Darienne

Hmmm....I have a container of all-purpose tomato sauce in the freezer as we speak and I shall look for no-cook Barilla lasagna noodles in my favorite Moab grocery store. Time for lasagna! (DH makes the tomato sauce in this household and holds off on the ingredients which would make it suitable for only one dish. Into the freezer it goes in containers. The only problem there is to keep him from filling the entire freezer at one go. Thus it gets defrosted and turned into spaghetti sauce, lasagna sauce, Mexican meatball sauce, Moussaka sauce, etc....yes, I know it make be 'tacky' but it keeps us going.)

I am curious about this one also. I've seen them but never tried them.

To have orange tape, which is not only visible, but actually sticks to cold plastic seems to me a great boon. Please post the source of this tape and I will send for some today! Pronto! I take very good care of our freezer contents but it is a major pain to keep it up. Anything which helps is to be invited in. Thanks, Andie.

Had to save your photo in order to look at it, but it was worth the trouble.

Ed, he-who-does-all-that-kind-of-buying, goes with Consumer Reports which gave the best rating to the Bosch. We bought one a few years ago and have had absolutely no problems with it.

In this case, guilt is highly overrated. Making puff pastry from scratch? Not in this lifetime...

dcarch's post reminded me of our own annual Dog Weekend at the farm. As the weekend grew, folks complained about the dishwashing problem and asked me to buy throwaway plates and cutlery so no one had to do any dishes. Well, I bought plastic plates and so on, very inexpensive...and now years later we are still using them, yes, and washing them. I simply could not throw them out. Besides the green element involved...I hate eating from a foam or paper plate and I absolutely refused to buy plastic cutlery. We have enough extra cutlery after 55 years of marriage to feed an army. Not matching...but who cares.

Forgot to add that we have an electric smart meter...thanks Ontario Hydro...so it means that we don't use the dishwasher except in off-peak hours. That's a nuisance, but it does save us money.

Deryn, I have to say that I loved your post. Mine could be the same, only backwards for some of the stuff. Right now we are in Moab Utah where the garbage is collected from in front of your house once a week and there are NO regulations about what you put in the container. Recycling is a personal decision completely because you have to take the stuff up to the recycling station yourself and without a vehicle you can't do it. And they take very little of what we recycle at home in Ontario. But then Moab is two hours from anywhere else and it would cost too much to truck the stuff out. You are asked to donate money to use the recycling station. I think most of the women..women...who sort the stuff are volunteers. Moab is a strange mixture of aging hippies, and those who are definitely NOT hippies and tourists. At home, we have no garbage pick-up but have to take our garbage to a transfer station...the garbage goes somewhere else...I don't know where...Michigan probably. You are allowed two bags per week, with stick on tags presented to you by the county. In the transfer station, they pretty much don't care to follow the regs. It's the old country vs city thing. But they are strict about allowing only township folks to bring their garbage there. But then...they know you anyway. And we bring them candy every now and then. And they give the dogs who visit little dog biscuits which makes it very popular. Folks call the place the Cavan Mall because you can leave useable stuff there and take whatever you can find...which is sometimes quite astonishing...like a working electric organ. Visiting friends ask to go there with us. We compost carefully on the farm, but then we don't waste much. The county picks up papers, cardboard and assorted cans, pop cans, tetra paks, egg cartons, etc...but woe betide you if you put anything into your recycling box which doesn't belong there. They'll pick it out and leave it in your box. Must cost a fortune in man hours to pre-sort the stuff on the road. The contractor who lived in our house many decades ago used the old derelict house in the back 40 as a dumping ground. It would cost us thousands to get it cleaned out. It's all different everywhere, isn't it?

Andie...that pie sounds heavenly. I can't make it in Moab, but it will first on the list in Cavan when we return home. ...could ask my Moab chums...none of whom 'bake' ...if anyone has a largish pie pan or even better, one with a removable bottom. But really it's OK. I have two Margarita pies to make this week and a Chinese feast to put on the next...so I don't lack for things to do.

...still waiting for Andie's almond/apricot recipe... A wonderful combination, almonds and apricots, and I can make anything from dried apricots. See fresh ones so seldom in our neck of the woods, even when in season.

"No one brought a thing"...ChocoMom, you have got to find a new bunch of friends!

Just scrolled back in this thread to see if I had posted in it and indeed I had in 2011. Here we are back in Moab and nothing has changed. It's the land of red rocks, blue skies, much sun (although not this year, alas) and really dreadful restaurant fish and chips.

We had grilled salmon with lime and baked potatoes (made by DH). And for dessert, Millionaire's Shortbread Bars, an experiment from a couple of days ago which probably won't be repeated.

No recipes here, I'm sorry to say, but I am now also awaiting the brilliant ideas to pour in. For my DH, there cannot be too many nuts in cakes, muffins, cookies, ice cream, etc, etc, and a good pie recipe will be much appreciated. :wub:

What is this urge in us to confess our stupidity? It has hit me again. A couple of days ago I threw a bunch of semi-dried figs into my food processor to make them into a more or less puree. Of course, they were hard to get out of the processor. But why did I swipe around the bottom of said processor with my finger? Right. The edge of the food processor blade is alarming sharp and now, days later, I am still suffering from that cut finger tip. Stupid, stupid, stupid. :wacko:

Tri2Cook, I think you are correct. I'm thinking about mac and cheese and chili but I'm not coming up with anything. Besides we had chili for lunch today and once a week is enough. Let us know if you do both of them together and if it could work.

Somewhere on eGullet in the last two days or so, someone mentioned Macaroni and Cheese and so that's what we are having for New Year's. DH will make it with his Mom's old recipe. Yum. A good way to welcome 2015.

As for my 2014 goals...not so good. We did start to have folks over for lunch again now that DH is well again, but not much. And I did find a good bean salad recipe with no sugar in it. As for working through the Power Hungry cookbook. I kept it up for a while but then found an excellent recipe for me personally, figured out how to quadruple the recipe with my limited food processor, and stopped trying new recipes and thus stopped posting. Win some...lose some. Right gfweb...time for a 2015 thread.

Moab has blue skies and red rocks...it doesn't have figs except for those in the Sun-Maid re-sealable paks. But still I am going to make Pan de higos in the next few days. Looks so good.

I adore dried figs and will look up recipes under those titles. I think I've had a fresh fig only a few times in my life and we certainly don't get them in our small Ontario city which is nearby the farm. What I do use figs for all the time is the breakfast bars I make taken from Power Hungry: The Ultimate Energy Bar Cookbook by Camilla Saulsbury. ps. I don't have the book with me but the recipe is called Citrus-Seed-Bars or something like that. I don't have the recipe with me either which was exceedingly short-sighted of me.

Deryn and Shelby, I think you both have a lot of company on this thread. If we want Asian food...we make it ourselves.

We are far from home this Christmas season, but still among friends. We are off to a friend's traditional Christmas Eve Pot Luck and so I have no idea of what we will be eating. We are taking Fanny Farmer's Viennese Crescents drizzled with dark chocolate as our contribution. Tomorrow we are having Christmas dinner with another friend and much of her family and a couple of stray waifs with nowhere else to go. Her son is bringing some kind of special ham which they all love...I am not a fan of ham...childhood story...and we are bringing a traditional French Canadian Tortiere made by DH and a Lemon Cheese Pie topped with a chocolate ganache, my old standby. Plus some Seed Brittle. That's our Christmas in Moab.

If it has eggplant in it, then I will love it. Good luck.

Gorgeous little cookies, Ruth.