andiesenji

A friend sent me a couple of samples of "super-premium" coffee beans - Alto Grande from Puerto Rico - "Blonde" roast. I ground the beans and made one pod for my Senseo - Bleh! Not at all to my taste. Insipid, slightly sour. So I brewed two cups in one of my vacuum brewers. If anything it was worse, what "coffee" flavor it had was nothing like I expected. Unfortunately there was not another roast option. The other sample was La Bolsa Maragogype from Guatemala and it was a medium dark roast which was much more to my taste. It had none of the sourness of the other brew and there were the chocolate tones that I expect in the darker roasts. There was greater complexity in the taste and a very nice, lingering aftertaste. He has promised to send me some more samples - a special small crop varietal from Ethiopia that is akin to the Yirgacheffe but is dry-processed (he rather lost me at this point) and will be roasted a special way that is more time-consuming. When I get the package and have the time to grind and brew the coffees, I will post again. In the meantime I am finishing a bag of Good Coffee for a Good Cause dark roast - a Fair-Trade organic coffee. Not cheap but very, every good to my taste.

Moderation in all things. That has been my motto all my life. I can see this being an apropos warning to those who eat nothing but processed lunch meats, bacon, hot dogs and etc, with little or no fresh vegetables and fruits. I like bacon and am not going to stop having it occasionally. I don't eat hot dogs or lunch meats or some of the overly processed "hams" that are colored with chemicals and who knows what else. My family has been totally free of colorectal cancers and many have lived to great ages, eating all the "wrong" things. My dad died relatively young - for his family - at 89 in 2010 while his eldest sister born in 1912 - who consumed bacon or ham at breakfast every day of her adult life, died in 2012. I never gave up butter or lard - I never trusted margarine and refused to use it at all - and my cholesterol at age 76 is still normal. I think a lot of this has to do with genetics and some people either produce or use the critical factors in foods better than others. If some has a family history of these diseases then they should pay attention and cut back. Science is important in these studies and they should not be ignored but there has to be some balance, some common sense because, as we have learned in recent years, eating foods labeled "low-fat" can introduce things we do not want into our diet and cause more problems than the original "normal" foods. Moderation, common sense and learning all one can about the subject is the key.

There is a Mexican restaurant in Valencia,CA that serves an ice cream float made with vanilla ice cream (made in house), hibiscus syrup and seltzer. I have been told that it is absolutely delicious and rather light - after one of the rather hearty meals they serve.

I did a search here, found the cheesemaking thread but can't get a clean link. This is a cheesemaking site with details about make quark with a dried culture and explains a bit more thoroughly about the methods. I buy a lot of cultures from this place and have made many of the cheeses, including aged until it got to be too much for me. New England CheeseMaking

Unfortunately, you need CULTURED buttermilk to make quark. The lemon juice coagulation works okay for baking because you need the acid/alkaline balance for leavening. But without the active cultures in buttermilk, you will not get a nice result - in fact you will get something that may have pathogens that will invade milk that is not "protected" by the active cultures (which also limit activity of mold spores) that primarily protect against nasty bacteria, such as listeria. I have lots of books about cheese-making, culturing buttermilk - I make my own butter too - and while you can use lemon juice for a quick coagulation for something like ricotta (not cultured, by the way, it is heat reduced), for yogurt, cream cheese, sour cream and quark, you have to use a culture. (Cottage cheese is also a rennet/coagulant, non-cultured product)

Welcome Richard! I have already replied to your inquiry about making quark. I'm retired too, never a chef but have been a life-long cooking and baking enthusiast and have experimented quite a bit with cheesemaking of various types. I still make my own butter, sour cream, cream cheese, yogurt, with the occasional side trip into the more "exotic" dairy foods such as paneer, and of course the quark. I went to baking school in the mid-50s (Dunwoodie in Minneapolis) and worked in my mom's bakery for a while but then got sidetracked into being an x-ray tech - which paid better, much better... I too am a trial and error cook/baker and have experimented quite a bit with modernizing some very old family recipes, mostly figuring out the rather sparse info on measurements, and cutting them down to size as some were for truly enormous families and today there is little need for a cake that beings with the instructions to "triple boult five pounds of white flour." I've been a member here since 2004 and have enjoyed every minute. The folks here are friendly, helpful and there are NO trolls and spats are quickly stepped on. I should add that I envy you in your location. I absolutely adore Spanish cheeses, Idiazabal is one of my favorites. And while I can't eat seafood because of an allergy, I love the paella that is made with rabbit and sausage - I live near a town settled by Basque people who specialize in that style of the dish.

