Soupcon

There is a great cake by Claudia Roden; Orange and Almond cake found in the NYT cooking site : http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/3251-claudia-rodens-orange-and-almond-cake Reqires a food processor, precooked oranges (so there is some prep to do before executing the recipe) as well as a spring form pan for easy release. Can be flavoured along with the orange with ginger or cinnamon.

Separate them, package them by weight, freeze them and sell them to bakers/bakeries.

How do I prevent browning on the top and what are good food dyes to use in macaron making as I think the food dye I used might be the problem?

Myfitness pal is the most comprehensive weight loss data base I have ever found or used. It does allow the user to determine the daily caloric intake and the program does show after each addition of food eaten the number of calories left in the daily allowance left to be consumed. You can also determine the daily intake in percentages of protein, carbohydrate and fat as well as the total daily carbohydrate limit. The program will do all the math for you on a running total basis daily within your predefined limits/percentages. Inputting your own recipes is a feature as well as recipes in digital format found on the internet.

As I am gearing up for making fruitcakes for christmas (no cake manages in this house to last a year in the ageing process) it reminds me of a story that is funny now but not so funny then and involved 3 fruitcakes. I was asked to bake my brother-in-law's wedding cake with my mother's fruitcake recipe and I did so well in advance. But as decorating a wedding cake is not something I would even dream of attempting to do I searched around for a professional baker who would decorate it for me. An excellent patisserie close to where I live had just hired a new grad from the local community college which has a very good professional chefs course and he had passed at the top of his class in the pastry arts. So I asked if he would decorate it for me and he consented. So I thought I was off the hook. On the day of the wedding I went to pick up the cake and he remarked to me that the cakes had seemed a little hard and so he had steamed them to make them soft. OMG. Obviously he had no idea what a fruit cake was and thought I had given him stale cakes and he did not bother to call and ask me or anyone else what to do with them if anything. The wedding reception was in a large downtown hotel and as I carried the cake in it began to list to one side as he had put no supports under the tiers of my now very soft fruit cakes and during the reception if fell over. The bride was upset, I was mortified and it took me a long to see the funny side of the story as I do now... the bride however still does not.

Why replace the ghee with olive oil? Ghee made with butter (not veg fat) is easy to make at home. I have been on a high protein low fat low carbohydrate diet for a year or two for weight loss purposes and provided I stick with the formula it works well. I reformulate my recipes keeping in mind my increased protein intake per meal and the severe decrease in carbohydrate. I am more likely to not have enough fat in my diet rather than too much. Carbohydrate intake is more difficult to manage as the average diet is so high in carbohydrate compared to this diet. The only dishes I have ceased to make are pasta dishes. Dishes that include rice as part of the tradition serving portion contunue to be made the same way but I limit severely my rice/carbohydrate portion and gross up the protein portion. I still eat eggs and bacon but pancakes have disappeared from my menu. Sandwiches for me are openfaced with a large (150 or more grams) amount of protein. French fries are a rare indulgence. Soups are broth based with meat and veg and a max portion size of 50 gm of dried noodles per serving if noodles are part of the soup that day. I weigh all the meat and measure the fat and milk by volume in order to help to figure out on a daily bases my protein, fat and carbohydrate intake. In short the diet works.

So what does everyone think about the new "Fine Cooking"? Contributions to the 97th ed. were from not experts in the fields of cooking but a robotics project manager, the magazines illustrator, a registered dietitian and a photographer and two designers. The contributions from experts in the field of cooking seem to be on the wane and the target market for the mag is not "for people who love to cook" but for the inexperienced as denoted in the title "we bring out the cook in you".

I suggest Randy you conduct a little experiment with these seniors. Write them a letter asking them for help solving a problem. Ask them to feed 40 people using the budget you have and for them to use the local newspaper adds to purchase the ingredients. Ask them as part of the exercise to use their favourite recipes to cook the dishes for their sample menu and ask them to submit their costs and recipes. Explain that those whose sample menus meet budget costs you will cook for them as detailed. Perhaps this will keep them busy and may prevent the complainers from complaining and also more importantly give them a stake in what you cook for them as it will indeed reflect their tastes.

