jgarner53
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Posts posted by jgarner53
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OMG, canned brown bread is da bomb! It was one of my favorite meals growing up, with baked beans and sliced wieners (always "wieners" in my house, never "franks" or "hot dogs" - because, duh, a "hot dog" implied bun - these fine culinary terms )
I have hunted and hunted and hunted up and down every last bleeding aisle in every supermarket in town (just about) for that canned brown bread, and there seems to be some law on the books that says that brown bread is illegal here because I can't find it anywhere!
But "Baking Illustrated" has a recipe for it, and next time I make baked beans, I'm whipping up a batch of this, too.Other canned items I can't live without:
evaporated milk
coconut milk (Chaokoh - cuz the name has "A-OK" in it!
or Mae Ploy if I'm feeling flush)canned tomatoes
asceptic packaged organic tomato soup
asceptic packaged organic butternut squash soup
chicken broth (if I don't have any of my own in the freezer)
Better than Bouillon (though this lives in the fridge)
various canned beans (black, chickpea, etc.)
Since my pantry is woefully small, I don't have room for a very large larder.
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Ooooh, those beans look good! Do you have a recipe you follow, or just sort of wing it?
My friend who lives in Carmichael calls that Trader Joe's (at Marconi & Fulton) the Mean TJ's because all the customers are really mean! They shove their carts in front of you, shove you out of the way, reach in front of you, etc. I'm surprised there aren't brawls over the last bottle of two-buck chuck!
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Oh, that's easy: last night's butternut squash gnocchi, made from a recipe printed in the newspaper's food section. I had everything on hand, though the squash had been baked previously and frozen. I thawed it and made sure it was good and hot when I added the potatoes. Well, either the frozen squash was a problem, or the recipe sucked ass, because the 1 cup of flour (to 2 1/2 pounds of squash/potato) only made sort of a soupy mess. Two or more cups of flour later (I wasn't really measuring, just dumping more and more flour in to try to get it to come together into some kind of dough), I finally got something that could be called dough, though it was still especially sticky, and couldn't be rolled down a fork for those charming little ridges.
They took longer than the mentioned 1-2 minutes to float to the surface, and if it weren't for the browned butter sage sauce and loads of parmesan, they wouldn't have had any flavor at all. The texture was somewhere between rubber band and the lumps of white bread my friend and I used to smoosh together out of Wonder bread when I was a kid.
Mario Batali himself could knock on my door and offer to make gnocchi with me, and I think I would refuse.
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One of my good, non-cooking friends (I love her anyway
) told me she got raves when she served my Christmas gift caramel sauce over a frozen sara lee cheesecake. So, similar principle, executed in a non-cook fashion. (honestly, frozen sara lee cheesecake?! 
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OK. I dug out my bundt pan (languishing in a corner cabinet such that I had to get out a flashlight to find it.
Made a sour cream coffee cake from Epicurious, using black walnuts from one of my husband's coworkers and Trader Joe's dried montmorency cherries in the topping/filling. It's out of the oven now and perfuming the house nicely.
Now I'm almost wishing I didn't plan to send the whole thing off to work with my husband tomorrow. (The vultures have been growing restless with sugar deprivation as there have been no treats for several weeks from my kitchen). Think they'd notice if a slice were missing?
Ok. I had to add a photo. I will dust the top with powdered sugar in the morning:
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Macaroni & cheese is one of my all-time favorite comfort foods. Ever. Hands down.
I grew up on Morton's frozen mac & cheese, not the blue box version, though I did go through a long phase (from about, oh 12, to, oh, about last year
) where I really dug the blue box or the Deluxe version. Until I decided that the Deluxe is WAAAY too darn salty for my palate anymore. Occasionaly we'd make a relatively light version from Cooking Light (which, if you don't use reduced calorie cheese, isn't really that light anymore 
). Last fall I got a fantastic rich, decadent recipe from a cooking class that's all about the cheese: fontina, gruyere, parmesan, and dolcelatte gorgonzola (which is not easy to find), mixed into a bechamel with onions (soubise), which makes it a mornay. Throw in some shredded proscuitto, stir in a pound of cooked penne, and then top with toasted, buttery bread crumbs and bake. Outstanding and decadent. A real treat.But for Sunday night I gotta have some mac & cheese hankerings, it's Alton's Stovetop recipe, which is really Cook's Illustrated's recipe, which is really John Thorne's recipe. Macaroni, evap milk, eggs, mustartd powderd, hot sauce, and a lot of grated cheddar. I could probably eat the whole damn pot of it.
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The sad fact is that I bet that at least 75% of Americans won't even notice the smaller size, or just shrug it off if they do.
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Another handy bit, especially with chocolate chip cookie dough (not useful for your wedding, I know, but handy to know). Those frozen lumps make for some good snacking straight out of the freezer!
When I was in high school, I worked in an ice cream shop that sold "freshly baked" Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. I can't tell you how many lumps of frozen dough I pilfered.
FoodSavers are awesome for anything that doesn't have air in it (like a baked good).
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Just the excuse I needed to bake a cake!
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I have a DeLonghi Retro toaster oven that I got to replace the cheapy Black & Decker model I'd had for the previous 10 years or so. Within two years, the dial that controls the toaster timer (and turns the oven part on) broke, so that the only way to turn off the toaster was to unplug it.
