LizD518

For me food / restaurant choices have become a barometer of how I think a relationship may turn out. For my most recent date, the guy and I went to a tapas restaurant that I suggested. He was enthusiastic about the idea, but it was obvious he didn't know what it was about because he was awfully disappointed about the size of the portions. I knew we were in big trouble (actually, I knew long before this moment, this was just the kicker) when he was talking about how hungry he was but that he didn't want to order more dishes because of the expense. I paid for dessert at a local ice cream shop. For the record, the food was excellent and we both enjoyed it, but if you can't go out on a first date with someone and either relax and spend a little more than you had planned or be bothered to plan the date yourself if the money aspect is that important to you, then we probably have a problem.

That looks like a lot of fun - and maybe something I will try with some of my friends!

I guess because honey is fluid, I had the thought that there is already some water present and that too much would dilute it too much. But it won't hurt to try it and add a little more honey if it is not sweet enough.

I'd like to use honey for the simple syrup on a cake that is baking right now. I googled "honey simple syrup" and found recipes ranging from 1:1 to 4:1. The cake recipe calls for a a 1:1 simple syrup of white sugar to water, but I ran out of white sugar while making the recipe. I think the honey will work well with the cake though, since it is a spice cake with a little bt of walnuts. I just need the proper ratio of simple syrup. Thanks!

Wow, that sounds delicious!! Good suggestion!

I'm driving the whole way, and I will have a refridgerator in between the short leg of the trip and the long leg. I like the idea of the cranberry upside-downer. The spice cake I did last year was her applesauce spice bars that were baked in a smaller pan to become thicker and more cakey. They were awesome.

I have made the dessert for my family's Thanksgiving dinner for the last few years. This year, I am travelling much further to get there - it will be a total of nine hours, broken into a short 2 hour trip and a long 7 hour trip - all the same day. My question is what would be a good dessert to take. I will be travelling the day before and we eat late, so I'll have time to assemble / finish on Thanksgiving day. Last year was a spice cake with a caramel glaze and the year before was an apple bread pudding with creme anglaise - I'd like to not duplicate those items. I'm thinking pie will travel best but I'm also thinking a cake, dis-assembled and then frost it on Thanksgiving day. Any other ideas? Any particular pitfalls with my original ideas? Thanks!

How appropriate - I am eating apple crisp right now. I always make a big batch of crisp topping and keep it in the freezer. Equal parts oats, chopped nuts, brown sugar & flour, flavored with some cinnamon, and maybe ground ginger. Rub in enough butter (about half the quantity of the dry goods) to make pea-sized pieces. Spread out on a sheet tray and freeze, then transfer to a container or bag. To make apple crisp for one, I saute an apple of choice (honey crisp, granny smith, macoun, gala, fuji, your choice) in a little honey or brown sugar and butter, pinch of salt, flour, and cinnamon and/or ginger. Saute until cooked, but still very firm. Put into ramekin & top with topping. Bake in 450* oven for 15-20 min until topping is browned and crispy. Let sit 10-15 minutes before eating. Can work for lots of other fruits as well.

The gap between the best contestants and the okay contestants has been noticable, but I haven't really minded because I have been so into seeing the best chef's food. For me it isn't so much how the competition goes, but seeing what these people come up with when my brain could never even fathom the combinations and techniques they produce. But then, that is why they are there and I am not a chef! OTOH, I too am waiting for Robin and Ash to be picked off. Ash has been in the bottom quite a few times and has seemed to talk his way out of being kicked off. His speech about how he hero-worships Mike almost came across to me as a smokescreen to get Mike kicked off - by stressing how much of the dish was Mike's direct responsibility. As someone posted above, in the situation where one chef does most of the work on a bad dish, that chef usually gets sent home. As for Robin, she seems like a nice lady -and she didn't deserve the shit-talk she got from Mike I - but she is also way out of her league here.

I made a great recipe a couple weeks ago that is going to become a stand-by for me. It is from Rick Bayless's "Salsas that Cook" - the Spicy Vegetable Stew. I modifeid it a bit by changing the chayote to regular zucchini and the broccoli / green beans to red bell pepper, and I think it would lend itself well to other adaptions as well. The key is to have the salsa contribute to the base of the stew which helps a vegetarian stew get real depth of flavor. I believe that if you are looking for a shortcut and don't want to make his salsa, you can buy versions of the salsas from this book as part of his frontera line of products. The stew itself is packed with veggies, black beams abd garbazos and tastes sublime with a little sour cream and cilantro on top.

I think next time I will leave them out overnight. I did a test with a few by folllowing the directions exactly - thaw time of 45 minutes, then leaving them another 3 hours (all at room temp). They came out marginally better, but still undercooked. I'll leave some out overnight tonight and then bake them tomorrow morning and see how those come out. Thanks for the input!

I'm sure the collective wisdom of this board can help me figure out what I am doing wrong here. I am using a frozen, un-par-baked croissant for morning meetings at my place of business. I cannot, for the life of me, get them to bake properly. They are supposed to be fool-proof, and other colleagues of mine (at different properties)have no problem with them, so I have concluded it must be me! The directions are two-fold and I am not sure if they are two different directions for different methods, or a two-part process. First, the box says to thaw them at room temp for 45min - 1 hour or overnight. Then, it says to proof to 1.5 times thier size, 2-3 hours. baking times for convection oven: 320*, 11-14 minutes. Now, I must confess, unless I arrived at work at 4am this morning, I was not going to be able to follow the instructions to the letter. And I'm not just the baker, I'm the general manager and sales manager of this account. The only reason I'm baking the damn croissants is because my cook cannot get into work prior to 8am. 95% of the time, that isn't an issue, so when it is, I pick up the slack. Yesterday I put the frozen croissants on sheet pans and into the fridge to thaw overnight. This morning I took them out at 6am and let them sit at room temp until 7:30am. when I baked them it was like all the butter just leaked out and the top got crispy, but they did not puff up. The inside was under-cooked. I even left them in a little longer, honing that the insides woould get cooked propoerly, even if they weren't puffy. No such luck. Did I just not leave them out long enough, or am I doing something wrong? I have some sitting in the kitchen right now, and I am following the directions to the letter, but it will be too late for the group that is here today. I can't bake them off until 11am, at the earliest. I will report back on those when they are done.

