MelissaH

We, too, enjoyed a dinner at Revel. That was about four years ago, on our last trip to Seattle. Apparently, the gang from Top Chef had been in just a couple of days before we were there. I no longer remember the specifics of what we ate, but I remember enjoying it tremendously.

Rose Levy Beranbaum fans and pastry lovers: the Pie and Pastry Bible Kindle book is now available for $3.99.

You obviously aren't left handed, and have never lived with anyone who is. About time something was made for us!

Could you please tell us more about this book? What sort of information is inside? How would you expect to use it?

I just gave in and ordered a copy of Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss from my indie bookstore. (I cried on their shoulders. They understood.) I'd hesitated to order it because I wanted to look at it first, to see if it was going to duplicate much of my library. Yesterday I was in Rochester and stopped into a Barnes & Noble (mainly to use their bathroom, as neither of the 7-Eleven locations where I stopped had a customer restroom or a Coke Slurpee available). They had a couple of copies, so I leafed through it. (They no longer have comfy chairs stationed about the store either. Boo to them!) And I drew the conclusion that it's worth buying: it has enough recipes different from others that I already have, which I could see myself making, it gives me mass measurements, it doesn't overload me on either evil raisins or the anise/licorice/fennel flavor I hate (and in many cases it specifies that if you aren't a raisin person you can omit them without a problem!), and a bunch of the recipes are ones that play right into my husband's preferred spice dessert flavor palette. And it was just plain fun to read, with headnotes for each recipe to give some historical and personal background as well as production notes. It isn't a fancy-looking book, and doesn't have a dust jacket. There are photos, although I'm more of a word person than a picture person. The notes on where to find special ingredients don't make anything sound out of range, even for me here in small-town middle of nowhere upstate NY. I expect my copy to arrive in less than a week.

I might be way off base here, but it's hard to tell from a picture. How similar are those to the Korean rice cakes called dduk or some other spelling that may or may not be along those lines? I can buy them ready-made at the Korean supermarket in Syracuse. If they're at all similar, this would be a super-easy comfort food type of dish.

That's smaller than mine. Mine has a 14 cup bowl, but nesting inside it are two smaller bowls, the smallest of which is 4 cups. I'm curious if smaller might be better than bigger for some of these cookie recipes.

This probably won't help, but when we make that kind of food, we usually do so when it's cold enough out to either stash the pot on the deck, or (if we won't be around to keep an eye on it) stick it downstairs in the garage, where the winter temperature is not far off from fridge temperature. When it's warmer, if it's something that can be divided into smaller portions, we'll do that (bigger surface area:volume ratio means faster cooling). And if necessary, we'll buy bags of ice.

@FrogPrincesse, how small is small for your food processor?

Doesn't psyllium husk have, er, pharmaceutical uses that might make you want to be careful about using or eating a lot of it?

Would you make (and eat) these last two again? They look easy enough to be weeknight staples.

I think Anna would be better suited to the task. After all, she doesn't need to take time out of her day to work!

I've played with sourdough. It worked OK, but for me it was too much of a PITA to deal with the starter, remembering to get it out of the fridge a day before I wanted to bake (and hoping that nothing came along to derail my plans after I'd fed the starter to get it ready for baking). I'm happier not bothering, and just using yeast.

You always make me soooooo hungry when I read this topic, @Anna N!

More Kindle books that are currently inexpensive: One Dough, Ten Breads Gjelina The Art of Living According to Joe Beef Chocolate Holidays and Flavor Flours (Alice Medrich) Baking with Less Sugar (I love love love this book!) Roots: The Definitive Compendium

@Cyberider, I picked up that one also! It makes fascinating reading, although I don't know how much I will actually bake from it. I did carve out an hour to test out one of the recipes from Dorie's Cookies, the Pink Peppercorn Thumbprints on page 143. I actually had a few problems with the recipe, which is highly unusual in my experience for a recipe from Dorie. I asked on Twitter for a confirmation of the measurements (everything with a mass measurement, I put on my scale), but she said they were all correct as published, and we used the same flour, so neither of us really knows where the problem lies. The first sign of trouble came when I tried to buzz the pink peppercorns, sugar, and salt in my food processor: the blade just zipped over the top of everything without doing anything. I wound up dumping it all into my spice grinder, and using that to pulverize the peppercorns (and make the sugar a bit finer). My processor is a Cuisinart model with nesting bowls. The largest bowl has a 12-cup capacity, and the next one down is 8 cups. These two both use the same blade. If you need something even smaller, there's a 4-cup bowl that fits inside that, with a special small blade to go with. I decided to use the 8-cup bowl for this recipe; next time I might see if the 4-cup bowl with the special blade can actually handle the sugar mixture. I continued on making the dough, but at the end instead of a "moist dough that holds together easily," I had dry crumbs, drier than even a piecrust dough would be. So I grabbed the bottle of vodka out of my freezer and pulsed in a couple of glugs so that what was in the food processor bowl was recognizable as a dough. It was still a bit crack-prone, but quite workable. Dorie uses Oxo cookie scoops; for this recipe she specified a small scoop. My dishers are made by Zeroll, so I guessed at what size would match the Oxo small scoop. I used the orange Zeroll, which is size 100 (that's the number of servings per quart), which was a touch smaller than the Oxo because the recipe said the yield was 34 cookies but I got 41. Next time I might go up to the next bigger scoop I have, which is the pink size 60, look into buying the size 70...or just be happy making more, slightly smaller cookies. My jam was homemade strawberry freezer jam. I didn't have any rose extract on hand, but I did have a bottle of rosewater so that's what I added in after heating the jam in the microwave. To make my life easier, I put the rosified jam into a piping bag, which was definitely neater than a spoon would have been. And I didn't bother with the confectioners' sugar dusting because I figured (correctly) they'd be quite sweet enough without. The flavor of the finished cookie was great, and I want to try these again. The peppercorn zing was there, but only as a whisper, which to me was just about perfect. Next time, as I said, I'd try the smallest bowl of my food processor. The recipe doesn't make such a large amount of dough that I need a ton of space. And while the aroma of the pulverized peppercorn-sugar mix is almost intoxicating, I'd prefer to do everything in the same bowl and not have to transfer anything. I still don't know why my dough was so much drier than the recipe described, but if it's a problem again, I might try whisking a little ice water into my egg. I'm open to other thoughts on why my dough wound up dry. Is it possible I got a small egg? Might my butter be at fault?