Anybody know where you can buy salted anchovies. I used to be able to buy them from Italian/Portugese family markets on St. Clair, East of Oakwood and before that on College Street West but no more. You know the ones found in the large open tin sitting on the butchers counter - yummy. All I can find now are the horrible anchovies packed in oil in small tins found in supermarkets everywhere and revolting to eat after you have had the real thing. Not that the salted ones here even approach the ones available in Europe. I have this craving...

How about Pommes Dauphinoise made without cheese - just potatoes, garlic and cream with salt and pepper for seasoning. I use this as my go to dish for events just like these and get rave reviews every time.

I think it's totally unfair for you to have to deal with three types of finickifications at once. One of your guests needs to take on e for the team. I like this word. Changed my mind (woman's perogative of course) I this word May I steal it? PS to seandirty I also think that recipe is a definite keeper. What a great sauce idea. Kudos to you.

I think there are something bean cookers who are having difficulty are missing from my earlier quote of Russ Parsons "alkaline substances are VERY problematic. they'll stop cooking cold. this is why boston baked beans you add the molasses at the very end. it's also why in certain cities at certain times of year, beans will never soften (alkaline salts in the water)" Is the water you are using alkaline? Could this be the reason you are having so much trouble getting the beans to soften?

I usually poach local hand made sausages from the farmers market in heavily salted water before frying in a hot pan with a little oil or clarified butter. But lately I have been using a long slow fry in a little oil or clarified butter over low heat to cook them. IMHO the long slow fry wins hands down. Just YUMMY

There is a thread on cooking beans and this contribution by Russ Parsons seems to say it all: "for a while, i was afraid that my tombstone would read "did not soak beans". here's what i believe about beans: 1) you do not NEED to soak them. soaking does speed up the cooking process and, i think, result in slightly more uniform cooking among the beans. not soaking, of course, means you don't need to plan the night before about what you're going to fix for dinner. also, and maybe more important, not soaking the beans results in a very, very flavorful broth. this is much more like mexican-style beans than, perhaps, french. 2) salt them right away. try them unsalted and salted side-by-side and you won't believe the difference. salted beans are seasoned all the way through. salting at the end you just get a very salty broth and bland beans. 3) acid is somewhat problematic. it does delay cooking. add tomatoes, etc., only after the beans have begun to soften. 4) alkaline substances are VERY problematic. they'll stop cooking cold. this is why boston baked beans you add the molasses at the very end. it's also why in certain cities at certain times of year, beans will never soften (alkaline salts in the water). 5) i do believe that beans need to be started slowly and cooked slowly. the starches soften and dissolve in order rather than all at once. cook them too quickly and you'll find that more beans break up. 6) there is almost nothing you can do about the "digestive unpleasantness" issue. certainly, soaking has absolutely no effect. i talked to a scientist who had measured the sugars left in beans after soaking. cold soaking removed only a very negligible amount (the sugars are the stored energy the beans will need in their role as seeds--growing new plants; soaking is the first stage of germination, it would make no sense to purge sugars at that point). hot soaking removed about 10-15%, if i remember correctly. and, he said, if you repeated the hot soaking three times, you actually reached a decent level. of course, beans that were hot-soaked three times in a row lacked something gustatorily. beano, the product, is an enzyme that dissolves the specific sugars that beans contain. it does work. on the other hand, part of the musical nature of beans is that they are very high in fiber, which the american diet is very low in. beano does nothing for this. the only thing that works is eating beans frequently; your system will adjust. note that in mexico and central america, where beans have always been eaten in abundance, 1) they never soak beans and 2) rarely experience digestive distress. cook more beans. "

