MelissaH
-
Posts
2,526 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by MelissaH
-
-
My grandma roasted one for dinner when my sister (from Arizona) and I visited earlier this year. It was easy (no trimming required) and tasted divine.
We don't see them in CNY. The closest we come in the supermarkets in Oswego are the Amish chickens, which I like better than Perdue, Tyson, or store brand. But it's getting harder and harder to find whole birds.
MelissaH
-
Grrr! I got a rude awakening to reality last night, as I made dinner and remembered a big reason why the kitchen needs to be changed.
I thought it was going to be a simple dinner, not much actual cooking because it's still hot: green beans similar to the ones in Dave the Cook's foodblog, served with polenta. I'd gotten the beans and a tube of premade polenta at the grocery store early in the afternoon, since we're looking in on an east sider friend's cat while she's on vacation this week and I was practically in the parking lot anyway. I figured I'd do the beans the way DtC did, except that instead of vegetable stock and creole mustard, I used a frozen cube of reduced chicken stock reconstituted with a bit of water and Dijon mustard. I also didn't want to open a lemon for one tablespoon of juice, so I used a little bit of an orange champagne vinegar imported from Trader Joe's. This dish gets cooked on the stovetop, in a big skillet with big surface area for maximum brownage. Therefore, I used my straight-sided NOT-nonstick pan, which conveniently also has a lid. In order to get the heat I'd need to make things brown, this pan got the back left burner of my stove, the only big burner that can do high heat.
The problem arose when I realized that in order to fry the polenta in a touch of olive oil, to crisp up the slices, I'd need to use my big non-stick frying pan so all the slices would fit in the pan at the same time. The problem: the big frying pan really doesn't work well on either of the small front burners, and the only other big burner is the one with the thermostat, which is great for simmering but really lousy for anything over 250 degrees F. A new stove must be able to handle more than one large pan on high heat at the same time!
In the end, I wound up doing the polenta in the toaster oven: covering the pan with foil so I didn't have to wash it, rubbing each side of the polenta slices with oil, and baking at about 400 degrees for about 15 or 20 minutes. It heated through, but it didn't get that nice crispy skin that frying or even grilling would have given it. We each got some of the green beans, a few wedges of a fresh tomato that needed to be used ASAP, and some polenta slices with shredded sharp cheddar melted over. It was about perfect for a hot night.
But this cooking experience was a huge slap in the face, since over the weekend we were visiting our friends Marty and Linda in Connecticut, who completely redid their kitchen a couple of years ago. We each got a chance to cook in their beautiful new kitchen, and to remember that it can be a lot of fun to cook with friends!
Marty and Linda's kitchen is more or less the same shape as ours, even though it doesn't appear that way at first glance. The big difference is that instead of having one of the short sides open onto a dining room, one of the long "walls" is not there at all, and the kitchen and living room are one big space. So instead of just a countertop and wall cabinets, they have a large island. The living room side of the island has four stools for seating, and underneath the overhang are three large two-door cabinets used to store games, cat food, computers when company comes, and the like. That all works well.
Between the other side of the island and the kitchen wall, they have the main aisle of the kitchen, which feels about as long as ours is. The island has no cabinets, only drawers. There are shorter drawers for smaller stuff, medium-size drawers for mixing bowls etc., and a really tall (double-height, actually looks like two drawers) one for the KitchenAid mixer. There's a single "wall" oven in the island as well (GE Profile convection). (There's a second oven in the house: the original range from the kitchen was relocated to the laundry room, and plugged into the outlet not needed since the gas dryer was installed. When Linda baked her wedding cake layers, we needed both ovens.) Against the wall side, there's a bunch more drawers, this time to hold the dishes, silverware, etc. There are also a few wall cabinets, which mainly hold glasses and mugs of various kinds, as well as one wall cabinet under the sink. The over-the-sink cabinets have glass fronts, but everything else is recessed-panel cherry. Against this wall are the sink (no disposal to help keep the gods of the septic system happy), the dishwasher just right of the sink, and the Viking 6-burner rangetop. Under the rangetop are still more drawers, deep ones for pots and pans. One short end of the kitchen is open, with space to walk between the island and the wall of windows, beneath the three skylights that do wonders for the lighting during the day. At the other end of the kitchen, if you walk straight through from the living room, you pass (in order) the door leading down to the basement on the right, the door of the pantry closet on the right, the island on the left, the microwave/fridge landing counter/phone/more storage space on the right, and (simultaneously) the counter over the dishwasher on the left and the fridge on the right before going through a doorway into the dining room.
The layout of the kitchen seems to work. There's plenty of room for two people to cook, although if two people need counter prep space at the same time, they need to use opposite ends of the island because there isn't really another big surface. All along the edge of the island, they put power strips so there's always an outlet nearby. (The computers plug into these outlets also, even though they get used from the stove. In retrospect, outlets on the other side of the island would have been a good idea too.) The rangetop and oven were purposely offset from each other, so that you don't open the oven door into the way of someone else cooking on the stove. A third person can be standing at the sink, loading the dishwasher or hand-washing the dishes that don't go in the dishwasher. Lots of people can be in the living room chatting with the cooks, either sitting on the stools on the other side of the island and doing little prep tasks or sitting on other furniture with drinks. It's just not so easy for the dishwasher to be unloaded and dishes to be put away if someone's working at the island on the kitchen side. The aisle between the island and the wall is 48 inches wide, just like the aisle in our kitchen is likely to be. All countertops are at standard height in Marty and Linda's kitchen.
The kitchen floor is hardwood, as are all the other floors in the living spaces of the house. It looked wonderful in this house, and was soft enough that my feet didn't start to hurt halfway through cooking. But I didn't like the part about being careful not to drip water on the floor, or being sure to mop up any drips with a towel after they happened, or just keeping a paper towel on the floor to push along with your foot and pick up the droplets you inevitably notice long after they've happened. I still think I'd be happier with a vinyl, linoleum, or other floor in my kitchen, even though we will eventually have wood throughout the rest of the top level of the house. Linda commented that she, too, loved the way the wood looked and felt, but if she were to do it over she'd consider a tile of some sort, just for the aisle between island and kitchen wall, to give one less thing to think about.
