blue_dolphin

Anna N, If you make any of the Paletas book recipes, please do share. The lime pie pops are very good. I've made them several times. Another recipe that intrigues me (not in the book) is the Mexican Street-Corn Paletas that Francis Lam wrote up after an afternoon with Fany Gerson. My popsicles, well, last batch that I'd just unmolded and left on the top shelf don't look as pretty but I think a few can be salvaged. Thankfully, the melted stuff stayed confined to the waxed paper lined baking sheet and didn't decorate everything on the shelves below. And the other pops had been packed up into freezer bags on the lower shelves and were fine. Sort of silly to complain about melted ice pops when there were several crews on my street working up on the poles all that time! I will make more careful note of these outages in the future and on hot days, I'll consider getting some dry ice for the freezer in case the outage runs longer than anticipated.

We have warmer weather predicted for the next few days and I've had a lot of melons in my CSA box so to use them up I've stocked my freezer with melon popsicles: Round 1 was Saticoy melon (similar to canteloupe but sweeter) and lime: 4 cups Saticoy melon, ~1/3 cup lime juice, 1/4 cup homemade lime cordial and 1/4 cup homemade melon liqueur The mixture was rather foamy coming out of the blender and I noticed that it separated a bit. I sort of tried to hide it in the picture by putting the tops down in the glass, but you can see the separation. For the other batches, I stirred the mix a bit to de-aerate it and used a gravy separator to leave the top layer of foam behind. Round 2 was yellow watermelon-margarita popsicles: I used 4 cups of yellow watermelon, 2 oz tequila, 1 oz Cointreau, 2 oz homemade lime cordial. I tossed in a few cubes of pink watermelon for color. Round 3 was pink watermelon and rosé wine with sort of a sangria-twist. I intended to just use the watermelon and wine but I decided to add a little more fruit. I ended up using about 4 cups of pink watermelon, 1 and a half cup of rosé wine and the juice of 2 smallish oranges and half a lime. I added diced orange, yellow watermelon and cranberry. Cherry would have been nice but I didn't have any. Now, here's the sad part. I started this post around 8 this AM, right after I unmolded the last batch and took them out for their photo. My post was interrupted when the power went out. Ah, I forgot, planned outage from 8 - 4. Really not the best day for this since it was 97 by 10:30 AM. I came home from some errands around 3 PM and decided to risk a quick reach into the freezer for a popsicle. I had to eat it REALLY fast as they were almost melted already - they were on the top shelf in a rather elderly side-by-side. And the power didn't come back un until after 7 PM. I haven't opened the fridge or freezer since and I'm wondering if I will have any popsicles left or just big blobs of frozen fruity ice! Anyone else making popsicles? I want to try to recipe from the Paletas cookbook with cherries and sour cream next. Depending on how warm things got and how my fridge recovers, I may have plenty of room in the freezer for more!

My dinners are not worthy of this thread but I snapped a picture tonight so you shall see it. Missing my mom, who passed away recently, I made one of her favorite summer suppers: Chicken macaroni salad (elbows, leftover Zuni Cafe recipe roasted chicken tossed with mayo, onions, celery, bell pepper and olives), corn on the cob and a slice of bread subbing for the Parker House roll that should be with this meal. Simple food and good memories!

Second course: refreshing melon drink with newspaper on the patio: I made lime-melon popsicles (4 cups Saticoy melon, ~1/3 cup lime juice, 1/4 cup homemade lime cordial and 1/4 cup homemade melon liqueur) After filling the molds, I had some left over so I added some ice cubes and gave it another wiz in the blender. Very nice!

Another fan of thin, crispy bacon here. Usually cheap, too. Today's breakfast had a little bacon but it was really about the lovely Celebrity tomato from my CSA box: Also, from the box is some supers sweet and fragrant Saticoy melon.

Just wanted to thank you for this reminder about tagging and making notes in EYB. I do take my time going through new cookbooks but tend to make only mental notes that are increasingly fleeting! I'm not sure I can approach your impressive level of organization but I can certainly make a start with better use of these features.

This was my understanding as well. I've only had one use for it, a "smoked" salmon spread. I remember that the person who gave me the recipe told me that I'd only need to buy it once and it would last forever. I did indeed use the same bottle for about 15 years, until it unfortunately broke in the Northridge earthquake.

