Jenni

I'm really interested in this. My Mum found a recipe for halloumi and we were very keen to have a go at making that, but just haven't got around to it. Homemade mozzarella would be great! We make paneer all the time but that's so easy it doesn't seem anywhere near as exciting as mozzerella or halloumi!

Rona, I am curious that you didn't pay for your drinks. You had consumed though, so isn't that kind of stealing? Technically couldn't the restaurant have chased after you and made you pay? I am assuming that in this case they realised your extreme displeasure and made a decision to let it go. I have on two occasions left a restaurant before my food arrived due to severe rudeness from staff and a wait of over 40 minutes. I did however leave money for the drinks that had been consumed by the group.

Careful - certainly in India, snake gourd refers to a completely different vegetable! In Hindi ridge gourd is called torai. In Bengali it is jhinge, in Tamil peerkangai and Kannada heerekayi. You will see variations on the spellings of these when they are written in English. Obviously other Indian languages have their own names, I am just giving you a selection. Try putting these words into google with recipe after them for some lovely regional recipes. My favourite use for ridgegourd is in chutney. It's something I always come back to! In South India actually it is common to make a chutney out of the spines that are scraped off when the ridge gourd is used for other dishes - an excellent example of being resourceful about something that would otherwise be thrown away! However, I use the whole gourd because I think it tastes great. I use about two cups of chopped ridge gourd. The gourd gets fried up with a spoonful of channa dal and some red chillies. Then it gets blended with 1/2 cup grated coconut and the strained paste of a small ball of tamarind that has been soaking in hot water. This mixture then receives an extra seasoning: mustard seeds, chillies, hing and curry leaves popped in hot oil and tipped in to the chutney. It's a really excellent chutney to go with most Southie breakfast foods such as dosa, idli, upma, etc. , but it is also delicious with rice as a simple meal or as part of a more complex one. In our house the favourite accompaniment is ragi rotti - which is a rough flat bread made of ragi flour (a kind of millet) and highly seasoned with onions, coconut, chillies and coriander. Other uses in our house are just simply like any other gourd in Indian cookery. They go well with potatoes and tomatoes in a North Indian style sabzi. And in Bengal they are much prized as an excellent summer vegetable as they are believed to be very cooling. One particularly good Bengali use for them is jhinge posto, which is ridge gourd with white poppy seeds. The dish is very similar to the more well known aloo posto. In addition it is (to my mind at least) an important vegetable for the famous Bengali "bitter stew" shukto. In the South they are used in various vegetable dishes much like other gourds. Ridge gourd also make great pakora or bhajja, can be ground up with soaked rice for a quick dosa batter or even added in thin slices to the dosa batter itself for a particularly unusual dosa! More often than not, people in India lightly peel the very ridges off. Some are more thorough in this peeling. But as I mentioned above, often this peel is not wasted! Thanks for letting me waffle on for ages about one of my favourite vegetables!

I'm glad you enjoyed the blood sausage. We always call it black pudding. Due to my Grandfather loving it (it's popular in Trinidad too) I always loved it (before I was vegetarian of course). To me, a full english is a sorry sight if there isn't black pudding!

By the way, I'm just going to say why I think my new shopping style is saving me money (even allowing for the fact that things are much cheaper here anyway and also I am cooking for less people). In the UK, as a family we buy most of our shopping on a Friday in one big shop. This includes the majority of our fruit and veg for the week. The thing is, during the week, we inevitably go and buy more fruit and veg and also other items. There are a number of reasons for this: The first is that we don't buy enough of some stuff because it obviously wilts or spoils as the week goes by. The second is that sometimes we fancy something specific, so we go out and buy it. And the third is related to the first in that sometimes stuff spoils and we need to replace it. And you know what, at the end of the week there is nearly always wastage because we buy stuff and then don't always use it or at least don't use it in time. However, as I said in my previous post, here in Allahabad I am buying vegetables and fruits daily. Usually I buy enough for meals from lunchtime onwards plus breakfast the next day. I also do sometimes buy larger amounts of items such as onions that keep ok for a few days, but I do try and keep this to a minimum as stuff does spoil quickly - especially if I don't something as frequently or as quickly as I think I will. And this is the heart of the matter for me personally - I will often decide I really want to eat something specific for lunch or dinner on the day and so I save money if I buy what I need when I need it. If I buy stuff days in advance there is a chance it will be wasted because I won't feel like eating it or I'll suddenly get a craving for something else and by the time I'm over that, other vegetables have spoiled. In addition, I have discovered that I am much better at judging what I need for one meal than what I need for a weeks worth of meals that I haven't really planned yet. Of course this is personal. I find it hard to eat things I don't really want (hard or even impossible - actually I think this is why I find it easy to stay slim despite enjoying food and cooking so much. It is not difficult for me to skip a meal if there is nothing I actually want to eat), so I do not plan meals a week in advance. Other people find it much better to have meals planned out for a whole week at a time. I do still think that daily shopping will prevent spoilage in this case, but it may not make as much difference as it does for someone with my style of eating.

