Darcie B

I don't particularly like regular apple pie (I guess it's not gooily sweet enough for my huge sweet tooth), so I came up with the following recipe, which sounds similar to what you ate. To avoid a soggy crust and make sure the apple filling is cooked to the consistency I like, I pre-bake a pie crust and make the filling on the stovetop. Not at all traditional, but I like it. Apple Pie Filling 5 large (fist-sized) baking apples 1/3 cup sugar (more if apples are very tart) 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1 tablespoon butter (more if desired) 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup dulce de leche or caramel apple dip (NOT caramel ice cream topping) Peel, core and thinly slice the apples. Place apples, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg in large saucepan. Cook over medium heat until apples are mostly tender. Stir in butter, vanilla and caramel apple dip. Heat just until bubbling. Pour into pre-baked pie crust.

Wow. My neighbor's cooking, which I have to endure frequently, has been elevated because of this thread. Considering some of the horror stories on this thread most of her food isn't that bad, except the pork chops. Thin cut pork chops baked at 400 degrees for 90 minutes or more ("I just can't get them to brown up...") Add dull knives to the equation and you get a workout eating the durn things.

I agree, it is a parent's duty to provide for his children. But when parents fail to do so, I feel it is the responsibility of the rest of us to take up the slack. Many parents lack resources to provide their children with alternative lunches or just plain don't understand the importance of good nutrition. The barrage of advertisements by fast food places makes it easy to make a quick (but bad) decision about dinner. Perhaps you and I have the fortitude and ability to come home after a hard day's work and cook a healthy meal, but not everyone else does. If we don't show children proper nutrition in the schools we are failing in our civic duty and telling them that nutrition isn't important. Polticians go on about how important our children are and we spend billions on creating new standardized tests but we feed kids chicken nuggets in the school cafeteria. My husband taught vocational school for five years and ate lunch at the school cafeteria (much to my dismay). He gained 20+ pounds and his cholesterol shot up. In the two months since he quit his job he's lost 10 pounds. The crap that makes up most school lunches is, well, crap. I'm sure it would cost more to feed kids good food, but how much more? How much would we save in health care costs down the road? We are such a short sighted people.

It seems that the food writers from both of our local papers must have gone to the same "school" of cooking as did yours. "The Food Guy," as one of the paper's food writers is known, recently wrote a column on how to make quick dinners so you don't have to eat fast food. One of the quick dinners was to boil water for pasta and heat up a jar of Ragu. The other paper's food editor thought it would be good to publish the recipes from the Boy Scout Jamboree Spam cookoff...for several weeks in a row.

I helped a friend make a chocolate wedding cake last weekend. She had never made a chocolate wedding cake, and furthermore had never made chocolate ganache or chocolate glaze. First, I was floored that she thought that her chocolate "buttercream" (i.e., confectioner's sugar, shortening, cocoa and fake almond extract) tasted better than the chocolate ganache recipe I gave her. Hers tasted like wet, greasy artificial almond sand, while the ganache was meltingly smooth and had much better flavor (even though, against my advice, she bought fake chocolate, the kind that replaces the cocoa butter with palm kernel oil and adds bunches of chemicals). The chocolate glaze was not shiny and I was again floored when she insisted that the recipe was to fault and not the fake chocolate. Both recipes came from The Cake Bible, BTW. I was further flabbergasted when she thought that the chocolate glaze would even out the layers and would cover up the defects in the cake. She always leveled her other wedding cakes with her "buttercream" icing. The layers were so domed in the middle I feared they would slide off each other. Not to worry, the fake chocolate glaze was like cement and glued the layers together. In the end, the cake didn't look as bad as I had imagined (luckily the lights were dim, and sugared fruit hides a multitude of sins). It didn't look good, though. But after all that I was floored because the bride said it was "exactly what she wanted." Had it been my wedding I would have cried. (well I did cry at my first wedding, although not about the wedding cake, but that's another story...) Expectations are low here. Maybe I should start doing wedding cakes.

