Special K

Mine's so tame, it's embarrassing. "SpArK" - Spinach Artichoke Kasserole.

I did a quick Google and found someone who started out with Trader Joe's frozen sweet potato frites.

Check here (if this works):

Wait, what? If you make dinner, shouldn't your roomate be doing the cleanup?

This is one of my bad habits too. It's especially irritating as I've been transitioning to a new range w/ a convection oven, something I'd never used before. LindaK, it's like we're leading parallel lives!

I used to feel guilty about this, too, and about using aluminum foil as well. Then Seattle started letting us put paper towels (and pizza boxes, and meat, and bones, and a multitude of other used-to-be-garbage items) in the compost bin (they use high heat), and (rinsed) foil in the recycling bin. Sweet! Also, I use fewer paper towels now since I got myself a stack of microfiber towels at the local Goodwill.

I found dried wild blueberries (the tiny ones) at our TJ's yesterday. I'm looking forward to using those in scones and waffles. Also, we bought the frozen fire-roasted bell peppers and onions, the frozen seafood blend ( shrimp, calamari rings and bay scallops) and the nearest jar of spaghetti sauce, heated all three together, seasoned it with some Old Bay and served it over some leftover rice. It turned out to be a pretty good no-brainer dinner after a busy, exhausting day. We'll definitely keep those items on hand. We like some of the wines, too. We're strictly red-wine drinkers, and not very knowledgeable about wine - we just know what we like, and we like it when what we like is cheap!

Thank you so much, Andiesenji!

Also, I forgot to say, a brand-new looking copy of Sara Moulton's "Sara's Secrets for Weeknight Meals." Yippee!

Found this at Goodwill today, paid $1.99 for it: From the label (ELKO Novy Knin) I was able to Google it; it's a dumpling slicer! Now I need to find dumpling recipes, because I must use this! If nothing else, I can use it to slice that big log of goat cheese that Costco sells.

YOu say that like it's a bad thing!

A lot of "me, too"s: Oven cleaning - the new oven has a self-cleaning feature, but I'm sure it would blow a breaker in our old house. I do clean it before Thanksgiving (and then really only because there are guests who might SEE!). Aprons - I have many, and they're handy, but . . . Water re-use - I feel guilty, guilty, guilty. Cat policing - with two Abys, it's just not always possible. Also: Failure to use leftovers - end up throwing them out. Often forgetting that the dishes in the dishwasher are clean, and adding dirty ones (which must mean there's room and I should have waited until the machine was full -- a double bad).

We have friends who moved to one of the swingin' retirement communities in Phoenix - and there they have Charles Chips! My friends are in heaven! My folks never subscribed (in Florida), but my friends' folks did, and my friends shared. Charles Chips were wonderful! Not sure they're worth moving to Sun City for, though. Ask me again this winter.

When we lived in LA (mid-80s), the Helms Bakery building in Culver City had already become the Antique Guild. I used to wonder about its former life as a bakery - that building is HUGE! They did have a nice selection of Helms Bakery memorabilia, as well as some nice, affordable antiques, many of which found their way into my apartment. Thanks for closing that loop for me. (Edited to remove a stray apostrophe from "its")

I have tons of clippings. When I have a block of free time (or am procrastinating . . . ) I go through the stacks of cooking machines and NYT dining sections and clip away - I take anything that looks interesting. I take even things I know I'll probably never try - I think it's because I have a fairly large filing cabinet (the library card-catalog case I mentioned yesterday), and, you know, Nature abhors a vacuum. Oh, and I am a pack-rat. This is why we do not live on a houseboat - my stuff would sink it. I think I use clippings and cookbooks about equally. I use the clippings in the same way I use cookbook recipes - I look at three or four (or five, or six . . . ) recipes for one dish until I have a very good idea of what's supposed to happen, and then I work on "my own" recipe until it's just where I like it, and that goes on the "final" index card. Then the idea is that I go back and toss the clippings, but I never seem to do that. You just never know. I also have a nice little collection of bloopers: mistitled things, mostly. It's funny when a recipe for brownies is labeled "Salmon." Those are posted on the refrigerator.

I have the exact same problem! No suggestions, really, except to try and find someone to fabricate something, which might actually be a possibility. There's a wrought-iron place here where they actually make things to order. Wrought-iron is probably not the best material for this kind of thing, but I can't think of anything else. If I get around to asking/having one made, I'll let you know.