Can you get the freeze-dried quark culture? That's what I have used for a few years, since it became available. If not, you can use KEFIR, the liquid, finished product, not the the "grains" that are used for making kefir. I used this method before the freeze-dried cultures became available because buttermilk here is "ultrapasteurized" and really not suitable for making a good quality quark. I got fresh milk - I usually make it using half a gallon (2 liters) of regular milk - although a couple of times I made it with half & half and got spectacular results. I bring the milk to a lukewarm temp - between 115 and 120° F. I stir in about half a cup of room temp kefir (I just leave it on the counter when I bring it home from the store the same day I will use it) and leave the mixture in a warm place (about 85 to 90° F) overnight. I check to see if it has coagulated the next morning - I dip a spoon in and if there is a thick coating and a little separation of whey, it is ready to heat. I put it in a non-reactive* pan over low heat and bring it to lukewarm - about 115° F., stirring constantly until the curds form and separate from the whey. I line a mesh sieve with cheesecloth or butter muslin, set it over a pot or bowl to save the whey (great for use in baking) and pour the quark into the sieve. After most of the whey has drained away, I use a broad spoon (wood, if you have one) to mash the cheese well to extract as much whey as possible. Transfer to a bowl, break up the mass with a fork and there you have it. *Absolutely do NOT use an aluminum pan - it will be a disaster. P.S. I know Kefir is available in Spain, I have a friend who lived there for several years - teaching English as a second language - and practically lived on the stuff.

I add butter and sour cream (both homemade) to pototoes while mashing and then salt to taste and some really aromatic fresh ground black pepper - have been using comet-tail pepper for the past month or so.

The first time I tried to candy citron, it was ripe and it really didn't hold together or look very appetizing - it got mushy and looked "furry" and did not have the flavor I expected. It was sort of like the Mexican "candied pumpkin" which looks firm but is easily mashable. It would not dry in the dehydrator, just sort of melted into blobs - it was sort of like gummy bears only less firm and had an odd flavor. I didn't use them in baking, I gave them to a neighbor who had several children and they treated them like candy.

I got the green fruit - at the time I knew a Jewish man who grew citron for the Sukkot festival and gave me some fruit to play with. I brined it as described in one of my very old cookbooks and then put it in very heavy simple syrup 4:1 sugar to water - which crystalized solid during the "storage" so I had to heat it to extract the chunks of citron. I had cut it into pieces that were about 2" square and 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick to make it easier to handle.

You can read about the process used to preserve the fruit HERE Pages 402-404. Unlike "regular" candied fruit, the citron is not "cooked" in the syrup but rather packed in it at ambient temps, AFTER undergoing a brining or pickling process to preserve it. Candying raw citron is not an easy task, the stuff is so dense that it simply turns into hard chunks that have to be stored in syrup because when they dry out, they are like rocks. I attempted this many years ago and gave up after a few very frustrating exercises in futility. A waste of time and sugar...

Here is a Youtube video on how to use the mouth atomizer, which, believe it or not, some people used to use to blow food dye onto foods. I once watched a "food decorator" prepping a table full of food for a photo shoot and using one of these to "colorize" some of the foods on display. None was considered suitable for consumption by humans but one of the camera guys took most of the stuff home to feed to his "herd" of dogs. This was back in the late '60s or early '70s before airbrushes were routinely used for this purpose.

It is an atomizer. Back in the early days of my artwork with pastels, I used one of these many times a day to spray fixative onto a pastel painting. I'll show you what a larding needle looks like. This is shoved into the fat - suet or lard - which pushes the pusher up the shaft. It is then inserted into the meat, the pusher is depressed as the needle is withdrawn, leaving the fat inside the meat. I have a couple more, one really old, and one that is slightly different, made for forcing "lardons" into shallow cuts in meats (also handy for inserting garlic cloves). Since they are in my antique and vintage, stuff, and not in regular use, it may take me a while to find them.

Happy Birthday!

Spartan apple. Snowy white flesh. Trees do look rather scraggly, uneven branches.

Exactly! This happened just this year in Ohio. When I was a child in western Kentucky, an entire family became sick and some died, from eating home-canned corn. It was fairly common back then, the Farm Bureau put out bulletins about canning safety every year when canning season came around. And the traveling vendors - The Jewel Tea man - or the Watkins man - would also have cards they gave away with advice about safety in canning.

I have that nut chopper and it works great for me. I only use it for the coarse chopping, have never turned it the fine direction.

I believe she said there was no power available.