That's interesting and unpleasant at the same time. I wonder why it overheated your motor and did not get to where you wanted it in the prescribed time. Do please try it again and let us know if a second batch is the same. Or perhaps someone else will try it. Also I am curious about the grittiness. It seems unlikely that DL would post a recipe which was gritty. You have pricked my curiosity. Usually with custard ice creams the custard is thick to start off with. This seemed really thin, almost watery when I poured it in the machine. However, except for the grittyness, the texture is terrific. It didn't freeze to a solid block like I thought. That also might be to letting it churn for such a long time, a lot more air got into it than I usually let happen. As for the grit...DL recommends whizzing it in a blender to help that problem. Although I think the grit comes less from the cocoa powder (some, but not all) than from the cinnamon, and especially the chili powder. I don't have a blender, just a food processor, and that usually doesn't work for fine blending, so I skipped that step. It is tasty though!

Made a batch of DL's Aztec Hot Chocolate which I churned up this morning as I was gettting ready for work. It is Philly-style made with both chocolate (I used Trader Joe's bittersweet) and cocoa poweder (Penzey's Dutch Process). It was tasty when churned, but took a really long time, so long it overheated the motor of my Cusinart machine. Hopefully that is only a temporary development. Overall, I think it will be a good flavor, but the grittyness of the cocoa powder, coupled with the powdered cinnamon and the chili powder are not something I would probably serve to someone besides myself.

I use a small mortar and pestle from Ikea, $10 I think. It doesn't get as fine a grind as a grinder, and I still use a spare coffee grinder for larger quantities or for cinnamon. But I don't mind the coarser texture as I am mostly cooking items like stews and curries with those spices. I do buy ground cinnamon, alspice and ginger for baking, but I buy the smallest amounts of Penzey's and have no problem using it up. Everything else is whole, and I make my own blends in quarter cup quantities and store them for convenience.

No comments on last night's episode yet? Ok, I'll start... Mike I actually put out a winning dish (in the QF) without seeming to ride anyone else's coat-tails. Of course, it helped that he was the only one with any first-hand knowledge of the ingredient. sorry, he just comes off as an a**hat and does not make me want to cheer for him. Bryan V is quickly looking like the man to beat, even with all the strong competition. It was also nice not to see him and his brother not cook their proteins sous vide and still be among the strongest competitors. Ceviche should be banned from all further challenges. In the desert...really? Nice to see Ashley really show her thought-process ( spreading the cast iron skillets out to get a more even cooking surface) and to have it work for her. Her dish looked good.

I made my first stew of the fall last night. Adapted from rick Bayless's "Salsas that Cook", it has garbanzos, black beans, sweet potato, onion, bell pepper and zucchini in a base of tomato sauce and one of his smokey salsas made with guajillos and anchos, tomatillos and tomatoes. Served it over rice, with a little sour cream and cilantro and it is delicious!

I'm really enjoying these posts Chris, and am jealous that you got to spend so much time at the home of your Indian friends! I want a real Indian mom to teach me how to cook!

I do both. If it is something I am just throwing together, and doesn't require a lot of time-sensitive attention, like Chinese or Thai, than I just leave things on the board. But for anything using a recipe, or if I need to move fast I'll break out the bowls. For things like Indian recipes which have lots and lots of ingrdiaents, usually spices, I'll combine the ones that get added to the recipe at the same time to cut down on the number of bowls, then I line then all up in the order that they get added and I'm ready to work.

So far this week the women look like the much weaker team. Too bad Ashley made the panna cotta instead just concentrating on one dish - the judges liked her original dish. One thing has been bugging me for a while - and not just on this season - everyone seems to describe theor dish with the phrase "a little". As in, I took a little Artic Char and paired it with a little blah blah blah... "A little" is the current "like" or "dude". Drives me nuts...

Funny, I was wondering whether there was a thread like this just the other day. This year I broke down and bought a citrus reamer. I was too cheap to spend $4 prior to this, thinking I was doing just fine squeezing them by hand. What a difference! Now it doesn't seem so expensive to make Ina Garten's lemon cake recipe or a batch of homemade lemonade because I am getting twice as much juice out of each piece of fruit! And I make less of a mess too because I can direct the flow of the juice into the container that I am using.

Pretty!! I think having some of the spices there makes it even more likely that you will reach for them in a moment of inspiration - especially something you might not use quite as often. I haven't been doing much cooking with a lot of layers / flavors lately. mostly I've been using fresh produce and herbs. Once the weather turns I'll go back to my cumin, coriander, etc...

That's actually the hard part - you need to be fully present to practice and I think most of us don't put that much total focus on our food when we are eating. It also may depend on the circumstances. Maybe part of the reason some meals are so much memorable than others over the years is because we are more focused on the moment, the surroundings, and the food than others.

I had the same feeling - it had the mouthfeel and slight grainyness that I get when I make ice cream at home. The only difference was that it didn't get as hard as my ice cream at home. But I loved the molasses-y flavor. I should have tried it with some fresh nectarines, maybe sauteed in a little butter. Or better yet, with the peach hand pies I made a couple of weeks ago.

Welcome! Omiting the rum in the sorbet might make it more icy / hard, but just let it soften for about 5-10 minutes in the frigde, or even on the counter. It will be fine.