Darienne

I just got the Perfect Scoop from our local library...have to try books out before I buy them...and it fell open at 'Orange-Szechwan Pepper Ice Cream'. Doo doo doo doo....this is a wonderful omen. Tonight I'll make it. This book is a keeper and a winner and I am going to buy it at once. WOW!

There is always so much more to learn. You are truly the Ginger Lady. Now that I have been eating the rhizome ginger for a year, I must prefer it to what is in retrospect very tame stem ginger. I admit that I had never considered the country of origin of my ginger, but now I will look carefully. Of course, this would make a difference. I wonder how many varieties of ginger there are. I'll look it up. Ed says for sure the ginger was from China. I shall try to find some from Thailand. I can ask at our local Asian market. This is not a large or cosmopolitan city we live near and so I may have to get my ginger next time I'm in Toronto which has a huge Asian population. Thanks again, Andie.

Good stuff, Andie. I never thought of tasting it. And I never thought of steaming just a bit. I did bite into this stuff after steaming to make certain it was ready for the sugar syrup bath, but I did not 'taste' it. I shall do it from now on. I am certain I won't have any trouble taking it back if it comes to that. I have it drying now on your wonderful grate and just ate another piece. It is still the same. Some underlying flavor that I just don't like...but I don't know how to describe it. Sour? Ate another piece. This one was fine. Perhaps it was just some of the ginger. I think Ed, who bought it, said it came from China. I could check that when I am town next. A mystery. Thanks. I'll dip it all and just eat it myself over the next months. Or not.

Is there such a thing as ginger which doesn't really taste all that good? I have just finished making another batch of candied ginger. The pieces taste fine about 3/4 of the way through the eating, but then there is some not quite right taste about the finishing up of the piece. Have I done something wrong inadvertently or is there just some ginger which doesn't make the grade. It looked fine, unwrinkled, plump, etc. I was surprised at how inexpensive it was... Any thoughts, please?

Hi Edward, Now I will pass your instructions on to my DH, my Edward, and with luck, he can make me one. Thanks so much for going to the trouble.

Sounds brilliant. I take it that you either made it or had it made. A photo or construction instructions would be nice...

Made a batch of sour cream two days ago. 1/4 cup of buttermilk to 1 cup of whipping cream. The result was bland to the point of uselessness. My DH said it tasted a bit soapy. Added a TBSP or so of lemon juice. One more day passed. Hooray! Sour cream! Thanks to all of you for so many ideas on the subject. Next I will try it with just cream and lemon juice.

(I did buy the KA hand mixer through Amazon.com while in the States.) Now we are home and I am using the old hand mixer to make fruit pancakes for breakfast. And I thought I would just write a short note celebrating our old handmixer. The case is cracked and it has only three speeds and no whisk. Some of the paint is gone and chipped. It is old and ugly. The mixer is SOOOO old that it is a GE, made in Barrie, Ontario, CANADA with all metal gears. The model # is M7A which is, of course, untraceable. I cannot recall how long ago Canada had a manufacturing sector. And it still runs like a dream after at least 35 or 40 years. And in the meantime I have burnt out at least 3 Black & Deckers in the last two years. Go figure.

Nope. I think I got it. Thanks

Wikipedia defines mojito: A mojito is traditionally made of five ingredients: spearmint, rum, sugar (traditionally sugar cane juice ), lime, and club soda. Can someone please give me a better sense of what a mojito macaron, or a mojito anything else might mean? Thanks

Add three more: two from a friend and one from a library book sale. No, there is no end.

Just to round up my part of this thread. Because I could not find any recipes about candying Calamansi oranges, I decided that there were none because none really exist. The oranges were the juiciest little beasts, too juicy for candying. Well...I thought... So, I set out to make marmalade out of both the just-picked oranges and the two years in the freezer ones. Threw at least half of the frozen ones out. They were not appealing at all. Two years in a freezer was not useful. I probably should have just tossed them all and made up the difference with navel oranges and lemon. Used only sugar and the oranges. Oh, threw about a couple of TBSPs of just zested off a navel orange zest in also. Very, very delicious results. (This is my very first ever made by myself jam/jelly of any kind. Yay team! )

To carry on the thread of thickness: my creme fraiche made by the Damerow method of one TBSP of buttermilk to one cup of whipping cream, no heating involved, aged 24 - 48 hours in the oven with just the light on to achieve a temperature of 80-85 degrees F...was incredibly thick. The whipping cream came from a small Utah dairy which although not organic by regulation, was about as organic as you could get. But thick? O my yes. It was almost as thick as cream cheese. I wonder why????

