Ladybug

[pair of Orka silicone mitts: I am waiting for the price to go down] I have the orka mitts, and I have to tell you they are highly overrated. It IS true that you can dip your hand in boiling water with the mitt on and never feel it - but how often does that really come up? (For me, almost never.) Also, you must be very, very sure you don't have any cracks or holes in your gloves before you try that stunt. What bothers me most about the orka mitts is they're so inflexible - trying to grab hot handles is difficult because they just don't want to bend much. I used them the other day to take baked potatoes out of the oven and grabbing individual baked potatoes was not easy, especially the runts of the batch. Trying to flip a hot waffle iron was almost impossible. The best thing about the mitts is that they can go in the dishwasher and clean up nice. I've only had the mitts for a couple weeks and I'm already thinking about retiring them.

Are you going to walk the 20 minutes back, lugging a stock pot full of 20 gallons of seawater?

I've had the same thing happen to me before and what I've always found is that I can always find something to say that's nice. Maybe it's too sweet, but it has strawberries in it, which I love, so I could just say, "You know, I absolutely LOVE strawberries! Thank you so much for making this for me!" My Mom taught me that you can always say something nice, even if you have to reach so far down as to say, "Wow! What a cake! I've never had anything like it!" I, too, have been guilty of throwing things out, but I always feel so guilty about doing it - like I'm both potentially hurting someone's feelings if they ever found out, AND wasting food, which I was raised to believe is a mortal sin. I'm always particularly anxious about throwing it out because I have three kids/witnesses that may let it slip. The good thing is that nothing is too sweet for those three little rascals, so I actually can just let them eat anything like that and then talk about how much they loved it. On the other hand, some food from friends is absolutely fabulous and we fight over it at my house. I like that problem much better.

I made the most fantastic red beans (meant to go over rice) the other day that is sort of like soup. It was so freakishly easy and amazing - one large ham bone, 1 lb. of kidney beans, water, and sofrito, cooked in a crockpot all day. The sofrito, as taught to me by a lovely 83 year old Puerto Rican friend, is just 2 med. peeled quartered onions, one bunch of cilantro, 2 halved, seeded green bell peppers, and one head of peeled garlic whizzed in a blender with about 1/2 cup of water until it's all pureed. I only used a cup or so of sofrito in the pot and froze the rest, which is what my friend does. I've tried making this before with other recipes, but nothing turned out anything close to as good as this was. Wow! When I find a recipe that turns out to be delicious and easy to prepare I get so excited!

Andiesenji, I tried your recipe and I have to say, my kids devoured it. They've never liked any homemade mac & cheese before. I didn't have bread crumbs handy, so I used cracker crumbs with butter & parm instead. I tend to feel very guilty about buying Campbell's soup at all, but this recipe was really tasty. Thank you so much for posting it!

About 10 years ago, when I had just discovered cooking could be fun and that "gourmet" cooking was thrilling, I decided to be adventurous and make a Pumpkin Peanut Butter Soup. It had chicken stock, pumpkin, peanut butter, onions, cayenne, etc. in it and it sounded like just the sort of thing I'd like to try. I cheerfully made it exactly according to the recipe (A Silver Palate recipe, if I recall correctly) and it was horrid. The flavor did not balance at ALL. It tasted like pumpkin, it tasted like peanut butter and it tasted like the LAST things in the world that should ever be combined. In addition, I chopped the onions into pieces that cooked up into limp, segment-y wormy looking strands coated with brown, grainy-ish goo. It was completely disgusting. The first bite was bad but the second bite was worse because that's when I realized how much the onions looked like worms. I felt so nauseous. It pains me to throw out food, but even I am not that cheap. Watching the wormy onions slither into the trash made me feel even more sick. Nasty!

I made my own plain, simple yeast rolls for Christmas dinner that I brushed with butter the last couple minutes before they came out of the oven. The butter ran down between the rolls and formed a buttery, almost crunchy, as in fried, layer on the bottom of the rolls. I split my roll and put on more butter and some crispy bits of ham. My very favorite bite was the last bite of the roll that had soaked up some syrup from the glazed sweet potatoes, combined with the crunchy buttery goodness and a sliver or two of ham. I wish I could duplicate it. It was unbelievable.

I'm a home cook and I don't know anything at all about your question, but I'd still be interested in seeing your menu last year. Thanks!

Not quite. Boosh is right (think of pursing your lips just slightly as you say it). The "de" is more like "duh", but clipped; "day" would be the Spanish pronunciation. The vowel sound is somewhere between the "uh" in "duh" and the "ir" in "dirt". If you say it quickly, you can even almost ignore the vowel and think "Buche d'Noel". "Noel" is like in the Christmas carol "The First Noel". 2 syllables (No-el, stressing the second syllable slightly). Wow -- it's a lot easier to say than to explain. Or, you could just call it a Yule log. ← "Day" - duh - I guess that's because I took Spanish in college. I know nothing about French. Thank you so much!

