andiesenji

Here is a peach one: peach upside-down cake and an orange spice here and a cherry: from Diana's Kitchen There are also recipes for rhubarb, cranberry, mincemeat, apple and mango. I have made a large combination fruit upside-down cake in the past, using contrasting colors, in a pinwheel pattern. pineapple/kiwi/mandarin/cherries(dried and reconstituted cherries). I just used a pineapple upside-down cake recipe, tripled, mixed the batter pouring it over the fruit, and filled the pan to within 3/4 inch of the top. Using a broad spatula, I worked the batter out from the center so that it was a bit thinner right in the center to counteract "the bulge". I had cut a large Silpat liner to fit the round pan, though liners are now available, because I was worried it would stick. When I removed the silpat, the bottom (now the top) looked like it was coated with glass. Perfect!

I also mentioned on a earlier thread that I steam a mixture of grains and seeds, most including rice, particularly the Lundberg variatals. Lundberg rices In particular the Wehani and the Jubilee blend. Millet, amaranth, teff, steel cut oats, kasha, sunflower seeds, etc. Occasionally I mix couscous in with the cooked grains and seeds. I seldom use water as I prefer diluted coconut milk, chicken, beef or duck stock, vegetable stock. There are a variety of seasonings I use depending on what it will accompany. I sometimes add chopped steamed vegetables but cook them separately. Of course I like plain rice also but it is always "doctored" with butter, various sauces, Memmi, Ponzu, sweet chile, sweet soy sauce, etc. I like the combination of cooked rice mixed with the jarred "three bean salad" then the whole thing heated and served with crumbled crisp bacon on top. The combination of sweet, sour, salty, smoky, etc. is making me salivate as I type.

30 minutes? You obviously do not have any idea of the distances involved or the cab charges in the area. You can easily spend more on cabfare than on your dinner. Pasadena would be my suggestion, it is next door to Glendale and has some very fine eateries. Old Town is a stretch of Colorado Blvd. (See it every year during the Rose Parade) where there are some places that are bistro style and you will get a good meal. I don't know about places with chef's tasting menus. My favorite in Old Town is Bistro 45 which is just off Colorado on Mentor Ave. (at 45 south Mentor) They were one of "Top 30 in L.A." in Zagat's, the Wine Spectator rated them in the Top 10 and they had high ratings in other publications. An old standard for me, excellent food, fair pricing and a very "homey" atmosphere is a long-held Pasadena secret, is Beckham Place on Walnut or West Walnut. This place is favored by long time Pasadena residents. My second husband, third generation born in Pasadena, and all his family frequented the place. They do a duck in cherry sauce that is remarkable. Their desserts are awesome, if you have room. Another place, on Arroyo Parkway, the Parkway Grill, has been a favorite in the past. I haven't been for a couple of years, mainly because I am usually with people who want to hang out in Old Town. http://www.oldpasadena.com/ I can't get the hyperlink thing to work so I am simply posting the link here.

Try these There are a lot of things to do with tamarind. I love tamarind drinks. They are very simple, such as this one and here is some more info. more recipes here not just tamarind.

I had suggested merging the L.A Potluck and Pie topics and I thought someone was going to do it but it hasn't happened yet.

Try this place. Plain high side cake pan non stick, scroll down to the 5th item. They range from 4 inch, 4 3/4, 6, etc. and the latter is 1 7/16 inch high. I just thought of the disposable molds that I use for little cheesecakes and for fruitcakes here. I get the M155D size - These hold up nicely. The price is certainly right.

I have been using a commercial (Blodgett) convection oven for several years. I have found that I get a better product if I keep the temperature as indicated in the recipe but shorten the time, sometimes by half, for very thin cookies, by 1/3 for thicker cookies. Also for baking yeast breads to get the "oven-kick" the temp has to be optimum. Time is the variable and when making a new recipe I check he internal temperature of a loaf with an insant read thermometer to make sure it is done. Once established I mark the exact time the loaf attained the correct temperature for doneness and use that as my baking time in the future. Regarding cheesecakes. You either have to turn the convection fan off while cooking or have a barrier to keep the fan from blowing ripples in the batter while it is soft. I have a sheet of heavy gauge aluminum, 8 inches wide, 32 inches long, bent into an arc that is large enough to allow a 14 inch cake pan to set inside it and into this goes the water for the bain marie when baking cheesecakes or large custards. I put the arc into the back of the oven on a shelf positioned near the middle of the oven. This deflects the air from the fan in the back of the oven from blowing directly on the unset cheesecake. I just bought a pieceof aluminum and took it to a metal shop and had them "hem" the edge- they have a machine that turns the edge down all the way around and crimps it so there is no sharp edge. It didn't cost much and comes in very handy in many applications. Once you get used to a convection oven you will not want to go back to a radiant oven. My oven will hold 7 full size sheet pans for things like cookies that do not rise a lot and each level bakes evenly all at the same time, there is no need to rotate from top to bottom and etc. (It actually would have 10 levels but the bottom three are taken up by a steam injection device - I do a lot of bread-baking and steaming for the first couple of minutes gives the best crust.

