Katie Meadow

Diamond Crystal for all cooking, but not for finishing or raw foods. No Mortons ever. Just a contrary habit. I grew up on Morton's iodized table salt, just don't want to go back.

Always butter, usually maple syrup. Occasionally molasses, or, if I have some on hand (which I don't often) shagbark hickory syrup. I noticed recently that Hickoryworks, the shagbark people, now sell a smoked hickory sea salt. Though I do salt the water just before adding my steel-cut oats, it never occurred to me to salt it at the finish. The hickory salt might be yummy that way. If you haven't ever had shagbark hickory syrup, it tastes like a campfire. Sometimes I add peaches in season or fresh berries, but just a few. I like to bury raspberries in the hot oatmeal so they get melty. Then I always top off with a little cold rich milk or half and half. I used to toast regular long-cooking rolled oats, and that really improved the flavor and the texture. But I'm very happy with the taste of untoasted pinhead oats. I'm sure they are fantastic toasted. Lazy, I guess.

Since cutting back on salt several years ago I too wonder about the most effective point/s at which to salt food. It would be great to know at what point in the cooking process the food makes best use of the salt. I usually follow a recipe and salt at the times specified during cooking, but I almost always use about half the amount called for in things like soups and stews. I do salt meat before grilling, but when Bobby Flay says 1 Tablespoon I use 1 tsp. Some chefs seem to salt several times during the cooking process, but I just don't find that necessary. I know one thing for sure. Anyone who cuts back on salt ends up complaining to their companions in a restaurant that the food is too salty. I don't go out much any more, because I just don't enjoy my meal if I find it too salty. Chefs who have restaurants almost always oversalt in their books, so I figure accordingly. I don't salt my stocks at all any more, assuming that whatever I'm going to make with them will get salt during and probably after cooking. When it comes to sauteeing veggies, I find that a little salt and pepper is helpful at about the midway point, or when the veggies have wilted or are thoroughly hot. I salt the water for regular pasta but never for Asian pasta, which already has a ton of salt in it. I've taken to using finishing salt since often my food is slightly undersalted, but at least I can control it that way, and it doesn't take much, as someone mentioned above. I use Diamond Kosher salt during cooking, and only use the gray salt as for raw foods or finishing. I'm typically cooking for two, not four, but my box of salt lasts at least six months. And that's cooking almost every night, plus bread baking.

Alice Medrich has some recipes like her whole wheat sables and buckwheat cookies with chocolate nibs that she notes are better a day or two later. Indeed, the buckwheat cookies were fantastic the next day and even better the day after. The fourth day I wouldn't know, since they were gone. Not generally a cookie person, it takes a lot to impress me. I don't know if my guests liked them as much as I did, but I liked them so much I didn't care. This is a great topic, since I am less sure of myself when it comes to flour and sugar, and always look for a dessert that can be made the day before a dinner party. So I can toss it out if it's horrid of course.

So if I get this right, the OP is objecting to an attitude among certain restaurants that implies, "Truffle up or shut up." I'm with you on that one. When I dine out, which is rarely these days, I just wanna have fun, with good food. Attitude I don't need.

I have used Chemex in the past, and every time I get offered a Chemex cup of coffee it's quite good. But I'm not sold on using paper filters. The Chemex website claims that there are good oils and bitter oils in coffee, and that their particular filters only filter out the bad or bitter oils. Is this true or even possible? I checked out the site referred to by Alex, and they suggest that paper filters impart an actual distinct (and unwanted) flavor, and that making coffee in quantity mitigates the problem. I have never exactly noticed an off-flavor from a paper filter, but I find the flavor is richer without one. Part of it is just what you are used to. At our house we use two methods for brewing coffee. When we want more than 1 cup we use a French Press, avoiding the filter issue altogether. For one or two short cups we use a single-size gold filter in what is now pretty much an antique ceramic Melitta cone. There's nothing about gold filtered coffee that I find inferior to paper filtered, and it saves money and paper. I wonder if you could use a gold filter in the Chemex, and if that would taste any different than a gold filter dripped directly into the cup. If it did, that would mean the shape of the Chemex is important. The design has always been beautiful.

