snowangel

I know that the British expats living in Thailand, where the temps hover around the 90's with great regularity, would still prefer their hot tea to anything.

1. When a co-diner (be it at the lunchroom at work or at a restaurant) looks at your meal and says something like "Yuck. You mean you are going to eat that?" or "that's disgusting." 2. When we go to friends' houses with the kids and they feed the kids first, and feed them something like kraft macaroni and cheese and generic hot dogs or those frozen "chicken" thingies. Saving the good stuff for adults, of course, while the hostess complains that she always has to cook two separate meals. 3. Wait staff not refilling empty water glasses.

Since tomatoes are in their prime, how about sliced tomatoes, plain, or layered with very thin slices of red onions, drizzled with EVOO and balsamic vinegar? Artifully place a few basil leaves on top?

I can't blame her. Any idea of just how heavy iron cauldrons and planks are? Not to mention cutting, splitting and hauling wood? Sort of like my grandmother said about hand-sewn quilts. Think they would have done them that way back then if they had decent, heavy-duty sewing machines? These women embraced modern conveniences.

I'm an iced coffee afficiando, and use the Toddy cold drip thing. They say "Cold water brewing extracts the desirable flavor elements, but eliminates many of the undesirable oils and acids found in hot brewed coffee that are not soluble at low temperatures. " Basically, you come up with a concentrate, and although I've never tried it, they recommend adding water to the concentrate and nuking it for hot coffee. I don't know if anyone else has tried a Toddy thing. As I recall, when the coffee guys go and buy coffee beans, they test them with the cold method, but I could be wrong. http://www.toddyproducts.com

My grocery is running a similar special. And, I love London Broil, and my kids like the leftovers on a good sourdough roll for lunch (brown bag idea!). Meat prices are so puzzling. The London Broil is cheaper than hamburger. Along the same lines, my grocery also has pork tenderloins (the whole ones, not marinated or injected with a concoction) for $1.88 a pound. Yet they are charging $4.29 for boneless pork chops. The tenderloins are great, and I usually cut them up into chops, stuff for stir fry, and smaller tenderloins (sorry to digress from London Broil). Do you grill or broil the London Broil? Season it before cooking?

Short, wide-mouth thermoses for hot stuff. Their lunch bags are insulated with a pocket for a freezie thing for cold stuff. And, yes, I do get the kids involved with planning and preparation. Today they marched off with hummus sandwiches on pita and tabbouleh (sp?), and canteloupe (fresh from the farmer's market, best I've had in years). It was Diana who yesterday afternoon noticed that our parsley plants were sort of out of control and suggested tabbouleh would be a good use. She's good at putting together meals, or portions of them, from the oddities left in the fridge and cupboard. The rotation idea is fabulous. I think we'll come up with a few this weekend.

I have much better luck if I don't use red potatos. I use russets or yukon golds for best results.

Interesting you should say this. Diana (6th grade) has often brought "odd" stuff for lunch. The caucasian kids in her school look at her food, and go "ooh, yuck." Fortunately, there is a fairly large immigrant (Hmong and Hispanic) population, and she quickly learned to eat at the table with those kids, because they always said "ooh, that looks good." Got to be so that table was sort of like a pot luck -- kids sharing their ethnic treats. I grew up in Thailand, and made the decision when my kids were born that they would eat the same food as Paul and I. I couldn't justify dumbing down my meals to fit the child, nor could I justify buying those little jars of glop. I remembered that in SE Asia, kids (even babies and toddlers) were eating the same food as everyone else. I had a real moment of pride the other day. Peter was invited to eat dinner at a friend's house, and when he returned, he said "Mom, did you know you can get peas in a can? They don't look like real peas, and they don't taste like peas, but Kay (the other mom) said they are peas." He also had his first taste of tuna noodle casserole. He was not impressed.

Thanks for the suggestions. Our next door neighbors (out of town for a few weeks due to funeral) are fairly recent immigrants from Mexico. The language barrier is pretty significant, but I know they do carnitas in the way Jaymes suggested as well as the method suggested by Sladeums. Juan will periodically bring home a whole pig or two (dead, but whole). He butchers himself. I know they make some type of soup with the head, but once they cut up the rest of it, they will make both deep-fried carnitas and the "braised" ones (as Jaymes described). For the latter, they use tequila and lime, and when we couldn't seem to understand each other on the spices, he simply went into the kitchen, put together a batch of them in a jar and gave them to me. I also got the impression that Crus (Cruz?), his wife, sometimes will freeze the Jaymes-type carnitas before crisping in the oven, then pulls them out, thaws and crisps as needed. When they do the whole pig, they waste nothing, and the kids always get the deep-fried pig liver. They pull out a huge copper kettle, set it on a burner and do it outdoors. My kids really like the fried pork rinds. They serve both styles with fresh corn tortillas (I have easy access to these), a salsa like Jaymes e-mailed me, embellished rice (cooked in chix broth, studded with peas and sweet corn if I give them fresh sweet corn). They also serve two other salsas, both firey hot -- one green, one red, both pureed -- and from what I gather from our limited language exchange, these are fried in oil (make sense?). THey have a ton of people over of all ages, and the band that practices in their garage plays. The adults drink Bud Light (heck, this is the midwest) and shots of tequila. The kids drink orange pop. Dessert is a mess of wacked up melons (all kinds). These are great parties. One of the things we especially like is that one of our children (Heidi) is disabled, and they are far kinder to her than your average Joe. The women go crazy over our youngest -- Peter, who is very blonde with striking blue eyes. The kids run around, the adults get sloshed, and although we can't understand much of what each other says, we all have a wonderful time. The next day, their lawn is littered with paper plates and napkins and beer cans and we help them clean up. Another fun thing they do for parties on a smaller scale is fajitas. Juan works in a slaughterhouse, and gets skirt steak. At one of these parties, there was someone who was fluent in English, and he, acting as translator, said that what they do is marinate the skirt steak in tequila and lime -- in the freezer for 2 weeks. Grill. Tear with hands, serve again with fresh corn tortillas and the accoutrements described above. I guess i'd be wise to spend more time at their house when they are doing the preparations.

