Katie Meadow

I add chocolate from good-quality bars all the time. I've used many different kinds. I add it two ways to my regular brownie recipe so it isn't a substitution, since I still use the same proportions of baking choc and butter. I'm with you, I don't like an overly sweet brownie, and I like a little chocolate boost and sometimes flavor as well. I might add a small amount of extra flour to the recipe, but not a lot. I take any bittersweet chocolate I like, sometimes just very dark, sometimes dark with orange or mint or even coffee. I might use a half bar at most. About a half of the total I use gets melted along with the butter/baking choc. The rest gets chopped fairly small, and is just stirred in at the very end, instead of or in addition to nuts. Start with a small amount. I guess I don't add enough to really change the nature of my brownies, and I don't like gooey or fudgy brownies--I just like them dense and moist and with good chocolate flavor. Lately I've been using Lindt dark mint. I've used Valrhona orange, and other Valrhona with varying cocoa content as well.

Maybe the thousand island concept comes from the fact that if you add mayo to the ketchup that's already on the burger, you are already in thousand island territory. There is a lot more use of mayo in CA, or at least is sure seemed that way when I first came out here. Mayo on a burger, mayo on artichokes. I grew up with melted butter on chokes. As for the avocado, they aren't as common on the east coast, although they are probably more common now than they used to be. I didn't grow up with them, but you can't live in NM and not eat them. I don't think my mother ate an avocado until she was in her eighties! I still find the CA roll sushi to be a dreadful idea. Avocado on a hamburger or in Japanese food? I just don't go there.

Before I lived in CA I imagined that CA style burger meant the inclusion of lettuce, tomato and possibly avocado. The lettuce and tomato slice were new to me (the avocado still seems perverse), but what I found most characterized the way west-coasters (like my native CA husband) eat burgers versus the way I grew up eating them in NY was the addition of mayo or mustard or both PLUS ketchup. I don't remember ever putting anything on a burger besides ketchup and pickles, w or w/o cheese in NY. After a 6-yr stopover in NM, between NY and CA, I am pretty committed to a green chile burger. I no longer eat cheeseburgers, altho a green chile cheeseburger is a pretty standard classic in NM, but I do like a tomato slice and a little feathery red onion, or pickled red onions if available. I grill poblanos, which is what's most easily available here, and I make my own ketchup, and I use it, along with a little mayo and dijon mustard--my adjustment to CA. I can't stand hamburger buns. I like toasted sour or semi-sour batard or country bread. Does CA style means the use of thousand island dressing? Since the basic ingredients of that are ketchup and mayo, I guess adding mustard to that isn't such a huge leap.

Good with nice cold grapes. And sherry maybe? I always like a strong blue cheese with fruit. I'm addicted to Stilton eaten with apples or pears.

The older and tougher the ginger, the harder the whole operation. If the ginger is beautiful and fresh and "young" you can peel and throw away less fibre, and it is much easier to grate. I've never worried too much about a little waste, and just trimmed out a straight edge chunk and used the box grater, most often the second-to-smallest side. The juicy tender gratings are left on the inside, and the tougher fibrous stuff is left on the outside of the box, and I usually don't use it. If I just want flavor and no fibre at all, I find a lot of juice can be squeezed out by hand after grating. I've never tried the microplane, but that's a good suggestion.

We have limited supplies, and I drink far less than I used to. Mainly in the summer we drink gin--either G & T 's or martinis. Last night my husband made a Leap Year. I'd forgotten what a nice drink it is, and what a lovely color. 2 oz gin 1/2 oz grand marnier 1/2 oz sweet vermouth 1/4 oz lemon juice twist of lemon

What you keep your bread in sort of depends on what qualities you are trying to maintain, no? If I buy a fresh loaf of Italian bread or a baguette in the morning I might want some for lunch, and keep the rest for dinner. In six or eight hours the bread itself doesn't really get too stale (yes, maybe a little), and keeping it out on the counter seems no different than keeping it in a paper bag. But if kept in a plastic bag, the crust will get dull and soft in less than no time. Does the "breathable" plastic bag keep the crust crunchy for several hours? A non-breathable one won't. If I keep bread overnight I expect that it will mostly be used for toast, so I don't care so much about the crust. But if left on the counter or in paper overnight, the entire loaf will be dry and stale and even make pretty lousy toast. Overnight bread seems to do best in a non-permeable bag around here. I also assume that humidity and locale must make so difference. The air is pretty dry here in the summer.