Oh, the wonderful undermounted sink! It's stainless, with a small shallow bowl and a bigger deep bowl large enough to hold a cookie sheet! No rim to catch the crumbs you sweep in, or the water you splatter on the counter! The faucet is relatively high-rise, with a single-handle control on the left and a separate sprayer on the right. It felt comfortable to work with, and didn't require any thought to know which way was on, or hot, or cold, unlike some faucets I've seen. Since we have city sewer rather than septic system gods, I'd also do a disposal.
The countertops throughout the kitchen are a granite-look Corian. I'm curious if the price has dropped at all since I heard that Corian's patent protection expired. I loved having a large area without noticeable seams on the island. It looks as good today as it did the first time I saw it two years ago. But I also noticed that the countertops felt warm to the touch, not cool like stone does. This was pertinent to my weekend plans, as I'd brought everything I needed to make a cherry pie, and this was my crust-rolling surface. I was careful to keep my butter cold, and everything worked fine, with one caveat. I'd been warned that when you turned on the oven, the top of the island also heated up a bit. So I made sure not to turn on the oven until my entire pie was constructed and moved elsewhere. All the sources I've found say that Corian and other solid surfaces cost about the same as real stone, and if that's still true when we're ready to remodel, I think I'd be happier with real stone. Or cheap laminate until we can afford real stone.
Their kitchen lighting scheme makes things easy to see, from what I could tell. (This time of year, there's enough daylight coming through the windows and skylights that we didn't need to test the lighting too much.) They have undercabinet lights under the wall cabinets, as well as a light above the sink. Over the island are recessed cans: incandescents closer to the rest of the kitchen, and halogens for the side with the stools. Linda's primary concern was to have enough light to see everything without having danglies from the ceiling over the island in the way of the view. For me, danglies would be less of a concern, as long as they were high enough to not get in the way. But since we can't do an island in our kitchen, we won't have to worry about that. (Something we will need to be concerned with, though: if we're getting rid of the soffit,we'll have cabinet doors just about all the way up to the ceiling, which means that we'll need to keep lights out of the way of the doors.) If we don't have wall cabinets all the way around, we'll have some places where we can't put undercabinet lighting, so we'll need a different option there. The lighting is something I'm less comfortable thinking about, and I'm guessing we'll try to find a consultant to (get ready to groan now!) shed some light on the subject.
A stove like theirs would have made yesterday's dinner much easier. They have a 36-inch Viking hood over the stove, which they say is easy to clean. (We didn't need it.) The oven also did a nice job on the pie, although Linda noted that in order to get baking times in recipes to work out, the oven needed to be set 10 degrees higher than the recipe instructed. (The oven's thermostat is spot-on according to every thermometer they've stuck inside, and once it's up to temperature, the oven stays within a couple of degrees of where it's set. I wonder if many recipes are written for ovens without such perfect thermostats, hence the difference between what this oven needs to be set for and what the recipe says to use.) I particularly liked being able to turn around and set the baked pie anywhere I wanted on the cooktop to cool, and it sat level and wasn't in the way.
Now, in our galley kitchen, an island is impossible. All our workspace will be along the walls. This means that we have a choice of where put our power strips on the wall OR just below the counter overhang. I'm sure now that we will not be able to put the refrigerator opposite the dishwasher, because there won't be room for anything else if the fridge door is open. (It's not uncommon for one of us to start clearing the table and the other to be putting leftovers away at the same time.) For us, wall covering choice will be crucial, because we'll have so much of it along the back of our work area.
Color? About the only things that are set for sure are the off-white fridge we're keeping and my dark blue KitchenAid mixer (the color was on sale when my mom bought it for my birthday one year), which I'd like to be able to leave on the countertop. I'm not a big appliance garage type; why should I hide the facts that I like to bake and we both use our kitchen?
I'm about at the point where I'd like to find a kitchen designer and see if there are other things we aren't considering, and to start to get a handle on our budget for both the "money-is-no-object" and the "we-haven't-won-the-lottery-yet" versions. Linda cautioned us to be sure that our kitchen designer actually cooks, because they found some who don't and consequently had some really silly ideas. I did a quick search on the NKBA Web site, and found 13 certified designers within a 50-mile radius. If you're in central NY and have used a kitchen designer, please PM me and let me know who you used and whether you liked them.
The two worst things right now are knowing that much of this process is likely to come to a screeching halt when the semester starts at the end of the month and I'm teaching new-to-me classes full-time, and knowing that I have to live with the old kitchen another year or so. On the other hand, a full-time paycheck will be nice to have when those budget estimates start to come in.
MelissaH
-
I am amazed, impressed and envious of the fish selection you have down there. Someone else commented on what we're missing in the way of fish, up here in the Midwest. Your photos really show it.
It's not just the midwest. All the pictures of fish and other seafood made me really hungry for things I can't get in small-town central NY. Thanks for showing all the good food, and the creative ways to cook it.
MelissaH
-
This is where pizzas on the grill can be great: everyone gets their own, with whatever they choose on it!
MelissaH
-
We made some purchases for the kitchen last weekend at the Ikea in New Haven.
Our initial foray to Ikea happened before we moved from northeast Ohio to New York. We were thinking at the time about our previous house's kitchen. We didn't know much about the cabinets available from Ikea, other than they seemed to be much less expensive than other options. So we spent probably 45 minutes playing with the setups in the Pittsburgh store: looking carefully at cabinet doors and drawer construction, seeing how the drawers slid, checking out the sizes available, opening and closing cabinets and drawers (many many many times, not always gently!) and in general investigating robustness and quality. We liked what we saw, and have also heard positive things from both Fine Homebuilding and Consumer Reports magazines as well as eGullet, especially with respect to getting a lot of bang for the buck. So when we moved into this house and knew we'd be redoing the kitchen, our first thought was to go with Ikea cabinets.
This time around, we didn't do too much with cabinets, other than pick up a new price list. We'll see if we get the order in before the prices change upward again next summer. But we did very much want to look at kitchen carts, to give us a bit more surface and storage area and allow us to remove the semicircular shelves at the end of the existing counter. There were two carts that we considered, but this is the one we ultimately went with. We liked that it had two drawers, two shelves, two wheels, a solid-feeling top, and a box that would slide nicely into the back of our car.
