amapola

Yesterday my mother in law sent us a package from Israel with, amongst other things, some lemons from her own tree. I have never seen, tasted or smelled lemons superior to hers, they are so fragrant and juicy and, well, lemony, it's really unbelievable. Usually I use them in sweet preparations, their flavour makes to die for lemon curd and spectacular deserts and biscuits but since I made lemon curd not too long ago and there is still a lot of orange cheesecake leftover from a birthday last week, I would love some ideas to incorporate the lemons in a savoury dish. Salad dressing, yes (with olive oil also from Israel, which makes an awesome combo...) as accompagnement to fish, sure, but I would really love to do something different with them, to make them stand out and let them get the attention they deserve. Does anyone have a suggestion on what I could do with them...? Thanks!

I have tried that and of course it works fine for the large loaves but for some reason my rolls never come out with the same nice texture they went in with. They always seem a bit too dense and dry when re-heated. That's why I thought I might try freezing them before they are completely done. Could I be doing something wrong when freezing them? I wrap them in air tight freezer bags and usually eat them within a month or so.

I do the exact same! The shops I go to are sort of around a block so whenever I (or we) go shopping (almost on a daily basis) I just have to think if it is meat or veg I want to plan the meal around. If it's vegetables (or there is still some meat in the freezer I want to use) I'll go around counter-clockwise, thus visiting the market first and if meat is the center of my plans, it's clockwise and to the butcher first. I hardly ever plan for more than the current day, only if I know I won't have time to do shopping the next day will I try to look that far ahead. Or in case of a special occasion, guests or a birthday or somethink like that.

I use them (pre-soaked) to help deepen flavour in beefy dishes such as soups and stews, I simply toss in a couple finely chopped. Also, I sometimes make a starter type dish out of them, soaked in water, chopped and then fried with bacon and some other stuff, and with a splash of sherry and a drop of balsamic vinegar. Nice with some toast or a handful of fresh green peppery salad leaves.

I want to make some small breads like croissants and bagels but since there's only two of us to eat them, I dread ending up tossing half of them out after a week... Does anyone have some tips on freezing the rolls? What would be the best point in the process if I want to have them ready say for example for a quick bake-off in the morning? I was thinking maybe I can half-bake them, or freeze the bagels after cooking them but I have no idea how that would work out and how to adjust baking times/temperatures...

Yesterday I turned out my first loaf based on this technique and it was far better that I had expected. Due to VERY limited kitchen space (and when I say limited space, I really mean NO space at all) I have no proper oven. In stead, I have to make due with a fairly tiny microwave-oven combination that doesn't get any hotter than 230 deg. celcius. It will just about fit my romertopf so I decided to just have a go at it and see if it would work at all in my crappy setting. I used a mixture of 2 parts plain flour and 1 part whole grain (about 450 grams total), roughly 2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp yeast, no starter or sourdough this time. I added water untill I felt the dough was the right sloppy but not battery consistency, I think it was about 75%. Then I waited, folded without too much problems, waited a bit more and baked. No crackling crust but still nice and crunchy and the crumb was nice and open and moist, a bit chewy. I do agree that doctoring the dough up a bit with some sourdough will improve the flavour, and possibily also the texture of the crumb. But on the whole, a great recipe, certainly if it can even be made without a proper over (the only up side to a kitchen as small as mine is that there is not much surface to cover in flour when transfering the dought to the hot pot...)

[Moderator note: The original Dutch Cooking topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: Dutch Cooking (2005-2006)] Hallo Klary, This being my first post at eGullet, I thought it would be nice to put it in this thread, since your dutch food blog basically brought me here 🙂 I was raised a vegetarian and only started to eat meat just over two years ago so I never really picked up how to cook meat as a child. And though I have learned quite a bit since then and even some of my most carnivorous friends consider me to be the best meat cook they know , I'm still having trouble cooking 'proper dutch' meat dishes. Especially gravy, jus, is giving me nightmares, I still have not mastered a good gehaktbal met jus... So I LOVE your thread. And all the insights you give me into the wonderful world of my native cooking Also, most of the dishes without meat you describe, are so pleasantly familiar to me. Would you believe there is a huge bowl of stoofpeertjes in my fridge and just a couple of weeks ago I made two tiny boterkoeken, by coincidence just the way you described, because I was looking for that chewy consistency and I figured a pinch of baking soda might do the trick... Anyway. Sorry to be so longwinding, I have a tendency to use a lot of words when I'm enthusiastic about something. I hope to hang around here for a while, and thanks for 'introducing' me here! Annabel