andiesenji

Absolutely fantastic blog, Wendy. The creative muse must be riding on your shoulders. I am simply awestruck by the depth and breadth of your repertoire.

I use mineral oil, and have done so since working in my mom's bakery in the 50s. Every afternoon it was cleaned before beginning the evening/all night baking. We used bench knives to scrape off all the dried bits of dough, then wiped the bench with a damp cloth and applied the oil while it was still just barely damp, then wiped it again, scraped it some more with bench knives then applied more mineral oil, let that application be absorbed for an hour or so then wiped it with dry rags.

I haven't been able to find the green glass knife. That was my great grandmother's favorite for slicing steamed puddings or some of the stickier cakes at teatime. It is smaller and thinner than the others. She had such delicate hands and I can still recall her slicing into a cake with that knife so the slice would fall onto the silver server to be transferred to a plate that held a little paper doily. This thread has brought back so many memories. Thanks for starting it. The biggest one was used in the kitchen to slice cucumbers extremely thin for cucumber sandwiches, they were so thin they were practically transparent. The smallest one shown in the photo above was always on the fruit tray on the sideboard. The one in the middle came from my dad's mother, I don't know if she ever used it. I didn't spend as much time in the kitchen when I visited their place because her kitchen help didn't like kids underfoot.

I did not add any water to the chicken tagine pictured above. I have found that in most cases the ingredients produce so much liquid is produced that water is not required. This is with cooking on stovetop. Possibly with oven cooking one would need to use additional liquid because the top is not used. The chickens we have here in the US may be fatter and the flesh has more moisture because of how they are raised. I used thighs only for my tagine and at the end the chicken and vegetables were swimming in liquid, not all was fat. There also was a little liquid in the chickpeas after I drained them - they had been soaking overnight - but that was all.

Those whisks were popular in the 20s and 30s. Egg whites were whipped in a shallow bowl, sort of like a soup bowl, so the whisk was the perfect shape. A lot of those whisks were made by travelling tinkers and also by the gypsies who used to travel around in the south and midwest. The ones that visited my grandfather's farm when I was a child were allowed to camp next to one of the barns and my grandpa always took their "king" a ham and a side of bacon, some cornmeal and other stuff. He always had things that needed fixing by them and treated them with respect. They never stole anything from our place but had a bad reputation at other farms. They would make wood handles for kitchen pots, make dippers for water out of gourds and carved clothespins from wood. They also made rolling pins and I have one. OT note... My first pony came from the gypsies. My grandpa paid for it with a gold coin. I thought that was so cool....

That is a lovely color. Fascinating how Le Cruset developed their colors. The medium blue was originally a special order by Elizabeth David who wanted the same color as that on the package of her favorite cigarettes - Gitane. For years, the only place one could get the color was in her kitchenware store in London, then they began selling it in the US and it was very popular.

I had forgotten about grandma's glass tomato and fruit knives. They always lived in the linen drawer so they wouldn't get chipped. I have a green one somewhere around and another crystal one with hand-painted flowers on the handle, it is in a box from Marshall Fields, Chicago stamped Christmas, 1936.

I received a shipment of books on Thursday but didn't get around to opening the box until this morning. (Was still working on several tax returns for last minute folks until Friday evening, then was so tired I did practically nothing yesterday.) 26 cookbooks in the batch, including some that are probably duplicates of ones already in my collection. Some interesting ones are An Alphabet for Gourmets, Anne Willan's Cook It Right, teh All-American Truck Stop Cookbook, Babe's Country Cookbook (Babe the Pig), American Hot, Christmas With Southern Living, Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver and Another Potful of Recipes. I haven't looked at all of them yet, however I will be going through them in the next week or so to see if any recipe jumps out and grabs my interest.

Here is a recipe that works quite well. You have to break the limes up and grind them to a powder in a spice grinder. Lamb stew, Persian I am not that fond of lamb. I substitute goat meat for the lamb. Goat is much sweeter than lamb, even when it is older.

Here are a few things that are very special to me: First, some breakables: Old bowls, bean pots (Bauer), Stangl pottery, English ironstone, porcelain, English and French. My grandma's waffle iron in the center. A green FireKing bowl (one of several) And the big covered casserole from France. And here are some of the metal things that remind me so much of my childhood. My other grandmother's copper jam pan, various baking molds, two of my Griswold skillets, The long fry pan that was made to fit over two top openings in a wood/coal range. And two lamb cake molds, one from one grandmother, the other from the other grandmother. The big sauce pan in the right rear was my great-grandmothers which she brought from England. I have three, this is the largest, holds 12 imperial pints.

