BarbaraY

I have never been to NYC and know only what I have read and seen on TV. I truly enjoy reading posts and blogs by those who see the real city and live your daily lives there. I think I could just about kill for the breads alone since I live in a very rural area where, if one wants good bread, they had best make it themselves. I'm curious about your shopping trips. Do you carry all your purchases home yourself or use some sort of public transportation? Or you just take care not to buy everything at once?

Today I received my order from Amazon.com with Bento Boxes, Japanese Meals on the Go by Naomi Kijima. It gives me a whole new take on Japanese food. I'm really looking forward to trying the recipes even though I will probably just have them for my own lunch at home. Anyone unfamiliar with Bento Boxes should find this a good book to add to their collection.

I have been having the same rant for years. If people have eaten out they blame the restaurant but if it's their own cooking, why they have stomach flu. Yeah!

I love cumiin but too much smell like gym socks to me. A little is good, a lot is not better.

In Japanese Cooking a Simple Art Shizuo Tsuji calls for kneading the octopus with grated daikon before the octopus is boiled. The only way I have eaten octopus was in Sushi and a Mexican Sopa de Mariscos.

I keep both Kewpie and Banquet brand mayo. My daughter loves Kewpie on broccoli or asparagus. The Banquet Brand is a Southern California brand that isn't a major brand. It is much more tangy than Best Foods.

I just checked a couple of my books. One prefers pan frying rather than deep frying. The other adds 1 tablespoon sugar to 5 cups water for the dipping medium. I think the sugar in the water might take care of the browning problem. Good luck!

You are a girl after my own heart. Cream and butter in mashed potatoes! Mmmmm! Great blog!

Now you really have my attention. That looks just too good. No Poussins to be had here but I can get Cornish hens.

I find that, here at least, most of these monster breasts are injected with a salt solution that gives them a truly nasty texture. Foster Farms has some that haven't been "enhanced" but they are still huge. I cook one half breast for my daughter and myself. Doesn't always make for a great presentation. Food service doesn't want 1 lb. chicken breasts so the big ones go to the public markets.

I consider this lack of self respect and very poor management. A new hire should be informed that messy uniforms, perfumes or B.O. will not be tolerated. I remember well the first time I had to call aside a line cook and explain that he needed to shower in the morning and use deodorant. If management can't do that, they shouldn't be managing.

I toast them in my micro/convection on the convection setting at 350º. I keep nuts in the freezer so they go into a small sheet pan frozen. Oven is set for 5 minutes. I put them into the oven during the pre-heat cycle, then finish when it has reached the temperature. Sometimes walnuts take a bit longer than pecans or pinenuts. I realize that this wouldn't work for everyone but I do think a timer is essential. They are too easy to forget if you get distracted. If toasting them in a regular oven I would start checking at 5 minutes. Using a broiler will almost guarantee burnt nuts. Not a good plan. The only ones that I do on top of the stove are pine nuts.

My daughter came home with a bottle of this a while back. She uses it more often than I do but it is great for cleaning up the pans that you don't have room for in the dishwasher. It really does take very little to do the job.

For Japanese cooking, I really believe Japanese Cooking, a Simple Art is the very best. Homestyle Japanese Cooking by Tokiko Susuki is very good at explaining things but many recipes call for things that aren't available in Americn markets and doesn't make suggestions for substitutions.

I will go to Joy of Cooking or Betty Crocker for Down Home American, Biba Caggiano for Italian, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, for French, Japanese Cooking a Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji for Japanese. Oddly, I don't have a specific choice for Chinese foods even though I have a fairly large collection of Chinese cook books. If I want to try something new I scan many of them. Am loving Ah Leung's food pictorials. It's filling up some blanks. Carrot Top, The Gold Cookbook rang a bell with me and I checked my bookshelves. Sure enough there it is, so battered that the cover is gone from the spine. It was the first "French Cookbook" I bought.

I picked up three Sunkist Moros at Safeway about a week ago........................NOT GOOD! The musky taste and rather dry texture was very off-putting. I once had a delicious Blood Orange Marmalade and was hoping to duplicate it. Not with those babies!

I don't recall ever asking a chef for a recipe but I have often been asked for mine. An amusing incident was the time a frequent customer from my previous employment came to my new job for a recipe. I had to confess it was Bradley Ogden's.

