MelissaH

I just want to say that yinz are all making me wish I had the time, space, and money for a freeze dryer. Alas, it's not happening any time soon, so in the meantime I'll just have to live vicariously through you. Kerry, I'm curious whether the spiralizing is important for the fun spiral shape or just because it gives you more surface area from which water can get extracted. Would shaving veg with a peeler be as effective, albeit less pretty?

We have the World Cuisine spiral vegetable slicer. My mom was so impressed by the zucchini "noodles" we made with it (we sauteed them with a touch of garlic) that she ordered one for herself.

I agree with those who soak no-boil noodles before building the lasagna. My current favorite lasagna is the spinach lasagna from Cook's Illustrated, usually the variation with mushrooms added. I put hot tap water in the lasagna pan and then add the noodles from the box, and given them time to soak while I make the white sauce. When they're ready, they come out and drain on kitchen towels until everything else is ready to go. The pan gets emptied and dried, and it's ready to go. I may, at some point, try soaking "normal" dry lasagna noodles à la Adventures in Food, where the pasta gets soaked in room-temperature water for about ten minutes per minute of cooking time as advertised on the box. We've done other pasta this way, and it works. Not trying to start any wars.

The local Polish Catholic church in town sells pierogi every year with your choice of cheese, potato, or kapusta (cabbage and sauerkraut), both for Fridays during Lent and in August at their festival. Because I wanted to learn from the best, I went and helped the kitchen volunteers several years ago, making literally thousands of pierogi during the week before the festival. They liked the way I rolled dough, which would be delivered to me in the community room by a runner. Making the dough was the exclusive province of the little old Polish ladies (back in the kitchen, where what I presume were wisecracks flew back and forth in Polish) so I can't tell you what went into the dough, other than it was made in the food processor and then set aside to rest before coming out to me and the other rollers. What I can tell you was this: we'd roll the dough on a floured surface, and then cut it into circles with a can that had both ends cut off. To make it easier on our hands, someone had cut circles out of fabric and then sewn elastic into the edges. They looked like the sort of pretty covering you might find on a jar of homemade jam in a store, but they were a godsend when you were cutting dough circles for a couple of hours nonstop. We'd put the circles on a sheet pan that had been covered with a piece of parchment dusted with flour. The flour was ordinary bleached AP flour like Gold Medal or Pillsbury, so I presume that's also what they were using in the kitchen to make the dough. We were told it was OK to reroll the dough once, but no more. When we had a pan full of circles, it would get moved to the tables where the fillers, or "pinchers," sat. The pinchers would then put a ball of the day's filling into each circle, fold the dough over the filling, and then pinch the edges shut. The filled pierogi would get consolidated onto a sheet pan (again, lined with flour-dusted parchment), and the emptied sheet pans would get returned to the rollers, to refill with dough circles. The last step was to send the tray of filled pierogi to a "checker," who would look carefully at each pierog to make sure that all the edges were pinched firmly shut, and correct any openings or pinch shut any holes in the skin: if there's an opening, there's a high probability that the whole thing will open up and dump its filling in the boiling water, which makes a mess (which is a big deal if you're boiling hundreds of them) or upsets the buyer (if they're purchased frozen, to be cooked at home). The cabbage-filled ones are the hardest to close properly, because the strands of cabbage tend to stick out from the center and into the edge that needs to get firmly pinched shut. After each tray of filled pierogi is checked, it's carefully labeled (so that someone who wants kapusta doesn't get cheese!) and put in the freezer until it's needed. Tradition has it that the last tray from each day gets boiled and then fried with onions on the spot, for lunch. The last step of each day, before cleanup, is to prepare the next day's filling. This, again, happens in the kitchen so I don't know exactly what happens, but I do know that mashed potato flakes and farmer cheese go into the cheese filling, the potato filling involves a little bit of cheddar as well as spuds that get peeled, boiled, and mashed (and dried out a tad with more mashed potato flakes), and the kapusta involves bought sauerkraut as well as some of the smaller cabbage leaves left over from making the golabki. In any case, after the filling is mixed, it gets brought out to the table along with a stack of parchment-covered sheet pans and a bunch of dishers with a scoop about the size of a ping-pong ball. The filling gets scooped out (and carefully leveled in the disher before pushing out, to control portion size) into arrays on the sheet pans (I no longer remember the array dimensions, but it was something specific so they know how much they have, and therefore how much dough they'll need to cover them) and stuck in the freezer overnight, because a frozen dough ball is easier to grab and seal in dough. On kapusta filling day, it's also really important to try and push any loose strands of cabbage into the filling ball, so that the whole thing freezes into a tidy mound that's less likely to cause a problem sealing. The whole system's about as efficient as it could get, without adding in any more mechanization beyond the food processors for making the dough. It was from these people that I also learned about using a large drill bit to core heads of cabbage, but that's another story!

