Katie Meadow

When I am short on time and last minute inspiration and need a salad for an Asian style meal I do this: slice cucumber very thin. Salt and drain to crisp if you want. Make a dressing of lime juice, thai fish sauce, pinch of sugar. Add chili oil or red pepper flakes to taste. Adding a squeeze of ginger juice might be nice, and a flurry of cilantro. Top with chopped roasted peanuts.

The older I get the simpler I want my dressing. Assuming we are talking about a basic mix of green lettuces, I have taken to using good Italian white wine vinegar. I make an emulsion with a little dijon mustard and olive oil. I don't measure, but my preference is for more olive oil than the standard 3:1 that my mother always used. I like to taste the olive oil, and have the salad not too acidic. I add salt and pepper after a brief toss with the dressing, and toss some more. I sometimes use a small amount of balsamic if I want that flavor. For a fruity salad I would add more balsamic. I also make a lot of warm rice salads when I have leftover chicken or ham or whatever, and for some reason I like to use sherry wine vinegar for that. For avocados or sliced raw fennel I like just lemon and oil, no vinegar, no dijon. I just emulsify briefly, with a fork, can't be bothered shaking in a jar. And I only make enough for one salad. I have no idea why, but I don't like keeping dressing in the fridge. Maybe because sometimes it just doesn't get used and becomes a jar of something icky that I have to deal with.

Mostly maintaining the cut-backs I made two years ago. More home-baked bread. Home-made marmalade exclusively, no store-bought or farmers' market jams. Bulk olive oil only. Less meat, more chicken. More ways to eat chicken IN things instead of chicken as the main event, such as in soups or rice salads or burritos. More big pots of soup, more beans & rice. More potatoes of all kinds, and more creative ways to cook them. Less pricey cheese, and less cheese period. Way fewer olives. Sandwiches for dinner sometimes: tuna melts, banh mi (learned how to make a pretty good one from Andrea's book!) Blt's in summer. Fewer packaged snacks, more stove-popped popcorn. Lots of different recipes for coleslaw. Rye instead of single malt scotch (not a hardship, I'm into it, but it does seem less of a budget-buster.) No to-go coffee, only home-brewed. No more cooking magazines; using the library and more internet sources for new recipes and ideas. Cookbooks have to be gifts (and not from myself to myself!)

I load flatware exactly as FG does: knives with blades down, but forks and spoons with tines/bowls up. This seems to be the easiest for grabbing, sorting and unloading. Knives get the benefit of hygiene and safety--although we're not talking sharp or pointy knives here. Forks and spoons look too much alike when they are turned head down, although I admit it's uncouth to grab them by the eating end; afterall, I go our of my way not to do that when I set the table. However, heads up makes it easier if your dog does the prewash. We wash all pots and pans or cooking equipment by hand, saving all the space for tableware, which seems to be the best use of space and water, although no scientific measurements have been taken. We have an Asko dishwasher and it seems to be particularly well designed to hold lots of dishes. Since we got a new set of everyday restaurant dishes, which are made to be very stackable, it holds an incredible number of plates and bowls. Chopsticks in my house are all wood, and no wood goes in the dishwasher. I wish I could say I am not anal about rearranging the dishes when I see evidence of poor spatial relationships, but it ain't so.

My guess is Denmark. Very nice find.

Long, long ago, in a place called Long Island, my father used to refer to my habit of slathering sun-tan oil all over myself as "basting." A coating of grease cooks you inside and hastens the crisping of your skin to a lovely golden rosy burnish. Among other things.

I am from the Baba Yaga school of chicken feet. They are good for only three things (once they have been separated from the chicken, of course): moving your house to another part of the forest, making good stock and grossing out the Justin Bieber age group. Okay, I might try a phoenix claw, but I'm not sure. And if, as someone wondered above, I had to give them a manicure every time I made soup, I'd be too nauseated to cook.

Search on eBay for Oreshki and you will find a variety of these Russian nut molds.

