Katie Meadow

One of the best xmas gifts I ever got was a cast iron comal. It can be used for perfectly heating flour or corn tortillas, making quesadillas, etc. It's also a large flat diameter, and allows you to make more pancakes at a time than most any cast iron skillet. Gets a lot of use in our house. They can be found at any large Latinx supply store I think. Or Amazon. My recommendation is to get a traditional heavy duty one.

Shame about those lovely wooden gates. Who knew?

Chickens of about five pounds or more are called stewing chickens--for a reason. I think it is worth looking at the Vivian Howard recipe for Scarlett's Chicken and Rice, cited above by @Yiannos. Personally I would use such a bird to make a rich stock. If you treat it like a fryer or a roaster you will get tough meat and miss out on the benefits of broth.

Nope, nothing. My favorite clam of all time. I'm so envious! Those ones upthread in the bowl look so fresh and perfect. Whine, whine. I miss the east coast, I miss my dead father who used to take us clamming. I miss my dead mother who lived three block's from Central Park but was convinced that it was still dangerous in 2012 and lived thirty years without going into the park. I miss taking her out for linguini and clams and vermentino at my family's favorite birthday place.You wouldn't think a picture of a bowl of clams could send a person into a tailspin, but there it is; this is a most dangerous year. I have my husband for company and neither of us has the virus and I have a constant flow of reading material. Okay, eat some clams for me and stay healthy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/arts/design/a-subtlety-or-the-marvelous-sugar-baby-at-the-domino-plant.html Probably bigger than what you are thinking about, but worth a read if you don't know about it.

Santa Rosa plums from a neighbor's tree. I was going to just eat them as that's one of my favorite stone fruits, but by the second day it was clear I needed to use them at once. I was thinking of a simple sweet plum sauce, but I forget that the sauce would thicken up when cooled. What I ended up with was fabulous jam. Just plums, seeded and roughly chopped but not skinned, a splash of water, modest amount of sugar and a half a small vanilla bean, scraped. So far we are spreading it on levain toast and stirring it into Siggi's yogurt. The jam was tart, and that's how I like it.

I don't think that's a cake at all. I think those are hatboxes repurposed as a religious icon. Clearly these people were up to their necks in hatboxes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/dining/buttered-roll-new-york.html The discussion of the NY Kaiser buttered roll sent me down a seriously weird rabbit hole. The above ode to the Kaiser roll received a fair amount of response, not unsurprisingly. I will admit that growing up on the upper west side of NY around the corner from Barney Greengrass I don't think I ever ate a Kaiser roll. We didn't have a local bodega that I knew about or grab breakfast from one when I was in high school. Two excerpts from the article are hilarious: It can be hard to explain the appeal of a buttered roll. Unlike the breakfast sandwich or the cruller, the humble buttered roll makes no claims to lusciousness. It’s not really greater than the sum of its parts: a round roll, sliced and slathered with butter. There is no alchemy involved. “I loved and relied on them when I was very broke and young and coffee still only came from a cart or a deli,” the chef Gabrielle Hamilton said. “I was always annoyed that they didn’t spread the butter evenly, so you had to eat a dry outer ring until you got to the center, where you got a gross mouthful of too much butter — if it even was butter. Still, it was a lifeline.”

I don't know if I have had dark chocolate made by whoever makes Reese's, but if it's Hershey it isn't anything to write home about. Trader Joe's makes mini cups with dark chocolate and although the chocolate is excellent, the PB filling is way too sweet for me.

To be honest, I can't think of a more toxic idea than Reese's that are either green peanut butter OR green white chocolate. If someone gave me that in my pillow I would toilet paper their tree. Well, maybe not in the time of a pandemic.

When I lived in NM in the sixties and seventies you couldn't go to a potluck without tripping over a zucchini casserole. These days, once a summer, when yellow squash looks good at the farmers' market, I might do the following: saute onion or shallot in butter, add lots of minced garlic. Then add sliced summer squash, cilantro, roasted green chiles, cherry tomatoes, whole or halved, salt and pepper and coat briefly. Transfer to a casserole dish. Bake for 35 or 35 minutes. Remove and switch oven to broil. Top with grated cheese like Oaxaca, broil until melted. Very forgiving, Fresh corn on the cob is a perfect side. With zucchini I most likely will make some kind of fritters. Zucchini and Kohlrabi grated together makes a pretty good fritter along with the usual suspects, eggs and flour and lots of chives or fresh dill. I admit I don't go out of my way to buy summer squash. And I don't have gardening friends nowadays. See @Margaret Pilgrim's confession upthread. So much packed into one little sentence!

