mizducky

Oh, I'd be totally into a topic like this! My experiments with my new little sand pot went on hiatus briefly while I got busy with Thanksgiving madness, but now that that's all over I expect to be playing with it again real soon now ...

Terrific food, and a really charming poem. (The tea set is darling, too!)

Believe it or not, I agree with you, sort of. Plain old kidneys, navys, Great northern, etc. are bred to produce quickly and a lot. They have none of the nuance of an heirloom bean. It's much like a hard, pink hot house tomato or a Cherokee Purple right off the vine. They are both tomatoes but there's a world of difference. Pintos I still love, if they are fresh. There are several strains of pintos but you want to make sure they are light when you buy them. the dark ones are probably old. ← Okay, I totally get the tomato analogy. I gotta quit messing around and just get some better beans. You shall be hearing from me Real Soon Now.

A slightly different perspective: I too have owned one of those clamp-to-the-counter hand-cranked meat grinders with lots of cast iron parts. My mom owned one too, and I used to love helping to crank stuff through it when I was a kid, so I admittedly have a bunch of nostalgia attached to that style of gizmo. The heavy metal grinder, when properly clamped to a good sturdy counter, is pretty darned stable--not like the kind meant to suction-cup to a countertop. We only used it a few times a year (usually either to make chopped liver or cranberry-orange relish), so the business of cleaning and drying the several little parts didn't get all that onerous. I might have felt otherwise, however, if we were using and cleaning it weekly or more frequently. Oh yeah, both my and my mom's grinder had this problem with juices seeping through the cracks. I think it's inevitable with these things, since if you tighten the screw enough to prevent drips, the crank becomes almost impossible to turn. Mom and I dealt with the situation by keeping the screw loose enough to make cranking easy, and just putting a bowl underneath the grinder to catch drips. Again, if this were a weekly ritual I might get tired of the drip thing, but as a few-times-a-year ritual I didn't mind.

What a riot! Brava diva! (What? None of the fighters do shots of bourbon before a bout? If it were me, I'd be knocking back a couple good stiff snorts of Wild Turkey 101 before I hit the canvas. )

While we're on the subtheme of Mexican vegetarian dishes ... Last night I had one of the best danged veggie burritos I've ever tasted. I didn't make it, I bought it at a cafe, but I took notes for my future cooking reference. They used some very tasty thick-sliced sauted mushrooms as part of the filling, along with the usual beans/rice/guacamole and a sprinkling of chopped onions. The mushrooms really kicked the thing up to a whole 'nother level. (Oh yeah, and they didn't waste any burrito-space on chopped lettuce, either.) I bet some sauted mushrooms would also be nice as one part of an enchilada filling ...

No, as a matter of fact, I haven't! It's been awhile since my last TJ's run--next time I drop by there, I'll keep an eye peeled for the stuff. Though it's so darn easy to just fling some ginger root and soy sauce into whatever other broth I've got working ... and returning to the topic of vegetarian cooking, one of my favorite ingredients is Better Than Bouillon's vegetable base. As with other pre-packaged soup bases, you have to watch out for the saltiness factor ... but their veg-base is so darned tasty that, once when I made a big batch of lentils with it, I wound up gorging on the whole batch in a 24-hour period. Turns out that the Better Than Bouillon folks have a whole line of these products, both with meat and meatless, including a couple of vegan varieties (don't be put off by their trumpeting "meat" all over that page I linked to--the veg bases are indeed meatless). I really need to try their mushroom base next--sounds incredibly yummy. And then of course there's the traditional broth-flavoring standby, miso. Though if you really want miso's full nutritional benefit you need to add it just at the end, sometimes I put some in earlier so its flavor cooks into the food.

I have never ordered a Fruit-of-the-Month Club gift from Harry and David, but I have ordered some of their other fruit for family gifts, and even stopped by their outlet store once when I was traveling through southwest Oregon, and found their products to be generally of good quality. That said, Harry and David's long suit in terms of produce is stuff that grows in their region--i.e. pears, apples, etc. So I'd assume all citrus and other tropical fruit in their clubs will be purchased from somebody else and thus be that one step removed from hands-on quality control. Just sayin'.

