Live It Up

Molly Stevens's Braised Scallions. Sometimes it takes a blog post to prompt me to make a recipe I've had access to for years. I made the braise and then turned the scallions into a dressing for pasta--I thought the shape would mimic the shape of linguine or fettucine well, and it did. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I think I added some other alliums (garlic, leek maybe). It was very good. Just don't be fooled by the person in the comment section who says that the scallion roots are good! The bunches I bought when I made this had beautiful juicy looking roots, so having read that I was pretty excited to try them. I carefully saved and washed them, and prepared them separately (roasted). They were terrible! I am pretty sure I spit out the one I tasted.

I just went to the bob's red mill site to see if I could figure out which recipe you used that you didn't like. Was it this one? Seems like soaking your cornmeal in your dairy would work, but there are a couple of other recipes on the bob's red mill site ( here and here) that involve soaking the cornmeal in boiling water which would probably speed up the process. The only cornmeal pancakes I ever make are a recipe I got from my mom. I will have to check it out when I get home, but I think it might be from the NY times. Anyway, the recipe involves cooking the cornmeal like polenta in water first, then cooling that mixture down and adding your egg yolks and other ingredients. Beat egg whites and fold in. They are very good and they don't have any gritty texture.

Mine is a Last word. The whole equal parts thing makes it pretty impossible to screw up, and it's a house favorite, so I always have the ingredients in the house. I've also noticed it's not particularly sensitive to substituting different gins. edited for spelling

OMG, thank you so much Pam!I am totally going to KosherFest. I can't believe that the timing is so perfect. This is why eGullet is the best!

Thank you so much for the responses so far. Chris Amirault--yes, huy fong sriracha and sambal are kosher, but they are not all-natural (MSG). I have also found 3 all-natural srirachas, but they are not kosher. I feel like I have tried every search on the internet possible. Yesterday I went to 4 different Asian markets with no luck. Pam R--I do need industrial packaging, but at this point I will take anything I can get. Probably most companies can be convinced to do some larger scale packaging if we order enough. So, any information you have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again! --Jessica

I recently started working for a company that, among other things, makes Asian style salad dressings that are kosher. Not keeping kosher myself, I have been dumbfounded at how hard it is to 1. find kosher ingredients and 2. get clear information about which products are or are not kosher. For example, Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce. I have 2 bottles, plus an industrial size can. Only one of the packages (one of the small bottles) has a hechsher on it (OU)and the LKK website does not state that this product is kosher...But I digress. I need to find some chili product that is not so garlicky, preferably gochujang or chili oil, and it has to be all-natural too! I have scoured the internet and the information just doesn't seem to be there, so please, if you know anything please help. Thank you in advance! --Jessica

dungeness crab. I made some recently with a champagne beurre blanc and it was amazing.

Wow! My laptop is broken and I haven't had any time anyway, and somehow I got 9 pages behind on the dinner thread. I have been cooking, and a lot of my meals have come out really well, but I never have my camera at home. All the meals on these pages look great, especially all the meatballs and Bruce's salads. Now that I'm all caught up, I'd like to request 2 recipes please. This one: and this one:

I would say yes, it's extremely rude. I worked in a cafe for years, and people bringing their own tea was a huge pet peeve. Usually people did it because they were cheap and they thought they could get away with giving us like 50 cents for a cup of hot water and then use our honey and milk and sit for hours--not cool and not the same situation you are asking about. However, some people brought tea because we didn't serve the type they wanted--it still annoyed me. I know that what you're paying for in a chinese restaurant is the food, and the tea is free, but if the proprietors of these restaurants have any pride at all, they will probably be insulted by your implication that their tea sucks. If it's a place you go often, perhaps you could talk to the manager and request that they get a specific kind of tea. Who knows, maybe I'm completely off base--I may have a shorter fuse than a lot of people--but I wouldn't want to risk becoming one of "those customers".

I haven't cooked anything out of this book for a while, but I've been following the thread. I have a brisket that I bought for some reason, but now I don't know what to do with it. Do you think that brisket would work for beef rendang? I've made rendang before from another recipe which was very disappointing, so I don't want to mess it up this time.