Shortly before we left, one of the two ceiling lights in the kitchen started to go fritzy on us, refusing to turn on about half the time unless you gave it a hard tap. We were afraid that would happen: those circular fluorescent tubes are quite pricey, and we don't like the light they give. So we also explored the lighting available at Ikea, to see if we could find replacements for one or both of the ceiling lights to get us through the next year, and then either stay in the renovated kitchen or relocate to another part of the house afterward. We wound up with two of these at a price tag we could swallow. We liked the directability of the lights, and if these don't wind up in the new kitchen, we can easily see them downstairs in the family room.
Our other kitchen-related purchases were cutting boards. On that initial kitchen investigation trip a number of years ago, we'd gotten a slew of plastic cutting boards in multiple colors, and some of them are now nicked up enough that we'd prefer not to use them anymore. We weren't able to find the three-packs of cutting boards they'd sold once upon a time, but we did find pairs sold in black, and a big-and-little set in white. In the scratch-and-dent area we also found a nice chunk of butcher block for $10. We didn't see anything wrong with it, other than the shrink-wrap was torn open. The surface is perfect. If we don't keep it for ourselves, we'll give it to my MIL because her wooden bread board has split and needs to either be reglued or replaced. Later today I'll give it a coat of oil. (We would have liked to have found another board for her like the one I have, shaped like a Z so it hooks on to the countertop and then has a little bit of a backsplash, but apparently those aren't being made anymore.)
Yesterday night, my husband took out the semicircular shelves. They surprised me by coming out in one piece: they'd been attached to a big piece of plywood, which was then attached to the outside wall of the cabinet. So we exposed a finished surface, rather than leaving behind ugly marks where the shelves had been. We also finally opened up a small corner that's been collecting dust bunnies for who-knows-how-long, and made it possible to actually get at the valve controlling that baseboard heater.
Did I say that nothing had been done to the kitchen in 40 years? I lied! When we took out the shelves, we saw a small piece of what was probably the original floor of the kitchen. Thank heavens we don't see more of it!
Here's the cart, put together and in its place alongside the cabinets. (The butcher block is resting on top. We haven't organized anything on it yet; this is just where a few things landed.) We also haven't quite figured out if the cart will have a place in the new kitchen, if it will find itself elsewhere in our house, or if we'll find it a new home.
We haven't gotten the new lights in yet, since we'd like to wait for a cooler day before tackling a job that may require some work in the attic. But I'm excited about the possibility of finally being able to shed some light on my counter!
MelissaH
-
I grew up in a family that paid NO attention to our own religious "dietary laws." They were simply a non-issue.
We lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood and I can remember while we ignored our own customs, we usuually had fish on Friday.
I suspect it was because mother could count on it being fresh.The supermarket we typically shop at gets their fish in on Mondays and Fridays. Other supermarkets have fish counters, but this is the only one that gets fish delivered on Fridays.
I live in a town of 18,000 people with no fewer than 5 Catholic churches. During Lent, the line for fish snakes all the way through the produce, nearly to the customer service desk.
Fridays are a great day to buy fish at this store, especially during Lent, because you know it's going to be fresh.
MelissaH
-
Another Japanese place I've been meaning to try is Aoeshi in North Olmsted . It's at the corner of Lorain and Columbia in the strip mall behind where Danny Boy Market used to be
Whoa: Danny Boy is gone? When I worked in North Olmsted, that used to be one of my favorite lunch spots: get something yummy from the deli, and a nice piece of fruit to go with, and head down the hill to one of the picnic tables along the Emerald Necklace.
My other favorite lunch spot from those days, the one relevant to this conversation: Phnom Penh, the Cambodian restaurant on Lorain just west of 130th. Once again, it's a bit of a hike from Cleveland Heights, but as long as you're in the mood for noodles of some kind and as long as you're not looking for tablecloths and candles, it's nearly unbeatable.
Have I just moved too long ago?
MelissaH
-
citric acid... How do I find it?
vitamin C powder - from your local natural foods store, or drugstore
More nitpicking here: vitamin C is not citric acid. Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, and citric acid is citric acid. They're both carboxylic acids, but they are not the same compound!
If you're looking to buy citric acid, you may see it sold as "sour salt." I found it (sold as "citric acid") in the canning supplies at my local orchard market. If you're looking to buy vitamin C, your best bet is probably to look in with the rest of the supplements.
MelissaH
-
Calling all geeks here:
My husband just got a new toy: a refractometer, ostensibly for his homebrew habit. This is a gizmo that measures the density of liquids: you put a couple of drops on a glass surface at the end of a tube, close a "door" over the top to make a thin layer, point it at the light, look through the eyepiece at the other end, and read the density in degrees Brix off the scale.
Homebrewers care about density of liquids because by comparing the density of the wort (unfermented beer) with the finished product, one can determine the approximate percent alcohol in the beer. But...it struck me the other day that this refractometer might also be a great tool to check the density of sorbet mixes, to see that the sugar content is high enough that the sorbet won't be icy but low enough that the sorbet will actually freeze. Has anyone out there used a refractometer for sorbet purposes? Will this refractometer (reads from 0 to 32 degrees Brix, I think) measure in the range I'd need? And will my husband be upset with me for prostituting his beermaking tool for other purposes? You don't have to answer that last question.
Thanks,
MelissaH
-
I don't have much experience with Galettes but I noticed in Melissa's blog that she put bread crumbs under her filling to help soak up the juice. That may be worth a try. I'm sure others with experience will help too.
Yup. The original recipe (I put a link to the recipe from Fine Cooking in the blog) called for crushed amaretti cookies. I didn't have any amaretti, but I did have some sliced white bread that was getting just a little dry. I buzzed a slice in my spice grinder to turn it to crumbs, and used that instead. No problems with juice sogging my galette, even though the plums I'd used were exceedingly juicy. However, what I did notice was that I missed the little bit of nuttiness and sweetness the cookies would have added, especially since the recipe didn't call for any additional sweetener in the filling and the crust wasn't particularly sweet. If I'd had other crunchy cookies on hand, their crumbs might have been a good choice in addition to or in place of the breadcrumbs. Now that I think about it, some gingersnaps would have been a nice addition to the galette I made. Guess that means I'll have to try it again!
