lperry

There is. This page might explain better than I can. Species Help Sheet

On the contrary, as someone who works in ethnobotany, I can tell you with conviction and a great deal of personal experience that it is the common names that are more often confusing. Scientific names are subject to rigorous rules and peer review and are equivalent across languages and cultures, while common names often change from one village to the next within a space of a few kilometers. I would argue that either system is useful in its own context. Andie, I've also overwintered chili peppers with great results. The South American varieties often wouldn't flower for me the first year, even when I was in Florida.

Black seeds are characteristic of Capsicum pubescens and no other cultivated pepper species. If yours don't have black seeds and fairly thick flesh, you have another species. Do you have photos? "Cultivar" is shorthand for "cultivated variety." Over thousands of years, humans selected for traits that were culturally important to them, so we now have many pepper cultivars that are typical of a region and its cuisine. Many different cultivars can be bred from the same species of plant. For example, consider the species Brassica oleracea which has been bred into the cultivars kale, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts (and many others). All these plants are very different, but they are derived from the same species. They have simply been modified by human selection. What you consider to be different peppers are often different cultivars but not different species of plants. Does this explanation help or confuse even more? -L

Rocoto and Manzano or Manzana are all common names for peppers of the species Capsicum pubescens. There are different cultivars of this species just like Bell, Ancho, Anaheim, and Jalapeno are all cultivars of the species Capsicum annuum. So they are the same botanical species, but not the same cultivar. In terms of cooking, the peppers you have are common in Andean cuisine and they tend to be hotter than heck. Enjoy! -L

I know this thread is an old one, but I go back to it every time I pull out the canning equipment. Thank you to Trillium for starting it. Last week I went blackberry picking, made the blackberry jam from Ferber's book, and added a little port at the end just to make it richer. Because the berries were sour to begin with (it's been very dry here), it is just the right level of sweet/tart. I'm hoping to get to a farm stand this weekend for peaches. Farmers complain about droughts, but they make for lovely intense flavors in fruit. Is anyone else preserving?

I had two sizes of screens and then realized that one worked much better than the other. It has a much finer mesh screen in it. That would be my only advice - find one with a fine mesh screen.

I went to Johnson's Berry Farm in Upper Marlboro this morning. We had to walk an entire row to pick about three kilos of blackberries, and Wednesday is her last day open this season. It has been so dry and hot that the berries are pretty sour, but the flavor is incredibly intense. Not so good for fresh eating but fantastic for cooking. I've got some macerating in the fridge for jam and it tastes wonderful.

There's also a really good foodsaver group on Yahoo groups. People post sales and best prices fairly frequently. I think you can browse the messages without actually joining.

Hi Alexis- To acquire the information you need, you will want to try to get access to academic journals, possibly through your local library. The field of archaeobotany is very well developed in your area, and you can find comprehensive information on native food plants that were exploited by indigenous groups prior to European contact. These would include maygrass, goosefoot, sumpweed, sunflower, amaranth greens, purslane (see recent thread), and eventually, the "three sisters" of maize, beans, and squash. Hickory nuts and acorns were a common winter stored staple, etc. etc. (This is a very abbreviated list.) Cooking methods are not so well studied because they are difficult to reconstruct, but the ethnobotanical and archaeobotanical literature is a good place to start, and I'll suggest the journal Economic Botany as a jumping off point. Good luck! -L

My recipe has about a tablespoon of corn syrup in it in addition to the ingredients you list. I've never had it separate. -L

Thank you so much! These are fantastic. I foresee additions of coconut, sesame seeds, cayenne pepper..... I also foresee more trips to the gym. It took all of fifteen minutes to make these start to finish. Very dangerous!

Thanks for the advice - this makes sense. Most definitely!

I do quite a bit of baking, but I tend to follow the suggestions that the authors make for which types of pans to use. But I've just now purchased a very pretty little fluted mold that I know I will use quite often. It is a five cup bundt-type pan that I want to use (this time) for a pound cake that I usually prepare in a loaf pan. I know that it will cook faster because of the tube in the middle, but I don't know just how fast that might be. If the cake in the loaf pan takes an hour at 325 degrees, should I start checking the tube pan after half that time? This is what the pan looks like, although mine claims to be a five cup volume. The site indicates that I should shave 10% off the cooking time, but I am assuming that this instruction is for a similar pan made from light metal (?) Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks- L

Thanks! I'll try this way next and report back.