I usually get one that has had the fat cap cut off and tied back on. I remove the ties and lift the cap and trim excessive fat from the meat. Then smear with copious amounts of finely minced garlic, kosher salt, and fresh ground pepper. Then put the fat cap back over it and roast at 350º for 3 to 3 1/2 hours. In the restaurant I would pull it at 115º but for home I would go for 130-135º unless you want it well done.

No breakfast in bed for me. Breakfast in bed is for hospitals. Just the idea of trying to eat bread in my flotation bed is ridiculous because one can't sit in a comfortable eating position. Give me a table on the terrace. Fresh brewed dark roast coffee and some scones. Champagne and strawberries would be a nice touch.

OMG! That was what we had for dinner last evening. I recently injured my shoulder and cutting up a lot stuff isn't on my agenda most days. Since I didn't feel like doing anything else, I made a box of Deluxe and cut a couple of pieces of Hillshire Turkey Kielbasa down the cneter so they would lie flat and browned both sides. I did cut up some zucchini amd mushrooms and sauteed them in olive oil with a bit of green onion.

I used to work at a place that cut up a lot of fries into a 5 gal bucket and then covered them with water overnight. They soaked up a lot of water during that time. Perhaps the salt in a brine would do the same on smaller pieces rather than whole.

There are so many brands of seasoned salt around, it's hard to tell what your problem with it is. Some are better (or worse) than others. I like a sprinkle of Johnny's on my breakfast eggs. It contains: fine grain crystalline salt, msg, pepper, paprika, granulated garlic, and "spices". My youngest daughter always goes into orbit when she sees me use it because of the msg.

mizducky, last summer I met a young Jewish woman. When I asked what her family served for Sabbath meals, she told me boiled chicken. That was it every week. Her Dad had been raised very poor in England and didn't want anything else. As for my family, we are the usual American mutts so that it's hard to be sure where everyone started. At least four generations back were the most recent arrivals. My paternal grandmother was a fabulous cook. When she and my grandfather were first married they traveled the Nevada boomtowns. He was a millwright for the stamp mills and she would have a boarding house where she fed the unmarried men. Bodie was the roughest but they left there when my dad was on the way. She made lovely roast chickens, the fluffiest biscuits, and creamy custards. The table was always properly set and she always had some kind of desert even if it was only a bowl of sugared peaches or berries. My grandfather sat at the head of the table and carved and served whatever meat was prepared. He had lost 1/2 his left thumb in an accident and I can still see him holding the steel in his left hand gripped with the stub of thumb while he honed the carving knife. Grandma loved to make fancy dishes and belonged to a card club which she entertained once a year. She loved making exquisite things to serve the other ladies. Sometimes I was expected to entertain with a recitation of some sort. (Don't ask.) She enjoyed learning new ethnic foods. The Italian neighbor taught her to make "Basilico Macaroni", Pasta e Pesto and Rice Pie, a rice frittata. My maternal grandmother was nowhere near as skillful. Her food was OK but really bland and not at all imaginative. My mom was not a good cook at all but she likes to think so and tells people how great she was. She did make a good Chile Verde but I can't think of much else that was good.

This is a problem for me too. The magnetized containers are really cute but I have way too many for my fridge and it is in a cumbersome place. It's bad enough to have to go across the room to get something out of it but it would drive me up the wall trying to go over there every time I needed a spice, too. I have one cupboard dedicated to seasonings and a shelf in the pantry has Oriental seasonings. As long as no one moves anything to another shelf everything is usually OK but it does seem that I spend a lot of time digging for things that have gotten shoved to the back.

Grinding Stones Obviously you didn't have Miss Rozier as your 4th grade teacher. She was a great lover of the local Mi Wuk culture and had a collection of Native baskets that is now in a museum. She got us all so involved that we agreed to stay an extra hour like the "big kids" just for our California History lessons. One of the girls in our class is Mi Wuk and her mother made us some acorn mush. It tasted like cold Cream of Wheat with no salt although I think it would probably have been better warm. Our local tribe has the Black Oak Casino for good reason. Black oak is the preferred acorn in this area. There are still many grinding stones along the creeks and rivers here. They are usually found near the water because of the necessary leaching that was done in loosely woven cone shaped baskets. Cooking baskets were so tightly woven that they don't leak. The mush was cooked by dropping hot stones into it. I do think Barbara's mom used a range, though, since by this time everyone had a stove. We used to play in the grinding stone areas. Some of the grinding holes were very deep, up to a kids elbow. You could also find obsidien chips nearby, the remains of arrowhead making.