MelissaH
-
BCinBC, thanks for answering for me.
I'd add that by boiling your water, you're also de-aerating it, and in my opinion, de-aerated water tastes kind of flat, sometimes almost metallic. An activated charcoal filter on its own should remove the nasties.
MelissaH
-
I haven't been to that one yet, Melissa, but let us know what you think. (I have family in New Hampshire.) Hope the new catalog is in the store by then--down here they still have a ton of the 2005 kitchen brochures lying around.
We paid a visit to the New Haven Ikea store yesterday afternoon. It was a semi-directed wander: we had a list of items we wanted to look at, but that didn't stop us from perusing other sections of the store.
We parked the car yesterday shortly before 1 PM. Yesterday was a Friday, and we really wanted to avoid the I-95 traffic rush leaving NYC for points east, so we figured that we had two hours to do everything inside and then make tracks for the infamous Q bridge before the world got there.
Our first impression was that it's a BIG store, bigger than the one in Pittsburgh. But then again, our last visit to the Pittsburgh store was a year and a half ago when we were back for a visit, so maybe I'm just remembering it wrong. But just like the Pittsburgh store, it was laid out clearly upstairs, and things were about where I'd expected them to be...which meant that we had to walk through the whole upstairs to look at the things we wanted to see.
We probably spent more time in the sofa section than anywhere else, trying to find something that we liked and fit our budget, but was also comfortable to back and butt; we eventually discovered a nice-looking loveseat that fit the bill if you double up on the back cushions, but the tag said it was out of stock. (The chair and the full-size sofa were there, however.)
We then moved on to the relevant section for this post: kitchens. We saw probably six or eight different kitchen "rooms" set up with a variety of cabinets, carts, and countertops. Every single sink we saw had a totally useless faucet design: little tiny knobs set right up close to the faucet so you'd bang your knuckles on the spigot every time, and you'd completely slime everything if your hands were gooped up with chicken slime. They also had a selection of kitchen carts to play with (the real reason for our trip this time) and a corner with knobs, drawer pulls, etc. But we only saw three people working in the kitchen area, and they all seemed to be occupied helping the same person. I found a selection of kitchen planning goodies, including a selection of last year's kitchen catalogs and a list of this year's prices for the various doors available. I finally got the attention of one of the workers and asked about the new catalogs, but was told that they were late, and probably won't arrive until the end of August. We picked up a copy of the old kitchen catalog, because old with old prices is better than nothing.
I can't speak to the kitchen planning skills of the employees, since we didn't try them out. They seemed so busy that I hesitated to ask them about anything nonessential.
That was all we looked at upstairs. Downstairs, we got two six-packs of flutes ($4.50 each) and some plastic cutting boards to replace ones that are badly nicked. We picked up a mirror to go in our bathroom, and some other little odds and ends. We went to the information desk to ask where to find the kitchen cart we chose, since it hadn't had a tag upstairs. At the info desk, we also confirmed that the loveseat we liked was out of stock. After retrieving the box for the cart, we checked out the scratch-and-dent "As Is" area and found a nice chunk of butcher block, cheap apparently only because it had torn plastic wrapping. And on our way out of scratch-and-dent, we found the area that held the chair/loveseat/sofa we liked. We saw the cushions, cushion covers, and much to our surprise the loveseat area was full with boxes that matched the loveseat number. My husband went back to the info desk to be sure it was the same thing, and once we confirmed it we loaded one of them, along with cushions and covers, onto a cart as well.
Finally we checked out, and the final bill was less than I expected, always a nice surprise. I was able to sweet-talk them out of a new 2006 catalog, since we'd driven six hours to get there. And finally we loaded up the car and got out of the store and across the bridge, just ahead of the main part of the rush.
My assessment: not a bad store; I wish it were closer to my house. But it looked like they desperately needed to have more workers in the kitchen section, so you don't feel like you're imposing if you need to ask a question. The setups in the rooms are a good way to see lots of different things, but again it would have been nice to see a better-staffed area with workers flocking to help as they did in other areas of the store.
MelissaH
-
Dinner's over, and all that's left to do is the dishes. I suspect they won't all fit in the dish drainer, so I'll do one batch tonight and let whatever's left wait till morning.
Anne and her mom Jeanne arrived just as we were setting out the munchies (chips and guac) on the table. We talked a little shop and a little about teaching, as Jeanne's a high school teacher. We munched and chatted until the beeper on the thermometer went off, letting us know that the chicken was cooked through.
Rewind to this morning: my husband put the chicken (leg quarters, on sale for $0.69/lb this week) in to marinate this morning. He made the marinade from a quarter cup of the commercial limeade, some freshly squeezed lime juice (one lime), a chopped up onion, four cloves of garlic, half a teaspoon each of dry thyme,marjoram, and Mexican oregano, S&P, all buzzed with the blender-on-a-stick until reasonably smooth. Marinade went into a plastic bag with four leg quarters this morning, and stayed there in the fridge till evening.
The chicken we get around here is standard mass-market chicken. We don't see kosher chicken, free-range chicken, or anything else special. Price Chopper does carry some Amish chicken, but lately they've only had parts of Amish birds, and on the occasions they've had whole birds, they've been big (over 4 pounds) and I really prefer something on the order of 3 to 3.5 pounds, especially if I'm just cooking for the two of us. Bigger than that, they don't cook as well when you rub them with spices and sit them on a beer can on the grill.
We had a green salad to go with our chicken (this was actually a cheat, since everything but the tomatoes from today's marketing came out of a bag of greens)
and also a corn and black bean salad.
The idea for this salad came from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. It also contains green onions, regular onion, and cilantro, and is dressed with olive oil, orange juice, and a bunch of spices I don't remember off the top of my head. The original was a hefty salad that could easily serve as the main dish of a meal because it had rice in it as well (probably brown rice if it came from a Moosewood cookbook, but we've always used white basmati). We decided to leave out the rice, both to be more Atkins-friendly and also because we didn't want to have that much food.
