djyee100

I own the Cuisipro Odd Size Measuring Spoon Set. The 1 1/2 tsp (1/2 TB) measure is very handy. The other odd sizes I find much less handy. http://www.amazon.com/Cuisipro-5-Piece-Siz...12030892&sr=8-3 The same manufacturer makes a conventional size spoon set. I don't own these. The spoons are well made with flat rims for leveling off. They also sound like the spoons you're dissatisfied with, & I hope they're not! http://www.amazon.com/Cuisipro-Measuring-S...12030892&sr=8-1 A friend bought me the Amco set. They are also well made, but they are slightly offset, not perfectly flat for leveling off. I've never had a problem with leveling off, though. http://www.amazon.com/Amco-4-Piece-Stainle...12031295&sr=1-1 If the stores are handy, Sur La Table sells Cuisipro (but call to check). Williams Sonoma used to sell the Amco. The workhorses of my measuring spoons were bought at a hardware store way back when. They're lightweight, cheap, & accurate. No mfgr's ID marks, though.

An oven where you can turn off the convection so that the oven cooks like a conventional oven would solve your problem. Otherwise, I'm going to side with your wife on this one. I'm a experienced home baker and I loathe convection ovens for baking, except for baking pizza. First of all, cookbook recipes are still written for conventional ovens (as far as I can tell). If you're limited to convection, you're constantly recipetesting & trying to adjust temperatures & cooking times. That's not fun. Lessening cooking times by 20% is your starting point. If your wife is trying to bake her mother's favorite recipes on convection, she's going to be at it for awhile before she gets it right. If she ever does. Secondly, I dislike how the convection oven cooks. It tends to cook the surface of food more quickly than the interior. That's great for crispy pizza but not other baked food. For example, I once watched someone bake batches of chocolate chip cookies on convection. When the interior of the cookies was done, the surface of the cookies was almost a uniform brown color. In a conventional oven, the cookies come out a lighter color with golden edges, & that's how I like my cookies. I've been told that the fan of the convection oven can hamper the ability of certain delicate cakes to rise properly. I don't own a convection oven, but I used them occasionally when I assisted chefs in baking classes for a few years (Dacor, Wolf, Viking). Ironically, the chef-teachers frequently didn't bother using convection. The time savings, so important in a commercial establishment like a bakery or restaurant, is almost meaningless to a home cook (or a cooking class, for that matter). So what if the cake takes 15 mins more for a home baker? And then there's the hassle of adjusting the recipe to the reduced cooking time on convection and getting it right. Not worth it, IMO. (And I suspect the chef-teachers thought so, too.) Some posts upthread praise the convection oven for roasted meats. I actually think convection ovens can be good for roasts. But your wife's concern is for her baked goods like cakes, cookies, and pies, yes?

I groaned as soon as I clicked on this thread and read it, because I knew I would not rest until I checked my measuring spoons. I weighed water from the spoons into a dish set on my digital scale, and all my spoons checked out. They were right on the money, from the chintzy spoons I bought for my first apt decades ago, to the fancy shmancy spoons a friend bought me for Xmas. I allowed 15g water for 1 TB, 5g for 1 tsp, and so on. See the water droplets on the spoons? One should aim for precision in baking, but I have always thought that a 10% leeway in measurements for a home baker is OK. Recipes do have some wiggle room. Shirley Corriher in Cookwise mentions a 20% span for a balanced butter cake recipe. Of course a small distortion is a big distortion for anyone baking in large quantities, such as professional bakers. With that in mind, I will not check my measuring cups. Period. I will let go and trust in the Force.

There's really no substitute for the aji amarillo that I know of. The aji rocoto is a notch or two hotter than the aji amarillo, with a different flavor, so it is not a good substitute. Various online purveyors sell the dried chiles. I've done business with Gourmetsleuth for cooking utensils, not chiles, & they were fine. http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/equivalents_s...ndex=A&tid=2417

I didn't wait for high summer tomato season after all. Some decent-looking slicer tomatoes showed up at the market, and I made the Tomato & Cheese Galette. Delicious when served with a green salad and vinaigrette. Ah, summer!

That buckwheat tabbouleh idea has potential. If you ever want to make it again, try tossing it lightly with a creamy dressing, or add in bits of mild creamy cheese. Instead of pickled rhubarb, make a sweet rhubarb chutney for the duck, or serve the duck with a sweet fruit chutney. The cream & sweetness will balance the bitter flavors in the buckwheat and herbs. A sumptuous dinner, & a game well played. Thanks for the pix.

I agree with Chris, merely hauling kids to a one-time field trip isn't going to do it. Occasionally my farm's newsletter tells the rest of us about their kids' programs. The kids are taught a great deal in the classroom & then when they go on the field trip it becomes real to them. One year the newsletter quoted a Q & A session with some kids at the farm, & those kids could answer questions that I couldn't! So it seems that coordination with classroom instruction is very important.

