Eden

finally got to make the meatloaf last night & was just putting it in the oven when the phone rang & Friends dragged us off to dinner, so I tossed it in the fridge instead and baked it for lunch this afternoon. I wanted to make a wheat-free meatloaf, so I tried this recipe, but I spiced up the sauce with some mustard powder & nutmeg (and skipped the splenda). Here's everything laid out on the table ready to go: One of the reasons I picked this recipe was the prosciutto & provolone you roll up inside of it: Finished product: Here's a side view showing the mozz in the center: and here's a slice right before I devoured it It was a tiny bit dry I thought (one more egg maybe?) but the sauce made up for that nicely, and I liked the overall flavor very much. The prosciutto adds a nice smokiness, and of course I love the melty cheesy goodness of the provolone! more pics can be found over in my album edited to correct the sauce notes...

Thanks for all the suggestions. I did not strain significant pulp/seeds out because i usually like a bit of seed/pulp to let me feel like there's real fruit in there, but if it will concentrate the flavor I'll try it. likewise a pinch of salt. we usually add a splash of some kind of alcohol to enhance flavor, but have not generally soaked our fruit in the booze for fear of it overwhelming the fruit flavor...

A friend introduced me to these as part of the spread for a tea party about 20 years ago. Also to just eating slices of fresh tomato with salt - yumm! Blessings on her head where-ever she is now! Of course this recipe requires you to make bread pudding or stuffing afterwards to use up the extra bread after you cut out the rounds - darn!

Actually not. my recipes all specify fenugreek seeds. (I'd never heard of the greens before today.) And per Alan Davidson, Fenugreek is a relative of Clover. he specifies that fenugreek seeds "need slow heating to bring out the full flavor, but overheating makes them bitter" Apparently it's also a common ingedient in commercial curry powders.

I felt as though the balance was right because the puree looked right based on our experience making previous fruit ice creams, matched a ratio from a reasonable recipe source, and most importantly it had the right mouthfeel... I'm pretty sure we tossed in a bit of lemon though at this distance of time I won't swear to it. The mixing the berries in whole suggestion is very close to my current theory which is to make a sweet berry puree and just swirl it into a near finished vanilla ice-cream. Blackberry-swirl sounds pretty tasty to me

not sure yet where I'm going to go with this cook-off (there are SO many tasty options, and I may yield the keyboard to Bill who is usually the maker of Ice-Cream in our house) but I'll start with a question on how to fix a previous failure. We have thornless blackberries in our yard (conveniently fruiting right now!) and last year we tried to make an ice-cream with them, per our usual mix of fresh fruit pureed with creme anglais, but the berry flavor really dissapeared in the final product I dont remember the exact proportion, but I really don't think it was a shortage of berry to creme, it was just like the berry flavor watered down when pureed & frozen. Any suggestions to counterbalance this? I don't want to waste most of a years harvest (we only get about 1/2 to 1 gallon of berries total) on an inferior product when I could just gorge on raw berries instead & make better ice-cream with something else...

The last dish I made with it was a kuku sabzi (herbed egg dish). If this isn't the exact version I used, it's very close. I warn you that, thanks to the fenugreek, this is not a standard tasting "omelette" at all & while my friends & I really enjoyed it, I would NOT serve it to food weenies. Fenugreek is also used in sabzi polau (herbed rice), Ash (persian noodle soup), and Koresh-e qormeh sabzi (herbed lamb stew). I think it's popular in fish dishes as well. Pretty much anything labled sabzi - which I think means herbs - is likely to contain fenugreek. Sort of amusing now that you tell us fenugreek is actually a legume. I'm fascinated by the idea of treating it as a dal. Please do post more about that.

just to be clear here, we're talking milk based products, not fruit sorbets/granita's etc? yes?

there's a restaurant in my neighborhood whose signature dessert (The Orgasm) is a giant chocolate chip cookie freshly baked in an 8" round cake pan, delivered hot to the table, topped with vanilla IceCream - Yumm! I've wondered if they had to modify the recipe at all to support the change in size... Are you sold on the sugar cookie base? because a softer cookie like a gingerbread would be more likely to slice/break nicely when serving time came and it's covered with icing anyway so you get the bridal white look regardless...

It's also used in persian cooking.

only 100f - really??? the few recipes I've read say between 125-130f. I just checked and my 1951 'Joy of Cooking' says 170f!!! (wow, that's some seriously overcooked veal!)

So there are a flock of evil songbirds who hang outside my bedroom window and commence warbling around 4 in the morning on a regular basis. My first response to this was "NOW I know why those Roman emperors ate Lark's tongues!" Being a food history geek I of course then had to go looking for the original recipe, just out of curiosity, but so far as I have been able to tell, this is some kind of (incredibly pervasive) food myth. there is nothing in Apicius' De Re Coquinaria (roman recipe collection) There doesn't seem to be anything from Cato or Martial... There are some later (Victorian & modern) references to Vitellius eating the Tongues of nightingales, but nothing actually Roman that I could find. The closest I get are some flamingos & peacocks. So how did we jump from this to Larks tongues? Anybody here have a theory or further information? (for those of you into ornithological correctness, no my early morning songbirds are not actually larks, but that's not something you really care about at 4am when the evil chirping starts )

I picked up a Frenched rack of veal at the Trader Joes yesterday, and now I have to decide what to do with it. I could just do a simple herb rub/marinade & then roast it (yumm!) because how can you go wrong with veal? but figured I'd see if anyone had any fab suggestions here first.

