Nyleve Baar

We were just in Cuba in October and mostly ate quite well (at the lower end of the price scale, though). Most of the time we stayed in casas particulares (private homes) and they fed us - actually had some of our best meals there. For $10 per person they will pull out all the stops - lobster prepared two ways, salads, rice and beans, beautiful fruit - the works. In restaurants it was more hit and miss. However, I can recommend one place in Havana. Actually it's two places, but they're both working out of the same kitchen, with one upstairs from the other. The more elegant of the two is called Los Nardos and it's right on the Prado almost directly opposite the Capitolio (a bit toward the Saratoga Hotel). The other one is upstairs from Los Nardos and it's called Asturianitos. More casual decor, slightly lower prices, and we actually found it more enjoyable. Either one is excellent. These were recommended to us by the woman in whose home we stayed in Havana - she says it's the only restaurant she would go to herself. There is always a line up outside the door at street level - and everyone is Cuban. We saw no tourists. I know that La Guarida (or something like that) is supposed to be excellent as well, but we just ran out of time to try it. Paladars were very much hit and miss. Some were pretty good, others were just ok. I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend any of the ones we ate at, but if you look around you may find a gem. You never know. Have a wonderful trip. We loved loved loved Cuba.

Buy pizza boxes at your local pizza place - get a size close to the size of your layers. One box per layer. Line with waxed paper, more waxed paper on top. Stack the boxes, tie or tape them together into one package and take as a carry-on. Pack icing separately (with ice pack) in luggage. (TRIPLE WRAP for safety.) I've carried very large cakes by train this way, then assembled them at the destination.

Years ago, we unwisely kept ferrets. They were loose in the house - no cage for our little weasels - and they used to nest in the most unusual places. Favourite spot for Slinky was my dish towel drawer - you'd never even know she was in there. Anyway, so I was making my famous Banana Cream Roll for a big family dinner. Step number 3 requires that I roll the baked cake up in a, yes, dish towel until cool. What I didn't really notice was all the fur...at least not until later. We picked most of the fur out of the cake before filling it with cream, dusting (heavily)with icing sugar and serving it. Now, years after the unlamented demise of both Slinky and Shyla, my kids still refer to the cake as my famous Ferret Roll but we don't tell the rest of the family why.

Definitely purslane. I can't bring myself to eat it, despite all the wonderful things I hear about it as a food. To me it's just a horrible noxious weed that can take over a garden in mere minutes. Leave a molecule - ONE SINGLE ATOMIC PARTICLE - of this dratted plant/monster in the earth and it will grow into a larger and more aggressive weed in front of your very eyes. Having said that, bon appetit and good luck.

Holy cow I'm speechless. This can't be possible. do you think this would work for spanakpita also? By the way, I use heated honey mixed with lemon juice for the syrup part. Sometimes a little orange blossom water too.

Warning. Do not try to make potato-leek soup with garlic scapes instead of leeks and expect it to be exactly the same and just as easy to make. It seemed so simple, so straightforward. How wrong I was. Ok, so the beginning was simple. Cut scapes into 1-inch chunks, saute in butter until softened, add chicken broth and potatoes. Cook until everything is tender. So far so good. Now puree the whole mess in batches in a blender (I wanted it really smooth). Looks fine but...yikes! The scapes have these little fibrous bits that I didn't know about. It was like there was straw in the soup. I ended up having to run the whole business through a food mill to get rid of it - which worked ok, I guess. But it was a lot more fiddly than what I had been planning. I've frozen most of it - will add milk or cream when reheating. I guess I'll appreciate it in January.

I just spent an hour helping some friends pick the scapes off their ridiculous crop of 1200 (give or take 500) garlic plants. I was paid in scapes. I'm thinking...what about a potato leek soup but with scapes instead of leeks? This could be frozen. Really - there are a LOT of them.

Fonduefest - now in its 5th year as a tradition. Everyone shows up with either a fondue or a salad. We drink a lot of whatever. Extremely fun. There were several cheese fondue incarnations, one oil/meat, one shrimp with cream and wine, and at least two chocolate fondues for dessert served with beautiful local strawberries and rice krispie squares. A good time was had by all.

I found a crazy amount (for me) of morels the other day after the first warm rain of the season (I'm up in Ontario). I've been hunting that area for years and only ever found, like, 5 or 6 there. But this year - bonanza! A grocery bag full! First meal was seared ribeye steaks served with a sauce of morels sauteed with wild green onions, then cooked down with a bit of brandy and finished with cream. Heavenly. Second meal was linguine with a very similar sauce, only made with white wine instead of the brandy and a bit of Parmesan added at the end. Killer. I gave a few away for a deserving friend. And now I await another rain.

Besides Sifnos, I can only comment briefly on Santorini. Of course it is breathtakingly gorgeous so definitely worth going. But we found the food more expensive and less interesting, on the whole. Try the tomato keftedes - it's a typical Santorini dish. I came home with a bag of sun dried tomatoes.

I can't eat an egg white. Not hard-boiled, not fried. I can eat a scrambled egg where it's all incorporated and looks yellow - but if I can SEE a spot of egg, I have to pick it out. I can't eat egg salad - although I'd love to - and I can't eat deviled eggs in public (in private I eat the yolk part and give the white to the dog or my husband). I can eat meringue. Why why why???

My mother's chocolate frosting recipe is made with raw egg yolk - I'm too lazy to go look it up right now but I think there are 2 or 3 of them in the frosting. It is truly creamy and delicious. The egg seems to help eliminate any residual grittiness from the icing sugar. Very very smooth. I make it. I eat it. I have served it to adults and children alike. So go ahead - sue me.