I have the 3 qt saute pan (it came as part of a set) & I don't use it that much. I like to cook 4-6 servings in a saute pan, & the 3-qt pan is a tad small for me. I feel uncomfortable tossing the food in that size pan, & prefer the 4 qt saute pan for its higher sides. I found the 4-qt pan at Williams-Sonoma summer sale a couple years ago ($90). Their annual sale is coming up in mid-June, so keep your eyes open. I've found the 4-qt size to be a great utility pan. However, All-Clad pans rarely go on sale anywhere (at least for the most popular sizes, for a significant discount) & the saute pans are very expensive when purchased separately.

My CSA farm does an annual harvest festival called the Hoes Down. Thousands of people show up every year. http://www.fullbellyfarm.com/hoesdown.html The farm also hosts many field trips & overnight camping trips for schoolkids. There's summer camp program for kids as well.

I suggest a condiment of julienned pickled beets, or a simple roasted beet salad with sherry vinaigrette. That will put sweetness, acidity, & color on the plate. good luck with your cooking, look forward to the pix.

Thanks for the informative post, Art. I was wondering how to roast cacao beans. I recently baked Alice Medrich's cocoa nib cookies with some Scharffenberger nibs. I hadn't made them in a while, & I remembered how great they are. I made my cookies with toasted almonds. An adapted recipe for the cookies on this blog: http://dessertfirst.typepad.com/dessert_fi..._high_frid.html

A fun game, also a little scary. If I tried this with my friends, who knows what they would come up with! APPETIZER: Salad of baby lettuces, smoked eggplant, marinated goat cheese ( http://chef2chef.net/featured_recipes/mari...goat-cheese.php ), topped with toasted pecans. MAIN: Potato griddle cakes with sauce or condiments. Something like this: http://recipes.celsius1414.com/p/recipe_157114.html DESSERT: Vanilla ice cream, buckwheat cookies ( http://www.melissaclark.net/articles/archives/000078.html Also discussed in http://wednesdaychef.typepad.com/the_wedne...bb_cookie_.html ), with rhubarb compote (bottom of webpage, the strawberries are optional http://www.thegreenguide.com/doc/95/rhubarb ) . Did I get everything? Not fancy, but a possible Main dish: fresh buckwheat linguine tossed with grilled (griddled) eggplant, roasted potatoes, tomatoes, goat cheese, olive oil & basil.

I don't have a Sumeet grinder, either, though I've used them at other people's kitchens. I've gotten comparable results by first grinding the ingredients in a food processor & finishing the paste in a mortar & pestle. It works! The Sumeet is only a super high-powered blender. You could try your blender, but I have a feeling that it would not work well to grind cacao.

I would say so. If I remember correctly, shelled beans have a very different look from unshelled beans. The fact that the beans haven't been shelled is better for you. The shells should keep them fresher longer. On the timeline of chocolate-making, you've got the raw beans from the farm. You are now the chocolate factory that must roast, hull, & grind them.

The beans you have sound like they are all nib without shells. If you click on the pic of cacao seeds here http://www.fieldmuseum.org/CHOCOLATE/making_harvest3.html , you can enlarge it for a better view. If this is what you have, they haven't been shelled. From what I know of chocolate making, the beans are harvested, allowed to ferment & dry, & then shipped to factories. At the factory they are roasted, shelled, coarsely ground & then finely ground to make a chocolate you can eat. During grinding, sugar & vanilla are added in to improve the flavor. I'm guessing that you have beans that have been fermented, dried & shelled. They still must be roasted & ground. Virtual tour of a chocolate factory: http://www.artisanconfection.com/stores/sc...tory/vtour3.asp Note that Scharffenberger roasts the beans first, then removes the shells. I posted a photo of chocolate-making on a metate from my visit to Oaxaca last year. You might be able to replicate this process with a food processor, followed by some grinding in a mortar & pestle for a finer texture. http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=109983 The beans should be warm to form a paste. But I have this question: the raw beans are perishable. I hope your beans haven't gone rancid. Maybe roast & taste a few before you continue with this project?

I like almost everything in that salad (meyer lemon, favas, shallots, olives, parsley, chives) as a match for the beef & the polenta, but I have a question about how well the bitterness of endive will go with the beef. As long as the Lemon Cream brings down some of the bitterness of the endive, I think this salad could go well with the beef. How about fresh peas rather than endives in the salad? The sweetness of peas always seems to match well with beef. The Chez Panisse Cafe cookbook has a braised short ribs recipe I like (it includes tomato in the sauce). Gremolata is served as a side. The gremolata is: 1/4 cup chopped parsley, finely chopped zest of 1/2 lemon, 1 finely chopped large garlic clove. That gremolata tastes very good with the short ribs.

