Nyleve Baar

raabranch@nexicom.net

Several years ago we were in Turkey where freshly squeezed pomegranate juice was available from vendors in Istanbul. It was done in a press exactly like that. Maybe needs a little more straining to eliminate the seeds. But it was delicious!

Wow carp. My parents were Hungarian and we ate a lot of carp at our house. My mother would poach it with carrots, onions, celery, etc. And then serve it cold. The liquid gelled. I could probably eat that again if someone put a gun to my head. (No offense - maybe yours is good.) As for the paprika, I would go for the first one you listed - kulonleges - for everyday cooking (paprikas, gulyas) as it has the typical sweet paprika flavour that you are probably most familiar with. The others will have varying degrees of spiciness, bitterness. I would get a selection, maybe 3, the first one, then maybe one of the csipos types, and another - edesnemes possibly. (Sorry about the lack of accent marks.) Anyway funny you bring this up today - I just made a pot of beef gulyas (maybe more a porkolt, because it’s more stew than soup) with nockerle. Pandemic lockdown comfort food!

After Pepperplate shut down, I imported all my saved recipes to Cookbook App. I need something like this so that I have access to my favourite repeat recipes from anywhere on my phone or iPad. Cookbook works very well, easy to use, pretty intuitive and simple to edit. You can import recipes directly from websites too, which works perfectly about half the time. You just enter the url and everything comes through, even the photo of the dish. Also it's either free or very cheap (I can't remember which, but I know I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a recipe app.) Recommended. https://thecookbookapp.com

Looks like our wood stoves are cousins. Mine is a Elmira Sweetheart - slightly smaller than the Oval. We originally had an antique Findlay Oval, which I loved, for over 20 years. Then our insurance company decided to send out an inspector who told us that we had to remove it or lose our coverage. I was distraught. Fortunately we were able to find the Sweetheart, which is a modern reproduction of the original Findlay model and built to code so that it could be legally installed. What a relief. This stove is the centrepiece of my kitchen, providing heat in the kitchen and a handy cooking surface. In the summer I use it as a filling cabinet and extra counter space. After all these years using the cookstove, I think I'm pretty good at using it to cook on the surface and can make a fire in about 5 minutes, without a match. Never quite got the hang of the oven for actual baking purposes, but it's perfect for keeping things warm, warming up a pan of leftovers or crisping a loaf of bread. As Chromedome very accurately put it, you don't set the temperature you need, you find the temperature you can use. This means juggling pots on the top - far left back corner is usually the hottest and the right front is the coolest. If I need a really hot fire quickly, I'll throw in some small dry bits. To hold a fire overnight, go for the heaviest densest piece of hardwood in the pile. Of course I also have an electric oven and a gas cooktop. But whenever the cookstove is going, it's my first choice.

I would let bread cool just a bit before slicing. You'll find that when it comes out of the oven the crust is very crisp - so when you try to cut the bread it might squish down too much and mash the bread. Maybe that's what they mean about messing up the crumb. But hey - it's bread! Do what you want with it. Seems to me that the structure sets a little as well, once it's cooled a bit.

The chef thing makes me crazy. I am a food writer and good home cook. And people will almost invariably introduce me as a chef. I argue to the point of embarrassing the person who introduced me and then I have to stop arguing. People just WANT to call any competent cook a chef. You can't stop them. Not sure where this came from but I'm guessing TV.

Ok this has been bothering me. So I’m going to ask. What’s the difference between a grain and a seed?i know that all grains are seeds. Wheat, oats, barley...all of them are seeds. Why are some seeds not considered to be grains? Someone (see above) said that technically quinoa and buckwheat are not grains but they’re seeds. But WHY are they not grains just because they’re seeds?!? Sorry for yelling. I don’t understand.

Is this a blinking red light that shines on the floor? Mine shines the red light on the floor - blinking when interrupted or door open and steady red when running. It only appears when you’ve started a cycle and maybe opened the door. You have to press “start” and then shut the door. The light should remain red but not blinking. if it needs Jet Dry it gives you a mysterious code on the display. I google the code (for example “h1 error code Bosch dishwasher”) and that should tell you what the code means.

Ok got it. This is Yellowfoot Chanterelle. So yes, safe and edible. Not the classic type of chanterelle one normally sees but still ok.

Canadian here. For the first time in over 40 years we had to cancel our usual Thanksgiving-of-Multitudes. I even had to dis-invite our son as he's a filmmaker and was working on a big shoot with lots of people. We had two other couples over for a very small Thanksgiving dinner that was nice-ish. But not right. Worst part of it is that there were no crowds to eat the day-after-leftovers so I ended up feeding stuffing to the chickens. Which is completely tragic. NEXT YEAR. Dammit.