The chicken came off the grill looking absolutely scrumptious. During the last bit of cooking, my husband sauced them with a bit of Frontera brand tomatillo salsa, and we served a bowl of salsa to add. It gave the bird a nice smoky flavor, and just the right amount of kick. (I like that in Spanish, there are separate words for thermal-hot and spicy-hot; we no longer simply say that something is hot but specify whether it's caliente or picante.)
To drink with dinner, we opened a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
And for dessert, we ate plum tart. It probably could have used a little sugar in the filling, since the bread crumbs (unlike the amaretti in the original recipe) didn't contribute any sweetness. Despite my misgivings about the wetness of the dough, the crust turned out tasty, reasonably flaky, and baked all the way through. I do think that next time I'd try reducing the water a little so it doesn't look as scary. I was concerned about the amount of juice the fruit gave off, because it looked really runny in the oven. The breadcrumbs did their job of soaking up liquid, and the extra few minutes of baking time to help brown the crust also helped to keep the filling from oozing. A little sugar inside might have helped with that also, to turn the juice into a syrup. However, we all agreed that despite my original misgivings about the crust, it was a good container for these plums.
And to drink with dessert, we had a special treat, brought by Jeanne from New York City: Moët & Chandon!
We drank a toast to buying new houses (Anne's), and selling old ones (ours). Thus ended a pleasant evening, spent with friends.
Two random notes to tie things up:
*I haven't made sour cherry soup yet, but I won't forget about it either. Stay tuned on that one. I'll be making a cherry pie this weekend, to share with friends.
*Some of you may remember that I still have two eggplants from last week's farmer's market. I'm leaning toward making them into a salad for tomorrow: cutting them into chunks, cooking the chunks (bake, boil, or steam), and then marinating the chunks in some kind of flavorful dressing. I also have two yellow squash left, which may also find their way into this salad.
This brings my blog to an end. Thanks for letting me share a week of my summer with you, and thanks for reading my rambles. It's been a privilege for me. In retrospect, I suppose the subtitle could have been "Local markets, and imported goodies." I like to make the best of what I can find...and find places where I can get the rest. This is one of the nicest small towns I've lived in, and it's been a joy to show you some of it.
As my "parting shot" I leave you with one of Oswego's other famous products: a sunset.
MelissaH
In memory of Tom Sullivan, who enjoyed many meals around my family's table.
-
. We went to the Barnes and Noble store and purchased a CD/book set on how to speak Dutch. (There's a good reason for this, but I'll save it for another post, probably the one in which I answer rjwong's very good question.) We also looked for wheeled backpacks in the EMS store, but all the wheeled cases they had lacked backpack straps, and all their backpacks lacked wheels. (There's a good reason for this errand also, closely related to learning at least a little Dutch.)
I guess that means you're heading my way somewhere in the near future!
Yup, we'll be on our way to the Netherlands and Belgium in January, during the break between semesters! We very much enjoyed our bicycle trip last summer (Flanders and Zeeland), and can't wait to get back. We won't be bringing the bike in January, though; we'll be acting as tour guides for another faculty member, his daughter, and my in-laws! The January trip is to firm up details for another trip that will happen in May just after graduation: the study-abroad portion of a class my husband will be teaching. My husband and the other faculty member will be taking a class of 15 to 25 (probably) students to Belgium, to give them the experience of a different country with a different culture. I'll probably be along on that trip as well, as a chaperone. My husband's looking forward to all the beer, but I'm looking forward to the cheese more than anything.
MelissaH
-
wow melissa. do you have mud/thunderstorm season like we used to over in fredonia? love the price chopper - they haven't made them down to nw nj yet
. so cool you guys can work in the same university and it seems there isn't that town vs gown problems so many places have.If we were going to have mud season, it would have happened today, with all the rain that's come down in the last 24 hours.
Weatherwise, we're probably best known for the lake-effect snowstorms (January 2004: starts snowing Wednesday afternoon, finally quits late Friday night, 54 inches in our driveway, 80 inches in a town 20 miles southeast of here) but we firmly believe that the 4-letter word about weather is not snow so much as wind, as documented by the weather station on campus (look in particular in about the middle of the page, 15 October 2003).Although nobody will talk about it much, there are certainly some town/gown issues. They mainly revolve around the fact that seemingly all the new people here are gown-related in one way or another (except the ones who came to work at the power plants). It's subtle: little things like people not connected with the university will choose to do business with other non-university people, given a choice. Most of the townsfolk seem to have families who have been here for many many generations---and this was the first freshwater port in the United States! It's such a small and close-knit town that it can be a little difficult for those of us who move in from elsewhere to break into society. What probably doesn't help is that campus is on the outskirts of the city limits, somewhat separate from downtown and most of the shopping. But the college community has been remarkably welcoming, and I'm still somewhat astounded that I can count as my friends not just people from the science departments, but also English, music, and history (among others). That's a new experience for me, since I've been at places where the chemists wouldn't even talk to the biologists!
do you fish for salmon in the spring? when johnnybird went to ESF(SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse) he used to go up several times to around oswego/mexico to fish. how about my favorite fish(even more than flounder) walleye? or are there guys who sell off their boats?We are not fisherpeople. I've never felt the need to prove myself smarter than a fish. But the best fish market in town is the local supermarket, and I've never seen walleye sold here or in Syracuse.
You don't even see a lot of fish sold in restaurants in town, and the last commercial fishing boat from Oswego now resides in the local marine museum. I think if you want fresh fish, you either need to know someone who fishes, or catch it yourself. We've looked into what it would take to get fishing licenses, but to get the really good stuff like walleye, we'd also need to get a boat. At this point, I'd rather remodel the kitchen.It's a pretty amazing sight in the fall during the salmon run: both banks of the river are shoulder-to-shoulder people!
MelissaH
-
I now have a plum tart in the oven, to be for tonight's dessert. I've even remembered to take pictures so far.
First, I did the dishes. I always like to start in a wide-open kitchen, and my kitchen has such limited working space that it's particularly important.
Then, I measured my crust ingredients. My guide was a galette recipe from Fine Cooking, available on line. I did half a recipe of crust, because as written it made two crusts and I didn't want to make another crust.
