JAZ

I've seen several "copycat" recipes online, but they seem wrong to me. If you look at the ingredients listed on real Old Bay, celery salt is listed first (meaning that it's the predominant ingredient in the mixture), with red and black pepper and paprika also making an appearance by name -- everything else is just "spices." The recipe versions I've seen all seem to make the erroneous assumption that the "Bay" in Old Bay refers to bay leaf and start with a huge amount of it -- in most cases, more than any other ingredient. My sense of taste and knowledge of how ingredient lists are put together make those recipes highly suspect.

I used to have a recipe for a shortbread cookie made with cumin seed and (I think) black pepper. The cookies were different, but oddly addictive. I also make brownies with cayenne and cinnamon, but that's another question entirely.

Much as I like Anderson Valley and the Mendocino area, the problem with staying there is that you'll then have a 4- or 5-hour drive to Crescent City. If you need to make it by noon, you'll be getting up at the crack of dawn and you won't have any time to spend in the redwoods. Depending when you actually get on the road, you could make it to Point Reyes Station for lunch on your first day. You wouldn't have a whole lot of time there, but it's not way out of your way -- it's about an hour and a half from the airport if traffic isn't horrible. Then what I would suggest is driving from Point Reyes after lunch up to Eureka -- that gets you close to the redwoods and to Crescent City so the drive the next morning can be leisurely. I've heard great things about Restaurant 301 in Eureka -- I wanted to go there when we drove up the coast last summer but we got a very late start and didn't make it into town in time. It looks as if they do both tasting menus and a la carte. Added bonus: It's conveniently located in a B&B that sounds nice too.

I'm definitely trying that the next time I make potato chips. I've used it on popcorn but didn't think about chips.

Old Bay seasoning wasn't common in my cooking world (Western US) and it wasn't until I visited Baltimore a few years ago that I had it in anything, at least not knowingly. But oddly enough, it was a visit to O's Steak and Seafood in Denver that brought Old Bay to my attention. The chef there used it on popcorn that garnished one of the best shrimp dishes I've ever had. So I bought a can when I got back. I've discovered that Old Bay is what made the shrimp salad I had in Baltimore so good -- I found this recipe at the Old Bay website and it's now my standard for shrimp salad. In addition, I now use it in Bloody Marys -- anywhere I would have used celery salt, in fact. Any other fans? What do you use it in or on?

Update: to see if I was really missing something crucial, I bought a bag of JollyTime popcorn and started experimenting. I used almost the whole bag, with various amounts and types of oil, various pans and various heat levels. Sometimes the results were edible, but I can't say that they were ever actually good. I finally threw the rest of the bag away when I found Walgreen's house brand of "natural" (i.e., not butter flavored) popcorn in small bags, 12 bags for $3. Yes, it's still more expensive than a bag of Jolly Time, but not less than premium popping corn, and it's great every time.

I definitely overbowl when it comes to salads, for exactly that reason. Although when I feel like being civilized, I don't eat from the giant bowl. And I have to admit that sometimes I overbowl just because I have really great oversized porcelain Revol "soup plates" and I love to use them. On a related issue, when choosing a storage container for leftovers, I almost always choose one that's way bigger than necessary. (That's a conceptual problem, though -- I have trouble estimating volumes.) But does that count as overbowling?

I realize that the points that are being made here in this discussion are good ones. I teach beginners to cook and I love doing it (although I don't do it for free, as Amanda suggests). But let's return to the actual piece that Ms. Hesser wrote, and not what we think about cooking and families and convenience foods. The fact is that Ms Hesser wrote a poorly constructed and poorly argued op-ed. It wanders; it makes claims and fails to back them up; it sets up straw men and can't even knock them down. Her first point is that Michelle Obama is responsible for making cooking seem like it's not a chore. She says: "Though delivered lightheartedly, and by someone with a very busy schedule, the message was unmistakable: everyday cooking is a chore" and "Americans have been told repeatedly that cooking is a time-consuming drag." Then she makes the point that home cooking has decreased, and that 32 families have been polled and they think that cooking from scratch is a "rarefied hobby." She states that "Companies like Kraft and General Foods promoted mix-and-eat macaroni and cheese, rice with mix-in flavor pouches and instant pudding. Pillsbury, the flour maker, became Pillsbury the biscuit, pie and cookie dough maker: baking just by turning on the oven." The implication is that a word from the First Lady could change this. To finish, she says that "convenience foods save neither money nor time." I interpret all of that to say: Michelle Obama is wrong for saying that she doesn't like to cook because it sets a bad example; no one cooks from scratch and that's bad, because rice with mix-in flavor packets and frozen biscuits are bad products -- and, presumably the cause of childhood obesity; pre-washed romaine hearts aren't worth the money and we should all buy whole romaine heads. I don't think I'm out of line with this interpretation. I'm not reading evil intentions into her article: these are the points she makes. Ms. Hesser has said elsewhere that she's not saying that Michelle Obama should get into the kitchen and cook. If that's the case, then why end with the whimsical daydream that "it wouldn’t be surprising if, with a little exposure to the kitchen, Mrs. Obama took to cooking herself"?

