Katie Meadow

@heidih, @Kim Shook et al, whoever recommended Nyakers gingersnaps, thanks for creating one more quandary for me. One box and I'm an addict. How do you keep them from getting soft? The only way I can think of is to eat the entire sealed package within 24 hours. I'm perfectly capable of doing that, but it would be nice to give myself an extra day or two. Ideas?

How exactly do you saturate and drain the paper filter?

For several years I had a great gold filter; it was fine enough so that the coffee drained slowly through it. I got a lot of use out of it, but finally it became raggedy and failed. I tried to replace the exact type but it was no longer available. I tried three or four kinds, including the stainless steel one cited above and none of them were fine enough to slow the flow. I gave up on metal filters entirely. I drink far less coffee than I used to, and I'm happy when my husband makes a press pot.

My mother was crazy for shad roe. She used to wrap it in bacon and saute it. I take one bite and find it amazing. Then after another bite I get overwhelmed by how rich it is. I would much rather have the shad. So delicious! A fish you don't see on the west coast. Citarella would bone it for you. Or at least they did in the past.

Agree--Almondinas original flavor are excellent! Most all commercial cookies seem blah to me, but then I don't think I am a cookie person. However there is one packaged tea biscuit / cookie I really like, and that's Effie's Oatcakes. They are not too sweet and just a little salty. And, unfortunately, pricey.

@liuzhouare those morels farmed or foraged? Do they tell you when you buy them? Just curious. I know that morel cultivation is still in its infancy, but China is apparently ahead of the curve.

I haven't made that recipe in years, but for a while it was in frequent rotation. My husband is now the chicken-roasting person. He just makes a bed of cut potatoes and lets the whole chicken cook on top of them in the oven. Works, and I get a night off. The potatoes are my favorite part. If I am just roasting potatoes I really like a bit of duck fat. In the summer months though I really love a room temp potato salad. I have one I'm crazy for this year.

You have a cat? We shop the same way, and I try not to forget what a privilege that is. Safeway is for paper products and Cheetos; things not sold where we buy vegetables or protein or bread. Many people don't have those options. It helps to live somewhere with a large multi-ethnic population. Or in a climate with a long growing season and a lot of farms and farmers' markets. It gets very complicated.

Ah, more great memories from the kitchen of @JoNorvelleWalker. When you got back from the ER I hope you reassured your guests that you got special artisanal red carrots from the market when they praised the beautiful color of the soup. @gilbertlevinethanks for the tip, but I have to confess I don't really like carrot soup. Also I'm very lazy, as in once the carrot is peeled I'm not likely to cook it.

I love carrots, especially raw. BUT. I can't remember the last time I had a really good sweet one. It doesn't seem to matter much where they come from. Farmer's market carrots don't seem to be a guarantee. I would be munching them all the time if they so often were not tasteless, woody or dry or were nothing but a fibrous core. And I adore carrot juice. If carrots were consistently sweet and tender I would have gotten a juicer long ago. Carrot and grapefruit juice is one of my favorite combos. Carrot and orange isn't bad either.

For the last six months we have adjusted to larger shopping hauls, less often. With a little fill in for fruit, tomatoes and so on we usually stretch our major shopping events to two weeks. Sweet potatoes are an excellent "end of days" food; just as good two weeks after they were purchased. But I do need lots of butter and salt to be happy.

Missed that. You are way ahead of me. I'm still trapped in the goo.

Speaking of molasses in storage tanks: the great flood of 1919. Maybe that's when they invented Boston Baked Beans. https://www.history.com/news/great-molasses-flood-science

Thanks for the info, @dtremit. It's unlikely I will ever make baked beans, I just don't enjoy them. My husband would be happy to have my portion at a pot luck/barbecue. Also I'm not into molasses. I find that anything molasses can do Steen's cane syrup can do better!

First I put the banana on a plate. Then I cut it neatly in half with a knife. Then I peel each half and throw away the peels so I don't have to look at them. They're unsightly, don't you think? And what if I dropped one and then slipped on it and cracked my head on the tile floor? Then I would have to post something in the "I'll Never do That Again" thread and there's no competing with @JoNorvelleWalkerso what's the point? But I digress. So now I have two perfect peeled halves of banana on a plate. And that's how I open them.

I eat a banana about once every three years, but only because I think it's good for me.

Most institutional food is the product of restricted budgets. The ingredients are bought in bulk, as cheaply as possible. The cooks are underpaid and under-skilled. Hospital food is additionally crippled by dietary rules as well, such as very low salt and very low fat. The use of canned foods is prevalent. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, like a bigger budget or a few dedicated souls out there who have some tricks in their bag, but you get what you pay for generally. And American standards are pretty low. When this subject is raised someone always brings up the French defense; how the school lunches are so wonderful. My husband remembers this from his one year in France in middle school. I wonder if it is like that now, or if it was simply better by comparison.

Oh, my mistake, my brain is fizzled.

Is there a person who eats out even once in a while who hasn't encountered inedible food? And you are still annoyed about an incident 20 years ago? Don't eat at "The Tides" restaurant in Gowanus. When we moved into the house we are in now more than thirty years ago we walked over to a funky little Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. I think it was very likely the food came directly out of a Chun King can. I don't think I took a second bite. Within a year the place closed and remained a dusty museum of tables for several more years. Rumors of two brothers and a murder bubbled up, but the truth has remained a mystery. So the moral is if you can get a story out it you are ahead of the game.

It's hard to know where to put this new piece of information I just gleaned from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee. She has a section on baked beans in which her research digs up this possible origin. Most of us think of baked beans as a yankee dish. It's always been too sweet for me; I guess I like my beans soupier and spicier, as in a pot of red chile or red beans and rice. She claims one possible origin is that sea captains brought the dish back from North Africa and/ or Spain and suggests that originally it was the Sephardic Jewish version of cholent, the beans and meat that cooked all night so that you didn't have to cook on the sabbath. That's about as far as she takes it, and she never mentions cholent. It never would have occurred to me! It may have started with a sweet component added, like maybe honey or pomegranate molasses or date syrup. I've never tasted cholent, just heard my mother talk about it from her early childhood. Perhaps it also made its way to the south directly from Aftica, and they added their own local molasses to sweeten in up. Somewhere along the line the meat morphed from beef to pork. I love this theory! Related to news about TTM and not the sabbath, I just heard she has been named editor of Bon Appetit to hopefully bring it back from disgrace. I haven't looked at that magazine in years, so this can only be good news.

In a normal year a guest would offer to bring tzimmes, so the host would never have to make it. Some at the table would wax nostalgic, others would remember the prunes and stay away. @weinooyou are to be congratulated for doing every course yourself. I'm with SE--completely happy with matzoh ball soup, several bowls of it. RIP RBG. If only you could have hung on another couple of months. I know you tried.

I'm with you. The profits on any renovations or upgrades are never guaranteed, but the headaches are. "Taking a loss" is a relative term and may not even be the case, given how long you have lived there. Do the least stressful thing!

Stock from lamb shanks? That means Scotch Broth!

Do you mean that it's wrong to be nonjudgmental or that you are wrong about thinking of yourself that way? Personally I think this thread is kinda silly. There's an awfully wide spectrum from personal taste to quirky to weird to just plain crazy.

Mine too. You can get pretty much the same taste if you roast the misc pieces like necks, wings, whatever turkey parts you get fresh. Takes a lot less time than roasting a whole turkey. For me that means turkey broth more than once a year, so all good.