Katie Meadow

I am not a big fan of standard Heinz or other commercial ketchup. And once I started to make my own I never looked back. It's very easy to make, takes about 45 minutes to an hour, and uses as the base 1 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes. My original recipe did not include this, but I add a little of my favorite BBQ sauce during the cooking process and that gives it an extra kick. I use it to "frost" my meatloaf and on burgers or any other things you might use ketchup for. It makes at least a pint and lasts well in the fridge; we're not heavy users in my house so I don't have to make it very often.

I'm sure Bobby Flay has many rubs for steak, but his recipe for Cowboy Steaks was printed somewhere a coupla years ago and it's my go-to for grilling rib-eyes. So, for what it's worth, here's a BF dry rub. The recipe says to rub the steaks and let them sit for an hour before grilling. He says it's good for four 12-16 oz steaks. 1 Tbsp kosher salt (I think this is way too much salt, so I use less) 1 tsp Hungarian sweet paprika 1 tsp garlic powder (I don't like garlic powder, so I use less or sometimes rub in a little fresh pressed garlic) 1 tsp coarse ground black pepper (I often cut back on this and add in some New Mexico ground chile) 1 tsp dried thyme 1 tsp finely ground coffee (grind it fresh!) '

Try2cook...a fantasy in pink! I totally forgot about this, but my mother used to always insist on having saltines with chocolate ice cream, so clearly she was ahead of the curve. I'm sure that when I was young and stupid I made it clear to her what a bad idea I thought that was. Not to break any important traditions, my daughter, home from college, looked at us like we were total idiots when our jaws dropped over our ice cream the other night.

So I'm spending my five minutes per month whipping through Via Magazine and see a small snippet about a restaurant in Marin County favored by Mario Batali for its pizza and its ice cream dessert: vanilla ice cream--served soft, looking for all the world like carvel--drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. So I had to try it at once. I used a very nice local organic vanilla ice cream and made no attempt to soft-serve it, dribbled on some good olive oil and then a pinch of gray salt...and...it...was really good! It took about six bites to adjust after a lifetime of ice cream on my home planet, but suddenly I needed another bowl to make sure how good it was. Has anyone else had this, I mean besides this restaurant's fan club? Has it been all over the place and I just never noticed?

It would be sad to think that the processed fast-food nugget, which is a way to provide a poor quality product in a crunchy inexpensive package, came before simple boneless fried breast-meat pieces. If nuggets came first, that would be sort of like, "You've seen the cartoon now read the book." I'm guessing the motivation came long before the desire to please children (or those so sloshed they might be in danger of catching a bone in the throat) and followed the same pattern as many other fried foods that found their way into sandwiches, like fried oysters or fish, making those foods more economical and more portable. The chicken had to be boneless and sized in long pieces to fit in a roll. So my vote says the "fingers" made with real chicken right off the bone came first.

Scotch, neat. My husband is a regular, I'm an occasional. If there's any good dark chocolate around the house, then count me in. Nothing beats a sip of scotch alternating with letting a little chunk of bittersweet chocolate melt on your tongue. Mmm, yummy.

'Nother idea: if heirloom beans are of interest you could pop into Rancho Gordo's retail outlet on Industrial Way. I'd stop there if I was going to Napa...but then I'd keep going and head on up to Calistoga for a mud bath! I just noticed there's a recent thread about the Oxbow market in Napa. Just one more place I haven't been, but I will add to the chorus praising Fatted Calf. I don't eat a lot of charcuterie, but their rabbit pate is out of this world.

There is a relatively new restaurant called Ubuntu in Napa. Take a look at their website and see if it's your cup of tea. It's vegetarian and pricey and getting lots of press lately and rave reviews. I haven't been, but it sounds very interesting.

I've had great success with a sort of combination of the roasting techniques above. Scrub the beets but don't peel. Toss in a roasting pan with olive oil and salt. Use a pan with 3 or 4 inch sides, at least as high as your beets. Cover the pan with foil and roast til tender at 375 degrees, half hour or more, depending upon size. Let the beets stand covered at room temp 15 or 20 minutes. Then they are super easy to peel. I love them in salad, but usually can't resist eating a couple of them hot, right away. The beets leak and make a yummy sauce in the pan which I save and add to my dressing. I love a mix of different colored beets. Goldens are nice, since you don't have to deal with staining.

You might try asking Andrea Nguyen, the author of "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen." I believe she spent her childhood in southern CA. Either way she's a wealth of information and very generous. Check out her website at vietworldkitchen.com and you will find an email address for her.

