runwestierun

I buy fresh basil in pound bags and have always just used the leaves. If I've bought more than I can use that day I will grind the leaves in the food processor with olive oil and freeze them. Here in the Pacific Northwest fresh basil has nearly doubled in price in one week, having remained steady for years. What a surprize! So today I took a pound bag apart and weighed everything--I am throwing away 7 ounces of stems from each pound. I am wondering if anyone uses the stems. Can I grind them with the leaves or are they too bland and fibrous? Anyone have any experience with fresh basil stems?

I buy big cryovac packages of bacon ends at the restaurant supply store because they are cheaper than perfectly shaped regular bacon. They are the pieces left over after they cut the perfectly shaped pieces of belly for bacon. In my experience they are many different lengths and many different thicknesses, so they may be more of a challenge to cook in the microwave than regular bacon, due to the different cook times for different thicknesses. I only use the ends diced up for flavor in dishes, not as a side for eggs. They are mighty cheap, sometimes only $1/pound.

Thanks, Liztwozee. We are snowed in right now, but as soon as I can get supplies I'll make this. I appreciate your post.

I know! I want to watch cooking on TV, but I want to watch someone with some self respect. Can you imagine Julia Child doing this?

Lizztwozee, I'd love to try your recipe in the photo. Any chance you'd post it?

I think pizza dough would work well.

I was at Costco today and they have a box of 18 of the Picardie Duralex tumblers for $19.97. There are 6 each of the 8 ounce, 12 ounce and 16.5 ounce tumblers. That seems like quite a deal.

Can I add my deviled egg two cents? Something I haven't heard mention of in this thread is the food processor. I find that the texture of the egg filling prepared in a FP is quite different from that mashed with a fork, and I prefer it. The food processor makes the filling so very silky and smooth. I use mayo, dijon and maybe a little water with the yolks. Then I add the rest, whatever I am feeling like that day. I cannot replicate the texture of the FPed eggs with a fork, though. It's really nice. I mean eggcellent. Eggceptional. I am eggstatic. Ba dum DUM.

A truly fun toy is the BBQ Guru. I own it and love it. It isn't just a thermometer, it also controls cooking temp. However its competitor, the Stoker, would probably be compatible with the iPad before the Guru. You could test this guy's app: http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-98276.html

What nickrey said. He beat me to it!

I love all things Jars France. http://www.terrestra.com/jarsdinnerware/?gclid=CM-37dK2va0CFQR5hwodVwOn_g I have never seen the IVV Italy line before, thank you so much for pointing it out. So much of what they have is so beautiful, especially the glass dishes. I love to combine glass with earthenware. I am very lucky that a local glassblower makes lovely plates and I use them with my Jars Tourron, Lily Pad and Tanga. I love rich colors in my dinnerware. It rains alot where I live and color just makes the table seem more alive.

I have done this but only after boiling the eggs in water with a bit of baking soda.

I toasted the buns with a little butter and that worked great for the people who don't like wasabi. Of the three components the meat is the most important, the slaw second and the mayo a pretty distant third. If you don't like wasabi or mayo, don't use it. Maybe squirt a little more hoisin on the meat if the sandwich seems a little dry. I really think this is a delicious sandwich and well worth making even without the mayo. (I do recommend using butter to "waterproof" the buns a little if you don't use mayo. The slaw is quite wet.) So we had these again tonight and I did something a little different. I fired up the grill and toasted the buns on the grill and I also grilled the leftover cold meat a little to caramelize the hoisin and get some smoke flavor. I liked the sandwich this way even a little better. So good!

Tried these last night with my new year's resolution to try a new recipe each week. DAMN they are good!

I've heard it takes 5 years' practice before you can be considered a skilled noodle puller in China. Maybe this isn't something we can master in an afternoon...

I have tried Chef Tomm's recipe and it didn't work for me. If you look at his video, you will see that his noodles break early on, and they are quite varied in size. I tried using the recipe from the young man in Emily_R's post, too, and that didn't work. I've tried kneading the noodles in the KA and by hand. I am wondering if the key is a special Chinese low gluten flour. I wish I could find my notes on this. I remember being frustrated by not being able to find the right flour. I also couldn't find the right basic (pH) ingredient because I couldn't translate it from a video I found. I went home with my tail between my legs.

I bake pizza on a propane grill. I preheat the grill all burners wide open, as hot as it can get. I can get mine to 750F. I bake the pizza on an aluminum round pizza pan with holes in it. I don't preheat the pan. I elevate the pan with a wok ring, they are cheap and it works prefectly. I put the wok ring directly on the grill. If I put the pizza pan on the grill without the ring it burns. The pizza bakes fast, 4-6 minutes, depending on how big the holes in the pan are. This is as close as I can come to woodfired pizza with my equipment. I love baking on the grill. If I have unused pizza dough I will shape those into breadsticks and bake them the same way.

Just make 2 pies!

Please don't hate me for asking this. Should it be "maple leaves"?? Or are you spelling it like the hockey team? Or are you using "leafs" intentionally? PS I also like #3.

Thanks, piracer, I immediately thought macarons when I found I had so many whites. But then I remembered where I live. I've made them here before and I have not been able to interest one person in them. They are too unfamiliar and suspect. I think that's why my brain was stuck, I wanted to make macarons and I knew they wouldn't sell, but I still wanted to make them. Thanks, Kerry, for all the weights. That really helps me. I'm making the dough tonight and I'll finish the macaroons tomorrow. Also, cloud cookies! Perfect! Thanks.

Kerry! This is perfect, I have lots of condensed milk and coconut. Thank you. You don't by chance know the target end temperature for the cooked mixture in the recipe you use, do you? They will like these. So I think this will take care of a pint of the whites, any other ideas?

Ahhhh, egg whites. I have a half gallon of egg whites left over from making lemon bars for a fundraiser bake sale this Saturday, Dec. 10th. I am brain dead. Can you please help me think of something that I can use them for that I can sell at this bake sale? I live in a rural community that is very conservative in its food tastes. For instance, one day I made croque madames for the farmers for lunch, and a couple days later I heard in town that I was trying to kill them with my weird scary food. Anything with a name like dacquoise would certainly be met with enough cynicism that I would sell exactly zero of them. Maybe I could make it if I called it "biscuit cake"... Any traditional ideas besides angel food cake?

I think the problem with getting ketchup out of a bottle lies with the ketchup itself, not how slippery the bottle is. Ketchup a non-Newtonian pseudoplastic and behaves oddly in terms of its viscosity. Specifically, the more stress that's put on it, the less viscous it becomes. That's why you can squeeze it out of a bottle in a stream like a liquid, but it stays put on your hamburger and doesn't run off. Ketchup is a type of non-newtonian fluid called shear thinning. Another example is paint. When you apply stress with the brush, the paint flows, but once it is applied it doesn't continue to flow, even if it's applied rather thickly. Non-Newtonian fluids are cool. I am sure you have played with cornstarch and water. It behaves oppositely from ketchup: the more stress you put on it the more viscous it becomes. For a fluid to be non-Newtonian it just has to have a non-linear relationship between shear stress and shear rate (related to stress and viscosity).

What Emily_R said. I made the smitten kitchen tart and for me it was too bitter. All the neighbors who come over for coffee voted it off the island too. It was pretty, though. But very pith-tasting. I don't even think that gobs of sugar would have saved it. Edit: No, it's not "smitten kitten".

Nicoise. Noice!