentioned it on that thread.

The crank is only on the right side and the handle is in the same plane as the rotating gear assembly. It is made to be held with the left hand and cranked with the right. The ones with the top handles or the "post-type" handles work with either hand but I know from experience (a left-handed stepdaughter) that the ones with the side handles are impossible for a lefty to use. There were ones made for left-handed people - by one manufacturer - they were sold at dime stores and were made by EKCO. They are quite rare.

I visited Cornell back in late 1956 when I was in baking school at Dunwoodie in Minneapolis. We went by rail, the Great Northern from St.Paul to Chicago and the Erie railroad to Corning because one of our instructors had wangled us a free stay at a resort-like country inn, along with free transport to and from Cornell which was about a half hour drive away. They were studying bread baking in depth and experimenting with various strains of yeast, optimum temperatures, etc. I nearly went back some twenty years later when I attended a conference for glass artists at Corning. The place where we had stayed in '56 was now a big Raddison hotel. We stayed at the even larger Hilton because the conference group got really great discounts. I experimented with espaliered fruit trees when I lived down in the Valley and had just under 2 acres. Apples, 3 varieties as I recall, Pears, I think I had 4 varieties - including the little seckel and forelle pears grafted onto the same rootstock, which produced heavily the 3rd year, Comice and Anjous, red and green. And there was another, name I can't recall. I also did apricots, peaches and we tried some citrus but they did not do well. The BEST espalier was two plums, grafted on a 10-year-old rootstock Damson, the two scions were Satsuma and Victoria and both bore amazing amounts of fruit the 4th year. These were all planted against two concrete block walls, one facing south and one facing west. I also grew mushrooms for a couple of years. A couple of my friends, as a joke, gifted me with 4 of the mushroom "kits" for different types of mushrooms. One was oyster mushrooms, two were Shiitake and one was Portobellos. I put them in a spare bathroom that I didn't use. Blackout curtains. Kept it humid during the really dry seasons.

I'm pretty sure I have all of Jan Grigson's books. Someone gave me her book on French pork back in the late '60s and a few years later I saw the Mushroom book at Brentanos and bought it. I came across it not long ago and the receipt was still in it - used as a bookmark. I love sautéd chanterelles with caramelized pancetta and the tiny cipollini onions. I used to order a white truffle about this time of the year and a black truffle in March. Sadly they are priced out of my range now that I am no longer working.

Here are some of my vintage eggbeaters. I chose one of each type that I have.

These are not easy for lefties to use.

In a case of "what's old is new again!" Look what I got. Sent to me to "test" and write a review - a newly introduced Zyliss "Quick Whisk" which is a new style of eggbeater. Unlike those of yesteryear, this one has beaters that are removable for cleaning and has a "bail guard" so the beaters do not strike the sides and bottoms of bowls or other vessels. And it works right or left handed which was a complaint of many women with some of the eggbeaters with handles that were for righties only. I have several "vintage" eggbeaters and this is superior to all of them in the way it is constructed and the way it works. Not only do the beaters themselves rotate, they rotate around a common shaft in a "planetary" motion.

It might also be a hook element for the top to hook onto. It looks to me as if it had something around it at one time. Somewhere in my stuff I have a little brandy warmer (alcohol burner) with a similar bracket that holds a wire support for a brandy snifter. The base in which it sets holds the cup in a ring but I don't think the cup has a handle. It has been years since I looked at it, it is packed away with stuff I haven't used for 30 years.

You are correct. It sits IN something. I grew up in a house where chafers were used all the time and I have seen and "helped" clean many of these. As a child I liked to do "chores" and the servants were very obliging. I loved to "help" with the silver polishing although I am sure I was more of a hinderance than help, but I did learn a lot about how things worked.

Does these look familiar? It is an alcohol cup, missing its lid, which sits under a chafing dish and holds denatured alcohol. It should have a slotted lid to contain and direct the flame. This one looks like it is from the Art Deco era. I looked at hundreds of chafing dishes from various eras when I was catering. At one time I had a dozen, many had cups similar to this, some were more elaborate with little burner controls and in some the cups were not removable. They had to be when they were silver so they could be polished. I found a few other examples of this type of cup. A mid-century modern style similar to some I had in the 1980s.

I just ordered some from Old Stone Market - it popped up in an online search and I realized that I had seen the site previously when it was recommended on a blog I follow. The blog writer recommended the saffron. So I ordered a jar of the Madagascar black peppercorns, a tin of the saffron, and a jar of the lavender flowers because I have not been happy with the ones from the health food store. Theirs used to be excellent, great flavor but the last batch I got was musty and very little flavor I took the bag back and was told they were "out of stock" so I got a refund. I'm pretty sure there were other complaints. Anyway, I am anxious to see how the Madagascar black pepper stacks up against my current favorite, Wynad pepper which is pricey but the flavor is extraordinary, especially on fruits, in fruit salads. It is one of the few peppercorns that are ripened before picking.