If the first bird was an older one, the second one was also an older one. I don't believe this farmer sells his old layers unless you specifically ask for a stewing hen. Last night's chicken, which I roasted at 300 °F for 3 hours and then let rest for 20 minutes, was also marvelously flavorful, and the skin was wonderfully crisp. It was less tough than the first chicken we roasted, but still not the best chicken, texturewise, I've ever eaten. I'm going to draw the conclusion that for whatever reason, these chickens are better cooked by a moist method. Given the climate where I live, the beginning of hockey season, and the Instant Pot and stovetop pressure cooker in my kitchen, this will not be a hardship for us. Now, off to peel the carrots and turn the remnants from last night into tonight's soup for dinner.

Is the problem that you don't know what to do with eggs, or more that you need to do something with them so you can reclaim your refrigerator space? Eggs have quite a shelf life, especially if you'll be cooking or baking with them.

I haven't moved. :-) We moved this chicken from the freezer downstairs into the refrigerator upstairs on Sunday afternoon. An hour ago, it still had ice freezing the neck to the cavity wall. So for dinner tonight, brining is not an option, unless we'd thought about dinner Wednesday way back sometime on Friday or Saturday. Nonetheless, I gave it a quick rinse to melt away the remaining ice. (As far as I could tell, the meat was thawed all the way through; the cavity was still frozen because air doesn't conduct heat as well as chicken.) It got salted and peppered, inside and out. I put a halved lemon, a piece of onion that was kicking around the fridge, and sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme in the cavity. It went into an oval baking dish, on top of a few slices of bread, and an hour ago at 3 PM, I put it into a 300 °F oven. I plan to take it out at about 6:00 tonight, so it can rest and be ready for dinner by 6:30. I'm about to check on it and add some halved potatoes to the dish (because I recognize that the bread might not be edible after three hours in the oven, even if it's covered by a bird). @ProfessionalHobbit, at what temperature and for how long did you roast your bird?

He farms. He doesn't cook. (I asked over the summer, while the farmer's market was still in session.)

Anna, these chickens were all hatched and slaughtered this year. Is it possible to have a stewing hen that's only a couple of months old?

I emailed the farmer, and learned that the birds basically go straight into an ice bath to get them cold, then into a commercial freezer. Is part of my issue perhaps that the chickens are frozen while they're still in rigor mortis, since they don't have a chance to relax?

Alas, no CSO. Just a Breville XL, which can hold a quarter-sheet pan.

Has anyone successfully roasted a free-range chicken that spent its life running around and otherwise working out? Over the summer, we participated in a chicken CSA. As a result, we have a freezer full of free-range whole birds, all about 4 pounds. We tried roasting one whole (I think I usually season the bird, rest it on a slice or two of bread in a lightly oiled low-sided baking dish, and put it in the oven at 400 °F till it's done), and while the flavor was superb, we found that it was much tougher than a supermarket chicken: the breast meat needed significant chewing, and the legs and thighs were really too tough to eat. We wound up cooking them further, as part of a casserole or braise or something along those lines for dinner the next night, IIRC. With more cooking time, the chicken was really good. We made another of the chickens into soup, and it had terrific flavor; the meat got enough cooking time that it was really nice. I'd like to try roasting another of our birds, but this time getting the whole thing edible the first night, as I prefer dark chicken meat to white. I'm wondering if I'd do better with a lower temperature and longer cooking time. Has anyone had success making a roast well-exercised chicken? Any guesses at how long it will need to stay in the oven to tenderize enough to eat? Is there an alternative cooking method I should consider instead? We like crispy skin, and we'd like to turn the carcass and any leftover meat into soup tomorrow night.

Would hot glue be considered food-safe? That's what I use to stick the refrigerator magnets back into their decorative holders.