MelissaH

Vacation Rental By Owner.

@Kerry Beal, kimchi jjigae is my husband's all-time favorite Korean dish. Could you please share your recipe and technique so I can make him very happy this winter?

Beans are good. This summer, I've been particularly into lentils because they cook so fast. In particular, when it's hot I like a salad made from the French green lentils that hold their shape (like this one or this one), or an Indian dal with red lentils that collapse completely, served with rice (like this one; slow cooker version here). And at a Lebanese restaurant in the tiny burg of Cortland, NY (are you listening, @ElainaA?) I had a really nice lentil soup that warmed me up nicely before we headed into a very cold rink to watch a hockey game. To me, the dal and soup are the sorts of things that I like to make in large batches and freeze in individual or pairs of servings, to reheat for lunches and quick dinners later.

I find chicken on pizza does much better if you put it underneath the cheese.

Did it find its way home with you?

Those of you with air fryers: have any of you tried it on zucchini "noodles"? Can it cook them without making them into watery mush?

Oh, yum. We went to a Wegmans store "only" 48 miles away last weekend for their Chilefest, and picked up a case of medium hotness Hatch chiles that were roasted especially for us. From the drum of the roaster, they got dumped into a plastic bag inside the box, and then they steamed nicely on the ride home. Once we got them home, my husband and our friend T took them out onto the back deck, where we put a plastic (easily hose-off-able) table with a couple of half sheet pans, a garbage bowl and a bowl of water, and a box of disposable gloves. While I put away the rest of our groceries (hey, we had to make the nearly 100-mile round trip really worth it!), T and my husband started in on the chiles, pulling out the cores and seeds, peeling the skins off, and setting the chiles on the sheet pans. (The bowl of water was to periodically clean the skins and seeds off hands.) I offered to help with the task, but it was deemed better for someone to keep a clean, ungloved set of hands available to open doors, refresh water, and do other things easier done with clean, ungloved hands. Once all the chiles were cleaned, we brought the two half sheet pans indoors. Portioning and sealing turned out to be a three-person project: one person with a bowl on the scale to weigh portions, a second person to load the bags (we use a Pringles can with the bottom cut out to support the bag, with the top folded over the top of the can to stay clean. A canning funnel fits inside nicely and makes loading easy. Once the bag is loaded, it's simply a matter of pulling up the folded-down top edge and letting the full bag fall out the bottom of the tube), and a third to actually run the sealer. From one case of chiles, we got twenty-five 8-ounce bags of chiles plus another three bags with 6 ounces. These will be shared with T and other friends who like the chiles. It's a week later, and the car still has a faint aroma of roasted green chile.

If you have a large amount of fruit to carbonate, you can do it in a regular cooler with dry ice. Put the dry ice in the cooler, and cover it with a towel so you don't freeze (and burn) your fruit. Then add the fruit. Put the lid on the cooler, and then use plastic wrap to tightly wrap the cooler, starting at the seal but then wrapping around the entire cooler. Let it sit a while (the video says 12 to 14 hours) before cutting it open and eating the fruit. I don't recommend using the leftover dry ice to make a bomb, as demonstrated at the end of the video! ;-) http://www.eater.com/video/2015/10/9/9486953/fizzy-fruit-hack-dry-ice

And there's also the Vegetarian Flavor Bible, which has enough different material that we keep both handy. And along the same lines is the Flavor Thesaurus.

How tall is the stack? (I'm trying to figure out whether it would fit on my counter.) And how much steam comes out the top when you use it in whatever mode generates the most steam?

@chromedome, I'm still stuck on the small size. This summer when it's been hot, I've been using my Breville Smart Oven (the XL version that fits a quarter sheet pan) extensively. I've been avidly following these CSO threads, but I just can't quite bring myself to pull the trigger and order yet another countertop appliance, which will be too small to hold much of my cookware. I'm still trying to figure out if this was a conscious decision by the designer (to keep the outside size down) or if it just totally slipped through the minds of the Powers That Be because only true kitchen geeks would care about such a thing. Is anyone else out there totally torn, still?

@Anna N, thanks for the heads-up. Earlier this summer, I ordered spare gaskets for both the Instant Pot and my stovetop pressure cooker. Now, the challenge is to find somewhere safe to store them where they'll be ready when I need them, but not so safe that I can't remember where to find them!

How much of your foraging knowledge will transfer? And how, other than a mentor, will you learn about the foraging opportunities available in your new location? (No need to enter me in the book drawing, as I ordered mine from you back in May and am eagerly awaiting its arrival!)

Keep us posted on the results, please!

Yeah, I've had lid issues both times I've used the mold. I'm new enough to this that I don't know whether it's something I'm doing (or not doing) or if it's just a "feature" of this particular lid/mold combo. And yes, the boozy pops definitely melted much faster. I think I'm going to steal that cookie sheet trick, to see if that works for me. And I'm going to start hunting for a small rectangular container that's *just* the right size.

