Katie Meadow

I have one Silpat that I was gifted with a few years ago. I don't use it often, just once in a while, since I don't bake sweets that much. It works. I agree that it never feels truly clean, but I think it comes out of the box with a creepy greasy texture to begin with. Can't swear to that, but it has never been a feel-good object.

That, and the fact that you need an additional large bowl to put the blended soup into until the soup pot is empty and you can pour back in the blended soup. I have an old workhorse of a processor which I use consistently and a Ninja bullet blender which is really great for smoothies and also easy to clean. My first move will be to put the lousy blender up into high storage and see whether I ever really want to use it. Right now the only thing I can think of that a blender does best is make chile sauce from dried chiles. However, my blender really doesn't have enough power and makes an inferior sauce. Pros like Bayless and others have high tech super blenders for that job. Not going there.

Thanks @Margaret Pilgrimand others who recommended the Bamix immersion blender. That was my xmas gift and I used it for the first time today. It's brilliant! Made a large pot of leek and potato soup. Can't believe how well it blends. Perfect!

The navels available in our market for juicing these days are pale and tasteless. The Valencias have been better. Also helps to just add the juice of one blood orange. Even if one orange doesn't jazz up the flavor much, at least the color makes you think it's better. I love straight blood orange juice, but you need lots of them. I've used a mix with cara cara oranges and that's pretty good; they are often pretty juicy. I use Sevilles only for making marmalade, and that's where the seeds come in handy as well.

It sounds like I have two possible paths. The first is experiment with the steel in the oven while baking on it, under it or whatever. Science experiments take live synapses and concentration and organization. Like, yawn. The other path is the path of least resistance: check the oven to see if the steel is in there. Then ask pizza man husband to get it out. I'll think about it for a few days.

At some point I must have been told never to refreeze, and I don't. The advice must not have come from my mother, because then I would have ignored it

I do the same, but with the bananas. I'm good with meringue or whipped cream. Just keep the bananas out of it.

It never occurred to me to keep the steel in the oven. Does it affect the heat? If you put a cookie sheet directly on it do they bake hotter or faster? Does this qualify as a a stupid question? If so I've missed my opportunity to contribute to that thread.

Our pizza steel is 3/8 inch. Yes, it's heavy, but certainly isn't a problem with racks in the regular oven. The biggest hazard or irritant is that I often forget to remove it before heating up the oven for whatever gets baked next. Getting it out while hot is no picnic. Hint: remove the whole oven rack with the steel on it to the stove top. We've never used aluminum, so can't comment on it. Love the steel, though.

Me too. And right now my absolute favorite quick pickle is this one from Woks of Life: https://thewoksoflife.com/asian-pickled-cabbage/ It's very basic, which means, at least for me, that it is multipurpose: works well with most Asian dishes and also with Mexican since it adds nothing but salt, water, vinegar, garlic and chile pepper to cabbage and carrots. The first step is to massage with salt. I like to add 1 small chile de arbol to the final jar, at the top, because my current batch of chiles is very hot. After 24 hours I remove it, since the mixture will increase in heat by the day if left in. One whole big cabbage seems the right amount, and along with the sliced carrots, perfectly fits one quart canning jar. Ready to eat in a day. Doesn't last long in our house.

I buy two things whenever I am in an airport about to fly, which of course will never happen again. One is a package of m & m's and another is a cooking / food magazine. I simply go to the racks and pick out which ever one looks most appealing. It usually gives me 30 minutes of entertainment once I'm strapped in, often enough time for the plane to get off the ground. I gave up on subscriptions years and years ago when it seemed like the number of recipes declined and the double page spreads of overly curated foods took over. Also the general design of all these magazines started looking like they were meant for younger people: reverse-out type for a recipe? You couldn't read it, let alone copy it. But back to the plane. I still had the m & m's!

They look very appealing. Coffee Gator's philosophy seems to be to make a cup of coffee good enough to keep consumers buying the product again and again despite the rate of breakage. The reviews are hilarious. I've wasted lots of change on metal filters. I had a fantastic gold one that was a very fine mesh resulting in a slow drip. It tore after years of heavy use. They stopped making that model and all subsequent purchases were a disappointment; the water drained through too fast. I'm not sure I see the advantage of the smallest size glass beaker. Wouldn't it be easier to just style the mini size to fit over an 8 oz cup like that traditional melitta cone? No breakage.

Few things surprise me at this point. We may yet wish we had stocked up on MRE's at Costco.

More salt.

@Kim Shookmmm! Violet Crumble! Is the honeycomb candy you made like the inside of a Violet Crumble?

I'm sorry I ever said a word. I've never gotten dizzy from a handful of cheetos or a sliced tomato, and I've eaten plenty of both. This thread proves that people just love to defame or defend MSG at the drop of a hat. I'm out!

No personal electrical appliances in the trenches? Who knew? Not even a silent Sunbeam stealth toaster? Wherever you were hunkered down, if you were packing MRE's you probably didn't have sliced bread, either. Maybe a toast fork can be weaponized, because it wouldn't be very useful without a fire, which you also couldn't have.

