Katie Meadow

Kim, your crazy cookie seems to be a tried and true recipe, often called Chocolate Caramel Cookie/ Bark or Chocolate Toffee Cookie. Smitten Kitchen calls them "Chocolate Caramel Crack(ers)"! There is a variant that uses graham cracker instead of a saltine, which is how I first encountered them at a picnic; the baker claimed it was an old family recipe called Granny Grahams." To me, this is one cookie that is way more than the sum of its parts--definitely way better than you would guess-- and can be made from the most basic corner-store ingredients or dressed up a bit. I wonder how it originated.

I'm bumping up this old thread because my husband is pretty sick of me complaining about this topic and yet I still want to complain, since it comes up every time I try to clean out my cupboards. And the problem is that you can never say these things to the loved ones who bestow these gifts. The most useful gifts to give to people who you know enjoy cooking but whose cooking you don't eat very often should have a broad appeal. Give me good quality plain extra virgin olive oil. Don't give me olive oil infused with provencal herbs or lemon balm. I am perfectly capable of using herbs de provence to make food taste that way if I so choose. Don't give me flavored vinegars, either. Who won't be happy to use some very good balsamic vinegar or imported Italian red wine vinegar? But how likely is any given person going to be to use up a bottle of habanero-peach vinegar? Perhaps people feel that if it isn't quirky it isn't special. Wrong. Many people adore chocolate, me included. I love bacon too. And I love New Mexico red chile in my bean pot. But that doesn't mean I like chocolate covered bacon or chocolate with chili pepper in it. In fact, I pretty much prefer my chocolate unadulterated. If you are giving a gift of chocolate to someone who really likes chocolate but you are not sure exactly what kind, give them the best dark chocolate bar you can find in a medium percentage cocoa: like somewhere between 55% and 72%. Don't worry, even if someone's favorite is 85% they won't hesitate to enjoy a good quality bar with a little less cocoa. If you know someone likes milk chocolate, well, give them some olive oil. Gifts that are home made are altogether different. Then you must assume that whatever it is was a labor of love and that is always appreciated. At any given time I can look in my cabinet and find full bottles of stuff that I can't imagine buying for myself. They end up getting tossed after about 10 years. You might think I would have forgotten who gave them to me, since I forget so many other things on a daily basis, but the weird truth is that I don't. Okay, I'm done, and now that I have yammered to hopefully at least a dozen people I am never going to bring this subject up again. Happy holidays!

The apple isn't getting enough love here. Are we tired of them? I'm not. It's a rare day that we don't have some apples in the house. Lately I have been on an applesauce kick. I like to combine the apples with some other kind of fruit. In the spring I was making a lot of rhubarb applesauce. The last couple of months I've been into apple-plum sauce. I've given up measuring ingredients for the most part, because it doesn't seem to matter--it's always yummy. I peel my apples first, but you don't have to. Generally I do equal number of apples to plums or stalks of rhubarb; typically a batch would be 5 or 6 apples plus 5 or 6 of the other. The plums should be nice and ripe and juicy. I peel the plums, too. For plums I throw in 2 or 3 T of sugar, for rhubarb, more like a third of a cup. The chopped fruit goes into the pot with everything: up to a half cup of red wine, a splash of apple juice if I have it. Rhubarb doesn't seem to need any extra liquid besides the wine. Add one cinnamon stick, half a vanilla bean, split and partially scraped out, and a pinch of salt. If I'm feeling adventurous I glug in a little calvados or cassis or even Angostura bitters. .Then I cook it at a slow simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes or until very tender. If your apples don't fall apart you can mash them a bit with a whisk or whatever. I love it hot and I love it cold. Works with ice cream and is fantastic with creme fraiche. One of these days I'm going to make latkes for my applesauce. I think the apple-plum sauce would be be a perfect match. We tend to buy mostly Pink Ladies, Braeburns or whatever is tart, fresh and very crisp. One of my favorite apples is an Arkansas Black, or as we refer to them, Black Arks, but they have a very short season here in CA and don't seem to be grown locally. Also Gravensteins make great applesauce, but if they are not fresh from the tree they get mealy awfully fast and disappoint. I imagine good apple sauce could be made with just about any apple that has a flavor you like. One thing that seems to make a difference: red wine is better for this than white, although white will do in a pinch. If all I could get were sweet apples I would add some lemon zest and a squeeze. Yes, it is baby food, but not just for babies. Also I am crazy for apple cake that has lots of apples in it. One great one is the Apple Tart Cake that can be found on Orangette's website. Another is Teddie's Apple Cake which has been a NYT staple for years. Sweet Amandine has a terrific adaptation.

