SylviaLovegren
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Posts posted by SylviaLovegren
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Stick with simple braises, stews, that can sit for a while and don't need precision. Stay away from expensive roasts or baking that requires exact times and temperatures. If you need to bake, simple cookies. No cakes.
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I've been meaning to label stuff for the last 30 years. Does that count?
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Sounds like the tasters in the article did a blind tasting and were able to guess provenance.
We have a local cheese maker who sells her "mistakes" along with the normal production. Some mistakes were put in a room with the wrong humidity, or got washed incorrectly, or aged longer than they should have,etc. Some of them are delicious and some of them are just interesting. But it becomes obvious when you are sampling the mistakes that cheese is a living product -- a dance between milk and bacteria and the environment. Sometimes you get Astaire and Rogers when you were expecting Nijinsky and Pavlova, sometimes you get Bristol Palin and Chaz Bono.
But how the cheese is treated has a definite effect on flavor and texture.
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Ok, here's an offensive one - yogurt stirred into your morning cup of tea. I defy anyone to make that taste good!
If you added salt and the yogurt was really thick, you'd have Tibetan Butter Tea, which may not be to everyone's taste but the Tibetans seem to like it.
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I figured that you might like an update on this: the frozen bags of zucchini weep more than a bit when thawed - so I've taken to draining off about half of the liquid before I use them. However, on the upside, the result is actually better in the death-by-chocolate cake with frozen zucch than it is with fresh.
Happy endings are great! Boy would I like some death-by-chocolate cake right this second, too -- with veggies it's healthier!
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Does the pumpkin chocolate have any, you know, pumpkin in it? Personally I just loathe pumpkin flavored anything except pie
, but maybe that's just me. The shape is really appealing -- makes me want to bite it.The eggnog looks and sounds delicious.
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I had yoghurt (a delicious Balkan-style available here that is thick and creamy, without the chalky taste that some of Greek yoghurts have) with apples and walnuts this morning, a favorite breakfast. In the summer, I substitute berries for the apples. Before lo-carb I used to mix in granola instead of the walnuts.
Also love yoghurt as a sauce for meats and rice in the Turkish/northern Greek way. Sometimes the yoghurt is mixed with dill or mint and/or garlic, sometimes it's plain and simply used as a creamy acid to cut the richness of lamb or balance the spiciness in a chicken dish.
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Toronto. Fairly new here and still haven't found great coffee. A few coffee joints here make good espresso, but I like a nice cuppa clear coffee for daytime. So far, all the beans I've tried have given very meh coffee.
A quick search shows that Manic Coffee carries Intellegentsia's beans - gets them delivered freshly roasted a few times a week, according to the web site...that might be a good start.
Wow! Thank you! I'm in the Manic neighborhood (in more ways than one!) a couple of times a week. Had their espresso coffee on the spot but never looked at beans for sale. I'll be there Wednesday morning.
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If the peels are unpleasant -- tomato peelings in sauce, peach skin in pies -- I peel. Otherwise a good scrub is all you need.
We're lucky enough to have a compost pile, so peelings go in that, which assuages a great deal of guilt!
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Zachary's post Same with coffee - you have to start with good coffee.
Yes, but where do you get THAT?
Where do you live?
Toronto. Fairly new here and still haven't found great coffee. A few coffee joints here make good espresso, but I like a nice cuppa clear coffee for daytime. So far, all the beans I've tried have given very meh coffee.
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Zachary's post Same with coffee - you have to start with good coffee.
Yes, but where do you get THAT?
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Recently bought a fresh pasta made with heritage wheat and cooked it the traditional way with lots of water. Pasta was delicious, texture perfect. The maker had warned me to use lots of water. The second time I made it I got "economy" and cut back on the amount of water. Since the pasta had a rough texture and was very starchy the additional stirring necessary to keep it from sticking together in less water caused the pasta to break more and a tremendous amount of starch to be released -- the pasta ended up very sticky and gluey. But I sure had some concentrated starch water! Next time, I'll go back to using lots of water.
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The main thing I wanted was beer - got one La Fin Du Monde (a favorite)
Where are you that you can get LFDM? Not fair!
And, yes, their meat and cheese, etc., is expensive. But sometimes their sales, especially on meats, are really good. And where we were in NJ, their prices for organic milk and eggs were much cheaper than the local supermarkets for the same.
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I've just gotten through indexing the first year of recipes on my blog -- before this kid came to live with me. Looking back, I notice that I didn't cook every night -- but even my "snacky" nights were good, from-my-fridge or pantry, healthy (for the most part) snacks. I can't feed him like that. If I'm coming home exhausted from what is an increasingly stressful job, and I really have no appetite, I give in much more frequently than I should to the temptation to stop and pick him up something.
