sazji

So how different is fleur du sel from regular salt, especially when cooked into candy? I'll probably go ahead and try it with regular salt anyway, as even if I could find fleur du sel here, it would probably cost an arm and a leg and several organs in between...

(Food Porn deleted) Oy, I think that would have gotten the money out of my pocket no matter how little there might have been...

Don't count on it...but then again, some of us are slower learners than others . ← Took me twice. I remember my North Carolina mom telling me how to make cornbread, now that I'd gotten a cast-iron pan. She emphasized "and don't forget that that pan just came out of the oven and is hot!" Of course I forgot, but let go of that handle *real* fast. Felt stupid, but even more stupid when I did it a second time several weeks later. Now - no way!

Well, you either eat lots of it and run and exercise a lot, or you eat a little of it, and make it when you have an occasion to share. My last big one was a big thing with fresh plums in a cheesecake type filling, it was great, I got one piece and had guests taking home pieces. But I did enjoye the piece I had! Tonight I made a "muhallebi" - a milk pudding that some friends make in their restaurant, and just gave me the recipe for - very simple thing, milk, vanilla, sugar, flour, butter, and then topped with an unusual chocolate sauce - butter or margarine, sugar, cocoa and two eggs. I was so hot to try it myself that I rushed home, halved the recipe and made it. It made five bowls. I ate one. I'll hope for drop ins tomorrow I guess, cause I don't want to think how I'll feel if I eat much more of it!

This is great! Here in Turkey there are several different cookies and other foods that refer to parts of bodies. Ladies' fingers, sweethearts' lips, women's thighs (which is a kind of meatball). I've been inspired... I made kittly litter cake once, years ago. I wouldn't even consider it here; people would just not be able to deal.... My favorite thing to do as a kid very interested in science and geology) was to make "mashed potato volcanoes." I'd stuck a big blob of margarine into my heap of instant mashed potatoes (hey, this was 1968 suburban Iowa City), cover them, form it into a "volcano" shape, make a hole in the top, and press on the side to make it "erupt." Mom didn't bother me too much about it. Here there is a packaged cookie, called "Tutku," which has a chocolate, lemon or coffee cream filling. It's sort of surrounded by a thin sugar shell. I sometimes find myself carefully eating the cookie from the edges, then over the top, trying to get down to the filling without breaking the shell. I'm not generally successful. But trying's fun. I remember making a Halloween dinner with a friend once, where we colored all the foods in a disgusting way. "Flesh tone" mashed potaoes with deep red colored chicken gravy, pork chops marinated in very little water an a lot of blue food coloring, greenish blue bread (we wanted to conjure up the image of mold, but it didn't quite work), and dark gray-and-dingy-yellow vanilla pudding with a bit of gray purple whipped cream on the top (we separated a little after it thickened to have two different colors, then swirled them a bit). We also tried soaking corn on the cob in red water, but it didn't work. It was not pretty. A blue chicken stew with separately cooked green and orange potatoes might be fun. (I suppose I could just use carrots...but they would take the blue...) When I was a kid, there was nothing I liked better than drinking blue milk. My mom was indulgent.

Actually with the exception of some of the really labor-intensive things, many baking projects like simple cakes, quick breads, bar cookies etc. really don't have that much hard labor. People say for example, "Bread, doesn't that take a lot fo time?!" Yes, it does, several hours, but mixing and kneading bread takes around 10 minutes; the yeast is doing most of the work and you can do other things. Also, when something is a little unfamiliar you take more time thinking about it, working out the details, but once you've done it a few times, it goes much more quickly. Make a pound cake every day for a week, you'll see how much faster you'll do it by Saturday! (Eat a pound cake every day for a week, see how much you weigh by Saturday...or become very popular at the office and see how much your coworkers weigh by Saturday.) And then lots of it becomes variations on a theme. Ling's mention of cleanup also reminded me -- I think the more you cook, the more you (well, some people...) get into habits that also make it all more time-efficient. For example, if there are a couple different steps to something, I might take a minute to wash up things in between, like when a piecrust is blind-baking, or chocolate is sitting on the double boiler. Um...this also has to do with the fact that I don't have a lot of extra mixing bowls... My mom was a real stickler on this, by the time a cake was out of the oven, there was never a dirty dish left.

Though honestly I see you more in something involving very dark chocolate...perhaps you could get married in a chocolate shell? It would have to be a mighty quick ceremony though...!

