Katie Meadow

I must be in the minority here. The older I get the more my goals for meals change. If I'm going to take the trouble to cook something that appeals I want to come out the other side with.a LARGE one dish meal that can be eaten for days or frozen for later. I don't want to cook every meal, every day. Leftovers are my religion. Red beans and rice three days in a row? Fine with me. Baking? I want a big loaf or pie that I can hack away at or slice and toast for days to come. Baking one cookie at a time. What if it turns out to be a really good cookie? Don't you want another? Is there a recipe for one deviled egg? The carbon footprint for this type of cooking isn't negligible. Heat your oven for twenty minutes. Bake one cookie. It just sounds nutty.

Totally agree with that. Also, the secret to a great turkey pot pie is chicken.@CookBotyou may not know that @Ann_T doesn't actually sleep. It must be one of her super-powers. And that she was baking baguettes at 4 am this morning, which is why she baked the pot pie in the evening instead. Otherwise it would have been Moe's breakfast and her lunch.

I'm pretty happy with the Matiz sardines, but haven't tried Nuri. Can anyone weigh in on a comparison or at least speak for the Nuri? And now let's talk about mackerel. I just tried the Nuri spiced mackerel and it is pretty interesting. A little on the dry side and very salty. How I ate them: my husband and I split one can and topped short-grain Japanese rice w the fish and the spicy oil. The level of spice is just right, at least for me. Since the salt factor was high we didn't feel like we needed more fish. Next time I might try a sprinkle or rice vinegar on the rice as well. Does anyone have recommendations for other Portuguese or Spanish tinned mackerel? Spicy or not. Maybe more tender or maybe less salty? Before I start randomly ordering on line, any suggestions would be appreciated.

@BeeZeeif you have time don't forget to get yourselves to Hole Donuts in the morning! Fried to order!

Pickled eggs in beet juice are always stunning with their red rims, but I've never had one that wasn't rubbery. Is there a way to avoid that? I feel the same about pickled shrimp. Pickled shrimp is always tempting for a party because they look great and can be made the day ahead. But can they be pickled and still be tender?

Bad idea is putting it mildly.

I have no idea! I've never made a pecan pie. I count on my SIL to make one at Thanksgiving. 1:1 sounds like a good place to start. I think corn syrup is sweeter than cane syrup. The thing about most pecan pies is that they are usually far too sweet for me. I love my SIL so I give her a pass. I save my slice for breakfast the next day, when I'm too tired or hung over or disoriented to make any judgments about anything.

I haven't noticed the disappearance of Bucheron. I know raw milk cheeses used to be available where I shopped, but not so much these days. My favorite cheese in the world is a cheese called "Lou Peralou," which is a sheep's milk brie that I believe is produced in Basque-adjacent territory. I haven't seen it in a million years but I'm still whining about it.

@Steve IrbyI'm a big fan of Steen's products, especially the cane syrup. I use it combined with honey when making granola, and use it for a drizzle in southern style greens along with a spritz of the cane vinegar Maple syrup I like on pancakes, but prefer Steen's in many recipes. Also I sub it for corn syrup, which I don't like. And for molasses, which I often find too, well, molassesy. I've been trying to convince my sister-in-law to use Steen's syrup in her pecan pie. I know that the Southerners are very loyal to Camellia but I have to say that compared with Rancho Gordo beans they seem kinda dull. I make red beans and rice often, and swear by RG's Domingo Rojo beans. For a straight ahead red kidney bean I find the organic dark red kidneys from Purcell Mountain Farms very good, although the Domingo Rojo beans are my go-to. When I visit my daughter in Atlanta I now pack some of those in my suitcase since my daughter and my husband are big fans of red beans and rice.

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.