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The Mexican market here in town has very fresh coconut, as well as young coconut still in the husk and occasionally green coconut.

Not all track lighting is crappy. I have seen these installed in a family room and kitchen and they looked terrific.

Check out this rotary microplane rasp. I am willing to bet that I can mount the 2-inch one on the end of a drill extension on one of my variable speed drills and convert it to a coconut grater that will work from the inside out. I have ordered a set and will see if I can make it work when I get them. I was trying to find a large stone drill bit, the kind with a bunch of big teeth on the end that is shaped sort of like a ball, but they are apparently only available to heavy industry as I couldn't find one on the internet. Oddly enough I can get one with a diamond tip but don't think it would work on anything as soft as coconut. (My boss's son works for deBeers in the industrial division.)

Ideally you should have a combination of general lighting and task lighting. Check out the kitchens at HGTV There are some great ideas and configurations in actual kitchens, which you can look at to see if they might work for you.

Julia introduced America, or rather "ordinary" Americans to the idea that French foods could be prepared in the home and were not some exotic idea available only to the traveller and the very rich. It was a concept that was very new to most home cooks who prior to that had been intimidated by the idea of French cookery. She was an interesting lady, worked for the OSS during WWII and traveled extensively. She is an icon and is revered by a great many professional chefs because without her foundation in the genre, they would not have enjoyed the popularity they achieved. The biggest names in the business owe a great deal to Julia.

Prior to my Christmas vacation, I ordered 8 pounds of the Cabot butter, 4 pounds of the Euro-style and 4 pounds of the Old-fashioned. I finally used the last of the Euro-style (unsalted) and ordered another 8 pounds plus 8 pounds of the Old-fashioned. It freezes well and I want to keep it on hand. I found that it works great in sauces, better than the Plugra, and is terrific in pastry. I made shortbread with the Old-Fashioned and it was supurb. it is costly, but not any more so than when I make my own, if I figure my time as part of the cost. Adding my time in addition to everything else, my homemade stuff costs me about 7 bucks a pound.

TurtleMeng Last week Vallarta Supermercado had the La Mexicana brand of "table cream" for 4.87 for a quart, the Cacique was 6.29. So if you watch the ads, or check in the market weekly, you can get a bargain. I shop at Vallarta at least once a week because their produce is excellent and the prices are fantastic. Lemons and limes are extremely cheap, compared to regular markets and they have "sweet limes" = Meyer lemons for way less than the regular markets, if you can find them. The Mexican limes = Key limes are also very cheap. I whip the table cream and find that it holds very well when making whipped cream frosting, probably because of the stabilizers which are fine with me. The shelf life is very long as it is in any heavy cream - the higher the fat content, the longer it will keep. I like the texture I get when using it in desserts. I never get the "grainy" texture that sometimes happens with the ultra pasturized stuff. I use it exclusively in my homemade ice cream which I would put up against any of the "premium" ice creams on the market. As an aside: I am an x-ray tech/off.mgr. and have been with my boss, an orthopedic surgeon, for 37 years this month. We are semi-retired but still doing some work as he likes to keep busy (at 77). He tolerates me taking extra long lunch breaks while running around looking for a particular ingredient or piece of kitchen equipment, not to mention the time I spend on the internet. P.S. I have never, ever, used margarine in baking. I started out as a professional baker in the 50s, in Wisconsin, and we used only butter, occasionally lard, for pie pastry. too many chemicals in margarine. I never bought into the butter = high cholesterol idea. I eat a diet high in cholesterol-containing foods and mine has never been over 150.

Several months ago I started this topic on making you own condiments Condiments It includes my method for making mustard, starting with the seeds and with photos. others posted recipes for mustard and ketchup and I also posted recipes for banana ketchup, mushroom ketchup, a sweet, hot chutney and also my recipe and photos of how I make my green sauce (tomatillo sauce) which is not very hot but can be if more or hotter peppers are added, and it is fantastic to use for stewing pork. Or just for a dip! I also make duxelles as well as onion confit. Pickles, pickled fruits Sambals and other chile-based pastes and sauces, some sweet, some sour and some extremely hot! I roast garlic in olive oil, in a large pot in the oven. I then jar it up and process it as I would any canned item and it keeps beautifully in the pantry for months. I will not take a chance on cold-infused garlic oil because of the danger of botulism, but this way the long period of oven heating insures that the organisms are killed. I can use both the garlic and the oil, as I usually put about a cup of the roasted cloves in each pint jar, then fill with the hot oil before capping. Preserved lemons preserved ginger Fruit and spice syrups. All kinds of dried things such as dried citrus peel, dried shallots, dried vegetables, etc. Compound butters, GiftedGourmet started this topic The Ketchup Conundrum In which I posted my recipe for mushroom ketchup (for people who can't have tomato products). It makes a great meat sauce.

