fifi

I see you sketched in a conventional double sink. Please check out this thread before you do that. You don't have to spend a fortune to get a bigger sink that you can actually WASH things in.

My fall back usually involves friends or family wanting one of my usual dishes but we have other things to do. (Like when the kids are in town.) I do a brisket in the oven in a cooking bag. You season it up as if you were going to smoke it. Put it in the bag with a couple of cups of very strong coffee. Set the oven to 225F and walk off. I do a similar thing with pork butt but with beer or white wine instead of coffee. This assumes that I am not firing up the smoker. I am getting enough confidence in the Weber Smoky Mountain that I could walk off from that, too... almost. Slow cooking methods are great because they are forgiving of you getting home a little later than you planned.

pyrethrum Whew... glad that is settled.

Fifi, I have the same cookbook from my grandmother. She married my grandfather in 1945 (after he came home from the South Pacific), and it was her first cookbook. I found a copy of Joy of Cooking from 1943 and it has fascinating stuff in it, like what to put in a care package to ship overseas, rationing, Victory Gardens... My mother and dad married in 38 and my sister was born in 39. Now we think she got it when they first married but we aren't sure. Dad went to the pacific and then I was born in 46. Dad's Scotch Raisin Bread recipe clipping from a newspaper is taped inside the front cover. My sister says that he first made it in 46. She remembers holding me while watching him work on it. Old cookbooks can mean so much.

Wow! I want to see the cytochrome that oxidizes phenol! Unfortunately, the semester came to an end before we got the bug classified. It took most of the semester confirming that it was using the phenol as a carbon source. That takes some pretty picky culturing techniques. I think it was some sort of pseudomonas but that was long ago.

Is pyretherin an indiscriminate pesticide that kills bees? Yep. In fact, bees are particularly susceptable. (I have to look up the proper spelling. I don't think we have gotten it right yet. )

Great links. Many thanks. The Cook's Garden is awesome. Just curious if any of you use vegetables in with ornamentals. A few years ago, a friend of my daughters gave me The Art of French Vegetable Gardening as a hostess gift. It is a beautiful book and really gave me a lot of ideas. In their perverse way, Amazon also points you to similar books. Since many of you are in garden planning stages I though I would bring this up. I have used pepper plants and eggplants in mixed beds and have used parsley as a border. One year I had this wonderful red stemmed and heirloom white stemmed chard. It was huge and positioned so that when I sat on my back porch in the evening, the low sun would shine through it and light it up. Gorgeous. (Delicious, too.) But that Bright Lights chard always looked puny to me. I also had an African Blue basil SHRUB. That thing got to be about 5 feet high and 8 feet in diameter and the purple bloom spikes attracted butterflies galore. I also planted fennel in the front bed and let it become a food plant for pipevine swallowtail butterflies. For weeks, when I left in the morning, I would see a brand new butterfly that had just hatched and was drying its wings. Other herbs, mints and basils especially, were everywhere.

As I think I have mentioned, all of my gardening is taking place at my sister's house for the time being. She is in NW Houston. We are currently trying to figure out what to do about the mirlitons. They are starting to sprout from the base and one sprout already had a baby mirliton. It is beginning to look like a mild winter but we are still prone to surprises. I am suggesting that we pile mulch around the base of the biggest vines so maybe they will sprout again in the spring. The vines that went everywhere went down some weeks ago, as did the towers with morning glories and moon vines. The oja santa (root beer plant) is looking ragged around the top but there are still some nice leaves underneath. The herb beds are looking kinda ratty, with the exception of the lemon grass on steroids. A good friend of ours has a big bed in the backyard that her late husband piled leaves on for years. Looking at that wonderful soil under there makes your mouth water. We are about to make her into a gardener. Immediate planting goals are lettuces, chard, parsley, thyme (it seems to die here when it gets hot), radishes... we are still thinking.

Nick, that picture makes me want to cry. I want my big sink back.

What a wonderful site. Many thanks, deibu. I am off to read for a while. (Ooops. Supposed to be working.)

And who thought that putting gum in whipping cream is a good idea. I can't find any sort of "heavy cream" without it short of driving 30 miles to a granola-crunchy grocery.

masa, meat sauce, corn husks tortillas, asiento, lime corn on the cob, lime juice, chile powder

Well... All I have to say is that in Texas we have snobbier snobs than any place on the planet. They are called BBQ brisket freaks. So there.

