quiet1

When we had the fridge that came with the house replaced, underneath and the wall behind and the side of the fridge that had been against the cabinets were all REVOLTING. I have no idea what previous owners were up to, but the folks before us had multiple kids and possibly there was a food fight involved or something... (The fridge was also seriously wedged in, so there was no chance anyone was going to remove it to clean behind or under - it took 3 big guys to get it moved forward a foot or so to get the dolly under it.)

I like the acidity and the texture since they hold up well. I like to mix them with an apple that is sweeter and cooks down more. I find with just baking apples the end result is too sweet for me.

We actually like Granny Smiths for a lot, but the farm share people get all kinds of apple types and I like to experiment. My mom is not an experimenter. At this point if she wants me to help make something, I just follow her instructions and don't give suggestions because it is simpler even if it drives me nuts when I know a small change would make things better.

My 27 arrived today. Wow that thing has heft. Going to season it tomorrow, or at least make a start.

I joined in 2004, but I can't remember how I found eGullet. I love having people to geek out about food with, though.

A Rachel Ray ragu recipe my mom wanted to try, with rigatoni, and spinach with garlic and cream that I threw together because I hate plain spinach but we needed a vegetable. The ragu is pretty good - I didn't follow the recipe exactly (it called for fennel and I hate fennel) but as a relatively quick sauce from scratch (quick meaning like 30-60 min total, not hours and hours) it's good. I'll find out the recipe so I can look it up if anyone is interested.

For cutting, could you brush the top layer with butter before cutting to keep it from drying out and stick it down a bit while you cut? Then add the rest of the butter over the top to soak in? I've never made baklava so there may be some good reason why that wouldn't work. (I'm thinking to brush on not much butter, so it isn't super soggy or greasy as you cut, just enough to make the thin layers of filo on top less likely to dry out and shift around.) My main reason for posting is one of the local Greek shops here makes a raspberry baklava that is a bit different and very nice. With all the sweetness of the syrup I can't tell what they are using for the raspberry layer, though - would it be a jam, or just raspberries cooked down into a paste? (It is not a very thick layer so they definitely aren't layering fresh berries in there.) The layering seems to be filo, raspberry stuff, nut layer, filo.

I have to say I'd be delighted to see microwave packs like the ones @rotuts pictured - much as I like to cook some days I just can't, and it would improve the options tremendously if someone picking up something that was reasonable food ready to heat up was an easy option. (Not that frozen food isn't a great help, but we haven't managed to tame the 'cooking in advance at home' beast and so we end up mostly resorting to commercially frozen foods, which can be quite limiting in selection when you have special dietary needs like low sodium. So that ends up being mostly the same stuff all the time, which gets boring fast.)

I wonder what the mysterious "spices" are.

Thanks, I kept finding just images of the package. Looks like mostly apricot and onion, light on the garlic and mustard. (Which is what I recall, it did not have a pronounced garlic taste.) I wasn't sure if anything else was hiding in it as the base, the way a lot of things start with onion/celery/carrot but those aren't really stand out flavors in the finished sauce? I'm thinking the dried apricots might be the way to go, to get the most flavor without a long cooking time. It isn't a terribly sweet sauce - fruity but not something you'd think of as sweet as such.

I'm bad local, I've never been to Penn Mac. I keep meaning to go, though.

When I lived in England, sometimes we'd pick up a packet of this stuff: http://www.africanhut.com/product.asp?id=86 It's an apricot and mustard type sauce, very good with chicken or pork. Of course, being a commercially prepared product I have no idea how authentic it is at all, but I'm not having luck finding any recipes even close to it. Did the company completely make it up or is Google failing me? It was quite tasty but had a slightly different flavor profile to what I'd expect from a European apricot-and-mustard sauce, so I'd like to try to come up with some kind of recipe for it. I can't find a photo of the ingredients list online either, just a blurb that said apricots, garlic, onion, and mild mustard in the way where those are probably the main ingredients but there is other stuff too.

Not an option, other people in the house use the microwave All The Time so we have to have one.

Got eaten too fast for photos, but dinner tonight was from a local place that does cuisine from Uzbekistan, which is quite interesting. This wasn't the first time I've eaten from there, but it is the first time everyone in the house ate there, and reviews were generally positive. (Of course, we don't have a lot of experience with that type of cuisine otherwise, so what do we know? ) Only complaint is that it looks like they are Americanizing their menu somewhat, since some stuff we ordered previously is gone. That's a bummer, as we have more than enough places locally that sell generic pizzas and sandwiches.

I'm looking at ones with 1000W for the microwave. We are currently making do with a 700 W loaner microwave from a friend and it's awful. When I had one in England I didn't use it for pure baking much - mostly plain microwaving or microwaving with some convection like to crisp up potato skins while microwaving them, or to brown the top of something like Mac n cheese while reheating. My housemate would like to be able to use some kind of grill or overhear heat function to finish off toast - not to actually toast it, but to brown cheese or melt butter that has been added to toast, and my memory of the one we had was that it might work for that sort of thing?

