Jean Parquette

I've made it before Thanksgiving and drank it at easter. Delish.

Maybe it's an inexorable process in which we cavalierly change (subtract nutrients from, add chemicals to) a natural diet into one we can't live on or with. I don't think that's what you meant by anthropogenic but perhaps it could be considered so. I think people are killing themselves by taking fat out of their diet. I think we could eat lots more fat and be healthier for it, but the fat cannot have hormones and antibiotics in it, must be from healthy animals. Perhaps that's impossible at this point. On the other hand we could eat lots of good fat, and if it was poured over biscuits or potatoes, it would be lethal. It's very interesting when people talk about making school lunches healthier their aim is always to make them low-fat. We're killing our kids. We don't know anything about what's healthy. The more fat we eat and the fewer refined carbohydrates, the better shape iwe're in, the more our weight is normalized, the happier and more energetic we are, and the higher our HDL cholesterol is. Those are all good things.

Has anyone used chicken feet in their chicken stock? I'm about to get some, and I think I'll make a stock this way (I wrote it this way in a column recently): In my big cast-iron Dutch oven I’ll make a mirepoix: What do you all think of that?

It might be possible to make great cheeses with heat-treated milk, but that depends upon what you call "great". A great cheese to me would contain all the tastes and proportions of raw-milk, all the benefits, too, and, if you like, risks. So, I guess I would say it is NOT possible to make a great cheese with pasteurized milk. Thinking out loud and circular here....

Yes, yes, yes! And as someone mentioned, Canola has a fishy odor. I just think it smells unhealthy, can't remember what it smelled like because I haven't used it in so long... but I do remember making popcorn with canola was a disgusting operation. Making popcorn with coconut oil, now there's a pleasure. Also nice to keep a little duck and goose grease around for special uses. With all these wonderful fats, why would anyone want to use manmade, vile-tasting, so-called vegetable oils. People say, well if you don't use them and don't use CRISCO, what do you use? Well, I answer, what people used before they were invented !

I've been using coconut oil for a lot of frying -- i like the taste, though it isn't strong, and I've heard of the health benefits and believe in them. I use butter, lard, and save the scraps of beef fat from other cuts to fry potatoes with. When I need an oil i use olive oil or organic peanut oil. Grapeseed, I think, is fine, too. The whole "unhealthy" saturated fats myth is a tragedy of an ill informed media parroting factoids told them by so-called health groups -- such as the American Heart Association, American Medical Association, and nutritionists and doctors who get their information from these groups who have an axe to grind and money to be made from the fallacy. There's a little book called The Queen of Fats, by Allport, that explains the history and reasons we get such an unbalanced diet from vegetable oils chock full of Omega 6's, and have been scared away from the Omega-3s in saturated fats. Butter, lard, tallow, suet, all are good fats if they come from properly raised animals. Since we've been afraid to eat them, we've developed many illnesses that didn't use to bother us -- obesity, hyptertension, alzheimers, bone loss, ADD and, perhaps most ubiquitous, diabetes. The list goes on. I never use canola oil, as it is hybridized from the rape seed from which motor oil is made and which is extremely toxic. In addition, it, as well as corn, soybean and cottonseed oils have paved the center of the US with chemically fertilized and pesticided fields that are poisoning soil that could grow healthy foods, and getting into the water and poisoning the gulf of Mexico. Most of these fields are owned by industrial farmers and the farmers are getting fat on subsidies from the American Farm Bill. So. I never use those oils, either. Sorry to go off on a tirade, here, but the subject is dear to my heart. In more ways than one.

This is a little tangent, but I recently acquired an old copper windsor pan, rather large -- 15 inches from rim to rim around the bottom -- and it needs retinning. Conant Custom Brass used to do it but does no longer. My husband wants to retin this pan, and he is capable, but I want the best directions as to materials and techniques I can get -- don't want to ruin this great pan! Any suggestions?

I was going to say, Fat Guy, that you seem to like German Striped. I do too, and I like Brandywine, too, but my favorite tomato this year, a new find and very local, is the Pratico, which was developed by an Italian immigrant in the early to mid 1900s in Rutland, Vermont, and Man, is it ugly -- a blotchy purply/orangy tube of goodness, about 2 inches in diameter and about 5 inches long -- a cross between, as far as I can figure out, a beefsteak and a roma. The seeds were handed off to a farmers' market grower by an "elderly person" a few years ago, and he's been growing a limited quantity ever since. I intend to save some seeds and hand them off to a few friends around the country. It seems to be a pretty stable hybrid, exhibiting the same traits every year. This is my first post, and haven't figured out how to upload a photo, so we'll have to go with the verbal description here. I have Brandywines that were just ripening over a dry August, but it's been raining steadily for the last four days and i believe their flavor will be compromised. I don't see how the grower can easily ruin a Brandywine without weather's help, except, perhaps, by growing them under plastic, which i don't think does anything a lot of flavor good.