Yeah, at this point spinach is officially back to whatever level of safety it had before the E. coli scare. As I've previously mentioned elsewhere on eGullet, I'm not a full-fledged vegetarian, but limit my animal protein intake, eat a lot of meatless meals, and am always on the lookout for more meatless dish ideas. The other night I made a lovely Japanese-style stew of cubed tofu, onions, carrots, and shiitake mushrooms, simmered in a dashi broth spiked with soy sauce and slices of ginger root. The flavor was mild and mellow but definitely yummy. Great warming dish to help my bod fight off a cold.

My maternal grandmother was Bubbe--her husband had passed away long before I was born. My paternal grandmother, however, we called Grandma--which was odd only because we called her husband Zayde, the Yiddish term for grandpa, so I never knew nor questioned why we didn't follow suit with his spouse. Anyway, as I think I've mentioned elsewhere on eGullet, only one of my grandmothers lived up to the legend of the Jewish Grandmother as Fabulous Cook. We saw my mother's mother but seldom, but I still harbor fond memories of watching Bubbe make crepes for blintzes, spellbound by how thin she was able to get them without tearing them. My paternal grandmother, however, could not cook her way out of a wet paper bag. We used to joke (in private) about her boiled-to-death chicken and always-burnt-on-the-bottom bread pudding. But Grandma, who we saw often, had a sweet and loving personality that more than made up for her mediocre cooking. Plus ya gotta love a woman who collects every last windfall apple from under the trees in her yard and then painstakingly peels and trims them all for applesauce.

Hmm. Wonder if those Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies are too dense to do that trick with.

Howdy, Rachel! I'm here for the party ...

Cool! I have yet to play with lotus leaves; now that I see how simple it is, I'm encouraged to give it a go. What other meat/vegetable/etc. combinations are typical liu in lotus leaves? Are there any Chinese dishes in which foods are wrapped in leaves meant to be eaten? I'm thinking of something equivalent to the stuffed cabbage leaves out of my Jewish culinary tradition.

Many thanks for your perspective on San Francisco, Erik. I really do need to get back up there again, sooner rather than later.

Fighting a cold today. I made a sort of "extreme congee" -- rice cooked in leftover dashi broth, with shiitakes, several crushed cloves of garlic, and a few slices of ginger root. Garnished with a couple cubes of fermented bean curd with chilies, plus a bit of chile bean paste. Warmth from the inside out. I don't know if it's having any effect on my cold, but it's making the rest of me very happy.

I used to have some mixed feelings about beans, but those feelings are getting more positive as I better learn how to cook with more varieties. I have loved lentils, split peas, and chickpeas since I was a little kid. Chickpeas I used to just eat straight, sprinkled with black pepper, the way my mom taught me--she had grown up buying paper cones of chickpeas from street vendors in New York's Lower East Side. Later on I learned the joys of hummus, as well as Indian chickpea dals and curries. Lentils and split peas my mom would make into excellent soups. Nowadays my favorite thing to do with lentils is a salad with a tart mustardy vinaigrette; I have used split peas, especially yellow ones, for dals. I used to think I didn't really like kidney beans, pintos, and other beans of that size and shape, because I found them too bland and starchy. Recently, though, I have done some successful experiments with cooking them with better technique and better choice of add-ins. I found out that a sprig of epazote adds a good, if hard-to-define, kick to beans. And I recently learned a whole lot from that eGullet front-page excerpt from the latest "White Trash" cookbook on pinto beans--I tried their recipe, and for a change my beans came out wonderfully creamy and flavorful. I think my next bean adventures may well be with aduki beans. I like the flavor and consistency of Asian aduki bean sweets, and want to see if I can come up with versions using less sugar and/or substituting a more nutritive sweetener.

