Mottmott

I used to keep a large Van Dyck brown monoprint I made of strawberries in the kitchen, but when I added some more cabinets I lost the wall space for it.

Thanks. This will bean my beautiful dinner tonight. I happen to have all the ingredients in the house, including canniloni beans that at this moment are cooking on my stove.

Wedding, Potlach, Wedding, Potlach, Wedding.... Many a marriage has foundered on the wedding. I'm simply incapable of even understanding inflated celebrations, much less participating in them. For many people, that wedding and honeymoon could have been the downpayment on a house. Beyond that, mostly one hears tales like this of ill will and anger generated and perhaps lasting for years. My personal belief is that wedding parties are most moving when intimate, limited to one's immediate family, held at home. And wedding or whatever, it's crude to plan a party and plan for someone else to pay for all or part of it.

Our postings have crossed, this answers some of my questions. You are a kind and generous friend. My suggestion would be to consider a slightly different approach. I would begin with eggs. They'll take you prctically everywhere. They are cheap enough to make any number of mistakes without pain. Teach her how to make a good omelet, and at least half dozen fillings and/or sauces for it. Ditto a frittata with variations. Either of these with a salad and/or soup can make an inexpensive meal at lerast once a week without becoming boring or giving a sense of deprivation. There are hundreds (or more) variations on these two dishes. These variations will take you into different kinds of sauces and fillings. For example the sauteed mushrooms you make for an omelet filling could be tweeked by instead adding some cream (or white sauce) and serving it on toast points or rice. Learn how to make a custard. This can be turned into either a sweet or savory dish depending on what you add to the basic egg, milk mixture. Soak a bunch of bread in it and you have bread pudding which can also be either sweet or, with the addition of some cheese and/or veggies, a savory dish (look up stratata). In addition to tomato sauce, teach her white sauce (bechamel) which is also very versatile. One of my favorite dishes is a lasagna made with both tomato and bechamel sauce as well as cheese. Turn bechamel another way, making it thicker, combining it with eggs and some vegetable leftovers and or cheese and you have a souffle or cheese rarebit. And so on. By exploring all the uses of eggs with their great capacity to bind ingredients together, you gradually build up an extensive repetoire of techniques and dishes. In their capacity to bind foods together, eggs, thick bechamel, and some of that leftover chicken can become croquettes. With an appropriate selection of vegetables (onions, celery, etc), the bread pudding can become stuffing for the chicken. Once you've mastered bechamel, it's a short hop to cheese sauce and the most delicious homemade mac and cheese to which you can add finely chopped onions and celery to make it more flavorful and nutritious. In a flush moment, you can stud it with some small shrimp for a company dish. And best of all, eggs are the genius of most baked goods. A little flour, sugar, a few eggs, maybe milk and you can go from pancakes to cake. Savory pancakes with corn or some other vegetable added can be the centerpiece of a meal. Just exploring all the techniques and ingredients to use with eggs will take you a long way without repetition or deprivations.

JGM, It would be useful if we had answers to the questions many here have posed to you. First, it would be useful if we had some idea of how poor your friends are. Are we talking about minimum wage poor or a young couple with an average income burdened by too big a mortgage, car payments, and overreaching credit card debt poor? I know people who with $50k a year (and more) who are poorer than others I know with 30k a year. Then, how motivated is your friend to learn how to cook economically (and, presumably healthily)? Is she characteristically, the last thing in the world I want to do is cook, dammit, let's do takeout tonight? or is she, I wish I knew how to cook because I really enjoy the challenge of making delicious food? Is she actively concerned about nutrition or vaguely aware that she should be concerned about it and never willing to wrap her mind around it. Is she the sort of person who enjoys trying new things? or does she resent it when she must do something different? This would make a difference for me if I were in your situation. Indeed I have been. Someone very close to me was in a similar situation, but she was intractable in her resistance to change. In her case, health issues were present as well as financial issues. If I cooked her a healthy balanced meal she would eat it happily enough. There was, however, nothing I could do to induce her to begin cooking that way or to stop take-out pizza, etc., even though it undermined her health. Some people do not care to own their problems, preferring to hand off the pain of their situation to others. Lastly, what do you mean by beginning level skills? Could she make eggs 5-6 different ways? A custard? A fritta? at least if she had a recipe to follow? Could she do it with chicken? Fish? Can she make non-instant rice? Cook dried beans? Are her veggies cooked from scratch? Or is her experience that of so many, confined to putting together meals mostly from processed foods? From your description of where you intend to start, it sounds as if she has hardly any cooking skills at all. It would help us to know.