Hassenpfeffer and my favorite recipe is This one That has been in several of Sylvia Bashline's cookbooks, including the first which I think was published in the early 80s as that is how long I have been preparing rabbit (or hare) this way. I also make jugged hare, which is very similar to duck confit, in principal. I should add that I usually triple or quadruple this recipe and cook it in an electric roaster for parties. People especially love the gravy. Besides the wild rabbits I get, there is a local (to me) farmer who raises several breeds of rabbit and also Belgian hare, which are much larger than our domestic rabbits. One of these will easily feed six or more.

Even though I have been admonished by some people that Kentucky is not truly part of the south, (didn't join the Confederacy), there are a great many people who occupy that state who would bristle at that statement. Most certainly have a "southern" mindset. And that goes for grits too. I was born at home (hospitals were for "sick" people) followed by a gathering of the family so I could be introduced to the clan. Had a double first name all during my childhood to the side of the family native to Kentucky, had white gloves and Mary Janes to wear to church, and had it drummed into my head that "pretty is as pretty does." I know 99 different ways to prepare grits and a different recipe for every kind of gravy known in the south from red eye to cream that is thick enough to mound on top of a chicken-fried steak. Oh yes, I was a cheerleader in high school, but only after I moved to Wisconsin

I will have to check. It is here. That is, the brand I use most. The stuff is delicious as-is. In fact, my housekeeper will spoon some into a little dish and eat it plain. (However she is one of these very thin people who eat like a horse and never gains weight.)

I am surprised that no one has listed, probably my favorite cobination. Pork chops and applesauce!

Manufacturers cream is not ultra-pasturized so it can be used for anything for which you use heavy cream. It is better for use in sauces because it does not "break" as easily as the other types of cream. I buy it to make cheeses as it works where the ultra pasturized will not. I use it all the time and get it at Smart & Final, the brand out here is Alta-Dena which is a local dairy with excellent products. I also use the "Grade A Table cream" sold in Mexican markets - this is sweet cream, not the "Agria" sour cream also sold in a similar container. It has some additives but I like it as it is extremely thick, spoonable more than pourable and whips up beautifully and holds well for long periods. I use it in cooking all the time with excellent results. I avoid the "ultra-pasturized" products as much as possible.

Make a large batch of lemon curd and jar it up in quart jars and process as you would any canned fruit (hot water bath). You can use this for pies or mixed half and half with heavy cream that has been whipped with just a tiny bit of sugar for stabilization, served as a mousse or airy pudding in a margarita glass (or just a bowl). Remove the zest, allow it to dry a bit, then freeze it. Freeze the juice in ice cube trays and store them in ziploc freezer bags (doubled). I buy lemons by the box when the Mexican market has them at a super sale price (5 pounds for a dollar), and do all of the above. Preserved lemons are of course an option and very good to use in may dishes, not just the Moroccan. I recently cut one into quarters and put it in with my onion confit (removed the seeds first) and the confit was very good, just a bit different, not quite as sweet.

I was not referring to culinary school books in my post. They give details of formulas or recipes that are not found in many "regular" cookboos. The cookbooks I described are the ordinary ones seen in any bookstore until the 80s, with the exception of the more techinical books, such as Julia's and Joy of Cooking, which did explain about the differences between salted and unsalted butter. I have been collecting cookbooks for more than 40 years and have cooked from many of the more than 1000 that I have now. I looked through several last evening and other than in very rare instances, the only reference in a recipe was to "butter" or "butter or margarine" and there was no glossary that described what type of butter was usually called for in the book. The rare instances which I noted were references only to "clarified" butter.

I would like to see a photo of the machine that they use at the grocery store.

Any American cookbook with a mention of butter in a recipe, prior to the mid 1980s, would be referring to "regular" salted butter because that was the American standard. It kept longer and was more stable, or at least that was the idea put forth by the various dairy boards. Prior to that time it was rare to see a recipe call for unsalted or "plain, unsalted, sweet cream butter" which is the way it was usually described to make sure that the reader got the message. About that time one began to see more mentions of unsalted butter and the product began to show up more readily on market shelves. So for about 20 years recipes have been altered to accomodate the popularity of unsalted butter but if you have old American cookbooks, you can be sure that butter means salted butter. If you read these recipes carefully, you will also note that there is less salt added to the recipes than in the more recent recipes that require unsalted butter. If you use unsalted butter in one of the old recipes, the product will taste "flat" because the salt in the butter was factored in by the originator of the recipe. Some friends and I had a discussion about this a few years back when we were helping set up a cooking program for a center for abused and abandoned women and children. It was simply teaching moms how to easily cook economically and nutritionally sound food and avoid the more expensive fast food stuff. It was interesting that those of us who were my contemporaries (over 45-50) assumed that recipes meant salted butter unless unsalted was specified and the younger people assumed recipes meant unsalted, unless salted was specified. It was at that time that we examined a lot of cookbooks of various eras and discovered what I mentioned above.