Who inspired you most in your decision to write of food? --The Rombauer ladies. One of my favorite things about the old Joy of Cooking was Irma Rombauer's chatty, anecdote-laden writing style. --The aggregate of on-line communities and blogs dedicated to food, which invited me to join the conversation and start putting out my own views and experiences. What is it particularly that you write of within the wide-varied subject? --Eating and cooking for real-world healthy weight management, including debunking certain dieting-industry myths and hype --Exploring world cuisines, especially those of the Asian peoples. --Cheap eats--mom 'n' pop joints, ethnic eateries, greasy spoons, diners, and other little indie alternatives to the fast-food chains that provide inexpensive and delicious nourishment to the everyday folk. When did you take up the pen? In general, I've been writing seriously--no joke--since grade school. And my first professional efforts started right out of college as a technical/marketing writer in the high tech industry. But my writing on food dates back only five or six years, all amateur--so far. Where do you wish to publish your writings? Do you have any specific magazines/journals or publishers that you have an urge to present your work to for acceptance? I have in recent years been doing much of my writing, including all my food writing, online, and have been looking for more formal online venues for my work. As a matter of fact ... well, I don't want to announce anything prematurely for fear of jinxing something, but Goddess willing and the creek don't rise, I may well have an announcement to make soon about having landed just such an on-line food writing gig. Why do you wish to submit your work to these particular outlets? --I have been a computer geek and online junkie since the dawn days of the late 1970s, when all we had were the Usenet Newsgroups on the ARPAnet. So writing stuff online has become second nature to me. --I, and my admittedly peculiar writing style, thrive on the online-writing environment. While I am damn good at more formal writing if I do say so myself, most of the time I find doing that style of writing to be like pulling teeth. But the conversational styles common in blogging and forums like these are near effortless in comparison. And for a writer who has had her own struggles with writer's block, a writing form that's nigh effortless does tend to make you sit up and take notice. --Conversely, whenever I have dabbled around the edges of more traditional paper-publishing markets, I have just found the whole rigamarole a huge turn-off all around. For this immediate-gratification grrl, the aggravation factor was just way too much--especially for the pittances offered to the entry-level writer. When offered the choice between a delayed-gratification, high-aggravation, teeth-pulling, ill-paying writing outlet, vs. an immediate-gratification, minimal-annoyance, almost effortless, and non-paying outlet ... well, effortless free-will pleasure won out over ill-paid aggravation, at least for now. --While I don't think print media will vanish anytime soon, I'm convinced online publishing will only continue to grow as a major player in the publishing industry, particularly at the expense of many newspapers and periodicals. To be sure, I wouldn't mind a bit if some of my on-line writing eventually led to a print gig of some sort. But as long as I have a knack for the online stuff anyway, why the hell not play to my strength? How do you hope to have your writings affect the world of food and people? --In terms of my writing on healthy eating: I would love it if I could reach out to every bewildered, battle-scarred veteran of the dieting wars, reassure them that the fault is not in their willpower or whatever but in virtually all the wrong-headed "advice" handed them by the dieting industry and its thralls, and help inspire them to think for themselves and develop plans for healthy eating and living that work for their specific and unique needs. --In terms of world cuisines: I cop to certain hippy-dippy convictions that the multi-cultural enjoyment of food can lead to greater cross-cultural understanding ... and maybe even a few additional baby steps towards world peace. (Hey, I warned you it was hippy-dippy...)

You know, I had absolutely no hope that anyone would get that. Just threw it out there to entertain myself. You, mizducky, have earned at least several delicious manhattans should you choose to enter the geographic area near San Francisco. ← Thank you! Another reason to revisit your fair city, which I've been meaning to do for some time now. It may be awhile, but I'll definitely let you know when it happens.

Catching up on your blog after a hectic week ... Among the things I'm definitely enjoying in this blog, in no particular order: --comparing and contrasting "mission style" Mexican food vs. the SoCal-Mex style prevalent here in San Diego. The burritos with everything but the kitchen sink in them, and the breakfast burritos, have definitely made themselves known in this town, with unique ingredient variants such as french fries. But if you do some poking around, you can find more authentically Mexican items, especially the soft tacos with variety meats that I love. --extremely cute kitties! I too was overcome with "awwwwwwww" at that shot of your cats in their youth, perching on their pet human. --the salute to cheap-but-good kitchen cutlery. --porridge! I make a big bowl of congee for my lunch at least once a week, usually more often than that; sometimes I make my own mongrel variant using rolled oats instead of rice, but with the same proportion of broth-to-grain as "normal" congee. --computer-geekery on the loose! --Asian markets! I adore wandering around them, trying to figure out what stuff is and how it's used. And I'm always impressed by the everything-but-the-oink pork offerings in the meat departments. --Manhattans, and other cocktails. As some in the booze section of eGullet may recall, I'm sorta trying to persuade myself out of my Manhattan rut, which is proving difficult since the Manhattan suits my tastes so very well. --And to top it all off ... ... gratuitous Firesign Theatre references!

