MelissaH

Klary, Your pik in 't potje recipe brought me back to the vacation we took during the summer of 2003, during which my husband and I spent a week riding our tandem bicycle through the roads of Zeeland. Glorious time. One of the discoveries we made on that vacation was vla, bought from the grocery store in a carton like a milk carton. We drank a liter of chocolate vla every day, straight from the carton. And then we cycled back into Belgium and it disappeared from the store shelves. Do you have a recipe for vla? Or is it something that everyone buys from the store? MelissaH

interesting. What about parsley root? Is that available in the US? you don't see that in the markets over here very often nowadays, but it used to be a key ingredient in Dutch cooking - soups, stews etc. ← Occasionally, and depending on which supermarket I shop at, I'll see bunches of parsley with their roots still attached. Ditto on cilantro root.

Hi everyone, The chili cook-off is coming at a good time. Our local college hockey team has a game this Saturday afternoon at 3 PM, which is a rare event since most games don't start till 7 or so. But the timing is perfect for inviting the buddies we sit with back to our place afterward for dinner. And the plan is to have a crockpot full of chili cooking for us through the day, and ready to eat after the game. But what goes with chili? I'm particularly looking for things that are either quick, or can be done in advance. (Or both!) We're planning to do cornbread in some form; I'm hoping that we might be able to do that ahead of time and then just reheat it right before serving. (Our backup plan: just have someone bring a bag of tortilla chips.) We're also thinking maybe salad, since that's also easy and quick, and someone else could bring that. Any other suggestions for sides to go with chili? And I'm particularly stumped about dessert. Is there a classic dessert to follow chili? Or should I just whip up a batch of brownies in the morning? Make sure I have ice cream in the freezer? (Or hope someone else offers to bring something?) Thanks, MelissaH

Chufi, Thanks again for starting this thread and posting all the wonderful pictures to go with your delicious-sounding recipes. To answer a question that you asked: I've never seen bunches of celery leaves for sale in the U.S. In fact, right now it's hard for me to even find bunches of celery with many leaves left on them! For some reason, the stores around here tend to de-leaf their celery, and sell them denuded, which is a shame because I love to include celery leaves in my soups. (During farmer's market season, I can easily get celery with some leaves. But farmer's market season doesn't usually scream "SOUP!!!" the way now does.) MelissaH

YMMV. I always had problems keeping milk in glass bottles good: see this thread. MelissaH

Chufi, I'll add my echo of thanks for starting this thread. You mentioned that winters are not as icy as they used to be. What, exactly, would a typical January day be like? Rainy? What sorts of clothing do people wear these days to stay warm and dry? (Yes, there's an ulterior motive here: I'll be journeying to your part of the world in early January, and I'd like to blend in rather than stand out thanks to entirely American outerwear!) Is Dutch cooking best eaten at home, or can it be experienced properly as a traveler? If I make some of your recipes, will I be dreadfully disappointed when I get there myself in person? MelissaH

My MIL makes and then cans her own apple pie filling. She uses Northern Spy apples, but if Haralsons are a good pie apple, I see no reason why it wouldn't work for that. I don't have her recipe here at work, so I can't provide more details. MelissaH

Last weekend my husband and I took a little trip. We spent one night in Kingston, ON, at the Frontenac Club Inn, a delightful B&B, and were served baked apples as the first course of our breakfast. We asked, and were told they used (unpeeled) Honeycrisp apples: they're apparently somewhat rare in that area of Ontario, but they worked well for this. They were filled with a little granola, and I think some maple syrup also. The dregs were great for sopping with bread! MelissaH

I completely agree with that. In fact, if Abra hadn't shared her wonderful choux discovery with me, I'd still be making mediocre cream puffs. ← So what, exactly, is this marvelous discovery of Abra's? MelissaH

I don't care so much how the recipe is written, because I almost always rewrite it myself before making it. I'm not willing to bring one of my precious cookbooks into my kitchen, partly because I have so little workspace that I don't want to use it for laying a book down, and partly because I'm not always the neatest in the kitchen while I'm at work there. So I look at the recipe, read it over several times, and then "pre-lab" it to make myself a procedure. I include the details where I want them, sometimes I change the order of things, and I say as much about a step as I need for myself. Someone else looking at my scribbles would be hard-pressed to figure out what I mean, but it usually makes sense to me...and if I'm the one cooking then I'm the only one that really matters. If I do something enough, I'll put my pre-labbed version into the computer so I can just zap out copies as needed, but for me, rewriting the procedure helps me keep straight in my mind exactly what needs to be done, especially if it's not something I've made a zillion times before. By the time I'm familiar enough with it, I generally know the recipe well enough that I don't need to write down anything but maybe an ingredient list. When I'm writing up a recipe for someone else, I often write up a somewhat bare bones version, with an ingredient list with quantities and any prep first and then directions afterward, but I'll liberally footnote the directions to add my thoughts. That way, my readers can read or ignore at their preference. MelissaH