Very good of you to do this. I'm sure your friend appreciates it. It must be overwhelming for her, but with some step by step guidance you'll get her through this. I spend a lot of money on food. Nevertheless I try to be frugal by using it all if possible. Lots of the bits we throw out can be the basis of soups and stocks. I realize it's hard for people to go cold turkey on meat, but that is often the priciest item in people's diet. However, if she can winnow them down to a 3 to 4 oz per person serving it will be healthier as well as cheaper. It will be psychologically easier for your friend if you emphasize that her goal is not JUST to save money, it's to do it by concentrating on making their diet more nutritious. We have been advertised into spending too much for too little nutrition, into consuming foods that are actually bad for us. Wising up, just cutting out sodas and commercially made snacks will make most of us healthier and wealthier. In fact, by focusing on eating healthier, they can almost automatically eat cheaper. Incorporating beans and legumes into their diet will add protein. Using whole grains for breakfast cerals instead of processed boxes of stuff mostly not good for you anyway will save big bucks. Last time I looked those heavily advertised breakfast "foods" were around $3/box. I buy organic rolled oats (better than Quaker's instant fluff) for less than $1/lb. Since you're starting with chicken: Suggest to her that she serve the chicken boned, then save/use the bones again to make a little moe broth/stock much as one uses the turkey carcass. There are lots of trimmings of onions, carrots, celery and other veggies that can be saved to use with the bones to make stock. Store it all up in the freezer as you go. Generally you can get bones for very little or even free. These can make stock to use in all sorts of dishes, uping the flavor and nutrition for next to nothing. Intensifying the flavors allows you to get by with much less meat. Using what we all too often throw away is an important step. I'm not challenged economically; yet the other night while making a relatively expensive meal, I used the ends of onions, carrots and some fennel stalks - all of which would have been thrown out - to add to the head and bones of a small bass for stock for a dish I was making for my vegetarian daughter at an otherwise carnivorous meal. I stuffed the small bass with a a little sauted chopped onion and fennel, mixed in some breadcrumbs (previously salvaged from loaf ends and frozen), a few spices. I stuffed the fish with this, tied it up and sauted it. I then added some cream to the reduced fish stock, reduced the cream, poured it over the fish and had her swooning over the dish and all the carnivores demanding a taste. True the bass was $9/lb, but not all fish are that expensive. A inexpensive piece of fish also can stuffed like this or be laid out, covered with a similar stuffing, rolled, tied, baked. Again, because I like it that way, I will take a piece of pork or chicken, pound it out very thin, coat (flour, egg, crumbs) it, and fry it. Three oz of meat makes an enormous cutlet that way; add a little freshly made salsa of almost any juicy vegetable or fruit with a dose of hot, spicy, sweet, herbal, and a touch of oil and vinegar for a delicious zip. It hardly matters what ingredients you put in, it's usually delicious. Plus there are gazillions of recipes out there. The savings is not just $, its the nutrition and not having who knows what chemicals added to your food. Also, depending on where you live, there are places to find food cheaper. Many towns have an equivalent to Philadelphia's 9th St Market where prices are WAY cheaper than supermarkets. If there are ethnic markets in her area that carry fresh produce and fish, they may be considerably cheaper. There may even be a food coop in the area. In many areas there is free food distribution for those of limited means by churches or non-profits. The important thing is to stay away from buying processed foods. They are (usually) less nutritious and always more expensive. Give up processed cerials and go to rolled oats, wheatena, or other whole grains for breakfast. Better for you and way cheaper. I get a pound of organic rolled oats for less than $!/lb. at my coop. I can't guess how many boxes of popped, fluffed, and transfatted cereals that's the equivalent of. Last time I looked a box of processed breakfast cereal was about $3/box! Amazing people buy all that advertising. Most important of all, I believe, is for them to get their head around not being deprived but instead being forced to develop a healthful way of eating. Whole grains, beans, legumes should be the base of all our diets. Fortunately they are among the cheapest foods. Some of the cheapest vegetables, such as cabbage, are really good for us and can be prepared in very tasty ways. If she buys carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, etc. with tops, those tops can be used, not tossed. I tend to saute them up for pasta & greens with lots of garlic or add them to soups. Perhaps when she feels less overwhelmed by the change she might even bake bread at home. A couple loaves of Cornell Bread will not call for pricy ingredients and supply way more nutrition cheaper than cheap bread that's not really filling. And in the winter having the oven on helps heat the house. (Also, not exactly on topic, during the energy crisis of the 70's when I turned my thermostat way down, I dicovered I not only reduced the heat bill, but reduced colds for us all as well. Since then I've set it between 55-65f and throw on a sweater if I need it. I get through some winters without colds now.)

