Shel_B

The way I understand it, conserves are made with dried fruit, and, that being the case, I've never tried them. I suspect they'd be quite different than preserves, but they could be something worth trying and enjoying. June Taylor (The Still Room) is but a short distance from my place, and it seems the conserves are sold at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. They may well be worth a try - I like what I read about the product. Thank you for the tip.

I like the idea of adding some gelatin ... Thyme with boar meat? I wouldn't have thunk it <LOL>

I don't know how old the jar is, but the expiration date is December, 2015. Turns out that Toots, independently of me, bought a jar as well. Her feelings are quite similar to mine. She says that the preserves are the same dark color, too. She gave her jar to the neighbor ...

I bought a jar of the Bonne Maman apricot preserves a while ago, and just had a couple of tastes. The stuff is terrible. There's very little apricot taste - mostly what I taste is sugar - and there are hardly any apricot pieces in the jar. The pieces I found were more like skin in terms of texture and density. The color is dark and looks like the fruit was overcooked - that's the only way I can describe it. The consistency of the preserves is gummy and, IMO, excessively thick. If this is "one of the best of the commercial products," I don't want to even imagine what a "lesser" product might taste like. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Toots' preserves, which tastes of apricots, not of fruit having been drowned in sugar, and which has a nice, bright color and a texture more akin to real fruit. I'll have to try one of the other preserves mentioned here. One plus is that I now have another jar to use when making my own later in the year.

Never heard of that one, but maybe it's available around here .... thanks! Hmmm ... I noticed that it contains 55% fruit whereas the Bonne Maman claims to contain 70% fruit. I'd think more fruit would be better, yes? Or do other factors enter into the taste of preserves. I'm sure the quality of the fruit plays a big role ... Oh, wait, I see that the double fruit contains "up to" 70% fruit.

I didn't want to leave this hanging, as I mentioned that it looked like a perfect solution to my problem. As it turned out, 23-inches is just a scosh too narrow - I really need the 24-inches. Bed, Bath and Beyond has one with the requisite dimensions, and I'll check it out in the next day or so.

Thanks to you both ... I know where I can get the product and will try to grab a jar tomorrow. Will let you know what I think.

Does the Bonne Maman have a strong apricot taste?

Toots makes incredible apricot preserves, and there's usually enough to last us a year. This past year, however, she didn't make enough for us and for the amount she ended up giving away as gifts, so sadly, there are no apricot preserves until, once again, it's apricot season. I'd like to find an excellent, not-too-sweet, preferably organic, apricot preserve to get me through this dry spell. It would be great if I could find some that are available in the local markets, but I'd be happy to order on line as well. Any help would be appreciated.

It's already frozen.

A friend just gave me a couple of pounds of ground wild boar, and I'd like to make a meatloaf with it next week. My thoughts were to mix the boar with some ground pork, something that would add a little fat to the mix, as the boar looks awfully lean. sauté some mirepoix, perhaps use leeks instead of onions, some roasted garlic, grind up some mushrooms to add to the mixture, maybe some ground, dried porcini 'shrooms, and add some finely diced herbs (but not sure which herbs would work well with boar), an egg or two, mix well by hand, and bake free-form. Any thoughts on the herb-mirepoix mixture - perhaps some other additions? What internal temp should I be looking at? Thanks! This'll be my first boar loaf.

Last night I discovered that the microwave does a great job of softening (ripening?) hard pears. Many of us, I'm sure, have grabbed some pears at the market that were hard as rocks with the thought of letting them ripen at home for a few days. Well, Toots brought home some of those rock pears, and I wanted an edible pear for dessert last night. So, on a whim, I put one of those sukkas into the microwave and zapped it on high for a total of one minute - two 30 second bursts. Bingo! one nice, tender, "ripe" pear. YMMV wrt time ... but give it a try. BTW, I tried a second pear this afternoon, and 90 seconds proved to be too much.

Thanks ... and I can plan that far ahead. I often set things out in the morning to warm up and then come back after noon or so to use the ingredients. Not a problem.

I tried softening the butter, but from comments here, maybe it wasn't soft enough, or I used too much ... I will pay attention to that and see if the results are any better. Thanks!

Further investigating brought up a recipe for lemon curd by Alice Waters that used a small amount of milk. And I vaguely remember a recipe that called for the addition of cream, but I'm not at my computer now, so I can't verify that from my recipe collection. ETA: I remember now - Cook's Illustrated has a lemon curd recipe that uses heavy cream. I'll be "generous" and go along with your supposition ...

Are you suggesting that I can use my blender to mix the zest and butter with the sugar?

Yes, I have an electric hand mixer, and when I tried the technique all I made was a mess. Maybe I don't know enough about how to do this properly with a hand mixer, or maybe the cheap and weak mixer I have is just plain inadequate - don't know. I plan to upgrade the hand mixer at some point, but have not yet decided which one I want, so it'll be a while. Meanwhile, there are a few recipes that I'd like to try using the described technique. What do you mean by "doing it by hand?" Do you mean completely manually, with a spoon or whisk? I tried that, and did pretty well with the zest and sugar, but incorporating the butter was very difficult and the results seemed to leave much to be desired.

I don't have a stand mixer, and have no plans or desire to get one. I could use Toots' mixer, but that's a PITA on a couple of levels. My current hand mixer is pretty weak, and for the time being I've no plans to upgrade. I'd like to make a few recipes that call for mixing sugar with zest and then beating in room temp butter. Can my Cuisinart be used for this process? Has anyone done this? What, if anything, might be the downside? Should I use the steel blade or the plastic blade for this? Thanks!