I like Barilla okay. For some recipes I like Creamettes. I also like the bulk pasta available at many Italian grocers, can't recall the name at the moment, the ziti is particularly nice. I recently tried Trader Joe's brand "Florentine" and I really like it. The shape is interesting and the tiny ridges on the pasta really holds onto sauce.

One of the doctors here in the office just told me about seeing a cook at the hotel where he stayed in the Yucatan, using a variable-speed battery-powered drill with a hole saw on the end, using that to grate the meat from inside coconuts. He says he had cut the top off with a hacksaw and was working the coconut over the hole saw (the drill was clamped to the table at an angle so the end that he was working on was hanging over a bowl). He not only was going to use the coconut meat, he was also going to use the shells to serve some kind of drink. Doc remembers that it was about a 2 inch hole saw and the drill was a Black & Decker. Apparently a lot of people have tried to solve the problem of the coconut not wanting to give up its meat easily.

I have tried to get hold of a friend who is Vietnamese and whose husband made her an electric coconut grater from an electric juicer, the kind with the revolving cone-shaped reamer. She hasn't yet answered my messages but hopefully I can get hold of her in the next couple of days. As I recall, he cut slits into the plastic (or whatever it was made of) reamer and epoxied in short curved blades which may have been serrated, but I can't say for certain. I have been at her home and watched her (and him) use it but other than it being white with black trim and having a switch to change from low to high speed, I can't remember much else. As I recall, she said he got the idea from an Indian or Indonesian coconut grater which was apparently hand-cranked and was in the center of a wide, shallow bowl. (It has been a couple of years and my memory isn't what it used to be.)

There are three Asian markets here in Lancaster and all carry the Thai frozen coconut "milk" which is thicker than the canned stuff and much fresher tasting. The huge Mexican supermarket also now carries it along with other tropical things that are cross-cultural. Frozen coconut milk. At least one regular market has also added it to their "ethnic foods" frozen section. Look for a small market that carries asian foods. They are tucked away in many cities and towns now as the Asian population has spread everywhere.

You can try one of these. Or, if you are handy, you can make your own. You need a small round saw blade, take it to a metal shop or welder and get it cut into segments and get two holds drilled into it. You then take a board, mark it where the two holes are, allowing the toothy part to extend 3 inches beyond the end of the board. Use two bolts with washers on both sides of the wood and wing nuts to tighten to bolt the blade to the wood. You cut crack the coconut into halves and work from the inside toward the shell. It goes quite fast, much easier than the method you are using. There are other types, favored by peoples in Africa but this is the simplest to make.

Regarding metal in the microwave. Both my Sharp Convection/Microwave and my friend's Panasonic convection/microwave that is built in, allow the use of a certain amount of metal. For instance when using the "combi" feature, which is a combination of convection and microwave, a metal rack is okay as long as the volume of meat is at least 5 times the volume of metal. That means that a roast or a whole chicken can be combi- cooked on the wire metal rack but you can't cook something as thin as steaks, chops or chicken pieces. The Panasonic has a ceramic base plate however my Sharp has a metal (enameled steel) base plate that is 15 inches in diameter and will hold a round pizza stone for use while cooking with the convection only. I don't leave it in the oven if I am going to be using it as a microwave. (I have another large microwave only, also a Sharp, so don't have to use the combination as much as a microwave as I do as a regular oven. My "regular" oven is a large commercial oven which uses a lot of gas and is only practical to use when I am doing a lot of baking or baking or roasting things that are too large to go into the smaller oven.)

When my friends remodeled their kitchen 3 years ago, (all electric home) they were talked into an Advantium oven by the contractor. After 4 months they had it taken out and a combination convection/microwave made by Panasonic installed instead. They found it was difficult to clean, had hot spots so that parts of a dish were overcooked and other parts undercooked and the same problem with cookies, some would be burnt while others were barely baked. When I used it while visiting that Christmas, I found that it was not as efficient as my Sharp countertop combination oven (that I had taken with me as we had a lot of food to prepare and knew the size of their oven was not enough for all of it.) I cooked two large prime rib roasts and the one in the Sharp, using the combi feature, was perfectly done but the one in the GE was getting too done on one end and was still blood rare on the other. I had to take it out, cut off the cooked end and finish it in the Sharp. For the price they paid, they thought it was vastly overrated. At the end of January they had it replaced. They may have corrected the problems by now, however I notice that while Sears still carries them, they no longer push them as they were a couple of years ago. At the store that is local to me, they only have one on display whereas they used to have 3 or 4. I personally know one other person who has one but they rarely cook, it is more a conversation item for them.

It certainly seems a bit simplistic. How can the subtle flavors develop in such a short amount of time? It takes me much longer just to prepare the ingredients for this type of dish. The cooking takes much longer.