If only Nigel Slater designed MREs for the armed forces. You may not have had an MRE as provided by the military, but I know you've had Spam, and that's the closest civilian relative I can think of. No toasters in the trenches--too much noise when they pop up. A dead giveaway if the toast flies out above ground.

The only experiences I've had with MSG have been Chinese restaurants. Since I don't have any Chinese restaurants where I adore the food, it's very rare that I have to confront the problem. Especially these days, of course. My own wontons, pot stickers, stir-fry dishes and so on make me happy. In fact I never order dumplings at restaurants, because mine are better. I understand that urge toward scientific experiments as @Duvelsuggests, but that's just not me. As for salt, I've never gotten dizzy from it, and I've had plenty of food that I thought was way too salty. Ask me if I care about all the studies debunking the effects of MSG!

I've never been able to detect the difference in taste when MSG is added to restaurant food. About twenty minutes later I know for sure one way or the other. No mistaking the symptoms for me. I don't eat a lot of Chinese restaurant food, partly because of that and partly because most of it doesn't seem that great. I make some dishes at home, admittedly a limited repertoire, and never wish they had more flavor. The fact that some people are sensitive to MSG and others not never seems to figure into "scientific" judgments. All I know is that if it isn't the MSG it is something in the food that doesn't like me. My husband doesn't react to it, or perhaps he's just generally spacey.

I've looked back on the foods that have survived frequent rotation during the past ten months. Mostly it has been comfort food which means several things. One is the nostalgia factor, the things I grew up eating pm the east coast or ate during my years in New Mexico, during the late sixties and early seventies. That would be wonton soup, various other Chinese dumplings, bagels and lox, linguini with clams, tuna melts, rice pudding, date-nut bread with cream cheese, root beer floats and of course pizza, although our home made pizza doesn't resemble a NY slice. Ever-present today are some of the foods I lived on in NM, admittedly with tweaks: pots of beans, burritos, flour tortillas, a constant freezer supply of roasted green chiles. Rattlesnake beans cowboy style over rice is what's for dinner tonight, on New Year's day, with Chile con Queso as an app and some pickled cabbage and carrots for a side. Another requirement about comfort food: I have to feel comfortable making it. It can't be too involved or time consuming. Yes, I have plenty of time, but limited energy for cooking. And, surprisingly, it involves decreasing amounts of meat, especially red meat. I ate beef for the first time in two years on xmas eve, in honor of a NM tradition. My first burrito was from basically a window in Albuquergue which became a years-long habit: a huge affair with pork, green chile and pinto beans, wrapped in foil, no table service, and eaten in the car. While driving a stick shift. The green chile was searingly hot. Now my burritos are very different, often made with rice and shrimp or fish, more coastal CA, more often with a hot red sauce. Soups are a constant. There's always some kind of stock in the freezer. So is pasta with a basic marinara sauce that gets frozen in pints; sometimes that becomes penne with a little hot Italian sausage, sometimes it becomes cauliflower with red pepper flakes on linguini fini. And now during the citrus months, fresh squeeze orange juice for breakfast seems important, where it used to seem too much trouble. I'd rather spend big bucks on a bag of oranges than on a hunk of meat, but that's just me, now. Prepared take out during the pandemic has been every couple of weeks from the same place we've been to for years, a Vietnamese place that has the strongest most delicious iced coffee you can imagine. Best for lunch, or it pretty much ruins our night.

Your kids ate broccoli? Happy New Year, night owl.

I've always been partial to leftover curried vegetables as a pie filling. Basic potato, cauliflower, peas, carrots and spinach or other greens, etc baked in a double crust. Or a single top crust works for deep dish. Not too sweet dough, all butter crust. Served with chutney or pickle and cucumber raita and tart apple, sliced thin.

That's probably correct. If you like crepes I suppose you could try making crepes in it, but it doesn't seem like a standard crepe shape to me. But I don't like crepes, so I wouldn't use it that way. If I acquired this pan I guess I would simply try lots of different things with it and see what it works best for. It's got a big diameter, so perhaps you could bake fish in the oven with it? Or maybe a very simple slim upside down fruit tarte? Fresh fruit in caramel, pastry over the top to bake. Really just winging it here. If you don't think it would be very useful, check out eBay and see what they go for in various conditions, used or unused. Somebody will buy it at the right price.

So....1 lb of macaroni uses 1 1/2 sticks of butter and 4 cups of various cheeses plus a cup of cream. Rich, you think? Americans will eat mac and cheese at the drop of a hat, as far as I can tell. Thanksgiving, xmas, whenever it's available. I get a craving maybe once a year, but mine is modest compared to many. And I always have a side of roasted green chiles to add, NM style! I admit that at Thanksgiving 2019 a new guest brought a big casserole of mac and cheese, which was his tradition. And since I am so bored of the traditional turkey and fixings it was a welcome change.