djyee100

I made this sausage with "picnic" pork shoulder from my local Whole Foods market. It was the fattiest pork available there. The Berkeley Bowl market sells boneless country-style pork ribs, really just very fatty pork shoulder, that their staff recommends for sausage-making. I've tried that meat and liked it too. When buying pork for sausage, I look for meat that is 25%-30% fat. If necessary I ask the counter person to cut open the rolled up meat so I can view the cross-section of fat to meat. A meat dept can grind in some back fat if the pork shoulder is not fatty enough. I ask the meat dept to coarsely grind the meat "like for chile," or "on the chile plate." Don't ask me what size plate that is in numbers, but the meat depts always understand me.

Emily_R, I thought the sausages stayed moist in that dish. They reminded me of sausages that have cooked in spaghetti sauce. The recipe is basically a braise, so the sausages are cooking in moisture at all times (juices from onions, tomatoes). By the end of cooking time the sauce has cooked down to that jammy consistency. Pricking the sausages releases some of their fat. A lot would depend on the kind of sausages you use. These were pork sausages that were fatty and juicy to begin with.

A foray into Thai sausage-making, Spicy Northern Thai Pork Sausage (Sai Oa), one of my favs. It's a sausage of ground pork, red curry paste, cilantro, soy sauce and fish sauce. Reminds me of hot links, but being Thai, it's spicer than any hot links I've ever tried. I cook Kasma's recipe, but this is a classic sausage and I've seen recipes for it in many Thai cookbooks. Served with Lemongrass Coconut Rice and Stirfried Greens with Garlic and Chiles from James Oseland's Cradle of Flavor. I make sausage infrequently, and in small quantities (less than 2 lbs), so I don't own sausage-making attachments or machines. I use a funnel to stuff my sausages--a method that makes hard-core charcuterie people cringe. But it works for me. The bad news is that it's slow. (But it does goes faster as you get the hang of it.) The good news is that you rarely tear the casing because it's slow. The other good news is that you listen to music and catch up on your audiobooks as you stuff sausage. I buy these nalgene funnels for sausage-making. The tube of the funnel should be about 20mm. Model No. 78014: http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/variant.asp?catalog_name=usplastic&category_name=25422&product_id=20578&variant_id=78014

Ader1, I wouldn't call Kasma's food nice and simple. She typically does very traditional, artisanal food, so you have to like to spend time in the kitchen. In any case, It Rains Fishes has been out-of-print for awhile, and the price for a used book is astounding. Kasma's website has much of the product info that you like in the book. I hope somebody else can suggest cookbooks for you.

I liked Percy's hot dog, too. And I'm going mmmm...over Prawncracker's food, especially that jerk chicken. Peasant food for dinner here, my version of Sausages and Potatoes Country Style (Salsiccie e Patate alla Paesana) from Marcella's Italian Kitchen. An easy pan-braise of pork sausages, garlic, onions, tomatoes and potatoes. The onions and tomatoes cook down into a savory-sweet jam that swathes the sausages and potatoes. Some leftover roasted bell peppers in my fridge, fresh parsley and rosemary also, so I tossed them into the pan. I liked all the additions, especially the fresh rosemary. To make this dish: Pierce 1 lb Italian pork sausages with a fork or toothpick in various places. Put the sausages in a skillet (10" skillet is good) along with 2 TB extra virgin olive oil, 3 thinly sliced cloves of garlic, and 1 lb thinly sliced onions. Cover and cook over medium low heat until the onions are very soft and translucent. Remove the cover, raise the heat to medium high, and cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are caramelized and light golden brown. Add in 1 lb peeled, seeded, and chopped fresh plum tomatoes and 6 bay leaves. Cover, and turn heat down to medium. Cook for about 10 mins, stirring occasionally. Add in 1 1/2 lbs potatoes, cut into small wedges, and S&P. Remove the bay leaves. Cover and cook until the potatoes are tender. Check that the potatoes aren't sticking or scorching to the bottom of the pan. When potatoes are cooked, gently toss in 1/2 cup diced roasted bell peppers, 2 TB freshly chopped parsley, and 1 tsp freshly chopped rosemary. Taste and adjust for salt. Let cook for another minute or so. Serve immediately.

I own and I've cooked out of both Mastering The Art and The Way To Cook by Julia. As much as I like MTA, I find the recipes very heavy on the fat. I usually try to decrease the fat in a MTA recipe by 1/3. I don't have that problem with Way to Cook. But ironically, I like the food in MTA better. The recipes in MTA are more old-fashioned in their cooking methods, often you're making 2 or 3 separate components in a recipe and putting them together at the end, and that means big deep flavors. Way to Cook is more streamlined, and I can taste the difference. I agree with what another post said, MTA may seem intimidating by the length of some recipes, but the recipes give great detail, troubleshooting tips, etc. It's extremely well-written and if you follow along carefully those dishes will come out.