Saying you are sick of cilantro, chile and lime is like saying you are sick of the classic mirepoix or the holy trinity of southern cooking: celery, onion and green pepper. Flour, butter and eggs is pretty trite, too, but they come in awfully handy when it's time for dessert. Maybe you just want a break from certain flavors right now. In that case, don't be mixing up any guacamole or pho or shrimp curry and join the Julia bandwagon: cook up a lovely Boeuf Bourguignon. Bon...etc.

I make rice salads frequently, often with leftover ingredients such as salmon, tuna or chicken. I agree that the rice should be freshly made for the salad. I like my rice salads room temp or slightly warm, so I usually make my rice an hour or two before assembling the salad. Rice that's leftover in the fridge is dry. I generally use white basmatti rice, but that's what I always have on hand. I make a tuna rice salad with either fresh cooked fish or canned. I like to add slivers of roasted red peppers, toasted pine nuts, maybe capers, parlsey, celery and red onion, with a dressing of sherry wine vinegar and olive oil. Sometimes I add a little saffron to the dressing. Then maybe a dusting of smoked Spanish paprika. For a chicken and rice salad I like to add fresh barely cooked shelling peas along with the usual suspects, or shelled edamame. I use either leftover grilled chicken, or just poach some chicken. I've made ham and rice salad too when I've cooked ham shanks for broth and don't know what else to do with all the extra cooked meat. For chicken or ham rice salads I usually make a dressing with dijon and white wine vinegar and olive oil. The flexibility with rice salads is great. Minced radishes, kohlrabi, fennel instead of celery, whatever. Easy to make vegetarian. Fresh corn, fried okra and diced tomato makes a nice rice salad too.

Thanks, I'm going to try this washing or soaking method the next time I have salty olives. In the last few years I've been searching out olives that don't seem so salty to me: lucques, cerignolas and nocellaras. Although lucques have finally reached a price per pound that I can't stomach.

I guess that puts me in my place. Still, I guess corniness & practicality don't always agree. ← Aww, Dave, I didn't say corny was a bad thing, did I? My FIL is a retired physicist who wears purple socks and birkenstocks. Isn't that corny? We also brought my in-laws a tablecloth sold at a roadside stand avec les cigales as the main design element. Equally corny and equally appreciated. Corny and practical are a perfect marriage! Hope you are feeling great!

I'm in the East Bay, and rarely go out any more. I'm clueless about SF restaurants now, but here's my take on Chez Panisse. Whenever my mom's in town we take her to Chez Panisse upstairs cafe for lunch; she likes to wander around that area in Berkeley. If you call for a reservation for lunch try asking for a table on the porch (I don't exactly know what they call it, but it's sort of a glassed in porch area) you will be eating in daylight and it's extremely congenial, although a tad cramped; the upstairs cafe can be a bit dark otherwise, but then the older I get, the more light I need on my food (or book.) I've never left there unhappy. I always end my meal with one of their home-made fruit sorbets. Costs a fraction of a dinner downstairs, I am sure. And if you go for lunch, you can always check out the shops in Walnut Square and buy some cheeses and pastry at that long-standing institution known as the Cheese Board. If you decided to eat downstairs, get hold of the week's menu ahead of time, so you will be able to pick a night that suits your taste.

Thank for the tip about washing olives. Perhaps olives that taste too salty to me could be made more acceptable that way. Since I've cut back on salt, my tolerance is lower. I have an great 50's style serving dish, with three sections. If I have two types of olives, I use the third section for pits. Or I often dedicate the third section to roasted and salted almonds or marcona almonds (altho marconas are far too costly to use often!) and provide a small pit-dish on the side. I do exactly as Steven does: I prime the pump by eating a couple of olives and putting the pits in the designated spot, so my guests don't have to wonder for even a second what to do with the pits. My FIL cures olives, and they are fabulous. He doesn't keep them in a brine solution, so they have to be eaten fresh, and quickly. Not a problem--a quart jar might last a couple of days in my house. We bought him the corniest olive dish when we were in the south of France a couple of years ago, with a built-pit bowl and, natch, an olive graphic. Well, he's corny that way, so he loved it.

I have stopped buying parmigiano and now buy only a variety of pecorinos. For grating (but equally tasty just to nibble on) I like Pecorino Stagionata. Now I've discovered Pecorino Maturo and that's good grated and dynamite on its own. For travel I found Pecorino Sardo is a fine all-purpose cheese, great for lugging on a picnic with crackers. It seems to last well unrefrigerated and is more available than the others. I always thought the pecorinos were less salty generally than the parmigiano-reg, but it's been a while since I compared them. Originally I stared using the stagionata as a grated cheese because it didn't seem so salty and had a more interesting flavor.