It was brought to my attention that I selected a dish that uses lemons, which are on your no-no list. That's what happens when you respond several hours after reading the original post and don't reread, but just start thinking about chicken. What about Ottolenghi's version of Chicken Marbella? It calls for leg-thighs only (which I prefer), olives, dates, capers and white wine. Also gets marinated ahead of time and doesn't require a sauté before baking. Maybe just cranky, but I find that process tiresome and messy. The dish does call for some red wine vinegar; I don't know if your avoidance of lemons is because of the acid, but if so I'm sure this dish would be good without it. In that case I might not add the 1 T of date syrup. Anyway I don't have date syrup around, but I usually do have pomegranate syrup instead.

I am a big fan of kedgeree. Not only is it easy comfort food, but it's very economical, especially when fish like fresh wild king salmon is commanding $20 or more per pound. I love kedgeree with smoked fish and also fresh. Andie that smoked sturgeon was a great score; haven't had sturgeon in ages. If using simple fresh fish I like to poach it gently in water and white wine and herbs until barely done. I will then use some of the poaching liquid to cook the rice. After sautéing the onions I add the cooked rice and the flaked fish back in just to warm it through. I've never tried using curry for flavor, but that sounds lovely. My go to is chopped herbs, like parsley, chives or dill, just added for the final warm up and then a squeeze of lemon.

My easy back-up chicken dish is Nigella Lawson's One Pan Sage and Onion Chicken and Sausage, very easy to find on line. I don't use sausages in mine just chicken. And I often fit in potatoes or carrots in the available space in the pan. Two nice things about this dish: one is that you don't have to sauté the chicken pieces before they go in the oven. The other is that it works equally well with dark and light meat, since it a slow-cooking dish with plenty of juices. You don't even have to turn the chicken pieces over, but I do check to make sure it doesn't need a little extra water or chicken broth about half way through. Prep for marinating is best done the night before, but if you are cooking it later in the day you can probably get away with doing the marinade in the morning. Simple and tasty.

Liuzhou, Huiray, thanks so much! Sad, but not surprising, to learn this is pretty much a thing of the past in China. But the Thai Pok Pok noodle soup looks fantastic. I would kill to have her pass my house once a day!

I remember reading somewhere that it used to be common (in China? Other Asian countries?) to have mobile vendors that would ply the neighborhoods in the early morning with hot soup noodles. When they came by your house you grabbed your bowl and ran out to get it filled. Sounds perfect to me. I love noodle soup for breakfast in cold weather, but I sure don't want to make it for myself at that hour. Is this a dying tradition or is it still thriving in certain places?

Cooking with my husband is out of the question. We collaborate on making one thing: marmalade, for which we each have our set tasks according to our abilities. When he cooks (rarely) I stay out of the way--I don't even want to watch; I'm too much of a control freak. He's very good at one fine- motor task at a time. He can make the most lovely pile of chopped parsley you ever saw. It's always twice as much as needed and it takes an hour. But it's perfect. He bakes bread that's fantastic because that plays to his strengths: patience, no multitasking, just one step at a time with long breathers in between. He has also mastered Coq au Vin (that happens once a year) by following the exact same recipe each time and has the right temperament for peeling those pesky little onions and wiping mushroom caps, jobs which I detest. I totally admire him for treating every ingredient as the most important one, but that's a very impractical way to get several things on the table at the same time. Cooking together isn't worth the cost of the Xanax.