One of my former coworkers used to eat Oreos regularly. Almost ritualistically - 2 oreos each afternoon before he went to the gym. No more, no less. Anytime I spotted a new flavor, I bought a package, tasted a couple and passed them off to my coworker so I got to try them without the risk of eating a whole package. He was happy to try all the flavors but didn't want any double stuffed, triple decker or chocolate covered versions. Something of a purist there. I thought the peanut butter ones had potential but the filling was too sweet, not surprising, but they'd be good if it had more of a salty peanut buttery taste. The cookie dough and marshmallow crispy flavors tasted like their names would suggest. I recall trying 2 types of mint flavor. One was pretty good and the other not but I can't remember the specifics. The raspberry flavor seemed very artificial. Lemon was OK. I never tried the birthday cake flavor since my coworker told me that he had tried them and didn't like them.

From left to right: Best Foods, Dukes, Trader Joes: Like gfweb said, who eats this stuff with a spoon? Not me. But I did try some tastes. Dukes and Trader Joes are both a bit more yellow than Best Foods. Like gfweb reported, Dukes has somewhat heavier, more oily (maybe eggy?) texture. A little more like a homemade mayo. I find my homemade mayo too heavy for my standard comfort food tuna or egg salad sandwiches. Dukes wasn't that heavy, but leaned a little in that direction as compared with the lighter, more fluffy texture of Best Foods. To me, Best Foods also tasted a little more salty and sour. Trader Joes was very similar to Dukes in color. I thought the texture and flavor of Trader Joes were midway between Best Foods and Dukes but I believe they are different. All three tasted fine with some tomato on toast. Having grown up with Hellman's, Best Foods is my standard west coast mayo but I'd use any of these three on a sandwich. I boiled up some eggs this AM and I could try mixing up some little batches of egg salad but I'm not sure I want to go through the trouble. I'll post if I do. Curious to hear from rotuts. Edited to add: Of these 3, Best Foods is the only one to add sugar. I tried to taste for differences in sweetness but couldn't really pick up a strong difference.

Those carrots do look good, Anna. I should give that recipe a try. I had leftover spiralized potato pancakes and a couple of scrambled eggs. Could have used a side of Shelby's tomatoes!

We usually had Roman Meal for sandwiches, too. Assuming it was available from the "Day-Old Bread Store" where all our baked goods came from. I had the same experience reported upthread of being put off the egg salad sandwiches that I liked by the, "Ewwww, stinky! Who's got the egg sandwiches?" comments of my peers. Like MelissaH, I remember the daily "lunch counts." We were asked to raise our hand if we planned to purchase lunch from the cafeteria, the teacher recorded the total and our room number on a slip of paper and dispatched a student to the cafeteria. This duty was highly coveted as it offered the opportunity to dilly dally in the halls for as long as one could. I think the teachers got dinged if their count was late as they seemed to find the whole thing an annoyance that got in the way of teaching. Cafeteria lunches were an occasional treat for us. 25 cents when I was in third grade and I think inflation had pushed it up to 65 cents by the time I graduated from high school. The elementary and high school shared the same cafeteria. All the meals, including soups were cooked on-site by the cafeteria ladies. There was a fair usage of canned fruits and vegetables but the mid-winter fresh produce aisles in the grocery stores were pretty sparce at that time in the wilds of northern NY. I think they did a decent job of serving hot, nourishing meals with what they had to work with.

This discussion piqued my interest so this AM, I ordered a small container of Duke's. Amazon tells me that it's scheduled to arrive by tomorrow at 8 PM. I will compare it to Trader Joe's and my usual, Best Foods. I'd have to recruit others to make it into a blind or double-blind study. I'm sure the question would come up and I don't want to admit to anyone that I paid $6.99 for an 8 oz bottle of mayo !

I woke up this morning in such a panic! I'd been dreaming of tomatoes. A tomato nightmare! Heaps and heaps of beautiful homegrown tomatoes like Shelby has been showing us. Except that they were all in my house. Covering every surface. And every time I turned around there were more of them! I knew it was my responsibility to put them up but I had absolutely no idea where to begin or how to go about it and no one to ask. And there were more of them every minute. And all the garden work was going to be wasted if I didn't figure something out right away. Yikes - it was a glimpse into Shelby's world and I was clearly not up to the task. Shelby, I'm in awe of all you are doing!

