mizducky

Awwwwwwwwww! That look is more eloquent than any restaurant critic's four-star review. Happy blogging, phlawless! You're off to a fabulous start.

Oh yeah. I blame it on my Jewish heritage. It's not a real celebration, and you're not showing real love, unless you greet your guests with that proverbial groaning board thing. Ess, mein kindele, god forbid you should go hungry! I also have an analogous problem cooking for myself as a sole householder. Lots of really cool things to cook just don't quite come off as well unless you make a goodly-sized batch of the stuff--plus it seems such a waste of effort to go through an elaborate preparation just to make a couple of servings' worth. Yeah, there is such a thing as freezing leftovers ... except some leftovers lend themselves to freezing a bit better than others. So, I'm continually doing this leftovers-balancing act. I've had to make some informal rules for myself, such as: I must really think twice or three times about making a new leftovers-producing batch of anything if there are still a bunch of older leftovers languishing in the fridge. (Although sometimes that problem is solvable by surveying all existing leftovers and purging any that have started to go biohazard.)

I don't have a Big Orange Bowl, but I do have a Big White Bowl. It's totally cheapo plastic, and ugly as sin, but man does that thing ever get a workout. Many thanks, Lori, for this glimpse into your life.

I'm afraid I'm not 100% sure of what you mean by "like a gyro but with cheese" ... but venturing in anyway ... My understanding is this: traditionally, raclette-the-dish involved taking a big wheel of raclette-the-cheese, cutting it in half, and positioning its cut surface near an open fire so that the exposed cheese started to melt; the melted cheese was then scraped onto waiting plates of boiled potatoes. I guess that is kind of like cutting off strips of gyro meat from the big chunk, eh? Anyway, seems that in more recent times raclette-the-dish has expanded to have other foods besides potatoes be the recipients of the melted scraped cheese; plus there's been a whole bunch of gizmos invented to do the cheese-melting a bit more conveniently. Ms. Diva's new toy is one such example of these new-style raclette gizmos, sometimes called a "raclette grill", but sometimes just called a "raclette", even if that is kind of confusing the name of the dish (and the cheese) with the utensil for making the dish. In this kind of grill, instead of wrangling a huge half-wheel of cheese, you put chunky slices of cheese in the little warming dishes and position them adjacent to the grill, where they melt, and can then be scraped onto whatever you're cooking on the grill's cooking surface. Edited to add: oops! cross-posts R us!

Here's a few of mine, though I'm not sure how applicable they might be to your situation: 1. I shop a lot of bargain joints. Actually, I think you've already got this well-covered, what with BB's and all. For me, I shop at a bunch of local ethnic markets not only because I've nuts for the cuisines and the ingredients, but also because the prices are so low. When I need mainstream supermarket products, I go to the local Food-4-Less rather than Von's. 2. I go meatless for a significant number of my meals. Tofu is cheap; and I'm getting better and better at my bean cookery. (I'm not totally sure how this strategy would play with your specific nutritional requirements ... ) 3. Fierce price-comparing. One reason why it takes me forever to get out of the local Food-4-Less is that I spend a lot of time poring over the unit pricing, doggedly calculating out price per unit even when the store makes it difficult by using different units for different brands of the same dang item. I have been known to go all the way back to the other end of the store to put an item back on the shelf when I find a lower-priced version that just happens to be hiding in an entirely different department--heh, or sometimes I just abandon the first item right there, as sort of a penalty on the store for trying to "hide" the cheaper item from me. I too have no qualms whatsoever about buying store brands, or even generics, when the quality is similar enough to the national brands to make little difference for everyday cooking.

Oh, I assure you that cold pizza for breakfast is beloved of many Americans as well. It even inspired a song!

Cheers, Ms. Diva! This is just totally off the top of my head, so I don't know if some of these would work or not ... most of these involve the grill plate, because that's the type of gizmo I'm most familiar with ... 1. Julienne an assortment of veggies (including something from the onion family), toss in olive oil and seasonings of choice, and grill. Or toss in a neutral oil spiked with toasted sesame oil, and add some slivered ginger before grilling. 2. Instead of or in addition to the named pork products, try some fancier stuff--prosciutto, random salumi, whatever that's thin-sliced and has some inherent fat content to it. 3. Grilled smoked fish. Yum. Ya gotta like that fishy fragrance, though. 4. More onions. Anything in the onion family is fair game. Mushrooms too. In fact, I would be tempted to give just about any vegetable, and a number of fruits, a go on the grill--most anything should go, if sliced to the right thickness/thinness. 5. Are there any Mexican markets in your area? Here I can walk in and buy pre-marinated carne asada meat all ready to grill ... 6. The veggies would be good with cheese melted on them. 7. Any breadstuff you'd want to eat with any of the above would be nice buttered/oiled and then toasted on the grill or the griddle. Tortillas would be terrific. That's all I've got right now. Have fun!

