Katie Meadow

@liamsaunt, that lasagne looks very appealing with a generous amount of spinach filling. Lots of leftovers is a great bonus in my book. My own cooking, but I don't have to cook it.

If you added beets to the Yemenite Beef Soup cited above you would indeed have a very good Yemenite Borscht. All the main ingredients for borscht are there, like the short ribs, marrow bones and potatoes, and the Yemenite spice mix Hawaij. Just wanting for the beets. Delicious, I would think!

For many people this time of year means a sugar overload. For me it's a wheat overload. I feel best when eating rice, so that's a big part of our diet. I'm not allergic to wheat or gluten, but I just do better when it isn't the main starch at every meal. My husband bakes bread and it's delicious, so I often do have toast for breakfast. My houseguests this year were three millennials, all of whom wanted lots of bagels and lox and ravioli and home made pizza. They have all flown the coop now but it's hard to go cold turkey when there is still part of a home made white pullman loaf and a chunk of Oaxaca cheese. My New Year's Eve meal was minimalist and perfect: a glass of semi-sweet iced tea and a grilled cheese sandwich. Oh, I forgot to mention that my nephew is a slave to ice cream. In the freezer there are half empty containers of the following: Dark Chocolate Sea Salt ice cream, Vietnamese Coffee with Chicory ice cream, and Bourbon and Corn Flake ice cream. That last one was the worst of the three. It's an alcoholic version of cereal milk ice cream, which is my least favorite thing ever. And at my request, someone caved and brought home the familiar and minimalist Hagen Daz Coffee. Which is what I had for my final dessert of 2019, several hours after my perfect grilled cheese. My husband and I are looking forward to Tomato and Rice soup for the first day of the new year. He is thrilled, however, to have the remains of all the artisan ice cream, so that should disappear quickly and leave some freezer room for lots of BROTH.

I too lived in NM for many years and got used to great bowls of posole. Especially that made by my best friend's father, a native of Santa Fe. I suggest you order the pozole from Rancho Gordo. It always seems very fresh and tasty to me. And if you are not familiar with that operation, check out the beans and other interesting items for sale.

I've had that book forever and can't remember the last time I cooked from it. Time to revisit! Aside from the recipes it is just a beautiful book with lavish photographty.

My traditional Jewish dinner on xmas day was potstickers with pork, napa cabbage, wood ear mushrooms and the usual suspects. I made no sides, we just pigged out on dumplings until we were full and the dumplings were gone. My nephew declared it his favorite xmas dinner ever, so you can't top that for a gracious guest.

Unless my houseguests (my nephew and his wife on the Meadow side) decide on another idea for xmas dinner I think I will make potstickers. I've eaten a lot of Chinese meals on xmas day over the years. Because xmas eve is spent with my husband's family for which there is cooking and traveling, my xmas dinner has always been simple, unless we get invited out, and then it's even simpler! If I'm lucky, my adored millennial guests will do some baking and there will be dessert of some kind. For xmas morning lox and bagels is about all I can muster, but that is never disappointing. So, xmas day is a some nice Jewish food, and that includes the potstickers with pork.

Those Nevada pine nuts look beautiful. When I lived in NM around this time of year we would drive up into the Sandia hills above Albuquerque, put a blanket down under a tree, and shake. In an afternoon in a good year you could collect a lot of pine nuts going tree to tree.. We just ate them raw. And I certainly don't remember ever washing them. Nor do I remember ever shelling them and using them for anything but snacking, one at a time. Lying on a blanket in the sun and then on the drive back down you could consume vast quantities.

Okay, that was me, missing something. Other than slipping on a banana peel or chopping off a finger (and I admit that every time I see you have contributed to that "Never Again" thread my, I stomach turns) I shouldn't ever worry that you are off your game!

For daily juicing of four oranges that would be fine, but when we make marmalade we juice 5 lbs per batch, and we do five or six batches over approx two months. Now I'm confused, though. The Hamilton Beach 932 commercial juicer you refer to is a manual appliance, so no batteries are required. It's a lovely object and enviably solid, I will say. It costs the same as the electric Breville all stainless steel model--$199. Unless I am missing something, which is always possible.

We most likely don't get the biggest variety of Old Chatham products here on the west coast, but I've liked just about everything I've tasted; I'll have to check my source to see if they ever get the blue. For a while I was really into their sheep's milk yogurt. I'm not sure I've ever had a pure sheep's milk blue. Sounds very yummy. I feel an errand coming on. I can't remember whether my cheese store has xmas music. That's my one rule in December: if I hear xmas music I walk right out. Which means that basically I don't leave the house all month if I can help it.