Sorry for not describing the cookies! They are little shortbread nuggets coated in a layer of confectioner's sugar. Given their small size, that's a lot of sugar for a small volume of cookie so they are quite sweet. But that layer of sugar also has a good bit of tartness. Not sure if that's just citric acid or if there are other "natural key lime flavors" in the sugar layer but the overall taste is sweet-sour, tempered by a bit of buttery cookie. For me, the sweetness of these guys is sort of a good thing as it limits my consumption. They are a nice sweet treat but I'm happy to stop after 2 or 3. I've made some lemon-rosemary pressed cookies that are much less sweet but I could nibble away a whole plateful over the course of a few hours! Also, an update on that TJ's pinot rosé. I just made a TJ's run to restock and learned that it's no longer available for reorder so whatever is in your local stores is it. I bought a case of it and then picked out a few bottles of other rosés to audition for my next "house rosé." Sorry for recommending something that won't be available for long but such is the nature of Trader Joes!

I'd say it's on the drier side of the rosé spectrum. Not bone-dry, just enough sweetness to balance the acidity. To my tastebuds, anyway. Edited to add: It's the kind of rosé that would pair well with a roasted chicken or grilled sausages. Maybe not so much with the most delicately prepared white fish.

Two things. Key Lime Tea Cookies: I like them with a little glass of my homemade limecello: I enjoy rosé anytime, but it is especially nice in summer. This TJ's pinot noir rosé from California central coast is fruity with a bit of crisp acidity. It has enough flavor that I can add a splash of sparkling water on a hot day and still taste the wine. $7.99 I have also used this to make a very pretty methode rotuts.

I am sipping one of these now and it is very nice. My first thought was, "I don't want no strawberries in my gin & tonic!" But I've got a tub of berries destined to become strawberry, lime and black pepper popsicles and recognizing the similarity, I went ahead and gave this a try. I skipped the sugar and threw in an extra berry. Edited to fix link

According to this NPR story, a bit of folklore from a family that had been saving the seeds for years indicated that they originally received the seeds from the Cherokees. Edited to add my thanks to Shelby for sharing all of this bounty with us!

My favorite way to serve these beans is with some bitter greeens, as in this recipe for pasta with cranberry beans and greens from Deborah Madison's Savory Way cookbook. I also love just the beans and greens together. Maybe topped with a poached egg. Mmmmm.

I love this quote from you, lesliec! I think it belongs on some Anne Taintor cocktail napkins or coasters. Something along these lines:

That sounds really good. After re-reading the spiralizer thread the other day, I'm expecting mine to arrive tomorrow and am looking forward to my first zoodles shortly!

I do believe gfweb and Toliver have addressed your concern. I love this stuff. When fresh out of the oven, there is a tiny bit of crispness in the darkest bits while the middles are meltingly tender and tasty. After sitting a bit, that little bit of crispness is gone but the flavor is still good. Here, I have absent mindedly eaten half a cauliflower at its best:

I forgot to comment on the rosemary. Yes, I tasted a bit of bright, fresh rosemary that stood out above the overall herbal flavors of the chartreuse. I suspect the source of that flavor was more the second sprig of rosemary that got whacked around with the ice and other ingredients in the shaker rather than the one that was flamed. But the fireworks were fun and I thought the rosemary flavor intensified a bit over time in the glass, so that singed sprig may have played a role as well. At least in my glass !

Very nice! I love rosemary and gave this a try today. The rosemary added to the lovely pale green color of the chartreuse and the added ice gave a nice bit of dilution that I liked on a warm summer evening. Should have used prettier ice!

Resurrecting an old thread here. Last week, Anna mentioned the pickled red onions from this cookbook. It's a much praised recipe that I've never tried, because it seemed rather bothersome but I had some nice sweet onions from my CSA box and based on Anna's feedback, I decided to give it a go. The process involves dividing the sliced onions into 3 groups. Each group gets 3 separate baths in the boiling sugar:vinegar brine followed by draining and cooling steps. This provided me ample opportunity to distribute droplets of sticky liquid throughout my kitchen. The end result is indeed a lovely pickled onion. Almost 2 quart jars full of lovely pickled onion. And much kitchen cleaning, surely due to my own ineptness. I may change my mind if they become even more marvelous over time but at this point, I would not follow the recipe exactly as written again. I would probably make a smaller batch and increase the volume of the brine if necessary so everyone could swim together rather than in separate sessions. Or I could become a more tidy cook ! Looking further into the book and based on an earlier comment from trillium in this thread, I tried the pasta wth preserved lemon and tuna as adapted for canned tuna since I didn't preserve my own but used some lovely canned tuna belly. Starting by gently warming olive oil to infuse it with garlic and other seasonings makes it my kind of recipe but it just gets better with the preserved lemon, capers and tuna. Most excellent! I will certainly make this again and again.