I am currently living in Allahabad, North India, if that clarifies any of the details in my previous post

I am lucky enough at the moment to be able to easily buy fresh fruit and veg every day as I need it. I can walk for just 5 minutes and get to a market and select whatever looks good or draws my fancy. If the veg there doesn't look so good, another market is not far away and vendors with carts make their way around the streets too so sometimes the best pick of the day comes to me! If I leave my house and go in the opposite direction, it's just 2 minutes walk to a well stocked but tiny store that sells staples like rice, dal, flour, spices, ghee, oil, drinks, milk, butter, etc. So that's easy too. And it's maybe a 3 minute walk to a bakery that sells some of the less common items like packaged fruit juice, if I should want it, and also ice cream. I'm very fortunate right now for these places to be so conveniently located and to have my schedule be such that it is easy for me to shop everyday. Having said this, daily shopping is not at all uncommon here. People do not necessarily have a fridge and electricity is tempermental anyway so the fridge may not always be so useful. In addition, people don't always have a lot of space for storage, and on top of that shopping is an enjoyable part of the daily routine - it's a chance to chat, gossip, haggle playfully and indulge in selecting the finest produce of the day. In addition, most shops are open very late so it is easy enough for even those who work full time.

A close-family-friend-who-is-basically-a-relative of mine in the UK makes honey, so in the UK it was kind of easy to get lovely local honey! But I'm being serious, looks pretty crappy now I'm in India. It's a shame, because honey is certainly quite popular and also is specifically used in traditional Indian medicine. It's actually interesting to me because the traditional wisdom of India says that honey should not be heated and makes a big fuss of how to consume it for health benefits. This news is a real shame.

Recently I had a nice combination: coke, ginger beer and a squeeze of fresh lime juice. Very nice.

Concering for those of us in India though...

How about when you put plates away, always put them at the bottom? More effort but it will achieve what you want.

How does it taste? Is it just the colour that is wrong?

I went all the way from Bristol to London on a special birthday treat to Quilon and was very disappointed. A little bit of background: Kerala cuisine is very close to my heart. I've spent a few months in Kerala and cook a lot of South Indian food at home including many dishes from Kerala. I thought Quilon was very expensive and severely lacking in terms of the taste of the dishes. The service was great yes, but I was oh so disappointed by the food - I couldn't believe we had gone all the way to London for that. Just a warning for you, YMMV of course.

Omg...I want this now!

Try looking at this page - some helpful comments on it too. Looks like ranch dressing, sriracha and mayonnaise are the main ingredients most people are trying in combination.

Two things: *If the oil got contaminated with botulism it would not be visible, so visual clues such as you noticed are not helpful. I don't think dried or fresh herbs would make a difference in this case. *I'm pretty sure someone here once explained that even if you heat the oil itself up to a high enough temperature to destroy the spores, the stuff in the oil does not heat up to that same temperature so it does not mean that the product is safe. Something about waters boiling point being 100 and you can't make water go higher than that unless you heat it under pressure? God I don't know, someone help me out here. I remember that the key point was that heating it up (not under pressure) is not helpful.

^^ That's a good idea, but does it dilute the taste with banana-ness a lot? That's the reason I don't like most commercial smoothies as they taste too much of banana to me!