Right off the top of my head: the short ribs & polenta are both heavy foods, with quite a bit of fat in them. I assume you will put butter and/or cheese in the polenta. Then you want to add a tomato souffle. The eggs are fatty, too. The tomato is acidic, & will help clear people's palates from the fat in the meat & polenta. The acidity in the wine will also serve the same function. But overall you have quite a few fatty foods on the plate (meat, buttery polenta, eggs), & possibly not enough acid in the combination to balance them off. This makes for what I call "flabbiness" (no pun intended). The palate becomes coated with too much fat that's not washed away with acidic foods, and all the food tastes bland and flat. The meat & eggs will also be heavy on umami flavor, & maybe you would prefer another, contrasting flavor here. Tomato souffle & polenta probably will not look that great together next to each other on the plate, even if the souffle is cooked in individual ramekins. There's a soft mushy reddish pink thing, then a soft mushy yellowish thing. Understand what I mean? I suggest you go with a contrasting flavor & texture, possibly herbaceous & green tasting, with some acidity to balance off the meat & polenta. Tender crunchy green beans with vinaigrette; a medley of tomatoes & artichokes; green salad with tomatoes. Something like that, which will taste refreshing next to the heavy-duty meat & polenta. Just some ideas. Have fun at your party!

Also, are there animals that might snoop around in your backyard if they scent food? My brother who lives in suburban-rural Massachusetts once had to chase off a bear in his backyard that was eating the sugar solution in his hummingbird feeder. (I told my brother to take down the d--n feeder, but he wouldn't. He would rather keep the birdies around, & if necessary, go out into his backyard with a machete to chase off a bear.) Not to be too discouraging or anything. I laud your inventiveness, and bravery.

Not a Southern tomato pie, but a California/Mediterranean tomato pie here. No good tomatoes available for another couple months or so, but now that you've reminded me of this recipe, I can hardly wait! TOMATO & CHEESE GALETTE 2 medium onions, about 1/2 lb 2 TB olive oil, plus extra for drizzling 8 basil leaves 1 large red ripe tomato, about 3/4 lb 1/4 lb St George cheese, mild white cheddar, or Cantal pastry for one 9" piecrust 1 egg 1 TB milk Thinly slice the onions & cook slowly over medium-low heat with the olive oil & 2 basil leaves until the onions are soft & caramelized. Add salt to taste. This step may take up to half an hour. Meanwhile, slice the tomato into 1/8" slices and let drain in a colander or on paper towels. Crumble or grate the cheese. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. To assemble, roll out the pastry into a circle. Leaving a border of 1 1/2", sprinkle half the cheese on the dough. Spread on the onion mixture. Tear the remaining basil leaves into large pieces, & add them on top, followed by the sliced tomato. Sprinkle on the remaining cheese. Drizzle with a little olive oil. Fold up the edges of the dough to form a galette. Mix the egg with the milk, and brush the egg wash on the dough. Bake for about 45 mins, until golden brown.

Er...maybe first check with a thermometer how hot it really is in there? Isn't there a range of warm temperatures that doesn't cook food but encourages the growth of bacteria like, um, salmonella?

I haven't tried this source, but it sounds good. http://aftelier.com/store/index.php?main_p...88cb8a3b51d8976 The seller is the coauthor of the cookbook Aroma. http://www.amazon.com/Aroma-Magic-Essentia...10014694&sr=8-4

Possibly the bakery was using an extra-good flour with some malted barley in it. But I bet the secret was really the method, not the ingredients. Have you tried to bake artisanal breads like the Italian bread you tried? The Italian bread in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice cookbook starts with a prefermented dough or biga, & that's what gives the bread a great flavor. His recipe has an optional ingredient of barley malt powder, also. The other ingredients are bread flour, water, dry yeast, salt, a little oil. No special ingredients here. I can recommend Reinhart's book, that's the one I use.

California doesn't have an Official State Dessert (how did we miss out on this one?), but I nominate Mudslide Cookies. The chocolate chunks & nuts can represent what's left of a multi-million dollar house that's fallen off a cliff during rainy season. As someone famously said, "It's not true that California doesn't have seasons. We have fire season and mudslide season." (And here's a recipe for Mudslide Cookies: http://www.worldonaplate.org/world_on_a_pl...acques_tor.html )

I found this website recently, although I haven't bought anything from it. It lists 3 different kinds of orange oil; also many other food-quality essential oils: http://aftelier.com/store/index.php?main_p...fedd4285afeaad8 The owner Mandy Aftel is coauthor of the cookbook Aroma. http://www.amazon.com/Aroma-Magic-Essentia...09446182&sr=8-4

I'm here with a lemonade made from Lemon Cordial Syrup, a variation of the Lime Cordial Syrup recipe in the book. Congrats to everyone who cooked for this thread, and especially to Robin, who started it all. Cheers!