MelissaH

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?)

Has anyone tried freeze-drying canned pumpkin yet? I'd be interested to know how much mass gets lost during the process. (I'm trying to reverse-engineer a pumpkin bread mix, and wonder how much of the water that gets added is just to replace the moisture originally in the "pumpkin flakes" listed on the ingredients.

I have both. I specifically got a paper copy of Prune rather than an ebook, because it looked like a format that wouldn't translate well. And I like the fact that the recipes are way more approachable than most restaurant cookbook recipes. I think the first one I'm going to try is the pumpkin in ginger beer with yeast...as soon as I can find a source for the yeast. I have all kinds of other yeast in the house, but not the nutritional version! Never mind that the cookbook itself is so much fun to sit down and read like a novel! (And also check out the book section of today's NY Times: the By The Book column is with Gabrielle Hamilton! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gabrielle-hamilton-by-the-book.html?ref=books

I can't think of anything better to do with a pretentious experience than laugh. Thanks for sharing it. I would have loved to join you, except that I don't think I could get to you right now!

Does the dislike of cinnamon extend to all varieties? If you have a Penzey's or other spice store nearby, you can smell the difference between the various kinds, which carries through to the taste and overall impression. There's a huge difference between the traditional "hot" cinnamon of Red Hots or Atomic Fireballs and the gentler flavor of Ceylon cinnamon.

If the hand-cleaning is a bigger issue than the counter space, try this with your stationary blender: half-fill it with warm water, add a few drops of dish soap, put the lid on, and run the blender for a few seconds. Dump, rinse, disassemble, and that's it!

Emmalish, thanks for finding those pictures. The one thing they don't show is that if your roll is longer than your ruler, you can work across and back: push with the ruler and pull the paper in that area, then slide the ruler over a bit and repeat, etc. Then work your way back down the roll until it's even.

Ooh, those muffins look like an idea worth keeping, especially since we may be on the hook for breakfast for two dozen in a couple of weeks. Being the type of person I am, I wonder if they'd work with some crunchy bacon pieces added, and then maybe using the rendered bacon fat in place of an equal amount of whatever other oil or fat was included?

That tofu looks REALLY good. Any chance of another Ladies Lunch on this side of the border before the snow starts to fly?

Or a homebrew supply store, which may or may not be the same as the wine making supply store.

Have you ever tried this with honey rather than maple syrup? I like the general concept, but my husband isn't into maple.

Waffles.

At the risk of going off-topic, although this might be interesting information for anyone else who is contemplating producing a cookbook: Word is a decent tool for getting the text of a project into shape, especially if it's something that has multiple authors or that needs a few go-rounds between author and editor. But AFTER that process, when it's time to make the cookbook look pretty and perfect and consistent, whoever is in charge of layout will port the document(s) into a more specialized layout program. And at this stage, text that's been changed WITHOUT HAVING A PARAGRAPH FORMAT OR CHARACTER FORMAT APPLIED is a designer's nightmare. I'm not saying that I want to remove the ability to create text that is italicized, underlined, or boldface. But when I'm working on a document that needs to be internally consistent, such as (one hopes) a cookbook, it's vital that all formatting gets consistently applied. For example, in cookbooks, each recipe usually has a title. On the page, the titles of recipes are generally typographically differentiated: different size, different typeface, different color, different treatment, what have you. You could do all this manually: change the font family, change the size, change the color, make it italic, and make a note of what you did so that you can do the same thing for each following recipe. Or you could create a paragraph format, which you'd call something like Recipe Title so you know what you're using it for, which includes all this, and apply that paragraph format to every recipe title. The paragraph format could even include instructions such as "Always start at the top of an odd-numbered page". If you do this, and you've set up your cookbook file to be printed on both sides of the paper and bound into a book, every recipe title and presumably the recipe that belongs with that title will start on a right-side page, without you needing to do anything else to it. (No need to manually put in page breaks or insert empty pages!) You could also just start at the top of a page, without specifying even- or odd-numbered pages, in which case the recipe title (and recipe) would start on the next new page. The real beauty comes if you decide to change the way your recipe titles look. If you've manually applied the changes, you need to then find each recipe's title, and change it from right-justified blue boldface 16-point Arial to center-justified red small caps italic 14-point Times (or whatever), and repeat those changes on every title throughout. If you've used paragraph styles, you make the changes within the Recipe Title paragraph style, and bam! it automatically updates everything that has the Recipe Title paragraph format, with NO chance of a rogue blue character or a comma or period that somehow escaped being italicized. Spend a little bit of time up front to create paragraph styles for the recipe's title, any notes, the ingredients, the procedure, even photo captions or table headings or whatever else you need in your book, apply them consistently, and you've taken care of most of the formatting. Paragraph formats apply to an entire paragraph. Word (and most other programs) have character formats in addition to paragraph formats. These are useful when you want part of a paragraph to look different than the rest of the paragraph (such as a few italicized words, or to add some characters from the Symbol font if the character you need is not available in the font you're using as the base for your paragraph format). When you click that little B button in the Word toolbar, you're applying an override to the paragraph format. These overrides wreak havoc later on: they don't necessarily transfer into your designer's layout program; if they do transfer, they create extra work for your designer; and they're easy to lose. (I speak as someone who has spent hours hunting through a hundreds-of-pages document for the one period that's italicized but is not supposed to be, and that will screw up the printing process if you leave it in.) What I would prefer to see, instead, is a B button that does not apply an override, but instead applies a character style called "Bold" (or, better yet, "Strong") where the character style is to make the text bold and leave everything else (typeface, size, color, and the like) untouched. This would have the same overall effect, and be transparent to most users, but make the editor's and designer's lives much easier in the long run. Ditto for the I and U buttons: have them apply character styles, not overrides. You can keep your buttons; I wish they worked differently because of all the busywork it would save! From an editor and sometime designer's point of view, if you want to write a cookbook, there are a few little things that you can do when you get started that will ease the process later on, and make you into one of those authors that editors like to work with, at least from a technical point of view. With that, I'll get off my soapbox.

I'm lucky enough to live within range of Wegmans, where the "club pack" of chicken breasts are individually vacuum-sealed. We cut them apart on the dotted lines, put the individual breasts (still sealed) into a ziplock bag that we label and date, and toss the whole thing into the freezer. It's easy to pull out and quick-thaw as many as you need, although lately the ones we've gotten are so giant that one breast feeds both of us. My MIL is quite envious of the packaging, since all she can get is a massive pack where if you toss it in the freezer, you'll get a giant single unit.

I would certainly think that your designer will drop a document into his template. However, you can make your editor's life much easier if you use paragraph and character formats appropriately in your document. Speaking as an editor, I'd dearly love to remove the bold, italic, and underline buttons from the toolbar of Word, and replace them with buttons that will apply an appropriate character style! Believe it or not, the extra spaces, tabs, and the like aren't a big deal. I use a macro package to do this for me: I click a button, sit back, and it cleans up all of this sort of thing for me. I know I'm a couple of days late on this, but check with your designer first, to be sure you need to spend your time doing this rather than working on other tasks that are less easily automated.