Katie Meadow

Sigh. Some day one of my trips to the south will coincide with muscadine season. They look beautiful.

Looking good, @weinoo. Matiz peppers, my fave. At first I read "Castrato" and thought oh, a new Tarot card. But no. It's just a person with a fish. Amazing displays.

I could be misinformed, but my warning is for wild picked foraged mushrooms in particular. I know that there are plenty of people who eat common supermarket mushrooms raw and don't suffer bad consequences, but that vague warning about all raw mushrooms is still floating about. Some sources say that raw mushrooms don't give up their nutrients readily and that they should all be cooked for that reason. I don't eat any mushrooms without cooking them, but that's partly because I don't like them raw. I used to belong to the SF Mycological Society and it was generally agreed that certain wild mushrooms can make you sick when eaten raw but are tasty and fine to eat cooked. It's been a while since I foraged for shrooms, but caution is always advised. Here in coastal CA Deathcaps, aka Destroying Angels or Amanita phalliodes, are common in the winter. I haven't heard about any disasters in the last few years, but apparently Deathcaps look like a common edible in Southeast Asia. But of course we haven't had a lot of rain in the last few years, so maybe that's limited the body count.

It has always seemed to me that the market for these "meat wannabes" is limited. Many of us who are concerned about the environmental impact of eating animal protein have other options, which are usually going to be chosen by any number of complex factors: individual taste, philosophy, etc. Every choice is going to be a compromise of some kind. You can decide simply to not eat the worst offenders: beef, lamb (not really a factor in the US), endangered or unsustainable species or methods of capture that are most harmful. Whether you chose to be a strict vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian or whatever your personal inclinations will usually be just that: personal--and will rarely be totally logical. I eat beef at most a few times a year. If I get a desperate hankering for a green chile burger, I indulge. I try to buy good quality sustainably raised product. It's just me, but I don't feel like I need a beef substitute, but then I'm not that attached to beef. There are so many appealing ways to eat black beans other than making them into a patty and putting ketchup on them. What seems to be important is for everyone to do SOMETHING, no matter how inconsequential it may seem to others.

Never a bad thing to remind people who forage for mushrooms that besides the importance of proper ID, there are many mushrooms out there that are okay eaten cooked, but should not be eaten raw.

More icky September heat in the bay area, so cold noodles are my favorite no-fuss dinners these days. After my fiasco with the cold noodle soup above, I'm now doing the simplest possible thing: cold Szechuan noodles. Fresh Chinese noodles are the bees knees. I make a sauce using smoked soy sauce, black vinegar, rice vinegar, garlic, hot chili oil or chili garlic sauce, a little sesame oil and a little peanut oil or rice bran oil plus a small pinch of sugar. Then I just spoon it over room temp lo mein and top with scallion. Edamame in some form or other on the side, or pickled cabbage. I have noticed that many recipes on line are for a Szechuan peanut sauce noodles. Almost all of those call for American style peanut butter, which strikes me as unappealing. Try using Jade Sichuan peanut sauce instead. It seems to be readily available in stores and on line. If you sub it for peanut butter adjust the other ingredients a bit. The Jade sauce has some heat to it.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so? Hospital budgets most likely don't have enough wiggle room to provide quality ingredients, nor can they pay for a great chef. When they serve chicken noodle soup there isn't a snowball's chance in hell they are making their own stock! And in addition I am guessing that there is a required standard baseline low-salt blandness as well, so even what little variety the patients who don't need special diets can get, there isn't much the hospital can do without putting lots more dollars toward the food. Probably the kitchen philosophy is simply to keep people alive, despite what you may think when you see your joke of a tray. The administration needs to scrimp and save wherever they can so they can build up their lawsuit protection funds.

What about dumpling fillings?

I'm in the @blue_dolphincamp. Breakfast is on the late side. Then I might have a snack, or not. Dinner, which is really Linner, happens anywhere between 3:30 and 5:00 pm. Later in the evening we might have a cocktail or a snack. Or dessert. This schedule developed a few years ago, and was made possible by the fact that we had both retired. In addition, I've had some health issues and lack the energy to cook later in the evening. And on top of that, the kitchen doesn't have the best lighting, and I need more and more light as time goes by, so prepping and cooking after dark isn't fun. I'm working on that, slowly upping the wattage and starting to put in under-the-counter lighting. But the 60's cabinetry, all birch, is still in use, so as with many renovations of a 1915 craftsman house, upgrades have been piecemeal and can often entail working around cranky systems. And we are getting cranky as well. It is no mystery why older people develop new habits.

I rarely eat beef any more, but I do know how expensive oxtail is nowadays. In New Mexico I learned to make a green chile stew with oxtail and potatoes. That was in the early seventies, and oxtail was not so precious. My memory is that one tail would make a great broth and provide enough meat for several large bowls. Delicious, it was.

I'm thinking I should get out my neglected bamboo steamer and try steaming something and see if I can get at least some of my money's worth out of it. I make dumplings often, but I don't steam them. I make wontons, which are boiled, and pot-stickers, which are also not steamed . But where the hell is my bamboo steamer, anyway?

