Ladybug

Also for kids: Kindereggs - basically a hollow chocolate egg with a toy inside. My kids LOVE them and collect the toys. Some of the toys are cheap pieces of junk, but others are really cute. The pieces of the toy (which usually you have to assemble) are very small and pose a choking hazard to the littlest kids - I think 3 and under is what the U.S. warning labels say.

Oh - just to add- I've never made apple dumplings before. I've made plenty of apple pie and even turnovers, but never a dumpling. I'm planning on using Beranbaum's Flaky Cream Cheese Pie Crust, which I have made before and am comfortable with.

I'm making a few desserts for a church thing and really wanted to make apple dumplings - you know, Rome apples, peeled, cored and stuffed with walnuts/brown sugar/cinnamon and wrapped in pie dough. The recipe (Rose Levy Beranbaum) says something about them being best served right away. Is that a hard and fast rule? The best I can do is to bake them an hour or two before consumption. I already bought the stuff and I'm all psyched to make them and then I saw that last little line and thought, "Hmmmm. Argh! Oh! eGullet folks will know!" Help me out, folks! P.S. How about reheating (if waiting to eat them is okay)?

My Mom bought canned salmon a few times when I was growing up. Once it had worms in it. She made a point of showing it to us. I was already alarmed by the mushy bones in the can so much that I've had a recurring nightmare that my teeth mush up like the bones in a can of salmon. I can't get past the worms and the nightmares. I always wondered who ate it!

As it's the home of Fort Bragg, most people just refer to it as Fayette-Nam. And Fort Bragg is "Fort Drag." And Pope Air Force Base is "No Hope Pope." Every base has some sort of unflattering nickname. It's fun and not really a reflection on one's patriotism.

Have you tried this? I've made hot chocolate on the stove with chopped chocolate and it takes a few minutes to mix the chocolate in well. I can only imagine, even starting with hot cream, that it would take quite a bit of stirring on the customer's part to mix in a whole chocolate truffle. I'd worry about these hypothetical customers ending up with lukewarm cream and lingering chunks of truffle in their cups. What would they stir with? You'd have to think of that, or think of some way to chop up the truffle after they've seen it because the glamour of the whole thing would be lost if you just handed them a dish full of chopped chocolate. You certainly would have to keep the truffles at room temp - chilled truffles would be harder to melt. What about flavor balance? Would a single truffle both flavor and sweeten a whole cup of cream - a serving size? The different varieties of truffles you offer could have different results in the cup. Think about the hot cream - would you have to cut the cream with milk so it wouldn't be so thick? It may also taste too rich with just cream. I know your school project for this is long over and I'm not trying to make you feel bad. But when I read your idea (that me, a housewife, had never heard of), I immediately thought of these things. I don't know if you considered these things - but your not mentioning it makes it appear you didn't - and this is probably the sort of thing people are thinking of when they say it appears you have no passion for cooking. No one is trying to slam you and I'm sure we all realize that all we know of you is what you write. None of us are qualified to authoritatively say that you lack what it takes to be a chef because we don't know you - only the cyber-KateW. You can be secure in the fact that only you can really know what you're capable of and where your passion lies. Everyone here just wants to be helpful. I wish you the best of luck and am a bit envious too. I'd love to be in cooking school!

Wendy, when you bake apple pies in volume do you make or buy the crusts? When we lived in Delaware, our pastor's dad baked apple pies in volume for bake sales. He's no pastry chef, but his pies were very popular. He bought the crusts, peeled the sliced the apples with one of those apple corer/peeler/slicer things, and made a streusel topping. He probably made less than 50 pies at a time and enlisted help wherever he could find it. The most hilarious thing about it is that the woman who taught him to make apple pie was always grumbling that he did it wrong because he used "WAY" too much streusel topping.

I've always wondered about that too. I've used the same method as fifi's for more than 10 years now and never have any trouble. My mom even wanted to know my secret because she says her rice never turns out right. I was mystified - I never realized rice was considered tricky to make.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies Here's my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe because they're chewy, not "sandy": 2 c peanut butter 2 c light brown sugar 2 large eggs 2 tsp baking soda 1 tsp vanilla Directions: 1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 2. Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Roll into balls, bake for 8-10 minutes. Variations: Chunky peanut butter, chocolate chips, or salted roasted peanuts, toffee bits, etc. (I like mine plain.) Edit: I should mention I found this recipe on epicurious.com, but I doubled the ingredients and simplified the directions. The original recipe makes a very small batch of cookies (This is bad!!) and adds what I consider to be unnecessary details. Keywords: Dessert, Easy, Cookie, American ( RG736 )

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies Here's my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe because they're chewy, not "sandy": 2 c peanut butter 2 c light brown sugar 2 large eggs 2 tsp baking soda 1 tsp vanilla Directions: 1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 2. Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Roll into balls, bake for 8-10 minutes. Variations: Chunky peanut butter, chocolate chips, or salted roasted peanuts, toffee bits, etc. (I like mine plain.) Edit: I should mention I found this recipe on epicurious.com, but I doubled the ingredients and simplified the directions. The original recipe makes a very small batch of cookies (This is bad!!) and adds what I consider to be unnecessary details. Keywords: Dessert, Easy, Cookie, American ( RG736 )

I went grocery shopping in France a few years back and they had some system where you had to push a coin into a slot on the cart to pull your cart free from the cart corral. I think it was 5 francs. You got your coin back when you turned it in. Makes sense, I think.