My post did say Asian sauces, not specifically Chinese sauces, and there is a more sizable section of Asian sauce recipes in that book. Asian sauces bear some similarity. I thought looking thru the entire chapter might help Jkim reconstruct this particular garlic sauce. As far as MSG goes, I couldn't say. Jkim, if we're thinking about the same sauce, I ate it with green vegs like Asian broccoli and snowpeas when I visited China. It was very good, and popular with our group. I thought it was a simple sauce, and my post gives my best guesstimate about the ingredients. If you are a regular at a restaurant where this dish is served, perhaps simply ask them what's in the sauce?

If it's the same sauce I'm thinking of, it's sauteed garlic (not browned), a tiny bit of soy sauce, probably some stock, and a cornstarch & water thickener. What does your sauce taste like? Just garlicky? If you can get your hands on this book, try looking in James Peterson's Sauces. There's a section with a slew of basic Asian sauces, and yours might be in there.

I'm puzzled by your question. How far ahead of time are you making this risotto? If I have to hold risotto, I make it a little ahead of time before serving the meal, and cook it until it needs only one more ladleful of broth to finish. Then before service I reheat the risotto, add that broth, finish cooking it and serve it immediately. For the short time period that I hold the risotto (an hour? less?) I've never had a problem with the wine souring.

I learned how to make this stuffed pork loin from chef Kathie Alex some years ago. Roast Pork Loin with Apricot, Pistachio and Smoked Turkey Stuffing (Roti du porc, farci avec abricots, pistaches et dinde fumee) --Soak 3 oz dried apricots in 1/4 cup brandy until softened. Drain the apricots and reserve the brandy. --Butterfly a 4-lb boneless pork loin, i.e, cut it in the middle without slicing through completely, so that it opens up flat like a book. Season with S&P and 1 TB freshly chopped thyme. Lay on 4 oz thinly sliced smoked turkey, followed by the apricots. Scatter on 1/4 cup of coarsely chopped pistachios. Close the "book," roll it up, and tie it. Heat oil in a large casserole or Dutch oven and brown the loin on all sides. Add in 1/2 cup dry white wine and the reserved brandy. Boil and reduce the liquid by half. Add 1 1/2 cups unsalted chicken stock and a bouquet garni of thyme, bay leaf and parsley. Cover the loin with a circle of parchment paper and the casserole lid. Bring to a simmer, and lower heat. Cook approx 1 1/2 hrs or until cooked through and tender. Remove the loin, keep it warm, and if you like, make a sauce from the cooking liquid. Definitely a company meal, delicious and spectacular to present. The first time I made this dish, it was very salty--from the smoked turkey, which I guess was not of particularly good quality. The second time I made the recipe, I omitted the turkey, and stuffed the loin only with apricots and pistachios. It still tasted good. But I suggest that you put in some smoked turkey, it really would taste better, just make sure you have the real thing. It shouldn't be salty like that. Kathie Alex served this pork loin with roasted butternut squash and a gratin of celery root and potatoes. The next course was a salad of various lettuces, including endives, roasted pear slices, blue cheese, dried cranberries (cooked and softened) and a shallot vinaigrette. The dessert was a knock-out of banana souffle with caramel walnut sauce. I'm salivating as I write this.

An unusual find at the market, tuna belly, plus lots of tomatoes in season, and arugula from my CSA. I made Pan-Fried Tuna Belly with Orange-Olive Tapenade, and Tomato Salad with Marinated Feta and Arugula. Served with store-bought focaccia (Acme's great bread, not mine. I wish. ) The tomato is a fairly new variety called Berkeley Tie Dye, colored with mad orange, red and green streaks. I thought the vendor was totally putting me on with that name. But no, the variety really exists. http://heirloomtomatoplants.com/Heirloom%2...to%20_seeds.htm The tomatoes I've eaten are quite acidic, vegetal rather than sweet. I'll stick to Marvel tomatoes when I want crazy red and orange striped tomatoes. Orange-Olive Tapenade (my favorite tapenade) is in Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook. The recipe is available here: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo...62.story?page=2 Marinated Feta with Mint and Capers, which is really tasty, comes from Janet Fletcher's The Cheese Course. The recipe is available on Googlebooks (Page 80): http://books.google.com/books?id=5oJoRJwao...page&q=&f=false

