kayb

You won't regret it.

Thanks, Darienne. She was a magnificent woman. I have a million stories about her. Gone much too soon (at age 59).

FWIW, and it's too late for Father's Day, I like to rub it down in butter, sprinkle with smoked paprika, and wrap in foil before grilling. You still get a bit of char. And the butter and the smoked paprika !!!!

I'd love a recipe for the cherry mustard. I would suspect one could can it!

I got mine on Prime Day two years ago, and I think paid 239 plus tax for it. So you did good. I NEED a recipe for that curried zucchini. Ditto the jerk paste, please!

Cilantro doesn't taste soapy to me...I just don't particularly like it, except in small amounts. I like black pepper, but it's easy to go too heavy on it, and that ruins a dish for me. I like beets OK, and recognize the "dirt" taste, which I've found in other veggies. My daughter doesn't like field peas because they "taste like dirt." Well, yeah, they kinda do. But it's good dirt. Don't know if they have a lamb category or not, but in Owensboro, KY, their specialty is mutton barbecue. I've tried it, and found it nasty. I'm not a huge lamb fan, once you get past lamb stews or ground lamb that's heavily spiced, a la a Middle Eastern or North African dish.

Today's pickage, upin returning home after three days on the road. There are tiny zucchini a d yellow squash, so I should have those by this weekend. Baby watermelons and cantaloupe as well. No limas or green beans yet. Tomatoes, but for yhe Su gold cherrirs, are stubbornly resisting getting ripe, though I have a fair number of green ones, especially Roma. The tail of one's t-shirt makes a fine impromptu container for picking.

Now I'm intrigued by the notion of making potato scones, which sound much like the potato cakes I grew up eating, and still make when I have leftover mashed potatoes. But they're just round.

My mother, oddly enough, was a marvelous baker of cakes; I say oddly enough, because she was a serious Type 1 diabetic and was VERY good about sticking to her diet. And while she was a perfectly adequate cook all the way around, where she really shined was in baking cakes, cookies, pastries and making candy. She had a cottage industry baking petit fours for bridal and baby showers; her "plain butter cake" recipe, iced with either a butter/confectioners sugar frosting or a seven-minute frosting. Cakes that were a standby at our house included fresh coconut cake -- we'd get coconuts from the grocery, and then either grate them on the box grater (I learned early on to watch knuckles, as blood really shines in fresh, grated coconut!) or drag out the sausage grinder. Icing for that would be a seven-minute frosting, topped with handsful of fresh coconut. Daddy was fond of a banana cake -- her basic cake recipe, with pureed bananas in the batter, frosted with a thin confectioner's sugar/butter/milk glaze and each layer topped with sliced bananas that had been carefully dipped in lemon juice. She would occasionally make an angel food cake, usually during strawberry season to use instead of a shortcake. And she often made a spice cake in the winter that was dense and dark and filled with great warm spices and nuts and candied fruit (though it wasn't like a fruitcake). She also made a fruitcake at Christmas, and I wish I had that recipe. She tended more toward pies, as do I. Chess pies, fruit cobblers, apple pies with a crumb topping, the occasional pecan pie, the notable persimmon pie we got for a few short weeks in the fall when persimmons were ripe. And she made doughnuts, the recipe for which I have but have never attempted, as the directions, in their entirety, say: "Fry in three pounds of Crisco. Glaze with two boxes of powdered sugar." It was a yeasted dough with potatoes in it, and I remember her making it up (in a dishpan! the recipe made about six dozen doughnuts) on Friday nights, always Friday nights, and waking up to the heavenly smell of them frying on Saturday morning. My all-time favorite Saturday morning breakfast. The best cake I ever ate in my life, though, was at a barbecue restaurant in the extreme southeastern Arkansas town of McGehee. It was an Italian Cream Cake, and it was absolutely the most delicious, moist specimen of same I ever ate in my life. It just about made my eyes roll back in my head. I have never attempted to recreate it, because I just know I could never come close. I just buy several slabs of it to go when I happen to be through there; it freezes well.

Never thought about rye flour in a flammenkuchen. Must try that. Made a decent marinated veggie salad last night and had it with what'll likely be the last meal off the chicken salad I bought last weekend. Corn, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, peas, pimiento peppers. Forgot to take a pic.

I've recycled for the past 8-10 years, ever since I've lived where a city offered the service. In Hot Springs, we had blue plastic bins -- big plastic totes, essentially -- that we put recylables in. They would pick up metal, glass and paper; you had to take your own plastic, something about it taking up too much space in the truck. In Jonesboro, we have used blue plastic drawstring bags. I keep mine as a liner to a big laundry hamper on the carport, and pitch the cans, bottles, paper and glass all in it. Boxes (we shop Amazon a lot) get broken down and stuffed in a big box. It all goes down to the curb every other week. We are getting the recycling carts next week; had to pay a one-time $20 fee for them. I don't mind that. I would be irritated at a recurring monthly charge; I agree, charge the people who DON"T recycle.