Interesting that a friend just returned from visiting her in-laws in Oregon, and she reported that they served a brined london broil, which she reported as the best ever. It was brined for about 4 hours and then grilled, she said, and had terrific flavor and texture. Alas, it's not grilling weather here.

Lucky you. Looks like Bosch has started putting their newer manuals on line, but ours isn't (yet?) available. Before the detergent change, we were able to get things perfectly clean with the quick wash cycle. With the phosphate-free detergent, the quick cycle didn't work as well, so we went back to an "auto wash" cycle. The countdown is great, but I adore the delayed start feature because at night, I can set it to finish its cycle just before we get up and around in the morning. When we go into the kitchen to feed the cat and ourselves, we pop the dishwasher open, dump out the water from any containers that flipped open mid-cycle, shake off the plastic stuff that never gets completely dry in the dishwasher, and leave the door open a crack to let everything get completely dry. As for the breaker...quiet is nice. And if you have somewhere to set up the old dishwasher, particularly if it's somewhere that you don't have to listen to it, so much the better!

These are the same questions, IMHO, that apply to any purchase of something that you expect to last a while and that's large enough for you to think more than twice about: a dishwasher, a washing machine, a snowblower, a water heater, a car.... Did it last as long as you expected it to? Did it work as well as you thought it would? Is it worth fixing, or would it be better to instead replace it? (And also: what would happen if you don't replace/repair it now?) We put our Bosch dishwasher in when we completely redid our kitchen in the summer of 2006. We run it three-ish times a week, so that's probably "only" about 1200 cycles, and have been very happy with it. The stainless interior is maybe not quite pristine anymore, but it's still in very very good shape, and the racks have held up well. Our water hardness is such that we need to give our showerheads a vinegar soak about once every four or five years. The dishwasher has been more reliable than either the Amana fridge or the GE Monogram range. The only (minor) issues happened when the detergent manufacturers removed phosphate from their formulas, and the detergent we'd been using all of a sudden didn't work as well as it had. We changed brands and haven't had any issues since. My only real complaint about Bosch is that the owner's manual is apparently not available to download, so I have to dig out the paper one when I want to change whether it dries with heat, since that isn't at all intuitive. And one more thing about Bosch: several years ago, they apparently issued a recall due to a problem with the control panels shorting. I checked our serial number at the time it was first announced, and we were not included in that recall so I promptly forgot about it. We periodically got phone calls for TWO YEARS after that, from Bosch or one of their representatives, to check our serial number and make sure we weren't part of the recall. They were definitely concerned, although I'm not sure how their record-keeping is.

Do you find that more dense objects (peanuts, coffee beans) are easier to coat than the fluffier ones (cereal)?

Not available in my part of NY either. I think they must be another of those downstate-only things. I love Wake Robin Farm's yogurt, but since they decided not to sell at area Wegmans stores anymore because they couldn't meet production (12 Jersey cows at the farm, according to their website), it's become an even more special treat.

Ooh, it's like a giant electric poffertje or aebelskiver pan! I love the idea: way more efficient when you're cooking for a crowd. (Can I come over? Please? I'll even bring some of our fine Lake Ontario octopus with me. )

At the risk of going ghetto, I recall reading about a homemade Funfetti cake recipe, which is a very white cake with multicolored sprinkles. (Ah, here it is: http://food52.com/blog/11225-how-to-make-a-funfetti-cake-from-scratch) I haven't tried it, but you could use chocolate sprinkles or other black or dark candy pieces, or even cookie crumbs, with whipped cream to frost.

Rotuts, could you please provide a link for the HomeBarista discussion? I'd be interested in reading it and the geeky details within.

Ours (red!) arrived while we were away. It didn't need a signature, as our catsitter found the box when she arrived after school. Now debating the first thing to use it for!

Can you order from Amazon.com? (And I'll ask my parents about GJ, which is a couple of hours north of where they live.)

My bag made it home...but then again I live closer to my TJ's store than Kerry does to hers. I will not tell you how long they lasted once they got home, though!

Definitely true. Best thing I can suggest is that eggs and sugar are cheap, so try it and see what happens (and when) for yourself.

My shipping notification arrived yesterday, but the tracking number didn't show up with FedEx till this morning. Delivery is scheduled to happen early next week. Those of you who have gotten them already: did anyone have to sign for the package?

