HungryC

If you're looking for more reasons to buy a Big Green Egg, it also works well as a charcoal pizza oven & hearth oven for bread-baking. I too balked at the price, until I figured out it would take the place of a smoker, grill, and wood-fired oven--with the triple-threat rationale, it almost seems like a bargain.

I bought a case of Core Wellness cat food yesterday; the pate at the duty-free shop was probably cheaper!

1) use instant yeast, and don't "proof" the yeast in water. No need to do so. Get better bread books if all of your recipes call for proofing the yeast. Suggestions for good bread books: anything by Peter Reinhart, Daniel Leader, or the King Arthur Flour cookbooks (about more than bread, but with a good section on simple yeast baking). 2)as previous posters have said, heavy bread is most often due to lack of hydration. Get a scale, weigh your ingredients, and find a cookbook with recipes written in weight. Flour is difficult to measure consistently by volume--once you start weighing it, you'll never go back. 3)keep baking. Yeast bread is literally alive, and it won't always behave consistently. It takes some practice to get a real feel for it. Pick a particular kind of loaf and master it before moving on to another one. Your loaf in the photo appears to be over-risen. A loaf should expand 10-20% once it hits the hot oven (called oven spring)....the deeply folded wrinkles indicate that your bread was already falling before the oven's heat could cause any additional expansion. Forget all of the recipe instructions on timed rising: you need to observe the loaf and decide when it is ready to bake. Air temps in home kitchens vary widely, and what rises in 90 minutes in my kitchen might take 2 hours in your kitchen. Learn to poke the loaf gently and observe the bounce-back: you want the indentation from your finger to slowly and gently refill. With practice, you will learn to look at the loaf and tell by appearance (surface tension, overall size, loftiness)....that's why you should make the same loaf a few times before moving on.

I don't keep kosher, but Mildred Covert's Kosher Cajun, Kosher Creole, and Kosher Southern Style cookbooks are pretty good, regardless of your dietary observances.

I had the EXACT same problem with silicone spatulas, spoon-tulas, slotted stirrers, etc. Mine were also LC brand--they proved impossible to clean properly. The dishwasher left a ton of greasy residue behind, as well as the salty-soapy-bleachy automatic dishwasher detergent taste. Tried washing by hand, and I wasn't able to remove oily residue/odor without a ridiculous amount of scrubbing & loads of soap. As I cook lots of strongly flavored things (ginger, garlic, chiles, etc), I didn't want smells/flavors to persist into baking (when those silicone spatulas are very good for scraping bowls). I got sick of the scrubbing and tossed 'em out. Don't know if the LC silicone is especially prone to this problem, but I haven't purchased any other silicone materials based on this bad experience. I went back to wood--it's easier to clean & doesn't seem to hold smells/flavors--and to a good ol' non-heat resistant rubber spatula for scraping bowls.

Dill pickle slices, the kind sold as "hamburger slices". Not too many--maybe 3 or 4 on a 6" long sandwich. Incidentally, the (fairly new) book New Orleans Cuisine: 14 Signature Dishes and Their Histories has a great chapter on the development of NOLA french bread, and the development of the poor boy loaf.

You might try converting them to the sloppy, NOLA-style roast beef poboy, too. It's good, messy, satisfying food. Think of it as a french dip, only the "dip" is already inside the sandwich, bathing the beef. Here's a good starter recipe by Danno. I'd use lots more garlic, personally, and I like the beef a little more sliceable rather than falling apart, but it's a proper recipe nonetheless. The most important point is a reduction gravy rather than a flour thickened one.

