MelissaH

About 15 years ago, we participated in a tandem bicycle rally, camping in the Netherlands in late May. My husband and I were two of the 8 Americans participating. The weather was mostly nice, but it was definitely oatmeal-friendly in the mornings. In fact, it was chilly enough that we had a difficult time lighting our stove, if we didn't bring the Gaz canister into bed with us at night to keep it warm. One of the other campers told us about sleeping bag oatmeal: oats and boiling water sealed together in a container with a secure lid right before you go to bed, wrapped in some of your extra clothes and stowed in the foot of your sleeping bag until morning. It can help keep your feet warm in bed, and in the morning it will warm your insides. We never did try it. We didn't have a container with a lid I'd trust along with us on that trip.

Just a note from (one of) your friendly neighborhood enabler(s): the following Kindle ebooks are currently available very inexpensively: My Southern Food: A Celebration of Flavors of the South by Devon O'Day ($1.99) The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak ($1.99) Citrus: Sweet and Savory Sun-Kissed Recipes by Valerie Aikman-Smith and Victoria Pearson ($1.99) Down South: Bourbon, Pork, Gulf Shrimp, and Second Helpings of Everything by Donald Link with Paula Disbrowe ($1.99) To The Bone by Paul Liebrandt and Andrew Friedman ($1.99) The New Sugar and Spice: A Recipe for Bolder Baking by Samantha Seneviratne ($1.99) and because we all like waffles so much, Waffles: Sweet, Savory, Simple by Dawn Yanagihara ($1.99) The only one of these that I've read is the Violet Bakery Cookbook. I was in NYC a couple of weeks ago and swung into Kitchen Arts & Letters, to browse and discover. This book looked good enough that I purchased a hard copy, which I devoured on the train ride home. The others, I suspect I'll be reading very soon. You're welcome! <running far, far away, as fast as I can manage>

I enjoy the magazine, or at least bits and pieces thereof. But some of the articles I find nearly unreadable—it's as though attitude or ego or something gets in the way of what they're trying to say, and I get so turned off by the way they're saying it that I quit reading. However, I'm saddened that we're likely to lose a unique voice in the world of food journalism.

@chromedome, I'm sorry about the loss of your father. It sounds like you're finding a happy and productive way to stay busy and keep your mother well fed for the near future.

@Franci, could you tell us more about those cookies, and possibly even share the recipe? Are they a sugar cookie, or do they have any additional flavoring? I love how cookies made with ammonium carbonate get so crisp.

Definitely early for upstate NY. Our market won't even start until May, and for the first month they won't have much beyond plants that those with greener thumbs can put in the ground and watch grow.

I am envious of those of you who live somewhere that fruit (other than storage apples) is in season.

Definitely use the cream of tartar and baking soda. (Together, they make a homemade baking powder, and one of the defining features of a snickerdoodle IMHO.) My current favorite recipe is Joanne Chang's, and I always make and portion the dough into balls the day before. They stay in the fridge overnight, and then get coated in cinnamon sugar and baked the next day.

And no Kindle edition listed, either, at least not yet.

That beet salad looks amazing.

So I'm into the meat chapters of the McDonald book, and I have alarm bells clanging in my head. In the early part of the book, he spends abundant time discussing food safety, which I applaud. He especially makes a point of saying that meat that's been tenderized with a jaccard can have internal contamination, brought in from the surface in the process of making the tenderizing cuts, and talking about time at some temperature to pasteurize and make rarer meat safe to eat. Great! Then, though, in the "tough cuts" meat chapter, he calls for long cook times in some of the recipes. One of these is the "Franken Flanken" recipe on page 72. In this recipe, a flank steak is cut crosswise into three pieces, which are reassembled into a thicker piece of steak with meat glue before getting bagged, refrigerated overnight, and cooked. To cook, he has you heat the water bath to 145 °F (62.8 °C) and then as soon as the meat goes in, reduce the temp to 130 °F (54.4 °C), where it stays for 24–26 hours. You can probably see where my concern comes from, given the abundant documentation elsewhere on eG of meat that goes off during a long cooking time, not to mention the potential contamination issues that could occur from cutting the steak into sandwichable pieces. There is a sidebar to this recipe, which claims that putting the meat into a slightly hotter temperature bath than you ideally want will help reduce the bacterial risk. This may be true, but will the meat actually get hot enough for long enough to quickly kill the bacteria? He also gives the option of blanching the steak first in boiling water before you cut it into pieces and reassemble, although he warns that this will result in striped meat when you cut it into serving pieces. But nowhere does he say that it might be a good idea to dip the whole bag into boiling water, to kill anything on the surface that might give you off odors or a floating bag from gas production. (And I'm not sure if the boiling water dip would be enough to take care of any surface bacteria that get sandwiched between meat layers. In fact, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be enough.) Obviously, this wouldn't be a concern if you could get a hold of an irradiated flank steak and had a sterilized cutting board and knife and everything else to use when you make the beef stack. However, that doesn't seem likely, especially in a home environment. Am I thinking overly cautiously? Would his technique pass muster for a government food safety inspector?