I'm experimenting with a nice hot-weather drink called the Gentle Persuasion, since I have all the ingredients with the exception of Lillet Rose. I have Lillet (blond), but found the amount added to the drink was just too much, since I'm not even a big Lillet fan. Here's Gary Regan's adaptation of the cocktail: 1.5 oz Lillet Rose 1/2 oz Laird's applejack 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice 1/2 oz simple syrup 2 dashes Peychaud's mint sprig I used the Lillet Blond and cut it back somewhat, but I still want to get away from the Lillet taste. What might be a good substitute or variation? I have the following on hand: Bonal, Amaro CioCiara, Fernet Jelinek (that would be weird, no?) and Cocchi di Torino, along with the usual suspects of Noilly Prat dry and Martini & Rossi Red.

I've had many oyster knives over the years. The worst ones are the ones with thin blades--they bend or get torqued out of shape really quickly. The one that I like best is the Dexter Russell with the 4 inch blade. This is the same one that is sold and used by the Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall, on Tomales Bay. I bought mine there many years ago and they will sharpen it for free when I stop by. I find that the ones with hand protectors or guards are less functional, and that if you learn good technique a strong blade with a narrow point works best. Some of the stubbier knives are strong but blunt and can be harder to manipulate in the hinge. Plus with the long sharpened blade it is easier to separate the top of the oyster from the top shell without doing damage to the body. Amazon sells the Dexter with a shorter blade, but the 4-incher isn't hard to find if you go on line.

Made a great tapenade today in the food processor. It is fairly easy to control how coarse the end result is when you pulse it. The recipe was an adaptation of a David Tanis recipe subbing Castelvetrano olives for the black olives and adding parsley. Really good. Seems to me that the type of olive used partly determines whether or not the texture is coarse. An oil cured of softer black olive is more likely to make a pastier spread than a crisper green olive, no?

Ann__ T, I never liked leftover pizza either until I discovered that pizza can be put in a regular toaster and toasted....like toast! It comes out hot and very crispy. It might not work with standard pizza place pizza, but the pizza we make at home is thin crust, with minimal cheese and a modest amount of toppings, and it holds together fine when vertical--excellent the next morning this way. Your pizza looks very yummy.

We bought a microwave 26 years ago when I had a baby so we could heat up milk or baby food if needed. We have the same microwave still, and have never used it to cook a single thing except microwave popcorn, which isn't really cooking, is it? We use it to heat up leftovers, hot drinks etc, which isn't insignificant when you consider the energy saved by not having to wash a pan to heat stuff up in. Now that I've become a devotee of stovetop popcorn I never make microwave popcorn any more. I rarely even defrost in it if I can help it--takes a long time and it's noisy. Love that 3am tip, but maybe not enough to see if it works.

Trying to use my plum shrub up as well as some ice tea since I am leaving town for a few days, so I made a Bourbon Black Tea Shrub Cocktail. Don't remember where I got the recipe--I didn't make it up. Never have bourbon but always have rye, so this is my recipe: 1.5 oz rye 1.5 oz black tea 1 oz Cocchi Americano (I used what I had, which is Torino) 1/2 oz shrub squirt of lime juice I liked it, husband not so much, but then I drink a lot of black tea and he doesn't. Coulda maybe used a teeny bit more shrub and maybe even a little simple syrup. Then it would be a Rye Sweet Tea Shrub Cocktail. Awfully klutzy names for a drink. Never heard of Rinquinquin before. Isn't that a German Shepherd?

I won't address the issue of top ten food lists, because frankly I would rather have a perfect peach than many of the items on those lists. But about caviar, since some have commented on it: My parents used to buy good quality Russian caviar once a year on New Year's Eve and saw fit to share it with me and my brother. That was 40 plus years ago and I still remember how yummy it was. They preferred it washed down with vodka, not champagne. My mother really loved caviar, not that she had it very often. When the SF Ferry Building first opened there was a company called California Caviar with a booth there and they served up several varieties of sustainable caviar, both domestic and foreign. When my mother came for a visit we took her across the bay and she flipped for their flight of caviar. Some of them were really good. CC is still in business, although not at the Ferry Bldg. Visit their website; it's educational and you can order on line. That is if you haven't already blown your budget.