The other night I roasted sliced fennel and chunked onions, liberally sprinkled with fresh-ground pepper. Absolutely heavenly, especially the fennel.

I am now a reformed junk-food junkie ... but back in the day, I had a whole bunch of guilty pleasures: --Jack in the Box's Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger --Carl's Jr. Six Dollar Burger (any variation thereof) --Cheapass delivery pizza with everything on it --Supermarket cheddar cheese--I used to rip through a 2lb block of the stuff in an embarrassingly short amount of time --Cheapass supermarket fried chicken --Americanized-Chinese buffets--some folks go to these and just tank on one thing, like the crab legs; I'd tank on things like the big greasy pork ribs --Big American diner-style breakfasts--like with the huge overstuffed multi-egg omelettes, hash browns, pork products, biscuits and gravy, etc. etc. etc. Technically, I could still indulge in any of these things as part of my occasional-splurge strategy, but now that I am only allowing myself those splurges on occasion (as opposed to, say, every single damn day ), I feel this peculiar reluctance to "waste" them on just any old crap. So of all the above guilty pleasures, the only one that still tempts me to expend a splurge on, maybe, is the Chinese buffet thang. Meat, grease, salt, sugar, MSG ... what's not to love?

That cherry salsa sounds terrific. And this is the first time I've seen your cherry-pitting gizmo--very cool! I'm also eager to hear more about those baked cucumbers--I've long wanted to find more uses for the darn things, and that sounds really intriguing.

I can't say that either I or my family have any expertise about barbeques--my dad was another of those 1950s-era backyard cooks who slapped steaks on the grill and called that "barbequeing". But one thing we always had with our outdoor fired-meat meals, especially when guests were coming, that I don't think has been mentioned yet is a huge fruit salad. We'd do the whole routine with cutting a watermelon into a basket shape, having at it with the melon-baller scoops until it was pretty much completely hollowed out, then piling in the balls of watermelon along with similar spheres of cantaloup and/or honeydew, plus whatever other fruit looked good at the market (blueberries and pineapple chunks were especial favorites). My family's practice was to use no dressing other than the liquid expressed from the cut fruit. Nowadays, I think I'd just park a bottle of good balsamic by the melon-basket for people to sprinkle on as desired.

Not only was that celebratory dinner totally yummy-looking, but I absolutely adore the building that houses Restaurant Sydney. Do you happen to know anything about the building's history?

Don't sweat it, Lori. Considering you're chasing after last-minute financial aid forms and wrangling cooking classes in addition to blogging, the last thing you need to be worrying about is tediously counting formatting commands to find the odd one out.

No guesses ... but just had to say that the "hit bull/hit grass" sign is cracking me up!

Alas, due to GERD, coffee has had to become a very occasional treat for me. But I'm originally from the New York Metro area, and like any good New Yawk kid I loves me some iced coffee, and went through tons of the stuff in my time. I must, however, confess to an iced coffee abomination I used to perpetrate on myself when I was a hapless college student, trying to keep up with 9am classes with an emphatically non-morning-person brain. I called this concoction Iced Coffee Sludge, and it was all about mainlining the maximum amount of caffeine in the fastest, cheapest way possible (this was back in the 1970s, when there weren't three $tarbucks on every block). Take one huge glass. Put in three or so heaping spoonfuls of *instant* coffee. Fill glass with a couple of inches of water; stir well to dissolve the instant as much as possible. Pile in as many ice cubes as will fit in the glass--about a trayful. Fill with water. Stir as best you can. Stick in a straw, and then drink as fast as you can possibly manage. Between the super amount of ice, and the fast inhalation, hopefully you won't be able to taste how nasty the damned thing is. Not much, anyway... Never fear, though--when drinking coffee for pleasure as opposed to pharmaceutical purposes, I was much nicer to myself. I got into Vietamese iced coffee real early, and basically never looked back. Although I did have a couple of meaningless flings with coffee granitas when they started appearing in Seattle.

Heh. So maybe y'all should be glad that Rachel hit Dick's and Beth's, instead of, say, Red Mill Burgers and Mae's. (I confess that Dick's and Beth's were occasional guilty pleasures of mine, too, when I lived in Seattle. Sometimes, ya just gotta have a serious greasy-spoon fix ... not just for the grease, but for the atty-tude. )

Wow--I must have been hiding in some alternate bookstore-dimension, because I didn't know about this particular book. (Oh wait--I'm no longer living in bookstore-rich Seattle but bookstore-deprived San Diego--okay, that's my excuse! ) Jaffrey's "World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking" is one of my all-time favorite cookbooks in the universe, so now that I know she's written another about the rest of the world, I'll certainly be getting my hands on it ASAP!