Can we see a few?? Pretty please?? ← Okay, charging camera batteries as I type. Will try to work some picture-taking in between finishing tax returns for some people who always leave everything until the last minute. I filed mine in February!

I have so many things I would be hard pressed to list them all. My family NEVER throws anything away that might possibly be useful for some reason, some time in the future. I inherited that pack-rat gene from both sides of the family in force. Cast iron spiders/skillets, pots, griddles, a huge old heavy copper jam pan with rounded bottom. Pickle crocks, milk crocks, butter crocks. Silver, china, lots of kitchen glassware for cooking, storage, and so on. Appliances such as my grandmother's electric roaster, toaster (which started me on collecting them), waffle iron and mixer. Odd kitchen gadgets and utensils that still work. Whenever I use any of these items it reminds me of my grandmothers, my great grandmother and various aunts and other family members who passed the items on.

Mary, That is exactly what I was attempting to explain in my earlier post. People just do not drive long distances if they don't have to. They will drive someplace for pleasure but not for shopping. My best friend lives in Yorba Linda and prefers to shop right there in town, even though there are more extensive markets in Santa Ana. She is not "into" cooking as I am so when I spend two weeks during the Christmas holidays with them, I drag her around to markets she has never heard of. She will drive far afield to go to movies and to restaurants, but not just shopping. But then she will drive all over the place on weekends to go to dog shows. Northern California, Arizona, Nevada, etc., Go figure! I do a lot of my regular produce shopping at a little produce market we have in Lancaster, and I also shop at Vallarta Supermercado. Vallarta has great produce and very cheap. Lemons and limes are a fraction of the cost in a regular market. They have a great selection of peppers and of course piles of fresh cilantro and etc. The middle eastern produce market in Reseda, on Vanowen, whose name I can't recall, is also one that carries quite a few unusual things and is very inexpensive. However it is always very crowded.

The beauty of the garbage bag is how dirt cheap they are. Use it once and pitch it, plus earily in the day you can use it to double line your garbage pail. I use plastic wrap/saran wrap over my smaller mixers and the one that has a shield..........that's lovely cause it contains the mess better then open mixers, even though it's challenging to work with. ← The time I am talking about is back in the 50s, before there were plastic garbage bags. We saw a baker at one of the baking shows we attended using the garment bags and thought "How Great is That!" and immediately bought some. The only plastic bags were the very thing ones that cleaners put over garments and that stuff was too fragile.

I have stopped at a place between Lake Elsinore and Temecula that has pretty good produce that is quite varied. I Think it is called "Tom's Ranch" and I know there is a billboard on I-15 that directs one to the correct offramp. It has been a couple of years since I was down there but they had heirloom tomatoes that were just lovely. They also had some unusual melons.

One thing that may make a difference is that duck egg shells are not a porus as chicken eggs. We used to mark eggs with an indelible marker and I often noticed that the color would have penetrated to the interior of chicken eggs, but not to the interior of duck eggs.

I thought I was weird for putting a tea towel over! I will have to try with plastic ! ← Way back when I worked in my mom's bakery we used the plastic garment bags that just fit around the big mixer and the top, where the hanger would go, would be secured to the top of the mixer with a cow magnet. it was split front and back and held together in the front of the bowl with a spring-type clothes pin. The heavy plastic was washable and we used the steamer to sterilize them.

I supposed that 97% of the time I am an organized cook/baker, especially with the baking. In fact I mentioned last fall about my routine for holiday baking when I weigh and measure all the dry ingredients for cookies/cakes and etc., and place those in their little plastic bags in a bus tub or on trays along with a copy of the recipe and list of perishable ingredients that need to be added to each and if special baking pans are needed, those go in there also so everything is together when I am ready to bake. With most recipes, I gather and prepare all the ingredients before starting to cook, just to make sure that I do have everything. I don't plan days in advance, except for very special occasions. But I do need some plan, so I can use up things that are perishable before they expire. Occasionally I just throw stuff together and if I don't have something in the recipe I substitute something else. Little glass dishes?? Yes, I have a bunch of little glass dishes, different sizes. Also little SS dishes, little silicone dishes, little pottery dishes, little porcelain dishes and disposable nut cups for use outside. Am I organized. Yessss. Those little dishes are placed in an antique shallow muffin tin to keep them from getting lost on the counter or being knocked over. This is so easy to do and saves a lot of mess. (if you have ever jostled one of these little dishes holding an egg, or honey, or oil, or ?????? you know what I mean. (Or, as I did one memorable time, pushing a cutting board too far and knocking several little dishes containing an egg, paprika, chopped bacon, olive oil, pepper and dry mustard onto the floor. Broken glass in a gooey mess was not fun to clean up, particularly when the dry mustard poofed up in a cloud and caused me to sneeze for 10 minutes.