I don't guess I'm in the market for anything significant this year. Had to buy a replacement coffee maker earlier this year, I'm still in the only-one-CSO and only-one-Instant-Pot camp. I could use a good hand mixer, for things I want to mix up in a hurry and not bother with the stand mixer. May look for one of those.

Junk food at home? Sure. My mother had damn near a cottage industry going with caramel popcorn, which was what we used to make popcorn balls for Halloween (kids would come out from town to trick or treat at our house in the country), but she'd just put it on a bunch of cookie sheets and then break it up, like granola. I do things like chocolate covered pretzels == easy, and people think you have conquered space, or something, when you make them and roll them in a crushed peppermint stick. I have recipes that cover hard candy, all SORTS of assorted chips and crackers and dips and spreads, popular pizzas (who remembers the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza-in-a-box kit? They still make them, and I made a special trip to the dreaded WalMart the other day to get one), and oh, I don't know, no telling what all else may be lurking back there in the recesses of my brain. One of my favorite pastimes is trying to recreate a "Damn, that was good!" taste from a restaurant. Sometimes I'm successful; sometimes less so. "The Google" makes it a lot easier, at least to find a jumping-off point. I've come pretty damn close to a lot of my restaurant favorites. Some things, like Dunkin Donuts coffee, you just can't reproduce. It's a function of their equipment and the quantity in which they make it, I guess. Yeah, I can buy Dunkin Donuts beans, grind them, make my coffee (in a variety of fashions; I've tried pour-over, French press, Keurig, Mr. Coffee), but it doesn't taste like Dunkin Donuts coffee, which I content is the best commercially brewed coffee I've ever had. Yes, I've been to a number of coffee houses, both chain and individual. Can't touch DD. IMHO.

That's just freakin' brilliant. I'd'a never thunk it. And I am the original cold-footed person; I sleep in socks doggoned near year-round. I keep them and use them for lots of things. Trashcan liners for small trashcans (bedrooms, bathrooms). Trash bags in the car (I keep a half-dozen or so in the console). A stash in the storage room so I can bring in three or four jars of something or packages out of the freezer without freezing my arms and hands off. A stash on the carport so I can grab a couple and use them to pick produce out of the garden (particularly handy if it's Attack of the Cucumbers and Zucchini season and I want to give a bunch of it away). And so on, and so on.

But it'd likely be a fine day to buy a(nother) CSO....

@scubadoo97 -- Donate the toaster oven. Get the CSO. You will never look back and regret it. I probably use it more than any other small electric appliance in my kitchen, save the coffee maker, which gets used three or four times daily.

Thanks for that! I never use a whole quart of buttermilk. I'll be freezing from now on. I used yogurt the other day to make blueberry muffins. I had yogurt I needed to use, and I figured it'd up the protein content of the muffins. I used a cup; my muffin recipe calls for 3/4 cup milk. Worked perfectly. I also like using beer in savory quick breads. If the powdered skim milk leaves you cold, get full-fat dry milk the next time. Taste still isn't like fresh milk, but it's closer.

Well, it looks gorgeous. I don't like meringue. The whipped cream topping is perfect.

If I come visit, will you make me one? I love coconut cream pie.

Best soft shell crab in the world: Antoine's, NOLA. Lord, but I love them.

Wonderful! Can't wait to hear the details and get it on my calendar! Excited to show you "my town!"

I reuse the produce bags if they're fairly clean and can be turned inside out and rinsed off with hot water. They dry turned upside down over the bottle of dishwashing liquid on the back of the sink. I particularly wash out and reuse those green plastic produce bags. They're pricy.

Found myself in Memphis, so stopped by my favorite MIddle Eastern deli. Falafel wrap, dressed with lettuce, tomato, dill pickle (!) and tzatziki. Dolmades. Baklava. Brought some of all of it home. Will revisit that today.

My favorite was Rosario's. On the edge of downtown (you come out the front gate of the Alamo, hang a left, and it's maybe two miles) in what looks like it might have once been a car dealership building. Good, good Mexican/TexMex. MARVELOUS mojitos.

I looked at several recipes and the filling looks for all the world like what we call down here a chess pie. My mother used to be fond of telling how she'd made two chess pies for a church pot luck, and put them on the kitchen table to cool. Came back through the kitchen to find me, at about age 3, sitting atop the table, with a big knife, having whacked a chunk out of one pie that I was busy stuffing in my face, and having marked a chunk in the other pie that I planned to cut next. I do not remember this stellar incident of good taste. But she swore it was true.