I make the waffle recipe also, but with a slight modification to the technique (courtesy of the yeast waffle recipe in a not-too-long-ago issue of Cook's Illustrated). I tend to cut back on the butter a bit, with no ill results, because my husband's going to put butter on the waffles no matter what. I cut back the yeast, to about half a package. I also add the eggs right into the mix from the start. Then I put the batter avec les oeufs into the largest pitcher I have (about 2.5 quarts), put the lid on, stick a plate in my fridge (for secondary containment), and put the pitcher on the plate. With this method, there's no need for baking soda, and the whole thing's ready to go in the morning! MelissaH

Ours still stank after being open for better than half an hour. It was big-time off. MelissaH

Back around T-giving, we bought some lamb shoulder at Wegman's in Syracuse, about an hour from home, because we were there anyway and we couldn't find what we wanted closer to home. They opened a cryovac package, cut off the chunk we wanted, and wrapped it. We immediately went to the checkout, and then rested the meat (along with a few other refrigerated items) in a cooler with some ice. As we drove home, we noticed a slight sulfide-like odor in the car. Once we got home and unloaded the car from all the day's errands, we noticed the smell in the kitchen. We opened the lamb, to start prepping the stew for dinner in a couple of days. And then we realized that it was, in fact, the lamb that stunk. We called Wegman's immediately and described the problem. They told us to throw it out, save the receipt, and next time we were in the neighborhood to stop back at the meat counter. As it happened, we were back down there about a week later, and brought the receipt to the meat counter. We found the person who had helped us and who we had spoken to on the phone, and he signed off on the receipt. A quick stop at the customer service desk, and we had our money back. We haven't bought lamb for stew since. We wound up getting some beef chuck and using that in our day-before-Thanksgiving stew instead. MelissaH

The last pie I made, I used the crust recipe from the latest (Sept. 2005) issue of Cook's Illustrated, which they'd intended for use in a deep-dish apple pie but which I used with cherries. The ingredients: 12.5 oz AP flour 1 tsp table salt 1 Tbsp sugar 2 sticks butter, cubed (they said frozen for 10 min; I didn't) 3 Tbsp sour cream 1.3 c ice water They used a food processor method. I have no dishwasher and dislike cleaning that machine, so I made my crust by hand, hence my reason for not freezing the butter. They buzzed the dry ingredients together, buzzed in the butter, mixed together the sour cream and water, and buzzed that in too, half at a time. I whisked together the dry stuff, flattened each individual butter cube with my hands, making sure that at least some of the cubes broke down even more, and then folded in the wet stuff with a big rubber scraper. From there, I divided the dough into two parts, shaped each into a disk, wrapped the disks in plastic wrap, and stashed them in the fridge for an hour or so. My husband really liked the pie I made, and this crust was a big reason why he liked it so much. Therefore, I'd like to do it again. My dilemma: I don't normally like to keep full-fat sour cream on hand. This recipe only uses 3 Tbsp/batch of crust, which leaves me with lots of leftover sour cream. I suppose I could just make lots and lots of pies or cakes in a brief timespan before the sour cream goes bad, but I don't want to do that to my waistline. My question: would it be possible for me to portion out the remnants of my sour cream into 3 Tbsp. blobs, possibly in ice-cube trays, freeze the portions, and then bag for later use? I'm sure it wouldn't be much good for eating on baked potatoes or the like, but would my pie crusts suffer, since it just gets mixed with water and added in? I have freezer space for sour cream ice cubes, but I don't have freezer space to store crust for two dozen pies. MelissaH

My husband's doughnut recipe, inherited down the line from his great-grandmother, is also a yeasted dough with potatoes. I haven't tried making them yet. Must get over "fear of frying" one of these years! MelissaH

Would it be out of the question for you to make a small cake, of whatever variety she's going to be using, and frost it with whatever icing would make you happy but still be close to what the bride thinks she wants, and deliver that to the bride? (As far as decoration, I'd do either nothing or just a very simple border.) That way she would know what she's getting, and if there's been an accident, food is always good to have around. MelissaH

