djyee100

And in case you are thinking of making your own fish sauce, consider the experience of Francine Segan, as told in her cookbook, The Philosopher's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook. While researching her book, Segan experimented with an ancient recipe for fermented fish sauce. This was not much more than a pile of fish heads and carcasses left outside to rot. After a few days, her neighbor politely knocked on her door and asked if her cat had died. End of experiment.

I suggest trying "Robert's Chocolate Cookies," which were developed to showcase Scharffen Berger 99% chocolate. The cookies are not sweet, and to my palate they even tasted a little flat (I wanted more sugar). Maybe the cookies should be served with port. But if you want a cookie to show off the pure nuanced flavor of a great chocolate, this is it. The recipe is in Alice Medrich's Cookies and Brownies. If you don't have the book handy (and it's a great cookbook, BTW), this blogger has her version of the recipe posted on her website: http://loveandcooking.blogspot.com/2004/11...ay-cookies.html The only difference from the original recipe: use 5 TB unsalted butter (the blogger's recipe calls for 1/4 cup unsalted butter).

We're talking about the real curry leaves, murraya koenigii. On the handwritten list (post #19), curry leaves are listed after cardamom. Duan salam is listed separately on the facing page.

I don't have an answer for this question (which is a toughie), but maybe I can shed some more light on people who split entrees. A couple I know order separate appetizers when they eat out, then split the entree. They just don't eat that much food, they don't want to take it home, and they don't want to waste it, either. They're financially well-off. However, at times they have not been well-treated by a restaurant because they split an entree, and they tell me (and presumably others) all about it.

Is that "curry leaves" on your list? If you (or others) grow this plant, ask for murraya koenigil or curry leaf tree, not to be confused with curry plant (as my local nursery did with my initial order). http://www.plantoftheweek.org/week129.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_Tree I acquired a couple small curry leaf trees 4 years ago, in a fit of intense Indian cooking. The trees like sandy soil and hot (90+ degree) weather. If I remember correctly, their native habitat is coastal rainforest in southern India. They have to be brought indoors during the winter where I live. When I bought the trees, I had fantasies of picking abundant fresh curry leaves. But the trees have turned out to be very slow growing. I manage to pick a stem or two of curry leaves every season. Most of the time I just get into my car and drive to the Indian grocery store.

Yep, that says it in a nutshell. Amateur cooks, people who cook because they like to, automatically learn because they're always cooking. We amateur cooks don't have to feed hundreds of customers and please the boss, but we do become more skilled because we (and our friends and family), are always--literally--eating our mistakes. I've always counseled beginning cooks to just keep cooking. If something is stopping them, like a missing ingredient or a troublesome technique, I tell them to skip it, go around it, and keep cooking. (Cookbook authors who devote themselves to developing perfect recipes may hate me for saying that. Sorry.) That's not to say a little organization wouldn't lead to self-improvement. A few years ago, while cooking, I mused about the techniques I was not so good at, and wrote them down in a list. Then I tackled the list in a burst of motivation and practiced the techniques. For awhile. Then it was back to just cooking what I like.

I don't think the purpose of this discussion is to hand out cooking report cards to people, nor is it to find ways to criticize other people's cooking. Whether we like it or not, not all cooks are of equal skill. We're not equal in talent, either. That' s not a put-down; it just is. I've met some incredibly talented and skilled cooks who are appreciative of other people's less skilled cooking (like mine), because they realize what it takes to put a good meal on the table. Someone else upthread mentioned this, and I agree, that a linear scale (like climbing a mountain) might not be appropriate here. An art teacher once told me that she thought her students developed by jumping from one plateau to the next. They became interested in one aspect of their art, and explored it without seeming to make much progress. Then one day it all seemed to come together, and they suddenly jumped to another level of ability. Since cooking is an art, maybe this is more typically what happens in people's development.

I'll cast a vote for Mustapha's Moroccan Olive Oil also. It's spicy and well-flavored, my favorite olive oil for a plain green salad. You can buy it online at Sur La Table http://www.surlatable.com/product/mustapha...asc=true&page=1 For ordinary cooking these days I'm using Zatis Olive Oil, a Turkish olive oil. It has a good flavor, fruity but not too strong. The purveyor has a picture of his mother on the label. In these days of marketing commodified beauty, that alone is a good reason to buy this olive oil. http://www.zatisrestaurant.com/zatisoil.html

