MelissaH

Rob, that purple color is amazing. Do they stay this color after cooking?

I didn't discover green bean casserole till I moved away from home, because my family never made it. Since then, I've seen it done both ways: canned beans and frozen. I can't abide it with canned green beans. (Then again, I can't abide canned green beans in anything, even when they haven't been re-cooked.) With frozen green beans, I like it. I've also tried several of the homemade versions, and they don't do it for me the same way that the cream of mushroom soup and can of fried mushrooms do. That's not to say that the homemade versions aren't tasty; to me, they're just something different that isn't the classic casserole.

My favorite use for the little prune plums is Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Dimply Plum Cake. If you have plums to spare, I'd be interested in your comparison of the two. <nudge, nudge> Anna, I too am a prime sourdough killer. When you figure out the secret to keeping a starter going without either going crazy or being completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of starter you toss out, please share it with me!

I kinda enjoyed watching Richard Blais in his original stint on Top Chef. But the more I see of him since then, the more of a cad he seems and the less I like him. I shudder to think of what's going to happen once he gets overexposed, as it sounds like is happening.

If you're looking for something you can just add water to, what about mixing the hot sauce powder with sodium acetate?

Shelby, would some variation on rice and beans work for your dad? There are so many possible variations, and all the ones I've tried freeze very well.

Myers is my favorite rum for baking. The flavor is assertive enough to not get lost and it seems to work well in my recipes, and it's not prohibitively expensive.

Oh, man, I'd love to be there for that playdate!

Anna, when you find a good pasty recipe, please share it. It's almost the season when we can find fresh rutabagas here!

Getting back to basics: last night we were invited next door for dinner, which was marvelous. One of the dishes on the table was the last jar of last year's applesauce; there won't be any more for another month or so because our neighbor likes to use northern spy apples to make her applesauce. Her sauce is chunky and spiced, but you could definitely tell that it was not made from a sweeter apple. What apples do yinz like to use for applesauce? Do you look for something specific, or just use whatever you can get, cheap, at the time you're ready for applesauce? Will you hold out for practically the last apples of the year, like my neighbor?

Smithy, you called these "wild apples." Are these like normal domesticated apples that have gone feral, or are they some form of never-domesticated apple? Or are they actual crab apples (which we can buy at a few farms in our area)?

If you have a lot of gunk, is there any way you can pre-filter to get at least some of it out? Back in my synthetic organic chemist days, it was pretty rare for us to filter through a Buchner funnel with a paper. When we were working up reactions, a very common last step before purification was to add a powdered drying agent and swirl it around. It would suck up any last bits of water or aqueous solutions. Then to get rid of the drying agent, we'd send the whole thing through a fritted funnel topped with a layer of Celite (diatomaceous earth). The Celite wouldn't clog as quickly as a filter paper would, and if it did it was easy to scrape off the top bit with a metal spatula and clear out the filter bed. (Side note: home beer brewers live in dread of a stuck mash: when the grain bed clogs up and the water can't flow through. The classic homebrew solution is to add some rice hulls to the mash grain. The rice hulls act sort of like the Celite, sort of like a pre-filtration, to catch the fine stuff that can gum up the rest of the works.) Anyhow, when we'd dried and filtered the solution, we'd pop it on the rotovap to remove the solvent, sometimes pump on it with a vacuum to make sure all the solvent was gone, and then purify our compound by some appropriate means.

I'm definitely talking to you before my next camping trip, Kerry!

Um, Kerry? I think this might just be the biggest understatement ever on eG! Nonetheless, I envy you, and look forward to seeing what you do with your new toy!

IIRK, Cook's Illustrated also liked Farmland's bacon best out of all they tried. It doesn't seem to exist in upstate NY, or Michigan, or western PA. Maybe it's a western brand?

Thanks for all the suggestions. After yesterday's batch, I think I've traced part of my issue to rolling up the bunch of herbs in paper towels: the water on the inside leaves can't evaporate, doesn't get wicked away, and keeps things wet. I just stuck each bunch in a jar with an inch of water in the bottom, and let the tops splay open to dry. Lucky for me, I don't need to use them for a few hours yet, so they have time, and if they're still looking wet after another couple of hours, I'll put a fan on the counter to blow it away. The chamber sealer suggestion has merit, but the scientist in me cringes at the thought of purposely sucking away all that moisture without a proper trap to keep it out of the pump!