We have started drinking a lot of orange juice in the morning. In addition, marmalade season is around the corner, and we make several batches to last the year every January thru March, depending upon when the Sevilles make their appearance in Northern CA. We do have a small and funky and quite ancient little plastic electric thing that really isn't adequate any more. My husband, who does almost all the squeezing, was quietly complaining about it the other day, and I'm thinking he's hinting at a gift. Fine with me. There's no indication he's growing tired of marmalade. I think it's a lifelong love affair. Some juicers come with two alternate juicing cones, all of them plastic. I don't think I need that, since we don't juice grapefruits, mainly oranges. If I am juicing one or two lemons or a lime I simply use a wooden reamer and I'm happy with that. Does anyone have recommendations? I don't need to keep the juicer on the counter and have room to store it. Size is not the priority. I would say the priority is stainless steel parts over plastic, a strong motor and no tendency to wobble or travel. Any juicers advertised with suction feet make me nervous; they must be subject to creep. The highest rated expensive juicer is the Breville, with the arm, and it costs close to $200. There does not seem to be anything heavy duty and reliable in a midrange price. I'm not totally opposed to spending the money on the Breville, but if anyone has suggestions for better value I'm open to it. Reviews on Amazon and other sites vary wildly. The Smeg is attractive, but not much more affordable. We have a Smeg toaster, and it's mostly arm candy, although it works as well as most toasters, which of course isn't saying a lot.

Okay, good to know. Thanks.

Standard canning or "Ball" jars are cheap when purchased from a hardware store by the dozen and can be used year after year. If you are making jam or something with acid and sugar and are not instructed to boil the filled jars in a bath it is still a very good idea to sterilize the jars and the lids (not the rings) by covering them with water and boiling them for a bit of time. I usually keep them at a boil for ten or fifteen minutes and don't remove them from the hot water until just before filling. I agree with all the above that using regular glass jars is a bad idea. Most fruits for jams are seasonal and therefore you want to keep them for many months, sealed. I always count the pops of the lids to make sure they are sealed, and if any one jar doesn't pop properly, I just use that one first. Good advice above about checking for chipped rims; those jars won't seal adequately. And a word of caution: don't re-use lids, just the rings. If I were @Shelby and had a great garden I would can all kinds of stuff that needed a water bath. I've done it, and it's a lot of work, not to mention it is typically done in hot weather and you really work up a sweat. Not for the faint-hearted. Plenty of grannies on the farm have always done the heavy lifting of canning, but I would prefer to sit on a screened porch in a rocker and read a novel now that I've achieved granny age. Still waiting patiently for those babies, though!

I've made her recipe in the past, with tweaks. It is quite good. If you have the energy I would suggest making a red chile paste/slurry using whole dried chiles rather than powdered product, but I know that's time consuming and a bit messy. Also I probably would not add the jalapenos if I had a good flavorful red chile sauce. It may be a completely strange quirk, but when I lived in NM we generally didn't mix fresh chiles with dried or powdered, nor did we often mix red chile with green in the same dish. Now that doesn't include the batches of fresh green chiles that had a few red ripening ones in the bunch; those were all roasted and treated as fresh green, and that was always my favorite aesthetically.

Today I'm making Posole. I have a mix of pork neck bones and shoulder plus one weird pork bone that looks a bit like a small turkey leg. My RG pozole is finished cooking. I think they take longer than RG says; mine took 2 1/2 hours, and they seemed pretty fresh to begin with. Or maybe I like them a bit softer than Steve does. I was going to defrost some some home made red chile paste, but discovered that my husband had already defrosted some roasted green chiles for his omelet. The chiles are hot, and I have enough for a Posole Verde, so that's what it will be. Garnished with lettuce and radishes and white onion. The pork stock is still simmering and smells like New Mexico to me. OMG I really should do this more often.

My husband does the Bowl run every week to ten days. He always checks the salmon and says it is rarely wild King. A when it is, the price is staggering. Same goes for my favorite fish destination, Tokyo Market, on San Pablo. If you are in the east bay it's just a great place to buy seafood and Asian supplies. Their black cod is the freshest around, better than the Bowl. They also sell grilled salmon collars, which are a greasy good treat, probably neither wild, fresh or King, but life is short.