I've been freezing pure grape juice in ice lolly moulds recently. Thing is, sometimes parts of them come out a bit icey and flakey. There are two possible reasons I can think of for this: *My power goes off a lot, usually for between 10 minutes - 2 hours. My lights and fans are on the backup battery but my fridge is not. This means that it does get a bit warmer sometimes! It still keeps the fridge part rather cool, but I imagine the freezer gets to more of a fridge than a freezer temperature. Don't worry food health and safety people - I don't keep milk in the fridge (I buy fresh everday) so generally all that is in there are veggies (only a few at a time, again I buy fresh everyday), water/other drinks and ice lollies! *I'm using pure juice which I guess is kinda watery. Should I be using puree? What do you guys think? Is the occasional partial defrosting making them flakey or is it the juice thing?

Hi Arey, If I were you I would not keep the pesto longer than a couple of days, just to be on the safe side. As MaxH says, botulism is rare ("I've made it that way hundreds of times and I never got sick...") but when it does occur it is very serious. Actually sometimes when you look online you find a lot of people being very scornful about it and saying that their Grandma did x such and such a way and lived to be 100, and how can botulism really be so serious, etc. Take it all with a pinch of salt! When botulism strikes it can claim lives because people weren't expecting it! They had done something the same way for years and had got away with it, so when they got sick they never thought it could be botulism. And it seems that many cookery writers don't even consider botulism when writing recipes for home preserves, so don't necessarily rely on instructions from a book either. All the commerical pesto I have seen includes citric acid to acidify the product and make it safe for longer storage. I think it would be difficult to guarantee any kind of safety if you did this at home on a casual basis though, unless you had some pH strips lying around and were able to test the product thoroughly. So my advice is to enjoy the product fresh, sharing it with friends and neighbours if necessary (ask them to use it quite quickly - don't want you to kill of the neighbours now do we!) and let that be it.

Your breakfast tagine looked amazing! Have you had the foul medamas there? That's one of my favourite middle eastern (ok, so I think it's actually Egyptian) breakfasts. Some people don't like the beans though...

I looked into one of these a few summers ago when I was making a lot of drink syrups to be mixed with carbonated water to sell at a few local fairs. However, it turned out that plain bottled carbonated water was so cheap that it wasn't worth it for me. Just something to bare in mind.

You are correct. Cashews, yes even the "raw" ones, undergo an initial roasting (whilst still in the shell I believe) to denature the irritating resin that is present in the shell. It is of course entirely possible that someone has found a way to denature this resin without heat but your average supermarket cashews will have gone through the usual method. In addition, I might be nervous about trying a truly "raw" cashew, even if it is claimed to be safe to eat.

Glad to see you put the cream on first (though you didn't use enough )

I feel like you could take any cuisine and highlight dishes which are incredibly easy, and also find dishes in the same cuisine which are time consuming and technically difficult.

I think the reason that tipping and restaurant reviews is such a delicate subject on eGullet is because many people here have worked or do work in the restaurant business. It's sort of understandable - people here know the effect that a bad review can have on a restaurant, and they know how measely serving staff wages can be in some countries! However, I do feel that at times (such as on this thread) the response becomes knee-jerk and unreasonable. There is no reason that we can't have an appreciation for the way the restaurant business works and still be able to dislike a restaurant's food or service. I'm inclined to give a restaurant the benefit of the doubt and give them a second chance (unless the food is really bad, as I probably wouldn't inflict that upon myself more than once) but I'm entitled to not like a place and talk about it's negative aspects if I want to. And I will. I will tell my friends not to go somewhere if it is repeatedly poor or if it's extremely awful the first time and with no apology or explanation from the staff. I will withold a tip for awful service or reduce for so-so service. I think one difficulty is that serving staff in America clearly have a special dependence on tips as part of their wages. To me, this seems like a stupid system, but of course my opinion on this will not change anything! So all I can add to this particular issue is that if a waiter expects to substantially supplement their income with tips, then they should really learn to serve in a professional manner. That doesn't mean that they can't make mistakes. But they should be polite to customers in such an incident and they should apologise and maybe even make it up in some small way if it is a large error. If a waiter is rude to my face and blatantly does not care if they ruin my meal, why should I tip them? This will only encourage them to be just as careless in the future.