Thanks for all the replies. This is one I am going to get at immediately. PS. Just reread the posts and downloaded the recipes. I really like the notion of adding a bit of lemon juice. Thanks.

I do love a good dollop of whipped cream on my desserts, but recently I have found that I am beginning to prefer sour cream...if you can get it. Decent sour cream, that is. Most of it is quite bland. Boring. Not much going for it. Not like the sour cream of my long lost youth. A recipe in Ice Cream: The Whole Scoop, Gail Damerow, contains a recipe for sour cream. The result was delicious, thicker than sour cream, not really tart enough for sour cream, but still very nice. Then I discovered that it was actually a recipe for creme fraiche. It was basically one tablespoon of buttermilk to one cup of heavy cream. Can you make sour cream at home? Is there a recipe? If there is, please send it this way. (BTW, the best sour cream we could find in Utah was organic and made by Horizon.) Now we are back in Ontario, and haven't started to look in earnest yet. Is there is a good regional sour cream? Thanks.

I used coconut oil/butter for years when I made 'I can't believe it's not chocolate', a recipe from Dr. Mercola from his cookbook. That was then...this is now. Believe me, it was not chocolate. Only chocolate is chocolate! Coconut oils have quite a range in taste and some we did not like at all. So do give it a second chance if you don't like the taste of what you have made . Try a different brand.

Thanks. That's a big help. Now think of what you have to look forward to. The marmalade we made was just so good!!! Chocolate fillings. Good. Curd. Mousse. All sound so good.

Thanks for writing. As for the tough rind...I wouldn't say it was exactly tougher, but different. The rind is more like that of the mandarin, but thinner. ...and the more sour flavor...true too. Like biting straight into a lemon. Not to mention that they are incredibly juicy little fellows. Still if it stands still long enough, I will candy it. The candied kumquats from last winter ended up being put in Alton Brown's wonderful Seriously Vanilla Ice Cream and served as dessert at the minor Chinese feast in Moab. I can see these ending up in ice cream too. If they will candy properly. I'll ask the resident candying expert, Andie.

Thank you Tri2Cook. Learn something new every day. Learn, learn, learn... I searched earlier for a thread on a new product which purported to do something for stability, but couldn't find it. I wrote to the manufacturer, who was giving out free samples???, and received neither sample or reply.

Imagine my surprise when I agreed to help a friend harvest her oranges and make marmalade and it turned out to be the fruit of two calamondin (she calls it)/calamansi oranges. We took photos and I'll post one upon receiving them from her. Until two days ago I had never even heard of them. So we followed a recipe for Seville marmalade and made the most wonderful marmalade this morning. When I left, I left with a bag of freshly-picked calamansi and a bag of frozen from last year's crop. Yumm What on earth will I do with the frozen fruit? And can I candy the fresh fruit, like kumquats? All answers gratefully received. (I should add that we live in Ontario, in Zone 3/4 and that these are indoor grown)

A couple of questions please for the newbie folk: from Wiki sources: Syneresis (also spelled 'synæresis' or 'synaeresis'), in chemistry, is the extraction or expulsion of a liquid from a gel, as when lymph drains from a contracting clot of blood. Another example of syneresis is the collection of whey on the surface of yogurt. So this would mean that the liquid part of the mousse drains out and makes things slip? Also why is gelatin not an answer to the problem? It doesn't do the job? It is also subject to syneresis? Thanks.

Wow! I said, imagine being so virtuous as to never use A/C. Then, I had to smile when I read that you live in Halifax. No one in Halifax EVER needs A/C. We shall drop into your non-air conditioned house sometime in the next couple of months when we go to Halifax to see our youngest and his wife. I LOVE Halifax! We do have a few room air conditioners on the farm for the bad days and for visitors, but mostly use the ceiling fans which are amazing in their ability to cool a room. In Moab we used a swamp cooler. Now there is a very green and wonderful solution to heat. I don't know how 'green' this is, but we also have a doggy composter. Not really a cooking concept. Oh, but we do make all our own dogs' food...they eat raw. No waste there...they eat the bones and all. And the veggies are pulped in the Champion.

What is natural compostable charcoal and what do you use it for, please.

Thanks to Chris and the others for all the useful answers. Shotts is not generous with his directions on 'how to'. As for the spatula, I will look for one today. The difficulty may be finding a stainless steel one. That's my only addition to all the advice. If you are using stuff from the hardware/building supply store, make certain that you buy either plastic...which does not stand up to use all that well...or stainless which won't rust.

One small thing which we have done is to use two compost pails. One pail is saved for our neighbors who raise sheep. Sheep will eat almost anything. The second pail is for the few things sheep don't eat: coffee grains and seeds and pits of all kinds.