This is a great topic, but HUGE! And it's really Anthropology. So many things come into play: culture, personal history, personal taste, availability, perception of value and current value. Being a fat aristocrat used to be a sign of well-being. If you were lucky enough to have lots of fattening food you were (comparatively speaking) healthy. When I moved from the east coast to CA I couldn't believe that white grapefruit was uncommon. Florida white grapefruit is the best. I'm pretty used to Texas and CA pink, and it's fine, but now I think of white grapefruit as a total treat. My husband, CA boy that he is, never even had one before he met me. Artichokes were precious to my mother when I grew up. She was crazy about them, they weren't that available, and she treated them like rare objects. When I moved to CA in the mid-seventies you could buy 10 artichokes in Watsonville (not little ones!) for a dollar. Everyone here ate them routinely with mayo, which I thought was very weird. Of course in the west, they use mayo on hamburgers. But now artichokes are not so cheap here where they are grown, and they seem like a splurge, selling by the choke not the bag. Chicken wings, feet, marrow bones. It now costs more to make stock than to buy broth in a can. Personally I agree about dark meat from chicken or turkey. My mother once advised me to marry someone who liked white meat, so I could have all the dark. Here's a question: if snake tastes like chicken, why don't we eat snake? And does it taste more like dark or light meat? If caviar (good caviar) were cheap and abundant I would eat plenty of it. If scallops cost the same as sardines I still wouldn't eat them. For several years after moving west I mourned the personal loss of Maine lobster. Now in my head it's so special that even when I go back to visit, lobster disappoints. I find it's better as a memory. The same can't be said for wild Pacific King salmon. Now that's a rare treat.

You are both saints, and both lucky. I won't embarrass myself by listing all the many ways in which I must have turned my daughter against learning to cook. She's a college grad now and on her own. God knows what she eats if someone isn't feeding her (she had the perfect campus job working in the dining hall, which meant free food and lots of it), but I know she doesn't like junk food and she does appreciate my cooking when she comes to visit, although her idea of helping me is to ask if I want help and then promptly leave the house. That way she can at least say she asked. She claims to have baked bread, but I have yet to see any evidence. Last summer when she was home for two weeks after graduation she scrambled an egg in one of my cast iron skillets without using any butter. She's pretty good at clean up, but after 22 years she still doesn't know or care where anything in the kitchen goes, and puts clean utensils and dishes wherever she feels like. When she visits I spend some frustrating minutes at critical junctures searching for a tool while something starts to smoke. Not that she isn't perfect in every other way.

Duck. I've eaten plenty of duck in restaurants and used the cooked ducks they sell in Chinatown for a variety of things, but this week I bought and cooked one myself. I didn't roast it. I had the butcher cut it into small pieces, then I browned the duck in a wok and made a Thai style soup. During the process I managed to end up with some duck fat in a jar as well as some shredded duck meat. I'm thinking I'll buy some Yukon golds and make duck hash? Anyone direct me to a recipe for that? Or just for potatoes roasted in duck fat? Is there any reason to do that any differently than if I used olive oil?

Anything Japanese.

Personally I see no resolution to the toaster vs, toaster oven wars. For years my husband and I have supplied his family's beach house with toasters, since that's what we like. And for years, his mother has been hinting that she prefers a toaster oven. But she is nothing if not frugal, and as long as there was even a barely working toaster at the house she wasn't going to rock the boat. Until finally my FIL almost succeeded in sparking a fire in the toaster that might have burned down the house. Okay, I'm probably exaggerating (although I wasn't there), but it was bad enough for my MIL to declare the toaster hazardous. Her solution was to buy herself a new toaster oven, and then bring her revolting old one up to the beach house as a fait accompli. Toaster ovens may have their uses, but when it comes to actually producing toast, they have always frustrated me. Most of them seem to cook very slowly, so you have to wait forever, and then, since they cook so slowly, they only dry out the toast and they never even get the toast hot. The heating elements are too far away from the toast, so it's really baked, not toasted. Another problem with toaster ovens is aesthetic. The requirements of its function are such that good design becomes a great challenge. Fallout from the aesthetic issue also results in an object that is virtually impossible to clean and is always unsightly. I'm the first to admit that my fondness for toasters and my distaste for counter-top ovens is not totally rational, but a gleaming chrome toaster with nice curves makes me happy. I can't afford a mid-century Airstream trailer. My husband decided that the corroded crumb filled toaster oven was unacceptable even for a beach house and after noodling around on line he found this diplomatic alternative: The Toastation. Could they have come up with a sillier name? Actually, they stole the name for my next entrepreneurial venture, the drive-up toast window, where you can have someone make your toast for you while you watch and supervise, or you can make your own at the self-serve station. Anyway, the Toastation is made by Hamilton Beach, and combines a 2-slice toaster (wide enough for bagels!) with a toaster oven. I have no idea yet if it works in either capacity, since we haven't been up to the beach since we delivered it for xmas. It looks about as dopey as you might imagine. Has anyone ever used one? If it doesn't make decent toast at least it was worth a good laugh, and it's clean. At least for now.

