JAZ

Lettuce in Your Kitchen by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby is mostly "main dish" salads, but many of them can be altered to work as side dishes as well. I've made several of their recipes, but mostly use the book for ideas for ingredient combinations and dressings. I highly recommend it.

Here's an idea that might solve all your concerns without the trouble of teaball: Cook and puree the soup as called for in the recipe. Then instead of straining though a sieve, line a colander with loose weave cheesecloth. If your colander is big enough for the whole batch of soup, just pour it in and let it drain through (if not, you could pour it through in batches). At that point, you should be able to gather up the cheesecloth with the pulp, squeeze it gently to get all the liquid out, then throw the whole thing away.

From the web page: Interesting -- I guess this has never happened to me because I've always had wimpy freezers.

Why do you think running the cooked asparagus through a food mill will be less messy than straining the soup? I make asparagus soup this way all the time -- blending then straining (using all the woody ends -- in fact, sometimes with only leftover ends). I use a medium coarse strainer, so maybe that's the difference. To clean, all I do is turn it over the trash can and give it a sharp whack against the side of the can. Virtually all the fiber comes out, then I just rinse it and stick it in the dishwasher. Is your sieve a fine mesh?

Are you sure that all you could taste was the Cynar? I ask because we all agreed that the drink tasted like the most spectacular artichoke we'd ever had. ETA: I will note that we used more mint than Toby specifies, and it had been picked moments before the drink was made. ← Based on the posts here and on the Rogue Cocktails topic, I've given this one a couple of tries. Although the second try was better than the first (which I tossed), I still just don't get the appeal. All I get is a big taste of bitter and a faint aftertaste of mint, like a really bad mouthwash.

Jaymes, is the amount of chili powder in your recipe a typo? One to three tablespoons doesn't seem like nearly enough to flavor two pounds of meat and 60 ounces of tomatoes.

What kind of chile paste do you use for this recipe? I have the book and decided to give that recipe a try. It was kind of a last minute decision, so I had to go with what I had in the fridge. I had a Chinese style hot chile paste with garlic, and a Thai sweet chile sauce, so I used a combination of the two. I liked the dish as it was, but would love to make it with the "correct" product; could you post a photo or even just the name of the paste that you use?

Enameled cast iron is good for lots of things, but bringing water to a boil fast is not one of them. You'd be better off just buying a cheap "multi-function" set like this one for pasta -- it's a bit larger than you specified but it gives you more flexibility than a 4-qt.

Oh the other hand, I think it's Pollan at his worst. I thought The Ominvore's Dilemma was engaging, well structured and beautifully written. I thought In Defense of Food was a good enough article, but a disappointingly weak book. This article, though, was just bad. The story of The Food Network was written years ago, and much better, by Bill Buford. Pollan's article meandered from topic to topic before he got to his point, which --when he finally got there -- was not well argued. I guess he's made his points so often now about the evils of processed food that he can't come up with anything new, which is a shame. If it had been half the length, I would have been bored. As it is, I was annoyed with him and with myself for having wasted my time. And that makes me sad.

did you bake brownies in a muffin tin? how did you make cups? also...saw i didn't spell tulle cookies right! duh. its tuile. thanks jaz. (must be one of those days....) ← We made them in straight-sided silicone molds, but muffin tins would work fine. Just bake as usual, then hollow them out. I used a moist, fudgy brownie recipe, but I'd think any style would work.

For a Valentine's Day class a couple of years ago, we did brownie cups filled with a raspberry mousse, which went over well. It didn't have anything crunchy, but you could add a garnish of nuts or a tuile chip.

Cooking the sour cream will make it curdle -- you'd do best to add it at the very end, just so it warms through.

Jeff, while I don't have a Beehouse teapot, I do have several other pieces made by Beehouse, and they go in the dishwasher just fine.

While I think your idea of a family style meal is a great idea, I also don't think that family style is "fancy" by most people's idea of that term, regardless of what's served. Maybe it's unfair, but unless it's plated, it probably won't seem high end. I think if you're going with family style, concentrate on food that can be done in big quantities and still taste good. Don't worry about fancy.

Although grapefruit aren't in season right now and all I can usually find are pink grapefruits, they have been good lately, so I've been using the juice in cocktails. My latest version of a Nevada-inspired cocktail: 1 oz. white rum (Flor de Cana) 1 oz. amber rum (Appleton 12-year) 1 oz. grapefruit juice .5 oz. lime juice .25 oz simple syrup Heavy dash Angostura I like it more than the original.

Until I started this topic, I had never heard of rye Triscuits. I'd seen the flavored ones -- rosemary, garlic, sundried tomato -- but not rye. My store doesn't carry them. Then a friend who knows about my love of Triscuits brought me a box. I can't decide whether I'm happy or not. They're fabulous, but they're also the sort of thing I could just eat a whole bunch of without even noticing. (Regular Triscuits aren't like that for me; I like them but can easily stop after one or two.) Now I'm torn between asking my store to carry them and just forgetting about them.

Ten years ago I was drinking Negronis, Picon Punches, and Fernet and soda. I still like them, and other drinks with a bitter edge. But I prefer my bitter elements less obtrusive.

Early in the evening, a Gimlet; late in the evening, a Rusty Nail.

I'm not suggesting that commercial bitters contain tonka beans. However, there are herbs, barks, and other plant parts that are fine in small amounts but not in larger quantities. Nutmeg, for instance. Apricot or peach pits. That's more the sort of thing I had in mind.

Over in the topic on Rogue Cocktails and in the book itself, they're dicussing drinks that use Angostura and Peychaud's bitters as the base of drinks. There's some talk about how economically feasible it would be to serve these at a bar, but I'm wondering how safe it is to drink them. Aren't some of the ingredients in bitters dangerous in large amounts? If you figure that a dash or two of these comes to 1/4 teaspoon, then the two ounces of Peychaud's in the Gunshop Fizz would be 48 times that, which makes me really nervous. Should I be?

I couldn't make a Broken Shoe Shiner because I don't have pineapple juice, but I did try the Art of Choke. No offense meant to you, Chris, or to the originator of the drink, but for me, it ended up in the sink (literally). I like bitter elements in small doses, but not this much. Which goes to show either that I'm not avant garde enough to appreciate it or that we all have different tastes. But I guess I'm glad I tried it. Now I know.

I had some pizza dough that needed to be used and remembered some recipes in Joanne Weir's Weir Cooking in the Wine Country that call for baking the dough with cheese and then adding various "salads" on top when it comes out of the oven. I gave two of them a try: one was arugula and shaved parm (similar to this recipe for a parsley salad) and one with cherry tomatoes and basil tossed with olive oil, garlic and red wine vinegar. Both of them were really great, and really easy (that is, once you get the dough prepared). A nice summer pizza option.

I guess I don't understand what your point is, Kent. Is it that most pepperoni isn't very good? Or that there's no authentic Italian product called "pepperoni"? Or that we should do away with "pepperoni" as a term applied to a spicy sausage? I like good pepperoni but agree that most of what goes by that name is not very good; I don't care if it's authentic; and I think it's an impossible dream to do away with the term because it identifies a type of sausage that Americans are familiar with in a way that the more precise Italian terms wouldn't do.

A couple of summers ago my family all got together on the Oregon Coast. We had a ton of Dungeness crab, so we made deviled eggs using the crab and remoulade -- similar to this recipe by John Folse. They went over pretty well. I also used to make curried deviled eggs a lot. The mango chutney sounds like a great addition. I have a jar of mango-curry mustard somewhere; maybe I'll try that. (edited to actually add the link.)

Didn't anyone attend seminars?