Here in the poboy's native land, the classic shrimp po-boy is always made with fried shrimp, overfilled on New Orleans french bread (most emphatically NOT a french-style baguette). The bread is key: it needs to be crisp on the outside, but relatively soft & fluffy on the inside. Outside of south LA, I find that mass-market "italian" bread (the kind that's often braided with sesame seeds on top) comes closest to real poboy bread. Warming or lightly toasting the bread (a sheen of butter is optional) is a nice touch, too. On a good shrimp poboy, abundance is key. Shrimp should spill out the sides onto the plate: overstuffed is a mark of quality in a poboy. Regarding the shrimp, 31-40 (per pound) are a good size, though you will often see "popcorn shrimp" fried and served on poboy bread or buns (very small shrimp, 51-60 per pound and above). Shrimp are generally coated in seasoned flour with a bit cornflour added for crunch (not a thick, wet batter or tempura batter) and deepfried or panfried. A few spots (namely, Casamento's) still fry in lard, though I use peanut oil. And on to "dressed": in NOLA, to dress a poboy means you're adding shredded iceberg lettuce, mayo, and sliced pickles (outside of NOLA in LA, you don't generally get pickles). Most places will add mustard (creole or yellow), cheese, or other embellishments upon request. It is usual practice for the diner to open up the poboy and shake on your favorite hot sauce (Crystal, Louisiana, Tabasco, etc.) Nouveau variations made with grilled shrimp, shrimp remoulade (frequently seen with fried green tomatoes), and BBQ shrimp (not barbecued at all, but baked or sauteed in a highly seasoned butter sauce) are eaten in NOLA & environs, but they're definitely not the textbook example of the dish.

I'm wondering about temperature...are the layers room temp when frosted, chilled, or frozen? If frozen/chilled, maybe something happens as the cake warms to room temp? Or something caused by the temp differential between the icing and the cake?

Have you tried shredding it with two forks while the chicken is still hot? This pulls the chicken into long, feathery pieces. You can also toss the shredded chicken with a little salsa or cooking liquid once it's pulled for extra succulence.

I'd say that shelf life depends on the sort of dried shrimp you have. The asian kind usually has head, legs, and shell intact, or at least some of the shell. This sort definitely doesn't last forever and can develop distinctly off flavors (mostly coming from the stuff in the heads). On the other hand, dried shrimp produced in Louisiana are air-dried in tumblers that flake off the shells, leaving just the very, very dried tail meat. These have a pretty long shelf life at room temp, as long as they're kept dry. I have a big bag that I use as cat treats (one cat will even do tricks for them), and after a year at room temp, they look & smell exactly the same. Here's a link to Blum & Bergeron,a concern that's been drying shrimp in Louisiana for practically 100 years. Dunno if your fridge storage has led to condensation that might cause spoiling...

Peanut butter fudge is always a quick seller; or make two-level fudge with a choco layer & a peanut butter layer. Bourbon or rum balls rolled in cookie crumbs, or the cake ball that's sweeping the south(too sticky sweet for my taste, but they sell like hotcakes at lots of bakeries): basically crumbled cake & icing smushed together into balls.

Amen to everything SL Kinsey just posted regarding the roots of "organic", with the addition of JI Rodale, who first published Organic Gardening magazine in the US in 1942.

Okay, I admit that she bugs me a bit, too. Why? Because she's an urbanite preaching to urbanites. Broad swaths of the US are decidedly rural, where people never stopped gardening, sharing vegetables with friends & neighbors, and cooking with local ingredients. 4-H kids still raise livestock, high schools teach agriculture as a credit class, home ec (foods & nutrition) hasn't been dropped from the curriculum, and nobody gets all excited: because it's a way of life. Last Friday, I stood in line at a local butcher, chatting with people of all ages, races, and social classes. While we waited, we watched the butcher carve up a 230 lb hog. I talked to the hog's owner, and he was going home to make headcheese that afternoon. When my turn came, I asked for skirt steak, and the butcher pieced one off as I watched. This wasn't "special" service, it was the same level of service available to anyone who walked through the door. So I find that Waters doesn't really know much about rural America, and it shows.