Attempt number one has been completed with fair success. I roasted the peanuts, so they were a little oily, and the toffee is half butter, so what I got was a lot of toffee sliding off the nuts. Not that that kept us from eating it ... Any ideas?

This sounds really good, and very similar to some toffee that I make during the holidays. What I really want is a recipe that keeps the nuts separate and coated instead of a candy with nuts in it. Do I just need to add more nuts, stir, and separate them on the sheet? Will that give me the right texture?

I was cleaning out the freezer and found that I have accumulated about five pounds of raw peanuts. General consensus is that they should be made into butter toffee peanuts, the kind that you buy that have the bumpy, uneven, crispy shell of buttery, salty goodness. I've been searching here (apologies if I missed a topic) and Googling the same search terms, but I am only finding recipes for sugared nuts (typically egg-white recipes) and hard, shiny-shelled candied nuts. Has anyone made these at home? Do I just need to adjust methods on a candied nuts recipe? Thanks, -L

Thanks for the suggestions. I had heard about Heartland - they come highly recommended for apples. Everyone has their obsession, and mine is preserving, so I always need larger quantities than I can get (at a reasonable price) at the farmers' markets. Plus, picking your own is more fun.

Has anyone gone berry or cherry picking lately outside the beltway? If anyone has recommendations, I would appreciate the advice. I'm also looking for somewhere to pick apricots and peaches later this season. Thanks -Linda

Thank you for the angel hair suggestion - dinner tonight was much better for it. I made a fresh tomato sauce with oregano and thyme (didn't have basil) and threw in the cheese. I can see these little things becoming addictive.

Not exactly. It's been pre-cooked so you just add liquid, and then you don't have to worry about cooking the arepas all the way through like you would a masa product. The texture is different as well - dense and a little grainy, and they crisp up really nicely in the pan. The flavor is very much like grits and I've done all sorts of things with them. Egg and chipotle, cheese and salsa, tiny ones (arepitas) for dipping into different salsas at parties.... Not terribly traditional, but really good. Now I need more masarepa.

Masa harina is the traditional ingredient that is used to make dough for tortillas, sopes, tamales and the like. Masa arepa is precooked and is soaked in liquid (usually water, but you can use milk or stock for a richer flavor) to make a dough that is then pan cooked or deep fried into little disk shaped breads. These breads, arepas, are common in Colombia and Venezuela and are stuffed with any manner of things like cheese or meat. There should be pretty detailed instructions for proportions of flour and liquid on the bag. I made some the other day for breakfast and filled them with scrambled eggs, cheese, and butter.

I found dandelions at the Asian grocery about a week ago and made a wilted salad with a hot dressing. I looked all over the internet for different ideas and came up with this one. I sauteed shallots and walnuts in walnut oil, added an herb vinegar, salt, pepper, and mixed the greens in the pan. I put a little honey in the dressing to balance the bitterness of the greens and added shaved parmesan on top. (No blue cheese in the house). I'll definitely pick them up every time I see nice ones.

Attempt #1 at a warm pasta salad was a success. Orecchiette with fava beans and perlini in an herb vinaigrette with fresh mint and oregano. Probably not a particularly traditional combination, but the little cheeses nestled down into the orecchiette so each bite was a cheese-pasta combination that went really nicely with the herbal dressing. I stole the fava beans + mint idea from the cooking of Liguria thread. Only two packages to go! Edited to add: I usually get the Trader Joe's flyer. I'll keep an eye out for it.

This week Costco has packages of tiny "perlini." They are balls of fresh mozzarella that are less than a centimeter in diameter. I'm envisioning baked pasta with tiny pockets of melted cheese, little marinated balls of mozzarella in a salad, fresh with cherry tomatoes, basil, and balsamic... Have you seen these? What did you make? What would you make?