Here is a recipe from a 100 year old West Virginia woman (a friend's mother-in-law). She usually uses homemade apple butter in between the layers. Molasses Stack Cake 2 cups molasses 1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp. ginger 2 tsp. cinnamon 2 heaping tsp. soda 2 heaping tsp. baking powder pinch cloves nuts if desired Mix together enough flour to make a soft dough. Roll thin. Using a dinner plate, cut in rounds for layers and bake at 350 degrees. Put the layers together with either apple butter or cooked, spiced dried apples. May stack as many layers as desired. May also make into cookies.

Bacon is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Baconmin Franklin

I have culled my cookbook collection recently to fit onto one small bookcase in the kitchen (but I did bring most of the "culling" to work for our impromptu library, so I guess I can still count them.) Let's see, I think that brings it to at least 33. I check out a lot from the library and of course use the Internet more and more. I do have a couple more that I want to have to round out the collection - I still have a few more inches in the bookcase! Judiu - Is that address you have still valid? I have a couple of books that need a good home!

Poach in apple cider spiked with bourbon, remove breasts to warm oven, reduce cider to nearly syrupy, add some cream and a splash of bourbon; serve breasts with sauce and top with carmelized onions.

I use the oven bags differently with my springform pans, using them outside the pan in place of double foil. I have not had any leaks with them. I cut the top off the bag because they are HUGE, put the pan in the bag, scrunch down the edges, and sometimes use a rubber band or wire to keep the bag close to the pan edges (if the bag is really large). No seams for water to seep through.

I'll check, but I live in West (by God) Virginia, and it is difficult to find some things here. It's not difficult for me to get regular cream through a restaurant (hub & I are friends with the owner) but I hate to make any extra work for them. They have it hard enough.

I use unsalted butter because I don't use enough to keep both kinds around, plus some salted butters I have tried seem to salty to me. The cost is the same here for either. I have a couple of questions about the low moisture, European style butters. They are difficult to find here, and if I do find them, I wonder about their freshness. Is there a way to transform regular unsalted butter into a lower moisture version? Kneading in a mixer? Clarifying? Also, when making butter, do you use a food processor, mixer, or do it by hand? How do you know when enough water/whey has come out? I made my own butter several years ago when I had a bread machine (one of the recipes in the owner's manual was for using the paddle to make butter). I long ago gave the machine away, so wonder what is the best method. Will ultra-pasteurized cream work? That's about all I can get here unless I beg a restaurant to order some for me. Could I use frozen and thawed cream to make butter? (If I order some non-pasteurized from a restaurant I'll end up with several quarts, I'm sure). MMMmmmmm....cream....I grew up in rural North Dakota (ummm, is there any other kind of North Dakota??), and there was a creamery in town. We would take our Tupperware pitcher down there and they would ladle into it the most gorgeous ivory cream you have ever laid your eyes on. I wanted to drink it straight from the pitcher.

This thread has kept me occupied and laughing for days! I see myself in many of the posts (stock down the drain, grabbing hot handles, halving only part of the recipe and others), but wait, there’s more! #1: I will never again turn the burner on under a pot of water and leave the room to watch TV. I turned on the wrong burner, the one with the leftover sausage grease and plastic spatula in the iron skillet. Return to see a puddle of melted orange plastic and auto-ignition of the grease. This leads to #2: I will never again pour water, even a little bit, onto a grease fire. I finally got the fire out by removing the skillet to the Formica countertop (scorch) and blanketing it with flour. I managed to clean up by the time my mom got home (I was 16). #3: I will never again try to get scorched and still hot caramel out of the pan with a spoon. I managed to flick some of the blazingly hot black sugar syrup onto my upper lip. It quickly cooled and easily peeled off WITH MY LIP STILL ATTACHED TO IT. #4: I will never again ask my husband to help me clean under the refrigerator. He brings up the LEAF BLOWER and re-textures the walls with greasy cat fur. Took me hours to clean… My friend will never again put water on to boil in my copper teakettle then leave with us for dinner. Vaporized tin lining smells bad.