I know this isn't what you were asking, but I always found baked ziti made with ricotta to be very disappointing--it's just never creamy enough. The solution I came up with is to use mascarpone instead of ricotta. It's also key not to mix too much sauce into the pasta. I don't have a recipe written down, but here's what I do: I make a very simple tomato sauce with just garlic, red pepper flakes, a little wine and some herbs (preferably basil). Mix your boiled pasta with a few spoonfuls of the tomato sauce, mascarpone, and some hard grated cheese (parmigiano or pecorino romano, or whatever you like). Spread the bottom of your baking dish with some sauce, put your pasta and cheese mixture on top, and then cover that with another layer of sauce. Cover that with mozzarella and some more of your grated cheese. Don't bake it for too long or it will dry out--just enough to warm it up and brown the cheese a little. Yeah, it's really bad for you (which is why I haven't made it in about a year), but it's so, so good.

I've never made it, but Nigella Lawson roasts lamb shanks. The recipe is here I would think that if you were roasting lamb shanks, you would want to keep them pretty rare or they could be tough. But anyway, give it a try--if they're way too tough then just consider the roasting as the browning phase of a braising recipe and simmer them for a while.

I forgot to take my camera, so I have to wait for someone to send me pictures, but I made 3 desserts from Baking for thanksgiving. The big winners were definitely the thanksgiving twofer pie and the caramel peanut topped brownie cake. I also made the cranberry upside down cake, which I thought was pretty good, but most people didn't try it--I guess we had some non cranberry fans in the house. The other dessert I made was a tarte tatin, but not from Dorie's recipe, which came out weirdly not sweet. Overall, though, tons of raves for the desserts thanks to this book! If I ever get the pictures I will post them.

I haven't been baking much because I have cut way down on my consumption of starchy foods, but this past weekend was the 2nd anniversary of my store. Last year I made coffee and muffins for the event, so I did it again. I made seven kinds of mini muffins--4 old favorites, and 3 new recipes. They were all really good. the old favorites were orange muffins (on the top tier of the picture above), cranberry vanilla coffee cake and banana nut The new varieties were earl grey, gingerbread, and hazelnut. For some reason I only took a picture of the hazelnut one, but that was my favorite. It was nice and moist because it had apple in it, but it had a really good hazelnut flavor. My husband liked the earl grey ones best, but the gingerbread were probably the most popular.

so the only guesses are onion confit and congealed blood and fat? Actually, petite tête de chou, you were closer. It's just the sauce from some chicken adobo I made. I stored the leftover chicken separately from the sauce so it would be easier to de-fat.

I have gotten so many laughs from this thread that I was thrilled when I saw this on my table. Any guesses?

Those look really good. Any chance of getting the recipe?

On Thursday I decided to have some friends over on friday night to attempt my second regional Italian meal. I basically haven't done any ambitious cooking or photographed my food since my disastrous Ligurian meal. This time everything just fell into place. I chose the Veneto because I had already bought a bottle of Amarone. As I was planning the meal at work, I wound up picking all my recipes from Mario Batali's Veneto shows (and one recipe from about.com). For the primo I made crespelle with radicchio and goat cheese, which was delicious and easy to make. This is what they looked like in the baking dish. They looked much more appetizing plated with a salad of raw radicchio and parsley on top, but I realized I forgot to take a picture of the plated dish after they were all gone. The salad cut through the richness of the goat cheese perfectly. Secondo was lamb with oranges and olives, which someone else also made earlier in this thread. This recipe is listed in Batali's second episode on Veneto, but I noticed that it called for chianti and tuscan olives. By the time I noticed that, however, it was too late to pick a new recipe, so I just decided to assume that the recipe was from the Veneto. The leg of lamb that I had had the bones in and I didn't bother to remove them. Also, I didn't pay attention to the recipe and I supremed my oranges rather than cut them into quarter moons, so the oranges kind of dissolved into the sauce. I also made butternut squash in saor from this recipe, but I forgot to get a picture of it. When I got home I found a very similar recipe in Lidia's Italy. With dinner we drank these wines. For dessert we had brutti ma buoni which weren't that ugly, but really good. One thing I noticed about Batali's online recipes is that there are a lot of mistakes. The crespelle recipe lists rosemary as an ingredient, but never calls for it in the instructions and the cookies do the same with the orange zest. I just used my common sense and everything turned out great, but it just makes me wonder about the fact checking on these things. So, only 2 months between my regional meals--at this rate it should only take me 3.5 years to cook through all the regions.