Yes. And did MS say it was her choice for best baking book of the year or just best book?

I hate pouring from the all clad 1 or 2 quart pots. If anyone out there has a technique to keep them from dribbling, nay sloshing, let me know! For frying I always like cast iron, and in such a small pot, the weight should not be a problem. Edited to add, that any build up of fat on them is called seasoning.

It strikes me that apart from the great pleasure we are all having using these recipes - in taste, looks, success in making them - there’s another element that makes Baking such a great book for so many of us. It emphasizes the sort of baked goods that we’re all happy to make for everyday fare (often) whether we live alone or have a large family. Yesterday I looked carefully at Flo Braker’s The Simple Art of Perfect Baking, a very good book and very useful in putting forth elements one could easily incorporate in confections of one’s own composing. But these are mostly party cakes. The Braker recipe I use most, a plum fig kuchen, is from her newspaper column. This no way disparages Braker’s book. I’m glad to have it in my library and consult it from time to time. I simply note that it emphasizes a kind of baking less useful for me day to day. I use The Cake Bible all the time for reference, seldom for cake recipes. I’ve made a couple recipes from the two Herme books and love them, but again, most recipes in that book do not often suit my casual life. I could make similar comments about most of the baking/dessert books I have. Dorie’s book, on the other hand has only a dozen or so recipes that I would make only for a party. The rest are for me, doable any/every day of the week. True, living alone, I may hand off some of it to one of my kids who live nearby, a neighbor, or freeze away part of it for another time as a calorie control measure. I’m sure others may disagree with me, but I don’t care to make even simple layer cakes with fillings and frostings except for entertaining - and not always then. For example, last weekend I did make the Tiramisu Cake for a large family party. We all loved it, but I’ll probably not make it again for a long time as I use those occasions to try out new occasion cakes. For me it's more fun to do something different all the time instead of the same thing over and over. It think the genius of Baking is the beautiful and exacting execution of book dedicated to the art of home baking with finesse. For everyday baking, it’s the goto book in my library. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win a bunch of awards. (Yesterday Martha Stewart may have gotten in the first lick, declaring it her book of the year.)

I remember seeing that as a child done by my aunt! My ancient memory is that somehow the finished dish was strudel baked in a pot, I seem to recall they were stacked. Perhaps she did an extra step after baking the strudel? Anyone know of something like this?

I've had a GE profile for about 5 years, bought as a scratch and dent through my appliance repair man. Somehow, it was sans GE service, but he guaranteed it. To date, it's never needed repairs, though about 1" of the gasket cloth is a bit frayed a bit. I'm not wild about some things about it: the simmer burner ONLY simmers, the oven burns a bit hot, but I adjust for it. The flame on the hot burner has a really annoying hot spot. The door window in my model is not only smaller than the current ones, but has a mesh that makes for bad visibility. Most of all, I'd rather have flush grates rather than individual raised ones. But when I read up on other stoves, I decide to stay with my known problems.

I'd eat it if it were scrambled. That beautiful look is great for company, but if things don't work out as they're "supposed" to, as long as it still tastes good, I'd smile and pretend it was meant to be that way Speaking of company. I made the tiramisu cake for dinner tonight. It's a tossup as to whether it looked or tasted better. I love making that sort of thing for company. I have a slice at dinner and send the leftovers home with the guests instead of to my waist. My thanks to someone above who cautioned it was a bit dry (sorry, too tired to check back to see who it was). I made extra coffe-kalua syrup to soak the cake. One thing to mention about this cake, while it's super rich, sumptuous even, it's not super sweet - a plus in my book Also, for TDay I took a tart to my stepdaughter's banquet. I used the Herme book's recipe for the lemon cream tart. Raves all around, and my DIL's begging for a repeat. When I make that recipe I up the lemon zest by about 25% as I like it a bit more lemony, otherwise follow instructions scrupulously. It's very similar to the one in Baking with the addition of a glaze. I've made it with and without the glaze and must admit the glaze is well worth the extra work.