I was wandering around a local Japanese market (Nijiya Market, for those of you who live in California USA and might be familiar with this little chain), thinking vague thoughts about making some kind of soup to try to scare off the sore throat I feel coming on. I spotted a bunch of different oden sets, and my vague thoughts turned into a definite plan! I bought a likely-looking set, plus a block of black konnyaku, some oyster mushrooms, and some katsuobushi; once at home, I made some dashi and added all the other stuff, suitably cut up, plus some daikon, carrots, and green onions I had kicking around my vegetable bin. Oh yeah, there's a few dried shiitake in there too. Everything is now simmering away as I type ... it smells wonderful, and my stomach is growling! Edited to add: Enjoying my oden right now. Yum! I dunno if it'll scare the sore throat away, but it sure feels good.

Sorry--upping periscope after having been a little swamped with work and all. I got turned on to another dandy Vietnamese cafe by Kirk/mmm-yoso's blog. The cafe is called Mien Trung, and it's in Linda Vista, tucked behind K Sandwiches in its own little lot in a tiny building it shares with a Thai restaurant. Its short menu includes no pho whatsoever, but it serves an excellent bun bo Hue. More about this place here and here.

Greetings, Ah Leung! I did have your clay pot on my mind, but I didn't see one like yours in the store I bought mine in, which was just a neighborhood grocery market. There's a restaurant supply store up on Convoy I could check. It's hard to tell from a photo on a computer screen, but it looks like your pot is glazed all over, outside and in--is it? That might help a lot with the heat toughness... For my first dish in my little sand pot, I made a nice batch of congee, with shiitakes and wakame. When I bought the pot, I also picked up some pork butt and a pig's foot. I had been reading about the French daube cookoff elsewhere on eGullet and started thinking about making some kind of braised meat goodness, and then it came to me that what I really wanted to make was a red-cooked stew. So that may be my next experiment with my sandpot. It only holds a quart so it'll be a small stew--but that's actually perfect for a single cook.

Thanks! I currently have the pot doing its seasoning soak in the kitchen sink (I opted for method #1 from the instructions that came with it). My heat diffuser seems to have gone missing, but I can't resist playing with the new toy ASAP, so I think its inaugural batch of congee is going to happen in the oven. Whee! We likes new toys, yes we do! Edited to add: I'm going to start it in a cold--not a pre-heated--oven, so as to make the temperature change as gradual as possible.

Hi, XiaoLing--if you're still interested in this question after all this time, I think I found the answer while researching info after buying my very first clay pot. According to this site, the wire cages around some clay pots "serve both to protect the fragile earthenware and distribute heat evenly." But apparently there are other clay pots without the wire cage that do just fine. So my guess is that if you've been using your pot without the wire and it's been performing okay, and you handle it carefully enough that it's not going to get banged up, then I don't think there's anything to worry about. Now for my questions about my new clay pot: it came with instructions giving two different methods of pre-treating it before first use. One is to soak it in tap water for 2-3 hours, and then make porridge/congee or rice the first dish cooked in it. The other method is to fill it with water that has been used to rinse rice, and leave it sit for three days. Especially since mine has a glazed interior such that I don't think water would penetrate it so well from the inside, I'm leaning towards method #1. Any opinions? Another thing: all references to clay pots I've found on the web so far (other than here in eGullet) only mention using the pot for oven cooking. Meanwhile, I've seen how lots of folks here on eGullet put their clay pots on their range burners with no ill effects. This makes especial sense to me given that my understanding is that oven-cooking is not very common in traditional Chinese cookery. But I have an electric range--is it safe to put a clay pot on one of those? Do I need some kind of heat diffuser between the pot and the burner? Any special way I need to prepare/pre-treat the pot for its rendezvous with the burner? Thanks--looking forward to playing with my new toy!

If it were me, I'd bring some kind of vegetable side to balance out all the (lovely, but heavy) meat and starch already going on. Say, a really zesty coleslaw, or some kind of pico de gallo chopped salad thingie (tomatoes, onions, tomatillos, cilantro, a jalapeno or two, lime juice, etc.) Or maybe even a fresh fruit salad. Something that would provide a lot of contrast with the main dishes. Edited to add: oops, I blipped over the part where you said another guest is already bringing salsa, so the pico de gallo might be redundant. Oh well ... then I'd definitely favor a slaw of some sort.