I think what I would do as a first step is buy a Sara Lee Frozen cheesecake, cut it up while still frozen and mix it into the ice cream to see if the basic idea works. If it does, then go to the next step and make cheesecake (I think the idea of making it in a sheet pan is great), but if it doesn't, you won't have taken the time and effort to make a cheesecake for nothing.

Doc, I think she is saying that -- she comes down on Pillsbury biscuits, pre-washed romaine hearts and flavored rice mixes. She's the one who brought up preparing raw ingredients and cooking from "scratch." But your apology for her is kind of my point. I mean, I'm all for families eating dinner together, and I'm all for families (and the rest of us) eating -- and cooking -- healthier food. But Hesser seems to demand more. It's not enough for Mom or Dad to come home from an 8+hour day and boil pasta, heat jarred sauce and make a salad, even if the family sits down and eats together. If it's not "raw ingredients," it doesn't count. I wish that, just for once, someone would say that we don't have to be perfect, that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. That is, whatever moves -- however minor -- we can make to eat better, learn more about where our food comes from and cook with our families are worth striving for. If it means making Hamburger Helper and a salad from pre-washed romaine hearts and sitting down together at the table instead of bringing home KFC to be eaten whenever the kids happen to get home, then hey! don't disparage that behavior, encourage it. Maybe it will lead to more cooking and "better" ingredients -- and even if it doesn't, well, at least the family's eating dinner together, right?

I think this is, again, nitpicky. We all have a pretty good idea what real cooking is and none of us (to agree with the good doctor above) minds a little prepared food as long as the general thrust is more or less away from microwaved TV dinners or whatever KFC is trying to force on us these days. And, as someone who has served their kids macaroni and cheese many times, I can assure that it is indeed not real cooking. ← I don't agree that this is nitpicky. Since "we all have a pretty good idea what real cooking is," maybe you can give me some guidance on the following examples: Cake from a cake mix Tuna casserole made with canned cream of mushroom soup Tacos made with ground beef and Lawry's Taco Seasoning, chopped fresh onions, tomatoes and lettuce, and bottled taco sauce Betty Crocker boxed "Au Gratin" potatoes Green salad with bottled salad dressing Grilled cheese sandwiches with Campbell's tomato soup These are all things my mother made for us while I was growing up in the 60's and 70's, along with pot roast, fried chicken, homemade macaroni and cheese, and all kinds of other dishes "from scratch." She was a great cook, but I don't doubt for a second that she was very happy to be able to use those and other shortcuts. So, tell me: what counts as "real cooking"? From Hesser's comments, I can't see that any of those dishes would make her cut.

One thing in Hesser's piece that I object to is her assertion that she knows what counts as "real" cooking (hence her derision of "mix-and-eat macaroni and cheese, rice with mix-in flavor pouches and instant pudding"). What makes her the arbiter of what counts as "cooking"? Suppose I told her that she doesn't really "cook" because she doesn't grind her own flour or cure her own sausage, or because she buys bread baked by someone else or beer that she didn't brew herself? I assume she'd object -- just like I object to her telling me I shouldn't buy pre-washed romaine hearts.

And yet, Hesser seems certain that it is evil: It's clear that only food prepared with raw ingredients counts as "cooking" for Ms Hesser. Picking something up on the way home, no matter how nutritious or delicious, wouldn't satisfy her.