In this case, I think it well worth while to try to crack the mystery because you have several accounts of success from others, some of whom have made it several times. It's a very distinctive cake both for flavor and appearance, something few muffins can claim (imo). I made the cranberry cake twice. My guess is that you did one of two things. Firstly, you may not have cooked the sugar mixture enough to turn it into the glue that holds the cranberries together. Reread the recipe. Secondly, perhaps you were too vigorous when you spread the rather thick, viscous batter over the berry/nut layer, scooping some of them up into the batter. In my case I actually used more berries and nuts than the recipe called for, but changed nothing else. I'm a do it in stages whenever possible sort of cook. Do a stage, take a rest, read a book, go online, then go back to the next one. Perhaps that extra time between the cranberry layer and the batter layer helped the cranberries set up. And I was very careful when I spread the batter layer, using a small offset spatula which I think gives better control than the rubber scraper/spatula I use for folding or scraping out the bowl.

i tried these, and was disappointed. they were dry, and i'm pretty sure i didn't overbake them. the flavor had potential, so i think i might try them again, with some creme fraiche or mascarpone for moisture. (if i don't just skip along to the next 50 things i want to make from this book!) ← You raise an interesting issue for me. When you try a recipe, find it wanting in some dimension (even though you're sure you followed the recipe), do you fiddle with it? or move on and try one of the gazillion other tempting looking recipes? One the one hand, I do find it a challenge to try to improve something that has potential. On the other, there's the challenge of all the untried. Perhaps it's age that leads me to say to myself, move on, try something else. So little time, so much else I could do. The exception? I've tasted something and want to replicate that taste, knowing the goal and experimenting to achieve it. But not when starting with just a recipe, even from a book like Dorie's where so many of us have found so many real treats.

Here's a second question on technique. This time about the glaze. Though I'd made this tart before, I hadn't used Herme's glaze which calls for Oetker's glaze (which I've never used). Everything seemed to be going fine but when I started to apply it to the tart, I barely managed to cover the lemon cream with glaze before the glaze started to gel too firmly to use. It was still somewhat warm when this happened. Fortunately, I did manage to get it covered and it even looked good. The one deviation was that I brought the water-zest-sugar mixture higher than 104f, so I took it off heat and brought the temperature down before proceding. When completely cool, the glaze is completely gelled and would not be spreadable. The recipe calls for the glaze to be cooled before applying, but if I'd waited for that I would not be spreadable. The texture of the gel when I ate some of the tart seemed fine. Regarding straining: I made this tart before, and though I did not glaze it, I did strain it. This time I didn't strain it, but I don't think it made much difference. (Perhaps because of my super new, first time time used to make this tart, processor.) My firsat version tasted very good, but not quite balanced enough to my taste, more creamy than lemony. This time I used about 20-25% more lemon zest. I did not increase the amount of lemon juice. I think the added zest made the tart better. My flub, whatever it was, didn't bother anyone but me. Everyone at the party today loved it - so much I barely got a taste even though there were more than a dozen desserts including seven other pies.

For completeness. I made a decision: the Cuisinart DLC 2014 cup Power Prep Plus. I looked at the Kitchenaid, even made the poor saleswoman dig out the bits and pieces not on display so I could "play" with it to determine how I liked moving the bits about. Well, then and there, Kitchenaid was history. Too many bits, too many directions about how to do this and that. Gave the Cuisinart a similar checkout and bought the one that allows me to do 3 lbs of dough at a time.

I caught only the last part it; somehow can't get the NPR file to open up for me. But Dorie sounded like the generous gracious person we know here, a natural teacher. And for the record, the holiday bundt featured in the article is a wonderful cake, dynamite flavor. It would be easy to dress it up for the holiday: a touch of a complementary ice cream, a few touches of fruit, nuts, etc; on its own or used in a parfait or some other complex of sweetness.

You need to expand your horizons. Try the Jiffy cornmuffins. They were always a favorite in my family.

Do you have the KFP 760/ KFP 770 (12 cup) or the KPFP850 (16 cup)? Have you used the special dough feature? Yes, I always keep mine on the counter. It lives in an otherwise dead corner between the stove and sink. I only need to tug it forward a little and it's on duty. Very convenient. I use it constantly.

Yes, they look impressive. And I particularly eyed the model with the little hole in the middle of the top. Does that have another top for slicing and shredding, etc? It's a big piece of equipment with a big price for an amateur cook, in a solo household at that. Neverthless, I'm willing to be convinced. I've reached the age where I justify many luxuries by deeming them heirlooms.

Maybe it's a little like wine. One variety won't do everything. I don't think Ceylon would ever be the only cinnamon in my cupboard, but I like it as a delicate dessert flavor. I wouldn't want Tahitian vanilla as the only vanilla in my cupboard either. And if I could only use one of either spice, I would doubtless fall back on the ones I grew up with - cassia and madagascar.

I'm not in the market for a blender just now, my Waring is only 40 years old. Ease of cleaning IS an issue. With my old Cuisinart unless I used it for something greasy or let the food dry in it, I could simply rinse it out with or without a swirl of soap and turn it upside down to dry. Ditto with the blender.

Pumpkin pie Apple tart Lemon tart No ground broken here.

Oranges

edited to delete - out of sequence