The term "foodie" simply makes me squirm, and I'm not even sure why. If someone calls me a foodie I take offense; it is infantile, I agree. I like eating tasty food. I like reading recipes and saving a recipe until I either make it and toss it, make it and love it, or don't ever make it and eventually wonder why in hell I ever clipped it in the first place. I cook all the time, mostly because I don't have the money to eat out a lot, or rather I chose to use the money for something other than restaurant meals. And I'm pretty happy with the food I cook and often disappointed in restaurant food, especially when it comes to value. My diet has changed in many ways over the past twenty years. Partly because I am more aware of what can be done with food (become a better cook?), partly because I have some health restrictions and needed to adjust the types of recipes I rely on and lastly because of environmental issues. If pressed, I would say my philosophy of food comes down to this: why eat a lousy tuna melt if you have the time, ingredients and the means to make a good one? I enjoy looking at the food photos on eG but I have no desire to photograph anything I make or eat in a restaurant. I only like reading about food if the writing is good.I admit that I think about food a lot. That's because I love eating and because I'm the one who does all the cooking in my house. And I wouldn't be happy eating the same old thing day in day out and because I'm always looking for ways to make something good even better. I rarely buy or cook expensive ingredients. I want eating to be fun, and mostly healthy. When it is treated as a competitive sport it's a turnoff. The word "gourmet" is also a weird word. What does it mean? It comes with a ton of baggage and never seems a very useful term. Also it is devoid of any political intent and therefore becomes a slippery slope. If you are going to eat bluefin tuna sushi you should know that soon you may be eating the last one. If you are going to eat foie gras you should know how it is made. It irritates me no end when I hear people say that cutting a shark's fin off doesn't hurt it, or that geese like being overfed by a tube or that fish have no lips so they don't feel the hook or that lobsters have no nerve endings or whatever. Okay, I'm done. Not sure why I went on such a rant. Now I'm going to finally go down and eat breakfast. If anyone cares, it will be coffee with chicory, leftover multigrain apple pancakes popped in the toaster and served with butter, maple syrup and whatever fruit has not yet been consumed by my husband. Bon appetit.

My hope is to be able to say one or all of the following: "Make mine a Manitoulin" "Honey, while you're up, get me a Manitoulin!" "Man o man i toulin" "I'm coolin' with my 'toulin" Is it cocktail hour already in Manitoulin? What is the time diff, say, vs west coast?

I wish I could come for a visit! I love this thread. How you get so much baking, cooking, shopping, eating out and working at the hospital done on a daily basis amazes me. It's time for you to invent a cocktail called The Manitoulin, to celebrate the fact that cocktail hour must be very long in the late daylight hours. That way we can all follow along in spirit and in spirits.

Okay, thanks for all the clarification. I get it. You want to recreate the "pure" texture of Velveeta (perfectly melted plastic) and "purity" of taste (no actual earthbound cheese products from 4-legged critters) but using real cheese and one chemical and you want to do it in a romantic chemistry lab-style white tile kitchen where the tables are beautiful black slate (in your dreams) and your middle school heart-throb is next to you, cool as a cucumber, while you are sweating bullets trying to melt--in this case--$35 per pound organic artisan cheddar. Kidding aside, I do get it. Sounds yummy and gooey and melty and above all, nostalgic. Never gonna happen in my house, but invite me over, please! I'm trying to imagine how sodium citrate can seem sexy, but by candlelight or bunsen burner, many things are transformed.

Forgive me for this question. I just can't help it and I am clueless about modernist cuisine anyway. What is the point of modernist mac and cheese? I mean, how is the final product different or better than traditional baked-in-the-oven-til-crispy? I wish someone would make it for me, because I can't imagine it.

