fifi

I have the Kyocera julienne slicer but I find it cuts too small for most things. I tried it to make a jicama slaw and everything turned to mush.

A perfectly baked chicken. (Makes good leftovers but there is nothing like that first slice of breast or a juicy thigh.)

Great article! I can really relate. I, too, am a cook, not a baker. However, I venture into that swamp on occasion. I, too, look at the King Arthur catalog and drool over the cool gadgets. But this is the first time I have ever heard anyone else admit that watching the dough go around with the dough hook on the Kitchenaid is a cool thing to do. The first time I tried it, I was so fascinated that I over-kneaded the dough. My kids came in and found me staring into the bowl, totally transfixed. (MOM! Snap out of it! It's just dough for chrisakes!)

I will take a well done sandwich with fruit and other goodies anyday. I remember an airline a few years ago, mostly east coast I think, that handed out these little red shopping bags with NOSH printed on them. Inside was a really good sandwich. That was really new at the time and I thought it was a great idea... better a well done sandwich than a really gross hot meal. I fly Continental a bit between here and Europe a bit, business first, and they do a pretty good job on the food. For the price of those tickets, they should. Best meal... Early morning flight from Seattle to Houston, first class. We were held up by fog. (Surprise!) The catering truck got lost so we didn't have that really good breakfast I was counting on. They did have a good supply of Bailey's on board to supply our milk & sugar. Then we got into the wine that they had for the afternoon service. It was a very happy flight.

My palm sugar is in a glass jar. I take the lid off and microwave it for about a minute at half power. It gets soft and sticky so it is hell to measure but that is the only way to get it out of a jar. I can't find the discs.

Aaah... Biscuits. I am not much of a baker but that is one thing I will do on a late Sunday morning for a brunch treat. Have any of you tried the cream biscuits from Cooks Illustrated? They are becoming a favorite from my kitchen. I like to knead the dough into one round and slice into wedges (one of the suggested methods). They look really nifty. With some added sugar they would make a killer strawberry shortcake.

I agree with most all of the above. In my now-being-designed house, I banished kitchen cabinets above the counter. I have enough room to put everything in drawers below the counter. I am short so those upper cabinets are next to useless to me without having a step stool permanently "handy" to be tripped over. And I don't like grovelling on the floor to get at the back of cabinets. I had a walk in pantry at my previous house. I will never live without one again! Painting tip for walk in pantries and other storage areas... Paint the ceiling a bright white, the glossier the better. You would be amazed at the difference when you turn on that ceiling light. A question about the Aga cookers... Does anyone seriously consider one of those in a hot and humid area like the Gulf Coast? I know they have a lot of insulation but I can't imagine having a permanent heat source where you have to pay for air conditioning 10 months of the year. They sure look cool, though.

Cocoa butter... My sister was 7 years older. There was always a stick of cocoa butter in the fridge. She used it to rub on her boobs to make them bigger! I used to sneak pieces of it. Boy was that good stuff! I haven't seen sticks of cocoa butter in years. If I could find it, I would hide it from myself so I could sneak a taste in the middle of the night.

Yes, I have found poblanos to be fickle in the heat department. I cut all kinds of chiles without gloves and don't have a problem. The last few times out with poblanos I regretted the no-gloves routine and they weren't all that hot to taste. But they still didn't have any poblano flavor. I think I will e-mail that chile pepper institute or whatever it is and see if they have an answer. I will report back if I get iny info.

My all time favorite from my grandmother and great-aunt... "'til it looks right"

I've been away for a few days and, while catching up, I had a great interest in this thread. My first inclination was to post a "yes... I hate it too". However, now that I have read through it, I don't think that is true. I guess the ketchup/hamburger (or fries) tipped me over the edge. But I still don't like raisins in my picadillo!

OK... I am NOT making this up. Several years ago, I had a recurring dream about REALLY BIG rabbits. They would hop up on my balconey with a THUMP and then go about all sorts of antics. After about a month, the dreams stopped. A couple of months later the dreams resumed. My basset hound stood on my chest and said... "They're baaaack!" The rabbits are in the living room doing the can-can. In the next scene, I have these huge pieces of rabbit (the rabbits were about 4 feet high at the shoulder) and I am trying to figure out if I have a pan big enough to do the Patricia Wells recipe that includes preserved lemons and garlic. I ran around to several stores buying lemons and garlic. The part about butchering a rabbit did not appear. I was then serving rabbit to the whole condo complex, bread line style. It tasted good, too. Analyse That! OH... The only black and white dream that I can remember, the world was made of fruitcake.