First, I put a couple of ice cubes in a cup with a spout, and then I filled the cup with water. I weighed out 5.7 ounces of King Arthur AP flour in a bowl. I added in a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a bit of salt, and gave the whole thing a stir with a spoon. My last bit of prep: slicing a stick of butter, straight out of the fridge, lengthwise both ways into long skinny logs and then crosswise into bits.
When I have a dishwasher, my preferred tool to make crusts is my Cuisinart. However, it's been nearly two years since I had such a luxury in my home, and it's likely to be another year or so. In the absence of a dishwasher, I prefer to use my hands, because they're much easier to clean. Accordingly, I started to toss the bits of butter into the flour, getting each batch of butter bits completely coated before adding the next. Once all the butter was in and coated, I started smushing with my hands, getting the butter all flattened. During the process, it starts to break into smaller pieces, and eventually gets more or less uniform. When I use my hands, I'm not tempted to overdo this part of crust mixing.
Then, I weighed out the requisite 2.5 ounces of water from my iced supply in the measuring cup. Following the recipe instructions, I added it all at once. I folded it in with a rubber scraper, and got a wet gooey mass. I thought for sure I'd goofed again (really, I'm a pretty good baker!) and would have nothing but failures to show you this week. But I went ahead and shaped it into a disk, and wrapped the disk in plastic wrap in preparation for an hour in the fridge. The disk of dough was so soft that I put it on a little plate, because I was afraid it wouldn't stay put on its own.
But after an hour in the fridge, the dough had firmed up dramatically, and I was starting to believe that not all was lost. I cleared enough of my counter to pull out my wooden pastry board. This was an Ikea purchase a few years ago, when we found it for $20 instead of the $70 or so of the other brands my husband had found. It's been worth far more than that. I turned my oven on to a little more than 400 degrees F to preheat, because it takes a good long while and doesn't tell you when it gets where it's going. I also got out my flour bucket, because I knew I'd need some to roll out the dough. The rolling pin was from my in-laws a few Christmases back upon my request; you can imagine the laughs that provoked from the rest of the family!
The dough, much to my surprise, rolled out reasonably nicely. It stayed soft, which meant that I didn't need to beat it into submission. I didn't quite get it round, though. After I rolled it, I folded it into quarters with the help of my big metal scraper, and transferred it off the rolling board to a sheet of parchment. I put the sheet of parchment on a pizza pan with very low sides, draped the same piece of plastic wrap back over the rolled-out dough, and stashed it back in the fridge because it was starting to feel awfully soft. Then I scraped down my pastry board and put it away so I had working space again. It will be nice to eventually get a kitchen with enough working space that I don't necessarily need to put one thing away to do something else!
The recipe called for amaretti crumbs. I didn't have any of those, but I did have a bit of white bread. I turned a slice into crumbs in my spice grinder.
Next task: deal with the plums. I used the six sugar plums I'd gotten this morning at Ontario Orchards, which collectively weighed a smidge more than 1 pound. Following the instructions, I rinsed and dried the plums. But in the next step, the instructions lied. They said to cut each plum in half and remove the pit. I took the first plum, ran my knife around its prime meridian and International Date Line, and tried to twist it open into halves. All that happened was that the plum mushed around and spilled some juice onto my cutting board. I'm guessing these instructions were written more for supermarket plums that are less ripe and are more freestone than these. So I instead cut the plums into wedges and flicked them off a pit, doing all the cutting over a bowl to preserve my countertop.
Now that everything was ready to go, I pulled the crust out of the fridge and unfolded it all the way.
I sprinkled the breadcrumbs into the middle of the dough, leaving a couple of inches naked all the way around. My plum wedges weren't neat enough to make nice concentric circles, so I just concentrated on getting all the breadcrumbs covered with a layer of fruit.
Then I folded up the rim of dough, making the pleats as pretty as I could and showing off some of the fruit in the center.
Finally, I brushed the crust with a little milk, sprinkled it with some pearl sugar, and loaded it into the oven.
It took a little longer to bake than the recipe said, but that's not unusual for my oven. The thermostat is a little off on the low side, and it's also got a hot spot in a back corner so you need to rotate whatever you bake halfway through, which loses a tremendous amount of heat. But eventually it looked done enough to come out of the oven. It's now cooling on top of the stove.
Will let you know how it tastes after dinner!
MelissaH
-
Just wanted to add a caution here that many margarines on the market are made with dairy components. In these parts, we can only find one brand of margarine that's non-dairy, and we either have to go to the big supermarkets Syracuse (our big city) or to a health-food store. Make sure to read the label. If it's labeled as kosher pareve, you know it will be dairy-free.
MelissaH
-
I went out in the rain, which is finally starting to let up. My first stop was the good old Price Chopper, since we ate enough guacamole that we wouldn't have enough left for dinner tonight. I also needed to get cilantro; while our orchard store has plenty of parsley on hand, for some reason they never do cilantro.
On my way back across town, I saw a boat docked in the harbor, with three big yellow cranes on top.
Last week there were boats unloading windmill parts. We regularly get concrete and gravel carrying boats. I don't know what this boat was doing. The carnival rides are there in preparation for Harborfest, which starts tomorrow night. I was hoping to make a trip to our farmer's market tomorrow afternoon, but I'm not sure I want to brave the crowds. (The event regularly draws upwards of 100,000 people. We've never managed to be here for it, though.) Fortunately for the organizers, the weather's supposed to clear up by then and stay nice through the weekend.
After I finished in town, I headed west out of town. As I've said previously, this is a largely agrarian area, and one of our major crops is onions. These fields are about five miles from my house.
You can always tell an onion field, even if it doesn't have onions planted in it like these, because the dirt is black black black.
My destination was Ontario Orchards, the store run by the Ouellette family for many many years. It's our favorite place to get vegetables all year round. This time of the year, they're open every day. After Christmas in the dead of winter, they'll only be open weekends until March.
Outside the store itself is an area where they keep plants and some growing supplies. There's also a large nursery with bigger plants, shrubs, mulch, and other gardening necessities, but it was so sloppy that I didn't wander back there today.