Heh. I'm in a quandary. There's tons of great produce in the markets, but there's also a heat wave on, and I hate cooking in the heat, and a lot of my favorite green things I like much better cooked. So I've been doing "guerilla cooking" -- waiting for the cool parts of the day/evening (which, allowing for the apartment to cool down after its western exposure has been roasted all evening, sometimes doesn't arrive until midnight ). Or I have in desperation resorted to pseudo-braising veggies in the microwave (with a cup or so of liquid in a lidded Pyrex casserole)--hey, it's better than nothing! When things cool down at least a little bit, I expect I'll be making big vats of ratatouille and of greens saute-braised with garlic, onions/shallot, olive oil, and a little broth--these are two of my all-time fave veggie dishes--and chilling them down for consumption over the following days. I also go through tons of my mongrel pico de gallo/chopped salad recipe--roma tomatos, cukes, and anything else that looks likely at the market, cubed and tossed with minced garlic, maybe a minced jalapeno, minced cilantro, and a very vinegary vinaigrette. Right now I've got a big bunch of fresh mint in the fridge that is begging to be used. My first thought is mint chutney, but I don't have any fresh chiles in the house (plus my tum's feeling a little out of sorts, so chiles may not be wise right now anyway). Soooo I'm contemplating coming up with another mongrel invention--a non-hot mint chutney? We shall see ... P.S. That photo of the zucchini with blossoms attached was pure food porn at its finest (fanning herself--and not from the heat wave )

I regularly see pesto recipes with that much basil, so I don't think quantity is the problem. Could you have possibly picked up some variety of Asian basil instead of Italian basil? Some of those can be milder than the European varieties, but some are much stronger and not really suitable for eating raw.

What is the purpose of boiling and shocking the basil? ← It keeps the basil bright green, without resorting to any additives.

Lookie! Cherry recipes, including slaw! (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.) Mind you, I never thought of the CDC as a purveyor of cooking wisdom ... but at least it demonstrates that *somebody* got away with putting cherries in their slaw in the past.

It is indeed challenging to make kidneys look pretty on a plate. Totally leaving aside any problems such as rancidity. Their odor when being cooked also tends to give many people pause (sez she who once, many years ago, almost came to blows with a housemate's guest over a kidney stew--I wasn't even cooking it for anybody besides myself, but alas the cooking smells didn't know that. )

You might find this page from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife interesting--I know I did. Tons of info about chum salmon, including a recipe challenge seeking to dispell some of the negative press this species has gotten. According to these folks, Good luck with your quest--let us know what comes of any cooking experiments you decide to pursue!

When I was in a local Middle-Eastern/Halal market the other day, I looked in the meat case, and glory be, there were some skinned lamb heads looking back at me! Now that I know that I have a source for the main ingredient, I'm tempted to give this dish, or something like it, a go. Only there are a few additional parameters that would need to be met: 1. The damned heat wave currently going on around here would need to be over and done with before I'd even consider turning on the oven, let alone roasting something for three hours. 2. I think I'd need some additional eaters--even though I imagine a single lamb's head wouldn't have all that much meat on it, there'd still probably be more than I could eat at one sitting. Although there's always the possibility of doing fun things with the leftovers. 3. I think I might need to wait for a weekend when current roommate is out of town. While this guy is a helluva lot more open-minded about my more exotic cooking experiments than the much-storied Fearless Ex-Housemate, I still think it might be a bit much to have him confront an ingredient that stared back at him. Although ... he is a lover of heavy-metal rock, so who knows--maybe he'd want a photo of the poor thing for his band's promo. So ... somewhat more seriously: anything I need to know about preparing one of these babies, if I should get my act together to do this, beyond what's already in this topic? Any preliminary cleaning I need to perform? Should I see if I can get the butcher at that market to split the head, or should I keep it whole? Other seasonings I should consider? Any other advice? Y'know, depending on which staffer I run into at the market when I go to do the buy, I wonder if I might even get into one of those wonderful conversations, along the lines of "Wow, Euro-American chick who wants to cook some of our food! Cool, let me tell you all about how we do this back home..."

Loving your cooking-class tips! Oh, and I'm glad to see that your students have not forgotten the tradition of making rabbit-ears behind somebody's head when a camera is pointed at them. (How *does* that meme keep getting passed on? It's like kid folklore!)