Deryn: leftovers are always welcome, especially when the leftovers are things that are easy to repurpose as an ingredient for another meal, rather than just rehash the same old same old. I'd rather make have leftovers than run short, assuming I can get 20 lbs of brisket into the oven at one time. Avocados: we love to be able to do them, but getting enough of them ripe on the day we need them can be an issue. We've had better luck going with packaged guacamole, which we then doctor with a few fresh avocados, cilantro, and tomatoes. Lisa: Love the calabacitas idea, but history has shown us that hot vegetable sides don't go over well, possibly because they remind the girls of what they get all too often in the dining halls. They definitely eat vegetables, but show a strong preference for them raw, with dip, before the meal.

Bumping this up because we're continuing the tradition of feeding the women's hockey season during their winter break, for the sixth year running, but with a twist. Since the beginning, we've based our meal around pork shoulders, slow-cooked in the oven and then pulled, served in small flour tortillas with either =Mark's BBQ sauce or my husband's mole, as the girls wish, and also black beans, rice, cheese, and other fixings. Mangos if they're cheap and available, because the girls love them and don't get them in the dorms. Veg and dip for before (the more veg the girls eat, the less meat they need later); rice krispy treats, cut into 1" cubes, for dessert. But this year, we know we'll have a couple of non-pork eaters around (one who doesn't care for the taste and the other who has a pet teacup pig), so we're planning to do beef brisket instead. Our plan is to put the brisket into a roasting pan with some kind of flavorful liquid, cover tightly with foil, and put in the oven till it's done. I was thinking really low and slow, but my butcher tells me that it shouldn't take more than about 4 hours at 350 ºF. We'd like to be able to cook the brisket a day or three in advance, slice or chop or pull or shred it, and then just rewarm it the day of the team meal. I don't have a crockpot or sous-vide system large enough, but could use the stovetop if you think that would be a better option. I also have a Weber Bullet smoker, but don't want to plan around it during snow season. Black beans get cooked ahead of time, and reheated for service. Rice happens in the 10-cup rice cooker. Both of those stay on the menu because they're readily available, easy for us, and add protein (especially for the girls who prefer not to eat a lot of meat). We will have lots of prep help for everything else that gets done right before we eat. All the other caveats apply: nothing too weird, and a spicy option is OK but must be something that individuals add to their own plates, not something that is done in bulk. Assuming about 30 eaters, how much raw brisket do you think I'd need, for everyone to be able to fill two small tortillas? The butcher thinks 20 pounds would be more than enough. What kind of liquid would be good with brisket? I've seen everything from Coke to jarred salsa verde to broth. The key here is not spicy, not weird. If you have a favorite recipe, please share it. What about sauces? Would the South Carolina mustard BBQ sauce be out of place with beef? (Mole goes with everything, as far as we're concerned, so we'll do that for sure.) Is there anything special that would traditionally be served with a beef brisket taco? Over the years, we've learned that the girls prefer their vegetables with dip beforehand, rather than added to the tacos (although we make sure we have lettuce and green onions available as toppings, and they go). I'm also wondering about a corn salsa or salad, made with frozen corn. Any other not spicy, not weird suggestions? MelissaH

I remember the Yumbo, which is weird because if it was retired in 1974, I would have been too young for it then! If I remember it, it must have been available, at least regionally, in the late 1970s.

I'd settle even for injera that has some wheat flour in it, if I didn't have to drive 70+ miles each way to get it.

The absolute best part of going to an Ethiopian restaurant is after you've eaten most of the stews and veg from on top of the injera, and finally being able to eat the plate covering piece that's been soaked with all the juices!

The one advantage I could see to doing homemade mashed potatoes over purchased flakes is that you could control exactly what goes into it: the right amount of milk, the right amount of butter, any flavorings. I would love to be able to find some mashed potato flakes without preservatives for baking. The other thing I wonder about, with homemade mashed potatoes, is if you could make dried potato water. (Or maybe that's a job for the rotovap first? Then take whatever you get after removing the majority of the water and freeze-dry that?)

Could you pre-salt the green beans before they're dried, or does the salt not stick through the process?

I haven't had a chunk of time to sit down and read the book cover-to-cover yet, just to dip my nose in here and there. Yesterday, I ran into a reference to "waxing" cauliflower cores (I think it was cores and not stems). The book doesn't have an index, so I can't look up what that means. Is there a recipe for waxed cauliflower? Does it have hair to be removed? What does this mean? (Anna, or someone else who has had more time lately?)