MelissaH

Has anyone noticed that you've been cooking at work, and come around to beg for some? (Once, I brought some frozen cookie dough balls in to work, so I could put them in the toaster oven and have fresh-baked cookies at lunch. Boy, did that day bring out my "friends"!)

Chris (or anyone else), any clue what this fruit is? What did it taste like?

No party here, just a couple of friends coming over. I'm going to make Kenji's green chile and bacon mac and cheese, Joanne Chang's PB cookies, and we'll have guac and chips and a bowl of pistachios for green. ;-) This is the one Sunday night of hockey season that my league cancels our game. We played during the NHL all-star game last week!

Kenji Lopez-Alt from Serious Eats says that putting the basil leaves in a boiling water bath for 30 seconds will deactivate the enzyme that causes browning. Then drain, chill in an ice bath, dry, and proceed.

If your pesto is turning brown after blanching the basil, I wonder if maybe the basil is insufficiently blanched.

@KennethT gets at an interesting point: how would the restaurant have been rated, had the price tag not been astronomical?

It certainly helps the sugar and spices to stick, but when you pour off the water, it's noticeably brown, and I think it might help to remove some of the bitterness from the skins.

I must jump in here. Proofreaders are NOT lowly! We're the last step in the process of making sure your book is as close to flawless as possible. Saying a proofreader is "lowly" is about like saying the last person who looks at a plate to make sure it's perfect, that every leaf and drop of sauce are in the right place, before it leaves your restaurant's kitchen to go to a customer is "lowly." We're the ones who make sure you don't have any embarrassing spelling errors (especially the ones that don't get caught by Spell Check, like leaving the L out of the word public), that you don't wind up with a hyphenated word at the very end of a page (or, for that matter, that words aren't incorrectly hyphenated), that you don't have widows or orphans, that all the capital letter Os are in fact the letter O and not the number 0, that everything is in the proper font, that everything is properly cross-referenced (none of this "see page xxx" where the xxx didn't get replaced by an actual page number nonsense!) and all the other things that affect the overall appearance and quality of the book. I have done pretty much every phase of the editing process, albeit on a smaller scale than your publisher. Every phase is necessary, and none is any less important than any other. If you want us to fix your recipes, be nice to all of us.

My beef stock (which cooked for 75 minutes on high pressure followed by natural cooling) turned out wonderfully gelatinous and with great flavor. I parceled it into one-cup packages of beef jelly, which I've frozen for later use. And then yesterday, I did a batch of soup: another shank, onion, celery, mushrooms, thyme, and barley, high pressure for 40 minutes, natural release. The meat after the stock was pretty tasteless, and fell completely off the bone. The marrow was also gone from the hollow of the bone, presumably in the stock. But in my soup, the meat was still mostly attached to the bone and I pulled it out as a single unit. I tasted the meat and found that it still had flavor so I shredded it off the bone (which was easy to do) and returned it to the soup. We have probably two lunch-size servings left, which will either get eaten for lunch this week, or bagged and stashed in the freezer for later. I have chicken thighs to use tonight, and am trying to decide what to do with them!

I've been using beef shank slices in my Instant Pot. My butcher cuts them about an inch thick. I did a beef stock with three of them, carrot, celery, onion, a squirt of tomato paste, etc., 75 minutes on high pressure and then natural cooling, which turned out wonderfully gelatinous. And then yesterday, I did a batch of soup: a shank, onion, celery, mushrooms, thyme, and barley, high pressure for 40 minutes, natural release. The meat after the stock was pretty tasteless, and fell completely off the bone. The marrow was also gone from the hollow of the bone, presumably in the stock. But in my soup, the meat was still mostly attached to the bone and I pulled it out as a single unit. I tasted the meat and found that it still had flavor so I shredded it off the bone (which was easy to do) and returned it to the soup.

If I were going to cook the spinach in question, I don't think I'd have a problem keeping and eating it, since listeria is killed in the cooking process. But if it were some other green, one better served raw, I'd return or toss it. Which I do would depend on how easy a return is for me to manage.

Is it possible that a bottom element is hidden under the oven floor?

