andiesenji

Fruited cocoa cake Here is a very old family recipe. The earliest mention of the cake is in one of my ancestor's journals ca. 1690. My great-grandmother found the "receipt" and deciphered the recipe in about 1880. Although it was prepared at other times of the year, it was always called Christmas Cake. I brought it up to date about 20 years ago when I was allowed access to my great grandmama's journals. I have continued to refine it right up to the present. Like many cakes of that era it contains dried fruits and is fairly heavy. You can use a combination of dried fruits, but the larger ones have to be chopped so all pieces are about the same size. I have used cherries, cranberries, blueberries, black currants, Zante currants, sultanas and my home-dried extra sweet seedless red grapes, dried plums, dried persimmons, peaches and pears. As long as the total amount is as listed in the recipe, it doesn't matter about the combination. I often make this for parties and most people love it. Technically it is a "fruit" cake but even people who do not care for fruitcake will eat this. Also like most of the English cakes that are served at tea, it keeps very well, as I have noted in the recipe. FRUITED COCOA CAKE original recipe ca. 1690 Notes: It is important to use Dutch process cocoa. If you can't find it you have to use baking POWDER instead of baking SODA. I use King Arthur Flour's Double Dutch Cocoa and Black Cocoa Half and Half. When glazed with the glaze at the end of the recipe, this cake will keep for several days at room temp and will stay incredibly moist. I have in the past made this cake ahead of time and wrapped it well in aluminum foil and kept it in a cool place for 6 weeks. However I now live alone. When my family was still all together, I could not keep it more than a couple of days......to give you an idea of the way things used to be, the original "receipt" called for 6 pounds of twice-boulted flour and 3 full pound loaves of sugar well beaten..... 2 pounds of butter and 3 dozen eggs. ****** 1 cup BUTTER unsalted 1-1/2 tsp SALT 1 tsp CINNAMON, ground Any of these spices are better if freshly ground. 1 tsp CLOVES, ground 1 tsp NUTMEG, ground 1 tsp ALLSPICE, ground 1/3 cup COCOA, Dutch process 3 cups superfine SUGAR 4 extra-large EGGS 3 tsp BAKING SODA 4 cups unbleached FLOUR 1-1/2 cups CURRANTS or raisins, any color. 1-1/2 cups DRIED CHERRIES or dried cranberries, dried blueberries. 1-1/2 cups WALNUTS, chopped or pecans or macadamia nuts, etc. I've used pistachios and even used pine nuts one time. 3 cups APPLESAUCE, unsweetened chunky style if you can find it, even better is homemade. ***** Preheat oven to 350 F Grease and flour a deep 11" x 15" pan or 2 10-inch square pans or 2 holiday mold pans. This will fill a large Bundt pan with enough batter left for a mini loaf or 2-3 muffins. ***** METHOD In a large mixing bowl (or mixer bowl) cream together butter, salt, spices, cocoa and sugar. beat until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each one. Mix baking soda with flour and sift, reserve 2 heaping tablespoons. Instead of sifting the flour you can simply put it in a large bowl and run a wire whisk through it which does the same as sifting, i.e. fluffing it up a bit. Add flour to batter alternately with applesauce. Sprinkle the fruit and nuts with the reserved flour, toss to coat well and fold into cake batter. Pour batter into pan and bake for about 1 hour or until cake tests done. (deeper pans will require longer baking) ***** Turn cake out onto cooling rack and allow to cool completely if simply dusting with confectioner's sugar for presentation. If using glaze, it can be applied while cake is still slightly warm. ***** ORANGE GLAZE GRATED PEEL OF 2 ORANGES 1/3 CUP SUGAR 1/4 CUP WATER 1 CUP ORANGE JUICE 3 TABLESPOONS GRAND MARNIER LIQUOR OR BRANDY Combine ingredients in saucepan, bring to simmer, stirring constantly, continue cooking until liquid is reduced by 1/2. Drizzle over cake ( I use a turkey baster and a perforated spoon as the glaze is too hot to dip my fingers into which is usually the way I drizzle icing). After the glaze has set, decorate edges of the cake and the plate edges with powdered sugar sifted thru a fine sieve or use a cut-out pattern or paper "lace" doily. You can also drape the cake with rolled fondant or decorate with cutouts of the fondant and brightly colored candied fruits. For dedicated chocoholics, melted chocolate can be drizzled or poured over the cake. Some people like the fluffy white "7-minute" frosting similar to that used on "Black cakes" from Jamaica. ( RG1120 )