I think I've found an ensemble perfect for Ling... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15240970/

...try to ladle soup into a bowl while talking on the phone and getting talked to by a guest. I grabbed a wide soup dish in the left hand, ladle in right hand, ladled the soup in, dropped the bowl as hot soup went over my fingers... I was holding the dish upside down...

I make an arugula salad with a dressing of pomegranate molasses (soured with lemon if necessary, some brands are a bit sweet), olive oil, and lots of chopped mint, and some fresh ground pepper. Sprinkle with walnuts, grated parmesian and some raisins. Good stuff.

Ummmm...there are two that I wrote in a "limerick storm" with a friend last year. And just realized they did involve food. The first is only marginally offensive: There was a young wino from Muş Who preferred to get drunk through his toosh. He’d get himself loose With a fifth of chartreuse And end up with with a creme de menthe douche. The second is part of a five-part series about goings-on at a monastery. If this don't get me banned from eGullet, I don't know what will! But they are limericks after all.... You have been warned Really. You can still decide not to read this. Oh, okay. The Abbot, a crusty old sod, liked to slop mayonnaise on his rod. Then a monk from Siam would add bits of old Spam, and suck till the Abbot saw God.

!!!!! (If you'd dropped the "So" in the second line it would have scanned better. But you've got Limerick Love, I can tell.) ← Or drop the "nick" of "nicknamed." I love it

First class -- scans perfectly. Um, start a lahmajoon thread -- I'm clueless. ← Tanks. I've got lots and lots of them, but they mostly have nothing to do with food, and they are also more or less foul. (A limerick almost has to be really, doesn't it?) Lahmajoon/lahmacun is a very thin flat bread topped with ground lamb, pepper, onion, pepper paste. It's E. Turkihsh/Armenian. The Syrian version, lahma bi ajin, is quite different, with pine nuts and allspice in the meat. There's lots of recipes around.

Normally it's not a problem for me but I react to it if there's a lot; usually just feel headachy the next day. I realizd that I would wake up with headaches the day after I ate at two particular kinda cheap chinese restaurants that used a lot of it. One evening I ate there and it tasted like the chef had had a spasm in his MSH hand - I mean the whole dish really tasted like not much else. I don't even know why I ate it. But as I was walking home from the restaurant, I suddenly felt cold and sweaty, and realized my heart was racing - we are talking about 6 beats a second, it would speed up and slow down....I stopped and just calmed myself down and it passed. Asked a doctor friend and he said he couldn't say for sure obviously as it was the next day (I felt like crap), but that the hyper-dose of MSG was a good bet.

