MelissaH

From this standpoint, The Passionate Vegetarian would be a particularly good choice, as many of the dishes are either dairy-free, or have dairy-free options. MelissaH

This topic reminds me of the food court in the University Memorial Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder: the Alferd Packer Cafe! (To the best of my knowledge, they never served its namesake's preferred dish for blizzardy days. Some of us wondered about the dorms on campus, though!) MelissaH CU 1993

Monday morning, our local Bed Bath & Beyond had a Farberware santoku for $9.99. We picked one up, more than anything to see if we liked it before shelling out big bucks. And for us, it would be really big bucks: I'm left-handed, my husband isn't. Ask me in a couple of weeks how I like it. MelissaH

Does anyone have experience cooking sous vide at high altitudes? I'm curious how the lowered boiling points of everything would affect the temperatures you'd need to hold. MelissaH

I also do steel-cut oats overnight, but I don't use a crockpot or rice cooker. My method is to boil 4 cups of water in a 3-qt saucepan, stir in 1 cup of oats (might have to try toasting them next time I do this), put the pot's lid on, and turn off the heat. In the morning, all you need to do is heat through, stirring occasionally to be sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan. I haven't tried, but I suppose there's no reason a bowlful couldn't be heated in the microwave. MelissaH

My first time through a new recipe, I actually copy the recipe out of whatever book onto a piece of paper. For me, the process is a lot like "prelabbing" the recipe: by writing the ingredients and procedure, I have a better chance at embedding it in my memory. Once I've made a recipe and determine that it is indeed a "keeper," I type it into my computer (along with notes on the source and any comments about it) so I only need to print out a new copy. I continue to add notes over time. I figure these recipes I've collected would be a great excuse for me to figure out how to build an index or make a functional database, one of these years. MelissaH

However, one thing to be aware of is that many of the slow cooker cookbooks seem to wind up on the bland side of bland. Many of the authors seem to be real wusses about spicy food, and soy sauce seems to be considered an exotic ingredient. Mable Hoffman seems to be particularly guilty in these respects, and she's got many cookbooks out. That said, one that gets more adventuresome (and more to our taste) is The Slow Cooker Ready & Waiting Cookbook by Rick Rodgers. (Here's an Amazon link.) Once you've played with your cooker a little, you'll also be able to figure out how to use it for some of your existing recipes. Have fun! MelissaH