This thread deserves a bump. With all the cocktail threads on eG I would have thought more people would be shrubbing. I made my first and only shrub recently using mostly plums and a lone peach by the cold-process method. It's very good! My husband has been adding it to our standard Manhattans and that's good too. Now I've discovered a new use for a shrub, although it's not in an alcoholic drink. This spring I've been making a lot of compotes and flavored applesauce, especially with rhubarb, which is terrific in combo with apples. But the rhubarb is going to be gone soon, so I'm experimenting with ways to jazz up my applesauce. Lo and behold.....shrub! Today I cooked apples with just a few strawberries that were getting very ripe, added a stick of cinnamon, half a vanilla bean, almost a half a cup of red wine and a drizzle of cassis. It needed more liquid without rhubarb, (and less sugar of course). Judy Rodgers, in her recipe for roasted applesauce, splashes in some vinegar at the end to brighten it up. So when my applesauce was almost done I added a glug of my shrub. Delicious. Really! I've always added a squirt of lemon juice to plain applesauce, but this is way better. Mmm, a great breakfast, lunch or dinner could be made with shrubby applesauce and potato pancakes. Do you have some novel ways to use shrubs?

Bob's Red Mill med grind cornmeal has been my go-tol for several years. i use it for whole grain pancakes and for corn bread or whenever a recipe suggests adding corn meal, as long as they don't specify finely ground. It makes a pretty toothsome bread, and if you have really soft teeth I can see how it might be problematic, but I really like that gritty texture. The idea of using a medium or coarse grind of cornmeal mixed with finer grind is very interesting, and it never occurred to me for cornbread.

I don't mean to sidetrack the discussion, but just a brief word about Whole Foods. Sometimes WF moves into a neighborhood without other large grocery stores or good produce markets and that can be very useful for those in the neighborhood. For instance, the WF near Lake Merritt in Oakland is is very important for the high density neighbors. Many are older people, many may have limited transportation options, many work in the area and shop there. There's nothing comparable near by. The same was true for my mother in midtown Manhattan. The area around her apt at 57th and 6th Ave had no decent large markets for many years. It's a touristy neighborhood, and the only groceries are small and very pricey. When WF opened at Columbus Circle it was a godsend for her, and for me when I visited. Here in the East Bay I have the advantage of a car, Berkeley Bowl and other great large markets and several farmers markets, so I don't use WF. And I do have some political quarrels with them and how they have run their business over the years. But the one-stop shopping for those in certain areas that WF provides, and the fact that the quality of the meats, cheeses and veggies are high can be a valuable resource for many people.

My name is Katie and I'm an addict. There were a few other fanatics on eG who used to twist up the rhubarb threads every spring, but they seem not to be active now. Here's my recipe for a very basic roasted rhubarb compote. I adapted it from a recipe by Orangette, adding strawbs and bitters. Excellent with or without the berries. 2 lbs cleaned rhubarb, 1/2 lb strawberries, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 vanilla bean, split, 1/2 cup dry crisp wine, dash of bitters Trim the rhubarb ends and peel away any tough strings. I leave most of the red outer layer, especially if the barb is tender and fresh. Set a rack in the lower third of the oven and pre-heat to 350 or 375. Cut the rhubarb into 1 inch lengths. Stem the berries and cut in half if large. Put all ingredients in a casserole dish (I use a ceramic one) and stir it around. Bake uncovered for about 45 minutes so the rhubarb breaks up easily or until the texture is how you like it. I have used both white and red wine, whatever is open or within easy reach and they both work fine. I have used angostura and orange, and I like the angostura better, but I'm sure there are many other flavors that would be yummy. I eat it without any additions most often, except sometimes I throw a few chopped walnuts on it. I like it hot, I like it cold, with ice cream, creme fraiche or yogurt. Lately I've also been making a rhubarb applesauce recipe I got on 5 Second Rule, and that's SO much more wonderful than just plain applesauce. The ratio I use is approx 1 large apple to 1 stick of rhubarb, which is WAY more rhubarb than the original recipe called for. One thing about rhubarb territory: I too am under the impression that it grows best in the north, not necessarily in a warm climate. I know someone who grows it in the northern Montana mountains. I believe most of the rhubarb we get here in the Bay Area is from Oregon and Washington, but I could be wrong. Two weeks ago I bought some from a local grower at the Berkeley Farmers Market. It wasn't very red. And, surprisingly, it wasn't as flavorful is what I usually get--organic or otherwise--from the Berkeley Bowl or other large markets. Maybe just a fluke?