I think that is a great idea. We could deluge him with all sorts of pictures of stuff he just can't pass up.

I do all of the above. I also still have my membership in Cooks Illustrated but I don't find I am using it much. I particularly like google because I often end up with several different versions of a dish that I can compare. I am not above "cherry picking" the best parts of multiple recipes.

The oldest book that my sister and I have is the Womans Home Companion that we think my mother got in the late 30s or early 40s. What a treasure. I would love to start finding some of these things from the turn of the century up until post WWII. Is anyone finding any that are from the various ethnic communities? European books would also be fascinating.

That is true of most of it. But there is a lot that is adsorbed (notice the "d") to the soil particles. Many years ago I participated in a study looking at the breakdown of various petroleum products in soil. South Louisiana swamp soil works great. Soil is amazing. For a project one time, I isolated a bug that uses phenol as its sole carbon source. I found it outside of the biology building where the cleaning ladies were in the habit of dumping their Lysol mop water.

Leave us not forget the Cajun Holy Trinitiy, actually called that. It is an ubiquitous seasoning mix: Onion, celery, bell pepper, usually in a 2:1:1 ratio. I noticed something the other day. 1 medium onion, 1 medium bell pepper and 2 celery stalks yield about a 2:1:1 ratio when chopped. That says to me that the ratio is not an accident but the product of the cook using all of what presents itself.

I think I remember my grandma using a mixture of lye soap and kerosene to wash off spider mites. (Those things are killers in our climate.) We always had kerosene around for the lamps in the houses at the bay compound that didn't have electricity. You had to spray it on, wait a few minutes and then wash it off or it would burn the plants. The kerosene will break down in the soil, eventually all the way to carbon dioxide and water so it goes away. When you think about it, "petroleum oil" (whatever is meant by that) is a natural product. Products called "dormant oil spray" may be what they are talking about. It is a common treatment for fruit trees here but can only be used in cool weather. It smothers the buggers. One of the differences in the way we have used various sprays or other methods is that we don't do it indiscrminately. If we see a problem we deal with it, in the gentlest way possible. Companion planting, mixed crops and other tricks help a lot. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I remember my sister and I debating for a couple of hours whether or not we were going to throw some of the pyretherin daisies in the blender and spray the squash plants that were under attack. We were mightily concerned about the honey bees.

Echoing the list above with one exception... I had the worst CFS in my life at Rio Ranch. It was tough, greasy, and had a really strange crust. I haven't been yet but a friend of mine from Hong Kong swears that the dim sum at Ocean Palace in the Hong Kong Market center at Bellaire and Boone Road is the best she has had since she left home.

This recipe for leche quemada is pretty darn close to the Monterrey house candy. I have had other versions that are lighter or darker. The note on how long you "toast" the milk solids is what determines the color. I have made this several times in the last few weeks to finally get the technique down. I think just about any milk/sugar mixture would prabably work but you have to have the milk to get that flavor behind the straight caramel flavor. The milk solids toast as the water boils off. When the water is gone, the temperature starts to come up. It is the temperature and stirring technique that gives you the texture, starting out sugary but then melting on the tongue. I am sure that what they did to get the little logs was to extrude the warm mass through something like a pastry tip.

Funny, I came to that same conclusion. I am short. One of the pet peeves I finally noticed while making my kitchen diary was that I hated upper cabinets. I had never really though about it before. I mean... EVERYONE has upper cabinets. You HAVE to have upper cabinets. NOPE. I got rid of them and the new kitchen will still have tons of storage, and two windows I couldn't have had otherwise. Also... Base cabinets will be all drawers of some sort. I also found out that I hate groveling on the floor. Thanks for the drawing, Dave. I get it now, unfortunately.

But then he would miss that experience of having the mise en place blast frozen. I second the steel wok and turkey fryer burner. Only way to go.

Now there is an idea! When you get the money, that sounds like the way to go. You still have the old kitchen to use, the otherwise unused space won't be missed while it is being "transformed", and all is right with the world.

One of my first acts after I get the house built will be to plant a Meyer lemon tree. The place is on a peninsula in Galveston Bay and has a microclimate that should allow it to survive to adulthood. Then I will fondly remember this thread and go searching for it. I just started a batch of preserved lemons having lost my stash somehow. I can only imagine preserved Meyers. I use the method in Patricia Wells' book At Home in Provence. It is basically just salt and lemon juice and it sits around for a few weeks.