This site has this recipe and explanation from Craig Claiborne's "Southern Cooking" Many consider him to be the quintessential southern cookery gatherer of obscure and arcane facts, traditions and "down-home" trivia.

I have been preparing Brussels sprouts this way: Brussels Sprouts with Chestnuts practically forever. This is not my exact recipe, I use two cups of chestnuts and instead of the oil I use 1/4 cup (or a bit more) of brown butter sauce. However except for these two changes my recipe is very similar. In my family this dish came from England and was often served during the holidays. We had 3 huge chestnut trees on the farm that escaped the blight back in the 1920s or so and we used to gather bushels of chestnuts which were roasted and eaten as is, boiled and mashed, combined with other things as in this dish, dried and ground into flour for baking, canned for later use and turned into confections by cooking them in syrup to make glacé chestnuts or marrons glacé. The combination of the sweet chestnuts and the slightly bitter sprouts is just wonderful. A variation was to drizzle a bit of Calvados over them half-way through the baking.

Ahem, I have used annatto like this for many, many years to get the red coloring so desired in spare ribs and etc. And who turned me on to this? Charlie Lau, one time chef at Kelbo's on Pico, back in the early 60s. He said there were a lot of gloppy sauces that were used to produce the color but he liked the annatto that a Mexican cook at the jai alia palace in Mexicali introduced him to back in the late 40s. It was his "secret" concoction and was simply Karo syrup, lemon or lime juice and annatto with some chinese 5-spice cooked and strained and in which the ribs were briefly dipped prior to being dipped into the barbecue sauce. He said to use tongs to handle the ribs because the stuff will dye your hands for days or weeks. Now, of course, we have gloves. It has very little flavor in and of itself but the color - that is intense.

And sausage gravy is........... simply sublime.

I have a very old sandwich grill, that is an appliance that is like a waffle iron (or a panini grill) but has smooth plates. I slice extra firm tofu about 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick, soak in either teriyaki, barbecue, sweet & sour and mustard sauce or some of each. I then butter the plates of the sandwich grill, place the "flavored" slices of tofu, lower the top plate and "fry" for a couple of minutes. These are then incorporated into a sandwich or simply placed on top of green or vegetable salads. You can also do this with a panini grill if the grids are not too deep. I have tried to do it in a grill pan but it is difficult to turn to cook the top side. Cooking on both sides at the same time works much better as it firms both sides at the same time. I also simply slice it, add some seasoning and use brown butter. Nice!

Nope. I am in Lancaster, California. I am just 9 miles from Edwards AFB where the shuttle used to land and where the test pilots fly the new aircraft that are in development. I got to see the first roll-out and the first flight of the Stelth bomber. Nothing like being in the middle of a tricky bit of kitchen work and having sonic booms shake the house. It used to bother me but now I can decorate a cake and never notice it. This area is known as the "high" desert as it is an ancient seabed at over 2000 ft altitude and almost flat as a pancake but surrounded on three sides by mountains. We have a great deal of ethnic diversity in a city of almost 130,000 - Palmdale, next door to the south is about the same size. The population growth has been incredible. We have, besides the Mexican supermarkets, Korean, Thai, Fillipino, Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, Salvadorean and British. There are probably more but these are the ones with which I am familar.

And to flavor a syrup that keeps practically forever - I have some 4 or 5 year old stuff that is still potent. It has one very great advantage. Unlike citrus based syrups, it will not cause milk to curdle. You can also make an extraction with alcohol and concentrate the flavor. You need to really pack the leaves into a jar, cover with alcohol and then using something like a muddler, crush the leaves, close the jar and shake it well, let it settle and crush the leaves some more. Put it in a dark place for several days, making sure the leaves are completely covered by the liquid - (I have a small round and heavy lid from a little stoneware jar that just fits into a wide-mouth caning jar.) After a week or so, take a tiny bit of the flavoring in a spoon and taste it. It should taste as lemony as lemon zest, if not leave it another week, crush the leaves some more.

You can buy "Mexican-style" hominy in many regular supermarkets and certainly in all Mexican markets. They have three or four brands at the Vallarta supermercado here in Lancaster. It is regular hominy with Mexican seasonings. They also have both yellow and white hominy.

I make an oven-roasted vegetable medley thing with various vegetables when I have just a couple of each, not enough to do one side dish with one vegetable. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, celery, onions in chunks with snapped green beans and so on. Enough to cover the bottom of a 9 x 11 or 9 x 13 baking dish. Season with kosher salt and pepper and perhaps some herbs de Provence or just rosemary or thyme. Then drizzle with roasted garlic oil and roast in a slow to medium oven (300 F) for however long it takes for them to just begin to become tender but with some resistance to the fork. I then add a can of hominy with its liquid, stir well, and return to the oven to finish cooking, about another 25 minutes should do it. When this is done correctly, it should have an almost meaty quality to it, but without any meat products of any kind included. It becomes a sort of oven vegetable stew.