I spent $50 to get it fixed, and THAT dial broke within a week. This time it was fixed for free (I might add, this was at a local repair shop, not through DeLonghi, since my toaster oven was out of warranty, and they basically told me I was SOL), and it's been fine since (going on a couple of months now), but I am leery. If it breaks again, I will probably switch to the Cuisinart, though it doesn't have the swinging retro styling of my deLonghi.That and buying a $7 toaster from Target for those freaking toast-n-serve bags!
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FYI, King Arthur Flour's Baker's Catalog sells something that seems to be similar here I can't vouch for their source, but after reading through all 13 pages of this thread, I can tell you I want nothing more than a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup for lunch!
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When dining at Chez Panisse recently, one of the items on the menu was "Bob's Turnip Greens." When we asked who "Bob" was, we were told that it was one of their local farmers, and that they try to give credit when they get a particularly nice product.
Now, this being Chez Panisse and not Chevy's, I felt I could reasonably believe what the server told us.
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and who remembers the Malt-o-Meal tv commercials? "Edgar, this is your tummy speaking. Edgar, I want Malt-o-Meal. Edgar, Malt-o-Meal." Talk about your irritable bowel...
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I'm not a huge cake fan, personally. I usually feel like most layer cakes are too sweet. I don't mind a good lemon pound cake, or a genoise used in a composed dessert (like a bavarian, or a mousse cake). Dessert-wise, I'm much bigger on things like mousses, or crème brulée.
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We didn't do Malt-o-Meal in my house, but there was Cream of Wheat (loved it, though haven't made it in a few years) and oatmeal (basic Quaker rolled oats). For some reason, I didn't like brown sugar on my COW, but did on my oatmeal.
Now I prefer steel cut oats with brown sugar and dried cranberries. I tend to make it the day before and eat it for several days.
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Love love love Mitchell's ice cream. A year later, and my mother-in-law still talks about how good the Mexican chocolate was that we had around last year at Christmas.
Hmmm, maybe that's what my New Year's celebration needs -- ice cream!
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lordy, do I remember the great pains my parents took to instill in me the hand-changing meat cutting rule. (I stubbornly wanted to cut with my left and keep my fork in my right) And with my dad being left-handed, no less! (I am right-handed). Now I cut with the right and keep my damn fork in my left hand, stabbing the meat with the fork upside down (so the bowed part is up, not down). Now, if I'm eating without a knife, then the fork is in shovel-mode in the right hand.
What surprised me was seeing my new, 50-something step-brother (dad got remarried at 73) hold his utensils with an overhand grip, like a 5-year old, rather than the more, uh, grown up underhand grip. He also talked with his mouth full.
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I got the Les Halles cookbook and Alton Brown's new book (bless him for including weight measurements in both metric and Imperial!). Not one dessert cookbook (what ARE people thinking? c'mon people, I'm in pastry school!)
I also got a copper sugar pot and gift cert to Sur La Table
The only gift of food were the yummy orange pistachio biscotti we got (homemade) from friends of ours.
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She's got one called Nibby Pecan Cookies -- could that be it? In the variation, she omits the nuts, increases the nibs and adds cocoa. Sound familiar?
That's it!
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So you had like 200-ish puffs??? Very very very cool - I'm definitely inspired.
Something like that. I piped them out onto half sheet pans, little more than an inch across, and then counted each pan before I froze them.
I should have made a full quart of pastry cream, but we improvised with lemon curd lightened with whipped cream for the last 50 or so. Most of those went on the bottom. The base was 12 inches in diameter. The top disk of nougatine came in around 6 inches.
and rather than spin my sugar separately, I did it straight on the croque.
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Is her cocoa nib cookie recipe in this book? We've done it a few times in school, and they're really outstanding cookies. I love the texture the nibs add to the cookies, which otherwise would be fairly uninteresting shortbread.
That Sicilian Gelato is amazing. I hunted down the recipe to give my brother-in-law after we gave them a Cuisinart ice cream maker for Xmas. Now getting him to buy something other than Hershey's cocoa...
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I got my KA Artisan 5-qt last year for Christmas, and it's worked for me just fine, on everything from whipping cream (and marshmallows) to panettone and three batches of really, really stiff bagel dough back to back. (the recipe from Cook's Illustrated's baking book)
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Santa brought me Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food, the Les Halles Cookbook, a new salad spinner that won't leak water all over the counter, and a 1.9 qt. Mauviel copper sugar pot. I also got a $50 gift cert to Sur La Table.
Now if the Easter Bunny would build me a new shelf in my kitchen so I have a place for my cookbooks, I'd be all set!
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I actually just soak my raisins in hot water.
This Week at the Berkeley Bowl
in California: Cooking & Baking
Posted
My best tip for shopping at Bowl is to take a lot of patience with you! I usually can only get over there on a weekend when it's a madhouse, people are lined up for parking places, and the checkout lines are huge.
That said, nothing compares to Bowl for its produce. The meat and cheese counters aren't too bad either. I love their bulk bins for things like steel cut oats, organic unbleached pastry flour, beans, rice, pasta, and granola.