I don't think this a frivolous question, or even an ego-inflating (or deflating) question. After all, people who write cookbooks have to think about the skill level at which they are pitching their recipes--especially now, with basic cooking skills less prevalent than they were 30 or 40 years ago. When I assisted cooking classes several years ago, I noticed the beginners were people who hadn't mastered the basic cooking techniques: boiling, poaching, and steaming; saute, shallow fry, and deep fry; grill or broil; and roasting. They were often uncomfortable with cooking, and inconsistent in their results. Proper seasoning with salt and knife skills were always an issue. In fact, their lack of knife skills frequently slowed them down and made them even more uncomfortable. I routinely advised them to take a knife skills class to improve their cooking! Past the beginner stage, though, I noticed that people's skills were eclectic. They were comfortable with cooking, but they pursued the food that interested them, so they could be very skilled with some dishes and not so good with others. Some common problems still emerged at this (intermediate?) level: cooking with artichokes or fava beans; filo dough; risotto; cleaning shellfish; and whipping egg whites. Put a * next to "whipping egg whites." I wish I had a dollar for every student who showed up in class because he or she had tried to make a molten chocolate souffle, as viewed on the food channel, and flopped on the egg whites. I don't know how I would define an advanced cook. Maybe you just know them when you see them. They cook just about anything, all the time, and it seems nothing fazes them. They're also very good at correcting their cooking mistakes on the run. I agree with others that baking might be another animal in the world of cooking skills. I've known many fine cooks who were not good bakers. Yet all the good bakers I've known were also very good cooks. Don't ask me why.

I've never had much to do with seaweed outside of a sushi bar, but recently I was reading Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, which includes a recipe for Shrimp Rolls With Crisp Seaweed. These are rolls of shrimp paste wrapped in nori seaweed and then deep-fried. I haven't made this recipe yet, though I bought the seaweed yesterday. One of my friends once tried many different kinds of dried seaweed while discussing it with a Japanese exchange student. My friend was very sick the next day. Too much of a good thing? In any case, I wonder how digestible seaweed is.

Re: California's fall from #1 to #3 from 1960 to 1999. I'm guessing that the ever increasing suburbanization of the agricultural areas has something to do with this. Silicon Valley was built over some of the richest agricultural land in the world. I live in a Bay Area suburb that was ranch and farm land 50 years ago, until the freeway came in. An old-timer once told me that my house was built over his father-in-law's tomato garden.

I've never done low acid canning, but if you use a pressure canner and carefully follow the instructions, you should be OK. A friend once canned all the food she and her boyfriend needed to sail on their boat from San Francisco to Tahiti. I was aghast when she told me, and not about the sailing--about the canning. But she assured me that she pressure-canned everything and was very careful, especially with the meat. She lived to tell the tale and they had a great vacation.

This is a variation on the pasta salad idea, but somehow it doesn't come across as the same ol' same ol'. The last time I made it for a potluck, people liked it and asked for the recipe. One woman said it reminded her of the food she ate in Rome (?!). My adaptation of "Ravioli and Tomato Salad with Masses of Basil" from Deborah Madison' s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone: Combine 1 lb cooked cheese ravioli; 1 lb peeled and cut-up fresh tomatoes; 8 oz jar of artichoke hearts, drained; 1/2 cup pitted and cut-up kalamata olives; 3 TB capers, rinsed; and a red wine vinaigrette. Just before serving, toss in a couple handfuls of fresh basil leaves, torn into large pieces.

I used to fixate on the extra thick clear plastic bags that the supermarket provided for veggies. If you split them down the seams, they're great for rolling out sticky doughs. But then my pastry skills improved, and I no longer needed the bags, so I stopped collecting them. However, sometimes people leave clean, unused plastic bags in otherwise empty shopping carts in the parking lot. I cannot pass up those plastic bags. I just can't. But the way I view it, if I didn't take those bags, they would just blow around from the wind and create more litter and pollution in the world. So I'm doing a good deed.

I agree with Carolyn that spring and fall are the best times to go. April and May have less chance of rainstorms compared to February and March. The very last time I visited Napa Valley in the summer, which was years ago, I and my friends did a dayhike up Mount St Helena. And what was the glorious vista we saw at the top of the mountain? A thick trail of dirty brown smog swathing the entire length of the valley, from all the visitors' cars. Enough said.

I discovered this method by chance: You can copy and paste URLs into the body of your message when you are writing it, and the egullet program will automatically convert the URL into a link. 1) Go the webpage you want to link to. Highlight the URL (or address) in the address bar by clicking on it with your mouse. On Internet Explorer (the browser I use) go to main menu Edit>Copy. 2) Go to egullet, and write a message as you usually do. When you want the link to appear in the body of your message, go to main menu Edit>Paste. The link should appear in your message. The link will still be in Text format; it will become active as a link when you post. If the link is very long (as with a search/query string), the egullet program will show only a portion of the link when you post it, but the link will still be active and work fine. Here, I just followed my own instructions with this link: http://www.metmuseum.org/

The article is entitled, "Test Kitchen: Churning Out Ice Cream..." by Denise Landis, published August 16, 2006. It is available on the NY Times website at http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricte...DA10894DE404482 The article will cost a small fee to view unless you have a subscription. I thought the article was helpful and informative. BTW, I went looking for The Perfect Scoop at my local Barnes & Noble, and the cookbook wasn't in yet. Argh!

Don't forget Graffeo coffee. http://www.graffeo.com/pages/source/sf.htm I first tasted Graffeo coffee at the Zuni Cafe (I don't know if they still serve it there). The coffee tasted so great that I just said Wow and asked the waiter for the name of their coffee supplier.