wow! And how exactly did you come across this combination??? No Brown sauce left in the pantry, only sweet chili sauce left, lived without fear and was not completely sober. There are few things of this type that are not improved with the addition of sweet chile sauce. I buy it in the large bottles, 6 at a time so I won't run out. I have used it as a dip for all kinds of things Kufta or kefta, falafel, dolmas, fritters of all kinds, bean cakes, used it as a topping on grits, barley, kasha, cheese blintzes, potato blintzes, potato pancakes, hoppin' John. and of course all kinds of Mexican foods. Chimichanges especially. And an avocado split in half and the hollow filled with sweet chile sauce is a symphony of flavors.

I forgot to mention that I have one set of the exfoliating, abrasive gloves in a different color that I use just for handling fish. Much easier to hold onto the slippery fish. Of course if you have fish gloves you wouldn't need these, but these are much cheaper. They go in the wash and when dry just seal them up in ziplock bags to keep them clean until you need them. I also use them for cleaning peeled bananas when I am going to sauté them or cook them whole. You know how you always miss some of those little strings that then turn an unattractive dark brown when cooked? One stroke of these gloves will take all those little bits of string right off and also makes it easier to hold onto the banana. I was on the phone late last night with a friend who is a baker in Alhambra and she said that since I told her about this she has used them constantly and all the other bakers in the place have started using them for similar chores. You all may invent even more uses for them.

I wish someone would RE-INVENT the home use large batch potato peeler. We had one when I was a child, one of my aunts has it and will not part with it, says she will will it to me but the way she is going, she may outlive me. It just looks like a large pot, rounded top and bottom has a fitted lid with a couple of thick rubber paddles. The inside walls of the pot have an abrasive surface. One filled the pot with potatoes, then with water and cranked the thing, checking through a sliding door in the top to see how the potatoes were comign along. I mean, you could do 10 pounds of potatoes in a very short period of time, they always had a few stray bits of skin here and there, where the eyes were, but it was quick. I think they disappeared becaue of smaller families. I have been haunting ebay, hoping to see one come up, but apparently everyone who has one is hanging onto them for dear life.

No, my latex gloves don't do the job. However I do wear them UNDER the raspy gloves when handling blanced almonds that are fresh from the boiling water. Save scalding...

Add to the list the single dose "pods" or multiple dose "pods" pressure brewing such as the Senseo or the Home Café system by Black and Decker.

This is my favorite online merchant. They have great service and great products.

Yes indeed. I have passed this hint on to a lot of bakers who all love it. First you have to make a shopping expedition to Pier 1, where I found them, or some similar place, I have seen them in other stores. They are the gloves that you are supposed to use to exfoliate your skin while bathing. Dry, they have just enough raspy surface to make short work of the skin on toasted (or blanched) hazelnuts or filberts, they also take the skins off blanched almonds that don't want to cooperate. I also use them for rubbing the prickles off of cucumbers and similar items however their most helpful use is skinning those darn hazelnuts.

check this thread duck

Have you looked at Taste of Home? I get just about every food magazine that is published, mainly because people keep giving me subscriptions as gifts. It does depend on your tastes and how willing you are to try new things, as to which magazines will serve you best. I like Fine Cooking as they combine traditional cooking with a little "out there" content, but the recipes are easy to follow and there are seldom any exotic ingredients. Other favorites are BBC Good Food from the UK, Cuisine At Home, as well as Saveur. Barnes & Nobel has a great selection of cooking magazines. I suggest you buy a couple every month before you jump in with a subscription. And if possible, see if you can find a "deal" on subscription prices. I recently received an offer from Bon Appetite for a year's subscription, 12 issues for 12.00. Often when you visit certain web sites, vendors and such, they will have offers at a fraction of the regular subscription cost.