I'm neither Polish nor Catholic, but over the summer I helped our local Polish Catholic church prepare the pierogi for the annual St. Stephen's Festival. I didn't help to make the filling so I can't help with that part, but I saw the rest of the process. Their procedure went as follows: The day before you make the dough, or longer, make your filling. Give the filling plenty of time to cool before continuing. Dish the filling onto parchment or waxed paper-lined sheet pans, making each scoop about the size of a ping-pong ball. Try to keep the filling scoops in nice neat balls, because the neater the ball, the easier it is to form the pierogi. Potato filling and cheese filling both scoop reasonably well, but kapusta (cabbage) is much tougher to keep in tight balls so save it for last, after you've had practice with the easy ones. Put 100 filling balls on each full-size sheet pan: 8 across and 12 down, and four extras wherever you can squeeze them in. Freeze (or at least chill well) the filling balls on their sheet pans overnight. Have as many people making dough as you have food processors. Expect the food processor motor to heat up and shut down for a while after making a dozen batches or so. For the dough, buzz in a food processor: 3 c flour (I think they used Gold Medal bleached all-purpose) 1 tsp table salt 1 egg 1 c water, lukewarm about 1-2 Tbsp margarine (Imperial, temp. of a kitchen with large pots of boiling water in August; one of the women commented that sour cream also works well) Take the dough ball out of the food processor bowl, and knead a few times by hand. Form into a ball, and set aside until the rollers are ready. Try to have as many rollers as you have doughmakers. The rollers should keep a little pile of flour nearby, to help flour the rolling surface and the rolling pin. Roll the dough out, trying to keep it uniform, to somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8 inch thick. If the dough is too thick, the pierogi are too large. If the dough is too thin, the filling will poke through. After the dough is rolled, cut the dough into circles with a can that has had both ends removed. The cans were about the size of the cans that fruit comes in, and each cutting can had its own padding for the back end (think like a showercap, but made of fabric and batting) to protect your hand. Put the cut circles on another paper-covered sheet pan and deliver to the pinchers. Form the scraps into a ball and set aside. After a few batches, you'll have enough scraps to reroll and cut. Have as many pinchers available as possible. The pinchers will need a comfortable chair, a tray of frozen filling balls, a tray of dough circles, an empty lined tray for the pinched pierogi, and a small bowl of flour. To form each pierog, take a dough circle and stretch it slightly, into an oval. (If the circles are too thin, return them to the rollers to be combined with the scraps and rerolled thicker. If the circles are too thick, return them to the rollers to be rolled thinner and cut again.) Place a filling ball in the center of the dough oval, fold the dough over, and pinch the edges together tightly. Be sure the filling is tucked entirely inside, because if filling is at the edge, the dough won't hold together. If your fingers get sticky from the filling, dip them in a bit of flour to help the dough stick to dough and not finger. Place the finished pierogi on the lined sheet pan. You should be able to get 100 on a tray, just like the filling balls. While you pinch, talk with your neighbors (in English or Polish), and give the rollers a hard time, especially Father Ed. As each tray is filled, it gets covered with a kitchen towel before it goes to a checker. The checker lifts the towel off the tray, and inspects each pierog to be sure the edges are firmly attached. If needed, the checker pinches the edges together again, double-checking that any filling is safely inside. If the dough was pulled so thin that it rips, or if a pierog is otherwise unsalvageable, open the pierog and return the filling ball to the pincher, and toss out the dough. When the tray is checked, put the towel back over it and send it to the kitchen. Have a large pot or two of boiling water on the stove, as well as a large skillet with melted margarine. The pierogi get boiled, removed from the water with a large skimmer, and then simmered in margarine. Try to do this shortly after the pierogi are checked, so they don't dry out. If necessary, tell the doughmakers and pinchers to slow down. As the pierogi are finished, they get removed from the margarine bath onto a couple of UNlined sheet pans reserved specifically for the purpose. Wheel them away from the stove to the coolest part of the room, and direct a fan on them to cool them quicker. Once they've cooled, they can be packaged, LABELED, and refrigerated or frozen until the day of the festival when they get sold. After the pierogi with the filling du jour are finished, it's time to reclaim the filling ball trays, to scoop the next day's filling so they're ready for the next day. Hope that helps, MelissaH

Raspberries have been available on and off, if you're willing to pay $5 or $6 for half a pint of berries, and check through them very carefully to be sure they aren't growing. Frozen's generally available at a more reasonable price, though, and probably a better bet. This summer was a good one for both straw and blue, and we picked and froze oodles of each this summer. We haven't found a source for pick-your-own rasp, though, and don't really have the yard space for a patch of our own. If you can believe it, we got rain today, after a few inches of snow yesterday. But it's fall in Oswego and therefore it's been windy the last few days, with gusts on the order of 50 mph coming off the lake. Not quite like last fall's windstorms, but enough to make for a good soup day nonetheless. MelissaH

That implies available mascarpone. And although there's a reasonably large population of people with Italian ancestry in this area, I have yet to see mascarpone in the stores in town regularly. Good thought, though. Had I not used all my cream to make the butterscotch pudding, I would have alternated layers of whipped cream and butterscotch pudding. MelissaH

Or line a plate or cookie sheet with waxed paper, plop the little babies down with a little sauce on each, and put the whole lot in the freezer for a bit. Once they're frozen solid, bag the lot in a resealable bag. Then you can pull them out one at a time when you need them. MelissaH