That is the best question to ask, certainly. I think what happens is that waiters feel that they shouldn't be predictable or boring, so they try to be creative, when "creative" isn't really desirable. I was at a very casual bar and grill kind of place recently, where the server said: "Everything is delicious. . ." as if it were a statement of fact, and then caught himself and tacked on ". . .y'all?" to turn it into a question. It was really odd. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic. I've never waited tables, but I have worked in retail, and there are similarities. You want the customers to know that you're around to answer questions or help, but there are only so many ways you can say that. I personally always stuck with the tried and true -- "Can I help you find anything?" "Do you have any questions?" -- but I've worked with people who wanted to be more personal and always managed to come up with something awful. So having been there, I guess I just take it in stride and assume that the desire is to be helpful. A verbally clueless server who checks in on the table might be annoying, but he or she is still better than one who disappears for the whole meal.

There are so many questionable statements in Hesser's op-ed it's hard to know where to start. The most obvious, perhaps is what the blog Eat Me Daily points out: More fundamental that that, though is the question of just why Mom cooking dinner from scratch is such a necessity of life these days. Certainly there was a time when there wasn't a choice, but please: do we really want to return to those days? There was also a time when Mom sewed all the family's clothes, and no one would ever say that we should return to that model. What makes Mom cooking from scratch so different from her making our clothes? I love to cook, so for me it's not a chore, but I hardly expect everyone else to share my passions. It's as if someone who builds furniture were to tell me that my life and my family's life isn't complete if I buy from Rooms to Go.

I used to use mine for these two tasks until I got a couple of the teaspoon-sized scoops like these. Much easier to get the dough or filling to release.

The ones you link to are packed in brandy -- the Amarana Fabbri linked to in the first post are in heavy syrup -- no alcohol. So that's going to make a difference.

I'm not sure about frozen, but the original (as far as I know) recipe from Fine Cooking magazine (here), which has a slightly different prep method, specifically says you can start them up to eight hours ahead of time. I'd think you could certainly start them a day ahead of time. The one time I tried them, I had serious problems with sticking, but I assume I just didn't use enough oil. They were still very good.

Depending on what you're cooking, a pressure cooker will cut 1/3 to 1/2 of the cooking time. I recently braised some "country ribs" (aka thick strips of pork shoulder) for chile verde; once the cooker came up to pressure, I cooked them for about an hour and had meat that practically shredded itself. About the same time for short ribs; 20 minutes for chicken thighs and the meat falls off the bone. In addition to the time savings, pressure cooking means that you don't have to keep the oven on for several hours -- you have one burner on for half to a third of the time, which keeps the kitchen cooler.

Last summer, I made a shortcake using blueberries and a combination of whipped cream with lemon curd folded in. You couldn't do the whipped cream way in advance, but it holds pretty well for a couple of hours.

The reason for using foil, as I've read, is so that you can lift the whole batch of brownies out of the pan after they've cooled. That way that they're easier to cut and (obviously) to get out of the pan without crumbling. You could probably make it work with parchment, but foil has the advantage of being more malleable, so that you can fit it into the corners of the pan. The recipes I've read that use this method call for lining the pan with a piece that's big enough to extend over the edges of the pan by a few inches, which gives you something to hang onto when you're lifting them out of the pan. I've done this and it works really well, although now I just use a silicone pan.

I never dredge meat in flour, regardless of how I braise. But yes, I proceed just the same way I would if I were braising in a Dutch oven, so usually that means I brown first, then add the liquid, then lock the lid into place and cook.

Restaurant Eugene has a new menu -- as you can read here in an AJC article by John Kessler. Eugene's chef, Linton Hopkins, has changed to a much longer list of small plates exclusively: I tried a couple of the new dishes at the bar and was impressed. I've been frequenting Holeman and Finch much more than Eugene precisely because I like smaller plates, but now I'm looking forward to trying more of the options at Eugene.

I've switched almost exclusively to my pressure cooker when braising. The main difference I've found is that the cooking liquid doesn't evaporate at all in the pressure cooker, so I usually have to reduce my sauce more. Other than that, I really can't tell any difference.

Something that just occurred to me is that we used to have this on Fridays, back in the days when Catholics were supposed to abstain from meat on that day. We kids weren't big fish fans back then, so it was probably a good alternative for my Mom.