What about doing dishes? My husband is wonderful in most ways. We share the cooking and the cleanup, mostly evenly. But I don't like the way he does dishes, and his mother doesn't like the way I do dishes. Him: Start with a dishrag, a bottle of dish soap, an empty sink, and a sink stopper. Put the stopper in the sink, add hot water to half-fill, and while it fills add a couple of squirts of dish soap so you get lots of suds. Once the sink is full, turn the sink down to a trickle. Dump a bunch of dishes into the water. Pull one out, wipe it clean with the dishrag, and hold it under the trickle to rinse before placing in the drainer. Repeat. The sink of water gets less and less sudsy, more and more full, and really disgustingly greasy by the time it's full enough to need to briefly pull up the sink stopper and drain back to half-full. More than once, I've found dishes in the drainer that still have a greasy slime coating them, presumably from being dragged through the dishwater and not being adequately rinsed by the trickle...or by inadvertent dipping back into the dishwater during the rinse! Me: Start with a scruffy, a bottle of dish soap, and room under the faucet. Wet the scruffy with hot water, and add a bit of dish soap. Put some dishes in the sink, so that the rinse water from previous dishes starts to degunk them. Take one dish at a time, and rinse well with hot water before scrubbing clean. Rinse clean, and place in the drainer. Add another dribble of dish soap to the scruffy, as needed to maintain good cleaning power. We haven't actually done the read-the-meter test for equal quantities of equally dirty dishes, to see who uses less water. But by this time next year, we should have a dishwasher! MelissaH

Has anyone ever used a propane-fired smoker? The one I'm thinking of has a metal chamber just like any of the others, but the whole thing is designed to sit on a gigantic high-powered burner like the ones for turkey frying (or like my husband uses when he makes beer). You put wood chunks in the bottom, and turn on the burner only long enough to get the wood smokin' hot. Then once that's happened, you can turn the burner off. If you need to reload, you just fire the burner again. I'm drawn to this approach for a couple of reasons. First, we always have propane on hand, both for our Weber grill and for the aforementioned beer burner. Second, since we don't have a charcoal grill, we have no reason to keep charcoal on hand, and I'm inclined to stay away from charcoal smokers for that reason. Are there any downsides to a propane smoker, if you're already highly propane-oriented and charcoal-disinclined? MelissaH

Do you have any favorite recipes? Particularly things that could make use of some of the late summer produce bounty? MelissaH

What about LEDs? Are they used for in-home lighting anywhere yet? MelissaH

I can: my Price Chopper has all sorts of flavors on the shelf. This from a store that doesn't have a great selection of many things! Now, what I can't find at all here: malted milk powder. We used to have easy access to Carnation brand in both chocolate and normal flavors when we lived in Ohio. Here, nada! We've taken to importing it from our trips to visit the in-laws in Michigan. What marketing whizzes decided that nobody would buy the stuff here? MelissaH

Very!! MelissaH

Jack, Thanks for the demo. One of my goals for this fall semester is to get organized enough that I can get a starter going and bake every weekend! On the subject of cleaning up afterward: I've always had much better luck de-gooping everything with cold water first. I put my dough bowl, as well as any implements, in the sink and add water that's as cold as I can stand. Using my hands, I rub all the goopy surfaces under the cold water, and only once the goop is gone and down the drain do I switch to hot water and add soap. Before I discovered cold water, I killed many dishrags! MelissaH

