Katie Meadow

RG's Mexican oregano is worth adding to your order if you are going to cook any southwestern-type beans. The Rebosero beans are a relatively new item (at least new to me.) They are terrific, and may not be permanently available. Good Mother Stallard beans are excellent for soup, but they seem to be in stock most all the time. Since shipping is a flat $8 per order it pays to split an order with a friend.

I do refrigerate it, but perhaps I don't need to. Peanut butter is never refrigerated in my house. Tahini sold in a glass jar seems to last longer and stays mixed and pourable, whereas the stuff in a can separates more easily and the solids can make like cement. The brands I have liked best are Sadaf and Mid-East, and both come in jars. Usually I can only find a fairly large jar, but it keeps for over a year in the fridge.

Agree totally. I've never tasted any Mexican oregano except RG's; intoxicating. To me it is like another plant entirely. I seem to be using it up in an alarmingly short time.

I'm partial to Pecorino stagionato for grating (and eating straight, too.) It has that sheepy taste, but is a little creamier and less salty than romano. I haven't been able to figure out the exact difference between the pecorino marked renero, stagionato or maturo, but I like them all. Usually only one is available at any given store or any given time, so I never get a chance to compare them.

Bumping up this thread to see if anyone is cooking any new types of beans lately. I just tried RG's Rebosero beans and they are great. Somewhat like a Pinto, but they manage to retain their shape when cooked well even though they have a very tender skin. Really delicious--creamy, good flavor. My preference in southwestern style beans has been to use Rattlesnake beans, but they are getting scarce as hens' teeth. Highly recommend the Rebosero!

You Yanks have me at a 24hr disadvantage: On the left coast we don't see the Sunday Book Review until.....Sunday, so I had no idea what you were talking about until yesterday morning. Four Fish is on my library list, and no fish are on my shopping list. I'm really depressed.

No need to carry a card or get tangled up connecting to the net at the fish counter. There is an Aquarium seafood watch app for the iPhone.

Place to start for all things swimmy? Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. Great site, well organized, appears to be updated constantly. I'm amazed at how much time I can spend browsing there.

If you can get hold of some fresh young collard greens, the current issue #105 has a great recipe for quick collards; they cook in about two minutes after being cut into thin ribbons, with no bothersome blanching. The recipe is vegetarian, but I used a little bacon grease as well as olive oil. Because they don't have a chance to cook down, you use less than you might for a traditional recipe. Luckily the farmers' market had baby collards, so I was starting with some lovely tender leaves, and I'm sure that helps for quick saute. I served them with the corn fritters from last summer's issue #100. Really good and really simple.

The Swing-Away fat separator. Revolutionary design, plastic, cheap, generously sized and works perfectly.

For my husband's primarily vegetarian family my favorite is eggplant parm. I usually coat my slices of eggplant in a light flour and egg batter, but even so, it doesn't amount to a lot of wheat product. In season, if you are ambitious, the tomato sauce can be made with fresh tomatoes. In July and August I'm actually very happy to make corn the main event. Last summer I was really into corn fritters and corn pudding and corn soup with roasted green chile. Or just a couple of buttered ears of corn and some simple tomato salad on the side. But I can make a meal of just corn and peaches, so I'm a cheap date. Fresh shelling beans baked slowly in olive oil with tomatoes and fresh herbs makes a pretty tasty main. Recently cathyeats posted a recipe for quinoa with corn and roast chiles. My lazy version was without grilling the corn (I sauteed the corn and scallion in butter briefly), and upped the amount of corn to the 1 cup of quinoa, and it was delicious. That was a main in my book. Never had quinoa and corn together, but it was yummy combo. We also like to have grazing dinners, which is sort of a kitchen sink production. Crudites, babaganouj, hummus, various salads of corn and beans, with mexican flavors or more traditional succotash, etc. I like it when there's no distinct "main," but lots of variety. I eat far less animal protein in the summer.

In my experience, the challenge isn't finding something exotic, it's finding something that isn't endangered or full of mercury. Clearly the list of fish and seafood is shrinking for all of us unless we start eating smaller size fish and try new kinds. The east coast seems to have a bigger variety of fish and bivalves than the west coast; when I go east and check out major seafood markets I'm always amazed. Bluefish would be in my top five, but it is rarely shipped west any more. Salmon was always at the top of the list, but the price for Pacific wild fresh salmon has soared and availability of CA salmon has evaporated. I love fresh ahi tuna, but the price is high and I don't think it's healthy, so that's become an infrequent treat as well. The most versatile fish and the one I buy the most is Black Cod (aka Sablefish or Butterfish.) I use it where-ever I might have once used Atlantic cod. The price is usually under $13 per lb, it's wild and fresh, neither threatened or unhealthy. It's hard to grill, because it's so delicate, but it is great for fish tacos and other things, and it is mild and rich. For grilling I like a whole trout. Farmed American and Canadian trout is supposedly one of the few farmed fish that has no down side. I also am partial to grilled fresh sardines, but, despite their being dirt cheap, very few markets have fresh sardines on a regular basis here. And not all vendors are willing to clean them, and I really don't like cleaning fish, especially a dozen little ones. As for shellfish/crustacea, I often buy wild gulf shrimp. I'm not sure why it is still available here, but it is. And local oysters, which are now being sold at the Farmer's market. The hardshell clams here just don't measure up to east coast clams. Local mussels are so-so. Dungeness crab is still pretty good when the price goes down during the season and you can buy live crabs in Chinatown or Ranch 99, but cooking and eating crab is a lot of work and the rest of my family doesn't care about it, so I end up buying it far less than I think I will. I don't like squid or octopus, and I just can't stand tilapia.

