Katie Meadow

Blackberries are my absolute favorite berry. All the reliable patches we used to pick have been plowed under for one reason or another. Some patches were thorny, some not so bad. Yes, long sleeves were advisable. The biggest danger was if they were growing entangled in poison oak. I don't understand why the commercial ones are usually so mediocre or unripe. Always seems like a waste of money. Once in a while we would make a pie, but often I just ate them in a bowl with cream poured over. Heavenly.

Five minutes, which is about the time it takes to make a thermos of tea. I don't cook breakfast. If my husband decides to make biscuits or pancakes I time my appearance for five minutes before anything is ready. Ordinarily I just eat toast and fruit. If there's leftover pizza that's exciting and, since my technique for heating it involves popping it in the toaster, it takes about as long as toast. We eat an early dinner, so I'm hungry in the morning. And please don't talk to me. My husband gets up earlier than I do, so the butter and marmalade are already out. He even cuts my bread for me, mainly because I am bad at making even slices and he seems to be a genius in that respect. He doesn't want me to cut my own because it means his next slice will always be a wonky correction. Just let me know when it's ready, @blue_dolphin!

Not at all ready to pull the trigger, but I found the Hubs website shipping info very elusive. Can anyone here tell how much they paid for shipping?

I have never been fond of green bell pepper, but until I joined eG I had no idea how many people hated them. I will use one when cooking red beans and rice because it seems like heresy not to. After a couple of hours cooking with the beans they pretty much disappear. Otherwise I have little use for them. Raw? No way.

@liuzhouI think of peanut butter and peanut sauce as very different critters. Peanut butter should be as simple as possible: ground up peanuts. Jif and Skippy, the two most widely used peanut butters in America, are highly processed and full of sugar. Most of us grew up on them in PB & J sandwiches. For that classic I prefer a more natural brand with no sugar added, like Adams. I'm not so into it that I am willing to grind my own nuts, although that can be wonderful. Perhaps I am culturally off base ur just of limited experience, but I think of peanut sauce as a more complex sauce for Chinese noodles or dipping sauce for certain--mostly Asian--snacking items. But for an easy hack in making Asian style peanut sauce I'm very happy with Jade brand All Natural Sichuan Peanut Sauce. It has heat and flavor. There are plenty of other peanut-based sauce products out there on store shelves, but I'm not wild about the other ones I've tasted. I didn't mean to dis the use of peanut butter as an ingredient in making sauces. I'm sure there's no end to the variety of sauces that can be whipped up by a talented cook; it's just one of those things I don't tackle. Hope this makes sense.

Ditto. May your stay be short.

@weinoo, I would have thought Balthazar could do better than just ketchup.

I'm equally confused and in the same way. Also what is the real meaning of cured vs brined? My understanding is that curing is the first step, done with lye or some other technique to leach out the bitterness. You can stop there or you can then brine them in a salt solution with herbs or all kinds of things. To my knowledge, all commercially sold olives are brined after curing for longevity and safely's sake. My FIL always picked olives from the trees that used to lead to the Davis Ca airport. They were usually a mix of green turning to black. He would cure t hem with the classic lye solution over a period of days that involved changing the water often. When all the bitterness was leached out he would simply put the them in water. He would do batches with red peppers, batches with garlic, and plain. I love love loved the plain ones. He did not brine them in salt, and so you had to eat them within a couple of weeks or they would go bad. Really delicious. His olives seemed naturally sweet, very different from any brined ones. We did it a couple of times with him and on our own. The olives were ripened on the trees, picked in mid-November in typically unpleasant damp chilly weather, which he considered part of the fun. He was definitely a "no pain no gain" kind of guy. But then, sadly, the city of Davis mysteriously cut down all the trees. By that time my FIL was too old to be climbing shaky ladders anyway.

Were you having cheerios at cocktail hour or having wine for breakfast? Or did you wake up at five am and raid the fridge? We need more details in order to assess the level of your depravity.

In my experience, peaches are unpredictable. Since sources vary widely, from farmers' markets to big and little stores, some peaches seem to ripen well in a bowl with other fruit over a period of days. Some peaches just don't ripen properly no matter what you do to them. And just because a peach is ripe, doesn't mean it's good. Just read @blue_dolphin's post above. Makes sense.

Yes, while Canada is on fire it's unseasonably chilly in the Bay Area as well, but a ripe apricot and a popsicle sounds more like a breakfast of champions to me than a raw hedgehog that isn't even a hedgehog. Enough lolling around in bed eGulleting. I'm getting up now to find some toast to butter. I'm in luck today since my husband baked two rustic sourdough loaves yesterday. Home-baked bread and home made marmalade, without a grain of nutritional yeast in sight. But wonder of wonders, I do have a strong desire to put some pink streaks in my silver hair.

So the nutritional yeast creates an insatiable desire for a frozen mett hedgehog? You had me at pink hair.

Who doesn't want nice skin and pink hair? Markers of youth! But does it create an urge to eat frozen food when it is still frozen, straight out of the freezer?

Nutritional yeast? I wake up at 3 am just like she does, but do I get out of bed and do something useful? I do not. When I finally come down for breakfast I can barely butter my own toast.

