Lisa Shock

Question for Lisa: do you pierce your potato? Yes, I do! So, oops, I missed a step in my instructions. My mom had some potatoes explode in the oven once because they weren't pierced, my family always pierces now.

I am a vegetarian. I usually just skip serving any sort of meat analog stuff, since it's not all that great. (I really, really hate Tofurkey.) There are literally hundreds of things you could serve for this meal which is essentially a harvest celebration. HERE'S this year's suggestions form The Well, with a link to over 600 recipes. If you feel like you need a main dish, the stuffed pumpkin is big enough to qualify. I feel that cranberries are essential, I prefer the fresh/raw relish type made with orange juice. I also serve some sort of dressing/stuffing but, sometimes I do wild rice, sometimes I do blue cornbread with green chiles. If I do the the wild rice one, I sometimes serve stuffed mushrooms as a starter; they are stuffed with a bread-based stuffing with chopped granny smith apples and nuts.

I am curious about this. Honestly, after I've finished off most of the potato and toppings, I get out a sharp knife and cut up the peel and eat it. It's really one of my favorite parts. Not to mention that I've always been told it's got lots of good nutrients. What is the advantage of having no peel? The peels contain the glycoalkaloid poisons solanine and chaconine. Most of the time, the levels of these is low enough to not do much harm. (That said, even low levels can affect a patient's reaction to anesthesia, so consumption of anything in the nightshade family up to a week prior to having a surgery is not advisable.) But, if a potato hasn't been handled properly (too cold, too hot, turned green in the light) levels rise and a person can be poisoned. Growers try to keep the levels low in new breeds, but, like any vegetable, individual specimens may have varying characteristics. People occasionally die from the poisoning, but, it's pretty rare. In 1979, in the UK an entire boarding school was poisoned by potatoes served for lunch, 17 boys were ill enough to be hospitalized. I myself used to experience frequent stomach discomfort when eating potatoes. Once I stopped eating peels, I got better. The method if pretty simple: pre-heat your oven to 500°, peel some big baking potatoes like russets, rub with oil, sprinkle with a little kosher salt, place in the oven on a tray or just on the racks, bake for 15 minutes then turn the temperature down to 250°, keep baking for another hour. They develop a crispy shell that is clean and smooth with no iffy spots.

Mine don't have a real peel, because I use a method I heard James Beard talk about on the radio which creates a crispy crust on the outside of a peeled potato. That said, I cut down the middle, fluff, and pour on beurre noisette and sprinkle a little salt.

Antique dealers buy it up. Go to an antique mall and you'll see tons of it. I think you're just not as fast as the pickers.

Here's a quick treat, it's something pastry chefs whip up for special desserts or to make something quickly for a competition. Pour some corn syrup into a small bowl or measuring cup, maybe a 1/4 cup's worth, and add a drop or two of water based flavoring and stir well. Then, add a couple of random drops of food color and don't mix it. Prep a sheet pan with a sheet of parchment or a silpat, the silpat works better, and preheat your oven to 400°F. Use a teaspoon to scoop up some of the syrup and smear it into 1"-2" diameter circles with at least 2" of space between them. -The more random the color placement, the better. Bake for 10-15 minutes (convention helps) or until the syrup bubbles up then stops. Remove from oven before it browns or burns. Be careful, these can burn you very badly. If you handle them with gloves, you can quickly place them over the back of a ladle or small bowl to make them into bowls to hold desserts or other interesting shapes. You can just allow them to cool, too. They will cool into a delicate, lacy hard candy.

Don't forget that you can keep all the trimmings in a plastic bag in the freezer, then make stock when you like. This way, you conserve a little every day with very little overall effort. Tomato Mushroom Garlic Beets are ok, but color the stock very, very pink. This is fine for a lot of applications, but, some may find hot pink risotto off-putting. As stated above, use the corn to make its own stock. Potato makes cloudy stock and the flavor isn't worth it in most cases. I don't use broccoli or other family members because of the smell. If you can stand the 'boiled cabbage' odor in your stock, then use them.

I am on the fence here. I think it sounds tasty, but, I wonder if the ginger flavor would disappear or worse, burn as the sugar caramelizes. I'd boil a tiny amount to caramel stage to test it. Good luck!

In culinary school, we were taught that the standard breading station for deep frying was flour, egg, then bread crumbs -or a replacement like crushed corn flakes. We also learned batters like tempura and beer batter. I've never seen raw, dry flour on the outside layer for deep fry. Can you reference a recipe? I have seen variations on flour and herb dredges, with and without egg, for sauteing. But those are usually recipes where a pan sauce is made and one function of the flour dredge is to cook the flour a bit before it becomes part of the sauce.