Interestingly, neither of the two recipes in that NYT article this morning called for MSG as a separate ingredient. It's a peculiar article and it's defense of MSG seems mainly to be: it's in tons of stuff we eat, so enjoy! It would have been more insightful if they had provided non-Asian recipes that included the strategic use of straight MSG in home-cooking. All those sauces have complex favors and large amounts of sodium, so it's hard to know what's what. And what are "normal amounts," anyway? When I make Vietnamese sandwiches at home I use about 8 drops of Maggi in one sandwich. The Drunkard's Noodles recipe uses a full tablespoon of it along with 2 tblsps of oyster and same of fish sauce--for 2 large portions of food! I am one of those people who used to ask for "No MSG please" in Chinese restaurants, since I did get an unpleasant buzz as I went out the door. I can only assume that they would eliminate the extra dose that was added on top of the sauces that already contained MSG, but it was usually enough. I still believe that less is more, but then my tolerance for salt is pretty low as well. I checked out that row of products at the top of page 5. Basically it's a junk food extravaganza, implying that the fifth taste amounts to not much more than an overdose of MSG and sodium. No thanks, I'll just have the seaweed broth.

The feet I get are very clean, so I just give 'em a quick rinse and toss into the pot. I usually use one whole chicken, 2 lbs backs and at least 1 lb of feet.

I too have a funky old grinder. I find that it grinds rather unevenly, but I do two things to help it: I stir the grounds mid-grind once or twice. When most of the coffee is coarse as it should be, there is a layer of grinds that are too fine on the bottom. I skim off the coarse grinds for the presspot and use the fine stuff for something else. When I first started pressing I stirred briefly with a wooden spoon. Several years ago I just got bored of that and stopped stirring. I pour the water in carefully, swirling a bit. I can't detect the slightest difference in the final result. I always thought that paper filters filtered the oil out of coffee, whereas the presspot (which is really a refined version of cowboy coffee, no?) filters nothing, really, it just keeps the grounds out of your coffee. A gold filter filters some oil but not all of it. It's really a matter of taste, whether you like quality that the oil imparts. One thing I do find makes a big difference is to let the water in the kettle cool down a minute before pouring.

I really appreciate the concept of the maps, but truthfully, when I was planning my trip, I found them hard to decipher. The pushpins, balloons, or in this case baskets, obscure detail and once you stick on a lot of them the organizational benefits start to decline. But then, that could just be me. What if you had regional maps and provided a master list of towns w/their market dates that was organized by those regions? If most people are like me, and if they plan on having a car, they will already have gotten a good road map to help them plan; no map on line that I could find came come close to that kind of detail. The Provence-beyond list I mentioned above seems really comprehensive; I am guessing there are other regional market lists available. That way anyone planning a "market" trip would have every possible town/day easily accessible for the region they will be visiting. Then there could be some way to plug in recommendations, comments etc on any given markets, so when you click on a town up comes whatever reviews have been submitted. Am I dreaming?

When we were in Provence in October we went to the daily market in Aix and then the next day, the Saturday market, which is of course much bigger and includes many winding streets organized by subject: antiques, clothing, scarves, etc. That was a beautiful food market, set in a lovely square where you can have cafe au lait and watch the show. I cook at home all the time, so a vacation for me means eating out. But when I got to that market what did I want more than anything? A kitchen. We bought twice as much fruit, cheese etc as we able to consume in picnics during the next couple of days. Believe me, I ate a dangerous amount of figs, but they were the most astounding figs I have ever eaten. When we planned our trip (sadly it was only a week in provence) I checked a website called Provence-beyond. The link is faulty, so I suggest googling "Provence-beyond markets." The second site of the search will yield a wonderful catalogue of markets sorted as you like, either by every conceivable little town or by day. Our only snafu was l"isle-sur-la-sorgue. We planned to stay the night there before the weekday market, but discovered that our hotel was not right in town. The parking situation in that town is a bigger nightmare than NY. Even on a weekday afternoon when there was no market we could find absolutely nowhere to park! If you don't stay right in town you will never be able to go to either of the markets there. The big antques market on the weekend sounds amazing. Some other lifetime.

Winter gin (for martinis): Bombay Dry Summer gin (for G & T's): Tanqueray Dry Vermouth: Noilly Prat Sweet Vermouth: Martini and Rossi Red (I like it for an aperitif) Vodka: Skyy (mainly for Bloody Marys)--love that Noxema-blue bottle. Scotch: Cluny. Perhaps in my next life Macallan 18 yr will be my house pour. But we're house poor. And the scotch sees more action than anything else. If anyone knows a cheap scotch that's better value than Cluny lemme know!

Lot of fix-it guys upthread! Since you have only had the board two months you could certainly make a good case for it being defective. Have you gone back to the store or contacted the manufacturer? If it's a quality board or a quality merchant odds are in your favor you can get a replacement or a credit. Might as well try before you get glue all over yourself or end up in tears--oh wait, that's me.

I've always had great luck with Bookfinder.com. Amazon and Alibris are encorporated there, along with loads of other smaller sellers. The descriptions of condition for used books seems pretty reliable. New books are on the left column, used on the right, in order of lowest price first. I recently bought a used hardcover copy of Jasper White's 50 Chowders for $7.50 (and that includes shipping!) and I can barely tell it's used. I'll check out Addall--I never heard of it, but it sounds similar.