Really it's only the nutritional yeast that's a new wrinkle. My mom never made me a BPHNY sandwich to take to school. Peanut butter, often salted, and honey on white bread isn't exactly revolutionary. And besides that, people who enjoy nutritional yeast tend to put in on all kinds of stuff that we have all been eating for years without it. I mean how do you create a new recipe using nutritional yeast? Don;t answer that! I've been reading the NYT and getting their emails for a zillion years and more and more I get tripped up by recycled recipes. Like, oh wait, I already decided I didn't want to make that last week and last year. Okay, so there are a new crop of readers every day, which is all to the good, so I get it. But another thing they are guilty of--and Eric Kim and Melissa Clark are big offenders--is reinventing the wheel. How many combinations of broccoli and cheddar are there really? Thousands? Here's one that will turn your dinner into a fireworks show and your kids into broccoli lovers! I know I sound cranky! And god knows I have plenty of NYT recipes in my files. And I admit I have never ingested nutritional yeast willingly, so the possibility that I am missing out on something fantastic is real. I can live with that. I will say this, @blue_dolphin , I so agree with @Anna Nthat your breakfast salads are amazing. And your popsicles are in a class by themselves. Where do you get your energy? Nutritional yeast?

OMG! I just glanced at this entry and I made a mistake! The sale was $179. No idea if that's still available. Sorry! I'm sure that original post wasn't very helpful.

As a person who vowed never to own a toaster oven, I have had many toasters in my many years. My all time favorite was the Sunbeam Radiant Control. You put the toast in. It goes down all by itself and comes back up toasted, all by itself. Yes, it was a miracle.Yes it was beautiful to look at. It was invented in 1949 and if it existed today it would cost approximately $260. However, it was a toaster, and by definition imperfect. I was a flea-market junkie in my twenties, and bought them whenever I saw them for a good price. None of them lasted forever and none, of course, made the perfect piece of toast. We who love toasters have no illusions abcout the beauty and the evanescence of toasters. This fact has never stopped any company from producing armies of toasters. (Think Cylons.) Just ask @andiesenji, who needed a whole room devoted to her collection. Sooner or later, often sooner, a toaster does something you don't like and it goes downhill from there. Eight or ten years ago we bought a Smeg toaster. It's made in Italy. The design is stylishly retro, very appealing, and it comes in some lovely colors. It is not cheap. Made for two wide slices, with a bagel button to toast one side as needed. A decent timer. It still works adequately, with increasing quirks, which is part of living with a toaster until you can no longer live with it.

Oh yeah, I remember those vending machine Boston Baked Beans. I hated them. It's a mystery to me why these sweet candied peanuts are called Beer Nuts. I prefer salted nuts with my alcohol. But then go to a ballgame and there's usually someone nearby ordering cotton candy while they have a half-cup of beer still in their paws.

Looks and sounds great. Plz direct me to the recipe! I always default to Laurie Colvin's Damp Gingerbread, but something different would be fun for a change. Thanks!

I'd put my Irish butter in that one and use my regular boring butter dish for my regular boring butter. As it is we now keep half sticks of each on one butter dish which is messy, fussy and annoying. My retinas are somewhat compromised and it's hard to tell the different easily, plus sometimes I want one or the other at room temp. This would go under the dubious heading of simplifying my life by buying more crap. A few years from now I could pass that adorable dish along to the twin grand-girls if they are the kind of girls who make high tea for themselves and their companions, whether stuffed or imaginary. Right now it looks more like one of them will prefer the mud of the soccer field and the other will become a cat burglar in a black suit dangling from a second story eave. They turn two today!

I like this Mutti brand for 14 oz cans of cherry tomatoes. The also are sold in a sixpack for $23. They are acidic and peppy, a little sharper than most of the 28 oz DOP Marzanos that I buy locally. I usually add a can when making a big batch of sauce. Nice to have an option for a small can when that's all you need. I also like the Mutti tube of tomato paste. https://www.amazon.com/Mutti-Cherry-Tomatoes-oz-12-Pack/dp/B00HXSKHKA/ref=sr_1_6?crid=3C40IYS3KGBP0&keywords=mutti+tomatoes&qid=1686250243&sprefix=mutti%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-6

The Hormel co. would have you believe that Spam is a contraction for Spiced Ham. Haters will tell you it stands for Specially Processed American Meat or Specially Processed Animal Meat. In any case it's the butt of jokes and gets more hate mail that probably any other processed food. The typeface, ITC Souvenir Bold, also is the most hated typeface on the planet. Paul Theroux surmised that Spam became popular when eating human flesh went out of favor. I apologize to all those Spam fans for bringing that up. I grew up making fun of Spam but never tasting it. When curiosity got the better of me I tried it. One bite was enough. I'm in the Theroux camp. My husband had it as a kid, but he grew up to be a book designer and then he couldn't get past the typeface, let alone the taste.

A blast from the past. I looked up deviled ham on line to see what the packaging looked like. I remember the spread from my college days, especially that devil on the wrapper. Not being a church going soul this would have never occurred to me: The term dates to the 19th century, and it was used to refer to foods that were spicy or zesty with the addition of mustard or pepper. In some regions of the South and the Midwest, deviled eggs are also called salad or dressed eggs when they are served at a church function, to avoid the term "deviled." How to avoid those pesky questions from young children. What's next after banning books? Ban the can. It won't work.The devil's in the details.

Am I hallucinating? Nuts.com sells 16 oz of jumbo salted VA. peanuts for $4.99. Hubs sells 20 oz of same for $27.95. ?

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?