The science of chicken feet escapes me, but I love them for stock. I use 1 lb of feet to 4-5 lbs other parts; rinse 'em and in they go. Using just feet for stock doesn't sound promising, but I'm guessing it's been done somewhere, some time. Feet don't make stock cloudy, not that I've ever seen. My understanding is that cloudiness is more likely the result of not skimming early in the process and of allowing the stock to boil, instead of keeping it at a low simmer the entire time.

So all this talk of pudding cake inspired me and I made a Lemon Pudding Cake the other night. I sort of combined my recipe with Plum Tart's recipe. I used about 2 T butter, and I cut back the flour in my recipe somewhat, although not quite to 1/4 c. I also liked the idea of holding out 1/4c sugar and beating it into the egg white, which gives the whites a different quality altogether--a bit more substance but still light. Whatever you want to call it, it was delicious; soupy pudding on the bottom, light and spongy on the top, like a sauce and a cake all in one. So what would you call David Ross's Apple Gateau (recently in making/baking thread)? The intro to the recipe says that it is more of a pudding cake than a gateau. Instead of water, halfway through the baking melted butter (a lot of melted butter) gets poured over, which I thought was very strange, but it turned out great. This dessert does not separate into a pudding and a cake, but the apples do organize themselves into a layer, and the consistency of the cakey part is, well, puddingy. No separating the whites and yolks for that one.

Runwestierun, that's one way to even the score. Very funny. Well, I should have known that just the appearance of this topic was a bad omen. I spent the morning sort of wishing my Oster beehive blender would break, but not tonight, since I was supposed to make a cream of green chile soup. I hate that blender. And tonight my sort-of wish came true. The part where the soup pours out from the bottom instead of the top wasn't exactly in the plan, but there you have it. I'm going to consult the blender topic, but if anyone has suggestions they are welcome. Yes, of course I want a Blend-tech, but I'm not sure it's in the cards just now. My daughter had a New Years eve 2am run-in with a tree and did some damage to my car. She's fine, but body work isn't cheap. Isn't there anything in between all the $50 blenders and the $500 ones? On the other hand, the place that's doing the bodywork is amazing. It's run by an Italian family and the waiting room has Memphis style chairs, some sculpture and an espresso machine. They made my husband a very good double espresso with lovely crema on top. Hasn't anyone invented an espresso-size to-go cup yet? And I thought my mother's 9 euro espresso in St. Mark's was pricey. This one will be a lot more.

When it comes to pancakes it's hard to imagine the size of the egg makes a huge difference. After all, when you look at a variety of pancake recipes the number of eggs to the amount of flour and milk doesn't appear to be very scientific, but varies a fair amount, no? Recipes written within the last 20 years seem to call for large eggs if they specify the size. Can you even buy commercially sold small eggs any more? I'm not the most exacting baker, that's for sure, so I just buy whatever is sold as "large" and it works okay...that's the least of my problems when I bake. Even the eggs sold at the farmers' markets around here are large and conform to most commercial sizes. I remember buying farm eggs when I lived in New Mexico in the late 60's and 70's. The dreamy pastel araucanas those days were more like Robin's eggs! At least that's how it seems through the looking glass.

Today's NYT magazine has a Sam Sifton recipe for Jamaican oxtail stew. It sounds awfully good. In New Mexico we usually made green chile stew (bowl o' green) with beef and potatoes. A bowl o' red most often was pork.

I can smell them on my hands for a whole day afterwards, no matter how hard or often I scrub my hands with anti-bacterial, lemon juice, water or anything else. I wear disposable gloves to prevent this issue; works very well! I use gloves, too. And I de-vein with sharp scissors rather than a knife or special tool. Then I rub the cut edges with a paper towel. Quick, easy and efficient. OK, I have a high tolerance for ick. If you do too, here's the quickest way to devein shrimp: grab the vein from the center of the cut head end between your fingernails and pull. Keep a paper towel handy to wipe the veins off your hands. Perhaps my high ick tolerance also prevents me from noticing the lingering scent of shrimp veins on my hands. :blink: I only use that grab technique if a recipe requires the shrimp to be deveined and with shells left on. But I don't use my fingernails, I use a blunt tweezers to grab the vein from the cut head end and slide it out slowly. It works, more of less, but it's icky. I don't have a high tolerance for ick. Cleaning shrimp is not a task I like at all, so when I cook shrimp I consider it a virtuous and selfless act.