A banana poking through a hole hitting a cherry? No f'ing way that's a coincidence. "A more innocent time" my arse. ← It's called Candle Salad. I don't know if it was popular in the 1920s. It was a ladies' lunch thing in the 1950s. (I'll leave it to you to ruminate on the ramifications of that.) It's still a popular traditional dish during the winter holidays. A few years ago I was taking a seminar on world religions. I brought a picture of Candle Salad to class and enlightened my classmates as to the regenerative theme of phallus (lingam) and yoni during the winter solstice--a crosscultural theme in world myths and religion. My teacher liked my analysis. She also laughed a lot and took home a picture for her husband. I offered to make the salad for the class, but there were no takers. They have to call it Candle Salad. What else could you politely call it? http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/879948-Candle-Salad

Just now I pulled my copy of Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking off the shelf, and I found two recipes for sesame sauce made only with sesame, no peanut butter. Why didn't I look in this book first? Dunno. When I think of Asian sesame sauce, I think of peanut butter. Which tells you how entrenched peanut butter is in that sauce. One of the recipes was printed in the NY Times ages ago. The recipe starts in the middle of the page here: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/02/garden/c...l?&pagewanted=3 The Chinese sesame paste in the recipe sounds like tahini made from roasted sesame seeds.

If you toast the sesame seeds and make a sauce out of it, the sauce will have an incredible roasted nut flavor. Or so I discovered when I tried a recipe for baba ganouj from Peter Reinhart's Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe (an early cookbook from PR's restaurant days in Sonoma). To make roasted tahini: Toast 1/4 cup white sesame seeds in a dry pan, moving the seeds around constantly, until they begin to brown. Combine with 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil in a food processor or blender. Taste and decide if you want to add any of the following: 8-10 cloves of roasted garlic, 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice, 1 tsp salt, chopped parsley for garnish. Add this sauce to roasted eggplant and you have baba ganouj. I really liked the sauce but I thought it overwhelmed the eggplant. For plain ol' noodles, it might be just the thing. Funny, I've never liked the taste of peanut butter in Asian sesame noodles. But I do like fried or roasted peanuts in other Chinese dishes.

Prawncrackers, what great pork chops and sausages. Love the crackling. A few days ago, I found some fresh cranberry beans at the farmers market. For dinner, Grilled Steak Slices, Shell Bean Salad with Vinaigrette, and Tomato Confit. I cooked the shell beans by the same method outlined for the shell bean salad here: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/31/dining/t...ml?pagewanted=2 For my bean salad I made a sherry vinaigrette with chopped shallots and parsley.

If that salami is too salty, tuck it discreetly into starchy dishes that need salt anyway. Some ideas from Pamela Sheldon Johns' Prosciutto, Pancetta, Salame: - Saute garlic, mushrooms, eggplant, parsley and diced salami, and serve with polenta. - Combine sauteed green onions, garlic, zucchini and bell pepper, along with cooked chickpeas and diced salami, and toss with cooked farro and a lemon vinaigrette. - Saute chopped onion, carrot & celery. Add in some tomato sauce, rice, parsley, basil, oregano, thyme. Cook until the rice is done. Add some diced salami. Stuff the rice mixture into parcooked bell peppers, top with Parmesan, and bake until the stuffed peppers are heated through and the cheese is golden brown.

I suggest that you saute a small piece of the liver, and take it from there. Once you taste it, you'll be able to judge what cooking method and spices will enhance it (or disguise it).

Kim, If we keep talking about prosciutto like this, I will end up at the store buying more of you-know-what. I bet that baked chicken wrapped in prosciutto tasted good. Percyn, I like how you made that blueberry pie. You've reminded me that I haven't made my blueberry pie of the season yet.

I've been puzzled by one thing on this thread--people saying that the fresh garlic they can buy at the supermarket is crappy for most of the year. One of my favorite vendors at the farmers market grows a huge crop of garlic in the spring and sells the new crop of dried garlic heads starting in June. He sells the garlic from that one crop until October or so, when he's sold the entire crop. I thought he planted garlic continuously and dried it and sold it until the fall, but he said No--it was all the same crop he harvested in June. Last year around September I bought a big bagful of garlic from him and kept it in a cool, dry place, and it kept well until January, when it began to soften and mold and sprout. What I'm trying to say is--garlic should keep. It's like a dried herb. People used to braid garlic in long strings and store them from the rafters (before central heating). What is it that commercial distributors and supermarkets are doing that the garlic should be of such bad quality most of the year? Or to put it another way, if the stores and wholesalers are failing to store garlic well, so that it will stay dry and mold-free for months as it's supposed to--maybe then people should buy garlic when it is of good quality (like now) and store it themselves. Anybody have thoughts about this?

