Darienne

Love Middle Eastern cooking but have cooked only from two cookbooks: Claudia Roden's A Book of Middle Eastern Food and Habeeb Salloum, Classic Vegetarian Cooking from the Middle East and North Africa. I could spend the rest of my cooking life just trying the dishes in these two books. No Middle Eastern restaurants in our area, alas. I look forward to following this thread as you cook from this cookbook.

Aha. Vinegar. Of course.

Thanks, eGers. I throw them all into a couple of basins of water, de-husk them, and then try to get the sticky off them in a few changes of water. Then I dump them into a huge stainless steel bowl with a bit of oil and then 'roast' them in the oven until soft...when they will be combined with the 'roasted' poblanos, etc, and thrown into the blender to blend. Hmmm...sounds like a lot of throwing and dumping... Not traditional method...but then my take on 'Mexican' food falls short of Bayless and Kennedy, but works for us. So, unless I hear other in the next couple of hours, that's just what I'll do. Oh, I found the non-dried husks easier to remove from the watery base. No bugs. Too cold. ps: I used the word 'roast' in apostrophes because my method is just too careless to be called 'roasting'. If they tend to steam more than roast, then that's what happens. Actually the above is pretty disgraceful when you consider the traditional methodology and I should be ashamed to have admitted any of it.

Not sure which forum to put this in... First of all I am not a gardener. Almost zilch is what I know about growing things. We live in Zone 5 Ontario which is not prescribed for growing tomatillos, although I grow them every year to make Andie Pasinger's Chile Verde which we love. Also one store only in my area carries Poblanos and I have a passel of them on my counter right now. OK. This summer was colder and wetter than usual and the first hard frost was two nights ago. I thought I'd better bring in the tomatillos. Also we never eat them raw. Now I have some questions: - is it safe to eat them (cooked) when none of them has a dried husk? (we've done it but I thought I'd ask anyway) - are they more mature when a paler green rather than a dark green? - does size count for maturity? - what about when the fruit is small but fills the husk completely? - what about when the fruit is only half as large as the surrounding green husk? - do you have to get all that sticky off them before eating them? I know I have more questions...thought about them as I was de-husking the little devils, on and on and on...they'll come back to me no doubt. Thanks for any and all help.

You two certainly do eat well.

Tried once to make Divinity. Biggest confectionery disaster ever.

Hmmm...fruitcake. A friend gives out the booziest fruitcake every year. OMG, it is so wonderful. Add to that Tortiere which DH makes according to a French-Canadian recipe given to him decades ago.

Shortbread cookies. For Christmas only.

Deryn, I would love the recipe for your " 'family-famous' Rick Bayless-inspired sweet chipotle pecans". Thanks.

Found this recipe online just now. It's not the source for the recipe I have always used but I'm sure it's fine. http://www.marilynmoll.com/2007/12/enstroms-style-toffee/ If anyone wants my version of the recipe, I'll PM it, as I did for Jaymes

Deryn mentioned dipping pretzels in chocolate. Well, there's also coating pretzels in caramel and then dipping them into chocolate. Confectionery partner Barbara and I have done this one a number of times, with much laughing I admit. We fashioned the strangest-looking apparatus on which to hang the dipped pieces to make sure they had a nice rounded shape.

Chocolate-dipped candied ginger cubes or slices are a big favorite. And toffee. I found this terrific recipe online which is a copycat for Enstrom's Chocolate-coated toffee. It is my best gift. And of course, various brittles.

This is our modus operandi also. Thanksgiving pie was a Mexican Coffee Ice Cream Pie with a chocolate ganache under the topping of whipped cream. We all ate a piece for the big meal...and then our guests were gifted with the rest of the pie to take home. Always works.

Not so in our family. Keeping everything exactly the same...except for the dessert...is just what the tradition calls for.

Your banana nut bread looks divine, Anna. And so glad about the universe thing...

At the risk of sounding pathetic, I have to say that I never had a cake nor a party. My adult favorite is a Double Chocolate Mousse Bomb found in One Cake, One Hundred Desserts several years ago and I made it for a party which was thrown for me by some women friends and then ever since on my own account. My own kids loved a cake made from chocolate wafer biscuits put together with whipping cream and then cut on the diagonal. So easy to make.

Hello and welcome, asadus. Just the place to come if you like to work with chocolate.

Does the area have an Indian food restaurant? I make Indian food at home, but would love to eat it out again. We have only two Indian restaurants in Peterpatch, owned by the same people and we haven't eaten there in years. What about Chinese? Our local Chinese food restaurants are all the same...all you can eat buffets and not very good. Again we make it at home...Ed does the mises and I do the cooking...but I would love to eat out on occasion. My DH, JUST LIKE his late Father, would rather eat at home any day and says that our food is better than the restaurant food...which isn't true in the case of the Indian food.

Turkey, DH's stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes (which I don't really care for), Brussels sprouts ( which DH doesn't really care for), carrots, cranberry sauce (which DH won't touch). The rest is up for grabs. Ed does most of the cooking. I make the dessert. That's it. Thanksgiving is not such a big holiday in Canada as it is in the USA and it's more than a month earlier this year. (Can't recall if ours moves around like Easter or not.) Oops. Sorry. It was supposed to be only one thing. Too late.

I've done the flat bag trick for cooked rice, quinoa and the like and this means I can break off a chunk for our meals. But the bag in the box trick is brilliant!!! Have to do that one although I am not sure that there are any plastic bags available in our small nearby city which are truly safe in the microwave. But then Anna or Kerry usually can tell me where I can get everything...lol. Or I just decant the stuff and heat it in the toaster oven. I freeze meatballs and shredded meat on a half sheet in our dog freezer which is the coldest of our freezers and then when the pieces are frozen, I can dump them into a bag for the people freezer and still get just a few pieces out at a time. Friends from the USA bring me those jumbo slider 2.5 gallon hefty tough bags which are great for shredded stuff...wish we could get them in Canada.

Just a tad limiting a concept for those of us who live in the great frozen north... Nope. We don't do it. Not inclined to eat stored turnips all winter long.

I have to try the wild rice popcorn issue for myself.

Butter: Some in a covered dish in the cupboard for easy spreading; some in the fridge for making baked goods which call for cold butter and also cold butter for crackers, new fresh breads and suchlike because we just like it better that way.

Welcome richichi to eGullet from another Canadian...formerly living in Ottawa...but long gone now. DH actually born and raised in Ottawa. It's such a large and cosmopolitan city now that you'll have ready access to all those wonderful exotic ingredients that we in the Ontario hinterland must get either by mail or by travelling to a urban area.

And now I know what Baked Potato Soup is. Thanks. Will try some. I've been on such a soup-making kick this fall that I've run out of containers in which to freeze it and space in my freezer in which to put it. And not sure why I've done it either... Chicken soup, Lentil and Spinach soup, Hot & Sour soup, Bean soup, Albondigas soup, Squash soup and a new one for us, Harira soup. Found a recipe for Harira soup in one of the freebie magazines, Vitality, which bulk and health food stores give out and thought...well, a soup which combines rice, beans and lentils. What can that taste like? Not North American to combine all three in one dish usually (if ever? Surely someone will let me know and soon. ) So I tried it and we really liked it. Didn't have the one ingredient, smen, and am not likely to get it either, but it was good and so filling. Still have no Beef 'n Barley or Potato soup but they will have to wait. We eat soup for supper every second night pretty much.