Yesterday I saw an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, and the chef at one of the places made a lemon curd using water, as well as the usual ingredients of sugar, eggs, lemon juice, and butter. This seemed very strange to me, and a preliminary internet search turned up nothing about this technique. Why would water be added to a lemon curd recipe? Any ideas?

I understood that vanilla powder was the same thing as ground vanilla. A search for vanilla powder brought up several ground vanilla bean options, and they were described as vanilla powder. I'll try searching for ground vanilla and see if something different comes up. I did find a couple of brands that will fit my needs, though, even when searching for vanilla powder.

Empire is the brand I'm most familiar with here in the San Francisco area. I understand the Whole Foods has recently started carrying Kosher Valley, part of the Hain Celestial group.

I'm having a utensil crock custom made for me. I did the same thing recently for a cutting board. Fortunately, there are a few craftsmen (and women) in my circle of friends.

That's the brand I purchased at Williams-Sonoma several years ago and which was useless. Little flavor so one had to use double or three times the amount to get the same flavor one gets with PURE vanilla powder. How can they advertise and label the product as "pure" vanilla powder when it so obviously isn't? A definition of the word pure is: not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, yet this product is mixed with a substantial amount of maltodextrin.

Over the past year or so I've looked for and purchased a number of items for my kitchen, as well as plenty of things to use in other situations. The biggest issue that comes up, at least for me, is quality, or, more specifically, the lack of quality. Recently I've been looking for vanilla powder. I was appalled at the number of brands that claim "pure" vanilla powder is in their bottles, but further examination shows they are no such thing. One company's main ingredient is maltodextrine, another company uses silicone dioxide sprayed with vanilla - and these are but two of numerous companies that claim purity but don't deliver. While looking for cutting boards I was stunned by the number of boards, even from well-known and reputable manufacturers, that literally came apart at the seams. What kind of crap quality is that, especially from a board costing $100.00 or so? A few months ago I was looking for bamboo utensils, and came across some marketed by a well-known Food Network personality. Many, perhaps as much as half, of the reviews claimed that the utensils split apart and broke. Looking carefully at the images of the utensils, it was clear that they were made by gluing and laminating, rather than from a solid piece of bamboo. That design practically guarantees problems. How friggin' difficult is it to make a bamboo spoon that stands up to everyday kitchen use. I have some that are more than 30-years old, and have not had a spot of trouble with 'em. Toots bought a faucet water filter from a well-known company. It's been installed less than three weeks, and it's already splitting apart and leaking. The construction of this new filter is light weight and crap compared to the same brand of filter she replaced after almost ten years of use. I was going to buy a pair of Levi's jeans, but the material was thin, the stitching of poor quality, and the material was already starting to come apart, before ever even trying them on, much less wearing them and washing them. Crap! I bought a new bed at Macy's. It took them THREE delivery tries to get the right bed in the right size into my apartment. They kept bringing the wrong bed! Gimme a break! I bought some bread sticks at Trader Joes, and every one of them was broken, sometimes in several places. When I returned them, the cashier said that it happens a lot - it seems that the packing of the bread sticks doesn't take into account their fragility. What the hell is happening out there? Do any of you encounter problems with quality, and how do you feel about it?

When you look at things from your own point of view and experience, it's sometimes difficult to imagine why someone else can't do, or has difficulty doing, what you do. I can easily buy, or grow, fresh lettuce, and most of the fresh lettuce we eat we grow ourselves. But, compared to fresh, store bought lettuce, the bagged lettuce we get (mostly whole, organic romaine hearts) lasts longer in our vegetable crispers than fresh. Both Toots and I have small kitchens, and minimum storage. We really have no place to store a salad spinner, and the salad spinners I had when I had a bigger kitchen, still required drying the lettuce leaves by hand. so the damned things saved very little time. Then there's the ability to get the spinner to spin fast enough to do a good job, and for some of us, that's a difficulty. Arthritis can get in the way, plus some people just don't have the requisite strength to get those spinners spinning. It may not seem possible to younger, stronger folks, but I know a lot of seniors that have such difficulty. And then there's time. It takes time to get the spinner from its storage space, time to separate the lettuce leaves and wash them, time to clean and dry the spinner, and time to store it again. A lot of older people just don't want the hassle, plus for some, putting things up on shelves in cabinets is just plain physically difficult. Being short, having mobility problems, or, as in my case, a bad back, makes getting things onto a shelf difficult and sometimes painful. Sure, we could use a step stool, but older people sometimes have problems with balance, and it's not unusual for a senior to take a fall, not something we look forward to, and so we avoid situations that can cause us harm, or at the minimum, discomfort. What sometimes bugs me about this forum, and other forums and internet sites, are the number of people who have difficulty seeing or understanding the problems or preferences of others. One day you'll be older, or have some problems, and then you'll know, and understand, that others may have problems with lettuce and salad spinners, or opening a can, or using a step stool. Maybe you'll understand that it's easier, more comfortable, and safer to open a bag of lettuce, or zap a frozen dinner in the microwave, etc., than it is to go through what, to some of us, is a hassle and uncomfortable to do certain things. To a lot of people, food and eating and food preparation is not the adventure it once was. For some, the adventure is getting through the day.