Katie Meadow

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.

Great article. I'm sure it escapes no one that the brothers are Darrell and Manning FARMER. Also at the end is a reference to Greg Johnston, who owns Geechie Boy Mills. That's where I get my grits mail ordered. Next time I order I will look to see if he is actually selling the long lost Cocke's Prolific-- meal or grits grind.

The appearance of corn at Thanksgiving has always mystified me. There is no fresh corn in late November in the US. Perhaps in corn growing regions people put corn by in jars, or use frozen corn for whatever corn dishes they think belong on the Thanksgiving table. Now anything made from dried corn I can see: cornbread dressing of a side of grits would be excellent. But my in-laws are very reluctant to give up potatoes. This year they won't be getting mashed potatoes because the nephew who makes them isn't coming. I'm making a version of Smitten Kitchen's Melting Potatoes that works for vegetarians, which four out of the six people at our table tonight will be. This promises to be the most relaxed, quiet holiday in the history of my husband's family. No grandparents,, no millennials, no dogs.

For the first time ever in over 30 years, Thanksgiving will be small and at our house instead of out at the beach. Six people total, instead of the usual 12 to 15. Looking forward to a small turkey! And this year my husband, who does most of the turkey cooking, has the opportunity to satisfy his long time desire for juicy white meat. I'm a dark meat person, so it's never worked out perfectly for the both of us. This time he is going to rotate the turkey during roasting after a dry brine. Our previous turkeys have always been really big and that hasn't been practical. Should be interesting. As my mother in law died in the summer, this will be the first time since since forever that my husband' and siblings have had a holiday with no parent and no sand on the floors and no view of the ocean. And since the absentees are the ones who really eat turkey, I will be left with a lot of stuff for the stockpot.

Mustard orchid it is! The more distance from broccoli the better.

Princess Pamela sounds awesome. You can make a good sweet potato pie yourself. I've made a couple of them in the past few years. Really good. My preference is to use no spices, so it really tastes like the yams it is made from rather than like a wannabe pumpkin pie. The best prep for the yams is to roast them, not boil them. Also if any recipe calls for corn syrup (and I think I've seen some that do) use Steen's instead for better flavor and less sweetness. If memory serves, the recipe I used didn't use either, just sugar. Before I baked my first sweet potato pie I didn't realize that when a recipe calls for them it is a 99 percent chance that they mean what are often labeled as yams; the ones that are orange inside. Sweet potatoes are white, and surprise surprise, actually not as sweet as yams. A true yam is something else entirely. This labeling problem has always irritated me no end. I did bake a pie that used sweet potatoes and yams. I liked it, but it tastes more earthy. I can get behind pork neck bones and rice in a hot minute. I often add neck bones to stock, and the meat that falls off them is really good.

I prefer dark meat as well, but that dish with the mushrooms looks awfully yummy. What is this method?

As a fellow Bay Area and Californian you have no doubt noticed the drop in the frog population, generally, not that I know anything about the various species, but I do know that you hear a lot less croaking in the evenings around ponds or various suburban and country habitats. And, of course, frogs are one of these bellwether critters, another canary in the coal mine. I think I have tasted frog's legs once, and have no memory of flavor. I'm getting squeamish in my old age. Why is it in westerns cowboys (or in other venues campers) roasting on the fire is always a bunny or a snake or a possum, but never a frog? Surely there would have been loads of them near wherever you put up your pup tent. I must have too much time on my hands this morning because now I'm going into the weeds. Would you roast a whole frog or just cut off the legs first like you assume they do in French restaurant, not that I ever to French restaurants. Although I have to admit I always suspected that many places called them frogs legs but subbed the drumstick of the wing. And of course, that's why it is common knowledge that frogs legs taste like chicken. @liuzhou, tell me, in the frog restaurants in China do they eat more than just the legs? I can hardly believe I'm thinking about this while I have a whole Sunday NYT sitting by.

@liuzhou, I hope this isn't too wacky of a question. If the Chinese eat a lot of frog, do they also farm it? Or is it wild caught?

Very much agree. I've pretty much stopped eating beef. Lamb too is not sustainable, but we eat so little of it in America that it would be a more important consideration in some other countries. I buy wild caught gulf shrimp and try to avoid farmed fish unless it is trout from Canada or the US. It leaves us in CA with very limited variety that's sustainably fished, but I am adjusting. Twenty years ago we could buy wild salmon fresh caught on the CA coast for under $10 dollars per pound. There were also abundant fresh sardines. Neither is available any more except once in a great while. Octopus are too charming and brainy, so I don't eat them regardless. As for chocolate, the inclusion of its listing in those ten most problematic foods is worrisome. I haven't really checked out the sources of my staple chocolates, but I really should. The avocados we eat are from the farmer's market, and grown in southern CA; I just don't buy them in the off season, so they are a treat, like good tomatoes.