Inside is all sorts of good stuff. It's probably the best place to shop for canning supplies of all sorts.
The onions, garlic, and other alliums are all from Oswego County. If you've ever seen New York Bold onions in your grocery store, those are from here!
They carry all sorts of fruit in season. Anything they grow is marked as "From Our Farms" but they also bring in fruits from other places. I liked the sign on the peaches, which came across from Pennsylvania.
Even this time of year, they have lots of apples, all varieties, mainly homegrown. But I'd rather be eating other fruit this time of the year, and save the apples for fall.
In fall, they press their own cider. Last year, we brought a six-gallon carboy and had it filled straight off the press. They use a UV system to kill any nasties that may be in the cider, so there's nothing added that might prevent other good yeasts from doing good work. Last year's batch hardened up rather nicely, and since my husband used a champagne yeast that can tolerate a higher alcohol content, it used up all the sugar present and wound up quite dry.
Today they had tomatoes galore: big, little, green, orange, yellow, red.
The cucumbers were also tempting; I may need to make a batch of half-sour pickles at some point before cucumber season ends.
We get our popcorn from Ontario. They have it in whatever quantity you want, both yellow and white.
Behind the counter you can get cheese (mostly from Heluva Good in Sodus, NY, just west along the lakeshore from us, and from River Rat in the Thousand Islands) and ice cream. There's a small bakery with half-moon cookies, bread, and coffee too.
In addition to people food, suet blocks that the woodpeckers and nuthatches like, deer corn, dog and cat food, supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeders and the seed to go in them, and hummingbird flower garden seeds.
Driving home, I checked out the lakeshore. Plenty of waves today, and no line at Bev's for ice cream although the parking lot at Rudy's was still crowded.
Here's what I came home with: sugar and pears.
That's yellow pear tomatoes and sugar plums, along with a much nicer head of garlic, all from their farm. I think I'll make a plum galette to go after the Mexican-style dinner we plan to serve tonight, since the temperature is only in the upper 60s and I can turn on the oven.
MelissaH
edited because I forgot the garlic
-
Melissa, hope you are planning on doing grilled pizza later this week, since you do have some viable yeast on hand.
My week blogging with you turned out to be so short! In part, because we've been helping Anne move, I haven't been home to do much cooking (other than the Day of the Dead Yeast). I thought about trying to do pizza tonight, to squeeze it into this week, but two things are working against me. First, Anne's mother is coming into town tonight, we've invited both of them for dinner since everything at both her houses is in moderate disarray, and the mom is Atkinsing so it wouldn't be nice to make pizza tonight. And second, the radar from today is showing Oswego underneath a nice blob of green and yellow, which isn't moving quickly.
We're visiting friends this weekend, and if the weather cooperates, we may try it there. I'll post results in the Pizza Cookoff thread when it happens.
MelissaH
-
now i boil my water and pour it through a brita water filter. i save over 1000 yen ($10) a week!
Do you live somewhere that the tap water is not safe to drink without boiling?
MelissaH
-
So, yesterday was another afternoon/evening spent helping Anne move. We made a big difference, getting furniture arranged in the bedrooms so they actually look like bedrooms. We also put felt or plastic "feet" on nearly all the furniture, since the hardwood floors were refinished late last week and now look absolutely beautiful. We arranged the living room as well, moving sofa etc. where they're going to live, and getting the bookcases in their proper locations and the boxes of books nearby. I suspect that as I type this, Anne's probably working on unloading the books into the cases while she waits for the plumber and appliance people to arrive. Lucky her, she's getting a new fridge, stove, and dishwasher! Here's why she's getting a new stove:
(The dust is what happens when you sand down hardwood floors somewhere else in the house.) The oven is in the wall to the left of the stove, and it's a whopping 18 inches wide, although it's in pristine condition. The oven couldn't really go any larger because that wall's actually over the stairs leading down to the basement, and to get a larger oven into that spot, you'd either cut into the headroom of the staircase or you'd need to extend beyond the wall on the other side. So she's getting a new dual-fuel range, which is going to go where the old refrigerator sits, which means that the plumber needs to come and install a new gas line so the stove has something to burn. (Yesterday afternoon and evening we removed the old cooktop units from the countertop, leaving two holes. My husband is very handy, and our plan is to cut the two openings into one large opening. There's just enough of the piece of countertop from between the two openings to patch the holes left from removing the control panels of the cooktops if we put an electrical outlet or two in the backsplash. We'll fill the large opening with granite tile to give a usable workspace. We'll also eventually convert the two panels that look like drawer fronts into real drawers that can hold things, to help replace the storage that will be lost to the dishwasher. Happy housewarming!) The new refrigerator will actually go on the other side of the peninsula with the stove, after many long discussions about the best places to put things while not spending a fortune to redo the whole kitchen. And the dishwasher will go into a space now occupied by a cabinet next to the sink. So we also had to clear out as much of the kitchen as we could, to make room for the appliance guys to bring the new stuff in.
By the time we were done with all that, we were all tired, sweaty, filthy, and in no mood to cook. It was also thundering and raining, which just made it feel more humid. So we brought hot subs home from our favorite local pizza joint, Cam's NY Pizza. We decided that of all the take-out options (Italian, pizza, Italian, sort-of Chinese, Italian, sub shop, Italian...) that was the best. My favorite is the eggplant sub, which comes smothered in marinara sauce and melted mozzarella. The steak sub, with cheese and green pepper, was also good. But the so-called Buffalo chicken sub just tasted like a fried chicken patty, with no evidence of Buffalo whatsoever. A little dose of Frank's hot sauce helped, but that's the one I wouldn't order again. We ate as we watched bourdain's No Reservations on Tivo. (Since getting our DVR, we've become incredibly intolerant of live television. We don't even watch much PBS live anymore!)
I woke up this morning when it started to rain again as the front came through at about 4:15 AM. I thought about getting up, and instead let the purring of the cat on my pillow massage me back to sleep. When I woke up for real because Lyon was smashing his hard little skull into my right ear, it was much later and still raining. I drank my glass-of-chocolate-milk breakfast, checked the refrigerator to see that the boys had in fact gotten their breakfast, noted from the lime squeezer and other paraphernalia that my husband had started the chicken for tonight marinating before he headed on campus, and turned the computer on. My job for this morning: run errands, including yet another trip to Price Chopper, and finally go to Ontario Orchards.