Since I started this thread I've made a lot of tuna melts, and I've come up with a method that makes me happy. Clearly there is a lot of flexibility about what may be called a tuna melt. If you can do it on a tortilla or essentially make a pizza, it would appear that the only required ingredients are tuna and some type of melted cheese. My method is this. I start with my standard tuna salad: canned bonito in oil, minced celery, a little minced red onion, minced pickled jalapenos, finely shredded romaine lettuce and a minimum amount of mayo to bind it together. The tuna with mayo can accomodate a surprising amount of shredded lettuce and the lettuce remains pretty crunchy. I preheat the broiler. I take one slice of bread and toast it in the toaster (making toast in the broiler has always been a mystery to me.) When it's the way I like it, I butter one side (and that would be sweet butter!), and put it, buttered side up, on a cookie or broiler sheet. I pile on the tuna salad, and then lay on some thin slices of cheese. I think I prefer sharp cheddar, but I've used mozz in a pinch. Then I put the second slice of bread in the toaster until it is almost done, slide the cookie sheet with the open sandwich under the broiler until the cheese is bubbly.Out it comes and the second toasted piece simply gets placed on top of the melted cheese. I admit this seems fussy, but it gets me what I want, which is a flavorful crispy sandwich without being a greasy one. Yesterday in Napa at what used to be called Taylor's Refresher I had a tuna melt made with Ahi tuna. Great idea, not so great execution--so much mayo you couldn't taste the tuna, so it was pointless. Good sweet potato fries alongside, though, and that's worth a lot. Chris, I think if I was using a tortilla I might try roasted fresh poblanos or other green chiles instead of pickled peppers. It might be good with jack instead of cheddar, too, as long as the chiles had enough heat and flavor.

I've had most success if I press in the berries as the first side is cooking. Perhaps my cast iron pan isn't perfectly seasoned, but when any berries burst on the hot skillet they tend to mess up the surface and get the next pancakes sticky. So, using a lofty recipe, small berries AND adding the berries after pouring the pancake batter in the pan seems to insure whole berries that burst in the mouth instead of sizzling in the pan. I admit this is extremely fussy. This is why I don't make blueberry pancakes very often, even though I like them far better than plain pancakes. No one in my family besides me ever seems to have the patience to make pancakes, and the pancake maker doesn't get much chance to slow down, enjoy them and read the paper, so we usually eat toast for breakfast. I can see how folding in egg whites separately would help get a rise out the pancakes but I'm too lazy to do that.

Actually the Webster residence hall is a pretty cool location, now being referred to as "uptown Oakland" which is slightly silly, because it a few blocks from downtown Oakland. However, a Bart station is only a few blocks away. She will be closer to Chinatown than she will to the Lake Merritt Farmers Market--definitely walking distance. And she will also be walking distance from some new clubs and restaurants that are becoming trendy hangouts at night for young people. Okay, I'm going on heresay now! But friends tell me the streets around B'way and Telegraph down there are hopping at night. The new Bakesale Betty's is just a few blocks away from 15th. For minor splurge dinners in the area look into Flora and Pizzaiolo, but there are tons of nice places to eat. I assume you will be renting a car when she comes out.

Goes without saying room temp: maple syrup, cheeses, hummus, babaganouj, salsa, ANYthing with tomato, potato salad. Actually most salads. Perhaps most anything that should be spread, although I like cold butter on bread. I prefer carrot juice to be close to room temp. Some fruits I like cold: watermelon, cherries, grapes, often apples. Some fruits I prefer room temp: pears, peaches, plums and apricots, citrus. Is it just me, or have there been some weird topics lately? My tastes never struck me as terribly nutty until I started reading my own posts in some of these cold vs hot, celery vs carrots threads.