Frankly I like Bittman's politics better than his recipes, although once a week Bittman anything is plenty for me. However, if anyone else in the magazine's regular food rotation gets axed as a result, I'm going to be extremely unhappy. I'm already sad that Christine Muhlke is giving up her farm column (she's moving to Bon Ap) but if Cooking with Dexter goes away I will be inconsolable.

Trying to think of things that are not easily replaced rather than appliances that could be purchased again (if money was not an object, of course) if lost or broken. I no longer own a Sunbeam Radiant toaster, but that's more like a phantom limb; somehow its ghost still occupies space. I couldn't easily replace my 30" Viking range (small size is hard to find and price is an issue!) and although I appreciate it every day, a replacement could be found. It occurs to me that the irreplaceable items are mostly found objects that were given new life by me. They include: a perfectly square Griswold cast iron skillet that can cook 11 slices of bacon with room to spare. An old large copper skillet found at the Goodwill that turns out a terrific Tarte Tatin. A very unusual size glass loaf pan that is the exactly perfect size to mold the large meatloaf that I make. A 1930s dark brown glazed casserole dish that is just right for a deep-dish pot pie. A traditional 6-popover pan used by my husband's grandmother. A genius of engineering and design. Most valuable and irreplaceable is probably my stainless flatware by Wm Fraser, made in Germany. The pattern, Finesse, was discontinued sometime in the late 1970's or early 80's, I believe. Some of it was purchased by me while it was still in production, and some was inherited from a friend of my mother's who had the same pattern, which seems like a stroke of amazing luck. Nothing gets used more often and holds up so well.

I try not to hang onto magazines after a year's gone by. At that point I go through the older ones and clip out any recipe I really want to keep, which usually means I have made it more than once. The recipe goes into a binder and the magazine gets tossed. I only get one magazine now, a gift sub, and I'm inclined to give that one up when it runs out. I figure old Gourmet and Bon Ap recipes can always be found on Epicurious. Culling yearly is the only way I will look at most of them again, or even remember where anything is. Seems more cost effective than building new shelving, especially if there are many issues in which only two or three recipes are keepers. Which I'm sad to say is the case for me.

Calming kitchen tasks: Making soups and stocks, removing cooked meat from bones. Shelling walnuts. Cutting apple wedges for pie. Cutting carrots into little cubes. Dishing out soup with a well designed ladle. Cutting the corn off the cob in straight rows. Peeling off strips of bacon and laying them neatly in a square pan. Building a lasagne. In no way zenlike or calming tasks: Chopping parsley. Peeling apples for pie before cutting them (that's a very zen task for my husband, however, who loves making a single spiral of peel from one piece of fruit.) Prepping raw meat or fish, including deveining shrimp. Washing lettuce or greens. Wrestling with celery root.

Interesting. The Epicurious recipe calls for no butter at all. Seems frightfully healthy, for a dessert.