I rarely fry anything, but this thread is making me pretty interested in doing some chicken. There doesn't seem to be consensus on the buttermilk soak...but it sounds like a good idea. Also, what types of oil seem to be favored? Lard is out for me. Would you want a different oil if you deep-fry vs. shallow fry? Do most of you prefer the taste of peanut oil to corn oil when it comes to fried chicken? I notice that several folks are sheepish about frying skinless, boneless chicken. If I died and went to heaven I would eat lots of chicken skin and plenty of bacon, but I really can't do that in this life--at least not very often. (And what, by the way, is a chicken tender? Is it just a kid-sized piece of white meat?) About the highest best use for larger pieces of boneless, skinless fried chicken hit the East Bay several years ago in the form of Betty's Bakesale, a small shop that sells pastries and a few sandwiches. Word spread and lines were long for Betty's fried chicken sandwich. It's simple and fabulous. It looks like she cuts a half breast into approx 3 or maybe 4 lengthwise pieces. I believe she does a buttermilk soak, but I'm not sure. On a french type roll she places several hunks of just-fried chicken, tops it with a generous heap of spicy non-mayonnaise slaw, adds the top half of bread and that's it. Frequently she sells out by noon. Before I went gaga over this sandwich I had never heard or thought about a fried chicken sandwich. I'm guessing there are plenty of you who have, though!

That watery piece of meat sounds extremely icky. I want the privelege of marinating my own flanksteak, thanks. I too love flanksteak, and when we grill a whole slab we like to marinate it for most of the day in olive oil and lots of aromatics. I do think it's a cut that benefits from marinating, if it isn't being slow-cooked like a brisket. If I am doing a stir-fry and will be cooking thin slices quickly over very high heat I only marinate the cut slices for maybe 15 minutes, as per my recipes. I'm getting increasingly fussy (squeamish, practically) about meat; I don't eat a lot of it, but when I do, I want to know that it's been touched by the fewest hands--or processes--possible.

Thanks so much, Dave. I have a little more help for you. I surfed about this morning and came upon one mention of this cheese. It was in what appears to be a local cheese newsletter of last August called Le Tranche Caille. Down at the bottom, under a heading that loosely translates as "cheeses available in the summer if the sun would only shine" (at least that's how my husband translated it). the spelling is indeed Lou Peralou. Also mentioned are Cocagne, I'itxassou and le Gabieton. Any of those familiar? The newletter is from Bearn. Where are you?

Does anyone know Lou Peralou? No, it isn't a cheesemonger, it's a cheese, a Basque sheep's milk brie. It hasn't been sold in my neck of the woods for years and once I was told that it's no longer imported, but I don't know if that's true. It's terribly yummy.

Perhaps there is a kind of continuum ranging from personal preferences to obsessive-compulsive disorder or eating disorders. Once a person's preferences become so noticeable or so numerous as to interfere with their own pleasure or the pleasure of others at the table it's hard to just call it pickyness. If you can't stand the cranberries touching the potatoes (and I agree it isn't an appetizing combo) and your solution is just to put turkey in between, you're happy, no one's the wiser and everyone has a nice dinner. But if someone serves you dinner already plated who doesn't know that about you and you get upset and ask for another plate, that's crossed beyond picky eating preferences. I think some people need to draw attention to themselves with food issues. Look how much attention kids get when the are fussy eaters. I know people that have just never grown out of their childhood eating patterns. If Fat Guy's mom prefers white eggs and has a store across from her building that sells them, she isn't totally irrational in rejecting his offer. But if she has a hard time walking, the streets are icy, it's zero degrees out and the closest store is eight blocks away then it's certainly irrational and perhaps neurotic or even phobic. If she can do without eggs til the next shopping excursion then it's a relatively harmless phobia. Naturally she knows exactly how to push her son's buttons! I have one pet peave and only because I have two good friends with the same annoying fetish. Both of them refuse to eat carbos and steadfastly deny being on any kind of diet. Neither has any allergies, they just "don't like" bread, pasta, rice, grits etc. And no, they don't know eachother. I forgive them because I love them, but I swear, sometimes I feel like I would pay to see either of them eat a sandwich or a plate of linguini and clams.

The March issue of Fine Cooking has an analysis of salt chemistry--why it brings out flavor, how it blocks bitterness and enhances sweetness, how it makes meat juicier. I love discussions about salt. Since I have to limit my salt intake just thinking about salt makes me happy. I used to love salt bagels, salty bloody marys with a side of cheetos....but no more. At family gatherings I would gag on my sister-in-law's cooking, because she doesn't use any salt at all. I still use salt, but very judiciously. I do always salt meat before cooking, but generally use about a quarter of the amount in the recipe. My tolerance for salt has really changed. The food at many restaurants--and it makes no diff whether it's a dive or a chic joint--is now too salty for me. Oddly enough, when I traveled in Europe last fall, I found the food in Provence to be pretty salty, but the food in Venice wasn't. So I would agree that salt preferences are very habitual. As for my sister-in-law I have now determined that it wasn't really the lack of salt, she's just a terrible cook; a little sprinkle wouldn't have helped.

With the theory that I should spend the most money possible and buy Italian, I bought the Rustichella d'Abruzzi whole wheat spaghetti. I am crazy about their pasta (altho in the interests of budget I often use DiCecco.) The whole wheat was inedible. I'm going to stick to the regular stuff and get my fiber some other way.