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/datastore/datastor...urveynumber=351 The above UC Davis website is the best source I can find for a description of the zante currant, and a chicken & egg opinion of which came first, the currant or the corinth. When it comes to grapes, I would trust this source. I am going to look carefully in my markets for the next couple of months and see whether any fresh zante currants are available, and how they are labeled.

So, that Sun-Maid product should be called DRIED Zante Currants (or dried black corinth grapes) since zante currants are not true currants and since currants are not a dried form of something else. What's in that little box is raisins that are made from what is in fact a type of grape, albeit a very small one. But that would be too confusing, since some Americans may never have had raisins that don't come in a box, and some may not even know that raisins are dried grapes, whether it be thompson seedless, muscats or any other kind of grape.

First off, let's not get sidetracked about the word "current," since it has nothing to do with plants or berries. There are three types of currant: red, black and white/yellow. They are related to gooseberries. I had wild red and black currants in my back yard in New Mexico. They were delicious. According to Wiki, the Black Corinth, also known as the Zante currant, is really not a currant, but a very small variety of grape that originally came from a Greek Island. Currant is, as noted above, a corruption of Corinth, and ended up being applied to the genus Ribes, which is the currant. It sounds like you may have the little black Corinth grapes or Zante Currant, since you say they have vines, so you are accurate in describing them as mini-grapes. They sound yummy! The currants I've had look more like berries on a bush, and don't resemble grapes in the way they grow. Raisins are dried grapes. Currants can be dried, but they are then called dried currants. I never dried them, just picked them off the bush as soon as they were ripe. I have no idea whether it's common to see any small dried grape varieties labeled as "currants." If I saw something tiny and black and dried labeled "currants" I would assume they were....currants!

It's news to me that dog lovers and foodies are mutually exclusive. But regardless of that, put these dog-lovers to work washing lettuce and helping prep salad under your supervision. After all, you are providing comfy space for the dogs as well as their lovers. You can certainly mix up ahead a large amount of simple vinaigrette that would work on a variety of lettuce or legume or veggie salads or even on potato salad. A little dijon covers a multitude of sins.

It helps the pizza from becoming soggy from the sauce. ← The best way I've found to keep the crust from getting soggy due to sauce is to prebake the crust for a few minutes before adding all toppings. And to keep the amount of sauce (and cheese) modest. We often do a 3 or 4 minute pre-bake (using a stone in the oven or no stone on the grill) and then flip the crust so the crispier side takes the sauce. I've never put cheese under the sauce and I get a thin crispy crust this way. If I had a stone that fit my grill I would use it, but it only fits my indoor oven.

Personally I wouldn't invest in a lot of stuff before I know what my roomie is bringing to the kitchen. If you can find some really nice basic pots and pans that are good quality for a good price--and you feel they will last long and be good investments and you really like them--then by all means buy them. A good enamel cast iron soup pot, like 5.5 qt or 7 qt can be a great investment if you can find one for a reasonable price. As noted above, not to heat the pasta water, but great for a pot of soup or chili or lots of tomato sauce. I use the smaller size several times a week, but there's just two or us most of the time. I used to use a 7 qt creuset round constantly when feeding more people. Most people acquire a non-stick pan somewhere along the line, so it's likely your roomie will bring one. A 10" cast iron skillet can do half your cooking and be a relatively cheap and permanent purchase. I agree with Fat Guy: if you have only one roomie, he/she can learn how to treat that pan w/respect. Nothing does french toast, grilled cheese or heats up a tortilla or bakes cornbread or cooks a trout or even cooks a fast egg scramble better than a well-seasoned cast iron pan. The one I've been using for the last 20 years was a flea market purchase. Then you can spend a bit more on a really nice stainess sautee pan that you aren't afraid to use for sauces, or things with lots of wet ingredients. One nice colander can rinse everything and be used if you don't have a pasta insert. One of my most useful purchases has been a dozen barmops. This is the best way to cut your paper-towel use by about 80%. They are terry cloth, and very good at drying lettuce or any other wet produce. They work for just about everything except draining bacon or wiping oil on the grill (or on your cast iron pan!) and far better for spills than a sponge or paper towel.

I never deep-fry anything, but the picture of the corn fritters in the recent July/August issue looked so good, and the corn has been so sweet lately, I went for it. They were fabulous. I think mine might have been slightly bigger than suggested, but the interiors were puffy and light. Sinful, really. I used barely the 1/2 inch of oil suggested, and I didn't make the roasted salsa, since I had some homemade salsa leftover. I didn't have any sour cream, so I subbed 2% Fage yogurt. My family liked the fritters with salsa, but I liked mine totally plain, with a little sea salt on top. We ate them practically as fast as we made them, so we didn't bother to heat up the oven to keep them warm. The carnival food of your dreams.