Good-looking swordfish on sale at the market, so I bought some and made Moroccan Fish Tagine with Tomato, Peppers, and Preserved Lemons from Paula Wolfert's World of Food cookbook. The fish is marinated with charmoula, then layered with tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, carrot, preserved lemon, and more charmoula. Straightforward to cook, actually pretty easy. Once the tagine was in the oven, I put my feet up and read a book. Served with roasted potatoes. It was yummy. The recipe for the fish tagine is available at the link below. I cooked my tagine at a higher temp, 325-350 F, because the fish steaks were very thick and I like well-cooked fish. No olives in the recipe I was using, and I would have liked them. http://www.gangofpour.com/carolyn_tillie/tagine/recipes.html

Those tomatoes look fabulous. So does the dinner. Are you cooking again in a newly renovated kitchen?

I just pulled a cruddy piece of ginger from my cabinet and went at it with a teaspoon. Works great. Try angling the edge of the spoon at a 45 degree angle, and scrape away. Some pix. Looks professional. http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Peeling-Ginger/Detail.aspx More pix. Like how I do it. http://www.brooklynfarmhouse.com/basic-tec...to-peel-ginger/ I usually cut away the little knobs until I have a straight-ish piece of ginger, and peel away with a Y-peeler. The spoon works, but it's too slow for me. I grate the ginger with a microplane. But I've met chefs who don't like the microplane. They wanted me to grate the ginger on a regular box grater or on a more gentle and aesthetic Japanese porcelain grater. http://www.spicelines.com/2007/05/tools_of...how_to_grat.htm It helps to think ahead. When buying ginger, I look for big straight-ish pieces, with as few little knobs as possible. I don't always grate ginger if I'm in a hurry and I can get away with it, as in stirfries or some steamed dishes. I slice off a few coins of ginger, about 1/8" thick, don't peel them, just smash 'em with a knife until they're pulpy, and toss 'em in. I fish out the ginger slices from the dish before service.

You're probably less than an hour's drive down the freeway from me. (If there are no traffic jams. Note to others: around here, that's a big if.) Do you belong to a CSA, or have you considered joining one? I've belonged to a CSA for a decade now, it has really spurred my cooking when I've had to do something with fresh, seasonal, and sometimes--unfamiliar--produce. I would also suggest checking into the many good cooking classes available in the Bay Area.

Ader1, Kasma's recipe for Jungle Curry is taught in her classes, but it is currently unpublished. However, one of her long-time students has published what appears to be an adapted recipe here: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34658.asp Instead of frog meat, you can substitute chicken, pork, or prawns. Instead of krachai, you can substitute a little less of fresh ginger root. I made my curry with about 1 cup fresh peas, a total of 8 small purple Chinese eggplants and green Thai eggplants, 1 cup sliced king trumpet mushrooms (shittake mushrooms would be a good substitute), about 1 cup fresh corn kernels, 1 med-size green tomato, a handful of trimmed whole okra pods, and 1 TB of brined green peppercorns (they come in jars at Asian markets). Instead of slivered jalapenos, I used slivered red fresno chiles. This curry is really hot. Fortunately I had some yogurt and fresh fruit handy for dessert.

Offhand, I can't think of one cookbook that would meet all your needs. But here are some suggestions. For explanations of French-based cooking technique, I would recommend Julia Child's The Way To Cook or James Peterson's Cooking. Peterson's book in particular has tons of clear "how-to" photos, and that's very handy. From what I've cooked from these two books, I like the food, too. For more mainstream, classic American recipes, I suggest that you check out Marion Cunningham's Fanny Farmer Cookbook. The most recent edition includes recipes that reflect American ethnic diversity, and that's an improvement. The recipes seem well thought-out. I haven't cooked much out of this book myself, but I found my favorite brownie recipe and my favorite mac & cheese recipe in it. The book I'm cooking out of now is Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. You don't say where you're from, and Waters' food, as you might guess, is very California-oriented. Definitely about plentiful fresh produce and the use of seasonal ingredients. Waters gives a basic recipe in her book, and then adds notes at the end about the many variations where you can go with the recipe. Perhaps you might like that. (I do.) I would caution that for best results you'll have to spend money on high-quality olive oil, spices, etc, not only fresh produce--Waters' style emphasizes natural flavors. This book includes info on technique, but it is more about Waters' technique, not necessarily the classic French technique. Nevertheless, Waters' techniques work, and they're efficient. I like the food, too. I've cooked close to 30 recipes from this book, and I've been happy with all of them. good luck!