MelissaH

You've given me a great view of a city I only visited for a couple of days in March of 2007. There's so much more to it than we were able to see. Thank you!

Oh, I know, and we do so when we can get decent tomatoes and decent peppers. But there are times when opening a jar is a lot easier and better, or times when we're feeding the masses. And then it becomes annoying to find only wimpy salsa on the store shelves.

I love the idea of using power tools to deal with kitchen chores. As I recall, you use a lathe to peel winter squash, do you not? I think of Duluth's population as still being pretty homogenous: European ancestry, for the most part: Scandinavian, Germanic, Slavic, British Isles, based on the faces I see in the grocery store. However, the populations of the university and colleges here are quite mixed, as are the staff of the medical facilities: with 2 major hospital chains and I-don't-know-how many clinics, the medical practice accounts for a lot of employment around here. Unfortunately the demand for international cuisine hasn't been enough to keep any sort of specialty store afloat, except for a couple of Italian groceries that have been around here forever. (Italian immigrants were a major wave early in the last century.) The Oriental grocery died several years ago, I believe a victim of the general economic slump that hit us all around 2008. There's never been a good Middle Eastern or Indian grocery store here. I'm glad that Cub and Mt. Royal, my other favorite large grocery store here (still to be visited this week) are meeting the demand. I do, in fact, use a lathe to peel butternut squash, my favorite of the winter squashes. HUGE time-saver, if I'm doing more than one squash, but not so good on the ridged varieties like acorns. My corner of upstate NY is also pretty homogenous. I wouldn't be surprised if, around here, a mixed marriage consisted of someone from a family attending St. Stephen's, the Polish Catholic church, wedding someone from a family attending St. Mary's, the Italian Catholic church. (To say nothing of the other two Catholic churches still in town, or the three that have been closed since before we moved here. But, like Duluth but on a smaller scale, we also have a university and a hospital, which help a little. We had a Filipino grocer for a brief moment, started by one of the doctors who was Filipino, but she passed away suddenly and the store subsequently closed. If we can't find what we're looking for at the one big supermarket left in town (I'm looking at you, hot salsa!), we need to go to either Syracuse (an hour away) or Rochester (an hour and a half) for an Oriental, Indian, or Middle Eastern grocer. How far would you have to drive? Is it close enough that you're willing to do so, or do you resort to mail order or just go without?

I'm reminded of the ladies who make the pierogi at St. Stephen's Church here in Oswego. Every day of the week leading up to their big festival, they make one kind of pierogi, and one filling. First, they make the dough (usually three or four food processors and stand mixers going at a time), set each batch aside to rest for a moment, and pass a batch of rested dough on to someone else to roll it out and cut circles. The circles get placed on parchment-lined sheet pans, and sent on to the tables of fillers. The fillers take the balls of filling that were made yesterday, place each ball onto a dough circle, pinch the edges shut, and put the filled pierogi back onto the sheet pan. The pans then go to a checker, who checks that no filling has crept into the seal (which would result in the pierog opening in the boiling pot) and fixes any potential problems, and then put in the freezer to wait for the festival. When the day's batch is complete (meaning all the dough balls have been sealed into dough), the next day's filling gets mixed and scooped with a disher into individual balls, which are put on parchment lined sheet pans and frozen. The freezing helps to keep the filling in a rounded shape, which in turn keeps it away from the edges when the dough gets pinched shut so the pierogi stay properly sealed in the cooking process. Doing it the day before also helps to expedite the assembly line, because the filling becomes grab-and-go and because the dough makers will know exactly how many batches of dough they need to make that day, for the complete batch. The pierogi stay frozen until the festival, when they get boiled and then fried. They'll also sell them frozen, for people to take home and cook later.I wonder if a similar methodology of freezing ravioli filling in dollops would help to expedite your process? Great idea, and thanks for the evocative description of the St. Stephens assembly line! It's still amazing to me how efficient the assembly line production is: in just 3 or 4 hours, they can have literally a thousand pierogi finished, and about the same number of filling balls in the freezer for the next day's batch. When I haven't been busy during prep week, I've gone over to help but also (selfishly) to learn some of their secrets. The only jobs I haven't done at this point are mixing the dough and cooking the pierogi, because those are reserved for special people who have been at it for decades. I knew I was on their good side when they allowed me to roll the dough out flat! Making the pierogi is women's work at the church, although the cooking on the day of the festival is strictly men's work. Another thing that's strictly men's work is coring the cabbages for the golabki, with an electric drill and large bit! I think the first year I helped was the first time I'd ever seen a power tool repurposed for kitchen work. Smithy, you have a nice array of international cuisine sections in your supermarket. Is the population as diverse?

I'm reminded of the ladies who make the pierogi at St. Stephen's Church here in Oswego. Every day of the week leading up to their big festival, they make one kind of pierogi, and one filling. First, they make the dough (usually three or four food processors and stand mixers going at a time), set each batch aside to rest for a moment, and pass a batch of rested dough on to someone else to roll it out and cut circles. The circles get placed on parchment-lined sheet pans, and sent on to the tables of fillers. The fillers take the balls of filling that were made yesterday, place each ball onto a dough circle, pinch the edges shut, and put the filled pierogi back onto the sheet pan. The pans then go to a checker, who checks that no filling has crept into the seal (which would result in the pierog opening in the boiling pot) and fixes any potential problems, and then put in the freezer to wait for the festival. When the day's batch is complete (meaning all the dough balls have been sealed into dough), the next day's filling gets mixed and scooped with a disher into individual balls, which are put on parchment lined sheet pans and frozen. The freezing helps to keep the filling in a rounded shape, which in turn keeps it away from the edges when the dough gets pinched shut so the pierogi stay properly sealed in the cooking process. Doing it the day before also helps to expedite the assembly line, because the filling becomes grab-and-go and because the dough makers will know exactly how many batches of dough they need to make that day, for the complete batch. The pierogi stay frozen until the festival, when they get boiled and then fried. They'll also sell them frozen, for people to take home and cook later. I wonder if a similar methodology of freezing ravioli filling in dollops would help to expedite your process?

