Darienne

We have a Champion and forgot to mention in my first post that DH put through it bushels of apples last fall. It did a great job and we just finished (alas!) the last of the apple juice this week. It tasted freshly made. Drawback: it is unwieldy and weighs a ton. We keep it in its original box, down in the cellar.

A great topic with lots of useful answers. We have 100 acres, most of it arable, and can take in a lot of folks. The learning curve would be incredible as we all rebuilt our lives. We would learn again what we can eat and not eat and what grows and what doesn't. We already know some and pooling knowledge would be the answer. Sounds like life used to be. Ed is currently helping a neighbor with his maple syrup production and that neighbor house-sat for us while we were away. Those neighbors also receive much of the confections and things that I make. Now there's a hardship. It was partly behind DH's decision to relocate to the country. We have a powerful generator...it sure didn't cost $250.00...and we have an oil furnace which can also burn wood. We have old covered-over wells on our property which no doubt could be resurrected for drinking water. Thanks again for all the answers.

Interesting topic in light of the fact that tomorrow I am teaching a friend how to make ice cream and that I have just finished 4 'Round the World' classes from a local caterer and chef. I've taught folks how to make certain confections, but always very casually and tomorrow's class is casual also, so I have really nothing to report there. The main thing about ice cream is the time element and so I am making sure I have that part covered. However, the classes I took were another thing. Each class presented a full course menu from a country: India, Italy, Thailand and Greece were the ones I took. They were fun and I did eat delicious dishes and learned quite a lot that was useful in that I could use the knowledge elsewhere. The menus were too ambitious and IMO led to real problems. The workload had to be apportioned..."students A&B made the sauce, while students C&D prepared the meat, etc." So, unless I was really quick, I didn't get to learn much about other task, nor the others about mine. The dishes all had to be fairly quick cooking of course, and so they used mostly cut up chicken as a basis. Also the teacher in two cases ended up making the dessert by herself with no one watching while we scurried around doing this and that. She worked way too hard setting up these classes so that the overly ambitious menu could work and did not earn enough firstly to cut down the scope of each class and also to establish as part of the plan that she would simply demonstrate certain dishes. Please understand that I am not complaining at all, simply pointing out the pitfalls of her choices. I also attended free weekly one-hour demonstrations in one of our local grocery stores weekly for quite a while. It was simply demos with tasting at the end, but was very professionally done and I did learn a lot. Questions were allowed and you can bet I asked a lot. The problem here was that many of the ingredients were those sold by the chain (duh!) and yup! I bought quite a number. Short cuts: you can't make chicken stock in one hour and the store doesn't earn much money. Buy their chicken stock tetra paks.) I don't go any more...there was a limit to the scope of the classes. I've taken classes with Kerry Beal and as you can imagine, they were excellent. I suspect Kerry is somehow super-human! This topic is huge and fascinating. Ed and I taught craft classes, together and singly, of all kinds with hardshell gourds...thus my avatar...and what a learning process it all was. Much of teaching is the same whatever you are teaching.....

Hi Nopales, Thanks for adding your knowledge to this topic and putting another perspective into the ring. This entire subject is new to me and so it is all interesting and challenging.

More work, but you could do something with Royal icing. Make little circles. Or make squiggles on the marshmallows. What's in those colored sugars? And dusting stuff? Probably don't want to know... Well, the colored sugar doesn't sound any better than the sprinkles and although I now have Aztec Gold luster dust all over my hands...the lid fell off...I still have no idea of what's in it. My hands make me think of the woman in Goldfinger? Do I have the correct movie? Sorry, not much help.

Just finished some truffles. 70% chocolate coating on my own ganache recipe (copying Greweling's directions pretty much): Tahini, icing sugar and bittersweet chocolate. Tastes like a cross between Gianduja and Halvah. Now to get them out of the house quickly.

Looks lovely. Now on my list. And I'd be astounded if a)I ever had all the ingredients that any recipe called for and if b) I followed the recipe exactly. Good going, EmilyR

Good for you, Minas6907, You have a faithful audience following your endeavors.

Wonderful Andie. I just love old cookbooks. For any new Mexican dish, I first check in Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking. 1965. I can't even remember where, when or why I bought it. I'd never been to Mexico...probably hadn't even tasted Mexican food then. Not one photo. It's a mystery. And now it's totally in pieces and nicely stained.

Found this interesting article, The Mexican Kitchen's Islamic Connection , although I can't figure out quite how I got there... Wasn't sure where to post it. It certainly made me sit up and think. No wonder I love both Mexican and Indian food.

DL spends a day shooting film at Patrick Roger.

Thanks so much for that informative response. I really appreciate that kind of detail. Barbara and I should make taffy on our next Candy day. It's been on our list forever.