One problem with jalapeños, as with poblanos, is that, depending on the source, they vary wildly in heat, especially if you don't live in the southwest or can't find a local vendor that is reliable. I like to pickle jalapeños, but if a bunch is too mild sometimes I add some serranos. I'm not partial to using them raw; after living in NM I got used to depending on roasted long green chiles for heat. And I fall into the category that @heidih suggests: those who don't like raw green bell peppers either. Pickled jalapeños I like in some potato salads and tuna salads. My husband throws them into sandwiches with abandon.

Yes, the diet you describe is quite popular. I'm on it now.

6 oz dried bay leaves, one smoked ham hock and 8 cups of water. Simmer until done. Serve with toast points, whatever those are. I'm told that Gabrielle Hamilton lived on this when she first started working as a poor line cook. Naturally she had access to a Bay Laurel tree (she stole the leaves from a neighbor's yard) and dried them herself, so assume that if if your soup isn't perfect, it's due to your inferior ingredients, or simply to the fact that you are not her. If you like pot liquor this is for you. Can be frozen in ten ice cube trays.

Not meaning to be a downer, since in fact I don't believe I have ever eaten ice cream made with lots of chemical additives. The artisan ice cream we buy in the Bay Area is typically made with organic ingredients; milk, sugar, fruit. My husband makes a fabulous lemon buttermilk sorbet which uses nothing but lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar and buttermilk. When I first met my husband, his father was into making ice cream with a wooden hand cranked bucket that I'm sure he inherited and if I remember correctly, used ice cubes and salt for cooling power. This was in Davis, CA where summer temps could easily go up to 100 degrees. He would use local fruit like peaches and strawberries, cream and sugar. It was really good. It took forever, but he was always a very patient person, a physicist who grew up on a farm. Probably you learn a lot of patience doing either.

Yesterday I made something yummy: strawberry milk. The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen minimally adapted from Gabrielle Hamilton. It's just a pound of berries macerated with a half cup of granulated sugar for a couple of hours. Then blend well the strawbs and juice. Mix with 3 cups of whole milk and 1 cup of buttermilk, and get it really cold. I put it in two mason jars, and it made about 7 cups. A great way to use up berries that are very ripe or blemished. My husband had it for breakfast this morning and loved it. I was never a fan of strawberry ice cream or strawberry shakes, but this is just perfect. It thickens up, like halfway to a milkshake and ends up tasting richer than you would expect. And yet, it's just milk! Preamble as always fun to read. As usual, the things that GH probably concocted out of her pantry as a teenager end up being more than the sum of their parts. https://smittenkitchen.com/2016/06/strawberry-milk/

I'm a big fan of Caputo 00 for pizza. We don't have a professional oven, and can barely get ours up to 500 degrees. The two best improvements we have made are that flour and the use of a thick steel.

@Smithy, the Oregano Indio from RG always looks like yours, a bigger leaf. It's delicious, but a splurge, compared to the price of any Mexican oregano I've bought in my local spice shop. It's been a long time since I bought Greek oregano, but the taste difference between any Mexican and the RG Indio is pretty distinct in my experience.

Throw the bunsen burner at him.

Good thing Dick's is one minute from New Law Courts. Very convenient if you sue Dick after you have a heart attack.

I do the same: put whole tomatillos under the broiler, then peel them. I find a straight tomatillo sauce too acidic, so that's why I like to make my guacamole with a few of them.

So sketchy! My husband braved our usual farmers' market last week. No tomatoes at all. Very very good bicolor corn. Excellent Santa Rosa plums. Lousy underripe apricots. Delicious strawberries. Of course you couldn't pick the produce yourself, just had to rely on a pre-packed bag, and you couldn't peel back the corn husks to get a peek, either. But early corn is usually very sweet and worm-free from our favorite vendor. One of the largest vendors was absent, and that's where we get tomatoes and herbs. Surprising about the lack tomatoes, since some of our regular markets have been stocking decent heirlooms for the last few weeks. Ah well, it is what it is. These days it is best not to count on anything.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I think I know what you are talking about. My husband has a tendency to "half-screw" the lid just enough so that I am going to grab said lid, a recipe for accidents. Now I ask him to simply leave the lid off and I'll put the jar away.

If there's one thing you can rely on in the Bay Area it's that if you plan to make gazpacho the fog will roll in and the temperature will drop. I love gazpacho, but in order to enjoy it fully I need to eat it outside in warm weather. After many years of this predictable annoyance I've just given up on it. If I've got the ingredients I usually end up deconstructing the soup. In other words, I make a Greek Salad. Good tomatoes, cukes and olive oil is 75% of the way to gazpacho, right?

I believe those recipes are for intravenous application.