'Now I see it, I'm sure I have a copy of that book somewhere. (A lot of my cookbooks are packed in boxes. )

'You only use the pot as long as you are actually SVing, and many things don't take that long, so keep that in mind. With that said, if you are using a circulator (rather than trying to heat the water on the stove or in the oven) then many people use Cambro containers which are available in various sizes and I understand not that expensive. You can even get lids, which helps with evaporation on longer cooking times, though you do have to cut a hole for the circulator to poke through in the lid. Plenty of guides for that online. The food safety thing is what made me buy an Anova - my mom and I both count as immune compromised (so far I haven't had any issues, but why risk it?) and with the processing many meats get today ('tenderizing') before you buy, to be safest you're really best cooking everything to death and then some, which is, well, not always that nice. (I cry a little when I have to turn my mom's steak into a hockey puck, y'know?) With SV you can heat a steak long enough to kill off a good percentage of everything all the way through without overcooking the meat itself, so rare/medium rare steaks are safer. Same with eggs, you can pasteurize your own for use in raw egg recipes or lightly cooked eggs and reduce the risk of salmonella. Heck, plenty of people SV burgers (it takes a bit of fiddling to get it sealed in a bag without squishing it flat - the water bath method of getting air out seems to work pretty well, but a food saver risks compressing the burger more than you might want) and then give them a quick sear so they can enjoy other than well done burgers without having to fuss grinding your own meat just before cooking. I haven't tried that one yet but it is on my list since my housemate likes his beef mooing. Also, if you think you will use a food saver in general, go for it, but you really really don't need one to SV - you can get air out just fine by using freezer zip bags and a sink full of water, and the zip bags are strong enough for most things you'd SV, especially starting out.

Wondering if anyone has any recent comments on how their models are behaving - our microwave just started behaving suspiciously so we need a replacement and I'm tempted by the combo units as I had one when I lived in England that was quite nice for some things.

I liked the take on recipes in the video essay - yes in some situations more specificity in the recipe would be a good thing, but even with that there are variations based on all sorts of small variables that you do have to learn to account for as you cook. The most obvious would be cooking times since maybe your stove is weaker than the one used by the recipe author, maybe your pan is different, etc. If you cooked exactly by cooking times and didn't use your own judgement at all, most cooking methods your results would not be particularly nice overall I suspect. (I think there are cooking gremlins involved also, as I can have something like onions which look the same to me and seem to be the same room temperature, same pan, same burner, and yet sometimes it seems like they are taking much longer to soften than other times. Gremlins! ) One of the reasons I find it hard to teach people how to cook (friends, relatives who ask for tips) is some people are really very dedicated to following recipes and I go with my 'gut' a fair bit so I get frustrated when I can see there is a problem in the recipe but they insist on following it anyway. This particularly comes up for me with ingredients, as with produce you may not be able to get exactly what is called for, or a slightly different type might look better/fresher on shopping day. If my mom is following a recipe and the store had no Red Delicious apples, that's the end of being able to make an apple pie for her, she won't look to see what other apples are available that would also work. Drives me nuts.

We definitely need an actual microwave. I'm pondering a combo one, I liked it a lot when I had one in England. My housemate is super excited for dinner some night now and has no idea why. (Potatoes and melty cheese = awesome in his opinion. ) That looks fantastic.

Wouldn't the supposed benefit of SV here be in reducing the risk of overcooking? (I can't eat lobster so I can't contribute practical experiences.)

New Year's leftovers here - sausage in sauerkraut and cabbage (which got even better with a night in the fridge) and sautéed Brussels sprouts and microwave "baked" potatoes since there wasn't enough mashed potato leftover to go around. Finished with leftover apple crisp. Unfortunately our microwave seems to have died so now I have to figure out what to replace it with.

I have an Anova but as mentioned there are other ways. I don't have a bag sealer, just freezer weight zip bags, although I did recently buy a roll of larger bags intended for a bag sealer just for the size and weight. (I have a larger piece of meat to cook that I decided would better fit in the larger bag, and you can just fold the top over and clip it shut as long as you keep that end out of the water bath.) For a vessel you can use anything that is large enough for the item you are cooking and works with your set up - stock pot, sink bowl, cooler, I think @Anna N once used the pot of her Instant Pot because it was there and a handy size. I think it was easier to see it as 'whatever stuff that you have that works for you' before there were so many SV products aimed at the home cook, because now when you read about or watch a video the person almost always has a full home set up with circulator and vacuum sealer (half the time now it is a chamber vacuum sealer, too, not even a less expensive bag version) and all the other bells and whistles and it makes it look less approachable if you don't want to buy all the Stuff to start out with.

Interesting thought. That would be another reason to perhaps separate the eggs first if making something that requires just yolks or whites, and pasturize in a small baggie rather than in the shell. That would be less effective for doing a bunch of eggs ahread of time to keep in the fridge, though.

[Host's note: this topic is part of a continuing discussion. The conversation continues from here.] We played bar tonight, although with limited supplies - tried a French 75, a gin and tonic (which made the gin quite drinkable, I was surprised, I don't like gin usually,) and a cocktail picked from the Kindred Cocktails website called Act of Faith which I suspect we really didn't have the right ingredients for and tasted mostly of very alcoholic fruitcake to me. (Rum, sherry, and bitters with a twist of orange, basically.) We don't have particularly good sherry on hand, which may have been part of the problem. I stock dry sherry mostly as a reasonably shelf-stable alcohol I can grab when cooking if something needs that extra kick without opening a bottle of wine, so it isn't bad sherry but certainly isn't anything people would exclaim over to drink alone. I also made Shirley Temples for the resident kiddo using a fancy ginger ale we bought to try, and he was enthusiastic enough about the taste that I had to make a round for everyone else to sample. Tasty but definitely made me want better grenadine. Kind of fun, though, I haven't had one of those in ages and it was a nice break from sampling cocktails before we broke out the plain bubbly at midnight. All of the drinks we tried were a little too unexciting for my housemate, who wanted something with 'interesting ingredients' whatever that means. I'm tempted to buy him a bottle of Somrus (Indian spiced cream liquor thing) for his birthday, but I have my doubts as to how much you could do with it other than drink it as is or make a milkshake type thing. Maybe a riff on an Irish Coffee with tea?