MelissaH

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been a most enjoyable week. This has been a most enjoyable week. This has been a most enjoyable week. MelissaH

Definitely contact Chufi. We did a market tour with her, and it was the best day we spent in Amsterdam. She knows everything there is to know about marketing there! MelissaH

I think a jug of pancake mix could be awesome if you're camping. . . ← Bingo! We have a winner!

Kerry, you implied above that you're driving to Buffalo, and thus keeping your flights entirely in the US rather than dealing with international flights. IYHO, is it easier to smuggle good cheese on land, or in the air? (Not that either of us or anyone else on eG would ever dream of doing anything along those lines, of course! ) Wish I could witness the festivities first-hand, rather than vicariously. MelissaH

I called Pulaski Meat Market, the Polish butcher in Utica. They don't carry any veal, so they don't have veal bones. I haven't tried looking up any of the slaughterhouses directly. (I suspect they probably don't deal directly with consumers very often, at any rate.) Where do the veal bones that show up in NYC come from? MelissaH

I looked for veal bones in several places in central New York, where I live. My local supermarket, Price Chopper, laughed. Our nearest Wegman's shook their heads. I tried at a small grocery store here that's known for their meats. No dice. As a last-ditch effort, I tried the German butcher in the big city. They could do osso buco, at $12/lb as a special order. (No thanks.) But they also said that I might have better luck in Utica. Apparently, all the veal slaughterhouses in this area are in Utica. The butcher I spoke with mentioned a Polish butcher somewhere in Utica, a place that's been there forever and whose name I can't remember. I may actually get to Utica next week, and it should be cold enough that I'll have no trouble keeping meat cold in the back of the car. I'd like to try making veal stock, but the raw ingredients are far from a sure bet here. MelissaH

I've made two batches of ice cream in the last two days. Yesterday, I did the lemon ice cream. I had Meyer lemons on hand, so that's what I used. Because so many of the recipes have been so tooth-achingly sweet as written, I started out with half the sugar in the recipe. The directions have you zesting the lemons directly into the blender, adding the sugar, and whizzing them together till both zest and sugar are fine. I couldn't get this to happen in my blender; the blades whirred around but didn't do anything to zest or sugar. I added the juice and then was able to get things moving. I added half-and-half and a pinch of salt, whizzed, and tasted. Much to my surprise, it was TOO tart. I wound up dumping in spoonfuls of sugar till it tasted right. After an hour in the fridge, it went into my ice cream maker. It got another hour or so in the freezer to firm up, and was perfect for after lunch. Today, it was my turn for the malt ball ice cream. I made the custard base last night. Following Kerry Beal's advice, I started with half the sugar. And that was about right. Today, about the time our homebrewing session was wrapping up, I was churning ice cream. It's still in our freezer firming up a bit more, but what I licked off the dasher was marvelously decadent and worth doing again. MelissaH

Lucky you, with some semblance of standardization by color. Our supermarket tends to group the milk cartons by color. All the red ones go together, the greens together, etc. The problem is that some brands use green for 2%, while other brands use green for skim! I always take the time to look carefully. All the UP creams from the dairy are different shades of blue. The non-UP creams are shades of yellow or tan. MelissaH

We got home from our holiday travels last night and headed out to get some cheap pizza for dinner and some milk for breakfast. And lo and behold, at our local dairy, we found something new: a quart container of so-called gourmet heavy cream, with 40% butterfat! (For comparison purposes, the "regular" heavy cream is 36%.) The regular stuff is available in both ultra-pasteurized and non-ultra versions, but the gourmet variety only comes UP. I guess you can't have everything, and I suspect they might not sell enough gourmet cream to make it worth their while for regular-shelf-life pasteurization. So, now that I have a quart of 40% butterfat cream, what do I do with it? I also have four Meyer lemons on hand, but the two don't necessarily need to be connected. I do have an ice cream maker! MelissaH

I'm hoping this is the year that Shirley Corriher finally publishes BakeWise. MelissaH

Or if you're looking for a nice little finger-food munchie type thing: Let some cream cheese and some soft goat cheese soften at room temperature, then beat them together with a mixer to make something that's pipeably soft. If I'm doing this for me and people I know well, I don't use much cream cheese, but for a roomful of students who aren't so into the goat thing, I use about half and half. If the mixture doesn't get sufficiently soft, beat in a smidge of heavy cream, a tablespoon at a time, to save your hands from aching later. For some extra zip, you can add some coarsely ground peppercorns to the mixing bowl. Scrape the cheese mixture into a ziplock bag, press out the air and seal the top. Snip a corner open and use the ziplock as a piping bag to squeeze the contents onto small plain crunchy boring crackers (or cookies if you'd prefer to take this in a sweeter direction, I suppose; tiny gingersnaps might be interesting). Then on top of each, arrange a few pomegranite seeds that you've whacked out of a whole fruit. One pomegranite will give you more than enough seeds for six dozen nibbles. If you want to get really fancy for the holidaze, add a sprinkle of something green, such as chopped mint leaves if you want to go sweet or snipped chives if you want to stay savory, either on top or beaten into the cheese. I don't usually bother because I don't want to detract from the pomegranite seeds. MelissaH