We're getting slightly off topic, but it is interesting to note that location seems to be a factor, which I didn't really think about. With every post I'm getting more and more embarrassed to admit spending $500 a month on food, although it's also true that certain non-food items like laundry soap and paper towels are often not excluded from the weekend shopping excursions, so my records may be a little haphazard. About half our meals are vegetarian, but that doesn't seem to make any difference; the cost of heirloom tomatoes at the farmers' market isn't really much less than the cost of chicken or farmed trout or shrimp. As for a Haas avocado, at the Berkeley Farmers' market they range from small at $1.25 each to extra large at about $2.50 or even more each. But they are the best ones I've ever eaten, so it's hard to resist. Gwens, when available, are about the same; they are my favorite. They are now selling huge Reed avocados--individual wrapped like French melons--for between $3 and $4 each. Randi, what do you pay per avocado? If you truck a semi full of CA strawberries to a Chicago supermarket, it has been noted elsewhere that the price per lb may very well be less than if you drive a few crates in a pick-up several hours to Berkeley. Some footprints are not as small as we might think or hope.

About pre-salting... I agree with the previous poster about making slaw shortly before eating it. That way you don't have to salt it first, and it's crisp and fresh tasting. This may just be personal taste, but I've never found letting slaw marinate in dressing to be an improvement. However, if I need to make slaw way ahead, I find that pre-salting does help keep the cabbage from getting limp or soggy, and helps keep the dressing from getting watery. I shred the cabbage and salt it in layers in a colander. Then I press it by putting a large bowl on top of the slaw and filling that bowl with water. I let it sit for at least an hour before adding other ingredients and dressing it. I haven't found it necessary to squeeze out any moisture after doing this, or rinse out the salt. However, I don't add further salt until I add everything else and taste for saltiness. I don't think this eliminates every bit of moisture, but it helps a lot. I like a wide variety of slaws, including one with green papaya. Recently I added shredded kohlrabi to a simple cabbage slaw and it was nice. I make very different slaws to go with different entrees. Some of my favorite slaw meals: Red beans 'n' rice with cornbread and slaw. Pot-stickers and Asian style slaw. Chili with cowboy slaw. Grilled chicken with Bakesale Betty's jalapeno slaw. Turkey and ham on rye with russian dressing and slaw.

Try this recipe for a change of pace. I think it was from Bon Appetit, a few years ago, can't recall. POTATOES WITH SAFFRON AIOLI 1 T water 1/2 tsp crumbled saffron threads 1/2 tsp smoked hot paprika or Hungarian hot 1/2 cup mayo 1 T olive oil 1 tsp fresh lemon juice 1 minced or mashed garlic clove potatoes: French fingerlings or yukon golds or red skinned new potatoes, unpeeled fleur de sel to taste (Orig recipe calls for chopped cilantro, but I don't add it.) Bring the 1 T water to a boil in a very small saucepan. Add saffron. Remove from heat and cover with a plate. Let steep 15 min. Mix that with paprika, mayo, olive oil, lemon and garlic. Keeps well. I like to simply put a dollop on my plate and dip the hot boiled potatoes in as I go. Of course there will be some left over. My husband likes to add more mayo and then use it as a sandwich spread. I've also used it in a creamy slaw.

Anything under $400 for two people seems very frugal to me, if that includes meals eaten out and alcohol. I tried keeping really good records of all food and beverage purchases for several months. I was staggered at how much we were spending, even though we almost never go out. But the more I kept tabs on it, the lower the monthly averages went, so clearly I was paying attention. Including wine, beer and very rare meals out, we were spending at least $600 a month for two. Our alcohol purchases are not high, since I am not drinking much. We managed to get it down to closer to $500 a month, at least during the winter. The summer budget goes up. Does anyone else find this to be the case? I don't make big pots of soup and I make a lot more trips to the farmers' market, where everything is irresistibly beautiful and costs an arm and a leg. I try to be careful, and only buy what's really outstanding. Prices are up at least 30% from last year. Those adorable Padron peppers that are all the rage now were $8 per lb last year, $12 this year. A few days worth of tomatoes now costs me about $10. Green beans at the Berkeley farmers' market are averaging $4 to $5 per lb. At Berkeley Bowl: $1.49, and just as good, if not organic. However, the stone fruit as the farmers' market has been outstanding, and I can't pass it up. Just goes to show, shopping more or less locally can carry a penalty; it's no small footprint if a gas-guzzling van has to be driven 6 hrs. roundtrip just to get a few crates of organic produce to the consumers.