Lisa Shock

I would not soak the candied fruit. That said, IMO, it's traditional to rinse it with water, let dry, and shake with a little flour to coat. This way, it's less likely to clump in the batter.

The formula you mention will probably work, but it will be a denser bread than the loaf you pictured earlier. I spent a year baking nothing but rye loaves before i was satisfied that I could do it well.

Tonight, I made a pasta casserole, something between baked ziti and macaroni & cheese, with some broccoli tossed in. I had some leftover mix, with flour, I mixed two tablespoons with some plain breadcrumbs and a little butter and used that as a topping. It was great. Not Italian at all, but very good. Be warned that my topping was right on the edge of being too salty. This is powerful stuff. (also, I think some gets lost in deep frying -with a bake, it all stays put)

You might want to read up on baking with rye. It needs to be handled completely differently than wheat flour, and blends do not always work well, unless the rye is less than 15% of the overall flour. If you use the same settings you use for wheat bread with rye, you'll get an overworked gummy mess.

So, I made the mix, although I had to make one substitution, I even went on a run to the market to get some spices I was low on to make this, and forgot that I don't have any paprika. I substituted some fairly spicy pimenton for the paprika, but only used half as much. I then used the mix, with egg wash first, to make some potato slices. It was very good. The pimenton made it fairly spicy, though, and the smokiness came through as well. I recommend it, but it's probably not true to anyone's memories of KFC. I was surprised at the synergy of the spices. I could not pick out ginger or celery seed flavor. Also, I had been wondering if the herbs would make it taste fairly 'green' but I did not get that. It was a little sweet, I did not add sugar -although I did add 1 Tbsp Accent (msg). The mix did make me sneeze, a lot. So, I'd be careful about getting too much in the air. I am going to try making other things with it now. I think there is real potential in using the mix as a dredge and maybe in a tempura batter (sub rice flour for the AP flour).

The one time I checked was in 1989....

Vegaline Premium or Vegaline Grid Iron are both very good. IIRC, you have to get them at a restaurant supply store. Smart & Final used to carry them, I believe that Restaurant Depot still does.

I have never eaten there. The one time I checked, they had absolutely nothing vegetarian besides drinks. The vegetable sides and even the salad dressings contained meat.

One last suggestion, I have gotten really good potatoes at various Asian supermarkets. One of them here in Phoenix, LeeLee a huge place, always has really tasty reds.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but, there are two issues with the formula as it stands: 1) It makes a really small amount. Maybe someone reduced it for home use, but, any franchisee, or someone packing for a franchisee wouldn't be sitting there and measuring out tablespoons of spice and cups of flour -they would probably need 30-100 times as much per day. Which leads me to: 2) The formula shown in the article is volumetric and involves all dry ingredients which makes no sense. By the time the recipe went into regular use in the first restaurant, someone was mixing it in large tubs or maybe a 35qt Hobart. (why mix it daily when you can mix it weekly or monthly then just scoop it out as needed) They were buying by weight, they should have been mixing by weight for consistency. It should probably read more like: 20lb sack of AP flour 1lb salt 1/2 jar Thyme (1.5 oz to a jar, therefore .75oz) 1/2 jar Basil (1.5 oz to a jar, therefore .75oz) 1/3 jar Oregano (1.5 oz to a jar, therefore .75oz) 1 1.5 oz jar Celery Salt 1 1.5oz jar Black Pepper 1 1.5oz jar Dry Mustard 4 1.5oz jars Paprika 1 1.5oz jar dry Ginger 2 1.5oz jars Garlic Salt 3 1.5oz jars White Pepper (plus sugar and msg) -Or, by the late 1960s, a 100lb sack of flour and some larger commercial canisters of spice. I can pretty much guarantee that the current formula is by weight (probably metric) and makes a large quantity at once. -Although they probably make small batches of experimental products in the test kitchen.

FYI, the Kindle version is still slated for September 20, although I still prefer my cookbooks to be real hardbacks. I also found an eBay listing as well.

The spices add significantly to the cost, too.

The flies will be looking for a place to grow eggs, the eggs then hatch into maggots. They prefer damp, dark areas. Throw out ALL of your your trash/recycling. Then wash your trash cans. If you don't use your garbage disposal often, run it now, and pour some vinegar down the drain. Run any sink you don't use very often like in guest bathroom. Pull out your fridge and stove and look for 'lost' rotting food. (on a gas stove, try removing the bottom drawer to get access to the floor below) Clean your under-sink cupboard, it's probably ok, but, a random piece of food could have landed there and started to rot. Just generally check the backs of things and under stuff. Make sure a mouse hasn't gotten inside, too. The flies themselves can live up to 30 days, so building or buying some sort of trapping device is probably worthwhile, I don't like using pesticides -particularly indoors. My sympathies are with you, good luck!

