MelissaH

I'm thinking tonight might be, from our freezer, meatballs in BBQ sauce. But I'm drawing a blank on what to serve them with. Any suggestions on how to use them? Bonus points if they'd meet challenge criteria.

Uh-oh. Will the lid still seal?

Serious Eats did a post about parcooking sweet potatoes a while ago, and my husband used it as the jumping-off point for some student research. Basically, by preheating the sweet potatoes, you're mashing them like brewers do in the beginning stages of all-grain beer production, and allowing the enzymes in the sweet potatoes to start converting the starches into simpler sugars. The sugars then brown more in the roasting process. My husband's student looked into the temperature and time variables of starch conversion.

I need to go back to the SV bacon idea. We had problems with it because after cooking it in the package, we couldn't get the slices to separate. Last time I shopped, I got another package of the same kind of bacon (Wegmans brand center-cut thick sliced), to cook by more traditional methods. And my husband asked if this was the same kind I'd done SV. I replied, "Yes, why?" He said that he was having problems separating the slices uncooked, just like he'd had problems separating the slices cooked. So I might need to redo that experiment, either using a different kind of bacon that WILL separate easily, or by separating the slices ahead of time and then resealing them before SV. Thoughts?

I think that the St. Lawrence Market was the place where, on one of my childhood trips from Pittsburgh to Toronto, I tasted halvah for the first time. I still love halvah, and I adore walking through markets too.

My public radio station discontinued carrying Splendid Table when they made a whole slew of programming changes last July. I asked them about it, and they said that they wanted to shake up their Sunday afternoon lineup because that's when they found they consistently lose a lot of their listeners. I actually didn't often listen on Sunday afternoons myself, but I do enjoy the Splendid Table as a podcast, which has always been available to me. I know two episodes of walking is a full day's worth of "points" on my fitness tracker. I do go through and remove the rerun episodes, though, so I don't have to listen more than once. I also enjoy getting the emails, with a recipe usually from an outside cookbook. I don't think I've actually cooked anything from those recipes yet, but I like reading about them.

Some of the larger Wegmans stores will do this, for a price. I can see where this might be useful if you're either really pressed for time or if you have physical limitations.

I like a piece of nonskid shelf liner instead of a towel, which reduces the amount of laundry the kitchen generates. (The shelf liner can still get thrown in the washing machine if it gets really gross. I air-dry it, which doesn't take long.)

We, too, use ice year round. But this time of year, it's often easier to head outside to grab some snow if the ice doesn't touch the food. (This time of year, the walk-out is also often a handy blast chiller, albeit not today when it's supposed to get up to about 40 °F and rain.)

We wanted to try it to be sure we weren't missing something. As it turned out, we definitely weren't. My role was complete after the eggplant was prepped and packed. My husband took care of everything from there on out, and he commented that the recipe seemed to have other problems with the way it was written. (This made the professional editor part of me absolutely cringe.) So...is SV eggplant always a bad idea? Or just in this case, and the SV miso eggplant recipe (from a different author) might be OK?

We tried a variation on the Anova recipe for eggplant parmesan yesterday for dinner. We were not impressed. The eggplant was a PITA to cook sous vide, because it's terrifically buoyant. The recipe specified single-layer packing, which I did. I sliced the large eggplant specified in the recipe a quarter-inch thick on our Oxo mandoline, salted and then rinsed and dried the slices, and packed and sealed them. That took four big bags plus a small one. And by the time I did all that, I couldn't fit it all into the larger of the two water bath containers we usually use (a 12-quart square cambro-like container that we got at the restaurant supply store, with one lid that we cut an Anova-shaped hole in and a second lid that we kept intact. I had to hunt down the shallower large rectangle bath that we use with the homemade SV rig constructed by my husband from a PID controller, three immersion heaters, a mechanical stirrer propeller, and an electric motor salvaged from lab. But then that container isn't tall enough to clamp the Anova to; I had to set the cambro-like container right next to it, to use as an Anova stand. Wonder if it would be possible to rig an old-fashioned ring stand and either a clamp or an iron ring to hold an Anova? And there really wasn't much of a savings, because after all that (or even if we hadn't had to go through the rigamarole of changing water baths and sinking the eggplant bags), you STILL needed to coat and fry the eggplant slices, construct the parm (we used some fresh campari tomato halves and some mozzarella sticks, and broil (or, in our case, bake long enough to make the frozen cheese sticks nice and oozy). Next time, we'll just go back to our previous kludge of buying the frozen breaded eggplant slices from Trader Joe's. So much easier and neater!