The King is dead. Long live the King. Yes, it makes me want to cry. Sockeye and Coho just aren't as good as west coast King / Chinook, but the days of fresh wild CA King salmon are just about gone. Sometimes we can get Alaskan King that's wild and usually frozen, but all stocks are depleted. Farmed Atlantic salmon is available as it is on the east coast, but I no longer have a taste for it; there's always something wrong with it and it makes me depressed. I don't know if any farmed Norwegian or Scottish salmon makes it out to CA; I've never seen it, but I've never looked for it either. I'm sorry for our loss and our ongoing stupidity. Forgive me! Seasonal Affective Disorder and xmas music always make December a hard sell for me.

Make sure Ronnie takes a camera so we can see pix of Chum on the job! A bird in the jaw is worth two in the paw. Or something. Is there room for a tripod in a duck blind? Clearly all this is a mystery to me, but I always like these hunting blogs.

Gettin' into the weeds now. Really astonishing that "Cox's" Prolific seeds were on Craigslist and the right people saw it.

@weinoo, I too really like good popcorn. I've ordered Geechie Boy's indigo popcorn and it was delicious. Special occasions only--it's pricey!

Wow, I'm so sick of leftovers. What a relief: this afternoon we made a vegetable stir fry, just cabbage, chinese chives and choi sum over rice. However the house really smells of turkey, since this morning I cooked my carcass for broth. Good, too. But tomorrow is more turkey. My husband is all excited about making a pot pie. He's the crust guy. Leftover gravy gets added to the filling mix (a game changer!), and hopefully the rest of the saved turkey meat will get mostly used up. Enough already. At lease there will be lots of veggies in the pie as well. Some broth goes in as well, but the rest of the broth I will freeze until turkey soup sounds like a novelty.

Saltines. Real homemade saltines with just milled whole grains. @Wholemeal Crank, won't you be my neighbor?

Since being away from NM for 30+ years I may be totally off base here. Either I had a limited view of chiles or things have changed. In the old days, Hatch chiles were really grown in and around Hatch. They were very hot, and honestly I don't believe that a lot of the crop was allowed to turn red and get dried. There was plenty of demand for fresh green Hatch chiles. If you scored a lot of them, you froze them so you could make chile verde or green enchiladas through the winter and spring. If you wanted to make a red sauce for posole or beans or enchiladas, or just a bowl of red with pork, you would use the more ubiquitous "New Mexico Chile," which were often dried and bound into ristras to hang until needed and for decoration. These were typically medium hot chiles, and very dependable for most dishes that used a lot of chiles; always a winter staple when fresh green chiles were not available. If you were to make a bowl of rojo or an enchilada sauce with true dried Hatch chiles you would blow your head off. That's another reason why I don't remember Hatches being dried. Perhaps now to satisfy demand the Hatch crop has evolved into something less hot and grown in abundance outside the area with milder seeds, which would mean that so called "Hatch" chiles might be sold dried because of a larger and tamer crop. Some time after I left New Mexico Hatch chiles became a "thing." Probably the demand exceeded the authentic Hatch crop. They were sometimes mixed with a crop called "Big Jims," which were a sort of strange assortment of hot and not so hot chiles, which I believe grew that way. They were not at all consistent or identifiable as true Hatch chiles. Unfortunately Big Jims were sold as Hatch and used in mail orders. I remember after moving to CA and mail-ordering some Hatch chiles I received Big Jims, and they were disappointing in flavor. In addition, if they called them Hatch they could command a ridiculous price for shipping, and they often were delivered not very fresh. I haven't had them in many years, so the the crop may have been improved. Rather than order chiles on line I now use green poblanos; I have a couple of sources that supply pretty hot ones, although many supermarket poblanos can be bland. I get large amounts from the farmers market in late summer and fall and roast and freeze them in batches. I do know that it is frustrating when all you can find are anaheims and you want something with a real kick. Anyone who still lives in NM do chime in and straighten me out as needed.

He's alive! There was an old head of romaine in the fridge that I am pretty sure was purchased just before the recall. My husband, a stubborn sort, with, I will admit, an iron stomach, insisted on using it in a turkey sandwich yesterday. He just couldn't do without, claiming that he would rather get sick than not have a proper turkey sandwich. Still happily chowing down on leftovers tonight. Me? Not gonna touch it.