Katie Meadow

Today I made the Jam Swirl Cake from Yossy Arefi's Snacking Cakes. The crumb was really nice. We had an abundance of apricot jam on hand, so we used that. We both thought the recipe would be better with a very tart jam, and possibly a little more of it than she specifies. She must have a very sweet tooth, as I'm finding that with all her cakes I cut back a bit on the sugar. My only other change was to use half vanilla extract and half almond extract, since apricots love almonds. I do have one dopey question. All her recipes specify adding the salt to the liquid ingredients. I've always added the salt to the dry ingredients, which seems, well, logical. Is there any good reason for doing it her way?

3 cans of DOP Strianese tomatoes for 7.99 is a good price. I don't feel right unless I have at least 6 cans of good quality San Marzano tomatoes in the pantry.. I make tomato sauce and pizza sauce in large batches and store it by the pint in the freezer. Most Italian brands of whole tomatoes that say DOP are pretty reliable, at least the ones I've tried.

Couldn't agree more. We all make choices about where to spend our money. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it doesn't. Except for people like the Roys, who eat out all the time but never touch their food. We rarely eat out any more, although we were never big spenders when we did. My idea of a splurge now is eating pistachio cream out of the jar. In no way frugal, but way more exciting than a mediocre meal out for two. And at least I'm supporting some farmer who grows pistachios on the side of Mt. Etna. And that crop is only as reliable as the volcano, so I hope those growers are able to put away some change for the day it rains ashes. The times I enjoy eating out are when I'm on vacation and don't have an option and feel I deserve to catch a break from cooking the rest of the time. And we don't take a lot of vacations. I consider it a vacation when my husband bakes brioche and makes French toast the next morning. Wow. It's a long road from Covid and the state of the economy to eating pistachios out of the jar. At least I use a utensil.

You had me at skate wings, you lost me at raw liver.

Over the last thirty years i've waffled on buying a stand mixer. But my husband suddenly decided he needed one and spent all of thirty seconds completing the purchase. This all happened because he came home with a Vidalia onion and we had the idea of making James Beard's famous onion sandwich. My husband bakes bread, but has always been happy to knead it by hand. However the sandwich pretty much requires brioche bread, which he's never made. He concluded that the kneading time for brioche justified the purchase of a mixer. First try was a Julia Child recipe and it was pretty good, but we agreed the taste was a bit blah, although it did make very good French toast this morning. Does anyone have a great go-to recipe for a brioche loaf?

With fresh brioche or a good white pullman loaf, Duke's mayo and a perfect ripe summer tomato it's hard to go wrong. Even better when you add a thin slice of a Vidalia onion. Very rarely do those four things happen to appear at the same time in my kitchen, but if they do, that's what I make. And a BLT just has to have mayo or the earth will tilt off its axis. Okay, maybe not, but is it worth the risk?

Walmart is having a sale on Kitchenaid Classic Tilt stand mixer 4.5 qt, white only: $279 My husband, who bakes bread using only his hands, all of a sudden decided to spring for a stand mixer. He wants to make brioche bread and read somewhere that hands aren't good enough for brioche.

She's nervy, right? No one else would do a book like that. She is detail oriented beyond my abilities, and maybe that's not always so welcoming if you are the kind of person who bristles at that sort of thing. She has a recipe for a delicious caviar sandwich (yep I've made it several times for New Year's Eve.) You can't do anything but laugh when she insists you use Pepperidge Farm white bread for it. There are plenty of nice white pullman loaves that can bought or home made. Searching out Pepperidge Farm is seriously cringy to me. Although for her sardines on triscuits it's worth going for the real triscuits!

Last I heard, several months ago, was that she does indeed plan to reopen Prune. Things do change, though.

Yes, the book is gimmicky and over-designed, but some of the recipes are really good. GH is a crank and a fussbudget but I love her anyway. Maybe you would like her memoir "Blood Bones and Butter." It's entertaining and well written. And as a lover of saltines you really should try her fried saltines; they are a gateway drug, although I'm not sure into what! You can find Fried Saltines with Cheddar and Onion on line in a flash. Saltines morph in 30 seconds into flaky pastry. It's a miracle!

My husband just came back with the most expensive eggs he ever bought: Petaliuma, pasture raised, cage free, organic. $9.99 a dozen. The price jumped $1.50 in the last two weeks. He does almost all the shopping these days so I just go along with his choices. Unfortunately we are eating more eggs than in previous years and baking more cakes. A correction may be due.

No expertise here, but my favorite chocolate for many years has been Neuhaus. They must have stores in various locations all over Belgium.. I'm not typically a fan of filled chocolates, preferring dark bars, but their filled ones are fantastic.