@liuzhouIt wouldn't surprise me if they were served but not steamed in the bamboo basket. They seem pretty delicate, and a leak onto the next-down layer of dumplings would be a mess. Also the bottoms of a couple of dumplings can get sticky and make it a bit tricky to even maneuver them onto a spoon, so there's a good reason right there to steam them in something they might be less likely to stick to. And I hope you are on the mend. This probably sounds totally stupid, but I think I would rather have lousy Chinese hospital food than the lousy American hospital food we get.

I've had a bamboo steamer for about twenty years. I used it once! So not exactly a brilliant purchase. When we were in Asheville NC there were a couple of good restaurants within walking distance that served soup dumplings in the top basket. Enough room for 6 dumplings. Soup dumplings don't seem to be as common here in the Bay Area. Since we both had colds and were in an airbnb that wasn't well stocked, those two restaurants were life-savers.

Take care and get better fast, whatever it is.

Well, okay, I didn't read the intro, and I'm a teeny bit embarrassed. I may be a dope, but my critique of the Times food editors still stands: why not call it Cold Noodle Soup with Tomatoes? As a cold soup, constructed by dumping in a lot of water and ice, it doesn't sound very appealing and I most likely would not have made it. Lesson learned! But as a cold sauced noodle dish (not soup) it wasn't bad! My takeaway from this is twofold: 1) Read a recipe carefully before making it. 2) Trust your instincts. And many thanks to all of you for being better readers.

Sometimes I wonder if the NYT actually tests their recipes with wide awake experienced humans in a kitchen. This was a recent recipe of theirs that I made, and it was pretty good. However my adjustments almost read like a joke, since I made so many of them. A couple of days later I looked at the recipe again and noticed that a couple of savvy critics were also mystified by some of the steps. https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022543-cold-noodles-with-tomatoes I made this because we are having a very nasty heat wave here in the Bay Area and I really do like cold Asian style noodles. Changes I made, some also made by others, included cutting the amount of water added to the sauce by at least half, so the sauce still had some flavor. The other really weird instruction has to do with cooling down the cooked noodles: they specify adding a ridiculous amount of crushed ice to the sauced noodles. First of all that dilutes the sauce, and second of all why not just allow time for your noodles to get cold? After all it isn't supposed to a cold soup, which would happen if one used the amount of total water they suggest. I didn't have any nice fresh Chinese wheat noodles, so I used thin spaghetti, which was fine. I cut back the volume of cherry tomatoes, didn't use any sugar in the sauce because I just didn't see the need. I added cooked, cooled shelled edamame, and upped the sliced radishes and scallions. In the end it turned out to be quite good. I like the technique of mixing up all the sauce and vegetables and then spooning it over individual portions. That avoids the annoyance of trying to serve well balanced portions of slippery noodles and sauce.

I've made Atlantic Beach Pie a bunch of times. I liked it with the saltine crust but my husband did not. I found a recipe that used a lemon biscotti to make the crust and that pleased us both. I imagine you could use any number of biscotti flavors, but I think a softer biscotti may work better than a very hard crunchy one.

And then there's Bridge Mix, always a sign of disappointments to follow when you see them in a bowl. Like raisinettes. I have no memory of Passover candy. My concept of Israeli candy is still stuck with Hannukah gelt. Worse even than Hershey's milk chocolate. For dessert at Passover my favorite tradition was meringues and strawberries. And a gluten-free walnut cake that everyone loved except me.

Sorry, not good enough! I don't need pix. But I do want to know what it was, and most importantly, whether or not you made it

so funny! It's been so long since I had canned salmon that I forgot about that little bone. The few times in the last 40 years we have opened a can I don't believe my husband even knew that little bone existed. I got to it too fast. Same thing when we have sardines on toast. I confiscate this little spines at once. My justification is that I need the calcium more than he does.

I too am a big fan of the Nyakers tin. I have tried smaller packs of the same and they don't stay as crisp as the big tin ones. I look the other way and pretend that there isn't a enormous quantity of what the ingredients lists as "vegetable margarine." But let's face it, you couldn't make such an affordable cookie using real butter. But they aren't graham crackers.

My experience is like yours. Either Honey Maid has gone downhill or my taste buds are too fussy. They are bland and too sweet to my taste these days. Always surprised that no graham cracker alternatives exist. You would think the time has come for those of us who seek nostalgic foods. Just think what good s'mores could be made with better graham crackers and decent bittersweet chocolate I have made Alton Brown's recipe and they were good, but a lot of work for a few graham crackers. And I agree, Bob's graham flour is very nice..

The smoked trout I've had from TJ's is not canned. It's in the fridge section. It is very very salty. The last time I bought it I could barely eat it, even in small amounts. Of course YMMV, and it is also possible that the product varies as well.

Which place on Clement do you like best for your takeout? A million years ago I lived a couple of blocks from Clement.

Has anyone done a taste test to compare the Nuri vs the Pinhais? The cans of Nuri do say Pinhais in smallish print. On Amazon the 4-pack variety descriptions are just the same. Both are 4.4 oz per can. If they are in fact the same origin marketed differently then the Nuri are a much better deal. I haven't been to Cost Plus World Market in a zillion years, but as far as I know they still exist in Oakland. Only reason to go there is to go to Bev Mo on the same trip, a couple of blocks away.