Thanks for the coffee suggestions. Has anyone done anything sort of off the wall with ice cream -- lavender, lemongrass, cayenne, other herbs or spices, whatever?

So, I don't have an espresso machine (on Xmas list). Do I just make some really, really strong coffee (using great beans from Peets) in my one-cup gold filter? A better method?

The new thread on ice cream machines has got me thinking. We make ice cream a lot in our house (use a Donvier). Anyone have any favorites, even if off the wall or with non-traditional flavorings? Always looking for new ideas. We usually use the custard method. Does anyone have a favorite way to infuse serious coffee flavor into ice cream?

You are right, I should keep it simple, and they all like cheese (not velveeta or wrapped american slices, either). I just checked the school handbook for elementary school, and no where does it prohibit alcoholic beverages. The middle school handbook, however, does prohibit alcoholic beverages. Funny thing is that we do let the kids have sips of wine, and Peter (1st grade) is very partial to the Russian River pinot noirs...

All three kids are in school this year, and flat refuse to eat school lunch. It took them exactly two days of school cafeteria food to say "that stuff is nasty" (emphasis on the word nasty). I will occasionally send leftovers (today it was masamun curry, rice, and bananas), but with 5 in the family, there usually aren't enough leftovers for three lunches. And who wants to eat the same thing for dinner and for lunch the next few days? You can only send pesto and pasta so often. They want more than just PB&J. They are adventurous eaters; I do get pretty creative with sandwiches (smoked turkey, great mustard, roasted peppers, for example). They need something filling, and don't have enough time to do a lot of on-site prep. I can keep cold food cold and hot food hot for them, but a microwave is not an option. Nothing terribly elaborate (I really don't want to be up at 4:00 am prepping lunches), and I refuse to go the pre-packaged lots of additives route. Ideas? Think adult food here, even though they are kids.

There's also a company in Southern Minnesota manufacturing the same type of surface as Silestone -- Cambria. http://www.cambriausa.com/ I've heard great things about Cambria and Silestone, and while I don't know what price point is compared to stuff like Corian, the article in our paper said that it is cheaper than granite.

Everything looks beautiful...I am especially coveting your fridge. I'm remodeling out kitchen (not nearly as drastic as you -- keeping counters, reworking and re-configuring some of the cupboards, but it has involved some dry-walling, and electrical, and I am replacing the floor with ceramic tile). I'm doing the work myself. I'm currently praying to the refridgerator god that my harvest gold albatross goes the way of all old appliances soon. The money I had earmarked for a new fridge just went into a new washer and dryer. The stove went to stove heaven last year, so the fridge is the last major appliance. Prayers gratefully accepted to help the beast on it's way to fridge heaven.

Anyone have any great recipes for making pork carnitas?

You could sub hamburger for ground pork in a lot of Thai and Chinese recipes. There is a great Thai dish with ground pork, lots of garlic and a ton of holy basil, and another that calls for long beans which you fry sort of crispy, remove, do the ground meat thing and then add the beans back in. You could even pre-brown a mess of it with garlic and onions and use it in fried rice (or pasta sauce or whatever).

Advantages include very little supervision; uses less energy than heating up the whole oven; and if it's hot outside, doesn't heat up the kitchen as much as the oven. There are lots of web sites with crock pot recipes. I generally just wing it.

When I was in high school, we lived in Thailand. The worst hangovers were after a night of Mekong, the Thai rice whiskey. We tried to get the oldest bottles we could (date of distillation was printed on the back of the label so we could look through the bottle and see date); hopefully snagging a bottle that was at least two months old. This stuff was great until the next morning -- the wickedest hangovers I've EVER had (far worse than Southern Comfort or tequila). The cure: Thai noodle soup or a plate of rice noodles stir fried with squid, topped with every last pepper that was in that condiment jar with the little Thai hot peppers in vinegar, followed by a bit of Thai stick and/or a valium (available over the counter at the time) and the day in bed. Left us ready for another night of Mekong!

The wierd thing is, Marcella Hazan has a recipe for canapes of mortadella and gherkins, processed together into a paste. I don't think Marcella knows about cheez whiz though... These sound as bad as the "cowboy sandwiches" we were served at a friend's house (the same friend who makes terrific tapenade; go figure?). Velveeta and spam, ground up, smeared on hamburger buns and broiled. Served open-faced. The dog wouldn't even eat them.

Sweet corn picked this afternoon, sliced tomatos and fresh basil, fresh green beans and a burger hot off the grill (topped with roasted red peppers. The veggies were so fresh and ripe they required no condiments. Come January, those of us in Minnesota will be dreaming of a meal like this. It was 96 degrees today and we ate on the picnic table, and went for a romp in the sprinkler afterwards!

I may have missed this, but what kind of floor have you opted for? Why did you choose what you chose? I'm in the midst of a major cosmetic remodel (fortunately, I have great cupboards, counters and layout), and it's time to make floor decision. I'm leaning toward ceramic tile.

The garden bounty is in and I have a ton of red peppers. My family loves roasted peppers on pizza, in pasta, in frittatas, etc. If I roast them all, does anyone have a suggestion on how to preserve them? In a jar with oil in the fridge? Help!