Okay, here is the recipe I use for Lemon Pudding Cake. I haven't made it in a long long time. If memory serves, it is rather fragile, and doesn't always come out exactly the same every time, but it's always yummy. I have a second recipe, probably from the same source, that uses only 1/4c flour. I don't believe I ever tried that. I think--but I'm not sure--that the recipe came from the SF Chron, and it has to be at least 25 years old. 1 1/2 c milk 4 T butter 3 eggs, separated 1 c sugar 1/2 c flour 1/3 c lemon juice Grated zest of one lemon pinch salt Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 1 1/2 qt baking or souffle dish. Get out a slightly larger pan at least 2 inches deep that will hold the cake pan comfortably. Put milk and butter in a small saucepan and heat til butter melts. Remove, set aside. Whisk yolks til blended. Add sugar, flour, lemon juice, zest, salt and milk-butter mixture. Stir til thoroughly blended. Beat egg whites til stiff but still moist. Fold into batter and turn into baking dish. Set into larger pan and pour enough hot water into larger pan to come half way up sides of cake pan. Bake 35 to 45 minutes, or until cakes springs back when touched in the center. Let cool. Don't refrigerate. Serve with softly whipped cream. Serves about 6. Or at my house, 3.

Wow - that's the dish that I most yearn for from San Francisco's Brandy Ho's. I am so there. Until I read this thread and did a little research I didn't even know about Brandy Ho's. Here's what I just learned: When Brandy Ho opened his restaurant in about 1980, I was already living in the East Bay. Brandy was an original cook at The Hunan Restaurant, located on Kearny, between Washington and Jackson. The Hunan, owned by Henry Chung, existed in that incarnation from about 1974 to 1989; Brandy must have been cooking there when I lived in Chinatown, in the mid to late 70's. After '89 Henry started a mini-empire called Henry's Hunan and now has, I believe, three locations, none in the original space. We used to walk down to The Hunan and eat there a couple times a week. It was an addiction. The place was a steaming smokey hole in the wall; you could feel the chillies in your throat the moment you walked through the door, which, I remember, was usually kept open, due to the combustible nature of the food. I don't even remember tables, but I remember sitting at the counter and watching them cook. I'd never tasted food like that before, and haven't since. When I went back to the first new location I was utterly depressed. It was not the same. Perhaps it never recovered from the loss of Brandy. The first time I had twice-cooked pork at The Hunan and one of those scallion pancakes I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Maybe I should make a trip over to SF to try Brandy Ho's. It's definitely still a going concern.

Exactly. The recipe is designed to form a cake and a thick sauce. A very popular homemaker cake. Agree. The lemon pudding cakes I have made have nothing to do with a two-step process or with pudding mix. It's a one-batter mix that performs a magic trick in the oven, separating into two somewhat distinct layers. I've never made a molten chocolate cake. I thought the molten chocolate was a pool in the middle and not exactly a layer. It's possible that the description of "pudding cake" is somewhat corrupted; many people often refer to semi puddingy cakes like clafouti as a pudding cakes, but these are more a description of a baked good that's fairly eggy and is somewhere in between pudding and cake--not the same as the cakes that form a pudding layer on the bottom and a light cakey layer on the top. The one I've made is very tart and very lemony.

This is a great thread! Barbara, the Chron has a library, and, last I knew, a librarian. You might try calling the Chron library and see if anyone can help you. Or you might try going to sfgate and see if there are accessible archives that way. The librarians at the Chron used to field all kinds of calls from the public, but my husband (who used to work at the Chron) says that may not be the case any more.

Didn't this topic used to be called: If you were on a desert island and you could only have one type of food what would it be? Most people used to say Italian, right? Perhaps we now just think of Italian American food as American food--spaghetti and meatballs, pizza, etc. If you look at the variety of real Italian food, much of it isn't a pantry staple or a household word. So, do we not even think of Italian food as ethnic? Interesting. That said, I would probably choose Vietnamese or Thai. I would have to think long and hard if I had to choose between them. It strikes me that if you had access to any Thai ingredients you wanted you could make almost any Viet dish. You think? Is the reverse true?

On average we spend about $15 per day for two of us. That includes some but not all wine, but not beer or hard liquor. That figure is pretty much based on cooking at home 24/7. We rarely eat out, and when we do it's frugal. I'm guessing the weekly bill edges up in the warmer months because, god help me, I can't resist the Berkeley Farmers Market. Most of the fruit and veggies sold there are mighty pricey compared to Berkeley Bowl. For the price of six servings of red beans and rice you can buy two or three peaches.