One of my long time friends, originally from Africa, educated in England and for many years a university professor here in soCalif, now back in England, said once that if coffee tasted the way it smelled it would be as popular as chocolate. He said that try as he might he could never get the stuff past his tongue. He drank tea constantly and could tell the difference between varieties with just a sip. He also could not drink cola products as they all tasted terribly bitter to him. His wife was a dedicated coffee-head and was never without a cup/mug/thermos or whatever, in hand. He learned to prepare it in various ways from espresso to various brewed types for her but couldn't swallow even a spoonful. He said that the aroma was so delicious it made him salivate but the actual taste was horrible and he tried many, many times and could detect the tiniest hit of coffee in desserts as well as other foods. The three of us attended a food festival in Santa Monica several years ago and one of the vendors had a chili which Louis tasted and discretely disposed of. He asked if it contained coffee and the vendor was surprised that he was able to tell. So was I, it was indistinguishable to me and I was amazed that he could sense it. Some people do have an extraordinary ability to taste certain compounds.

One just opened in Santa Fe, so they are working their way closer to you.

Try this place for the smooth tartlette molds though they may be smaller than you want. here I have bought bread pans from them and brioche pans but never any of their little molds or pans. I also buy rolled fondant from them when I need a large batch and know I won't have time to cook up my own. They carry a quality product at a fairly reasonable cost.

I have purchased mine from Big Tray They have 4 dozen for 141.00 which works out to less than $3.00 each. shipping is reasonable.

I think that this thread has pointed out that we all have differing tastes that converge at some points and diverge at others. It is very true that some people are super-sensitive to some flavors or aromas and others don't notice them at all. This can change also and sometimes fairly late in life. And abruptly...... My across-the-road neighbor has a 49-year-old son who has always been one of these "eat what is put before one" persons, no interest in any special foods, ethnic or spicy, he simply had no preference. A year ago he was having a lot of headaches and went to a doctor who found he had a severe sinus condition that had been present for many, many years. An EENT doctor did a rather extensive surgery and warned him that he might have some odd sensations. What he had was a sense of SMELL, something he had never had prior to the surgery and which also interfered with his being able to taste. Imagine if suddenly you were able to see in color after being limited to black and white all your life. This is what it has been for him. All of a sudden he can taste things. He has become fascinated with hot and spicy, warm and savory and fresh vegetables and fruits of all kinds. Prior to the surgery he could not taste any difference between a peach and an orange. Now he can tell the difference between a peach and a nectarine. He is amazed at what he has been missing all these years. His mom is happy, now she knows that there was a reason he never noticed her cooking. His wife is not a thrilled, she is not much of a cook, but he is learning that he can do it himself. He is watching FoodTV and has borrowed a bunch of my tapes from old shows. He even likes cilantro - he loves pesto (before he thought it was on the pasta just for color). The only downside is that he has gained 25-30 pounds, however he was rather thin before the surgery. So there is something else to consider. How many people have conditions such as this that impede their enjoyment of good food?

I second the motion about the Dawn Power Dissolver. If any spots remain I use my old, "tried and true" method which is a barely damp cloth, dipped into dry baking soda and used to scrub off the clingy bits. I do not use anything abrasive on any of my cookware. Eventually it will cause the surface to dull slightly. And oven cleaner is okay on porcelain surfaces but not on some metallic surfaces, and certainly not on anything that is non-stick, even though it is not directly on the non-stick sufrace, the fumes can soften the stuff. This is not good. Even the super-hard surface on Farberware's Millennium non-stick (takes metal utensils just fine) can be marred with oven cleaner.

Have none of you ever read "The Egg And I" by Betty MacDonald?

That makes sense to me, unless someone objects in the reasonably near future I'll make it so. I still have some of the wild boar meat like that which I cooked for carnitas on that thread. I can roast and chop it and stew it in my homemade green sauce. People seem to like it.

I know when they came out. The Santa Barbara store(whose manager developed the idea) introduced them the weekend of the Santa Barbara Kennel Club show at the Polo Grounds in Montecito (just south of SB). They were a big hit at this show that was a very big show in those days, (over 4000 dogs entered) it was the last of the "benched" shows in southern California. (All the dogs were assigned a benching area and had to be on display all day except when in the ring or being walked). They had two stands, one at each end of the grounds and did a huge amount of business all day. They served them in flat styro containers and the top muffin was not on top of the egg as butter was included so you could butter the muffin half if you wished. They were served with tater tots, on the side, it was some time later that McDs came out with their own version of hash browns.