I was surfing David Lebovitz's Paris-based website and found a recipe there for kouign amann. http://www.davidlebovitz.com/recipes/index.html

I found the recipe for salted butter caramel ice cream but not the coffee or the caramelized banana ice creams. Can anybody post link(s) where these recipes appear on the site?

In the same vein, here's a carrot-parsley salad recipe. It's from a magazine interview with Alice Waters many years ago. Make a gremolata of 1 bunch parsley, chopped; the grated rind of one lemon; and 1 garlic clove, crushed. Add the gremolata to shredded or grated carrots (I usually use about 3 large carrots for this recipe). Moisten the salad with a vinaigrette dressing. You could also substitute Moroccan preserved lemon for the fresh lemon rind in this recipe or blurby's. That's another classic combination, especially with cumin.

I like Muir Glen canned tomatoes, because of the CAN. Muir Glen lines its cans with plastic, so the tomatoes don't have that metallic taste I'm sensitive to. This past January, as I grimly surveyed the hard, pale, basically pathetic fresh tomatoes for sale at the supermarket, I decided to buy a bunch and roast them. I rubbed them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, fitted them snugly in a shallow casserole dish, then roasted them in a 400 degree oven until they were slightly browned and blistered. The roasting concentrates the flavor, and those tomatoes tasted better than anything I have bought canned.

My CSA delivers fresh garlic or green garlic to us every spring, and they say that you can use fresh garlic like dried garlic. I find green garlic just about as strong as dried garlic, but fresh garlic has a wonderful herbaceous flavor to it. A few years ago I sent this recipe to my CSA's newsletter, and it turned out to be a hit with people. The recipe is adapted from A Culinary Journey in Gascony by Kate Hill, which is a fun book to read and cook from. That one mint leaf in the recipe makes a difference in flavor, BTW. VETOU'S ASPARAGUS Adapted recipe from A Culinary Journey in Gascony by Kate Hill. 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 oz bacon, pancetta, or ham, chopped 1 bunch fresh spring onions, bulbs only, trimmed and cut lengthwise into halves or quarters 1 bunch green garlic, tender lower portions of stalks only, trimmed and cut lengthwise into halves, then cut into 3-inch pieces 1 bunch asparagus, peeled or trimmed, then cut into 3-inch pieces 1 fresh mint leaf 2 sprigs fresh thyme salt and freshly ground pepper 1/2 cup white wine 1 tablespoon butter lemon wedges Heat the oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add the bacon, pancetta, or ham, and cook briefly until soft. Add the onions and green garlic pieces, sauteing gently until half cooked. Do not allow the onions and garlic to brown much. Add the asparagus, mint leaf, thyme, salt and pepper, and 2 tablespoons of water. Cover the pan and cook slowly over medium-low heat for 10 to 15 minutes. Check occasionally, and if necessary add a little water to prevent the vegetables from sticking to the pan. Uncover the pan, add the wine, and continue to cook until the asparagus is tender when pierced with a fork. Taste for salt and pepper. Remove the vegetables to a warm serving platter. Turn the heat up to high and reduce the liquid left in the pan to 2 or 3 tablespoons, then add the butter. Swirl the butter in the pan until it melts. Pour the sauce over the vegetables. Serve hot with lemon wedges.

There's a recipe for "Braised Peas with Onions, Sage, and Pancetta" in Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It sounds like the dish you're describing. The dish is supposed to be made with big, starchy, less than wonderfully flavored fresh peas (not the small sweet spring peas). I bet frozen peas would be a good substitute.

This is a comfort food for me: Ground Beef with Peas in an Asian stirfry. The recipe is from a 1960s cookbook I will not name, because the author is now in disrepute. She offers "Chinese-American" recipes like chop suey, seasoned with MSG--This cookbook was published before Chinese food was supposed to be healthy or authentic. But I cook the recipes now and then. The food reminds me of the Chinese restaurant food I ate as a kid, and hey, it still tastes good. I skip the MSG, though. Here is my adaptation. It's quick and easy after a busy day. GROUND BEEF WITH PEAS 2 Tb oil 2 cloves garlic, crushed few slices of fresh gingerroot 1 large onion, sliced 1 lb ground beef 2 Tb soy sauce 1 Tb dry sherry 1 tsp sugar 1 Tb cornstarch, dissolved in a little water 3 cups frozen peas (FG, this is almost a whole bag!) roasted sesame oil Heat the oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat. Add the garlic and gingerroot, then the onion, and saute until slightly softened. Crumble in the ground beef, and break it up into smaller chunks with a spatula. Cook the beef until the red color disappears. Add the soy sauce, sherry, sugar, and 1 cup of water. Mix in well. Add the peas, and let cook for a minute. Season with salt and pepper. Then add the dissolved cornstarch. Bring to a boil, adding more water as necessary, until the peas are hot and the gravy has thickened. Drizzle with a little roasted sesame oil. Serve hot over steamed rice.