Norm Matthews

Just remember that there are thousands of varieties of yeast. What is indigenous to your area might or might not be the same kind on the grapes that makes good bread for La Brea Bakery. Also there are some California red grapes that won't grow in Canada and some native American grapes that don't make good wine.

No. With wild yeast, it's a coin toss whether you will get a good yeast for bread or not. It might be amazing, it might be awful. There are thousands of different varieties. What makes good wine might not be good for bread. A little cultured bread yeast will be a better bet. It will revert to wild in a week or two.

The BBQ sauces I like are more like tangy steak sauces than the sweet sauces most people attribute to BBQ. Many serious BBQ smokers only use sauce as a light finishing baste or as a table sauce if at all. What gives BBQ sauces a bad name are the kind that you find in places like McD's and other places that think dousing anything in tomatoey sticky sweet stuff qualifies it as BBQ.

That white film on the skin of things like plums, grapes and cabbage is wild yeast. When it is fed, grown, and kept alive in a batter of flour and water, it is sour dough yeast. Cultured yeast are strains that are developed to promote certain characteristics like rapid rising in breads or to promote the best fermentation results in beer or wine. Cultured yeast will quickly revert back to its wild state if fed and grown in sour dough like conditions. Heat kills yeast, cold inhibits it.

This is the best BBQ sauce I have ever had and it can only be got through mail order http://www.horizonbbqsmokersstore.com/servlet/the-300/Horizon-Original-BBQ-Sauce/Detail Some history: When Oklahoma Joe sold his renowned smoker company to CharBroil, they closed the company and put it out of business and OK Joe moved to Texas. A few years later his brother who was also in the original company opened Horizon Smokers and offers the same commercial, competition and back yard smokers and the same sauce also sold by the company but now it is called Horizon BBQ sauce. When it had beed sold under the Oklahoma Joe name, it had won Jack Daniels World Championship BBQ contest: Best Sauce in the World, American Royal International Sauce Contest: Best Sauce on the Planet, and Memphis in May BBQ World Championship: Best Sauce in the World. The original rib rub recipe is also excellent and can be found on the web in several places. Here is one link http://www.food.com/recipe/oklahoma-joes-rib-rub-118966

Clementines are good in a salad.

Don't refrigerate olive oil or salad dressings with it in it, but I seldom make enough salad dressing to have to refrigerate it. I never heard of keeping fish sauce out of the fridge but I just bought my first bottle of it. It is ginger flavored Viet Nam sauce. When I grow tomatoes and I have more than I can eat before they go bad and not enough to can, when they are perfectly ripe, they go straight in the refrigerator so they last a little longer. I don't like cukes unless they are pickled so they aren't even around my house most of the time. Melons are something I like cold. They always go in the fridge. It is nice to keep butter in a butter keeper but to be honest, it is easier to keep it chilled. If I want it softened, I wash the butter dish, bottom and top in very hot water, wipe it dry and set it out. It softens in half an hour.

Ann-T, I was looking at those pizza ovens the other day. They look like they'd heat up a lot faster than a stone wood fired pizza oven. That pizza peel is very pretty. What kind of wood is it? It looks sort of like olive wood.

The Asian market had some good looking pork hocks so I made them with beans and greens along with a few new potatoes. I planned to make corn bread but forgot.

Sani-Tuff is a form of rubber. It's hard to sand due to density, but has more resiliency so it gives while glass doesn't. http://www.notrax.com/Products/36-11-Apex-Food-Service-Products-Cutting-Boards/177-T45-Sani-Tuff%C2%AE

It bothers me a little too. It's like saying Chicken Fried Chicken for regular fried chicken. BTW I think I have figured which came first. It depends on your belief system though. If you believe in evolution, the egg came first because whatever laid it wasn't quite fully a chicken yet. If you believe in Creationism, the chicken came first. She was created from the rib of a rooster.

Years ago a church group to which I belonged prepared Thanksgiving dinner for the rest of the congregation every year. I was assigned to make the green bean casserole. i didn't know what it was until I went home and googled it. i was appalled that they would ask me to make something with canned green beans, cream of mushroom soup and canned onion rings but I made it and it got eaten completely. My son likes it now and wants it for Thanksgiving and I don't mind it either.. once a year.

I made some Seolleongtang (Korean Beef Bone Soup) yesterday. Charlie and Cassie had some last night and I froze the rest for his mom when she gets here for the wedding in a few weeks. On Wed. I plan some pork hocks, navy beans and greens. Here is one of the kids recent engagement pictures.

I thought the issue was putting them in the refrigerator before cooking.

It is the refrigerating that causes the off flavors. The cold converts starches in the potato to sugar. See an explanation here http://www.stilltasty.com/questions/index/74/page:1

I use it for many of the things already mentioned but one use I didn't notice is when I make Irish butter, I put it on wax paper, lay the top over it, place a ruler or kitchen scraper on top and pull the bottom of the sheet. It makes a perfect round log. I twist the ends and let it set up in the refrigerator. I suppose you could do the same with refrigerator cookies. Putting a folded layer between things in the freezer, like hamburger patties, helps separating them when cooking one or two.

How do you cook them? Boil, baked, steam, fry, pressure cook, etc? Do you cook them whole, peeled or with skin on? Do you slice and pan fry or make hash browns. When peeled or cut, Do you keep them in cold and or salted water until used? Or do they set out for a while? Do they turn brown in the air before you use them?

Last night we had oxtail soup with bok choy, mushrooms, onions and a tossed salad.

Lisa Shock beat me to it but to add a little, when people started moving in large numbers to the city from the farm for factory jobs, chicken was not readily available in local city grocery stores until they started mass producing chicken for sale in the city for meat. Until then they were mostly raised for eggs and only killed and eaten when they stopped producing... or had one too many roosters.

You are correct. City Chicken was made with veal. It was not lamb. My friend used to make lamb on skewers but it was called shashlik. My mistake. I have another friend who still makes it today. He uses pork. Perhaps that is just him. I have never made it.

Most people could not tell it wasn't apple pie. City chicken was usually pork, sometimes with lamb on a skewer to resemble a drumstick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_chicken

The recipe I have used is a lot like IowaDee's. Recently I 'changed' it to "Mexican Lasagne" by layering the filling with corn tortillas instead of cornbread and topping it with cheese. Sometimes I added canned tamales on the bottom but I didn't know that was part of some recipes... I thought I was just improvising. I also have that recipe for mock apple pie. I think it was of the depression era like City Chicken was also.

When I lived west of here there were a couple of ranches that raised beef for sale. The meat had to be processed at FDA monitored plants and freezing the meat must have been a requirement because that was the only way it was available. Steaks and roasts from Dodge City and Omaha are also only available frozen. I have never cooked one from frozen though. I don't think I'd be tempted to try either.

That reminds me of quite a long time ago in Lindsborg, Kansas. It is a town with a strong Swedish heritage. The King of Sweden even visited there once in the early Seventies. About that same time, that is where I had a blacksmith make me a potters wheel that I still have. I enjoyed Smorgasbord at the Swedish Crown restaurant every time I could. And here is a souvenir I still keep from that past time.

I had a fondue party a few years ago for friends who were moving away. I found a couple fondue pots and a couple chafing dishes at thrift stores. I had cheese with bread sticks, crackers, pretzels and crunchy vegetables, hot oil for chunks of ribeye steak and three or four dipping sauces and chocolate with vanilla wafers and marshmallows. For the kids, ( three under 7) I breaded and fried chicken tenders and gave them ketchup along with some of the other sauces.