Katie Meadow

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?

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!