I have to say that I love this sort of spot, but please consider putting up a stand-up counter for eating, even if it is just a three-foot long shelf along the wall. In poor weather, people appreciate a dry spot to wolf down lunch. Figure out if municipal rules allow you to put a bench (or a compact folding chair or two) out in front of your space--people sitting and snacking are good advertising, as passers-by can SEE what you're serving. Incidentally, I encountered a food kiosk co-op in Berkeley, CA--an indoor shared space occupied by multiple small vendors of ethnic specialties (can't remember its name, but it was on Shattuck). But I thought the concept was brilliant: small entrepreneurs sharing space & overhead, while attracting a larger clientele due to the variety of offerings.

If the French don't feminize the word in their own language, why would you want to do so in English? Contemporary English useage trends away from gender-specificity. Poetess and cateress are dead & gone, and actress is on its way out (at least among professionals). It seems rather affected to me (sorry, don't mean to offend, just being honest as a French speaker).

I do agree that egg dishes are a convenient way to use up odd bits....I generally make quiche or omelettes with leftovers. And I'm a big fan of "whatever" openface, on a toasted slice of good bread. Leftover veggies plus a quick veloute equals cream soup of the week!

Buy 'em already shucked, save yourself the trouble of learning to shuck and fry on the same dish....frying is my favorite way to eat oysters, by far. Corn flour, or a mix of flour & a little fine cornmeal makes for a crispy coating. Peanut oil is my seafood frying oil of choice, but lard is also an excellent oyster-frying medium.

Not unprofessional, just Roman. Most places will leave you alone with a digestif (or the whole bottle, if they liked you) until you ask for the check.

Ooh, good question. It's a toss up for me: south-Louisiana style french bread (like a baguette, only airier & more tender), or french sourdough. But square-sided soft yeast dinner rolls (the brown-topped kind made with DMS) are a very close third...

The American water lotus is certainly food-safe, though I don't know if it is tasty. Water lotus seeds are routinely eaten in coastal south Louisiana.

You can't go wrong with flowers: either fresh and added to the cake, or sculpted out of marzipan. Flowers look lovely in blue, esp on an ivory buttercream or fondant. I like the lotus suggestion best of all.

In my area, Yelp is pretty useless. Not sure if it is the relatively small population, or the callow youth factor of Yelp's primary contributors....but I don't see a very sophisticated segment of the dining population participating in Yelp.

I adore baking cookbooks that provide volume measurement for ingredients alongside weight (both in ounces and grams). It's not hard to do: the better baking books (Leader, Reinhart) accomplish it with a chart-style columnar listing of ingredients. Bake for a while out of a book organized as such and you'll begin to hate all others. On the other hand, if the author is being super-precise about process, please have a good reason for the precision. I'm thinking of RL Berenbaum's scrupulous avoidance of yeast touching salt: yes, in theory, the salt will kill some of the yeast. But not a single solitary other baking book I own requires the salt & yeast to be stirred in separately. No loaf of my thousands of loaves has failed due to salt-yeast contact....so why the big fuss? For ethnic books, I want context: is this a festival food, or an everyday one? How did the author encounter the food or learn to prepare it? Is it associated with a particular season or event? A little ethnography helps the recipes along. I also detest lengthy paragraphs of instructions: is it so hard to break things up with numbers or bullets? Worst of all, though, is bad color: light text on a colored background, or body copy in something other than dark colors.

I sometimes buy & use bottled ginger/garlic paste (from an Indian market). I buy & use roux-in-a-jar (though I do also make rouxs from scratch). "Lazy" is a relative term: we all have different thresholds for prep work, different time constraints, and different palates--people who've grown up with Campbell's beef consomme added to the pot roast LIKE it that way, even if they're aware of "purer" ways to achieve a stovetop braise. So, I draw a distinction between prepared foods that make home cooking a little easier, and those pre-fab things that result from a manufacturer simply trying to add value to a commodity product. Ex: those peeled hardboiled eggs....when I see them, I think "oh, an egg producer has figured out how to sell the eggs that don't meet quality standards for fresh shipment in the shell..."