Kerry did a workshop for the university's chemistry club a few years back. Some of the students (now all long graduated) still talk about it.

When my copy of the book arrived, this was the first recipe that really jumped out to me, with the egg salad. I might need to have friends over for lunch.

Much to my surprise, our library had a copy of Chris McDonald's book! I of course snagged it, and am in the very early stages of reading it (as in I just cracked it open yesterday for the first time). I might need to renew this one, to have adequate time to try it out.

That looks luscious. Did you find the time to actually sit and enjoy it?

How disappointing! But please tell us: what was Plan B and did it taste good even if it didn't look like your initial vision?

My usual is a barbacoa burrito, black beans (well drained), brown rice, corn salsa, lettuce, cheese, and just a touch of sour cream. I never saw the sense of adding guac when you have sour cream, as their role seems pretty similar.

This reminds me of an avocado milkshake I once had, and which I may need to return to.

I'm starting to wonder about a bigger question: Who is their intended target audience? It obviously isn't me, because I'm not seeing anything new. It isn't @Anna N either, because she and others have given up in frustration (which means that the folks who put together the class aren't doing a great job of explaining either how to do the math (if they think this is really aimed at the normal smart adult without specialized STEM training), or why it's so important to get numerical answers out of their questions rather than just understanding concepts and trends. And it's not @Smithy, who for whatever reason doesn't find enough worthwhile in it to keep doing the exercises. (What's different this time around?) So who are they looking for? And what, exactly are they expecting that group to gain from it? I'll be curious to see what kind of end-of-class evaluations they do.

I hate to say it, but I bailed several weeks ago, when I realized I wasn't getting anything new out of the course. Even the videos weren't doing it for me, because I'd seen the concepts in them before. And the kitchen assignments were really not floating my boat either, because why would I want to make a molten chocolate cake several different ways when I really don't care for any molten chocolate cake and I'd really rather just have one of my mother's brownies with her special icing? I suspect this means I'm not their target audience, more than anything. Is anyone here still participating?

I, too, ordered a copy of the book. And now I can't wait for it to arrive so I can start to play!

Now, if only they'd sell the black mixer with special black flour, so that when it poofs as you try to stir it in, you won't see it.

I, too, have no issue with the anonymous tracking, and I think it's a stroke of brilliance. It's all about sales, so why wouldn't you start to sell something in cans if a lot of people are concocting it from a freestyle machine?

No baguette, or any other kind of bread. I wound up serving the meatballs with green chile cheese cornbread that I also found in the freezer, and my husband used up the last little bit of cabbage from the fridge (along with a carrot and a red pepper) to make a coleslaw. Too bad nothing in BBQ meatballs starts with C!

Ooooh, I love snickerdoodles. They're one cookie I find difficult to make, because I usually do a full batch of dough and immediately scoop it into cookie-size balls. They stay in the fridge overnight, and then get frozen flat on a parchment-lined cookie sheet before getting bagged and baked a few at a time. The problem with snickerdoodles, of course, is that one of the defining features is the cinnamon sugar coating that's applied just before baking. I haven't yet found a way to manage this, because it doesn't stay intact during the freezing process, and it's impractical to make a small amount of cinnamon sugar for coating, say, half a dozen cookies each time I want to bake a few for dessert for the two of us. I like your solution of just baking the whole batch and giving them away to get them out of the house. I think it was Dorie Greenspan that espoused a slight variation of using cardamom sugar instead of cinnamon sugar as the coating. I'm not sure if it would then really be a snickerdoodle, but I bet it would be tasty!