I'm a bit confused, Shel, about why you'd like a hand mixer if you're going to start making bread. I've always either done bread in a stand mixer, or by hand. What breadmaking tasks are you thinking would be made easier with a hand mixer?

I'd like to make better use of my freezers, both to hold things for later and then use them when it gets to be later.

My kitchen cabinets are from IKEA, and we've been very happy with them. They're also fairly easy to modify to fit your exact needs, if need be.

Many baking cookbook authors will tell you how *they* measure flour. I'll look at this, and then when I make a recipe from a cookbook the first time, I'll measure it their way into a bowl on my scale, and note how much that is in the recipe. After a few repetitions, or a few different recipes from the same book, it's usually possible to figure out how much a cup of flour weighs according to that particular cookbook. (Bonus: if you don't like what happens the first time, and it's something that seems related to the amount of flour, it's possible to add a little more or less and make adjustments that should carry through the rest of the cookbook if the author was consistent. But anymore, I have enough baking books that if I'm buying a new one, it really needs to have mass measurements.

I'm relieved to know that we aren't the only ones with a "to do and to eat" list!

gfweb has a good point: is the display dead? If so, try plugging something else into the outlet, to be sure it isn't an electrical issue with your home rather than a toaster problem. If the display still works, but nothing happens when you push the on button, then it's more likely an issue with your toaster.

Oh, with the right apps, it could be!

If the squash were so tough that I needed anything more sophisticated than the most basic lathe tools to take off the skin, I wouldn't bother.

If your canned pumpkin is too wet for gnocchi (which is a great idea), spread it out on some paper towels to absorb away some of the moisture. I do this for anything that's potentially affected by water, as it's always easier to add liquid than to take it out.

On the subject of pumpkin soup, I was browsing in our local indie bookstore yesterday, and opened Patricia Wells' latest book to a recipe for Thai pumpkin soup with crab. I didn't find anything else in the book that made me want to buy it, and I couldn't justify spending $35 for one recipe. Lucky for me, the recipe is available on line here, among other places: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/24/246739596/thanksgiving-dinner-deja-vu-try-french-food-this-year I think we're going to try it at some point. If you get to it before we do, please tell us how it is!

My husband made an onion gravy. We all liked it, but thought it maybe a tad sweet. Some of the recommendations from CeeCee may very well help with that, next time we try it. Thanks!

Lisa, that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. The flavors of Marmite or kombu definitely would not fly with this vegetarian!

Our Thanksgiving dinner has just enlarged to 7 people, one of whom is vegetarian (no meat, no fish). In addition to the turkey gravy, I'd like to make some gravy that everyone can put on mashed potatoes. The kicker is that the vegetarian does not eat mushrooms, and most of the vegetarian gravy recipes I've found seem to rely on mushrooms. Where do I go from here? Do you have a mushroom-free vegetarian gravy recipe that you like? Is my best bet maybe going to start with caramelized onions and red wine? Thanks!

Is this CSA box typical for your CSA? We tried the one in our area a couple of summers ago, and were disappointed. It seemed like every week, the bulk of our share was made up of a giant bunch of one variety or another of kale. We'd get other stuff too, but the kale was overwhelming. We were not able to have a list of dislikes as everyone got the same box, although it was possible to add "extras" if you wanted. Do you ever feel overwhelmed by some vegetable that keeps recurring in your CSA box like a horror movie nightmare?

For those who are into a little heresy and laziness now and then, the muffins I made from the pumpkin bread mix were pretty good. I mixed it up just as the package instructed, and added about a cup of chocolate chips. I got 12 muffins from one package. They held up well for about three days, until my friends and I finished them. We preferred them slightly warm over completely cooled. The pumpkin flavor was there, not overwhelmed by spices as is often the case.

I have a steel mesh glove, which I also use in conjunction with my mandoline. I usually slip a disposable nitrile glove overtop of it, so when I'm done I just peel the glove off and toss it, and if I've been careful I don't need to wash the cutproof glove.

Noooo! I am sorry to hear this, and glad that I can still go back and remember Dave via his foodblogs and other writings.

Anna, when you and Kerry find a raw food restaurant, I'd like to read what you say about eating there. The above bowls remind me (visually) of what friends feed their dogs. I wonder if they focused too much on the "vegan" and not enough on the "food" part of what a restaurant is supposed to do?

I have the bigger Breville oven. After about a year, the fan started to rattle. One call to customer service took care of the problem: they shipped me a new one at no cost; I sent the old one back, and it's been working beautifully ever since then. No complaints from me about temperature control, the way it toasts or bakes, or anything else. I'd have no hesitation to replace it with another one.

I, too, would like to know whether there's anything new other than the weights in the revised edition.