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

Actually, you might: too much salt and the freezing point will be so low that it won't freeze under normal ice-cream maker conditions at all! Cold cured salmon soup, anyone? MelissaH

At the Asian store we frequent, which has a Korean tilt, we picked up a package of something called "malt powder." My husband's a homebrewer, so I know what malt is and I know what it looks like. Well, this stuff isn't like any malt I've ever seen before: rather than a uniform powder (or even stuff that's recognizable as sprouted grain), it looks like quick-cooking oatmeal. The sole ingredient listed is barley. Any clue what this is, and how it might relate to common beer-brewing malts? My thought was to use it when I bake bread. I'll post a pic of the package, if you think that will help. There's writing in Korean, but I can't read it. MelissaH

Actually, acetic acid is miscible with water: the two will mix (and dissolve) completely, regardless of the proportions of each. However, acetic acid is a weak acid, chemically speaking, which means that is does not dissociate completely into acetate ion and H+ (rather than staying together as one molecule of acetic acid). Trying not to get too technical, here's a brief discussion of freezing point depression. If you dissolve stuff in a substance, the freezing point of a substance is lowered. The amount the freezing point is lowered depends ONLY on the concentration of PARTICLES of added stuff. Salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) completely ionizes in water to form Na+ cation and Cl- anion. Thus, one unit of NaCl will dissolve in water to make two particles. Sugar, on the other hand, dissolves without dissociating, so one sugar dissolves in water to make one particle. Thus, if you had two aqueous solutions, one of NaCl in some concentration and the other with an equal concentration of sugar, the solution of NaCl would have a lower freezing point than the solution of sugar: even though the concentrations of NaCl and sugar are the same, the solution of NaCl has TWICE as many particles as the solution of sugar. Acetic acid is a weak acid, so some of it will dissociate but some will not. Therefore, acetic acid won't lower the freezing point as much as a salt will, but the freezing point will be lowered. Alcohol won't dissociate when it dissolves in water either. That said: in general, the vinegars that we can buy in the store are NOT pure acetic acid, but only about 5 or 6% acetic acid in water (maybe with some other stuff added). Remember that the more particles get added, the lower the freezing point. So getting rid of some of the water and making the vinegar more concentrated would certainly help to lower the freezing point even more. MelissaH

I've always just used a plastic bag (either produce or regular grocery). I have no dishwasher, and a bag doesn't need to be washed afterwards. MelissaH

I'd actually go the other way and say not to bother using a homemade mayo. Why bother? Save your arm muscles or electricity because any subtleties in the mayo are completely and totally lost under chocolate and cake yumminess. YMMV. MelissaH