I have several facsimile reprints of very old cookbooks purchased from Acanthus Books Some of them were written very seriously but the way they sound today is often hilarious. One that was reprinted again in 1994 is The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie You have to think that some of these cooks were very adventurous because they were taking things that sounded really odd and were preparing extraordinary dishes from them. One British friend who is about my age, born just before WWII, said that when she began reading old cookbooks from the 19th century, she wondered, "what the hell happened?" because ordinary homemakers a hundred years earlier were cooking much more interesting dishes than when she was a girl. Of course she was growing up during a time of strict rationing in the British Isles. Still, she said it seemed to carry on for much longer afterward than was necessary. People had gotten used to canned foods and were suspicious of many "foreign" foods.

I used to have a friend in Niagara, (passed about five years ago), who owned a bakery/café and bought from them, and a couple of times, mid 2000s, sent me some of their products after I sent her some peppers and a few pounds of my candied ginger. The whole fruits were impressive.

I still can't recall the name of the bakery supply place but their minimum order for the glazed fruits was 5kg. That was fine when I was catering and baking large batches of fruitcakes, stollen and panettone but way too much for me, even splitting with a couple of other hobby bakers. There is a place in Canada that imports and sell the Italian glazed fruits, the mixed as well as whole fruits but they too will only ship in 5kg amounts per item. The name is ELIO Importing.

I received my order from L'Epicerie today. The fruits are vacuum sealed in plastic bags but they provide a carton for them after the bag is opened. I just cut around the edges of the carton and removed that portion of the bags to access the contents. There is a wold of difference between this stuff and the regular "fruits" - expensive but to me worth every penny. The flavor is lovely and the fruits are tender. The flavor of the citron is intense and it too is very tender.

I have a VHS video of Graham Kerr and Julia Child "Cooking in Concert" and you can tell they are having a lot of fun as they cook three ducks.

Sounds interesting. My honey cake recipe uses no white sugar, only honey and Lyles black treacle. I haven't made it for years, not since I was diagnosed with diabetes.

There was a supplier in L.A. that carried it. I can't remember the name. I got the name from one of the trade magazines several years ago.

I'm so glad you posted about this. I hadn't realized they weren't in operation for awhile. I usually order at this time of the year. I just placed an order for some of the black "Pearl" cocoa, candied fruit salad and the citron, and some chestnuts. I can get the Agrimontana products elsewhere but in amounts too large for me to use and I like the "fruit salad" for my stollen and for panettone. The citron is for a butter/cream cheese pound cake that is as close as I could get to recreating a "tea" cake my grandpa's cook made when I was a child and which was a favorite of my great-grandmother. It originally called for a pound of butter and a pound of "strained and pressed clabbered cream" (essentially cream cheese) but I cut it in half because I don't need a large round cake. Only candied citron with walnuts or pecans, lightly toasted, although sliced almonds were used a few times.

If you have one of the "vintage" cake splitters, the tines are fine enough to penetrate deep into the dense cake to facilitate the absorption of the liquid without disturbing the surface of the cake too much. I have a couple and still use them for sponge or angel food cakes. Lehman's still sells them.

If you mix some finely chopped dried apples and nuts - I prefer pecans - to mincemeat, it makes a terrific filling for empanadas or little hand pies - baked - and a cream cheese pie pastry is perfect. They keep quite well for a few weeks in a cake tin - not in an airtight plastic container.

When I was a child, there were a few people in my huge, extended family (21 living in my grandfather's home during WWII) who did not like traditional fruit cake. We always had it and many types of cake for "tea" pretty much every day. There were "special" fruitcakes for the holidays, liberally dosed with spirits and those were the ones that some people did not like. So we had the "Christmas cake" which I have written about many times before. A fruited cake made with cocoa and I have baked hundreds myself and never had anyone turn it down or say they didn't like it. It doesn't require aging but it keeps quite well, like many of the British type cakes, such as Dundee cake, seedy cake, etc. In 2004 we had a discussion about Pork Cake and a new thread was born from the "Fruitcake" thread and I implored one of my aunts - from the other side of my family - to reveal the secret of "Meemaw's Pork Mincemeat and Christmas Cake" (my dad's grandmother). Here is the link to that thread PORK CAKE which has the recipe and Viva's experience in preparing the cake, with photos. After that two or three other people prepared the mincemeat and the cake and wrote about their experiences. During the intervening thirteen years I have made the mincemeat about six or seven times, canning it or freezing it and subsequently baking cakes, pies (both savory and sweet), filling for empanadas (or pasties), adding it to turkey stuffing, stuffing for a rolled pork roast, stuffing for pork chops and mixing with sausage to make patty "sliders" for sandwiches. Three years ago, before my health became iffy, I made a batch of the mincemeat and made several small loaf cakes and took them to the senior center here and distributed them to my friends, two of whom are Jewish but when I offered them alternative, non-pork cakes, they said they hadn't kept kosher for years and at their advanced ages, a small transgression could be excused.