SylviaLovegren

Stinkbugs stink when you bite them. Very truly yours, A veteran of picking raspberries in the Pac NW

If you're cooking a piece of meat in beer, then the meat/sauce will contain everything that the beer contained. The question is, are you planning to consume the entire piece of meat plus all the sauce, so that it is the equivalent of consuming all the beer you added? Or are you planning to have a slice or two with a bit of sauce, so that you are consuming a small portion of the beer? See Mjx's formulation above. Bottom line: don't worry about it unless you absolutely must refrain from eating any sort of carbs, ever.

Whatever sugars and carbohydrates were in the beer will either be absorbed by the meat, present in the sauce in one form or another (hopefully caramelized) or stuck to the side of the pan. They don't magically puff away, unless you're cooking on heat high enough to burn them.

I also bought a little box of silk mending thread on little wooden spools made by Belding Corticelli. Apparently, they shut down in the '30's. I didn't realize it was silk until I got home and looked more carefully. I was mostly interested in the box and spools to make a mending kit for my travel bag, but I changed my mind about that, upon discovering the thread is silk. As much as he can drive me nuts, and vice-versa, he is a wonderful guy. If you're planning to use the thread, be sure to test its strength first. Textiles do degrade, especially if stored near heat, light or acids (like cedar chests!). You don't want to stitch something up only to have the seams break inopportunely. Fabulous finds, by the way. I'll pea green.

Sometimes if I'm making gravy from pan juices and there's enough fat already, I'll add a slurry of Wondra-type flour with stock and then cook long enough for the gravy to thicken and lose some of the raw flour taste.

That info has been around for a long time. So have humans eating grilled meat. Ultimately everything we eat is poisonous or harmful in certain concentrations. And ultimately we're all going to die, no matter what we eat. Key seems to me to be eating a wide variety of relatively whole foods cooked with care and caring, eating thoughtfully but without being obsessive about it and through it all, enjoy!

Read a book on Hershy and chocolate, They built a factory in Canada, and the chocolate did not have that distinctive taste, so they stripped the plant out and copied exactly the plant in The USA. That is so interesting! Well, they didn't quite succeed. It still tastes different.

It all sounds wonderful. Did you go to Lexington #1 BBQ? There are a couple of real good places in Lexington, but #1 is just out of this world. You need to order "outside meat" though to get the deep flavor. Incomparable.

There is a certain taste to an old-fashioned Hershey chocolate bar. Europeans usually hate it but I love it. I don't qualify it as "good" chocolate, but it has a certain harsh bite that is compelling. Oddly, I've found the Hershey chocolate bar in Canada -- which looks exactly like the one sold in the States -- has a different taste, mostly missing that harshness.

How do you know you have no THC receptors? That is fascinating. I buy small quantities (of TEA not cannabis!) and store them in a beautiful old Chinese tea tin with a tight fitting lid that I bought back when I was a hippie a hundred years ago. That stays in the pantry away from light and heat.

You can use Romano, too. The key is a firm cheese that will melt without sprawling too quickly. And the shape needs to be thin enough to get warm all the way through but a large enough piece to make a good serving or two. Rounds are OK for a small serving for one person, but a rectangle allows the piece to be narrow enough to get warm in the middle, again. The key is very hot oil -- you're searing and browning the outside, not cooking the cheese. Sides? Good olives are always appropriate. A serving of a tomato/cucumber/pepper salad dressed with oil and lemon, garlic and lots of black pepper. Something with some texture and some acid. And some good bread. And ouzo!

Thank you. Exactly to the point.

Not enough salt?

I live in Toronto, Ontario and have no idea what you're referring to. Sure, there are burgers that have seasoning, but you can get just plain beef burgers as well. No idea about the ground turkey. I regularly see Maple Leaf ground turkey in the grocery stores, haven't tried it, but I use their ground chicken, and it isn't seasoned at all. Not saying you don't see seasoned ground meat, but it's hardly the norm. Thanks Brian It could just be the supermarkets in my area. All of the frozen burgers are pre-seasoned -- at the Loblaws, the Sobeys, the FreshCo and the No Frills. I get delicious non-seasoned grass fed ground beef at the local butcher.

Those look and sound delish. Will definitely give them a try. Classic warm dips are artichoke dip and hot crab dip. A simple google search should you give tons of recipes for them. And there's always chili con queso -- which you sort of did with the bean/cheese/tomato already. We had a tea luncheon the other day at church and I made little sandwiches -- white bread buttered with egg salad and brown bread buttered with tuna salad. They disappeared rapidly. We also had a cold zucchini soup (which I didn't make but was quite good) and I made an oldy recipe from the Joy of Cooking -- Brown Sugar Coconut Bars -- basically a brown sugar cookie base with eggs beaten with brown sugar, then coconut and chopped almonds stirred in, pour over the partly baked base and cook until brown. They come out nicely chewy and butterscotchy. They used to be popular when I was a kid and I see why -- easy and yummy.