My two favorite snacking cakes these days are Yossy Arefi's Simple Sesame Cake and Dorie Greenspan's Poppy Seed Tea Cake. The first is found on line and in her Snacking Cakes book and includes a generous amount of tahini and lots of sesame seeds in the batter and on the top. The Dorie cake can be found on the NYT site and elsewhere as well, I think. It has a modest lemon flavor and an amazing amount of poppy seeds. Both are excellent sliced and toasted. Both are for people who love crunchy seeds.

Jalapeños were more reliably hot when I lived in NM. Here in CA they are rarely hot. If I want to make pickled Jalapeños I usually add some serranos so that the brine gets hotter. Of course sometimes they are blah too. I've never really cared for them raw and they are too small to roast and peel, so not terribly useful.

Do you find the dried facing heaven chiles mild? I do. I like the flavor but I need to use several to infuse a small amount of oil. For more heat in a stir-fry I often use chiles de arbol. They are easy to come by and cheap. But you can't beat the name Facing Heaven and they have a lovely color and shape.

So" Two Phils" (no apostrophe) was already taken? I still find this hilarious!

I confess to watching the derby every year, and also to my ambivalence about the whole event. I also confess to disliking most of the food considered derby worthy, especially pimento cheese and bourbon, and probably I wouldn't like hot browns, either, given the combination of turkey, gravy and cheese. However we did make pie. It wasn't a traditional derby pie, as I'm also not wild about pecans; it was a chicken pot pie, and very good. One thing that always fascinates me is the names of race horses. There seems to be no rhyme or reason and no grammatical consistency. The names have some kind of peculiarity in common that I can't quite grasp and that I find endlessly entertaining. And yes, the race was exciting.

Yes, I keep those in stock. Very nice for a single portion, the tin being a little bit smaller than most regular sized sardines. They are mild and delicate. I wish they would sneak in just a bit more of those peppers, they have nice flavor, not at all hot. For general use I like the regular size Matiz. More sardines for the money, not quite as cute, though and not quite as mild as the small ones.

Some peppers have better flavor than others, so you're not just eating them for the heat. In the old days, in NM, real Hatch chiles were often so hot you really did need to remove some seeds, but the flavor was the best.

Hail to the King! The real king, King Bolete

What you are describing sounds an awful lot like an Italian Panforte. I'm sure there are countless versions, some a bit spicy, but the common ingredients are hazelnuts, almonds, figs, a bit of cocoa and a minimal amount of flour. I've made a wonderful one called Panforte Nero which I believe came from Alice Medrich.

I'm going to try the vinegar next time around and see what happens. I did not grow up eating mac n cheese. Once in a while there was noodle kugel at someone else's house, which was typically made far too sweet and, god forbid, often contained raisins. But I discovered mac n cheese when I moved to New Mexico where it was impossible not to garnish it with roasted hatch chiles. Now that's one of my top five comfort foods. When my daughter was young she had no problem letting me know that the boxed stuff was superior to my homemade. She's changed her tune now. There's a BBQ place near her in Atlanta that makes a sinful swoon worthy version that is rigatoni in, essentially, cream. It's unlike most all unappetizing mac n cheese you find served in a rib joint.

If you look at the word macaroni, or really "maccheroni" in Italian history it does indeed refer to a generalized collection of dry pasta shapes and does not refer only to what we call elbow macaroni, which is just a shape of pasta. And yes elbows are frequently used for mac n cheese, but other shapes you favor don't make the baked pasta dish any less an official mac n cheese. To complicate matters, let's talk about Yankee Doodle. The "macaroni" in the song actually refers to a European style of dressing popularized by the aristocracy in the 1700's; maccheroni meant a dandyish outfit. In other words, if you put a feather in your cap and called it "macaroni" you were an American yankee making fun of Europeans, and probably of Italians in specific. Racism, baked in.

What do you mean, "eating it alone?" And this topic is very confusing. Are we discussing only the ethics of eating baby animals vs adults? Or just baby cows vs baby other animals? Food Ethics is such an enormous topic. When it comes to cows alone you could fill a library. There are just too many cows on earth. And when it comes to food ethics in general, we all make our own personal deals with the devil.

No idea where I got this instruction but I always do it for potato salad: Cut the boiled potatoes while still very warm. Dress with just salt and vinegar and let sit fifteen minutes before adding everything else. whether it's no mayo or a lot of mayo. I have to say that most recipes for mayo-style potato salad call for.way more mayo than I could ever imagine using. I've seen recipes that suggest a cup of mayo for a potato salad that basically feeds three people. Now that's goopy.