I have had a love affair with during since I was in the third grade in Iowa, when a Weekly Reader article about the fruit, complete wiht picture, captured my attention. I knew then and there that I wanted to try it. (I was, after all, the kid whose mom knew that to get him to eat more meat instead of desserts at the all-you-can-eat buffet, all she had to do was tell him that swiss steak was rattlesnake meat...) So many years later in 1985, when I was about 27, I was back in Iowa and in a particularly awful economic situation. And wouldn't you know that that's when I'd see a pound of frozen durian at a thai food store for 10 dollars. Ten dollars I really didn't have...but I had waited so long. I plunked it down without a second thought. After it thawed, I opened the package, got a whiff, and said "Oh, no way....crap...." Then an hour later, "Dammit, I spent 10 dollars for that, I'm going to eat it if it kills me!" So I took a piece and took a bite. Weird. Tasted good, the smell was bizarre. Like some component of rotten onions. Took another bite. Hmmm...took another bite, somehow it all came together. It took me about 3 minutes to eat all of it. Much later, living in Seattle, I went with friends up to Vancouver, where they import fresh fruits from Thailand. (The whole durians in Seattle, BTW, have been frozen, so the peels have no smell - the peels actually have a very sweet, almost pineapple-like smell.) I found a durian, very ripe, for 30 Canadian dollars. Got it. But then didn't have time to eat it there...so we had to smuggle it back! I put it in a plastic sac, tied it tight, put that in another sack, tied it tight, till a total of around 7 sacks I think. Put that in my suitcase. Put the suitcase on the very bottom of the pile of suitcases (there were four of us in the car). I also had a start of a plant that a friend had given me. So an hour later, as we're approaching the border, the smell is already making itself apprent in the car. And we got a border agent that looked like something out of "Cops." The conversation: Agent: So, where ya been? Driver: Vancouver Agent: How long ya been there? Driver: Just a day. Agent: What'd ya do there? Driver: Went to a party. Agent: Was it a pretty wild party? Driver: No, mostly 50 year old folk dancer... Agent: [long pause]....D'ja buy anything? Driver: No. Agent: You spent 3 days in Vancouver, and didn't buy anything? Driver: Yes...no, we only spent one day. Agent: [another pause] I'm gonna have you drive around back to the inspection area... Oh, SHIT, we're thinking...as we go under the sign that says "It is forbidden to bring plant material..." (BOB!); "It is forbodden to bring fruits and vegetables..." (BOB!).... We got in, expecting to come out and find the entire contents of the car on the asphalt, durian proudly resting on the top of the pile... They checked our IDs and asked "why did he send you here?" "No idea!" we answered. They let us go on without another word. So, I took some durian (well sealed in a jar) to a Cambodian friend in the music dept. at the UW. We opened it in his office. Two minutes later, the secretary comes running into the room, yelling "Oh, my god, it's gotten into the ventilation system, it's coming into my office!" The next day I still had a couple pieces left. I figured I better eat them before I left the house, so I sort of wolfed them down, and headed out to catch my bus into school. God on, sat in the back. Soon I noticed that the people on either side of me were leaning. Really leaning. Away from me. There were some high school kids on the facing long seats along the windows just in front of the rear row. One of their friends came onto the bus, and as he sat down, one of them said "Hey, dude, don'cha ever change your socks?!" The kid looked puzzled, then said "hey...what's that smell?" We were very close to my stop then, and as I got off, one of the girls half-whispered "God...I think it's that guy!" I fought the temptation to say "Yeah, and it was my breakfast!!!!" Whenever I would buy a durin at Viet Wah in Seattle, the checkout woman would more likely than not say "Oh, you gotta Vietnamese wife?" They'd be really surprised when I told them no, it was for me. Regarding the burps - one checkout woman said that the way to eat durian was to drink soda water along with it, so you would get more burps and enjoy the experience longer! I've tried various durian flavored products; the only one that I did almost like was the ice cream. Worst was the durian-flavored wafers. I bought a big tin of them just cause I liked the tin so much. Then brought the cookies into work and put them out in the kitchen on a plate by the coffeemakers. They all got eaten (!) but several people commented that they tasted weird...

Wow, I wish I'd seen that fig tart a few weeks back when my purple fig tree was still producing more figs than I knew what to do with! (Besides eating them fresh, making preserves and giving away lots to the neighbors.) The moon cakes do look wonderful. I'm planning a trip back to Seattle in late October, and that's definitely on my list of things to eat! That, and lots of Pho...but this is a dessert thread... [Edited because I couldn't find the word "wonderfu" in any of my dictionaries.]

Seasonal stuff, unfortunately the charge was out on the camera so no food porn to accompany. There are some wonderful big purple plums in season here now, so for a party the other night I winged a dessert with them. First I blind-baked a pie crust in a large baking dish (bigger than 9x13), then made a cheesecake filling with two packages of cream cheese, two eggs, a couple teaspoons of flour, sugar to taste and a bit of grated lemon peel. After pouring that into the crust, I arranged around 20 plum halves, cut-side up, over the filling. Put it into a 375 degree oven, lowered the temp after 10 minutes to 325 and cooked till the plums were done. The only pain is that my oven is a convection oven and tends to brown things on the edges a bit fast; and putting foil in to prevent it is hard because it gets blown off by the air currents. But the dessert was wonderful, and I sent a lot home with people who requested pieces...good because I would have made repeated trips back to the kitchen otherwise...

