Jaymes

I like eight. Plenty of folks for good conversation. Most important, eight is enough for people to have smaller side conversations. And, it's two tables of bridge - in case you want to play cards after dinner. Something we often do.

Well, for one thing, these days there's nobody home to receive the delivery.

Don't know how they'll sell their butter but, as I said, at our local Amish store, we buy the butter in big rolls. You can slice off a disc and freeze the rest. Those big round slices are not handy for our small rectangular butter dishes, but they're absolutely perfect for my nice big round "butter bell" that I picked up a while back at a local swap meet.

Assuming you speak Spanish, google "churros con chocolate recetas" and you'll find quite a few recipes.

It may also be the breed of cow. I recently bought some heavy cream from a local dairy called Milk Thistle that uses Jersey cows instead of the much more common Holsteins, and it was another thing entirely. It seems to have a higher fat content. My parents live next to a dairy farm that only has Jerseys. They do produce a higher fat milk. IMO, It's also better tasting. (although food can affect flavor as well) Jerseys aren't as large as Holsteins, so they don't produce the same volume, but it's definitely a case of quality over quantity. Once, when I was a teenager, the dairy that buys the milk from the farm had a power failure and couldn't take any milk, so the farm gave us large amounts of raw milk. (normally, their contract does not allow them to sell/give milk to anyone but the dairy) We made butter and fresh cheese from that milk and it was amazing. I have never had better butter. Also, we had several pounds of the butter in the fridge (we should have frozen it) and, oddly enough, it had a cheddar cheese flavor after a couple of weeks' time. Wasn't that butter wonderful? About 20 years ago, a friend of mine told me that the dairy farm near her was selling fresh butter. I asked her to pick up as many pounds as $30 would buy. I distributed this butter throughout the elders in my family and neighborhood, who remembered butter before it came in yellow sticks. One of my aunts cried, because it took her back to the life she led and remembrances of the relatives she left behind in Eastern Europe. The farm is now gone, sold off and turned into an over-priced housing development. All the other dairy farms around here belong to a collective, and are under contract similar to what you described, otherwise I would be right there, buying whatever they could sell me. Theresa Don't know where you are, but if you're anywhere close to an Amish community, you might check to see if they sell butter. I can buy it in big rolls. Wonderful.

I like hot chocolate made in the Mexican manner - "like water for chocolate" - bubbling hot water and one of the Mexican brands of chocolate, preferably Mayordomo. Then top your mug of hot dark chocolate with some whipped cream. As you sip, the dark chocolate comes up through the cool cream. My favorite. By far. But then, I like dark chocolate candy better than milk chocolate as well, so it's probably no surprise that that's the kind of hot chocolate I like best, too.

I had an absolutely wonderful Green Chile Mac & Cheese while out to lunch yesterday. The flavors went together perfectly. My new quest will be to find a good recipe. I googled it and there appear to be many likely possibilities.

If I'm curious about a particular recipe that I've heard of and want to prepare, I'll usually google it. But if I'm not sure what to fix for dinner tonight or for lunch tomorrow or for a party next weekend, or if I'm just bored with my usual repertoire, I'll sit down with some of my favorite books and leaf through looking for something interesting. Can't do that online.

Real buttermilk.

How about chilied nuts - peanuts, pecans, etc. Or a big box of caramel corn?

My former husband, a native Texan and great aficionado of Mexican food, made this lament a while back while eating in a local Mexican restaurant: "I hate all the damn yankees that have moved down here. For one thing, they've ruined the Mexican food. It's not even hot enough anymore to make your nose run."

The mustard ice cream sounds particularly intriguing. Is there anything else you use it for?

That looks terrific and sounds even better. Could you link to the recipe?

From Cooked Books Does anyone know to which recipe this quote referred: "I've discovered what may now be my favorite recipe of them all."?

I've been thinking about this and although I have no evidence to support it, my opinion is that it's not a good idea. You have to be so careful handling raw ground meat as it is. And then to add all the ingredients and mix it up and stick it in the freezer seems to me, anyway, to be asking for trouble. A meatloaf is so dense that it would take a while for the center to freeze. Especially if you've cooked any vegetables, like onions or celery or bell peppers, they might still be warm when you added them. And then the thawing out would take a while. You'd have to do it in the fridge to be sure the whole thing stayed cool while it thawed. People do freeze ground beef all the time in something like a hamburger patty, but those are much thinner. Perhaps if you made small meatloaves it would work fine. I don't know. But my gut feeling is that it's a bad idea. If you try it, let us know what happens.

