Kajikit

One of our church members passed away and I offered to bake cookies and brownies for the funeral... we're expecting about 150 people and that's a LOT of people to bake for! Various friends are bringing sandwiches etc. I'm going to make sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, my deluxe chocolate brownies... and I need a few more cookies or slices. Any ideas? And how many cookies do you think I need to bake for 150 people?

Somebody suggested keeping flour and grains into the freezer to ward off pantry moth... but there is absolutely no room in mine! My freezer is always chock full of the following - - frozen vegetables (assorted varieties) - unsalted butter for baking - bread and rolls (we live in Florida and they last about five minutes out of the fridge before they go nasty!) - a few prepared meals and servings of leftovers (no more than a dozen serves at any one time) - lots of meat. (this takes up 1/2 the freezer basket) - and if there's any room left on the shelf this week, a couple of tubs of icecream.

Before we could give you any useful suggestions we'd have to know WHY these particular items are on the forbidden list... or else what is actually permitted! What is the person trying to avoid? (if it was just low-carb, you could use a whole carrot in the stock for flavour and simply remove it from the finished product so that it wasn't eaten... but if they're needing to avoid say beta carotene, it would have transferred itself to the stock while it was cooking, so simple removal wouldn't do any good.)

You don't have to LIKE something to know how to cook it... but if you loathe something enough to not want it anywhere near you and refuse to have it in your kitchen, that could be a problem. Unless of course, it's YOUR kitchen and you're the boss - in which case, what you say goes. If you choose not to have any salmon on your menu because you think it tastes like old carpet, that's your prerogative - but it's the salmon-loving customer's prerogative to go elsewhere!

cheese pizza, mini-quiche, tabbouli, salad, cheese balls, rice salad with tuna, soybutter or sunbutter (tastes pretty much like PB only sweeter so kids should love it), mini muffins (savoury or sweet), veggie sticks and hummus...

I never would have thought of putting lemon juice into my blueberries... but following some of the earlier suggestions in this thread I made a blueberry pie yesterday - a basic sugar pastry pressed into the pan (my recipe is far too soft to roll out)... I boiled up one punnet of blueberries with lemon juice, sugar and cinnamon. Then I thickened it with cornstarch and mixed the second punnet of blueberries into it, and I poured it into the crust and crumbled the rest of the dough on top. It was DELICIOUS!

I'm pretty sure that it will keep indefinitely in the fridge... or until it starts to crystallise, in which case reboiling it would fix it.

Our local farmer's market store has a sign up that says that they sell regular eggs, brown eggs, and double-yolked eggs. It's the only place I've ever seen double-yolked eggs specifically advertised. I haven't actually seen a double-yolker since I was a little girl.

Toss them in the freezer until you're ready to use them. They make great garlic rolls if they're sliced in half and spread with garlic butter, then broiled for five minutes. I love sesame seed buns cut in half and made into open-faced grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. The tomato juices soak into the bun and the sesame seeds get toasted while the outside of the bun goes crispy.

Beautifully crisped-up-outside, fluffy-inside baked potato...

Yes! Do you refrigerate it? I've noticed that bad pizza will be really bad when it's been refrigerated and eaten cold. Amen on that. I adore leftover chinese food, although I am sometimes loathe to reheat it. Is it heresy to eat it cold? You, my good poster, are a genius and I thought it should be pointed out to one and all. It reminds me of a friend who, at Thanksgiving, was searching for some leftover turkey for a sandwich only to find the carcass stripped bare. Thus he invented the stuffing sandwich, one of mankind's most redundant meals. Monuments have been erected for lesser inventions. edited to clarify, like buttah ← Add a thin slice of ham to that potato salad sandwich and you have ambrosia... Seems to me that most leftovers are better eaten cold unless they're very greasy.

Here's my mother's scone recipe. Scones should be very LIGHTLY sweetened if they are at all, unless you're making a fruit-based (date/pumpkin etc) scone. They're really a vehicle for lots of melted butter, delicious preserves, and fresh cream. NOTE - being Australian, mama's recipe used the traditional Flora margarine and it made excellent scones. Since I'm in America I use butter and it works just fine. Scones are done when they're browned on the bottom and golden on top. 3 cups flour 2½ tablespoons sugar (optional) 4 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 oz. margarine 1 egg ½ cup milk METHOD Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut in shortening, then rub in with finger tips. Beat egg, add milk, add to dry ingredients. Bake in a hot oven.

I've never had the 'real thing' but that looks fantastic! Would nutella work as a filling for a chocolatey poptart or is it too sweet? I'll have to make these for my husband.

Please don't try it. Eggs and mayonnaise can't be frozen without ruining the texture. The eggs will turn into rubber when they thaw out.

At last a noteworthy dinner... Slow-braised country spareribs in homemade bbq sauce (sauce based on tomato paste and mustard with various herbs and spices); potato salad with egg, bacon and mustard; cheesy corn pudding (crustless quiche made with fresh sweetcorn and shallots); and green beans with bacon and almonds and lemon juice.