I didn't see this thread earlier. You can get one of these $22.00 and one of the ethanol gel fuels (Party City sells 12 cans for 15.00) Some people I know have three and serve hot chocolate, hot Mexican chocolate (with cinnamon) and a coconut beverage at a local swap meet. I have an old "space-age" design, globe-shaped hot beverage server that I used for decades for hot chocolate, hot cider, hot tea or spiced tea (long before chai appeared) and used Sterno. I have it on ebay now as I no longer need it. I used the liquid Sterno because the solid, gel type was not available back then. This only holds a gallon and is enameled steel so would be completely inadequate for your needs. It has held up well since the late '60s when I bought it because it matched my Descoware enameled cast iron cookware.

I have several nut choppers but have been using this one for a couple of years. It fits on a wide-mouth pint or quart Mason jar so I don't have to watch closely to see how much I have chopped. Like the others of similar design, it chops coarse when cranked in one direction and fine when cranked in the opposite direction. More expensive than most others but it is in my opinion, easier to use. The blades are quite sharp - use a brush to clean them, keep your fingers clear. (I speak from experience!) Not for use with macadamia nuts...

A couple of the whites are separated, beaten to soft peaks and folded into the mixture but not as much as in a chiffon. It's on my blog HERE.

I've been buying from Vanilla Products USA via ebay also, since the other vendor I liked upped the price considerably. I bought a pound of the bean paste a bit more than a year ago and because of my worsening heart condition I did little baking last fall so I vacuum sealed the whole jar and stuck it in the freezer. I defrosted it a couple of weeks ago and it seems to have suffered no damage from being frozen, still potent.

I can't stand most pumpkin pies - dense slabs of filling in soggy crusts - overly spiced and cloyingly sweet to the point that it overwhelms the taste buds and can even spoil the "flavor memory" of the rest of the meal. The pumpkin custard pie recipe I got from my great aunt Maude (Maw-dee) uses less sugar, less spice and a lot more eggs than the "normal" pumpkin pie (or squash or sweet potato pie) and is lighter, not quite as fluffy as a pumpkin chiffon, but not at all dense.

You might try your hand at whole dried limes - here in the desert I have no problem drying them outside in a large wire colander in the summer. In the winter I have used the dehydrator. I boil them in brine - heavily salted water - for 5 minutes, allow them to cool, they turn kind of gray-green, dry them well with a tea towel or paper towels and put them in a wire colander covered with a round cake cooling rack and set them out on a plant stand that gets sun all day. It has to be covered because otherwise the birds will get at them. I bring them in at night, dust them off occasionally if we have high winds and there is dust blowing. In the dehydrator it takes about 6 days at 120° F. for them to dry completely. They feel hard and very light. I store them in a mesh bag, hanging in the pantry so air can circulate around them. I pound them in a mortar to break them up and then grind in a spice grinder and sift through a sieve to get rid of some of the bigger chunks that don't want to grind. I use them to make baharat - a spice mixture that I include in some rubs - especially for goat meat. Also in a stew. Here are some links one with suggestions of how to. This one with some ideas of how to use in middle eastern recipes. And this one with more suggestions of use.

I have a lot of family recipes but most need to be "modernized" and cut down to a reasonable size because I grew up in an enormous extended family - raised by my maternal grandparents - and most of the recipes (receipts) are for large batches. When something starts out as "weigh out 4 pounds of flour" - you know this is going too far for today. I have a few on my blog (link below my signature) - the oldest the "Fruited Cocoa Cake" that is truly ancient and which I modernized many years ago. My great grandmother had also "brought it up to date" in the 1880s so a century later I played with it to get it right. The first mention was in an ancestor's journal in Virginia in 1690 and required chocolate "lozenges" pounded to powder. The first line my great grandmother wrote, after describing the cake, was "take 5 pounds of thrice-boulted white flour" . . . It's an amazing cake which we always had for Christmas but also at other times of the year. For Christmas it was baked in a large rectangular baking pan that barely fit in the oven (Estate range, large oven) and placed on a very large silver tray that was lined with several layers of oiled butcher paper that was trimmed to fit the cake so the paper wouldn't show until the cake was cut. My great grandmother never actually cooked or baked anything - she was a very aristocratic lady - but she knew how to tell cooks what to do. My grandmother did some baking of special things (the Dundee cake) even though she had a cook and lots of kitchen help. Her mother's Griddle Cake recipe is my favorite. And some of the recipes are "family" recipes as interpreted by my grandparent's cook Miz Lily Pearl Gibson. Also my great aunt Maude (Maudie) gave me her recipe for Pumpkin Custard pie. My mother did not cook or bake. She owned a bakery but was strictly management. My dad's mother was a pretty good cook but I spent little time with them. (My dad and mom divorced when I was just a toddler)