Okay - like "Boosh day No-el?" (I do know how to pronounce Noel.)

How do you pronounce Buche de Noel? I've never heard it pronounced, only seen it written. I feel so dumb not knowing, especially since I usually make one every year (a la Rose Levy Beranbaum's Chocolate Cloud Roll and whipped cream filling, plus her Milk Chocolate Buttercream - but I'd like to try something new!). Every year when someone asks me what sort of cake that is (Yes, I live in a rural area), I have to go through the same long, ignorant explanation I've given here - I don't KNOW!

I used one tablespoon, which seemed to do the trick just fine.

Clickety.

I like Rose Levy Beranbaum's Mahogany Buttercrunch Toffee. I've made that recipe so many times and have gotten rave reviews every time. Oops, I wanted to add that I add a bit of corn syrup to her recipe to prevent the sugar from crystallizing. I read all about that in Shirley Corriher's CookWise and although I can't remember how it works, it really does make a difference. Before, the toffee was still delicious, but a bit grainy instead of brittle and smooth.

No, I'm not sure at all about that black scum. Maybe it was harmless - but it hadn't been there the week before and I am kind of weak-kneed about anything moldy. It was the first (and so far, only) time that I've tried to cure olives. But I would try it again in a New York minute! I love olives.

I tried this once and despite being ever so careful, my olives got moldy. I was really upset! After 3 weeks in brine, the olives were edible and even tasty, but my "recipe" called for a minimum of 4 weeks. Sometime between the 3rd and 4th week, my olives got a coating of black scum floating on top of the brine, so I threw them out. I will try again if I ever get my hands on fresh olives again. At the time, I was living in Turkey and got them from my obliging neighbor's tree.

While I was living in Turkey, one of my friends found HALF of a roach in the middle of her cheese borek. Another friend, a Turkish lady, used to insist upon seeing the kitchen before she'd eat in a restaurant. She barged into one kitchen to see a guy in the bathroom (door open) washing vegetables with the same hose used to spray down oneself after using the faciliities. For the uninitiated, Turkish toilets are porcelain holes in the ground that you crouch over to go - TP is generally not available. Instead, you're to spray yourself down with a length of rubber hose attached to a spigot in the bathroom and drip-dry, I guess. Some public restrooms would have an attendant that charged admission and handed out one puny cocktail sized napkin. ???!! Once I found a brown piece of rubber/plastic in a package of Domino's light brown sugar. I meant to call the company, but never got around to it.

My son, at 4, could not say "s" sounds at all - for some reason, everything with "s" was pronounced with a "p" instead. One day in the grocery store as we were going down the soup aisle, my little wonder said (very very loudly), "Mom, why you like POOP?!" Every head in earshot snapped around quickly to see the Mom who liked "poop."

Mine, in order of assembly: Some kind of hearty wheat bread with lots of seeds,nuts, etc, toasted Chunky peanut butter,spread medium Lots of cherry preserves, more cherries than jelly Another slice of toasted bread You're making me hungry. I like PBJ many ways, but I like this way so much that I never make any other kind.

Fried rice, of course! We can never get enough of it around here. The best batch I ever made started with leftover spareribs. I used some leftover goat once that turned out to be great too. Prime rib would make great fried rice. If you don't have any day old rice lying around, I've made a batch in the morning and refrigerated it until dinner time.

Where's mktye when we need her?

How about a picture? Suppose you were a teetotaler - what would you sub for the rum? Seems to me it's a vital ingredient.

I was going to suggest lime too. I prefer it to lemon with blueberries. I also like cardamom with blueberries.

I thought about using those Magi-Cake strips, but then I remembered I wanted do the recipe exactly as written. I wish I'd saved the pics I took of my cakes when they came out of the oven, but I had absolutely NO cracking and only a very small dome. The center of the cake was probably a centimeter higher than the edges and that settled a bit as it cooled. The cake wasn't crumbly at all. It wasn't what I'd have described as moist, but it wasn't dry. I think, to improve the recipe, it could be more moist and more chocolate-y. I used Nestle's cocoa powder. To get anything better than Nestle's or Hershey's, I'd have to mail order it. I wonder if making the cake more moist would make it less slice-able/more fragile? My mom likes to add eggs to recipes to improve them - I wonder what that would do? My home baker 2 cents . . .

I've made the Hershey's recipe for chocolate cake several times - and it does taste great. However, my memory of it isn't good enough to compare it with Sinclair's recipe. I do know one thing - I've had the same problem with the Hershey's recipe every stinking time I've made it - it falls apart. I stopped using Hershey's recipe when it finally dawned on me that the cake fell apart every time. BTW, I always seem to make layer cakes and I used that particular recipe with a pecan praline and whipped cream filling. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I'd oh-so-carefully managed to assemble the cake, wrapped it up in a Tupperware cake taker and oh-so-carefully transferred it to a party and the whole cake had broken in half and slid in different directions. Everyone ate it anyway and said it was delicious, but I felt so embarrassed.