This is such a great thread! I'm pretty sure I had that same cookbook--we always used to make faces on our cheeseburgers with various toppings from that one. I don't remember ever eating the pear bunny, but I remember the picture. This made me cry, actually. Sometimes I really miss my dad. As for my first cooking attempts---hmm. I have a really hard time remembering because I was always in the kitchen, and I can't recall when my parents were there or not. My mom is a flight attendant, so she was usually gone about 3 nights a week, and my dad died when I was 9. My mom used to make hundreds of fried wontons and egg rolls for my school fund raiser every year and I was enlisted to stuff and roll them while she fried. I think I was 7 or so when that started. I remember I made chocolate pots de creme from a chocolatier magazine by myself. It was for my dad (maybe his birthday?) so I had to be younger than 9. I also loved cookbooks. There were a couple of them that I kept constantly checked out of my school's library, and I know I made a lot of recipes from one of them. I wish I could remember what it was called, but each chapter featured a child, some of whom were the kids of chefs, and their specialties that they cooked. I remember making lemon chicken from that book when I was 10, maybe. As for the first real meal I cooked---I took cooking classes my whole childhood. At one of them we learned to make chicken stuffed with mushrooms, wrapped in phyllo dough. I made my mom give a dinner party right after thanksgiving and made that dish and wild rice. I don't remember what else I made, but I do remember that it was really good. I think there were 8 or 10 people there, including some of my dad's friends. I must have been about 10. Now that I think about it, it was really sweet that all of those adults were willing to put themselves in my hands like that.

These oatmeal pancakes are my favorite, partly because they sit over night so there's no work to do in the morning. I'm not a fan of fluffy cakey pancakes (unless they have blueberries in them), and these have a satisfying chew from the oats. When I do have time (which hasn't been for at least 2 years now) I like to make my mom's cornmeal pancakes which have beaten egg whites. They are light and crispy and delicious. Man, I wish I was going to have a day off in the foreseeable future.

I remember seeing a Japanese restaurant in Englewood, NJ that was called Kuma. I don't know what, if anything, that means in Japanese, but it means vagina in Swahili. I always thought that one was pretty funny.

I never noticed this cookbook before, but the pictures on this thread are making me think I need to buy it! One question for anybody who might know: do the sections written by the chefs who have their own books contain new recipes, or are they redundant if you already have their books. For example, if I have Ken Hom's books, will there be anything new in his chapter of this book?

Welcome jclaar, I think you'll get lots of responses but I must say having roasted my own coffee at home exactly once I am extremely stoked to do it again. I used a cheap-o aluminum stove top popcorn maker with a crank, waited for the first crack, and then ran outside to de-chaff with colanders just before they went black. I brewed some right away and then some the next day. The second batch was substantially better. I am confident that with a few more iterations I can approach and possibly surpass my local roasters. Plus its a lot of fun. You must check out an egFoodblog from earlier this summer (name escapes me, index needs updating) but an energetic woman from NYC (the Village?) with a kitchen store showed me how it can be done with a big old iron pan and a fire escape. ← Hey that's me! You can find my blog here. I've been roasting my own coffee for almost 2 years now, and I definitely don't plan to stop. The only downside is when you run out and have to buy beans--but it just makes you appreciate how much better home roasted is.

I've actually gotten around bay leaves by buying a laurel tree. I actually started it as a 3 inch sapling a couple years ago and now its about 4 ft high and filling out nicely. I keep it in a pot outside in the summer and bring it into the kitchen in the winter. It comes in really handy and I've stopped buying bay leaves, I just grab a couple when I need them. It's super easy and adds another multitasker to the kitchen, which is always a plus. You may want to consider just buying a couple trees if you really fly through the leaves. ← Yes, andiesenji also suggested that I get a potted bay plant, but unfortunately that won't work for me. I live in a small apartment with very little light, no outdoor space and 2 cats who destroy plants. I have a cactus, but they have chewed every other plant I've had to death.

Some ideas for veggies: Perhaps a bruschetta of greens for the amuse such as this oneor this one I would definitely put a veggie with the main, especially if you are going with a pale sauce because I hate an all white plate. If you use chard leaves for the amuse, you can braise the stems for the side, or use beet greens and then the beet roots for the side.