MelissaH

This is a food book, if you consider a book about how your food is grown to be a book about food: The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks. It's beautifully written, and at times absolutely heartbreaking (remember the hoof-and-mouth outbreak?). Overall, it's an interesting look into a way of life I'll probably never experience firsthand but appreciate tremendously. (edited because I apparently can't spell without autocorrect this morning)

It's very common in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In fact, when we were in Belgium for the spring, it was impossible to find skim milk that wasn't UHT, and all the UHT milk was far less expensive than the refrigerated milk. It has a slightly cooked flavor that I don't particularly care for if (for some reason) I want to drink a glass of milk, but it's fine for cooking, baking, and hot chocolate making. I kept some around because my shoebox-sized fridge didn't give me the luxury of always having a half-gallon container in the fridge.

I found http://www.pickyourown.org/tomato_acidity.php, which talks about whether you need acid when you can tomatoes. Apparently, some varieties of tomatoes are not quite acidic enough to qualify as an "acidic" food, and that's why all the CYA instructions say to add lemon juice or vinegar. The link goes on to say that low-acid foods need temps of 240 to 250 °F to destroy botulism spores, attainable by using a pressure canner at 10 to 15 psi, and those temps need to be held "from 20 to 100 minutes" to destroy bacteria. But I would think that if you used whatever the canning directions for beans are, as that's definitely a low-acid food, that the time and pressure would be adequate to make tomatoes safe as well. A Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/what-sold-me-on-pressure-canning-at-home/2015/01/26/4d365546-a2a3-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html says that for pint jars of cooked dry beans in their cooking liquid, leave an inch of headspace and process 75 minutes at 10 psi.

I would love to hear the trick, when Andie comes back and rescues us from the cliffhanger she left us with!

Mazel tov! I'm very happy for you, and I look forward to seeing what happens next. (And this copy editor hopes you get a good one from your publisher!)

I actually do have an induction burner, which I could use with my 6 qt Fagor stovetop pressure cooker. But most of the time, I just use my gas burners. We're back into hot and sticky mode for a few days. I think anything that gets cooked for the rest of the week will be cooked on the grill. I can't imagine eating short ribs right now.

Anna, I've had that recipe bookmarked for quite a while, but hadn't gotten around to trying it. However, I'm thinking that tonight might be the night, given your endorsement. I only have a stovetop pressure cooker, so that's the way I'll have to deal with it. Do you notice any difference in how hot the kitchen gets with the electric version compared to a more traditional pot?

Anna, do you think a pasta machine might be an appropriate way to roll this dough very thin?

I wouldn't have known to ask about this one, either—except that one of the bloggers I follow posted not long ago that a knitting book she'd written several years ago is out of print and the pattern rights are going to revert to her so she can revise and reformat them for sale on her website. And huiray is absolutely right, about photo rights being something else to clarify. Right about now, I'm wondering if I should have gone to law school!

At some point if the publisher decides to discontinue the book, would the rights to the recipes and essays revert to you, to use as you please?

Anna, save some for me!

The newest book by Joanne Chang, Baking with Less Sugar, has a bunch of recipes for baked goods where dates are used as the only source of sweetener. I haven't tried any of those recipes yet, but the others from the book that I've tried (blueberry bran muffins, coconut chiffon cake, honey cashew morning buns) have been winners. She takes the dates and cooks them in a bit of water with baking soda so they break down, and uses the resulting syrupy mixture as the sweetening agent in the baked good.

I remember Roman Meal, which is what my mom bought for sandwich bread. I always wanted white bread, but my mom insisted on something that at least looked brown.

Did anyone else's school have the Lunch Count ritual at the beginning of the day, just after the teacher took attendance? The teacher would ask those who were going to buy lunch to stand up. Then those students would sit down, and the teacher would ask those who were just going to buy milk to stand. At some point the ritual was amended to add a request for those who wanted skim milk (with lunch, or just as milk) to raise their hands. Ostensibly, this was so the cafeteria (which still actually cooked) would know how much food to prepare each day. I know I usually brought my lunch (and did NOT get milk to go with it, ick!) but I can't remember much about what I brought. The year I went to fifth grade, I switched into a private school where everyone's lunch was included, and those of us who were old enough to be trustworthy were actually served on trays with real breakable dishes and glasses and the like. The year I went into ninth grade, the school proudly announced that tuition was not going up this year, but that lunch was no longer included. That was when I basically quit eating lunch.

BaTampte is one brand I can find as well. If the jar isn't too old, they're half sour. If they've sat around in the grocery case, they're more than half sour. Even in a refrigerator, they continue to age. You really can't keep them at the half-sour stage without either adding some kind of chemical preservative to end microbial action or cooking them to kill off the organisms that do the pickling. I suppose freezing could also do the trick, but you wouldn't have that nice snap once the pickles are frozen.

Trouble is, they don't stay half sour. Because the half sour pickles I know are a fresh pickle, they get picklier as time passes. The only way to get half sours, which I've also heard called "new pickles," is to get to them before they become full sours.

I didn't tell you about the first time I got roasted chiles, when I didn't know that you pretty much had to freeze them on a cookie sheet before you bagged them rather than just toss the whole container in the freezer. And I also didn't know that you really should wear gloves when you handle them, especially if you're going to manipulate contact lenses (even if you wash your hands first!).

A friend's small children decided one day that anything with visible onions was no longer edible. So all of a sudden, meatloaf and other food had "water chestnuts" instead, although the recipe and preparation had not changed one bit! (Fortunately, the phase didn't last long.)

I might have to look for those cookies next time I'm around a TJ's. I love lime! Do these have any tartness to them, or are they just sweet sweet sweet?

Looking at your box of chiles is making me miss my Colorado days big-time. This is the time of year when the chile roasters would come to the farmer's market, with their giant drum roaster that you could smell from blocks away. If they didn't have the kind you wanted already roasted, they'd tell you to come back in half an hour and they'd have them ready. I'd take the big plastic bag of warm roasted chiles and carefully put it into another plastic bag, and then load it into my backpack, where it would nestle into my lumbar region for the short bike ride home. There's nothing like that here, alas.

What about a soak in vinegar?

I've never seen meatball grill baskets like those, but I think I might need to look for some!

November 2004 for me. That was a little more than a year after we'd moved to New York. We're still happily here.

Hard work, yes; I think for some people the bigger deal is that it's work at lousy hours when you'd rather be home with your family, and in many cases with minimal benefits.

I, too, love those spiderwebs with the zigzags. You've now got me thinking of ways to incorporate spiderweb-like patterns into a future knitted sweater! The one year we grew eggplants, I was surprised that the flowers were such a pretty purple. And I was even more amazed to see that the eggplants were purple right from the beginning; it's not like tomatoes where they start out little and green, get bigger and green, and only then change colors.