Last night and this morning I made plum butter from the last of the Isabella plums. (These are a plum with nearly black skin when fully ripe but with a rose pink flesh, an heirloom variety that does not travel well and ripens after picking. They are picked when they are a ruby red, then allowed to ripen on a tray until the skins are a deep purple, almost black.) These have an intense flavor and I sweetened them with Splenda. After putting the cooked pulp through a food mill to remove the skins, which give the finished product a lovely color, I added some of the strained bread and butter pickle syrup that I made up for pickling last weekend. This little piquant flavor addition did wonders for the flavor of the plum butter. It also makes a great flavor enhancer for peach butter, often rather 'blah' to my taste.

I eat something similar, andiesenji .. pretzels with sour cream and cottage cheese mixed ... crunchy yet creamy! mmmm.. I also have a somewhat similar snack: Sour cream and onion potato chips dipped in lemon yogurt. It's the salty and the tart which I love. Plus you get the crunchy/creamy thing going on. :licks lips: I must confess that I am a cream addict, the thicker the better. One of the reasons I began making my own cheese/cream cheese, etc., was so I could have a legitimate excuse for buying cream in large quantities. People would look in my fridge and see two gallons of cream and look at me as if I had horns growing out of my forehead. I can say, "oh yes, I make my own cheese, cream cheese, ricotta, butter, sour cream, yogurt," and so on and they would nod and say "I see." The truth is that I do make all these things but I can also take cream straight into a bowl, add enough fruit for flavor and that is a snack. Or, I can mix it with fresh cheese curds and have the best "creamed" cottage cheese ever. The flavor and texture of the barbecue potato chips, dipped into this creamy, lumpy stuff is heavenly. Spicy corn chips are dipped into plain sour cream. Another flavor combination I happend upon by accident is grilled bratwurst, cut into chunks (no buns in the house) and accidentally inundated with lemon curd. (I was talking on the phone, not paying attention and grabbed a quart jar of lemon curd from the fridge, instead of the applesauce.) Wow, was that good!

Herb who?

I can only tell you what works for me. I have a voice activated microrecorder made by Sony that has a very good microphone for picking up at a distance. I set it nearby but out of harms way and turn it on. Because there is a lag time, I always say ah or something similar before dictating ingredients or directions. I usually weigh ingredients as I add them because using a scale with a tare feature is easier than volume measurements. I can always convert to volume measurements later if I wish. The first thing I do is list the date, the title of the recipe and/or principle ingredient. I gather all my ingredients onto a tray and list them in the order they will be added to the recipe. Then I recheck the list of ingredients and the amounts. (If I made a mistake the first time, the second time will correct it.) If one or more ingredients are unusual, hard to find, or need special preparation I will include the source or the directions at that place in the dictation. As I put everything together, I dictate what I am doing and what utensils I am using. If the recipe needs special attention, chilling, resting, etc., I describe what, how and where. As I work I note the time so I can determine how much time will be required for various steps in the process all the way until it is completed. If I want to speed things up, I will do two or three versions at the same time, A., B., and C., varying the amount of ingredients in each or changing the times required to reach a certain point in the recipe and describing in detail the variations in the different versions. I then transcribe this into Word, put it into the format that works best for me, print it out to proofread it, make any corrections and proofread again until I am sure there are no errors. I wait a few days, then make the recipe from the printed page to make sure that I have included all the ingredients, all the steps and have the same result I obtained earlier.

bacon and avocado (to continue the theme) prosciutto and melon peaches and shaved ham apples and Kasseri or Caerphilly cheese ditto pears Barbecue potato chips (rippled) with large curd cottage cheese (my favorite secret snack) crisp waffles topped with chili cheese blintzes with habanero salsa, ooooooohh!!