OK. Photos of Mexican Menus. Alas I have an old ailing camera and if it has a macro lens, I don't know how to use it properly. Rick Bayless is the top right photo, lots of dark shaggy hair, mustache and beard, wearing a plaid shirt. He provides 3 menus: - Chicken Soup Tlalpeno, Cheese Empanadas, Green Bean Salad - Tortilla Casserole, Pickled Cauliflower - Black Bean Tostadas, Chicken in Escabeche The recipes are far from his current authentic ones, calling for canned tomatoes, mild or hot 'chili' powder, 'vegetable' oil, sour cream, etc. I am not implying any adverse criticism here...the cookbook was a good start to getting folks interested in cooking Mexican food. Asking for crema or queso fresco or annatto seeds would not have led to a great readership at that time. (don't know how to do a tilde in this venue) Second edit: other contributors are: Jane Butel, Elizabeth Schneider, Sue Huffman, Barbara Hansen, Constantine Coules, Vickie Simms, Lucinda Hutson and Margaret Shakespeare.

Found this little goodie in our local Value Village today: Great Meals in Minutes: Mexican Menus, Time-Life, 1984. Contributing chefs include a VERY young Rick Bayless. VERY young. The cookbook is incredibly dated, written at a time when the quintessential ingredients which we count on using in Mexican foods today were not only not available in Canada, but obviously not available in the USA either. Still I am looking forward to poring through the book for ideas. Anyone else ever use this book? Gosh, the summer of 1984 was our very first trip to the Southwest. Our first Mexican food. Wonderful! The rest is history.

Oooh. I am jealous. They look lovely. I've never made taffy to this day and I look forward to seeing what you do next in this line. Whose recipe did you use? And anything special we should know? Something to look out for? Etc? Good one, Minas6907

We have our second Champion. Here's the Champion website. We plumb wore out the first one. That's at least 20 years. No regrets. No problems. Great machines. Workhorses. The main reason we use it now is to pulp our dogs' vegetables. They eat pulped greens every day with their meat and yogurt, etc. Of course we have used the Champion for making juices of all kinds, and running through frozen fruits for a kind of sherbet.

This topic for me should be called ‘Salads: 2009 & 2010 Reprise’. Over the last two years I have collected a good number of wonderful salads, lots of ‘company’ salads among them. Firstly,we eat only salads for supper every second night. And we put on our Annual Dog Weekend for which I need massive quantities of food. Many eGers have helped me over the past two years with salads. Calipoutine sent me the very best Bean Salad. Cathy, as in What Would Cathy Eat? has provided several, my favorite being her ‘Tangy Quinoa Salad’. Other favorites from somewhere are: ‘Marinated Broccoli and Cauliflower Salad’, ‘Black Bean and Sweet Potato Salad’, ‘Carrot, Walnut & Dried Cranberry Coleslaw’. Old favorites are Taboulleh from Roden (no tomatoes, pul-eeze) and an untitled ‘Chickpea and Grape Tomato Salad’ which I have been making for decades now. Wait, I do have a new entry and probably this summer’s go-to salad. It’s my own amalgam of several salads each of which contain two or more of the following (but none all): corn niblets, black beans, potatoes and Poblanos (plus onions, etc). Because I print out my recipes without sources (I’ve got to stop doing that) I can’t give most of the above salads’ websites and I can’t print them online. I will PM any of the salad recipes however.

Thanks so much for posting about the e-book. Downloaded it and now I shall try some of these goodies. Thanks again.

Ed got them at a local convenience/lunch bar/ etc place, named Charlotte Pantry. I suspect you could get them at a bulk food place or a small Mom & Pop breakfast type restaurant. I know that our local bulk food store has round pails which they sell for a few pence. I just checked three of the pails. They're all labeled Tasty Batters and all contained muffin batters. That square shape is the best!

Many of my daily smoothies start with pomegranate juice. Don't have a favorite tho... Does anyone make smoothies with vegetables in them? I can't quite wrap my limited mind around the concept. Oh, except for avocados.

Mitch got there just before I did. To have enough raspberries to make a really luscious ice cream would be wonderful.

Hello AnneN, and welcome to eGullet, place of much learning and much sharing.

Pails: #1 upper set of pails, lids off to accommodate stuff (cracked my head on the support beam taking this photo. Forgot how low the ceiling is on this very old cellar) #2 pails: one with lid partly on; other lidless Larger pails: 9 1/2" x 9 1/2" x 13 1/2" Smaller pails: 9 1/2" x 9 1/2" x 8"

Now that I am finally older than dirt, I have finally put my freezers into order. Of course it helps that we bought another chest freezer: all the dog stuff goes in there now freeing up everything else. After last year's "Great Freezer Cleanout", DH bought all these large recycled squared off deep plastic pails...the kind that muffin mixes, etc, come in...about $1 per...and they stack beautifully in the freezer and no space is wasted. I made a diagram on the computer which I then use to note the contents roughly in the freezer, changing the notes when I have to. The diagram is then pinned by magnets to the oil tank which is just beside the freezer. It then takes only a few minutes to pull out the entire freezer and go through the contents. I can't believe what a change in my freezer life...

Lovely Jenni, I await the recipe...