MelissaH

Altitude definitely affects oven spring, and other yeasty issues. I'm assuming that your new home is higher than where you used to live. What I've found, based on baking at my parents' home (altitude about 8600 feet, compared to where I used to live at "only" 5000 feet, or where I live now at about 300 feet): *The lower air pressure at altitude means that things rise much faster. I got better flavor development letting bread dough rise till doubled, and then deflating and letting them double again. The extra rise took about the same amount of time at my folks' house as an ordinary rise-once at low altitude. *Keep an eye on your dough. More than once, I've gotten carried away and had the dough rise to the point where it collapsed, in a shorter amount of time than I'd thought possible. *Consider underproofing slightly. *Be super super careful to keep dough covered. If it dries out and gets a skin, rise is inhibited. If it dries out quickly in the oven, your oven spring will be inhibited. With bread dough, I'd sometimes brush water directly on the surface of the dough just before I stuck it in the oven, to keep it from drying out too fast. *The best source I've seen anywhere for other high-altitude baking tips is Nancy Purdy's book Pie in the Sky.

That would not have been a possibility at my MIL's. When I was getting ready to make cookie crumbs for a lime pie (but that's another topic), she commented that she had a food processor now. She's never had one before, but yeah, that sounded better than bashing cookies in a ziplock bag. And then she pulled it out, and my heart sank. It was a Cuisinart brand FP. We took a quick look at the blade, ran the serial number, and registered her for the recalled blade replacement. And then I took a closer look at the blade, and saw cracks in it, even though it was barely ever used. So, no food processor. How smooth do you need to take the filling, to make it pipeable without needing a gigantic hole in the bag or tip?

And I finally tried a carlota de limon, more or less. My limey victims. It took 8 of these to get a scant cup of juice. I zested about half of them before squeezing. And the cans of milk, one each evaporated and sweetened condensed. I used the mixer with the whisk attachment to mix them together, which wasn't quite as easy as it sounded because of the thickness of the SCM. But eventually they combined, and I slowly poured the lime juice in while the mixer was still running. About a third or halfway through the addition, the contents of the mixer had noticeably thickened, but as I kept pouring, it thinned out. I let it keep going, hoping that it would maybe hold a bit of air and whip up, but instead it just splashed little droplets of filling everywhere. So I poured the contents into a glass measuring cup, stirred in the zest, covered it with plastic wrap, labeled it so I wouldn't confuse it with the corn soup that was in an identical glass measuring cup covered with plastic wrap, and stuck it in the fridge for several hours. My thinking was that maybe it needed a little time for the acid to better work on the milk...or maybe the chill would solidify the fat enough that I could beat it later. When I came back, it had, in fact, solidified enough that I felt comfortable using it. So I opened my maria cookies, and assessed their size. I wanted to make individual carlotas, since they were destined to travel to some friends' house the next day. The cookies were a tad too large to fit into a regular muffin tin, but seemed to work OK in a jumbo muffin tin. So I put a paper liner into each cup (tactical error; I should have first pushed plastic wrap into the cups to help me pop the liners out later) and then distributed a cookie into the bottom of each. I added a couple of spoonfuls of glop, then another cookie, another couple of spoonfuls, etc. I think in all, each cup held four cookies with glop, plus one last cookie to top it off. The pan then got a plastic wrap topping, and a long cold rest in the freezer. I had enough glop left over to also make two custard cups, layered the same way without the plastic liner. They, too, got a plastic wrap lid and an overnight freeze. The next day, just before we left home, I tried just flipping the whole muffin pan over with the plastic wrap still on top. Nothing budged. I wound up needing to use a plastic knife (it's a pan with a nonstick coating) to cut around each paper liner and then to lever it up and out. This part would have been much easier if I'd pushed plastic wrap down into the cup. Four of the cups then got packed into a lidded container for transport, with more plastic wrap between the layers, and the container went into a cooler of ice for the trip (an hour and a half drive, plus about another hour and a half while we ran various errands near to our friends' house). They went into the fridge while we ate lunch, and then came out. Here's what one of the custard cup versions looks like (because nobody photographed the muffin cup version). This was about half an hour out of the freezer. The flavor was quite bright and limey, although I think adding the microplaned zest to the goop was probably not the best way to use it, because I didn't care for the chunky texture. I also think that when I was making the goop, if I'd stopped pouring in lime juice when it visibly thickened, the goop would have been unbearably sweet. (Although a judicious addition of powdered citric acid might have helped with that.) It was certainly easy, although it needs a good bit of hands-off resting time. I don't think it would work as a roll, like the traditional chocolate water/whipped cream icebox cake is usually assembled. The idea is definitely worth playing with a bit more. Maybe chilling the evaporated milk so it would whip better would also help with the thickening?

@chromedome and @Norm Matthews, we had the same discussion with my MIL. Our conclusion was that the ground beef was too lumpy to pipe well. Thus, a spoon it had to be.

We actually wondered the same thing, when my MIL talked about making this recipe. But she opted to go with Mexican-ish instead of making her life a whole lot easier and buying a couple of lasagnas from the local Italian shop, which makes terrific lasagna from quality ingredients, because our niece (her granddaughter)s husband "doesn't like lasagna." I'd certainly go for an easier option, either layering it into lasagna (and in my case, probably using the Cook's Illustrated trick of soaking no-boil noodles in hot tap water for 5 minutes, then laying them in a single layer on kitchen towels until they're needed, so you don't need to worry about getting the pasta hydrated in the lasagna), rolling it inside of crepes a la cannelloni, or even taking it a step closer to Mexican and using corn tortillas instead of traditional pasta.

And also Ronni Lundy's book Victuals. $1.99 (US, Prime). Sqirl is still regular Kindle price for me.

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?