Be my guest. I've tried a few times and never had enough success to make it worth the bother. Furthermore, if I'm going to make ricotta, I'm not going to want to put forth the effort to make the pasta and then put it all together. That's a far better tradeoff for me than using the icky egg roll wrappers that are sometimes available. I'll happily continue to buy the ricotta that's available. If my end product is maybe a little less sublime, so be it. But if it means that (a) I'll actually make something like ravioli, and (b) that I'll make enough of it to freeze some for a later dinner, I'm all in with that.

My thought was also that it was getting beaten to death, and needed more gentle handling (or, I suppose, machining). Another thought: Serious Eats pointed out that organic confectioner's sugar uses tapioca starch rather than cornstarch, because it's difficult to find organic cornstarch. I wonder if switching this (and therefore switching the starch) would help.

I like Diamond Crystal because it doesn't include the additive that Morton's uses to keep the salt from clumping, which adds a bitter flavor to my tongue. The two versions of kosher salt also look distinctly different under a magnifying glass (or, I suppose, a microscope. Anyone got one of the USB scopes?) so you can actually see why they pack differently. (That said, the most beautiful salt to look at close up, to me, is Maldon. Gorgeous pyramids! But definitely not for the pasta water.) I know that when I make pasta, I fill the pot to the third hole from the top of the insert, and use a palmful of the Korean extra-coarse sea salt we get at the Asian market. How's that for measuring? (That said, lately I've been experimenting a little bit with the method of using much less water and stirring often at the beginning, to keep the starch in the pasta from gluing everything together. I definitely don't have the proportions down yet.)

@JoNorvelleWalker, with the ricotta we get here, it probably wouldn't make much difference. If you're using great ricotta, I could see not freezing it. Where I live, despite the Italian population, that doesn't exist.

That truly takes talent in the kitchen, to manage all that. Host's note: this topic has been split to improve server (that is, of our computers) efficiency. Click here for more inspiring adventures of the Ladies Who Lunch.

I saw this article in a hard copy of a Lucky Peach magazine last year (I think).

As for the pork belly, we tried the hoisin version for dinner last night (with steamed broccoli and a quick carrot/jicama pickle, and a couscous mixture). 35 minutes in the Breville SmartOven, when the interior tested at 165 °F, then out to pour the rest of the liquid from the package and under the broiler to turn it into a glaze. At least, that was my intent. The liquid was so thin it just ran off the belly, and I kept on seeing little orange poofs inside the oven as if the fat were aerosolizing and bursting into flame. I had no success in getting any kind of a glazed crust. Next time, I'd either use the larger oven (which seems silly, given the size of the belly) or find a different way to cook entirely; possibly heat the packet with the Anova and then toss it into a hot cast-iron skillet? I still have a pack of the other flavor to experiment with.

FWIW, I like the orange Zeroll for scooping balls of cookie dough, so it's not a total waste. When I helped the Polish Catholic church make the pierogi (basically, the Polish version of ravioli!) for their festival, we used a disher to portion the fillings. Each day, we'd seal fillings we'd scooped and frozen the previous day into freshly made dough, and then we'd scoop and freeze the next day's fillings. We did cheese, potato, and kapusta (cabbage), and freezing the filling balls helped to make them easier to handle. For the kapusta especially, it was almost required, because when the filling balls started to thaw, the cabbage strands would start to unwind, and that made it difficult to get a good seal of the pierogi dough so it didn't dump its filling when it was boiled. With more classic Italian fillings, has anyone tried this method of portioning and freezing the fillings ahead of time?

Nothing more yet for me.

How do these differ from what used to be called prunes, and have since just become, well, "dried plums"?

Too bad. I love the idea of wings with a lime-sriracha sauce. Maybe I'll try that myself, but with better-cooked wings.

My verdict on the Crispy Oats and Honey Nut Crispy Oats: they're OK. Compared to the Wegmans brand, the Honey Nut variety (especially) seems rougher, almost shaggy, on the outside. They're noticeably sweeter. I think I prefer Wegmans enough to spend an extra $0.30 for the box.

And those amounts with the sig figs they give you to work with? Get real!

Another Finish user here. I first saw Finish tablets when we stayed in one of those extended-stay hotel rooms that has a kitchenette with a dishwasher, and they provide you with everything you need including the dish soap. At the time, I looked down my nose at it. But then I read a review of the various dishwasher detergents in Consumer Reports, and they rated the Finish Powerball as #1. It's available reasonably inexpensively at either my supermarket or my warehouse club, and it seems to work well in my dishwasher. The Finish pods seem to be a powder that's pressed together into a lozenge. Many of the other pods are a skin that's filled with liquid or other stuff. I like the idea of just pressed powder, with nothing else there that needs to somehow get dissolved away.