There are plenty of great inexpensive options in Oakland, although CCA isn't in a particularly inexpensive neighborhood, being close to College Ave/Rockridge area. Back when my husband went to CCA (then CCAC) there weren't any dorms there--your only option was off campus living. I have no doubt your daughter will learn the hot spots very quickly. I'm guessing a good percentage of the student body is local to the Bay Area, although that may be less true than it used to be. Will she have a car? My favorite Thai place is called Old Weang Ping, and it is located near Mills College. Talk about atmosphere! In spades, and very good food. My favorite pho place is Pho Au Sen, on 2nd st nr International Blvd. Best bowl of pho, dirt cheap; open all afternoon but closes early (like 7 or 8). In Oakland Chinatown there are a couple of banh mi places that are very good, and It's pretty cheap to shop and snack there. Of all the Farmers markets in Oakland and Berkeley, probably the best prices are at the downtown Oakland market on Friday mornings. The Berkeley Farmers market on Saturday morning is wonderful, but my daughter, when she deigns to visit from a college town in WA, is horrified by the prices. She's right, it's a little scary how much 2 bags of high-end organic produce ends up costing. I can't stand the long lines at Bakesale Betty's, but that fried chicken sandwich is awfully tasty; it's big enough that my daughter and I used to share one. She and her east bay cronies like to eat Ethiopian food, and that's pretty reasonable--and there are a lot of them around. As you can imagine, there are plenty of cheap eats on Telegraph, near UCB. Happy to help out in any way I can, and you can certainly PM me.

I sift when instructed to, if only because I am not a very practiced baker and assume that there is a lot more "science" involved in the art of baking, which may or may not be true. I am under the impression that sifting changes the volume by aerating the flour somewhat; so that if you sifted you would end up with slightly more volume than if you didn't. In other words, if you decided not to sift, you might have to adjust the measurement of flour. That would be far too taxing for me, so I just do what I'm told when it comes to flour. If it is true that you can get around sifting by weighing the flour instead of measuring the volume, doesn't that support my assumption? I'm already breaking out in a sweat.

When I make blueberry pancakes I make sure to use a batter with a lot of loft. And I tend to pick out the smaller berries from the box. I agree that the really big berries are hard to work with in a pancake. Fussy, right?

I grew up with salted butter too. I don't recall my mother ever baking so much as a batch of cookies. So I too continued to use salted butter for years after I was on my own. I would buy unsalted butter only if a recipe specified it. Then I had to cut back on salt, so salted butter was the first to go. Now I'm so used to the taste of it I can't imagine going back. Unsalted butter is delicious. The only time I miss salty butter is on a matzoh. So now I just sprinkle buttered matzoh with a little sea salt or kosher salt.

Seems to me that 90 percent of all recipes that specify salted or unsalted butter call for UNsalted. I never buy salted butter any more. I just adjust for salt as needed. I never pay attention to the amount of oil called for when sauteing onions, etc. I do what works for whatever is going in the pot, adding oil as necessary. I often cut back on sugar and cinnamon. For me, a little cinnamon goes a long way. I prefer it in rubs or savory foods rather than sweet ones. For apple pie I usually cut it in half. In my experience, no potato salad meant to serve fewer than 15 people has EVER needed 3/4 cup of mayo. But the number one recipe direction that I ignore is the specification to add carrot, celery, peppers or garlic at the same time as the onion when sauteing. I like to soften my onions slowly, and they take more time. After a few minutes the carrot and celery or peppers go in. And the garlic goes in only a minute or two before the rest of the ingredients are soft.

Of all the weird questions. Luckily I'll never have to chose. I prefer nibbling a straight up raw carrot to a stalk of celery, but they are both very good. Carrot juice leaves celery juice in the dust. Although I used to be very fond of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonic, and I can't imagine a carbonated carrot drink. However, I never go a week without using celery for several things, but I can go a week without carrots and not suffer. Celery is probably integral to three quarters of all the foods I cook. Soups, stews all kinds of beans 'n' rice, tuna or egg salad or potato salad. Tuna salad made with minced carrots... No. And a Bloody Mary needs some salted celery sticks alongside but a carrot would be silly. I would chose apples over oranges, as well. Does Julia Child or anyone else have a recipe for orange pie? Exactly so.

I pretty much gave up on BBQ or grilled chicken breasts until I discovered kosher chicken. The leg-thigh of a non-brined chicken seems to have enough fat in it to survive the dry heat if you are very attentive, but it's no mean feat to achieve succulent white meat; a sloppy sauce or a dry rub, it doesn't seem to matter to a thick breast. If it wasn't so easy for me to buy good kosher chicken here, I would definitely brine my own before BBQing.

Nothing replaces celery, but fennel is a close second. I have used it instead of celery in potato salads and tuna salads, and often sub it for celery in Italian flavored soups. The only person I know who doesn't like celery doesn't much like fennel either. For her, I make a potato salad with lots of chopped radishes and a little red onion for the crunch factor.

The best thing about French's Mustard IS the color. Looks beautiful. Love those handles.