There used to be a few permanent "Farmer's Markets" around the L.A. area many years ago, when there were still "truck" farms in the San Gabriel Valley and the San Fernando valley and Simi Valley. When I lived in Burbank in the 1960s, there was Rob's Ranch Market on the corner of Glenoaks and Alameda. It was a ratty series of wooden buildings that had been joined to make one L-shaped building around two sides of the parking lot. They also carried dairy products from Giacapuzzi dairy, including all kinds of raw milk products plus Goat milk and products from a goat farm in Newhall. They also had a tortilleria in the back with 3 or 4 ladies patting the tortillas from hand to hand and baking them on a big square steel sheet. They would make them extra-thick to order. Sadly, when Burbank decided to "beautify" they forced Rob's to modernize and they eventually sold out to a chain and it became a Market Basket market then a Ralph's. I can remember shopping in Rob's when it was raining and the roof leaking in many spots with the clerks running around with galvanized trash cans placed under the worse of the drips. Those of us who shopped there just thought it gave the place character. It also was not air conditioned which would have been useless as there were double doors in several places that stood open all the time.

I think that part of the reason there is no big produce market such as you describe in the L.A. area is the area..... San Francisco itself is spread over 47 square miles and the residential areas are close in to the business district. The outlying cities are not all that distant and driving distances are not the same as here. If something were centrally located in L.A. it would mean a long, long drive for many people. There are half a million people in the Antelope valley and for a time we had a Farmer's Market in Palmdale every Saturday morning but not enough people supported it and it died. One would think that something like that would be very popular but it was not publicized well and had to move a couple of times as their space was developed. I would love to go to the Santa Monica Farmers market but it is too long a drive for me just to shop. The ones in the Valley are at times or on days where I can't get to them because I am working. The distances here are just so much greater than in the Bay area. I drive 70 miles to work which means a 140 mile commute for me four days a week. I drive to South Pasadena about once a month to shop at Bristol Farms (and Sur La Table since I am in the area) and would go to a Farmer's market if one were open at the time. I have been told there was one in Artesia but only on Thursday so that wouldn't work for me. There was supposed to be one opening in South El Monte this year but I have yet to hear if it is going to get the permit. That is the other thing. Many municipalities are not friendly toward these markets. They make so many rules and regulations that it is prohibitive in cost to organize them. Green Thumb Nursery on Sepulveda blvd in Sepulveda attempted to organize a Farmer's Market several years ago but after months of negotiation gave it up because of all the permits that were required, making it too time consuming and costly.

99 Ranch Markets have a pretty good selection of produce. Nothing like you describe at Berkeley bowl, but pretty good and the prices are reasonable. Marukai Market at 1740 West Artesia Boulevard in Gardena has a pretty good selection of Asian produce. It is an interesting place to shop, they have a huge selection of fish and fish products.

I used to shop at Jurgensen's on Ventura Blvd., in fact I had a house account and got a bill once a month. It made it easier for me because I hated standing there writing out a check while people were in line behind me. It also meant my housekeeper could shop for me and charge it to the account. They were so great about special orders, fancy strawberries on long stems, Brussells sprouts on the stem, huge artichokes or baby artichokes. And the cheeses. They had the greatest selection of imported cheeses - I still have one of their signature cheese crocks that held their special blue cheese spread that was so delicious. I also have one of their crocks that held fresh caviar, the light gray one with drawings of sturgeon in blue on the sides. I do miss them. And their breads - wonderful artisan breads long before La Brea bakery came onto the scene.

They are also very good for eye health. I make an infusion from the dried berries that I mix with tea. The local middle eastern market carries them. Even though they are dried, they should be stored in the refrigerator. I saw an article about the various fruits that support eye healt in Prevention magazine 3 or 4 years ago and have been buying them ever since. They are also great sprinkled on salads, in sandwiches and etc.

I like kosher salt because it is "sweeter" to me. However I am blessed with a lot more taste buds than most people (had one of those "ink-blot on the tongue" tests) so it may not taste so to you. I also like sea salts that contain additional minerals. I have a large collection of various salts from all over the world. Iodized salt has a bitter component to it. I am very sensitive to iodine so had to stop using it many years ago and began using kosher salt because I liked the way it tasted and to me it was easier to sprinkle on foods evenly using my fingers. This is all a matter of personal preference. Just tasting straight salt on your tongue is difficult. I have found that the best way to taste a salt is to spread some plain bread with unsalted butter, cut it into squares, then sprinkle a bit of one type salt on one piece of bread and butter.

Try it drizzled over a poached egg on toast. When I first got a bottle I couldn't thing of anything in particular to do with it so I tried it this way. Heavenly!