MelissaH

No ice cream truck where I live. Kids in town can walk to the dairy or convenience store to buy their ice cream novelties. The last truck I saw with bells on it was during the spring we lived in Belgium on sabbatical. It didn't sell ice cream. It sold soup!

As does amazon.com. Forkish's first book, Flour Water Yeast Salt, is also at that price.

Coincidentally, when we visited my MIL a couple of weeks ago, she also made a Mexican stuffed shell recipe that turned out to be the hit of a family dinner. Hers was torn out of one or another magazine, and included ground beef, salsa, and a bit of cream cheese. What went into yours?

I had SO many problems with this cookbook that I was about ready to throw it out the window! The local indie bookstore's owner actually offered to buy the book back from me because I usually bring in something to them when I buy a cookbook, and I bitched long and loud about this one. I said no, both because it's my local indie bookstore and because the reading is enjoyable enough that I'm not ready to get rid of it. When this book won the cookbook competition held by one of the big cooking sites, that site pretty much lost its credibility with me, at least for cookbooks. That said, your nan looks like good bread. And this post reminds me that I should look up other recipes in Flatbreads and Flavors by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, which I've found to be relatively reliable for this sort of recipe.

I have nothing useful to add, since I'm never going to have this problem living where I do, but boy, am I jealous! (I did look at fig trees, which are sold in the local nurseries. But to get them to survive the winter, they either need to be brought inside, or buried. Given that I can kill mint, I'm not even going to try.) But my impulses for other fruits that do provide themselves in great quantity is to find a way to preserve them such that they can be used in a variety of other foods: freezing, canning, jam, and the like. They won't be great for salads, but imagine the luxury of a schmear of fig puree inside a tart shell, along with maybe some goat cheese, in midwinter.

I just logged out and looked. And I'm still seeing the higher price, even when I'm not logged in as anyone. I logged back in and the price didn't change. Obviously, there's something more affecting their pricing!

Could you find a way to buy at the non-Prime price? The kicker is that the Kindle, of course, is linked to my Prime account.

I'm still seeing Everything I Want To Eat at $14.95. I'm a Prime member, so that's not the issue.

Is there a Mixed Nuts D, also? (And do the letters mean something, or were they just assigned in series as far as you can tell?)

Um, yeah. If I got into that, I'd be paying a visit to Kerry or one of her ER colleagues.

They knew you wanted to get home. Isn't that how these things work?

I grew up in the Burgh. The cake itself is nothing special, IMHO. But the candied almonds on the outside are what make the cake special. I haven't tried any of the copycat recipes, but I suspect the secret is in figuring out juuuuuuust how far to take the nuts without burning them (despite the name). Other than that, make a couple of layers of your favorite cake (whatever kind you like; I suspect the original is made with cake mix cake), fill it with your favorite custard (better than Prantl's travel version, which is specifically made to not require refrigeration), frost it with your favorite buttercream (probably better than the commercial version if you don't use shortening), and coat it with sugar-candied sliced almonds. The nuts are the showstopper part of the cake, and what everyone remembers.