As for cooked sausage rounds: On PBS, I caught a show (don't remember which one) where Cook's Illustrated tasted breakfast sausages. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that they said the precooked brown-and-serve versions were the tastiest. I wonder if something like that would work in the sandwich maker? And for the eggs: one of our local watering holes cooks all their breakfast sandwich eggs in the microwave, using pbear's method from what I can see. Do you have to pre-toast the muffin, or does the sandwich maker take care of that? I'm up to at least 3 (frying pan on stove, microwave, sandwich maker) and possibly 4 (toaster) for the number of appliances you'd need to make a sandwich with the new toy, Anna!

You know how you see people on TV chop their parsley and cilantro into a beautiful fluffy green pile? I can't do that with the herbs I get at the supermarket. Both the cilantro and parsley I can buy are grown in dirt. I know this because the dirt is clinging to the stems and leaves. Since I don't feel the need for extra mineral content in my diet, I need to wash the herbs before I use them. (Once, I tried chopping then washing. Big mistake.) Once I wash them, I can't get them dry enough to chop into anything but a soggy mess. I've tried a vigorous shake, a trip salad spinner, a roll in paper towels, a roll in cloth kitchen towels, and just about every permutation of these. I've tried doing the washing and the drying in the morning, when I won't need to use them till late afternoon or evening. I still can't get them dry enough to chop easily. About the only things I haven't done yet are to aim a fan at them and blast them with the heat gun. Is there a good way to dry my parsley and cilantro? When they're dry, I have no trouble chopping them.

I can taste a difference. It's subtle, but it's there, and the nuttiness of the browned butter enhances the butterscotchiness as well as the pecans (or walnuts; I've used both successfully). Part of my propellant issue may have been that at the time, I lived at an altitude of about 5000 ft. The lower atmospheric pressure meant that there was a greater pressure difference between inside the can and outside, so it may have upset the balance between the amount of contents and amount of propellant. (If a can sits for a while and the seal isn't perfect, some of the propellant can also leak, regardless of your altitude, which also doesn't help.) But I got so fed up with the other issues that I never went back to the sprays with flour!

No. I've been browning the butter in a saucepan on the stove, adding the brown sugar while the butter is still hot so I can melt away any lumps, letting it cool so it doesn't cook the egg, and then adding everything else. Plenty of room to mix. My experiences with floured pan spray were universally awful: turned the pan sticky and black, clogged nozzle, propellant lost so that I couldn't push out half the contents of the can. What brand are you using that you like?

I've been doing my mixing in the pan with the same silicone spatula I use to mash the brown sugar into the melted butter and get rid of any lumps, and then at the end to scrape the batter into the pan. Is this not the right implement? Does the pan ordinarily need to be treated? I've gone to parchment because it's so easy to get whatever you've baked out afterwards, and because I always have it on hand.

I certainly don't think you're missing something, except maybe some mussel meat. I've never heard of mussels all falling out of their shells. And piling up the empty shells seems beyond ludicrous to me. Then again, I've only ever eaten mussels in North America and Europe, not in your part of the world, so my regional bias might be showing!

Here's my second take on Kerry's blondie recipe. This time, I browned the butter and then melted in the brown sugar far enough ahead of time that it had cooled down so it didn't cook the egg. I also boosted the amount of salt (because I use Diamond Crystal, which is less dense than many other salts) and vanilla extract (taking a cue from the Cook's Illustrated recipe mentioned above). I also added walnuts (untoasted because I'm lazy, and sprinkled on top, so they might toast a bit during the bake) and (ssssh, don't tell anyone) stirred in a double handful or so of chocolate chips before I scraped the batter into a parchment-lined pan. I don't know if you can see it in this photo, but the same thing happened this time as last: there's a thin layer of grease on the outside. There's enough grease (presumably from the butter) to get through or around the parchment and stay behind on the pan. It doesn't make the eating unpleasant, but it does leave your fingers a bit slimy. Any ideas what might cause it, or how I can get rid of it?

Silly little thing, but the can opener my FIL gave us for xmas the year before he passed away. It's the kind that uncrimps the lid rather than slices the metal, and it's still working beautifully, even given my left-handed ineptitude with can openers. I have to smile every time I use it, because it makes me think of him.

Not that I've noticed, at least with cookies (which I also bake on parchment on these same sheet pans) or things that go in deeper pans. Maybe I'll have to pay more attention to whether the bottom browning depends on where in the oven they bake, and whether I get lazy and do multiple pans at one time in the oven.