I use a similar pair of cleats when it's my turn to drive the zamboni at the rink where I play hockey. The zamboni bay isn't as well heated or insulated as anyone would like, and by March, the floor is about like inside the rink. Even (or especially) if you live in areas where you don't get much ice regularly, I'd recommend keeping a pair in your coat closet. Y'know, so once you dig out your grill, you can safely get yourself out to flip the burgers.

That's the third pattern on my "someday" list. The first two: Bavaria and Jubilee. And then looking at these, I saw a new one, Stained Glass. If I made a lot of cakes with poured-over glazes that differed in color from the underlying cake, I'd need that one.

Oswego isn't that bad! Those of us who live here know what we're in for, and we're equipped to handle it. When we get the big lake-effect storms (the ones where the snow band sets up right on top of us and doesn't move for a few days), we get asked not to drive, because it's easier to plow when fewer cars are on the road. Even then, if you need to get somewhere (such as to refill your snowblower gas can) it usually isn't a problem, once you get your car out of the driveway. We aren't quite as chilly this morning as ElainaA: the NOAA buoy in the harbor says that our air temperature bottomed out this morning at 18 ºF. Even the wind is down: a couple of days ago we had sustained winds of 40 knots with gusts nearing 55 knots; today we're just seeing a breezy 20 knots. Yesterday, I made a pot of beef stock. I was able to quickly chill it on the "walk out" (AKA my deck) to the point where it was safe to refrigerate. This morning, I plan to defat it and then package and freeze it for later. I'm thinking that some of it will get combined with barley and mushrooms in the early part of next week. How much snow have we seen in the last few days? None.

I have USA loaf pans. They seem to bake well, but I always line them with parchment before using so I can't speak to their release properties. As for Bundt pans: bite the bullet and go with the Nordicware cast aluminum, NO nonstick lining. I chewed through several cheaper variants, and finally gave up. I have only the classic Bundt right now, but there are a few more I lust after. (Discussing this with some of the enablers in my local indie bookstore, I learned that some libraries out there actually have "lending libraries" of the baking pans you only need occasionally, such as some of the fancy cake pans. Wish mine did!) The key to successful Bundt cakes, for me, is to make sure that the pan is well lubricated before the cake batter goes into it. I usually do this with a healthy squirt of Pam for baking (the one with flour), which I then spread all over with a silicone pastry brush. I'd think for some of the fancier pans, this would be even more crucial.

I have beef stock going in mine now: 3 pounds of crosscut beef shanks, a couple of chunks of beef femur bone, onions, carrots, a couple of big squirts of tomato paste, celery, peppercorns, bay leaves, and water. I took Kenji's shortcut (from a stew recipe, IIRC) of just browning the beef on one side, thus continuing @Anna N's theme of saving energy. The kitchen smelled delicious during the initial browning, but now I can't smell it anymore.

If no hooded or external venting is required, where does it all go?

Really, it's just a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just columns for Class, Specific, Approx Wt, How Many, Location, and Date. Everything below that is entered and modified as added or used. The advantage of the Google spreadsheet is that everyone in the house has access, and we can make changes via phone or tablet.

We still have our Google spreadsheet freezer inventory. We have columns for type (soup, chicken, beans, or whatever), the specifics (cut of meat, kind of bean or soup), package size, how many of them, location in freezer, and date). About once a year, usually when it's nice and cold, we go through and make sure that things are up to date. For us, the real advantage is that both of us can access and update the shared document. And because Google automatically tracks changes, it's easy to see who took the last whatever!

He didn't specify, other than he found them both acceptable but thought the ebook was easier to read. This was after downloading the samples of both. He ultimately purchased the ebook (to go along with our home hard copy, and the hard copy he got from his textbook rep at work because this will be the text for his food science class this semester). He's going to tell his students that any form of electronic book or paper is acceptable for their class.

I agree with what other people have said. The one other thing I'd add is that our favorite question to ask locals is NOT "What's a good restaurant?" but rather, "Where do you like to eat?" Sometimes they'll tell you what they think you want to hear, but more often than not, you find places that you'd otherwise never hit on your own.

My husband preferred the ebook from Apple to the Kindle version.

I'm still looking for a roommate! If I don't find one, I'll probably have to bow out, even with the favorable exchange rate.

And I envy you!