When I was a kid we used to freeze our sandwiches to save time in the mornings... I was never very fond of them because the bread dries out on the outside and gets soggy in the middle. Freshly-made tastes MUCH better.

I've been experimenting with different bought pizza doughs the last few months... all my pizzas are made the same way - dough in a sheet pan topped with tomato paste and grated pizza cheese and pepperoni, and baked at 450 degrees. Publix fresh pizza dough tastes good but it fights like the devil... it's so springy it was almost impossible to fill the sheet pan with a suitably thin crust without its bouncing back to half the size. I followed their baking directions and almost incinerated the pizza because my crust was very thin and I didn't realise it would be done in ten minutes! oops. It tastes like (good) pizza shop pizza. Publix sells frozen bread dough that makes a very nice pizza. It's wetter and more pliable than the fresh dough and easy to stretch out in the pan. One loaf makes a sheet pan and it came out nice and crispy in 15 minutes. In a hurry, I bought a pack of refrigerated pizza dough. I didn't expect much from it but I was pleasantly surprised. If you ignore the oil used, it doesn't have anything particularly gunky in it, and it comes ready-to-use. Just pop open the can and unroll the dough and stretch it out a bit then bake. Baking with a generous amount of topping on it came out rather soft, so I pre-baked the next crust and it came out almost too crisp. Not gourmet, and not what I'd use on a regular basis, but nicer than a pre-made crust and virtually instant.

When I have plantains I usually just fry or roast them (ripe plantains roast up beautifully using much less fat than frying)... but those piononos sound delicious. I'll have to try that out some time.

Batch three didn't come out nearly as nice as batch two. It's more sour, a lot more seperated and very uneven in texture. I'm not sure if that's because I used my own yogurt as a starter, or because the oven I put it into was a bit warm? It's still edible, but not nearly as delicious as my last batch was. I had to add honey to my bowl to make it edible instead of eating it plain.

Yogurt batch two turned out yummy - perfectly pot-set and nice and smooth. I ate one jar of it and put most of the second into a paper-towel-lined sieve to drain for a few hours... and that came out delicious! I just used the last part of Jar two to start a new batch of yogurt, and we'll see if was a viable continuing culture - since I only made the yogurt about three days ago I'm hopeful.

The NY Times article and reader response to it prompted me to make my own yogurt this week. I'd always thought that you HAD to have a yogurt maker to do it (my father used to make yogurt in the yogurt maker when I was a kid) so I'd never tried it. I was surprised at how well it worked out without any high-tech equipment at all. For my first batch I boiled a quart or so of 1% milk in a small saucepan and turned off the stove when I caught it nearly boiling over. I left it to sit in the pan until it was cool enough to dip a finger in without wincing (about 30 minutes just sitting on the stove top), then mixed in the yogurt from the top of a Publix fruit-on-the-bottom yoghurt because that was all we had in the house! I put the lid on the saucepan and popped it into a slightly warm oven with the oven light turned on, and in the morning I was amazed to find a saucepan full of yogurt. It was yummy, if a little strange-looking because I had to decant it from the saucepan into a storage container so that I could use my favourite saucepan for other things. Today I'm making a second batch and I've refined the technique to make it quicker and easier. I washed a couple of big peanut butter jars to put the yogurt into, and while they dried I heated up two jars worth of 1% milk (no thickener added). When it came to the boil I turned the stove off and left it on the heat for five minutes, then I sat the saucepan in a sink full of cold water (no ice). About ten minutes later the water was warm and the saucepan was lukewarm so I mixed a small tub of plain publix fat free yogurt into it and poured it into the jars. I heated the oven to its lowest setting (ours goes to 170F) while I was boiling the milk and turned it off as soon as it was heated up. And now the two jars are sitting in the oven with the oven light on, and come the morning I'll be able to see how well they worked out.

I had a vile taste in my mouth after I ate anything for weeks but it was caused by a virus... I refuse to eat pine nuts because they ALL taste soapy to me.

I think seeing the title of this thread must have jinxed me! I hadn't had a kitchen accident in a long time... and today I burned my finger making a dark roux for gumbo. I'd never done it before, and I had no idea just how HOT that stuff gets while it's cooking. So I picked up the wooden spoon and I touched it and my fingertip sizzled! Ouch to the nth degree!

Mildly sweet, slightly malty flavoured, and extremely soggy. Nothing else tastes quite like a bowl of wheetabix. If the sogginess is offensive you can put butter on them and use them like a fat cracker.

Mmmmm... 'salad' sandwiches/rolls are delicious. As many chopped/grated fresh vegetables as you can manage to pile into a roll, with meat as an optional extra. I make them for DH only in preference to his US tastes I sprinkle some vinaigrette dressing into them and call them a 'sub'.