Finding a great toaster ( and one that's reasonably priced) is a lifetime quest. Just the idea of being without a working toaster is enough to unbalance me, but then toast is what I have eaten almost every day for breakfast for the last 40 years. My favorite toaster was the Sunbeam Radiant Control. Of course that would be the perfect toaster for Chris's mid-century kitchen. I had several models that were produced in the fifties (see Andiesenji's post above.) In the sixties and seventies I would haunt the flea markets for them, always making sure I had at least one that operated properly. For a few dollars you could find a decent used one, polish up the chrome and expect it to work for five years and look beautiful. Those days are long gone. The toaster we use now is a Cuisinart, bought new, and it's been pretty reliable; we've had it at least 12 years, which is a very long time in toaster years. They have been redesigned of course since our model, and I wonder if they still make a decent product. Not bad looking, and not unreasonably priced. The Dualits always look wonderful but in order to spend that kind of money on a toaster I would have to be pretty convinced that it would work perfectly every day for the rest of my life.

Darienne, yes, I did make that up on the spot. I'm impressed with myself. My nephew just moved to a new apartment and has virtually nothing. I've been thinning out so I can give him some stuff as well as make some room on my shelves. I realized there are several cooking vessels that I use exactly once a year if then, and only for one specific dish. It's been interesting to question whether I really need those things, or if something else can fill in. Mostly the answer is no, nothing else will do. Aah, stuff.

With the exception of tomatoes, food preserved in jars tastes better to me than the same stuff in cans. Heartsurgeon, you might try Annalisa ceci in the jar. I find them tastier and less tinny than any canned chick peas. Same goes for tahini if you are making hummus. The tahini in jars like Sadaf or Middle East brands seem far superior than tahini in a can; the consistency is softer, it doesn't need to be mixed nearly as much as the canned stuff does. I've also found that buying tahini from a store that specializes in mid-east ingredients and has a higher turnover results in fresher tahini, as well as more options.

What exactly is a casserole pan? I take it most of us mean a pan that is a lot wider than it is deep. Over time I have acquired four pans that I think of like that, all of which are different but useful sizes. They have sides that vary from about 3 inches to 4 inches. Three are rectangular, one is oval. The oval one is the deepest, and it is pyrex. Traditionally I have used it for eggplant parm, but only because it's easier to snuggle round slices into a curved edge and because my eggplant parm tends to be a little deeper than my lasagne. The giant rectangular one is Creuset enamel cast iron. It weighs about a thousand pounds but it's a thing of beauty. I don't look forward to a time when I can't carry it fully loaded. The next one down is glazed porcelain, Emile Henry style but I don't think it's Emile Henry as I don't remember it being pricey. The smallest one is another Creuset, very old, with funny metal handles that I purchased used on eBay. It's adorable, too small for lasagne, but perfect for mac 'n' cheese for two or three with one serving of leftovers. When it comes to something like lasagne, I've never noticed that the enameled cast iron and the clay turn out markedly different ones. My lasagne comes out pretty much the same every time. (And that's a good thing.) In fact a great lasagne can be made in a funky old metal roasting pan in my experience. Casserole is just another word for forgiveness. The funky metal roasting pan is one of my oldest pans, and I'm very attached to it. It works surprisingly well for roasting vegetables in the oven. If I saw it at the Goodwill I would think, eww, but after 30 or 40 years, I see my pan as being well seasoned.