Whose Amaretti? I haven't found a commercial brand I like. Actually, now that you mention it, I used to get Lazzaroni and liked those well enough. They have disappeared from places I shop regularly here in Phoenix, it's been maybe 3 years or more, now that I think of it... The Virginia ones seem to have taken over, and, I'm not as fond of those.

Lisa, what makes you say that? I would think that the cell walls would break down but release a more non-viscous liquid, as so often happens when you defrost frozen stuff.... Growing up, we had a big garden and sometimes things would get a touch of frost and have weird textures and ooze odd things. I should have been clearer, yes, actually being hard frozen through would have resulted in a limp slimy plant and a bunch of excess water. But, sometimes, just a little frost or cooling to just above freezing does odd things to plants.

Might have been caused by an accidental freezing.

Used to be Pepperidge Farm Brussels, until the company reformulated all of the cookies in the early 80s and Brussels no longer resembled its old self. (a pair of lace cookies with a lot of chopped nuts sandwiched with very dark chocolate) Current favorite: Amoretti.

I really enjoy my FoodSaver, I even use it for keeping cat food fresh. I also own one of the original Rotato peelers. I have used it to make garnishes and bird's nest potatoes. There is an electric version now, but people complain that it isn't as sturdy as the original model.

I am in the Orange Punch crowd that Mr Wondrich writes so eloquently about. (although sometimes I use clementines)

My condolences, Dave always wrote with insight, wit and clarity. His writing helped us all join in as part of his life. He will definitely be missed.

There are already a lot of apps out there for recipes. The websites with the actually good, test-kitchen tested, recipes already have their own apps, and they own the copyright to those recipes. Other sites rely on 'user' reviews of recipes which means that there is a lot of review padding by friends, relatives, and possibly hundreds of alternate identities of the original author. -Not to mention everyday housewives who think you can sub Kool-Aid for fresh squeezed OJ in a recipe. What I want in a website is pretty much what ATK, Food & Wine, Epicurious, etc. already provide: recipes tested by thousands of reliable testers, weight based measurement of dry goods, and reviews by professional reviewers.

Blending chocolate won't necessarily improve it for certain tasks. Couverture is created especially for enrobing and molding. The split is balanced for those tasks and the cocoa mass is ground very finely. Unless you know the split for all of you chocolates, blending them is risky, and, if any of them are labelled a couverture they are already generally quite good. Frosting is far more forgiving a use for chocolate, you'll still have to run tests. Cake with milk chocolate can be done, but, I can't find any good formulas that use weight measurement for the dry ingredients.

The Pumpkin Pie Spice mix that seems to be in everything right now is just a dry, ground mix of: cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice with maybe some clove added. No need to pay extra for a jar that contains spices you probably already own.

I've been making a lot of sourdough lately, with sandwiches in mind. I picked up one of these Pullman pans at Home Goods and have been using it a lot. I also really like my old Pyrex Bake-A-Round. Other than that, I free-form onto my pizza stone.

Yeah, It sounds like the store isn't being run well. The raviolis sound the package was thawed and refrozen. Maybe the case went warm one day and wasn't emptied, or, a customer ran around the store with that package in their cart for an hour then put it back.

I'd like to point out that you originally referred to the metal dies as being brass - a soft, malleable, easy to work metal made of copper and zinc. When I mentioned bronze, a tough, brittle alloy of copper and tin, suddenly you had made a die out of bronze, which is a much harder metal and is more difficult to work with. If your die was really brass, it would be very different from bronze. Bronze swords, knives and other cutting tools stay very sharp for a very long time whereas brass won't really hold an edge and the pressure of extruding would smooth out any roughness or sharpness pretty quickly.

I'd make simple syrup, cool it, juice the apples, using the pulp extraction type juicer like you'd use for carrot juice, and while making the juice add a tiny amount of vitamin C powder to retain color. Then, I'd make sorbet. (apples have a tough fiber, you can't just puree them for sorbets) You could also make and can apple butter. And, if you have a basement, you could cellar some of them.

I have to agree that most Americans use way too much sauce on pasta. I was taught as a child (Italian family) that you should always be able to taste the pasta itself first and foremost. A lot of times I see people, both at home and in restaurants, use 4-5 times as much sauce as I consider to be 'normal.' I generally just put a couple tablespoons of sauce onto my portion, and I have seen it just slide complete off of supermarket spaghetti.

I believe the dies you are referring to are made of bronze. They look like brass, and get referred to as brass by laymen, but they are made of bronze. The texture part is important for dry pastas, especially shapes which are supposed to hold sauces, if the sauce is thin. You can see the difference when you buy the pasta, the regular, cheap supermarket stuff has a super-smooth and shiny surface and looks golden in color. The bronze die pasta doesn't have a shiny surface, and it can appear white or dusty white. I think there's a difference. Side by side comparison would be easy, buy packages of the same shape of a cheap pasta and a good bronze die one, set up two pots of salted water and have sauce hot and ready to eat.