Nope, pectin looses potency over time. It won't hurt anyone to try it, but, more than likely it simply won't work.

HERE's a link to an eBay auction of the Claudia Sanders seasoning. Click on the images to enlarge them. (ebay doesn't keep info forever, this link will break very soon) This item was made by Marion-Kay in Indiana. Note that the ingredients are shown on the back of the package: Pepper (white and black), MSG, Salt and natural herbs and spices. White pepper is listed before black, so there is more of it than the black. (and more of it than anything else, which jibes with the newspaper article) There is more MSG than salt! And, like today, herbs and spices do not need to be mentioned by name.

I just realized that you could make meringue cookies, torch them, and crush them black into char dust and sprinkle that on the plate.

Esme gin for some G&Ts. IMO, it's decent and very floral. A nice change of pace.

I don't see crumble as part of lemon meringue pie. Also, the cream quenelle, what does that represent? -Meringue does not contain cream, it's just egg white and sugar. The curd is also cream-free. (although it does contain a small amount of butter) I see the following components in the pie slice: crust (with vanilla flavor), custard (with lemon juice flavor), and meringue (sometimes has vanilla). Fire would be a potential extra. The beauty of lemon meringue pie, to me, is in the eggs. The genius here is the balance of using egg yolks for the curd and whites for the meringue. Essentially, I would look at some sort of sweetened egg yolk preparation (plain, very yolk-y sabayon?) and some egg white foam. Then, you have lemon supremes. And, maybe, some shards of glass-like hard candy made with vanilla extract. I might add meringues, the cookie, to represent the topping, maybe. I would add a shortbread cookie to represent the crust. I can't imagine deconstructing this further, as you just get butter, flour, and sugar.

What's for dinner?

I have suspected sugar myself, and hey, it's not an herb or spice, so, it may not appear in the list. That said, some spices trigger a recognition or memory of sweetness when no sweetener is there. If the ginger is really there, it explains a lot of what the Esquire team was saying. They had a really tough job trying to untangle flavors after they were mixed and deep fried with chicken. Thanks for the Poundstone reference. That was what I meant, I just did not recall the correct year. Once again, I wonder how much spice is destroyed in cooking, and, we probably have better lab equipment nowadays. The Chicago Tribune's taste test seems pretty conclusive. However, I'd like to see a real test with 100+ participants given unmarked samples of both the real and the supposed recipe and see what happens. -Don't even say anything about KFC. I think the Tribune, while well-intentioned, did not work the test out well enough to eliminate unconscious bias.

I like a red called Sangre, but have only seen it once in a store since I left New Mexico. I have raised them in my garden, though.

I am also suspicious of the celery part of the celery salt, but, I agree that back in the day spices were sold way past their prime. I would also like to mention that part of what triggered my thinking for my recipe was reading a newspaper article (maybe a magazine???) in the 1970s where someone sent some of the Colonel's chicken to a lab to try and reverse engineer the recipe. They found flour, salt, pepper, and a lot of chicken. They could not confirm other spices. So, part of my thinking was that the herbs and spices were already very processed as part of the bouillon, and then being fried just destroyed them. (I had no clue that modern food labs were using chemicals from, or found in, the herbs not the whole herb. Nowadays, I doubt that the 1970s test could find any of the esters used as flavorings in processed foods. -And be affordable for a reporter.) And, using bouillon explains finding so much chicken in the breading.

If you have wine and mushrooms, You could make coq au vin with the chicken, pork and tomatoes. Or, another French meal: mussels as a starter ratatouille spinach salad with bacon dressing (maybe a little raw cauliflower for crunch)

The salt level seems right, what with salt and celery salt. (I spent a lot of time in the 1980s trying to make something comparable or better for a friend with a restaurant.) What I am suspicious about is the ginger. Honestly, what I finally came up with with for my own copycat version, was based on looking in an older relative's spice rack and seeing an old jar of chicken bouillon cubes. The package said "XX Herbs & Spices" on it, and I realized that you could just grind the bouillon up finely and toss in some extra salt and some black pepper and be done. People seem to like my version. I don't have a pressure fryer, so I have never done a side-by-side tasting panel. (if anyone here would like to try my method, and could give me feedback it would be appreciated -it's about 10g of crushed chicken bouillon, 1g black pepper, 2g salt, to 300g AP or pastry flour used as the final part of a 3-part breading station)

Here's an Italian dish: Eggplant and Rice Casserole. I think this could be made without the cheese, and could definitely be made by substituting water with a couple teaspoons of herbs (dry is fine, try fennel, rosemary and parsley) for the beef broth.