I've had the best luck with Italbrand DOP (what does that mean?) San Marzanos; there are only about three Italian brands that I see regularly on the shelves where we shop. One thing I've noticed about the Italian tomatoes is that they vary can to can, even within the same brand. I don't see that as a bad thing, necessarily. It makes more sense than tomatoes that taste exactly the same. Italbrand seems to be a bit more consistently good than some of the others. Cento doesn't have a presence around here, nor have I seen La Valle. Strianese, yes; they are sometimes very good, but sometimes anemic. I've tried the Muir Glen, but there is something about the taste that seems off to me. Maybe I just don't like the type of tomato they use? I like the Ortiz stuff too. The bonito is what I use now whenever I want canned tuna. I've convinced myself that since bonito is a smaller fish, there's less mercury. And it makes a pretty decent tuna salad. And Heidi, I haven't had a bad can of chipotles yet either, but I just assume that it's because it's so fiery that any subtleties escape me. When I get a hankering for Vietnamese iced coffee I like Longevity Brand Sweetened Condensed milk. Partly I just love the can.

I will eat foie gras, but only if someone else pays for it. I will not make my own and I will continue to feel very bad about how it is made. It's creepy. I will learn how to make biscuits. I will learn to make Alton Brown's graham crackers without relying on my husband to do it for me. I will continue to let him do everything else that involves flour. I will eat more fresh sardines, even though I have to go out of my way to buy them. I will not be intimidated by the Chinese fishmonger who tries to sell me dead crabs or crabs with missing claws. I will make enough marmalade this year so that I can give some away instead of treating every jar like precious jewels. I will continue to hate tripe. I will try more new recipes.

Thanks Andiesenji for your assist. The NYT op ed page this morning amplifies the answer--worth a look, I won't try to paraphrase. Here's my New Years Day menu for 8. The cow peas are not going to be the star, nor will the pork or greens, but they will all be represented in some fashion. Cocktails (something with rye, because I don't like bourbon.) Manhattans? In fact, there are no southerners among us. Cheese straws (Lewis and Peacock) Carmelized bacon (to satisfy the pork requirement and the tastes of two foodie 20-somethings) Pickled shrimp (New NYT cookbook) Roasted tomato soup (One of only two Cook's Illustrated recipes I ever make) Crab cakes (Gotta take advantage of this year's Dungeness haul; lotta work to cook the crabs and pick the meat, but I feel sad if I don't make crab cakes once a year.) Beans 'n' rice, a room-temp salad of some type (Good Mother Stallard is all I've got right now, but they will be an upright stand-in for black eyed peas.) Green salad (friend's contribution; I hate messing with raw salad ingredients.) Cornbread Lemon Buttermilk sorbet (my husband's secret recipe) Buckwheat butter cookies w/cocoa nibs (Alice Medrich)

What's supposed to bring good luck in the new year, the legumes or the pork, or both?

David, I made this as per your recipe, and it was delicious. We had it for dessert last night after our Coq au Vin, serving it as you did, with ice cream and caramel sauce. I used two granny smiths and two pink ladies. Both my husband and my picky Walla Walla daughter declared that it was even better this morning at room temp or slightly warmed. It is more custardy and eggy than I would have imagined, but that's why it was so good for breakfast.

What if the crab grabs onto your tonsils on it's way down? I've had my tonsils out, have you? What if it bites you while you wrastle it between your teeth? Frankly, this sounds like a very unappealing kind of street food. If it's snapping or wiggling, no thanks. I'm happy with just a hunk of baguette. At least a raw oyster doesn't try to crawl out of the shell. As for the tabasco bath, I am guessing it doesn't kill the oyster first, but perhaps it makes it wish you would put it out of its misery in a damn hurry.

David, thank you thank you! Four apples never scared me. Two quick questions: you really cut the apples so small and they hold some shape? The picture looks like they were cut bigger (just curious.) What kind of veg oil did you use? KM

David, that Apple Gateau looks fantastic. Can I get a recipe for that and the caramel sauce that goes with? I'm on an apple cake kick. Thanks.

Is it because someone really wants turkey or because someone doesn't want beef? I'm so over turkey for another 11 months, but other poultry is respectable, no? You could roast a different kind of bird. We do Coq au Vin for xmas dinner every year, and the rest of the menu is simple, because we have to transport a main dish for Xmas eve and don't get back til midnight. Our traditional dessert after Coq au Vin is a Tarte Tatin, but this year I'm thinking something easier, perhaps a creme citron (lemon wine mouse) with raspberries, served with some chocolate cookies I can make ahead. I was going to ask for a kitchen torch for a present, but then I forgot. Otherwise I might be making creme caramel.

Thanks to all for helpful replies. I looked up that cheese and learned that it is a salty aged sheep's milk cheese. One of the sites I found suggested it might not be that easy to come by, and that aged myzithra or some type of pecorino can be used as a substitute.