Oh you have no idea how nauseating it is to pitch so many (formerly) lovely raspberries that are overrun with botrytis so I can make my four jars of jam.... I just bought 6 of the large clamshell packs at Sam's Club and there was not a bad berry in the bunch. They are now being turned into raspberry syrup in a steam extractor.

She does mention kosher salt, she says to use more because it weighs less because of the crystalline structure.

Akin to confit, is the pre-refrigeration method of preserving pork chops. At hog-killing time. The chops were cut up and fried while the lard was being rendered. Then a layer of cooked chops would be place on the bottom of a large crock. That layer would be covered with melted lard then another layer of chops, another layer and lard and so on until the crock was filled, topped with lard, covered with a clean board with a weight on the top and placed in the coolest spot around, root cellar, spring house, etc. Sealed away from the air, these chops would keep for many months and the deeper one got into the crock, the better the chops tasted.

Absolutely. There are some applications where, using your garlic powder example, that nothing else will do. Dry rubs for BBQ come to mind. Then there are recipes that would suffer from tampering with. On several threads, it has come up that the ubiquitous green beans with the mushroom soup and canned fried onions is just not the same thing if you make it from scratch. I have an old crock pot recipe for beef stew that uses a can of mushroom soup and a package on onion soup mix. It just isn't right without those. I have a yellow squash recipe that starts out with diced onion lightly browned in butter. It is better with the dried onion flakes. There is a nuttiness to the flavor that is really good. Then there are the "comfort foods" that some of us remember from our childhood, particularly if our childhood was in the 50s, that rely on the prepared food craze at the time. I agree with you 100% There are some "convenience" foods that are worth using because they enable you to do other things with more flair. I often have people ask me for my recipe for Mac 'n Cheese. I unabashadly tell them my "secret". First I cook the Creamettes brand elbow macaroni, if that is not available then it is Barilla. It is then cooked aldente, then drained, tossed back in the pot with butter and a can (or two, depending on the amount of macaroni) of Campbell's Condensed Cheddar Cheese Soup, undiluted. Stir, pour in a casserole, sprinkle the top with parmesan or asiago, freshly grated and run under the broiler for a couple of minutes. It is alway creamy, never gets gummy or hard and tastes good. If we want spicy it is the Nacho Soup I use. In the meantime, I have baked bread from scratch, cooked fresh mushrooms, onions, tomato and squash, grilled chops or steaks and prepared a killer dessert. The mac and cheese takes 15 minutes, tops.

All of the uniform shops around here (and there are several) have hair nets in every color and in different sizes, also beard guards.

If it is thick enough, and 1 inch should be, just get some sandpaper, coarse, medium, fine, super fine and sand it down until it is flat. If you know someone who has woodworking equipment they can do it for you. Even hardwood can be worked easily with sandpaper, wrap it around a block of wood which you can get as scraps at a lumbar yard or someplace like Lowe's or Home Depot, etc. I have a lot of butcher block counter tops and occasionally have had one develop a bump, usuallly from someone setting a hot pan on a wet counter. I have a lot of woodworking tools and use a wide draw knife to shave the bump down, then finish with sandpaper then seal it. I buy mineral oil (food grade) in the drug store or Wal-Mart. It is usually right next to the Milk of Magnesia. If you spend a little more and get one of the "end-grain" cutting boards, which are usually much thicker, you will not have a problem with warping just from moisture as wood warps along the linear plane. Heat and water will cause it to swell but it often will return to normal after a time. If there is one of the "Factory Outlet" group of stores near you, check for a kitchenware outlet. They have excellent buys on cutting boards, all shapes and sizes, cheaper than I have seen anywhere else. I bought several to take with me when I am going to be cooking somewhere other than my home because most people do not have good ones and I do not want to ruin my knives. I carry one for meats and poultry and one for vegetables to prevent cross-contamination. Here is a good hint for you. Go to one of the art supply places and buy one of the semi-rigid plastic art carriers. They have the perfect size for carrying your cutting boards, keeps them clean and away from other things.

