maggiethecat

I'm with Priscilla -- love the wallpaper and the pink-striped bowl. I salute your "all new" take on the blog, and I like the pix of your home. I can relate -- it's a family house.

Cheese-its. What can I say? Since I lost my job, it's been easier -- no junk machine or boxes sitting on co-workers' desks leering at me. But I've made a big hole in a big bag of TJ's pistachios.

When I was in Ontario last year I discovered that there's a provincial law prohibiting anything but well-done burgers. Seems you have to sign a waiver form if you want them medium to rare. God, that burger sucked. But I digress. I don't follow the Julia Child thinking on burgers, I follow the Paul Newman creed. It works even with well-done burgers. Use a fatty chuck blend. Form the patties lightly, so that the wriggly pattern stays intact. Salt and pepper and the genius thing: rub a little Worcestershire sauce with your fingertip over the surfaces. It makes for taste. And don't cook them too fast.

David: That lamb looks fab and the photo is pure food porn. My daughter made Jacques Pepin's lamb and white bean stew in the pressure cooker from "Fast Food My Way" a few days ago. She said it was amazing, and was pretty chuffed with herself. She served it over couscous and it reminded her of a similar stew she'd eat at the corner mosque in Paris. Forty minutes, start to tender finish.

I saw the video demo at Martha's site and I'm so pumped to try this recipe. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

For Immediate Release: We found lamb shoulder for 1.99 a pound, and bought a six pound beauty. Tomorrow: Navarin Printanier. Later: merguez. And, of course, the bones and scraps will go to Scotch Broth Jackpot.

I second that. Even the most accomplished home cook can hit the wall, and fall into the rut. Sometimes it's just one new recipe that dazzles to pull you out!

Gosh, so many great ideas -- not enough meals to use them in! Here's another simple stunner from Marcella Cucina:" Mashed Potatoes with Sauteed Zucchini" It's. literally, mashed potatoes mixed with butter-sauteed julienne zukes. And half a cup of grated parm. Smashing.

Absolutely spot on. Terence Conran ran Habitat way before he got his knighthood. Habitat has a website, and I did the checking -- nothing they offer on line right now looks like your cool dish. Also checked out eBay. Zilch.

Not to hijack this into a craft topic, but I thought I'd report on my Plastic Bag Sanctity index: I recycled about twenty more bags into a much funkier version of the project upthread. What with being careful about taking my cloth bags to the grocery store, I'm officially out of raw materials. The swatch below is about 7x20. If we're very good, it might never get finished!

No sorry! I'm jealous. Where I live in the Chicago burbs Scotch Broth isn't available. I'll wait until I go back to Ottawa and timidly buy a can and hope that that muttony magic comes back. But it's a soup that's so culinary -unfashionable and so disdained by canned soup buying Soccer Moms it makes me laugh, even as I remember the meaty whiff, the vegetables and the barley. Somehow, for all its Campbell's genealogy, it seems like back to the past. I like that.

I'm with you on the UK. Jake, maybe?

I can lend an endorsement here -- it's just really really good eating. (I love the idea of the smashed sauteed potatoes.) Anna: Those mushrooms will happen in my house this week.And I'm checking out everyone else's suggestions. (Susan, did you stick to the thirty minute timing for the Clay Pot Pork?) I confess that when I started this topic the obvious escaped me. Where in the world could I have found a more knowledgeable set of recipe testers than my fellow Society members? I'm grateful, and my cooking will take me places I didn't foresee. For me, a new recipe that rocks can make my day.

I was skeptical about the no stock part too. ( Santa Marcella disapproves of stock in Italian cooking, and favors light broths. She has been known to specify a Maggi cube.) But it was a what the heck, why not try it thing. And the barley water was surprisingly savory. (Actually, wasn't barley water a good-for-whatever-ails thing you back in the day?) Yes, I used canned beans. The soup was nutritious, cheap, easy and rockin'. I wish I'd taken a picture.

I'm sure you're right. If I can get my hands on a lamb bone...

Congratulations to you and Janet on your success. I think that a medium level cook would get jazzed (sorry, Janet!) by learning the basics of some fun techniques. Preserving: Gravlax? Pickles? Chutney? Jam? Baking: Absolutely! In addition to the suggestion about making a straightforward white loaf, show them puff pastry. It's the magic thing. Smoking:I know you're a smoking SME. Eggs: Souffles, creme caramel, zabaglione Soup: From down-home to elegant Sauces: Lots of choices here. Pasta: Oh, that first bite of handmade fettucine! I think a medium level cook wants to stretch his power and technique -- and come back with some wow-worthy new dishes.

Wow. You've all been inspirational. Thanks for the rockin' suggestions. Last night was one of those eerie occasions when I had a handful of ingredients on hand and not much of interest otherwise. Ingredients: Swiss chard, canned cannellini beans, a Roma tomato that needed immediate attention, likewise celery, and the end of a box of barley. Onions were around, as they usually are. Marcella Hazan's "Marcella Cucina" is new to my bookshelves, and while leafing through it I found culinary Kismet :page 88 Swiss Chard, Cannellini Bean and Barley Soup (I should mention that while I revere Marcella, I've always found her literary persona to be un poco unyeilding? Dictatorial? She's the Mother Superior with a ruler twitching in her capable hands and I'm the schoolgirl about to have my knuckles rapped because my skirt is a half an inch too short. She terrifies me.) What a recipe! Dead easy: sweat the celery and onion, add the chard and tomato, sweat until tender. The barley is boiled separately, and the water is added to form the base of the soup. Add the beans to the soup. No stock. The seasoning is salt and pepper. And it rocked!! It's a beautiful to behold soup, with layers of flavor.