Yesterday we hosted a party for about 30 people. Most of the food was provided by others, but we wanted to make sure we had at least one munchie, one soup, and one dessert. Everything went off without a hitch until I tried to cut the brownies I'd baked into squares and they crumbled to the point where they were too ugly to serve at a party. Taking a page from numerous eGulleteers, I whipped up a batch of butterscotch pudding, and layered it and the brownie crumbles into a trifle of sorts. It was yummy, if a tad heavy. I started thinking that a bit of fruit layered in with the brownies and pudding would have been a nice addition. My question: what fruit would go nicely with both chocolate and butterscotch? I know that bananas would have been an obvious choice, but bananas are the one food I cannot stand in any way, shape, or form. The strawberries we picked earlier this spring and sliced and stored in the freezer were another possibility; I knew that they'd be a slam-dunk with the brownies but wasn't so sure about the butterscotch. What else might have worked? Bonus points if it's available in small-town upstate NY in early December.

This thread brings to mind an article by Mark Bittman that originally appeared in the NY Times, was republished in Best Food Writing 2002, and I just now found on the Web, if you can get past the horrible font and background that make it difficult to read. The gist of the article is that restaurant cooking is a totally different beast (excuse the expression) from home cooking in every aspect, from ingredients to equipment to manpower to time allotted to general mindframe of the person doing the cooking. Bittman closes the article with a few tricks the home chef can try to make their food more restaurant-like...including the use of more butter. Julia would applaud. MelissaH

In following this thread, I'm a little surprised that my browning-on-top solution hasn't been mentioned: a blowtorch. I swear by mine for creme brulee, and have also been known to use it to even out the color on top of other dishes. Just don't hold it too close, and keep it moving!

Mr. MelissaH has maintained for quite a while now that Giada's head is too big. I haven't watched her much myself; something about that show makes me want to change the channel...or wait for the end of the half-hour. Gotta second previous remarks about natural-foods Christina. We have a PBS station that devotes a good chunk of Tuesdays to food shows, and after watching hers one rainy day, I was about ready to (a) turn her off; (b) laugh till I wet my pants; and © change into a dry pair of asbestos underwear and fire off a letter to her. (Really, now, how on earth could sprinkling salt over carrot sticks in a bowl help break down cellulose and make them more digestible? And if you added as much flaxseed as she does, would you ever get off the john?) That said, a few hours after Christina, we're blessed with a full hour of Julia, in various incarnations. Current selections are in her kitchen with "master chefs" and Baking with Julia. I never get tired of watching those. I don't care much for the new Charlie Trotter show. (At least it's new to me.) The first Kitchen Sessions was OK and watchable, but I can't handle the new one. Any time I see someone standing in front of a dozen little pots, taking a dollop from each and constructing a plate, I yell at the chef on the screen to "Get real!" I don't know if the show's changed that much from the first season, or if my supply of patience for things that will never happen in my own kitchen has just been exhausted. Although there was a moment in the first show that really grossed me out, thinking back on it: it was in the episode where he cooked fowl. The part that got me was when he showed us some-or-another whole raw bird, caressed it with his bare hands, and then immediately touched another whole roasted bird with his same bare hands, in the same continuous camera shot and without an intermediate stop at a sink with hot water and soap. After seeing that, I swore I'd never eat anything he laid finger on. Or have I just taken too many biochemistry classes? I suspect Emeril might be much more watchable when he's not in front of a large audience with cameras rolling. The bigger turnoff about him, for me, is that he's messy in the kitchen. Maybe you quit caring about that when you get rich enough to hire someone to clean your kitchen for him. Who would I like to see come to my TV? Flo Braker. Harold McGee, even in a cameo role on Alton's show. Someone doing Korean cuisine. Someone who can help me figure out how to get everything for dinner finished and on the table at the same time!

So, a little time has gone by since the last posting about using maple syrup in marshmallows. Has anyone tried it yet? My instinct is to use maple syrup to replace all the corn syrup. To me, a mapley marshmallow sounds like an interesting accompaniment to a pumpkin or sweet potato marshmallow. Or maybe just sprinkle finely chopped toasted walnuts over the maple marshmallows, in addition to or instead of other dustings? -MelissaH