Did you make the "Very Hot Cajun Sauce" as well ? If so, was it that murderous? Some of Prudhomme's stuff is relatively tame (which the meatloaf stikes me as) and some is off the charts HOT (which to me, without making it, seems like the sauce would be). I trust you Jaymes, your carnitas are Da Bomb. Tell me about the sauce, if you can. TIA. Didn't make the "Very Hot Cajun Sauce." It does look pretty tangy and some members of my family are not that fond of heat. Also, my family is very fond of the meatloaf glaze that I've used for some thirty years, so that's what I always put on top of my meatloaves, regardless as to which recipe I've used for the loaves. Here it is: Sweet & Sour Meatloaf Glaze * 1/3 c catsup * 1 tsp Worsty * 1 T dark brown sugar * 1 T yellow mustard * 1 tsp (or more to taste) horseradish Mix all ingredients together, brush over meatloaf. Lay bacon strips on top if desired. Oh, and PS - thanks for the compliment about the carnitas. It really pleases me to know that someone is enjoying my recipes and I appreciate your letting me know.

We've found through the years that regular cornbread seems to go better with chili than jalapeno cornbread. Although we do like jalapeno cornbread and have it often, we've found that since we've already got the chiles in the chili, a plain cornbread is a better accompaniment. Some people like to crumble the cornbread into their chili. Others like to put butter and honey on their cornbread and have something sweet to eat alongside, as sweet is the best thing to calm the heat from spicy chiles. And in fact, that's a good tip. Anytime you're sitting in a restaurant and your tongue is on fire from a spicy dish, grab one of those little packets of sugar instead of the cold drink. Works much better. In fact, nothing works better to neutralize hot peppers than something sweet.

It's one of our family's very favorites and has been for decades. But we are under no illusion that it's a "chocolate cake." I can see how if a chocolate cake is what one is expecting, one would be pretty disappointed at the barely there, only slight undertone of chocolate. But I think that's a good thing. There are many, many wonderful, deeply chocolate, richly chocolate, chocolate-on-chocolate, chocolate-in-chocolate cakes. I think it's nice to have another choice. And the tang of a good red velvet cake fits that bill for us.

I'm not sure that red velvet cake (and by extension, blue velvet cake) is really a "chocolate cake." It is only supposed to have two tablespoons of cocoa powder in the whole thing. It's a tangy cake with vinegar and buttermilk, and only slight undertones of chocolate. Too much chocolate masks the tang.

No eggs? How does that change the texture?

Rajas con crema

Interesting to me, now that I type this, that I've never tried the bread soaked in milk. I've used everything else - bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, even instant oatmeal, but for some reason, bread soaked in milk just didn't sound that appealing. However, after reading your post, I'm definitely going to do it the next time I make meatloaf. What kind of bread did you use? Just a white bread with a good crumb - something like Italian or French?

Last night I made Cajun Meatloaf from Louisiana Kitchen. This was a huge hit!

When my kids were small, I obviously didn't let them cook on a hot comal/skillet. But they loved quesadillas. I always had vats of my homemade salsa (recipe elsewhere on eG) on hand in the fridge, so the kids would take a tortilla, put a little grated cheese on it, fold it over and zap it in the microwave for a few seconds until the cheese melted and then eat it, topped with plenty of Mom's homemade salsa. Not so good as a crispy version perhaps, but so quick and easy for them to make. And with three kids and a husband to cook for, anything that got them into the kitchen and me out of it cheered me immensely.

What kind of cheese is "Menninite cheese"? Or should that be "Mennonite cheese"? (But even then, what kind of cheese is it? I've never seen Mennonite cheese, despite growing up in a province with a large population of Mennonites.) Simple is best, it seems. Have you ever seen zucchini put into the quesadilla? Zucchini blossoms might be interesting in there with the cheese. I wonder if that's ever done. In the early 1900's, a group of Mennonites immigrated to the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua from Canada and started growing crops and raising dairy cows and making cheese and butter. I actually was lucky enough to be able to take an extensive RV trip south from Laredo through Chihuahua, and then on the train across the Copper Canyon and over to the Pacific Coast, down to Mazatlan, and then finally, back up along the coast to the US. One of the overnight stops was at the Mennonite farm community where they prepared dinner for us and gave us a little talk about themselves and how they happened to settle there. We purchased many homemade goods, fabrics, wooden carved toys and other handicrafts, and cheese and butter. The cheese is a pale yellow cheese with the texture of a jack. It's not crumbly or particularly salty like some other Mexican cheeses. In Mexico, it's often called 'queso menonito.' However, in recent years, because it originated in the state of Chihuahua and has become so popular that other manufacturers are now making it, you hear it more often referred to as 'queso Chihuahua.' Of course, the best versions of this are still made in Chihuahua by the Mennonite community. And to your other question, squash blossoms are used extensively throughout Mexico and often find their way into tortilla-based dishes.