I made Kerry's pie, for a family dinner last night. Here are some photos. Crumb crust, made from Maria cookies that I crunched with the bottom of a saucepan in a plastic bag and lubricated with butter, then baked briefly and let cool. I was prepared to do the crunching by hand until my MIL, who we are visiting, said, "I have a food processor. I got it cheap from Amazon." Whoopie! And then she dug it out of the cabinet where it lives (she doesn't have much counter space, and she has always had a strong aversion to leaving anything out, which drives me BONKERS when I cook in her kitchen) and I saw that it was Cuisinart brand. I took a closer look at the blade, and my heart sank: it looked like one of the recalled riveted models. So we checked the serial number and sure enough, it was included. We took care of submitting her recall, but I wasn't about to use the Cuisinart to make cookie crumbs at that point, especially after I looked more closely at the blade and discovered that it had already started to crack at one of the rivet points. So, saucepan and bag it was. I based my crumb crust off of the general idea here. I didn't have a scale, but I knew that each sleeve of Maria cookies contained 200 grams, so to get the last 50 grams, I'd need a quarter of a sleeve, or 8 cookies. I crunched them in 3 batches, put them into a bowl, and added about 5 Tbsp of melted butter and a three-finger pinch of salt. It looked really dry, so I melted another Tbsp of butter. It still wasn't holding together well, so I did the rest of the stick. I wasn't totally happy with the results, but hey, the whole thing was experimental, and I figured that if it didn't hold together, I'd call it crumble rather than pie, right? After I pressed the crust in, I put it in a 375 °F oven for about 5 minutes, just enough time to let it get a bit browner. I like the taste better that way. So there. The crust rested overnight, unmolested. Then, yesterday morning, on to the filling. The dry: a box of lime jello, a little less than a quarter cup of sugar (because I was worried that it would get overly sweet if I used the full amount), and the zest from two limes. You can see where the lime oil from the zest is starting to darken the color in the jello. Lime juice, lime carcasses, and a skinned victim that got a temporary reprieve. (The remaining lime and a half that didn't get juiced for the pie got juiced into my MIL's supply of lime juice, which she keeps in a bottle for cocktails.) Just add boiling water. In retrospect, it might have been better to wait to add the zest until after the solids were completely dissolved, just because that way it would have been easy to tell. At this point, I stuck the bowl in the fridge for 5 minute intervals ("Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes, please.") until it was cooled and starting to thicken, a total of about 20 minutes. I also thought that the color was a bit violently green for anything I'd want to eat. Then it was time to whip a chilled can of evaporated 2% milk, a new adventure for me. It grew and grew and grew. Following the directions, I tried to fold the thickened jello mixture into the whipped milk, and got nowhere. (Should this maybe happen in the other direction, folding the whipped milk into the jello?) My MIL, who is far more expert in all things jello than I, suggested that I just use the mixer to beat it all together, and that's what I did. It combined everything well although the volume collapsed a little bit. Worse, by the time I got everything homogeneous, the luridly green color was faded to the point where it was barely green at all. I wound up beating in three drops of <gasp> green food coloring to enhance the curb appeal. Et voilà: one pie, with slightly demented crumb crust. The amount of filling I got was about perfect to fill a 9-inch deep-dish crust. (I was all ready to run to the grocery store and grab a thing of Cool Whip to go on top, if there wasn't quite enough to make it look bountiful.) And everyone enjoyed it, even those who were a bit taken aback at the initial tartness upon their first bite. I did feel like I should be wearing my high heels, frilly bib apron, and pearls while I mixed up something so charmingly retro, but it was exactly right for this crowd—the menu included a loaf of Great Grandma's graham bread. I think I might even do it again, should the right opportunity present itself.

I'd say that you need to decide whether you want to use the "I'm going to cook exactly what each person/family wants" model, or whether you want to come up with a menu that you offer to all your clients. (Are you going to be more like a personal chef, or more like a restaurant?)

I'm visiting family in small-town western Michigan. We're making dinner for a crowd tonight (Jacques Pepin's Normandy chicken fricassee) and decided to use a mixture of bone-in breasts and bone-in thighs rather than try to cut up a whole bird or two in a kitchen without much counter space. Guess what's next to impossible to find here? Bone-in breasts. The only packages they had were discounted because the sell-by date was today. There were yards and yards of shelf space of boneless skinless breasts, and about three packages of bone-in, skin-on. To answer your question, I like to use smaller tortillas for quesadillas. Or stuff them like tacos. Are they small enough that you could dunk them in sauce to soften, fit them into a custard cup, and bake to firm them up and then remove them to use them for edible bowls?

I can vouch for Joanne Chang's recipes. I have all three of her cookbooks, and her recipes fall into my "most trustworthy" category, along with those of Dorie Greenspan and Jacques Pepin (among others). They work.

That's what friends are for!

@Smithy, next time you need to clean your kitchen, I think your husband should put a lot of hot water with a bit of dish soap in the blender, cover it, and turn it on.

@Kerry Beal: getting ready to make your lime pie with the jello, recipe upthread. Does the pie get stored in the fridge or the freezer, after you make it but before you eat it? Does the whipped milk topping go on before the chilling, or right before you eat it?

I, too, like Stretch-Tite. I can find it in all of my local supermarkets, and it was also available at a BJ's near me (last time I was in one, anyway; my membership expired in January and I didn't renew).

The times I was subjected to it, or to the old-fashioned giant shredded wheat biscuits, I felt like I should be mooing or neighing or baaing as I ate it.

ANYTHING beats Weetabix, any time!

Could someone please type a translation of the recipe into English? If anyone makes it, include your testing notes!

Might it be worth checking out some of the other companies that ship cakes, to see what they do and how they deal with the challenge? I know Momofuku Milk Bar ships cakes across the United States.

My MIL still also uses one of those Mouli-Julienne gizmos!