Katie Meadow

RWood thanks so much! Shel, the ingredients for my buttermilk ice cream has somewhat different proportions, and no creme fraiche: 1 1/4 c heavy cream, 1 vanilla bean, 4 large egg yolks, 1 1/2 c sugar, 4 c buttermilk. The direx are intimidating; my husband has made this twice, and although it was very good, it is indeed not for the semi-lazy and cholesterol watching like me. We haven't made it for years, using instead the buttermilk sorbet recipe you have. I don't see how RWood's ice cream could be anything but swoon worthy.

Oh yes, I have used beets. There are several recipes floating around that make a chocolate cake using beets. Nigel Slater has one, and there's one on The Vanilla Bean blog that I have never made but that sounds great. I make a root vegetable cake that uses a "whatever you have in the fridge" philosophy: a combo of grated beet, carrot and sweet potato or yam. It's about the healthiest great-tasting cake you can make, and also uses oil instead of butter plus some applesauce. I also have made a cake that uses a surprising amount of butternut squash and another that uses Japanese yam. Then there are some versions of Red Velvet cake that use beets instead of food coloring. Never tried that either.

I had a very nice experience at Buvette several years ago. I went with my 90 yr old mother, who likes her French food. We went on the early side and sat at the bar. The bartender was incredibly solicitous and the food was right in my mom's wheelhouse. The martinis were huge, and we both got very tipsy, so it would be hard to tell you what we ate. I'm pretty sure it had rabbit in it. And I'm pretty sure we had some type of apple tarte tatin for dessert. Right away we noticed how uncomfortable every seat in the house is, but the friendliness and alcohol and lovely food made up for it. If I was looking for a long and leisurely meal I might go somewhere else where there were chair backs and a bit more padding. Having cocktail hour with food at the bar at 5pm was a good way to go.

Only in Kansas City would anyone try to make Italian dressing taste like BBQ sauce. Even Lidia would cringe.

I agree that oregano is what makes Italian dressing in a bottle taste like mid-century Americans thought Italian dressing ought to taste, which is essentially like American pizza. My mother's interpretation of Italian dressing was simply olive oil and vinegar (that would be a mouth-puckering amount of red wine vinegar in her case) with some herbs. That's to distinguish it from dressings with ketchup, mayo, buttermilk, blue cheese, etc. When she added dijon mustard and a little garlic she called it French dressing.

RWood, it should not take me more than a couple of hours to drive down to Monterey. See you soon! But really, I need to make that fig dessert. Can I get a recipe for everything but the buttermilk ice cream (already have a good one for that.) Thanks!

Giving diners an opportunity to rate their food probably increases their willingness to pay large amounts of money for the privilege. Everyone seems hooked on rating everything, and wow do most of them love sound of their own....keyboard. See Delia Ephron, also in today's paper--it's very funny.

Yes, they typically are labeled Orange Honeydew. Right now is the best time to find out what kinds of melons you like best, and the biggest selection will probably be at a farmers' market. I'm also very partial to the Yellow Baby watermelon. It is indeed yellow or golden fleshed, and there may be other varieties of yellow as well. They taste slightly different from a red watermelon--more vegetal perhaps. My opinion is that seedless melons don't have as good flavor as ones that are grown w/seeds, so I don't buy seedless watermelons, even though they are becoming more popular. And after all, spitting seeds is part of the watermelon experience. Surely there are some farmers' markets in your locale. When I lived on the east coast my mother was always waxing poetic about New Jersey tomatoes, so maybe there are some legendary Jersey Melons.

Happy Boy sells at many farmers markets in the Bay Area. I have had most of their melons, including the Charentais. It's not my favorite melon--it's very sweet. I'll take a straight ahead perfect cantaloupe over many of the super-sugary juicy melons now in abundance. My favorite melon (not in the watermelon category) these days is the orange honeydew, which has become pretty common in the last few years. But I'm sure all melons have their devotees, and it is also very possible that I tasted a mediocre or over-ripe Charentais and formed my opinion that way. No matter how many "techniques" people give me for picking a good melon I find it's mostly luck.

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.