I liked the dolsot bibimbap at Chorong House better than the one at Tokyo Seoul. 1121 E Fayette St Syracuse, NY 13210 (315) 428-0501 MelissaH

maher, This sounds delightful. I'll have to give it a try at some point. I've also successfully taken out Arabesque from the campus library, and found the ouzi (sp) recipe within. If not now, then definitely in January! All the recipes I'm finding seem to require cooking the rice in some kind of flavorful liquid. How much would I lose if I used leftover rice? I have lots of that in my fridge today. MelissaH

Hm. I've never gotten questions at Wegman's, but then again I'm also careful to always weigh and tag my produce in the produce section so it just needs to be scanned. Our local Price Chopper, OTOH, is getting worse by the day. Not long ago, a checker actually had to ask, "Broccoli or cauliflower?" MelissaH

Yes, it is. I discovered that too, along the way. Ooh, I think our library has a copy of this book. I'll have to check it out. This restaurant (might have been Casablanca, might have been somewhere else) didn't think a roast leg of lamb was a necessary accompaniment, but the yogurt side was quite nice. This looks close to what I remember eating. I'll have to give this a shot, I think. Thanks a bunch, M. Lucia! MelissaH

We finally had the opportunity to use some over Thanksgiving. (We live a six-hour drive from the nearest TJ's, and nothing frozen would be frozen still by the time it got home. Ah, the joys of a station wagon!) We baked it blind, and heaped slow-cooked onions over the top. Delicious. MelissaH

When we were visiting in Tucson over Thanksgiving, my sister suggested that we eat at a Middle Eastern restaurant one night. We gladly said yes, since we don't have any of those in my town. (And this one had a belly dancer, to boot!) We asked my sister what was particularly good, and she and her boyfriend both immediately said, "The oozie." So that's what I got. Oozie turned out to be a rice dish, nicely seasoned, with small pieces of meat, onions, and pine nuts. I got mine with chicken, but it was also on the menu with lamb or beef. And it was wonderful! Since returning home, I've been trying to find a recipe for oozie, without success. Does this sound at all familiar? Is there another name or spelling for this dish that I should be looking for? MelissaH

I'm practically crying reading this blog, both from the beauty of it and the fact that I can almost taste everything but I'm here, not there! MelissaH

We used to be able to find packaged herbs labeled as "herbs for fish" and "herbs for poultry" and the like. The packs would include a couple of sprigs of several different herbs, the specifics depending on what the herbs were meant to be used for. I liked them because I'd get just a little bit of a bunch of things, so I could get many different flavors. I haven't seen them around here for a while, though. Guess it's time to get the Aerogarden going again for the winter. MelissaH

If you're concerned about direct contact between the bag and the pie crust, you could probably use foil directly on top of the crust, and then put the bag on the foil. The bag wouldn't contact the food that way, so it wouldn't get buttery-greasy and it wouldn't leach anything through direct contact. But you'd also get the easy-out advantage. MelissaH

Reading about this is the next-best thing to being there. What a treat! MelissaH

On one leg of our Thanksgiving flights, we were served breakfast: a little bowl of Cheerios, a carton of milk, and a banana. Best airline food I've been served in years. MelissaH

This is a great idea. You're right on the texture aspect. I'd been thinking about that ever since I read the Cool-Whip suggestion. I'm going to have to go with the frosting! ← Or maybe instant mashed potatoes, made up to whatever density you want to practice with? (I didn't make this up myself. I think the idea came from Regan Dailey's book In The Sweet Kitchen.) MelissaH

We've done our stuffing in a slow cooker for many years, dating back to the times when we had only a miserable tiny oven. And I agree with previous posts: SIMPLIFY YOUR MENU! Get down to just a couple of munchies that you can prep way ahead of time, or better yet, ask people to bring their favorite. Remember, there's a lot of food to come, and at least for me, the primary goal of munchies is to keep people out of your way! Either soup or salad should be plenty, if you feel you need either. (Do you have enough dishes?) I'd go with one form of potato. I'd also think that if you're having a cornbread stuffing, you don't need to have cornbread on the table in addition. Desserts are another good candidate for making ahead of time, or having other people bring. The best part of T-giving for me is having friends and family around. I try to engineer the menu such that I'm not too flustered to enjoy their company. MelissaH

We used to use plastic grocery bags, doubled up, inside our kitchen trash can. But since we redid the kitchen and got a new nifty sliding trash can, we use commercial bags. The plastic ones have been building up, and it's not so easy to find somewhere around here that recycles them. (I know Wegman's does, but I never remember to bring them.) I've heard about people cutting plastic grocery bags into strips and then knitting them into a tote bag, but I have yet to try it myself. We have one of Wegman's $0.99 reusable bags. I'm getting better about grabbing it from the back of the car when I go in to shop. MelissaH