I made ice cream yesterday. My recipe was one from Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer, and she calls it "baci" flavor: chocolate hazelnut. I didn't take pictures, because my hands were occupied with the ice cream and most of my work area was covered with equipment and ingredients so I didn't have a safe resting place for the camera. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but here's what happened. Complete recipe here. So, following the instructions but not quite in the order she specified, I made the custard on Saturday evening. I started by melting 4 ounces of 70% chocolate, and then setting it aside to cool until I was ready for it. I used Rapunzel brand chocolate, because that's what I had on hand. Then, while the chocolate cooled, I whisked the 4 egg yolks and 6 Tbsp. sugar together until light and ribbony. (I don't quite get why it's important to get them to a ribbon, though: it pretty much deflates in the next step.) While this was happening, I heated 2 cups of heavy cream and a splash of 2% milk to the boiling point. (The original recipe said 2.25 cups of heavy cream. In fact, nearly all her ice cream recipes from this book call for 2.25 cups of cream, so this must be something "nice" in the metric system, or at least a normal quantum of cream for sale in the UK. This being the US, where cream is quantized in cups, I filled in the last quarter cup with the highest fat milk I had in my fridge.) Once the cream reached the boiling point, I used about a third of it to temper the ribbony egg yolks, which I then added back into the pot of hot cream. I then whisked in the melted and cooled chocolate, and then 2 Tbsp. dutch-processed cocoa. In a divergence from the recipe, I put the pot back on medium highish heat, and actually brought the pot up to a boil, and then poured the contents of the pot through a sieve into a 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Nigella says to use a much lower heat and go only until thickened, with no mention of a sieve. I don't have that kind of patience, and in my experience, lumps can happen even on low heat. I learned long ago that it's best to make sure the ice cream mixture winds up in something with a spout! I then whisked in 7 ounces (by weight) of Nutella, and 2 tsp. of Torani hazelnut syrup, and only slopped a tiny little bit on the counter. Even before the Nutella, the mixture was looking more like pudding than ice cream base to me. By the time the Nutella was completely incorporated, it was still pourable but almost to the consistency of soft serve, albeit significantly warmer. It tasted really good, but I knew this would be something to serve in very small portions. Nigella says to cool in an ice bath, stirring every so often to avoid forming a skin on top. I didn't have enough ice to make an ice bath, so I just left it out for a little bit with plastic wrap pressed directly onto the surface so I didn't have to stir. Nigella doesn't say this, but I like to put my ice cream mixes into the fridge overnight (or at least for a few hours) to chill before churning them. So, into the fridge it went! Total mix volume was on the order of 3.5 cups. Yesterday morning, I got the freezer bowl out of the deep freeze and assembled the ice cream maker (Cuisinart brand). I got the ice cream mix out of the fridge, pulled the plastic wrap off the top, and was left with a semisolid clump of delicious goo that stayed put even when I turned the measuring cup upside down. I called my husband, turned the ice cream maker on, and the two of us (each armed with a silicone spatula) managed to transfer most of the goo into the freezer bowl. We left one of the spatulas in the mixing bowl next to the ice cream maker, and let it go...and go...and go. We tasted every so often, and noticed that the color did lighten up somewhat as air got incorporated, although the ice cream never did feel particularly frozen or cold to our tongues. I usually know the ice cream is done when the motor changes sound. After 40+ minutes, the motor still sounded the same but the ice cream hadn't changed much since the last taste test, so we declared it done. I scraped the stuff into a Rubbermaid container, pressed a piece of plastic wrap onto the surface, sealed the container, and put it into the deep freeze to finish hardening. After licking the dasher and the spatula (but not the freezer bowl) clean, I knew that we not only needed to serve this stuff in tiny portions, we needed something else with a contrasting texture and taste to go with. So I whipped up a batch of yeast waffle batter and stuck it in the fridge. This wasn't my best batch: in the process of trying to rush things along, I wound up developing much gluten, which resulted in a much thicker batter. From the batch of batter, I only got 4 very dense waffles that didn't spread much inside the waffle iron rather than about twice that many light, airy waffles that disappear into a cloud of crunch and ooze batter down the sides of the iron. I need to remember next time that if I need to rush waffles along, I must put the batter into the fridge in a container larger than 8 cups, so I don't have to beat it down three times over the course of a couple of hours to avoid having it grow out of the container and down the sides onto the refrigerator shelf. They tasted fine, but the texture contrast wasn't quite what I usually get and what I hoped for. Finally, after 6 hours in the deep freeze, we'd eaten dinner and were ready for dessert. As each waffle came out of the waffle iron, I broke the large square into 4 smaller squares (but because the waffle batter didn't spread like it usually does, the waffle quarters weren't squares so much as quarter-rounds), put two in a bowl, and added a quenelle of the ice cream. A sprinkle of chopped hazelnuts to finish it off, and it was ready to serve. Between four of us, I think we ate a total of about 6 spoonfuls of the ice cream (and all four waffles). It had marvelous flavor, but was sooooo rich! The waffles were absolutely necessary in this case, to contrast both flavor- and texture-wise. We're already thinking that we'll make the recipe again, but with some tweaks. For one thing, the egg yolks and Nutella add fat, so we're thinking we could use half-and-half (or possibly part half-and-half and part whole milk) rather than all heavy cream. I think for me, next time I'd also let the ice cream maker churn in some hazelnuts right at the very end. Or I'll just make sure the waffle batter is thin enough and add the hazelnut pieces to the waffle batter. I'm after something a little lighter and with a colder mouthfeel, yet I'd also like to keep the velvety mouthfeel that comes (at least in part) from having fat in the mix. I'm also curious to try adding a little hazelnut syrup to a chocolate ice cream base without Nutella, to see how much flavor you get from the syrup and how the Nutella affects the base thickness. And who knows: maybe I'll get lucky and the physics department will have some extra liquid nitrogen kicking around later this semester! MelissaH

Can you get Northern Spy apples? When I can get them, they're my favorites to use in a pie, either alone or in combination with something else. MelissaH