I tried using Kikkoman to make fried rice dark once - big failure. It was impossible to use enough of it to make the rice as dark as what I had at the restaurant. It would have been fried rice soup, only the rice still would have been pale brown, not dark brown. I almost wondered if they use something like Kitchen Bouquet, Cantonese version, plus an ungodly amount of fat. Pork fat sounds right - I know I didn't taste peanut oil. I wonder if "crap dark soy from China" is the secret?

I've never driven past a fish market in my area (so didn't think there were any), but I just looked in the yellow pages and found a few. Why are they all in the rough part of town??! No frozen, eh? So much for the easy way out! Sushi is hard to find in these parts. I've seen a few Chinese buffets with sushi, but I've never been brave enough to try it. I'm going with the fish store. I'll just bring my Glock. (JOKE! I'M JOKING!)

I like the retro kind too. I've always wondered how the rice gets so dark, though.

I love fish. My husband, however, does not. So in our almost 13 years of marriage, I've only made fish a few times. (I'm not counting shrimp - he loves shrimp.) Well, he's away for a week or two and I absolutely CRAVE fish. But I don't know what to buy - all the markets around here don't seem to have much that looks good. I live about 2 hours away from the coast, so you'd think I'd see fresher fish. Most places don't even sell fresh fish - only frozen. If you had to buy frozen fish, is there a particular brand name that is as fresh as frozen gets? I really crave it plain - not breaded and fried, just broiled or poached with butter. Are there any varieties that I should not broil?

No, no milky products at all. Just for you, I double-checked the notes I made the day my friend showed me how to make the pies. Jaymes, 35 minutes seems kind of low. Is it a very thin pie? You didn't mention the size of your pie pan. I love your suggestions of ginger, orange, etc - I'll have to try one of those next time!

I learned to make sweet potato pie from scratch from an old friend, who learned it from her mother-in-law in Tennessee, who learned it from HER mother, who probably learned it from HER mother. Whew! It's not at all fancy, but it's delicious. I don't have a recipe, unfortunately - it's one of those things you just make without a recipe. My friend peels, cubes, and then boils sweet potatoes (# depends on how many pies she wants - and extra filling can always be baked w/o a crust in a buttered ramekin). She lets the sweet potatoes drain for a while, mixes them into mush and then adds butter (to taste, which means plenty), cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, a touch of flour and lastly, eggs. She says to put enough of everything so you can taste it all at once. Just keep tasting it until it's right. She doesn't taste it after the eggs (about 2/3 per pie) are put in, so she puts those in last. It's a very inexact science, but I have to say I've made the pies this way many times and they've always turned out great. In fact, it gave me courage to fool with a recipe I had for pumpkin cheesecake, and that turned out a lot better from tasting the filling as I went along to get more of a balanced flavor. Oh! She bakes the pies at 350 F for about an hour. To the uninitiated, sweet potato pies taste like pumpkin pies. Some people can't tell the difference. BTW, once I tried this recipe with baked sweet potatoes and somehow the pies seemed too fibrous. Still tasty, but a bit too textured - I apologize for the lack of recipe and sophistication - you'd have to be pretty brave to just wing it like this! I had a tutor the first time I tried it.

Shoot! If you can get natto, you can surely get peach cobbler!! Much of what you don't get about Southern American food doesn't sound like the best examples of Southern American food. I grew up in NC and haven't been served much jello salad - but I have had homemade sweet potato pie. I've had plenty of pecan pie. I've had cobbler - and some of it is absolutely nasty - but made well, it's perfection. The same goes for white sausage gravy. If you didn't like it, perhaps it wasn't made well. I think you should challenge yourself to try peach cobbler until you like it, much like you advised me to eat fish sauce until I could appreciate it. Cook it yourself to make sure it's made properly - not soggy, pasty or too sweet. If at first you don't succeed, try try again!

It's a huge success everywhere in the U.S. Olive Garden is a huge success. People want easy and cheap; food quality is secondary. Bruce The people who eat at Red Lobster and Olive Garden don't think the quality is secondary - in fact, it's probably better than what they make at home. Think Hamburger Helper.

