andiesenji

I had forgotten until this post jogged my memory, but as a young child, I loved chicken croquettes. I believe I haven't had one since the 1970s! ← I like them all. We have a local restaurant that makes salmon croquettes occasionally, complete with the obligatory cream sauce (gravy). I still make ham croquettes, chicken or turkey croquettes and crab croquettes.

Or you call ahead and get a delivery at the airport, of a particular foodstuff to carry along as you continue your flight. I flew from L.A. to Rhode Island with an hour stopover to change planes in Chicago. I had an order of fresh brats, packed in ice, delivered to me as I was waiting to board the flight on to Providence. The flight attendant was kind enough to find room in a fridge for me. My friends met me at the airport and were thrilled to get the brats as they are originally from Wawatosa, WI.

When the day is wet and miserable and the streets are flooded and you stay home because the drive to work is going to be horrible and instead of kicking back with a good book (and I have lots to read), you pull out a large roasting pan and cut up a bunch of vegetables, pull out your big jar of oil-roasted garlic and make roasted vegetables, not for any particular recipe, JUST BECAUSE. And here it is just before going in the oven 3 hours at 275 degrees later: All done and ready to be incorporated into "instant stew" or pureed into soup or simply dished up as a side dish. Even though this has no meat in it, it has a "meaty" flavor. Carrots, parsnips, potatoes, celery, onions, sweet peppers, garlic and seasonings.

My nursemaid used to tell me that blowing bubbles in my milk would make my nose turn up on the end. Talk about scarred! However I never needed a nose job either.............

I found the recipe for the chicken dish with barberries (zereshk) It is very good. Zereshk Polow

I forgot to mention any of the out of style foods I love. Croquettes come to mind. I love them, whatever they are made of.

Hey! Fondue is coming back. You can tell by the proliferation of fondue pots popping up in catalogs, W-S and Sur La Table, etc., and on line, anything from candle power to electric. Think of all the years that the only time you saw a fondue pot was at yard sales or swap meets and young people born after the mid-70s, wondered what they were. Everything comes and goes like the tides - I am waiting for beehive hairdos, ironed hair is happening again, they just use a different kind of iron. Sadly most schools no longer offer much in the way of home economics. However I happened to come across an instruction book in a thrift store that had a picture of "Candle Salad" on the back cover. I put it down but should have bought it, just for laughs.

Thanks, Andiesenji. That looks like what I am looking for. I want a permanent installation that will be attractive as well as functional. ← Emil (the neighbor) built his to look like a little Swiss chalet. I think a lot of people who saw it casually thought it was a playhouse for children. One of the farmers about a mile from me built his out near his hay shelter (big, big roof, no sides). If it ever stops raining, I will drive over and take a picture of it. It looks like the outhouse from Lil' Abner (the movie), complete with a stovepipe that has a couple of bends in it and a conical shield on top. The inner structure is sound but he used warped planks on the outside, strictly for decoration. He used to work in the movie industry, building sets, and I think he got the idea to make it look sort of cartoonish. Then again he may have made it look like this to make sure thieves wouldn't break into it, although he has some big rottweilers that patrol his place at will. When I go over there I don't get out of my van until he or his wife comes out and calls the dogs back. In any event. They do not have to look unattractive or even utilitarian.

Barberries are zereshk. I make tea with them - good for the eyes. They should be stored in the fridge. Here the price varies with the season. I just bought some last week $10.99 a pound. I make a chicken and rice dish with barberries which is very good. I will try to find the web site and post it later. It is on one of the Persian/Iranian sites that one of our patients told me about.

Several people around here have used these plans to build regular smokehouses which are big enough for smoking hams, sides of bacon, turkeys, etc. (This is a rural areas.) This place has plans for make a smoker out of an old refrigerator. One of my ex neighbors made one out of an old upright freezer (single large chamber unlike most fridges). It worked fine but he wanted more room so built a separate structure. They sold their home about two years ago and the new owners wanted to put in a pool so tore the smokehouse down. Actually I think they sold it and it was taken apart and trucked away in pieces. It was made with some heavy timbers.

One of my friends is a "natural" soap maker and also makes vegetable dyes for several weavers. She uses safflower petals in her soaps. It actually turns out as a crimson color rather than orange, which you would expect. Vegetable fibers will not pick up the yellow or orange in the safflower, it tints cotton pink and linen red. Silk will pick up the yellow/orange as will wool but a particular mordant needs to be used. The safflower is also used in ayurvedic and chinese medicine. It has been used in the past to color margarine and cheeses in the place of annato. It has also been used, and still is, in cosmetics. The stuff is easy to grow, in fact in some areas becomes a persistent and invasive weed.

The asfar is safflower petals and is indeed used in place of saffron but also has its own uses. I don't know what flavor the orange ones are. I haven't tried them. The local store has several types of melon seeds, from white to black and several colors in between. One type is pinkish, flavored with "black" salt, which is very strong. The local store's supplies change with the seasons and they don't always have every type. There are quite a few middle eastern as well as Indian people who live up here but nothing like down in the Valley (San Fernando Valley). I will ask Mike the next time I go to the store, however we do have a bit of communication problem. If his wife is in the store she can translate for me, she is US born.