We keep chickens. Double yolks are more common in very young pullets, just starting to lay. It's like they haven't quite figured out the system yet and - oops! Two yolks! As for taste and colour, it has to do with what they eat. In the summer our hens range all over the place and eat everything. Their yolks are very yellow and the eggs are really flavourful. In the winter they only have access to plain old chicken feed, plus whatever kitchen scraps I can save up for them and their eggs are paler and not as tasty. I very much doubt the theory that an older hen lays richer tasting eggs.

Argh. That is a type of chanterelle but I can't remember exactly which. I will look it up and post when I have an ID.

Thanks for the advice. I've never eaten these before. I did toss out a few my husband picked, as they were one step beyond. There may still be more out there - will look when it stops raining. So the interesting thing about porcinis is that I actually don't love the texture of them when they're fresh, although the flavour is wonderful. I prefer to use them dried. These elm oysters have a nice texture but not as much flavour.

Elm oysters cooking in butter - tossed with roasted butternut squash, sage, garlic, ricotta gnocchi and a little Parmesan. Very good. These mushrooms have great texture, but not as much flavour as some others I’ve tried. Definitely worth picking!

My husband just found a bunch of elm oysters on our property! Will be cooking up something mushroomy tomorrow. What do you like to do with these?

Another great porcini season here! Just winding down, which is totally fine with me. We ate as many as we could stand - grilled, risotto, pasta, etc. - and I dried a ton of them. Also froze about 5 lbs. whole, as I’ve seen them sold that way. I think we’re done. This is just one day's worth and we only stopped picking because we couldn't carry any more.

My favourite inexpensive rose - available in Ontario (LCBO Vintages) - apologies if the picture is gigantic. Can't figure out how to make it smaller. Delicious and $15.95.

My black krim tomatoes are all wackypants this year! This one looks to me like a boxing glove. It was so big that it made an entire platter of caprese salad, with a few yellow cherry tomatoes sprinkled about for contrast. Delicious. I think it's my favourite tomato.

I've had a curry leaf plant for about 5 years. Indoors all winter, then out on the patio in the summer. Some years it struggles badly and some years it gets that horrible dreaded scale all over it and I need to go over the whole plant with a q-tip soaked in alcohol to get rid of them. This past winter it was so badly infested with scale that I was going to either throw it away or cut it down to the stalk. I went with cutting it down - cleaned all the scale off the main stem and repotted into fresh dirt. And it came back better than ever! It branched out in several places and put out more leaves than it's ever had. Very pleased. Don't give up on yours. It's still a baby. Check it for scale or aphids. Probably needs better light but otherwise they are pretty resilient.

To keep myself busy, and to allow me to bake without having to eat everything I bake, I gave myself a job. CoronaCakes Bakery delivers once a week to 4 friends - something different every week. Sometimes they make a special request, other times I just decide what to bake. I have refused to make the Confetti Angel Food Cake with Pink Icing that has been requested several weeks in a row from one particular "client" because I do not want to end up with 4 angel food cakes-worth of egg yolks in my fridge. I bake, then drive the circuit and leave the packages on the porch or in the garage. Lemon squares sounds like a good idea for a future delivery...

Driving to the dump one day a couple of years ago a grouse committed suicide by flying into my pickup truck. I continued to the dump, unloaded my crap, and then decided to pick the dead grouse up off the side of the road. I took it directly over to a friend who knows how to deal with these things. He did a magic trick that somehow amazingly left me with two lovely, boneless breasts by standing on the wings and pulling up on, I dunno, the feet? Can't remember. Anyway - a few hours later they were wrapped in bacon and cooked. Delicious roadkill dinner. I am very proud of that moment, actually.

About a month or two ago I got a notice from Pepperplate that they were going to start charging a subsscription fee for the app. Heck no, I said. Unfortunately I had about 150 recipes stored on that app, and didn't want to lose them. Looking for a free alternative, I found this: https://thecookbookapp.com/ I was able to export all my Pepperplate recipes to a file on my computer and then, laboriously, re-enter it into Cookbook App. It's fairly intuitive, has an attractive interface. You can also import recipes directly from a website by using their URL import too. It works perfectly about half the time, partly about 1/4 of the time, and not at all about 1/4 of the time. But you can still cut and paste into the app. Easy to search recipes and works across all devices, which was important to me. Because I often need to access a recipe when I am not at home. I think there are better options but nothing I could find that was totally free. So this will do me for now.

I have a Chefs Choice 1520 and I love it. I have absolutely zero interest in learning the fine art of knife sharpening. I am good at keeping my pots and pans in good shape; I know how to season a cast iron skillet; I can wing a recipe for almost anything from scratch. But knife sharpening is something I can't be bothered learning. The 1520 keeps my knives in good enough shape for most of my needs. I have used one of those sharpeners for well over 40 years (this is my second one) and many of my knives were wedding presents (1977). They're still absolutely fine. The machine has not destroyed them so far.

Oh please please don't use those sticky traps for mice or anything else. The poor creatures get stuck and die a long painful death - it's not ok. Use a snap trap. Disgusting but quick. Those little mice were just looking for a warm place to spend the winter. They don't need to be tortured for that.