When an egg freezes - as happens often here because we keep chickens and, well, it's winter - the shell cracks as the egg expands. When it thaws, the texture of the yolk is quite changed. It becomes rubbery and weird and I have never had the inclination to experiment. I usually just muck them up and cook scrambled eggs for the dog.

On Sifnos, the typical Greek salad will be served with a soft white cheese - not the usual feta. It's wonderful - they'll ask you if you want Sifnos cheese on your salad. Just say yes. They put a scoop of this stuff - it's sort of a cross, flavourwise, between ricotta and feta - on your salad. Delicious. Also on Sifnos for really (really - and I mean really) fabulous fish and seafood, go to a little village called Chernissos (also called, variously, Hernissos and Xernissos) at the top end of the island. There are two tavernas down on the water. We ate at the one (I forget the name of it, sorry) that faces directly onto the beach. The fish was the best we had anywhere in Greece and relatively inexpensive compared to other place we ate. You choose your fish from the cooler and pay by the kilo. An elderly woman in the back grills it simply and perfectly. Apparently they have excellent lobster but my companions were not lobster eaters, so we just had fish.

I have always used fresh pumpkin to make pies. In fact, I usually buy 3 or 4 small pumpkins in the fall, make the puree and freeze it in recipe-size portions to use all year. One important hint, though: after baking and pureeing the pumpkin flesh, spoon it into a colander lined with cheesecloth (or some other fine mesh) and let it drain for a few hours to get rid of the excess liquid. This gives you a nice thick puree without having to cook it on the stove to reduce (as I've seen suggested). I think the fresh pumpkin puree is a nicer colour and has a fresher flavour than canned. And isn't at all time consuming if you happen to be in the kitchen doing something else anyway.

Nokerli (I think) is a Hungarian dumpling that is usually served as a side dish with chicken or beef paprikas. My mother's nokerli were heavenly, and I make them only once in a very great while. Not so much because they're difficult to make, but because I can eat an entire potful without batting an eyelash. My mother's recipe, however, is basically just flour, egg and, I think, a bit of water. This becomes a very loose dough - probably similar to spaetzle - which is dropped into boiling water off the end of a spoon. Properly done, you have a longish dumpling, about 1-inch by 1/2-inch. The recipe you describe, with butter and milk, would be somewhat richer than my mother's version.

The following post may offend delicate sensibilities. Do not read if you don't like the word "burp". You've been warned. When I drink coffee or tea from a styrofoam cup, I burp the taste of styrofoam for hours afterward. I find this extremely disturbing. Obviously the stuff is getting into my system somehow - and wants to get out. No more. No more styrofoam for me.

I am only looking to do this because I have had an unbelievably bountiful porcini-picking season. Used as many as I could while fresh, froze a few and dried the rest. I have two very large jars, plus some jars of commercially dried ones that I had previously bought (unaware that I would soon come into such a windfall). Even if I make one bottle of porcini-infused oil, I will still have plenty to last me until NEXT year.

What do you think about using a crock pot for your Low-Tech Version 4? And...would you pulverize the porcinis or leave them in pieces? Strain out afterward? I've been reading all sorts of scary food safety stuff about this, which I don't usually do but honestly I don't want to kill my friends or family. At least not this way right now.

I have one KA lift mixer with an extra bowl, and one hand-held beater that lives in a drawer. I use both - but for different purposes. You have to admit, you don't always need the heavy-duty capacity of the stand mixer. Sometimes you just need to whip a bowl of cream or muck up some eggs. That's when I use the hand mixer. Why not go that route? It still gives you two mixers - you can give your wife the easy jobs with the hand mixer - and you also get to buy a new toy.

So I have a pretty substantial amount of dried porcini mushrooms and was thinking how nice it would be to make some infused olive oil. Has anyone done this themselves? I'm worried, of course, of poisoning my family and friends (oh, and myself too) with botulism. Is there any safe way of doing this safely?

Absolutely insane. Absolutely. Never - never ever - seen the like of it before. Never. I don't know if this was a particularly good year or if I just haven't been looking in the right place but it was incredible. Didn't think it would be possible to get tired of porcinis, but seriously, it is. I'll start using my dried ones soon - I really look forward to that, actually.

Well, thanks but it's really all over now. I think that my reliable old oyster mushroom tree may still have a few left, but everything else is gone. My dog-walking partner picked 2 measly shaggy manes this morning but they were a fluke. It's getting cold. The tricholomas are still there, though. Lots of them. I won't even go and look at them because I have a hard time not picking them when I see them. Morel season is, what? Only 6 months away?

Gah - I missed this whole thread. I'm up in Ontario and about a month ago we were quite literally DROWNING in porcini. It was obscene. I was invited to hunt on a friend's property where there is a history of these things. Well - unbelievable. For about two weeks, I could go every other day and pick 10 lbs. of them. We ate porcinis in everything, I made risottos and pastas and slow-cooked veal dishes. I made and outstanding mushroom soup and invented a really wonderful porcini, spinach and asiago strudel. When we got sick of eating them fresh, I sliced and dried what was left. I now have two big jars full of dried porcini for winter consumption. Amazing. I've never seen anything like it. But now they're done. What's up these days is something called tricholoma terreum - small and grey-topped with white stem. They're quite delicate and not generally recommended because they're notoriously hard to ID. So I've become a little skittish about picking them, even though they're ridiculously abundant under pine trees. Also my husband reacts badly to them (I don't). So it kind of kills the fun. Anyone else eat these?