Aileen
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Posts posted by Aileen
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Home Brewing
in Beer
I just started homebrewing, my first batch is in the secondary right now and I'm going to bottle tomorrow or the next day. I like the tip about bottling, I'll try that!
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I have a big problem with the way animals are treated on factory farms. I live near a town that has a huge number of feed lots (not close enough to smell them every day, though, thankfully!), and whenever I see the way those cows live it disgusts me. They are at a minimum a foot deep in muck, without shelter of any kind, and so crowded they can barely move. Sickening. There is also a turkey processing plant in my town and I've seen turkeys shoved tight into tiny cages and stacked 15-20 high in the middle of 90+ degree heat with no shade. They were sprayed with water to keep them alive. I don't know how long they were kept there, I was only nearby for an hour. I suspect it was a long time. I don't know how anyone can NOT have a problem with that sort of treatment of animals.
I grew up raising sheep, cows, and goats, and we ate the ones we didn't keep for breeding, so that aspect obviously doesn't make everyone immune to "omnivore guilt". I avoid some of the guilt by buying only free-range organic chicken and 100% grass-fed beef from a local ranch where the cows graze on national forest land. My kids and I don't eat meat every day, either. I just think it's better for our health to go veggie-heavy.
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I'm landlocked (Colorado), and this is my favorite fish dish:
Super easy and wonderful with rice and roasted asparagus.
I use frozen tuna in cryovac bags from Safeway and it always turns out great. Everyone I've served it to loves it.
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I made the Crisp Oven-Fried Fish from the latest issue the other night. The flavor was very good, but I doubt I would make it again. The coating had the tendency to break off in chunks, which really bothers me for some reason. I'm still looking for a perfect oven-fried fish recipe.
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My absolute favorite was Big Cherry. NOT Cherry Mash, which is much easier to find these days - and not nearly as good, IMO. If I'm at a gas station I always check for Big Cherries, and when I find them I buy a dozen or so...
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I've never tried to cook pasta at that elevation, but I camp every summer outside of Leadville, Colorado (our campsite is about 11,200 feet), and it takes a LOOOOONNG time to cook rice there. I assume the same is true for pasta.I cooked pasta at 11,600 feet once. It wasn't pretty.Can't let a comment like that go by . . . please elaborate!
Was base camp in Nepal? Some kind of two mile high pasta club in the galley of an airplane?
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I tried poi for the first time last week, absolutely revolting! Room temperature slime with no flavor of any kind. I like all sorts of "strange" foods, but that stuff made me ill! Hmm, I also can't stand yogurt by itself, I'm thinking it's a textural thing.
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I just returned from Kauai, and have a few opinions to share! I'll start with the bad to mediocre:
Hanalei Dolphin. The food was okay but EXTREMELY overpriced for the quality. The kid's meals were $12 for mediocre fish and chips, etc. I ordered the seafood chowder, which was seriously lacking in seafood but tasted ok ($20). The fish of the day was $31, no one at our table ordered it, but my parents had Ahi that was presented well-done (they weren't asked how they liked it cooked).
Bubba's. Maybe it's just a personal preference, but their burgers were very dry and I thought their "special sauce" (ketchup and relish) was terrible.
Grind's Cafe (Waimea or near there): Mixed. Some of the kids had pizza which was quite good, my older daughter had chicken ceasar salad, small portion, which was HUGE and tasty. I had chili and rice (trying to go with the local stuff), and the chili was extremely bland, very disappointing.
Restaurant directly behind CJ's in Princeville: Sorry, can't remember the name. My sister's crab legs were terrible. Everything else was bland and overpriced.
Now for the good:
JoJo's Shave Ice (Waimea): Yum! The macadamia nut ice cream made the shave ice fabulous, and I'm not really a huge fan of sweets.
Bar Acuda (Hanalei): Everything we ate was delicious. It was VERY expensive - $15 for one sea scallop presented on mashed potatoes - but some of the tastiest food I had on the island. Also, the menu was quite limited. NOT a kid place (we left ours with their grandparents.)
Tiny bakery/cafe in the Ching Young Village center, Hanelei: I can't remember the exact name, but the food was great local stuff. Huge and wonderful brownies, tasty breakfasts. I had the Loco Moco, it was fantastic.
Hamura's Saimin (Lihue): Very good and cheap - even if the place looks like it might fall down at any moment. The Special Saimin was even better with a healthy splash of the pepper vinegar provided on the tables.
Cafe Hanelei (Princeville Resort): My favorite meal, even though, once again, the kids' meals were overpriced and mediocre. My mom got the fish of the day ($25), grilled Ono with a parsley beurre blanc, which was absolutely beyond delicious - best single item I tasted on the island. My sister and I ordered the Ahi sandwich (rare, of course), crab cakes, and soup of the day. All were fantastic. The crab cakes were my favorite, though. Huge lumps of crab, nice avocado-based salsa on top. Can't beat the view there, either, and the service was better than most.
There were others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head...
Wish I had pictures, but I only thought to take a pic of the Saimin, and don't have it handy right now.