The "bananas" look like plantains to me. The flesh of plantains can range from white to orange and remains firm even when the skin is totally black - only when it begins to shrink and wrinkle do they soften a bit. Many varieties are not very sweet and can be used as a vegetable side dish.

Super seeds are melon seeds. They come in different colors at the locak middle eastern market, depending on how they are flavored/salted, etc.

I wonder if this was a process taught years ago but that somehow fell out of favor. The first classes in the French method of cooking that I attended were taught by a Chef Gregoire. He was quite adamant about salting meat as soon as it was cut. (We started out by getting instruction in how to cut portions of meats from large pieces.) The meat was salted then placed in a colander set in a pan in the refrigerator for a couple of hours, then rinsed, oiled and wrapped for use in our recipes the following day. (Our classes were on Monday and Tuesday, the two days his restaurant was closed.) I don't recall that any of us ever asked him specifically why we were to do this. We were all so in awe of this man that we accepted just about everything he told us as gospel. One classmate did mention that the process was similar to koshering and the Chef replied that if we bought kosher meat we could skip the salting process as it was already sans sang.

This is definitely a sin, jgm, and yes, you will braise in hell. We will announce your penance shortly. Mind you it's not even close to the sin of being a 'pretend' swallower, which certainly begs other questions, none of which I particularly want to know the answer to. ← When deciding upon the penance, please keep in mind that they were very, very, very good cookies. ← At least you replaced the cookies with purchased ones. Sometimes undeserving people take advantage of donated foods at events such as this. Several years ago I had volunteered to help with the distribution of donated food, picked up by postal delievery people on their rounds, it is easy for people to contribute a few things, usually canned goods and we got a huge amount of goods. While I was sorting things into boxes so each recipient would get an assortment of things, I noticed a postal employee (not a letter carrier) who was putting certain items into boxes and taking them out the side door to the parking lot. I followed him out and found him loading several boxes into the trunk of his personal car. I called a supervisor who came out and removed the boxes and had other employees return them to the area where we were working. This jackass had picked out a bunch of expensive stuff such as canned meats, specialty and gourmet items and etc. When questioned his answer was "Those people wouldn't appreciate this stuff and probably wouldn't know what to do with it." Needless to say, he was put on report and later fired. I thought he should have been dismissed on the spot for theft but that is not the way the postal service works. However he was a temporary employee, still on probation so they canned him at the end of his probationary period. Good riddance. I often wonder, when I donate to these events, who is watching now and if anyone is taking unfair advantage. Oh, by the way, the guy had a brand new car and was wearing the very expensive Michael Jordan athletic shoes. So he could easily have paid for the food he was trying to steal.

I bake ginger scones, made with my homemade candied ginger. However the ones everyone likes best are apricot/ginger.

And she also sells an excellent wok stove. One of the docs at my office bought one and is very happy with it. (I gave him a wok when he became interested in stir fry when he went on a diet. He lost 96 pounds and looks fantastic! Walking is his only exercise and he eats only Asian type foods, vegetables, meat and fish. Amazing.)

I have a separate wok burner. If you have a place where you can cook outside, get one of the turkey fryers, they cost less than 60 dollars and will fire up a wok just fine.

I use a half-sheet pan and a Silpat liner.

I have bought 3 from this vendor the wok place. All of these were gifts and everyone is pleased with them. One is the two-handled one, the one made in China, it has to be seasoned with mineral oil and dried carefully (she sets it on the burner and heats it after drying it with a towel) and oiled before storing. The other two were the ones with the long handle and helper handle, one was a 12 inch and the other was a 16 inch. These also have to be carefully dried and oiled to make sure they do not rust. The heat response time is very rapid.

I have one of these, have had them in my last three kitchens and they are a godsend! Not only pot filling, but if I have heavy, cast iron and heavy copper cookware with stuff stuck in it, I simply run some water into it and turn on the gas. I have a short, round bamboo "broom" that I use to scrub the interior of the pots when the water is boiling. It makes it so much easier to clean them and this does not destroy the patina on my old cast iron. And if you are wondering how I empty them, I have a 3 gallon stainless steel bucket (bought at a local feed store) and ladle most of the water into that with a 1 quart saucepan and empty it into the sink. (Actually my housekeeper does it most of the time, if she is around, but I can do it also.) They come in several different styles and different lengths. I got the one with the longest reach like this! However I can advise you to avoid getting the copper finish.

Freekeh is a green cracked wheat that has been lightly roasted. half way down this page is a recipe for chicken freekeh that is very good. There are some other recipes here that are more complex but also quite good and are mostly recipes for one or two people.

You can get the commercial ones that make 24 at Kerekes but they are pretty pricey. I have the 12 portion ones and the 6 portion ones and simply put them on a sheet pan for baking. Kitchen Krafts has the 6 portion ones for less than 10 dollars each, do the math. Kitchen Krafts I have 6 of these and they are heavy and the muffins bake evenly in them. The 12 cup ones are Chicago metallic and I have had them for many years - they are available at a lot of vendors.

I have a little secret. I cut a piece of parchment the size of the top of the quiche, butter it liberally and gently apply it to the top of quiche about half way through the baking. It allows the top to get a bit of color but keeps it tender.