Put a label on it? Even a strip of tape with the name of the ingredient and the date you put it in the freezer. That's what I do.

I don't know what that is -- perhaps a regional thing? But if we're going regional... Canada (or at least Ontario) sells frozen Angus Beef Hamburgers. So what's wrong with that, you ask? Well, if an unsuspecting person buys this product and cooks it, that unsuspecting person will find out that the "hamburgers" are actually flat meatballs, flavored with garlic, salt, pepper and various herbs. They don't taste anything like hamburgers and have a penetrating artificial smell and flavor. Ugh and urp. You cannot find a plain frozen actual hamburger that has not been flavored. And the other day when I bought what I thought was "ground turkey" (since that is how it was labeled) I discovered that it, too, had been flavored with garlic, salt, pepper, herbs, etc. Gaak. The only good thing about the "ground turkey" was that I had to use it in something that would disguise the flavors and came up with a wonderful chili with beans and ground turkey that was really delicious. In fairness to the supermarkets, most restaurants, at least in Toronto, serve flat flavored meatballs rather than nice ground beef in their "hamburgers", so there's that. Why flavor all the ground meat, Canada? What's up with that?

There are many functioning historical kitchens in the Toronto area and I have participated in making griddle breads on a swinging metal plate in an open hearth and baking a pie in a built in wall oven heated by the fireplace.

That is so wonderful -- I am totally jealous. Ever think of publishing them?

I second that and I HAVE made a lot of those cakes and they are good and the directions are clear.

They didn't. Homes did not have ovens in them until the advent of the commercial stove in the mid-1800s. (although many people did not own one until the beginning of the 1900's) Baking powder is also a product of the 1800's, and, sugar was a rare and very expensive commodity that rich families kept locked in special containers. Cheap sugar is a 20th century phenomenon. Prior to that, you took your dough to the village baker to be baked off. Or, most commonly, people make hoe-cakes or baked in dutch ovens on the hearth. Baking at home as we know it is a tradition that only has a few generations of history. Most of your grandmothers did it because it was new, exciting and fashionable for young housewives to be able to bake at home instead of buy from the bakery the way their parents had.You might want to check out a PBS series from a few years back called 'Colonial House' -a reality show where they had a group of people live for six months as colonial settlers. All cooking happened over fireplace hearths. And, there was very little 'baking' going on. The invention of the scale predates the home oven by a couple of millenia. Well.... I have some of my great-grandmother's recipes for cakes and she was born in 1860. Americans made plenty of baked goods in the olden days but before the invention of the thermostatted oven and chemical leaveners, great skill was necessary to have consistently good results. I personally can highly recommend almost every cake recipe in the 1950 Betty Crocker and the 1974 (or maybe it's 72?) Joy of Cooking. So long as you follow their instructions for measuring dry ingredients (and they have very clear instructions on how it should be done for their recipes) the results should be quite good. Cooks were using cups, spoonfuls, butter "the size of an egg", teacup fulls, wineglass fulls, etc., for centuries, and with some experience, ending up with delicious cakes. It's much easier to pass on a recipe that uses weights but it's not at all impossible to cook elsewise and women have done it for a very long time. ETA: Amelia Simmons American Cookery (1796) is subtitled "And the best modes of making....Cakes". It has numerous cake recipes, all calling for prodigious amounts of ingredients. The ingredients ARE generally measured in pounds (one calls for 20 pounds of flour and 1 teacup full of coriander seeds!) and obviously are expected to be baked in the home oven. The delicate light cakes we are used to now, thickly iced and multi-layered, are an invention of the 1800s. (Although I believe angel cakes, leavened only with egg whites, are quite a bit older.) Here's a link to American Cookery: http://books.google.ca/books?id=_6CggcPs3iQC&pg=PA41&lpg=PP1&dq=amelia+simmons+american+cookery

I'm much more of a Michael Pollan kind of girl. Nature already figured out what food is. I have no problem with scientists trying to understand that but in terms of eating, I'll go with the already built incredibly complex and beautiful system that exists so easily out there. That food is pretty much free, made with solar energy and a bit of sweat equity, and it tastes really good.

What kind of cake? The easiest cake in the world is "Wacky Cake" http://southernfood.about.com/od/chocolatecakes/r/bl01018c.htm You can get a lot more complex after that, but it all depends on what kind of cake you like, what kind you want, and what you're using it for.

Totally depends on the mom. If I were the mom I'd take: Pavlova with lemon curd (or a lemon curd tart or home made lemon meringue pie) A coconut cake with thick white mountain frosting liberally sprinkled with fresh grated coconut. If it had lemon curd between the layers you'd get extra double bonus points. A raspberry/white chocolate mousse. With a few dark chocolate truffles alongside to cut the sweet. A big box of New Orleans pralines, but I wouldn't share ANY of them, so bring something else for the other folks.

Srsly!?! All those years living with a huge shady backyard covered in hostas and trying to raise veggies in pots that I moved around and all the while vegetable heaven was just sittin' there agrowin.