We have a few community ovens in Toronto. Here is info about one/two of them: The two wood ovens are near the basketball courts and the outdoor ice rink, at the northwest corner of the park. They're next to some flower and vegetable gardens that are surrounded by split-rail fences to keep the dogs out. Roses grow over the fence, and beans and squash in season. Sometimes in winter if it's really cold out, skaters come off the ice to stand by the oven nearest the rink, to try and warm themselves. But the ovens are not very warming, because they were designed to channel all their heat into their baking chamber. Oven schedule If you want to bake your own bread, you can come after 3p.m. on Thursdays and use the residual heat left from the farmers' market baking. If you want to learn how we bake the bread, you're welcome to come and watch any time on Thursdays between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. You can also get free sourdough starter from us, to take home. But don't try to chat much with the bakers, they need to concentrate on their work. And don't ask about workshops or lessons - there won't be any. It's not a school. But if you want to watch and learn that way, you're welcome. How they got built You can see a step-by-step photo gallery of how the oven was built, and get some tips: When we first put out feelers in 1995 to see if anything would stop us from building a communal wood-fired oven, we found to our amazement that there was nothing to stop us. The building inspector said the oven was too small to come under his jurisdiction. (He also looked at the oven plan diagrams and told us he had once been a bricklayer, and that he thought, personally, that our plans looked good.) The park supervisor said he didn't see anything wrong with our oven plans, and then he went away on holidays. The fire department said they had no problem with an enclosed fire set some distance away from any other building. A government agency that had given us a small "child nutrition grant" said that fresh bread from an oven sounded nutritious to them, so we could use some of the grant to pay for the oven materials. A friendly and capable contractor in the neighbourhood looked at our plans and said, sure, he was busy in the week but he could get our oven built in a couple of weekends. So with nothing to stop the oven, we went ahead and built it. Our experiences, and suggestions to others, are written down in a booklet called Cooking With Fire in Public Space. You can download a PDF copy of the un-illustrated text by clicking here: Cooking With Fire in Public Space. You can also see a step-by-step photo gallery of how the oven was built, and get some tips: The plans came from Alan Scott — oven designer and builder, visiting leader of our second oven workshop, desem sourdough baker. Alan's web site is www.ovencrafters.net. You might read The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott (Chelsea Green, 1999) — a "thoughtful, entertaining, and authoritative book that shows you how to bake superb healthful bread and build your own masonry oven". Also, the brick oven page at the Masonry Heater Association's web site is full of interest. How we use the ovens An oven attracts festivals and community events. This only makes sense. People want to share food on special occasions. If we had built substantial stone barbecues instead of an oven, the festivals would still have come. But an oven is more sheltered from the elements, and in winter we can bake bread and make pizza even when it snows. We don't have to put on the festivals ourselves. People call up and say: Dinner around the oven ....six folk-dancing groups get together once a year and there are too many people for a small hall -- could they come and dance outdoors and bring a potluck to augment our bread and pizza? ....A theater company has devised an open-air park performance about the mythology surrounding baking in ancient times, could they get us to bake some bread for opening night? .....A community Hallowe'en parade needs a destination for the parade to end at -- could they end at the park around a giant bonfire, with fresh bread for the participants? .....The local city councillor's office wants to host an all-neighbourhood lawn sale, could they put it near the oven and have some pizza available? The smaller events come even more easily. A nursery school wants to do its annual fundraiser, a daycare wants a picnic of all the parents and kids, a street festival will culminate in a pizza-potluck at the park, a group of friends wants to bake unleavened bread before passover, a city parks tour wants to stop and have lunch at the oven. Even birthday parties, if screened, are a kind of community get-together, with familiar faces as friends from school and, often, their parents, gather around the pizza-making table. And that's not even counting the school classes which want to make pizza at the park, as part of their play day, or part of a lesson on wheat. There used to be weeks in the spring when there were school outings to the Dufferin Park oven twice a day every weekday. (We finally put a halt to having so many: we were turning into a pizza joint, when we're actually a park.) Some of the children who came to those early school visits told us they'd never been to the park before, even if they lived three blocks away. So the oven brought them into the park. They often said they'd come back with their parents, and sometimes they did. Pizza Oven Sunday Scene The programs we do offer ourselves around the oven are also proof of the strong desire people have to eat together. Once or twice a week in the summer it's an open oven, when anyone can come and buy a lump of dough and some tomato sauce and cheese, bring their own toppings and make lunch. Often there are seventy or eighty parents and young children coming to make their lunch. Getting your lunch like this takes much longer than ordering a slice from the pizza place up the street. But people tell us speed is not the point. Perhaps they've come to meet their former prenatal class here, all of them now with six-month-old babies, and they're all spread out on three big blankets. Or they've just arranged to meet one friend and spend an afternoon off work in the sunshine, talking and watching the children run around the park. Or they've come on their own, new in the neighbourhood, hoping to meet some of their neighbours. Any way you look at it, an oven brings people into a park. Build it and they will come.