MelissaH
-
I can't really tell what kind of cat food you're serving them, but that's pretty nice plateware for cat service. Do they have other accoutrements, such as bibs and silver, for dining?
I must confess, my cats get served right down at the point of their bowl, and when I start dishing the wet food, they usually get a few drops on their heads, because they can't wait to start eating. Perhaps I should plate on the counter, instead.
Do you think you'll show a picture of the cats? Other than the one in you avatar?
No bibs, although they could sometimes use them!
They both specialize in head-butts, so we try not to dribble anything on their heads or we'll find it on our ankles later.This particular morning was Friskies Prime Filets with Beef. Mmm! Actually, this one is pretty good, as far as the boys are concerned. Lyon, on the left with the big fluffy tail, licks all the sauce off first, maybe eats a couple of chunks but leaves the rest, unless it's something particularly delicious like Turkey and Cheese. If there's no sauce, Lyon won't go near it. Lyon also adores dry food: the sound of more going into the bowl is the best way to call him out of hiding. Although both we and the vet wish he'd learn to chew a little bit better, so he wouldn't need to get his teeth cleaned every year. We think it dates back to when we first adopted the boys from our local shelter when they were a year old. (The shelter named them, and the boys knew their names. We figured that if a cat knows his own name, you'd better not change it.) Lyon had a congenital problem with the roof of his mouth that's long been surgically repaired, but he apparently has a very long memory.
His littermate Leo, on the right as they eat, starts from the outside and works his way in, but he has a hard time if it's a flavor that comes in shreds, like Turkey and Cheese. If it's a yummy flavor, Leo's plate is licked clean when he's done. Leo's also been known to push his brother out of the way to get more, so we often need to keep an eye on them, to be sure nobody's a pig. Usually what happens is that Leo somehow silently communicates to Lyon that it's time to get out of the way, and if Lyon's left on his own (without being pushed out of the way) then we don't give Leo a hard time. We think Leo might have been the runt of the litter, in part because his feet (as big as silver dollars) are absolutely enormous compared to the rest of him and because Leo's generally the one to eat every last scrap of food. It's not uncommon for Leo to eat most of his own food, move over and polish Lyon's plate clean, walk away and wash up, and five minutes later come back over to explore and finish off his own portion. Interestingly, Leo's quite a bit pickier than Lyon: there's one kind of cat treat he'll eat (but he once got his paws on the can, pried the lid off, and ate the whole thing!), and he won't go near much people food. The one thing we need to be very careful about around Leo is dry malt extract. We keep lots of it around the house, since it not only goes into beer, but combines nicely with ice cream. Leo will rip through a thick plastic bag to get at malt. Lyon, on the other hand, will at least try most brands of cat food, and he adores cheese and yogurt, but he doesn't gorge himself on the specific yummies the way his brother does.
Since it was so hot until the thunderstorms rolled in last night, they'd both spent most of the week sleeping. Lyon adores the stand over the computer monitor, which was put there explicitly for his pleasure
but Leo prefers other locations, such as the top of the tall bookcases downstairs.
Last night was the first time since we got home from our trip that it was cool enough for the boys to sleep in our bed, their usual nighttime napping place!
MelissaH
-
I got back from running around in time for lunch:
The bread is Siebenfelder, from Price Chopper, BOGO this week. Ingredients on the label: wheat flour, water, rye flakes, oat flakes, flaked wheat, soybeans, sunflower seeds, yeast, spelt flour, barley, flax seeds, salt, sesame seeds, dry sour, malt flour, fennel, cumin, caraway, lecithin, ascorbic acid, dill. Particularly good toasted with peanut butter.
For PB sandwiches, with or without J, I really prefer Jif. But the only Jif we have in the house is creamy. I have no use whatsoever for creamy PB. For most savory uses, I find Jif a bit too sweet, and prefer Skippy, which is what I have on hand at the moment and what went into my sandwich.
Along with, I tried some of something I found while running around: Mega M&Ms!
Tasting notes: (1) Blue food of any sort just doesn't do it for me. (2) These things don't look a whole lot bigger in diameter than the "normal" ones I'm remembering. That's a U.S. dime down front, as a calibration aid. I don't have any normal M&Ms on hand to do the direct comparison. Where I think I notice a size difference is in the depth: these puppies have potbellies! (3) Somehow, these just don't taste right. The crunch of the shell isn't quite as satisfying to me. Maybe it's the difference in surface area:volume ratio. Maybe it's that they're blue. I wouldn't go out of my way to find them again.
Probably the most interesting thing I learned today, though, is that this
is an endangered species, at least in Oswego. You can read the stories from the local paper and the Syracuse paper on line. The basics: Price Chopper is buying a few Tops stores, including the one in Oswego, and will be transferring operations to the "new" store in September when the deal closes, and subsequently shutting down the old store. The Tops location is certainly bigger than the current PC store, which doesn't really have the room to even make the aisles wide enough for two carts to comfortably pass one another. The local labor leaders are all up in arms, because PC isn't a union shop and I believe Tops is. But I'm really going to miss having a supermarket close to the center of town, and I might just have to give a little more thought to where I shop this fall. I'm grateful that I don't live in a one-supermarket town (yet; the parent of P&C, our third supermarket chain) is not doing so well financially) but I always hate to lose some choice.
MelissaH
-
A strategy, which I've been using for the past seven years of living in small towns with supermarkets not quite what I'd like: make a point of visiting other towns or cities in your area. Find out what they have, explore their offerings...and bring a cooler loaded with ice so you can take home any goodies you might find in the local markets. Sure, it takes a little bit of preparation. But that way you get a break from the ordinary, and you often find nice surprises.
MelissaH
Joconde Cakelets
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
I'm also very interested to see this. I love to bake, but have a wardrobe I need to continue to fit into. Therefore, things that can be made into finger food and brought into work are perfect for me, and I always like to do things that have an added "oooh" factor.
MelissaH