Is it possible for him to do some of the cooking? To take some of the weight off you and give him some hands-on experience with the food he eats? A kid might not touch a carrot stick you cut, but if HE makes carrot and celery sticks with dip as part of the simple meal he prepares for you, he's much more likely to think it's yummy. Just a thought.
Good luck! That's a tough one and bless you in your endeavors.
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I always loved their organic salami -- not the sliced kind, the small tube you have to slice yourself. Don't remember the brand, tho. And the Nieman Ranch ham.
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My mom and dad were campers/fishers and trout was (hopefully!) always on the menu. The favorite way to cook them right out of the river was to first fry up some bacon in a heavy cast iron skillet. Roll the fish in some corn meal with some salt and pepper. Set aside the crisp bacon, then fry the corn-dusted fish in the bacon fat until crisp on both sides. Remove the bone and serve. You can serve the bacon slices on the side. Lemon wedges if you have them.
Just recently got a Spanish cookbook out of the library -- imagine my surprise to see this same recipe in it. Just in time to cook some trout from the supermarket!
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Also, some cucumbers are quite sweet. Lemon cucumbers, for instance, the long, pale "Armenian" cucumbers (I grew both last years) and one I buy in the middle Eastern market, can't recall the name.
I think they can vary as much as the various melon types.
The "Armenian" cucumber is actually a melon -- snake, to be exact. Snake melons belong to Cucumis melo, as do cantaloupes and muskmelons.
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Interestingly enough, I've been getting into a new melon this summer - the Hami melon. It's a muskmelon, to be sure, but much crisper than a canteloupe. And with some cucumber overtones, which isn't that surprising, since they share the same family and genus.
Depends on the Hami. We got one in NJ last year -- my first Hami -- that was silken fleshed and the sweetest, most exquisite melon we'd ever eaten. Bought a few since, from the same source and other places, too, and they've been kind of meh. Good, but nothing amazing. Much as you describe, in fact.
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Love my All Clad sauce pans. I have a couple of L.C. sauce pans and almost never use them because they're not responsive.
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No brown -- wrecks it. Soft but not runny inside. But I do like over easys with crispy brown edges.
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Mid-end of July for raspberries and blackberries in Lynden, Washington.
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I like to start with olive oil with some garlic and crushed red pepper, then add some white wine, then the clams (shucked with juice or in the shell or bot) and steam (at this point some fillets of canned tomato can be a nice addition too), then some parsley, salt, then add long pasta. You can leave out some of those ingredients and it will still be delicious.
That's how I do it, too. Sometimes I'll add lemon juice instead of the white wine, or a few drops of lemon juice TO the white wine. If I need more sauce, I add some of the pasta cooking water. Make sure there's plenty of salt.
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Omelets with things in them -- cheese, vegetables, what have you. Or a frittata. That, with a salad and something easy for desert (fruit, cookies, ice cream). You can add bread, potatoes or rice for the people who eat that and those who don't can pass it by. An appetizer of nuts or cheese and crackers (no-carbers can leave off the crackers), some olives. If you have some frozen fun things on hand -- like gyoza or cheese straws, etc. -- that are quick to heat up, those make a nice addition to the appetizers, as well.
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Nothing wrong with ghee from sweet butter, it's delicious and works well in recipes.
FWIW, here is how I set about making ghee from scratch in one of the traditional ways (more on that below):
Step 1 - Bring the days milk to the boil and leave to cool for several hours.
You have no idea how amazing that sounds. Here all milk is pasteurized and homogenized and mixed at the dairy plant from milk from hundreds of different cows and farms, then put into containers and sold days -- if not weeks if it's ultrapasteurized -- after it came from the cow.
Except in my hippie ancient history days when I got natural milk in bottles from a local farm, I have never in my life had day old milk.
People who blanket-veto seafood
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
It's an interesting phenomenon. If you look at old US cookbooks or magazines, there was a fair amount of fish served. And in the 50s and 60s things like anchovies and sardines were very big as appetizers, cocktail food, etc. Boy, did that go away.
If you don't eat fish/seafood the smell and texture are very different than land animals. And the slightest bit of tiredness of the fish and the smell gets nasty fast.
I grew up in the Pac NW and was used to absolutely fresh right out of the water fish and shellfish -- often caught myself or by another family member. When I moved to L.A. I couldn't tolerate fish there because it tasted so old. Same thing with most of the fish I found in markets in NJ -- not fresh! Nasty! In Toronto, fish is so expensive we just don't bother mostly. So now I'm one of those Americans who mostly only eats canned tuna...