Something that I didn't see much discussion about: filling and then unmolding. How do you all do it? I have the Norpro mold: makes 10, metal frame with plastic depressions, plastic lid with stick slots. I've used it for two batches of popsicles: the first from tapioca pudding and the second based on a blender pineapple daiquiri recipe. Before I made the pudding, I stuck my wooden sticks in a shooter glass and added water to pre-soak them. (I don't remember where I read about this, but somewhere said to soak your sticks in water for an hour before using them, so I tried it.) The pudding was pretty viscous and dripped when I poured it from a spouted measuring cup into the mold. Once I got it loaded, I gave the top a swipe with a dampened paper towel before I put the lid on, to try and keep the lid from sticking in place. After about half an hour in the freezer, I stuck the sticks in and let it finish freezing. When I was ready to unmold, I pried the top off, dipped the whole thing into a bowl of hot tap water for a five-count, and wiggled the pops out one by one. This worked, but many of the pops had melted significantly by the time I released them. I laid each one on a piece of plastic wrap, folded the wrap over and around, and then stuck the whole lot in another plastic bag to keep them collected. For the pineapple daiquiri pops, I didn't soak the sticks. I again put the mixture in a spouted measuring cup and poured it in. This mixture wasn't as viscous as the pudding but it was still a little on the thick side, and I still got a few drips to wipe off. When I was ready to unmold these, this time I tried dipping one enclosure at a time in a glass of hot water. The first two, on the edge, worked beautifully. But when I got into the middle, I couldn't find a vessel of a size that would admit one or two of the interior enclosures. Instead, I wound up pouring a bit of water from the cup over the enclosure I was trying to free. This worked well enough on 5 of the 6 interior popsicles. By the time I made this batch, I had been to the dollar store and purchased a box of cheapo non-ziplock sandwich bags to hold the individual unmolded popsicles, which I again bagged to contain the lot. I still experienced some melting while the bagged pops waited to be collected, but some of that could have been because this particular mix was such that it didn't freeze particularly hard. The sixth one had the stick pull out, and I scraped out what I could with a spoon and ate it as a slushie. As far as the soaked vs unsoaked sticks: the pudding was easy to eat off the stick. The daiquiri seemed to have frozen right into the stick. More experimentation may be called for. That said: what do you use to fill the mold cavities evenly? And do you have any tricks to make unmolding easy?

Or, for that matter, in Belgium when the apartment where you're living for 3 months has only a microwave oven.

When I read the article, I thought this sounded less like what I think of as a restaurant, and more of what could loosely be described as a supper club.

Two years ago when we visited Nfld, we noticed that onions were scarce and expensive. We surmised it's because they don't seem to grow there, and thus had to be imported. I'll be interested to see if you also found/find this to be the case!

This might be the first time I've ever heard gardeners complain about not having enough zucchini.

I haven't been to either PEI or Nova Scotia yet, but a couple of years ago we were in Nfld. And yes, it was absolutely gorgeous! We only had two weeks so we stayed in the eastern third of the island, but I don't remember seeing any fish drying on screens like that. (Then again, there hasn't been commercial cod fishing in Nfld for quite a while now, while we all wait for the stocks to recover.) We did, however, do a few hikes on areas with lots of wild blueberries underfoot, which made me quite happy.

@kayb, would you be willing to share your cheesecake recipe?

We didn't even try. My cousins in Albuquerque had the weekend pretty well planned. We did, however, go to the zoo and the botanical garden, both of which were great hits with 3 1/2 year old Simon (and to some extent, 10-month-old Max). The chiles we ate were on a cheeseburger at Standard Diner (seemed like a decent benchmark, but I like the ones my husband makes at home better!) and at Amore Pizzeria (highly recommend, especially if you have kids along; the pizza in question was the Zia: white sauce, house-made mozz, green chile, corn kernels). From there, we headed towards Mesa Verde for a night, and then up to Ouray to visit my parents. And therein lies the reason we didn't look too hard for chiles: the H side of my family is notoriously wimpy-tongued. My ABQ cousin, whose father is my dad's younger brother, and I talked about this; we believe that in the elder H home, food was more for subsistence than enjoyment, and there was a profound lack of flavor at most meals. My cousin said that when his folks came to visit, and they went to a more typically New Mexican restaurant, about the only thing on the menu that my uncle could tolerate was...cottage cheese. Even the bit of zing in the vinaigrette on the salad was too much for him. Fortunately, those particular genes did not get passed on to the next generation! Anyway, even if we'd found chiles in ABQ, we couldn't have easily kept them good for the two weeks after that until we got home. We had a few days on the Front Range when we did occasionally smell a chile roaster, but even then we decided not to bother. Wegmans is once again having a chilefest at selected stores this year, and we plan to go to one of those and stock up. Time to use the last few of last year's supply from the freezer! I think I want to try my own version of the Zia pizza, which was stupendous.

While we were in Denver, I picked up a bag of the Bollywood Popcorn to snack on in various hotel rooms and along the way home. That stuff is absolutely addictive: good flavor with just the right amount of heat. And then, after I ate a plastic hotel-room cup of the popcorn, I filled that same cup with chunks of my first (and probably last) Rocky Ford melon in years. The cantaloupe pieces picked up the last little bits of salt and other seasoning, and WOW! I might need to do that again on purpose.

It doesn't have potatoes so technically it isn't a chowder, but this is the second summer I've loved the Serious Eats pressure cooker corn soup. I've never missed the potatoes because there's a ton of starch thanks to the corn. You start by sauteeing alliums, and then add bay leaves, tarragon stems, corn cut off the cobs and the cobs themselves, and chicken broth. Once everything is in, the lid gets locked on for cooking. After a quick cool, the cobs and bay leaves and tarragon stems get pulled out and the soup is buzzed in a blender. I've done all kinds of variations: rendered some bacon and used its fat for cooking the alliums (and added the bacon to my bowl at the end), switched up the varieties of alliums, swapped water for the chicken stock for a completely vegan soup, used cilantro instead of tarragon (and added some halved cherry tomatoes to my bowl), added a sprinkle of grated cheeze, doctored with hot sauce or vinegar when the soup was too sweet for my tongue....