Editing to add Scotty's: I tend to forget because BBQ is just BBQ to me. It was good, though, and a lovely view!
Editing again to add that we looked everywherre for Hanalei Mixed Plate, it appears to have closed.
I also forgot to mention Smith's luau. I was very impressed with the quality of the food considering they were trying to feed about 300 people at once. VERY tasty! I loved the entire experience actually, it was one of my favorite activities.
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Thanks! It's a pretty steady stream of cars going both ways on a two-lane road. It sounds like the plants are too close, don't think I'd want to risk it!
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Add CO as well. I've been driving a new way home from work and have seen a lot of mature plants. I was thinking I would try to pick some next Spring, but then I wondered if the fact that they're growing so close to a pretty busy road is a bad thing. Do you think the quality and flavor would be hurt by car exhaust?
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I always did the horizontal cuts for many years. I started skipping them a couple of years ago, as I never seem to cut myself unless I was performing that particular cut. I got sick of it. I agree that the dice are fine for home cooking without that step.
Note that I have a visible shake to my hands that makes the horizontal cut somewhat more difficult to perform (Essential Tremor, inherited from my father).
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I detest most pre-made baked goods, unless they're from a small bakery and made fresh. The artificial flavors/preservatives in them make me gag.
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Since when is recalling an anecdote from your past for a very small blurb in a magazine article "selling out"? I, for one, LOVED it. (And I love Oprah, too.)
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I made this simple recipe for a party last week, it was a big hit: Endive with Smoked Trout and Herbed Cream Cheese
I love the flavor of raw endive, myself.
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Besides The French Laundry Cookbook, which I don't use because most of those I cook for wouldn't care for the food, I've had a lot of problems with Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen. I had downloaded quite a few recipes from the Food Network site and made them with great success, but after buying the book I realized that the recipes in the book are different from the ones on the site, by just enough to sometimes ruin the dish (for example, calling for a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes in the online version and a 28 oz can of the same in the book. Didn't realize it until it was too late.)
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Daniel, I regularly make the Chicken Tostadas With Tangy Romaine (not sure if that's the exact title), they're wonderful. I've also made a few of the taco recipes (one called for chorizo and avocado salsa), they've been very good as well. I need to note that I live in a town with a large Hispanic population, though, and can easily get wonderful Mexican ingredients.
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I grew up with Kraft but abandoned it when I found the real thing. Since then I've always bought chunks of Parmiagano Reggiano, and served it to my kids. Over the summer I had a babysitter who bought and cooked meals for my kids. I came home one day to find a green can in my refrigerator, and I was horrified! Sadly, though, I found that my kids much prefer the green can to my freshly-grated Parmiagano Reggiano. That seems to happen far too often where my kids are concerned. Starting them off with the good stuff doesn't seem to make them immune!
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I saw a display of these in a local mall a couple of weeks ago, and I'm tempted to buy. I, like Marlene, grow herbs myself in the warm months, but waste a lot of money through the winter on the packets from the grocery store. I also don't have a window near my kitchen that would work for a window garden, and these things are very pretty! I think I just talked myself into buying one.
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I grew up eating both "real" mashed potatoes and instant. A favorite after-school snack for me was a bowl of instant mashed potatoes, eaten with my fingers (only when my mom wasn't around, she frowned on my eating-with-my-fingers habit). I still love both kinds, although they are very different. The only thing I can't stand is mashed potatoes with the skins - yuck.
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I don't like hard candy, none of it. I can tolerate candy corn, maybe 2 or 3 of them.
Not too fond of ice cream, either. Don't care if I never eat it again.
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There's even a couple of pretty good places to eat in Monticello now, which is close to the Southern part of Canyonlands.....the Needles. I'm dining at one of them tomorrow night, in fact.
Bill, I just have to ask about good places in Monticello! I grew up in Grand Junction and years ago worked at Lake Powell, and when I drove through Monticello and Blanding last summer I was dying for a decent restaurant!
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Because I'm a single parent and work full-time with a 45-55 minute commute, and making my own tomato sauce is low on my cooking priority list, I rely almost completely on Barilla. I have many pasta recipes that are simple enough not to need it (like Puttanesca), but if I just want some American spaghetti, Barilla's my favorite.
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Just read this, and I must agree with Maybelline about Star of India in Ft. Collins. I used to eat there often when I lived there and still miss it!
Now I live in Longmont, which is a town with some wonderful Mexican food, but I must say that two weeks ago I was having some margaritas at the Rio Grande downtown (Denver), and after waiting forever for a table we decided to give up and go to a tiny Mexican dive across the street. I don't recall the name (if anyone's interested I can look it up), but their carnitas were excellent - better than any I've had before. The rest of my party raved about their food as well. Warning, though - the margaritas are terrible.
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For me, neither. But for my SO, definitely pie. Rhubarb pie especially.
Gluten -free meatloaf
in Cooking
Posted
Coming in late, but no one mentioned the substitution my gluten-free mom makes: crushed tortilla chips. She occasionally uses Nacho Cheese Doritos, as she doesn't mind chemicals and they make a tasty loaf. Tortilla chips work surprisingly well, actually.