More random musings now, while I still have time before classes start tomorrow (yikes!). I'm going to be quantitative now, for once, since I've been thinking about numbers most of the day already. I put a price tag on the cabinets, as calculated by last year's version of the Ikea software. With last year's pricing and Adel birch fronts, we're at about $4000 in cabinets. (I couldn't do this year's pricing because I haven't downloaded the new version of the software on this computer. You can apparently only have one version at a time, and rooms made in last year's version don't open properly in this year's version. Since I don't want to redo the whole thing, I'm using last year's prices for my guesstimations. Even if things have gone up by 10%, we'd still only be at about $4400, although this could go up depending on the amount of customization we'd need to do.) After a lot of discussion and thought about the way we cook, we've scaled down our range thinking, from 36-inch pro-style to a good-quality 30-inch consumer model. If we decide we need a second oven, a convection toaster oven to replace our current Black and Decker model will probably fit the bill. The list price on the top-of-the-line GE Profile dual-fuel range is about $1750 if you don't want stainless. While my husband doesn't mind a little stainless used judiciously, he doesn't want large expanses of the stuff. Considering the price markup on stainless and the fact that anything low is bound to get noseprinted, I'm inclined to agree with him. For the range we'll probably go with either black or bisque/almond/off-white/whatever you call it to match our refrigerator. Downsizing the range will also get us 6 more inches of storage space down below, and we've always thought more is better. Hood: this is one place we're thinking it may be good to use some of our range savings. I want a hood that sucks! We'll need to talk to someone to help us figure out our needs, but with the amount of smoke we've been known to generate, oversize (say 36-inch hood for a 30-inch range) might not be a bad idea. The house is old enough that makeup air shouldn't be a huge problem. But we'll be talking to people when the time comes so we don't mess up. Wild guess of $1000 here. Dishwasher: we haven't really talked about one much, other than it WILL exist in the new kitchen. I'd like something with a stainless interior, but without a tube sticking up the middle of the bottom rack that makes it difficult to load large items. I suspect we'll be visiting somewhere like Sears that has lots of brands and lots of models on the floor, opening every model, and looking inside. I'm guessing that we'll probably be looking at a list price of $700 to $800, but I wouldn't complain if a lower model will do everything we want. Anything's better than the current dishwashers in this house! So far, the price tag's at about $7500 for cabinets and appliances. To this, we'll need to add shipping costs on the cabinets if we get them from Ikea, countertops (probably about 55 ft^2 or a bit less) and possibly their installation, a sink and faucet, a new mighty garbage disposal to go in the new sink, a floor (no more than 144 ft^2 because the kitchen is about 18 ft by 8 ft if you measure from the walls), lights so we can see what we're doing, permits to do everything, and a little help from a plumber and an electrician, maybe also HVAC although we need to talk to one of those people sooner than next summer anyway. Maybe a little help from a contractor if our time looks like it's going to run too tight for us to make the kitchen livable and functional before classes start in the fall. Probably a whole bunch of little things too, like new silverware organizers and trash can. Appliance garage-building materials. And either a dumpster or a day's use of a truck to haul a load of demolition debris to the dump because you can't do that on a household yearly pass. I also haven't considered paint or backsplash yet, or drywall to replace what's likely to get torn out. I'm guessing that color is going to be the toughest decision in the whole kitchen. One thing we're wondering about is if it will be possible to somehow incorporate the Lion of Flanders into the kitchen, if yellow and black won't clash with beech-veneered cabinets. Neither of us is Flemish in the least bit, but we're both huge cycling fans and we fell in love with the region on last year's summer (cycling) vacation. I don't think I want a big flag in the kitchen, but maybe we'll get lucky and find appropriate tiles already made. Or we'll just hang a flag in a different room of the house. We already have a cycling-themed bathroom! Did I forget anything in my list of kitchen stuff that we'll need to buy? The more I can add now, the less likely I am to be surprised later. Overall, I'm guessing that we're probably looking in the neighborhood of $20,000 for the entire renovation. I'm hoping that my guess is on the high side of things, especially if we can do a lot of the work ourselves, but this is a number I can live with. After all, this is a house that we're planning to stay in for quite a while (knock on wood) and we want it to make us happy. MelissaH

Oswego's the largest city in Oswego County, about 18,000 people big. Does that mean 5 Oswegos equal 1 Duluth? MelissaH

In today's NY Times there's an article on cooking in a toaster oven. What kind of toaster oven do you have? What do you make in it? Do your experiences match the author's, or is it necessary to get a brand-spanking-new model to take full advantage of having one? Mine's a Black and Decker model that we got for a wedding gift. It seems to work better as an oven than a toaster. We haven't done much cooking of raw ingredients, but we use it to warm up crispy stuff that wouldn't stay crispy in the microwave. I'm intrigued by the idea of using it to roast garlic and vegetables: must give that a shot the next time I don't want to turn on the big oven. MelissaH

By far. For the record, New Orleans is the one place in this country I'll drink coffee. It actually tastes good to me there. And when I have the pleasure of visiting, I must go to Cafe du Monde for my cup. The only other place I've ever drunk coffee is a small town in Zeeland, where for my chocoladekoffie they added a square of bittersweet chocolate. I can't help but think that with even regular old American coffee, a square of good chocolate and some scalded milk might make a difference for me. To get back on topic: I seem to remember a blurb in Cook's Illustrated (I think) that discusses scalding milk for bread-baking, and I think they actually did the experiment. They discovered that scalding does make for a higher rise. I don't know what it means if a toad hops into your milk. MelissaH

Here in Oswego we still don't really have aisles that look like these. Of the three grocery stores in town, only one is set up such that you can pass someone else without scraping something off a shelf. Our produce is getting better, even in just the two years we've been here, but when I need a produce orgy I have to drive the hour to Wegman's.How big or small a town do you feel like you live in? Do you feel "safe" running to the grocery store in whatever you happen to be wearing, or are you pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you know and you feel like you need to at least put a baseball cap and a non-holey shirt on? Enjoying this slice of your life tremendously! MelissaH

Recipe, please? MelissaH ← I added it to the eGRA. Check it out. ← Thank you! Have you ever used frozen spinach to make this? One box worth? MelissaH