Katie Meadow

Agreed, I wouldn't be able to identify any vodka in a Bloody Mary, especially because I use about half as much alcohol as any bartender or as my husband. When I'm out and looking for a cocktail I never order one, since I make them perfectly. Well, for me. Varietal BMs have never appealed to me. Once I tried adding clam juice to approximate Gabrieile Hamilton"s Mariner, but getting used to that would make for an extended learning curve. I know lots of people use Clamato juice, but the whole concept seems strange to me.

Dinner and dessert all in one bowl. That sounds amazing.

@liuzhou that is a pretty strange story. I only hope that if I mysteriously end up under my chair with a bruised foot you will make me clam soup. Heal fast. Do your local noodle joints deliver?

We gave up on that game before it was over. Too depressing. Celery salt sounds like a good addition. What exactly IS celery salt? Can you add celery seed and salt?

I've always admired people who make their own pasta and noodles. I'm not one of them. I actually prefer dried Italian pasta over most fresh. When it comes to Chinese noodles, in Oakland Chinatown there's a great noodle factory where we can get all sizes and shapes of fresh wheat noodle products. I'm getting older and much lazier. Making potsticker filling and forming the dumplings themselves is enough of an accomplishment. If I had to make my own skins I would be napping through dinner time. Sadly, just popping into the factory store for a pack of noodles has become less of an adventure and one more post-covid negotiation. I'm really well stocked in dried rice noodles, though, and they have become a staple.

So funny. I'm reading this and meanwhile I'm drinking a bloody mary and eating popcorn. Ordinarily my preferred snack with a bloody mary is Cheetos, or, if I'm feeling vegetables, edamame. but my husband wanted popcorn since we are watching the first Giants/Dodgers game. I go for simple: Knudson tomato juice, horseradish, worcestershire, tabasco and lots of lemon juice. These days I'm liking Tito's vodka. In truth I'm a lightweight and use a modest amount of alcohol, so most vodkas would be fine with me. Mostly we drink cocktails with gin in our house, but frankly the idea of gin in a bloody mary as suggested upthread makes me cringe.

Looking over the KA Flour recipe I'm not sure how different this is from cookies. Couldn't you use the batter and make cookies? To those who have made them, tell me how this is different or why it wouldn't work.

Agreed. Anyone who thinks toast is a simple matter will be unburdened of that opinion when a piece of charcoal sails halfway across the room. In other words, just the words "pop up" require a second volume.

Yes, if an above-ground test has ruined your eyesight and your taste buds you might make a Southern Smoked Banana Dog and mistake it for food.

I come from another school altogether. The one thing I want least from a toaster is speed. If there's anything that annoys me it's a charred exterior and a damp interior. Avoid any product that claims to toast your bread quickly.

I'll believe it when Fauci says it. The only deterrent Kimchi might provide is that it keeps everyone six feet away.

Orange Julius was something I took for granted growing up in NY. Wow, it certainly hijacked this thread. As soon as I polish off the strawberry milk I made yesterday I'm going to add frozen o.j. to the shopping list. My husband already thinks I am insane. He's really getting sick of strawberry milk and, as a native California boy I suspect he hasn't a clue about what's coming next. This pandemic is one wild ride, neh? I started quarantine with a burst of cooking and now, well, I'm just making the same ten things over and over again. Until I find a new thing, and it goes into the bizarre rotation.

I so wish no one had mentioned Orange Julius. If you see motion in the ground beneath you don't worry. It's just me crawling from one rabbit hole into another.

@blue_dolphin Let me know what you think of any Geechie Boy grits that aren't plain yellow or white. I've never ordered any of their specialty grits. Your breakfast looks great. Although I would happily eat freshly made grits in the morning but definitely don't have whatever it takes to cook them before breakfast. I do however very much like fried grits cakes for breakfast, made from left over molded grits, and that happens once in a while.

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!