While I was cooking barley tonight for quite another kind of soup, I remembered Campbell's Scotch Broth, which my mother served every other week with a grilled cheese sandwich at lunchtime. I don't buy canned soup, but I remember the vegetable rich soup with a mutton broth base, tiny flecks of what must have been mutton, and the satisfying grainy orbs of pearl barley. It tasted good. It smelled good. It was better than any soup in the then Campbell's repertoire by a caber toss, except, perhaps, for the classic French Canadian Pea . When I married an American and moved to Chicago I made my own newlywed soupes, but I'd occasionally check the soup aisle for Scotch Broth. No luck -- a mutton stock based vegetable barley soup didn't cut it in Chicago. So I did a wee googling tonight. You can buy a case of Scotch Broth at Amazon for about forty bucks! It's mentioned that it's expensive because it's a product of Campbell's Canada. And should your taste runs to Pop Art, Andy Warhol's Scotch Broth print is available here. Is time playing tricks on me? For Campbells's canned, is it a good soup? Or is this simply a fond childhood memory, and Scot's w'ae hae?

Everyone here, I'm guessing, finds a recipe online, in a food mag or newspaper, or in a cookbook old or new and says: "Hmmm. I'll give it a shot." Sometimes they disappoint, sometimes they're Ok or even excellent. Now and then one rocks your kitchen and gets filed under "I never knew X could be so good. I'll make it again soon! Why was this never in my repertoire? Why do all recipes for X pale before the one I tried for the first time tonight?" I don't mean that the recipe has been published in 2008 -- you simply need to have tried it for the first time in 2008. In the past few weeks I've found two. Funeral Grits from Virginia Ellis's Bon Appetit, Y'All. (2008)It's a simple casserole that gets taken to wakes, but for me it's the ultimate cheesy grits dish. I've made many the cinnamon roll in a long life of baking, but the recipe from David Rosengarten's It's All American Food(2004) makes my efforts from many other well regarded baking sources look like heavy, tasteless, zestless pale imitations. I'm going to have to curb my enthusiasm, or any hopes of retaining any version of a Girlish figure will be doomed. They're that good. Can you point us to a great recipe you've tried in 2008? I want to know.

As well as making suggestions about the practical steps we're using to reduce plastic bag blight, perhaps it would be fun to record the approximate numbers of plastic bags we haven't used today. Nothing like that sense of self-satisfaction about doing something really green and important, and perhaps a friendly spirit of competition, as well as hints from our peers here, can make a difference. It might be fun to check out the metrics after a year. So: If you faithfully remembered to take your reuseable bags to the grocery store, you can estimate how many plastic bags you saved. If you got the bagger to combine three plastic bags into one, you've spared two bags. If you've asked the checker to pack fifty pounds worth of groceries and wine into a wine carton(or a laundry basket in your trunk) , go ahead and SWAG the numbers of bags you've saved or recycled. I'll go first. I have recycled twenty plastic bags today, because of the crocheted bag post from Rehevot. In fact, it will be a work in progress because I'll have to beg extra bags from friends to finish the project! I refused one bag at Walgreen's and took the printer cartridges home in my purse. So on the Plastic Bag Sanctity Index today: my score is 21.

OK, anyone who knows me could predict that I'm already cutting up plastic bags and making the "yarn." I'll post pictures when I'm finished.

Now, that's self-discipline, and I'm going to try it. (If I remember to!) Great idea.

I feel truly guilty about this issue: I try hard and don't measure up. Every time I read or hear a news story about how plastic bags are blanketing our oceans and messing with the environment my heart drops. And I still can't get it together! I have a super eGullet tote, three cloth grocery bags I've bought here and in Canada, a string bag I bought in France, and another I crocheted myself. There's also an Ikea bag that could hold a whole goat. My heart's in the right place. Why the heck can't I remember to put the bags back in the car? I remembered a couple of weeks ago and got a stare from the adolescent bagger. I told him: "You can fit this into these two bags. You may put a plastic bag around the chicken and that's it." He managed. I think I saved the planet from at least eight plastic bags. At my local supermercado, Italian greengrocer and TJ's I just ask that everything be packed in the cardboard carton from a box of wine or Swiss Chard. It's amazing how much can fit into a cardboard box. And of course, when I unpack at home my cat has a box to sit in. It's raining. I don't care. I'm going to take my shopping bags to the car. Edited to add: My father, aged 81, has no problem remembering to put his cloth bags back in the trunk. At his grocery store in Ottawa, I noticed that 75% of the customers toted their own totes -- maybe it's a Canadian thing. Most peeps, from stoners to civil servants to Goldsters gave the checkout folks a cloth bag. It's in a metropolitan walk/bike area, and I think that the handles on cloth backs are way more comfortable than those on supermarket plastic bags.

157,182, including two for me: "Marcella Cucina" -- yes, I'm still terrified of that woman, but her zucchini/mashed potato dish I made last night was really, really good. And "Bon Appetit, Y'All" by Virginia Willis. It's a Southern cookbook seen through the eyes of a grad of La Varenne, and the ex-manager of Martha Stewart Living's kitchen. I'll try the Funeral Grits this week.

Irish Stew. Moan. But, Kerry, you're Canadian, and citizens of the former British Empire (Indians, Pakistanis, Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians --dare I say Irish?) are lamb loving people. Med folk too. But it seems as if, here in the Heartland, the taste for lamb -- even it's existence -- is marginal.