Currently on sale at the pharmacy downstairs (Seattle- Bartell's) for $0.99 a box - 4 or 5 flavors. Just tried those and they're great! My grocery had three kinds - plain almond, plain almond dipped in chocolate (the bottom of the cookie), and chocolate almond dipped in chocolate. I bought the chocolate dipped varieties. I'm going to send some to my grandmother because she loves biscotti. What are the other flavors? One had mint and chocolate. That just seems wrong. No recall on the other. I'll look. Edit to add: The other is bite sized almond biscotti enrobed in chocolate. Ahhhhh! Thanks! Now I feel like I've tasted the best of Nonni's already.

I shop for the bulk of my groceries every two weeks and generally have to make small trips a few times in between for milk, etc. I always take all three kids and they are generally decently well-behaved. The most difficult part of it is keeping my 20-month old entertained. I almost always end up opening a box of Goldfish in the store and letting her eat some. The older kids usually nibble some too. I always feel as if I should be looking over my shoulder when I do this, but I see other moms do it all the time too - it's like eating on credit. I am very careful to never let them eat produce, which is sold by weight, because that would be stealing! Sometimes the cashier will hold up the obviously lighter bag, wave it around and give me the hairy eyeball, but I've never had anyone raise a real stink about it. I do use coupons, but not so many because, as hjshorter noted, most of the coupons are for products we don't buy. If something is on special, I may buy it even if it's not on my list. For instance, pineapples are usually about 4 bucks each - but recently I saw them for 2 bucks, so I bought one. It was devoured so quickly, I went back to the store and bought another one. I compile a grocery list a day or two before we go shopping. I always make a few impulse buys. If I go shopping when I'm hungry, the impulse buys get out of control, so I try to make sure we've all eaten right before we go. My kids know that they can each pick ONE thing from the store, and it must be a small thing. I also veto garbage like Easy Cheese (which they are DYING to try). After they choose their one item, they aren't allowed to ask for anything else. I don't plan my menus more than a day or two in advance. My basic dinner strategy is to look in the fridge and use up whatever will go bad first. Today, that's asparagus. Yesterday, it was green beans. I always have a few things in mind that I feel like eating and that influences my grocery list. I never send my kids to the store for me because the eldest is only 8 - and I rarely send my husband to the store because he generally comes back with the wrong thing. When he does pick up a few things for me, I write a very detailed list, including where to find the item in the store. I do teach my children how to pick produce or meat, etc. We're all picking up peaches or tomatoes and smelling them in the store. It's very cute to hear them say, "Well, THIS sure doesn't smell like a peach!" I also teach them about coupons and checking for the lowest price. Right now, I'm having lots of conversations with my coupon-clipping five-year-old like, "Yes, that is a nice coupon, but we don't BUY cheese dogs, so we don't need that coupon."

Currently on sale at the pharmacy downstairs (Seattle- Bartell's) for $0.99 a box - 4 or 5 flavors. Just tried those and they're great! My grocery had three kinds - plain almond, plain almond dipped in chocolate (the bottom of the cookie), and chocolate almond dipped in chocolate. I bought the chocolate dipped varieties. I'm going to send some to my grandmother because she loves biscotti. What are the other flavors?

Ice. Ha ha. Well, I often like to eat strawberries frozen. Or grapes. Grapes seem too sweet to me lately, but in the freezer, they're better.

From time to time I crave some sort of clam I ate when I was about five years old. My Dad took us to the beach and dug up some teensy clams - about the size of a quarter with a dark gray/brownish shell. He pried them open with his pocketknife and we ate them raw. I can vividly remember that briny, salty taste. It was delicious. I wonder just what it was that I ate? It's really weird because I've certainly never eaten one raw before or since. My Mom used to like buying cans of smoked baby clams and I crave those from time to time too, but I've yet to succumb.

We had a big ice storm last winter in North Carolina last year and our power was out for 3 days. It never got above about 40 during the day and froze every night - and most of my stuff was fine. I chucked the milk and a couple other things in the fridge - but everything in the freezer was still fine. A few things closer to the door of the freezer (which I opened twice) were "bendable" and we ate those right away. We didn't get sick. I just have this strong, nearly-impossible-to-repress urge to conserve. I just couldn't throw everything out, especially since it still seemed fine. I know that my personal experience is no evidence that y'all's food would be fine, but I would be very reluctant to chuck it all. Maybe I'm just a horrible, stingy miser, but it comes naturally. My Dad has even been known to cut open a tube of toothpaste to scrape out the last little smear. (I'm not quite that bad!) My Mom taped together all the little strips of paper from a spent book of checks to make a sign saying, "WASTE NOT, WANT NOT!" My Grandpa put screws and nails into the end of pencils when they got too short to hold onto so he could still use them. My Grandma saved all her scraps of bar soap and put them in a net bag to use to save a few cents. I come from a long line of cheap people.