I spoke to my friends in Yorba Linda earlier this evening, they told me that old George, the original owner from Missouri, died and his sons had a falling out about the way the place was run in about 1997 or '98. Marie, George's second wife and Louise, his first wife were good friends, and my friends told me they moved into Leisure World together. That was a prime piece of real estate which they owned, so it was probably sold for a bundle. I haven't been down that way for a while so have no idea what is now on that corner. Too bad you never tried their pies. The strawberry pie was just perfectly ripe strawberries, piled as high as they could in a blind-baked crust, then their own clear glaze (not that canned glop) which was like a simple syrup cooked to the soft ball stage, wa then poured over the pile of fruit. I have never tasted a strawberry pie as good. They did a blueberry pie with blueberries in blueberry cream that was also unlike any I have ever tried. Their lemon meringue was also great. My friends said their favorite was the chocolate cream pie with the crust made from vanilla wafers and with shaved chocolate on top of the pastry cream topping. (About 1000 calories to the square inch.) In the late 70s and early 80s the Santa Ana Kennel Club had their two shows (spring and fall) at the Disneyland Driving Range (long gone now) and those of us who stayed at the grounds in motorhomes always converged on Belisles after the show. Even with a large group like us, the service was always fast, courteous and I never heard of them getting an order wrong. And note that all the "waitresses" were not youngsters. One, whom I remember was named Betty Ann, had been a waitress for 50 years. No trays for them, they could carry three plates on one arm and two in the other hand. Fantastic. We used to go there for breakfast prior to visiting Disneyland, would order one breakfast for two people, which they were happy to provide extra plates because they knew how big they were. My stepson, who had two hollow legs and was a body builder, would eat one of the "Mountain-Man" breakfasts all by himself. I think it included a slab of ham, several strips of bacon, sausage, 6 eggs, fried potatoes and a stack of pancakes. It came on a large platter. They also had wonderful fried chicken, chicken fried steak and the smothered pork chops with stewed apples were the best. The chicken pot pie was also a favorite. I think they started out as a competitor to the restaurant at Knotts Berry Farm. I haven't been to Pie and Burger or Apple Pan. I used to go to a House of Pies, can't recall just where at the moment. There used to be a place named Tick Tock Pies on Van Nuys Blvd in Sherman Oaks. They had a big sign out front that was a pie clock face. That is going back a long way. They were just down the street from Bob's Big Boy drive in and on Friday night (cruise night) they were an alternate to Bob's.

Your blend is probably as good, if not better than the one I use. I often cook it in the microwave and taste and add to it if I want a bit more "spark". Actually I buy a big bag of the basic stuff at Smart & Final. Then I add to it, broken pieces of cinnamon, star anise, fennel seed, celery seed, sometimes black caraway (sweeter than the regular caraway), sometimes ginger, dried lemon peel or orange peel. Rarer still I may toss in some black cardamom. The regular mixes that combine coriander whole cloves mustard seed black peppercorns whole allspice bay leaves dried peppers celery seed is a good base. If I want an oniony flavor in the pickling liquid itself, I add some dried shallots. I grow a lot of shallots and drying them really concentrates the flavor. The same holds true with garlic. I much prefer the black and brown mustard to the yellow, mainly because I grow more of it. Occasionally I add fenugreek seeds to a batch, makes an interesting flavor change. I love to experiment.

This pickle recipe my pickle recipe also works well with squash and etc.

My original recipe for refrigerator bread and butter pickles is here Andie's Bread and Butter pickles It took me some time to develop this recipe and it works beautifully every time. You can also make it with summer squash and also with mixed vegetables, cauliflower, broccoli, celery, carrots, little onions, etc. If you like them spicier add more red peppers. You can make this recipe in a larger batch and can them using the hotwater bath method. The acid level is high enough to prevent spoilage as long as they are processed correctly.