SylviaLovegren

My mouth is watering.

Noise, for me. Either too loud music or too loud noise in general. Makes me think of Sam Goldwyn's "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded". The fad for tin ceilings was a terrible thing.

Peanut butter cookies and lemon bars always sell well. Oatmeal cookies are good, too, for chocolate avoiders. Shortbread? Various biscotti,as fancy as you like to make them. For gluten-free, what about coconut macaroons?

Where? I have a great place in Toronto, they sell grass fed beef at reasonable price, and the steaks are extraordinary. But if you're not close by...

Chicken is pretty close to duck. Is it ok to sub that? Hot dogs for sausage? (Sorry- I'm being snarky but I think beans are THE essential part of the cassoulet.) I'm not saying you must use Tarbais. I'm saying if you're going to all the trouble, why use a crap bean like a Great Northern, which are nothing like a Tarbais? Use a runner cannellini (very close) or a flageolet, which are creamier than a Great Northern yet have a thicker skin so they won't break down in a cassoulet the way a GN might. My staff and I eat a lot of beans. The Tarbais are just plain different. And pretty incredible on their own. We won't be charging $35 bucks a pound, by the way. Grateful to be on eGullet and to find your website. Wow. Now I'm hungry!

Yes, at all meals, and yes in a restaurant. We're the only ones we know who do it and we do get some odd reactions. We try not to be confrontational or "look at us, we're PRAYING!", just quiet. It feels odd to eat without a small prayer of thanks.

Just strain regular yogurt. That's greek yogurt for you. Jenni posted that great recipe for bitter melon in spiced yoghurt a month or so ago. That was really good!

When I hear fruit salad dressing, I think of the old fashioned boiled dressing like this one from Gisslen. If you've never tried it, the fruit salad dressing is really pretty good. http://netcookingtalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2579 That's very much like the special occasion fruit salad dressing my dad used to make, although he didn't add the sour cream. It was basically a zabaglione made with canned pineapple juice (of course!) instead of Marsala. It made a really delicious and festive fruit salad, albeit a bit rich. But that was the point! I recently tried a wonderful fruit salad dressing, made from honey warmed with cardamom, then thinned with lime juice. Used it on a salad of oranges, honeydew melon and pomegranate. Really good.

Congrats to you and to hell with the CDC's BMI. I was one of those annoying tall skinny people who could (and did) eat anything and never gain weight and who felt smug and virtuous about it. Then in middle age my metabolism changed and I packed on a good 30 extra pounds. Been trying to lose them for 10 years with very little success. It's @!##@!!! hard! So hats off to you. (The one good thing for my own personal saga is that I've learned a bit of humility...)

Best tamales I ever had were off a street truck in Hope.

That makes sense. But a (non-French) friend in Toronto told me to go get some javelle water to clean up a mess. I did a double take since I'd only seen it in US home help books from the 1800s.

Me neither. (Well, Fritos and Bugles. But most of the other stuff is Greek to me. What's wrong with a good bag of potato chips?)

Why have I never heard of Munchos? Funyums rings a faint bell. What are they?

I love that Canadian stores sell "javelle water" (aka bleach). That usage went out in the States in the 1800s.

Didn't know she did this. Very annoying. My husband is superstitious about salt and has a fit when some is spilled, has to throw some over his shoulder. Of course, our young adult son finds this a perfect opportunity to torture dad.

I wonder if having it tightly closed was the problem? I know with fresh meat if it's going to be held for more than a day it needs to get some air circulation to keep from going off. No idea whether brined meat would work the same way, but otherwise I don't see what could go wrong.

Are you looking to adopt, by any chance? Because I could easily be available.

Stewed tomatoes. So good. Haven't had them in years.

You can also use it as a green in soup.

Why not cut the butter into a more convenient shape and store the various parts as wanted? When we lived in the Pac NW the butter always stayed in a covered butter dish on the counter, but when I moved to the East Coast without central air I learned that butter can go rancid as well as melt at "room temperature". So far, in Ontario, I've only found butter in huge blocks. But since we stopped eating most carbs, our butter consumption has gone way down as well. Sadly. So the huge blocks of butter stay tightly wrapped in the fridge "dairy" section.

I've pretty much given up on FN. I'm interested in cooking, or food history, or culinary culture, not whether the host is demented or can eat 15 habaneros in one sitting or cooks in a leather jumpsuit while wearing stilettos. The host should be interesting because of his or her take on food, not because of personality quirks or narcissistic showoffery.

Having eaten wild-caught introduced carp (in Eastern Washington) -- they tasted like carp, er crap. Muddy and bony. Perhaps if they're held in fresh clear water for a few days to flush them the taste would clean up. But couldn't they be used for surimi?

If they're in a tin I'd be afraid of chemical reaction and/or leaching. Pour some into a glass and look and sniff. If either comes up wonky, I'd throw out and start fresh.

With the seasonings that sounds more like a fish cake than what I think of as a "fish stick" (silly name, isn't it?). Fish sticks, to me, are pieces of fish with a crispy breaded coating, like mini fish'n'chips without the chips. My mom used to prepare frozen boughten ones and I remembered them as being delicious, crispy and good. So I recently bought some frozen major brand ones (Gorton's, I think), followed the directions and ended up with dreadful fish sticks -- soggy and whiffy. Ugh.

If I recall correctly, black pepper originated in the old-world tropics (India, I think), while chilis are new-world tropics things.... I can't think of any of the countries where it grows natively that it's been fully replaced by chilis - they augment the heat, but they're not the only source. Meanwhile, in the original homes of the chili, it continues to reign supreme as the hot spice. Yes, pepper is Old World and chili is New. I just always wonder where the heat would have come from in Indian, Thai, Laotian cooking, etc., before chili.