Savory, always. Can't even face orange juice, but tomato juice is fine. The only time I ever want sweets is for dessert on those rare occasions when we eat out - and then it's usually because the selection on the cart just looks so beautiful! But a bowl of sweetened cereal, or a stack of pancakes, etc., in the morning just does not seem appealing to me at all. I guess the first thing I learned how to cook as a kid was bacon, so the rest of the kids could have their cereal or their Carnation Instant Breakfast or whatever, and Mom could stay in bed. In pastry/bread baking school, I used to gross everyone out by eating bacon rinds for breakfast (but maybe that's because they were all vegetarians).

Agreed. And I'd add that I'd bring back the idea of the whole family sitting down to dinner at the same time, no cell phones, no TV, no distractions - just good food and conversation. I'm 57, and that was already going out of style when I was a kid - I guess I'm nostalgic for something I never really had. I don't have kids of my own, but if I did, I would absolutely fight for the family dinner hour.

I'm not at home, and my collection of what I think of as "cookbooks" includes an awful lot of books about food, memoirs and such, rather than straight collections of recipes. I usually do cook a half-dozen or so recipes from a new book and then it either stays in the kitchen or gets moved to one of the other 25 (I'm not kidding) bookshelves around the house. My excuses for not cooking from all of them: Well, there are just too many! There's not enough time! As I've mentioned before, I'm a (retired) librarian, and I just don't feel comfortable in a room that isn't filled with books. I'm an insomniac, and if I give up on sleep and get up to read, I don't want anything with a plot that I'll get drawn into; I want something pleasant I can just dip into - that said, sometimes I will get so engrossed in, oh, say Laurie Colwin or MFK Fisher or Calvin Trillin - and now I'm reading R.W. Apple, Jr.!! - that I'm totally startled when the alarm rings at 5 a.m. And, as so many others have noted, my usual M.O. is to read through a bunch of recipes for the dish I want to cook, and then, once I get the gist, I wing it. I have learned (finally!) to write down exactly what I do, and tweak it with each successive try until I get it "right." Then it goes onto a card and finds a place in my recipe file (actually it's an old library card catalog file). Those are the recipes I end up using all the time, but they definitely have their origins in my cookbooks.

Richard, you are right, of course. I didn't count the photos; I didn't have much time to leaf through the book, so that was just my first impression. I guess 26 photos of finished dishes just isn't enough for me - but that's just me. I know that a lot of people would rather have fewer pictures in their cookbooks - more room for more recipes! Anna, I will certainly post my impressions of the recipes when I get the time to try them.

Well, it's probably just me, but I like my bacon very overdone by most people's standards. And thanks for the tip about the potatoes!

Well. Got the book. I'm sure I'll love cooking from it, but I do have one quibble. I was . . . well, dismayed is the word . . . to find almost no pictures! There are a few beautiful photographs of the finished dishes, and in one or two we can actually see the clay pots they're cooked in, but there are not even any drawings in the introductory section. Even after reading the description, I still didn't know exactly what a cazuela was supposed to look like until I googled its image. Maybe it's just me -- I guess I just need pictures in my cookbooks. Oh, and I know this sounds mean, but the first recipe I looked up in the index (the no-knead bread in a Romertopf), showed a typo - her mention of it (she doesn't give the recipe) is on page 266, not 366. (I can't help it; I'm a librarian, and one of the first things I check in a new book is the accuracy of the index.)

About what you'd expect - apparently the first really good ones were manufactured in Holland in the 17th Century.

Just ordered it! This is the cookbook I've been waiting for! Now I'm off to scour Goodwill, etc., for more clay pots.

The first time I made my onion rye rolls they were perfect. Then I started trying to "improve" them . . . mostly for looks . . . now I'm trying to think . . . what was it? I know I tweaked the recipe a bit, which is unusual for me to do the first time I try something new. Did I use bread flour instead of AP? Dark rye instead of medium or light? Was is the particular kind of onions? Do I need to go back to using all raw onions and give up the pretty caramelized onions I used to top the rolls? WHAT was it???? WHAT?! Still good eats, but not that moaning-in-bliss perfection of the first batch.