"Most insightful post. The reputation for bland, boring, underseasoned, tasteless, unimaginative, uninventive, traditional, often-boiled textureless food, while deserved at one time, is certainly a thing of the past. All of the influences you cite have played a large role, especially travel and immigration. I remember a time when the only place you could get a highly-seasoned and flavorful meal in London was at a curry house." This quote is reflective of most food found in N.A. today with the exception of high priced restaurants. My parents were English and I lived in England in the 50's and 70's and found none of the above to be true. Yes there was rationing which I do remember but meal times were never "Chef Boy-ar-dee" glop from a can which my sons' friends today equate to a decent meal or the ubiquitous pasta and the contents of a bottle or can and a salad of iceburg lettuce and a cardboard tasting tomato which more frequently passes for dinner/supper of my work mates today. My mother was a great meat cook (learned of course from her mother who was an even better all round cook) and rare meat was the order of the day with the exception of poultry and pork of course but lamb and beef - always. Stews, deep dish fruit pies with cream for desert, yorkshire puds, roast and baked potatoes, all kinds of fruit puddings and deserts. I remember eating duck, goose, rabbit, venison and pidgeon as a child. - certainly not the average N.A. fare even today. My parents were not wealthy by any means and my English grandfather grew a lot of the produce we ate in his garden and on his allotment - extra land used for vegetable growing most English people had/have. My grandmother had a chicken coop at the bottom of the garden for many years - fresh eggs daily and my grandfather had a greenhouse he built to grow tomatoes and seedlings for planting out in the spring. Much better food we ate then than most of us eat today.

Not being a vet but being familiar with IV solutions for humans - a 0.9% solution is normal for IV infusion and is = to the saline & found in human blood. I'll bet that chickens are not much different. So probably at least a 1% solution by weight as weight is the most accurate measurement as different salts occupy different volumes when measured by weight. Trying different solutions by percentage will give you the one you like the best as in the long run it is all a matter of taste.

You need salt in the poaching liquid as you need to achieve equilibrium in saline content between the salt already in the chicken and the poaching liquid, otherwise you leach the natural salt content of the chicken flesh into the poaching liquid until equilibrium has been reached. No salt food is not very palatable and if poaching with no salt in the liquid you probably will find the eaters adding excess salt to their food at the table. Try poaching chicken breast in saline and non saline solutions and compare yourself. I bet you prefer the breast poached in the saline solution every time.

Stephen With my fist born,s montessori class (he was aged 3 at the time) I took graham crackers, tons of royal icing made with meringue powder and many different kinds of small candies to make gingerbread houses with them. The royal icing was the glue which held the houses together and acted as snow and a base to glue on the candy decorations. Each house uses pre sized (by you) lengths of crackers for the walls and longer lengths for the two roof pieces. I cut the end house pieces so as to support a peaked roof. The houses require you help the children glue the houses together carefully and apply the royal iceing and ornaments and the let them dry overnight to be taken home the next day. The kids, teachers and parents loved this so much I did this every year my children were at montessori and then for many years of my childrens public schooling years up to grade 6 when it even expanded to include the whole school. You will have just as much fun as they do. When I undertook this activity, the children were the ones to make and decorate the houses with the adults only aiding them (not doing for them) and the children used their fingers to apply the royal icing and candies. They were allowed to apply as many candies in as many ways as their could think of.

Lentils du Puy. YUM. Discovered them TG and love em. I cook them in my rice cooker with a little extra water/stock/wine than I would normally use for the same amount of rice and now have no more burned pans from forgetting about the damn pan on the burner. Turned on many of my colleagues to eating Lentils du Puy as I often take them for lunch.

I have the new edition, not that I had any earlier editions, and I love it. I took it away with me on an all "girl" weekend at a cottage and I barely got it a glance as everyone else lined up to read it. It is a fond of info and insignts. Quite the best cookbook I have read in a long time.