There's a bit of confusion about phyllo/yufka here. Yufka is a catch-all term in Turkey for very thin pastry that may be made in a variety of ways. What it has in common is that it is generally used as a filling for something. What Chufi's friend used for the börek is commonly known as "hazır yukfa" (readymade yufka) here. You can buy it at places that specialize in it, pre-packaged in grocery stores, or even sold in piles at neighborhood markets. It's a bit of a "shortcut" for people who don't want to open their own yufka. It's ideal for sigara börek and other things. It's rolled out and then cooked very briefly to stabilize it on a large slightly convex griddle. There is also baklava yufkası, which is very very thin, and opening it is an art in itself. That is much more like what we know as phyllo. Some is much thinner, the thinness is achieved by rolling several sheets at once (up to 13) around an "oklava," a long thin rolling pin. Many housewives roll their own yufka for their boreks, and depending on what they are doing, where they are from, and their own skill, it can be thinner or thicker. The yufka that the börek places use is quite different. The dough has lots of oil in it, and it's opened not by rolling but by throwing. The dough is kneaded several times to develop the gluten, then rolled into rounds about half an inch thick. One round is spread with a butter/oil/margarine mixture within about an inch of the edge, then another round is put on top and they are sealed. The dough rests another hour or so, then is pulled out somewhat. It is very very relaxed at this point. The börekçi throws the dough several times in sort of a circular motion (imagine throwing a wet towel in a way that it will settle on the table in a circular motion). With each throw, it stretches and opens larger, and then is stretched out the rest of the way to the edge of the large marble table. It's then cut and stuffed (or in the case of "kurdish börek," layered plain and baked). The thin bread that they wrap döner in is not yufka, it is lavash, although sometimes it's a very thin one, also known as katmer in some areas, where it is sometimes the main form of bread. This would never be done with "ready yufka" as that is not completely cooked. "Katmer" can also refer to what is also known as "gözleme," where a piece of dough is rolled out thin and stuffed with a filling, then cooked till crispy on a convex griddle.

On the prairie one day Daniel Boone Craved a spicy and hot lahmajoon Then cried out "Oh, damn, I'm all out of ground lamb!" So he settled for fricaseed coon.

The partner of a friend of mine in Seattle was famous for putting out an entire Russian Christmas dinner each year. It was truly amazing, I don't even remember how many courses. We were warned to pace ourselves, and it lasted 4-5 hours. It started with "zakuski," a variety of appetizers. Two or three different soups followed - a beef pickle soup, and a duck borscht, which was eaten with an almost cookie with a mildly sweet custard-like filling. There was a dish of shredded salmon and rice flavored with dill, inside a crust that was shaped and decorated to resemble a salmon itself. There is a lot I'm forgetting... I remember Jovan coming out of the kitchen with an evil look on his face, asking "who's ready for the next course??" The dessert was a very light junket-like pudding made out of cloud berries.

Olive oil cookies are quite common in Turkey. Here's one recipe: ZEYTİNYAĞLI KURABİYE 2 1/2 c flour 1/2 c sugar 1/2 c olive oil 3 eggs 1/4 t baking soda Combine all ingredients in a bowl, knead well. form into balls and place on a greased pan, bake in medium oven (350F, 170C) Some spices do go both ways quite easily; cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice are thought of as sweet spices but can go in savory as well. Cardamom is very flexible too. Saffron...who knows where to classify it? But the really hard-core "savory" spics might be a bit tougher. Still I've had a very nice lemon pound cake with rosemary. And though we don't usually think of cumin as a sweet spice, it's in the Dutch spekulaasje cookies. It's also an optional ingredient in indian chai; I love it.

I believe the issue with things like pumpkin butter is similar to that with non-acid vegetables -- you have to be *very* careful to do it right or you can get botulism going. In this sense pumpkin butter is very different from apple butter; apples have acid that preclude the growth of botulism while pumpkin does not.

And don't forget, you can also eat the flowers as well. (But only gather the male flowers - those are the ones on the long thin stems. The female flowers have the beginnings of a squash at their base, don't go picking them!) You can dredge them in a batter and fry them, or you can stuff them as well. Delicious. Unless you are a *really* early riser, the bees will have done their work by the time you get out there, so taking the male flowers won't affect your harvest.

Ouch. I had a similar experience when I was about 10 years old, but didn't post it because it didn't happen at a restaurant but rather at (wince) Boy Scout camp. Which is probably worse in the short term. Luckily camp comes to an end... I went to the bathroom - it was the pitfall type - and when I got all the way back up to where our troop was beforesomeone pointed out that there was a 2+ foot length of toilet paper emerging from the back of my pants, hanging down like a tail. Luckily it was the last piece and it was clean....

Thanks, this is very interesting information; I ended up learning more than I thought I would. The brownie recipe I use calls for: 6 oz unsweetened chocolate 2 sticks unsalted butter 4 ex-large eggs 1 c sugar 1 c b sugar 1 c flour 1/2 t salt Baked in a 9x13 pan. Which I also had brought from the states specifically for brownie baking.