Does this count as a dessert terrine?? Out of The French Laundry Cookbook- strawberry & champagne terrine ← How lovely! Let me guess he calls it strawberry jell-o? OK when the next round of roses come in I am definately making some kind of a rose-petal terrine!

I don't really blame them for wanting to know in advance (though perhaps they could have phrased it a little better) with so many people who think it's OK to show up everywhere 15-30 minutes late. I have one friend (ranted about on the perpetually late thread) who, when she had us running over 30 minutes late to a restaraunt once on a busy saturday night actually said menacingly "they better have held our reservation" I secretly hoped they'd kick our sorry asses to the curb to make a point, but when we finally arrived they found us a table & were very gracious. It must suck to be the floor manager & have to be nice to people who are being so inconsiderate though...

thank you that's very useful to know. I love cooking from her books, but I only do so when I'm ready to dedicate a full day to the process, and really get into the zen of washing rice I will look for the book you recommend above & see if I can enjoy Persian food without it being an "event" Ooh now that I'm thinking about it, I really want some sour-cherry pulao I might have to make some this weekend...

According to the barristas at the Fremont cafe they'll be closing sometime this Fall. At least I have a few months to find a new hangout in Fremont that will let me sit around & gabble with my friends in Italian for a couple of hours without bugging us to buy more than a cup of coffee

what do folks think about Najmieh Batmanglij's cookbooks? I've been quite happy with them, but my only comparison is to the food in Persian/Iranian restaurants, not to real home cooking...

I'd like to add that I found jbonne's information extremely helpful. I'd been thinking about Vios, but it sounds as if this is not the right restaurant for me. I will however recommend it to my friends who like good food, and want to take the kids with them. it doesn't seem a huge stretch to expect children to be no more intrusive to my dining experience than any other customer at a restaurant. a restaurant is shared space, and part of what i'm paying for while there is the temporary lease of the table space so i can sit there and be served. Actually people DO have to satisfy certain standards of behavior in order to co-exist with one another. That's pretty much the definition of civilization. I make a reasonable effort not to impinge on other people's dining experiences, and I expect the same in return from every other person in the restaurant regardless of age. If a person isn't able to handle that concept, that person shouldn't be in a restaurant, period. [i'm not talking about for "kid oriented" places like mcdonalds, or "the old spaghetti factory" etc, I'm talking about normal restaurants where you have reason to expect a quiet meal.] I was raised that if I went to a restaurant I was to sit quietly at the table like all the other people in the room. I could read, or draw, or yammer my mom's ear off, or whatever as long as I kept my voice level & didn't bother people at other tables. If I couldn't handle that & needed to burn off energy I went (or was taken) outside to run off some steam, and then come back & sit at the table like a civilized human being. All this while being raised by my nice little 60's "I don't want to repress my child" mother I applaud the people who take the effort to do this, it can't be fun to go out to dinner in the early phases of raising a kid, knowing that you'll probably have to walk out half-way through the one meal that week you didn't have to cook yourself. But in the long run you're teaching them not just that "appropriate behavior" changes for different environments, but also self-control, which is one of the more useful skills you can have in this crazy world. (oh and that "when mom says something in THAT tone she means it, so you'd better shape up!" )

another vote for the Krups here. as FWED mentions there can be a thin hard layer on the bottom, but it's generally a good reliable machine. We bought this brand after talking to a Chef who had gone through like 3 other brands first and killed the motors on all of them!

My Matfer came with an instructional video. If Bron makes a video as well I'm sure you can contact the company & they'll send you a copy. I just looked & can't find mine or I'd lend it to you since I'm sure they're pretty simillar - sorry.

Pacific food Importers/Big John's PFI Here's the website. They are notoriously difficult to find so here's the thread with instructions.

I'd be curious to try it. We had a sparkling Recioto once in Venice which I just adored, but suspect the setting may have influenced my opinion The only sparkling reds I've found here have been Lambrusco-like.

bake them all at 337F and in my experience the number one thing to be careful of when expanding recipes is fruits & veggies not given by trimmed weight. if you use "5 apples" in your pie normally, and you're making 20 pies you will probably not need 100 apples for the expansion, but more like 90 (depending...) One of these days I'll have time to go back & convert all my recipes to weight ratios (hah!)

As to how I'm doing, I know I'm eating far less, which has to have a good effect right? I can't tell you in hard#s since I didn't weigh myself before I started, but I'll know when my clothes fit differently... I'm at 3 weeks now, and while I don't know the #s exactly, I know it's over 5 lbs, because I've dropped 5 from when I looked at the scale about 10 days ago, when presumably I'd already lost some... Also my tightest pants are now looser, and my loosest pants are a bit too loose - this despite some notable days off the diet. Yay!