Last week I experienced "the Italian way" to can tomatoes. Four of us were kindly invited to can tomatoes in the garage of a friend one Friday. Two of us duly bought 8 bushels of roma tomatoes, remembering the instructions to make sure that they were ripe. The tomatoes were delivered and left in the garage for the big day. When I arrived at the home of the friend, slightly late I confess, I found canning in full swing. Anna and her husband had been up since 6am washing the tomatoes and setting up the equipment. (Washing 8 bushels of roma tomatoes... my goodness) There were two large metal burners fueled by propane on which the canners - two large oil drums - would sit. Two tressle tables with table cloth were lined up at the back of the garage on which I could see many prepared clean quart canning jars with a few pieces of fresh basil in them. The metal lids and rings were in a bowl on the table. At one end of the table was a large wooden trough with small drainage hole at one end under which I could see a bucket. Beside this trough was THE MACHINE. This machine is like a meat grinder except there is a screen over the length of the screw through which the tomatoe juice and pulp are forced and the skin and seeds are forced through the end into another disposal bucket. The skin and seeds are very dry and contain very little liquid after going through THE MACHINE. The pulp and liquid are forced out the screen and down a guide into another large bucket. One of the burners has a large aluminium stock pot simmering into which 1/2 bushels of tomatoes are dumped to make it easier for the skins to be removed and then the blanched tomatoes are fished out and dumped into the wooden trough to await their turn in THE MACHINE. One of us is working THE MACHINE, using a pusher to force the hot tomatoes through and others and pricking the hot tomatoes with a fork (hot tomatoe juice in the eye or on the face is not pleasant) so the person manning THE MACHINE is less likely to get burnt. Others empty the pail with the tomato juice and pulp into yet another large tub where the salt is added - four circles in the air with the salt box running salt is the correct amount I am told. And still others ladle the tomatoe pulp into the waiting jars. When enough jars are full with appropriate head space and with the lids and rings in place the oil drums are loaded - approx 100 jars per oil drum - with layers of old cotton sheeting, old towels etc are crammed between the jars and between the layers to stop them from moving and possibly breaking while cooking. Then when the drum is full, we all teamed together to lift the drum onto it's burner making sure it was centered and stable, the gas was lit and we were cooking. It takes about 1 hour for each full drum to boil, then they boil for 1 hour and then a few hours to cool down enough to bail out the water and lift the hot jars out. We canned 150 quarts/litres of tomatoes all together that day. This family normally carries out this canning ritual for each of its members and regularly cans 12 bushels or more a day for a number of days in August/Sept of each year and has done so for the past 30 or so years.

There is in fact no shortage of food in this world. The problem is location, transportation and cost as a result of the subsidization of crops in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia and the policies of the World Bank in the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) forced on the poorest countries of the world. The SAPs forced the farmers to subsidize the "industrial base" in their country while making farm inputs increasingly expensive and forced many small farmers off the land while at the same time allowing the agribusiness to take over the land once farmed by small sharecroppers for the export markets (bananas for example) - a condition of the SAP (world bank) for exports from each country involved. This allowed Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia markets for their over production of crops due to subsidies and to replace the staple crops once produced by local farmers to be substituted by a taste for the cheaper imported wheat, corn etc. Food aid from these same countries also made sure that the farmers in neighbouring countries to those experiencing crop failure were undercut by tied aid or food aid. So counties which had or should be self sufficient or almost self sufficient in food production are now dependent on imported food. Holding commodities futures has now also become a method used by large investment dealers/traders and countries to offset the decline in value of their holdings in the declining US dollar and the amount if each commodity is finite while the increase of US dollars in world markets appears to be infinite - many dollars chasing after few widgets drives up the price of widgets.

I have smoothies for breakfast daily especially as I have to be at work by 7am and making breakfast any other way at that ungodly hour is not on. I use 250 gm. yogurt, 200 gm. frozen fruit and 30 gm of unflavoured protein powder and add milk to thin. I use a stick blender and take the smoothie with me in the car. I find I don't get hungry in the mornings now with a protein drink for breakfast and my food intake as a result has decreased to the point that I am loosing weight. Yahoooo.

Does anybody know where to buy duck/goose fat (other than Whiteheads where it is priced out of this world) and fresh/frozen duck legs in Toronto or surround?