Great article Mamster. I will definitely try the chicken boobs. I am a poblano freak and went through my "poblano period" a few months ago. I only have one problem now. The poblanos I have been getting lately are pretty much tasteless? What gives with that? It doesn't seem to matter if I get them at Fiesta (a local market that specializes in food from south of the border) or the local grocery. I made my usual cream of poblano soup a couple of months ago and it didn't taste like much more than a cream of chicken soup. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Lentil sprouts!!! I would probably love wheat berry sprouts but I can't get them to sprout before they sour. YUK!

I will second jackal's take on this. I have a recipe from a Chinese friend that uses the fresh "picnic" ham. What I get from the Chinese butcher is the shank portion of the ham. The recipe is a braise that starts with light soy sauce, darker mushroom soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, rock sugar, LOTS of sliced ginger as a bed to sit the thing on, and green onions. It is cooked at 275F for about 5 hours and the meat is luscious. You peel back the skin and the fat is "like buttah". The meat is used as you would pulled pork. GREAT recipe. (Is there anything better than pork and pork fat?)

The two all time favorites around here are: I make a tomatillo salsa that is fairly chunky with lots of jalepeno, onion, garlic and cilantro, sometimes with some parsley thrown in or other green stuff like basil or mint. It is a take off of some stuff we used to get in a little cafe in Tampico. The other is a Chiapas marinade recipe out of Zarella's "Food from My Heart". It is called a marinade but it is also used thinned as a sauce, mixed with crema, etc. It is basically anchos but has ginger, allspice and other stuff. I think that sauce would be good on dog crap. This is one of the few recipes that I never stray from on pain of death.

Thanks a lot, fimbul! You would have to bring THIS up. Anyway... I think of salsa as a chopped up side dish (relish?) that used to be primarily the tomato, onion, pepper thing. Can be cooked or not? So what is pico de gallo? It is always what they call the raw stuff in the restaurants here. Then "salsa" has come to mean any mixture of chopped up vegetable matter served on the side as a "relish". (One of my favorites is mango, purple onion, red bell pepper, diced jalepeno, jicama and lime juice. Pretty far from the tomato thing.) Then chutney raises its head. I always think of it as a sweetish relish (there is that word again) in the Indian tradition, usually cooked and with some sort of fruit as one of the ingredients. But, then, my knowledge of Indian food is not as broad as my knowledge of the Latin traditions. Is my simple thinly sliced purple onion with lime juice s&p a relish? Too simple? So what is it??? Thanks again, fimbul. You make me realize that I haven't a F****** clue!

Loved the article because it sounds like the kind of thing I would do. I have the same issues with living alone and sometimes working at home. I have some new directions to go now with that damn big chicken I baked the other day. I do have a couple of questions about technique though... Basically the same one Suzanne had about boiling vs. simmering. The other one is how you can get a lot of flavor out of beef bones with only an hour of simmering? When I do this to make stock it is usually at least 3 or 4 hours before the flavor comes up and the meat gets tender. (I usually use neck bones and sometimes add shank bones with meat.)

Well, I'll be damned. I didn't know DCS made the Monogram. That explains the similarities. Learn something every day.

I just got back from a Mother's Day dinner at my favorite place on the bay where the owner also owns the shrimp boats. I proposed the problem to the cook and the captain. This place turns out more than 100 pounds of boiled shrimp a day on a good weekend. I figured that if these guys don't know, nobody does. I go there often and know these guys so I figure they will give me the straight story. Here is the verdict... First part of May when we have our annual shindig, they have just molted. Also, they never try to boil a really fresh shrimp. They use the shrimp off of the bigger boats that flash freeze or they head the shrimp off of the bay boats and dump them in the blast freezer back at the processing plant. They don't try to use those that have just molted. Good thick shells and not just-caught is what you want. The cook said that you really don't want to give your customers shrimp that are hard to peel. Therefore, they have put a lot of study into producing easy to peel shrimp. This is NOT for tender concern... They want you to quickly peel and eat then order more! The easier they are to peel, the more they sell. They also showed me a trick where when you are heading the raw shrimp you can pull out the vein at the same time. When you pinch the head, you bring you fingertips together where the vein goes up into the head, grasping the vein as you separate the head from the tail. Most of the time, out comes the vein. It works!

Check out the GE Monogram line. It hit me right due to price/features. The small oven can be used to proof bread or make yoghurt. Availability of service was another consideration.

My nephew has a great idea for a wedding gift. He gets a Lodge cast iron chicken fryer (kind of like a deep frying pan so it is very versatile) and puts either a book or a card announcing a gift subscription inside. He chooses those depending upon the couple. It is always a hit. Lately, he has been buying the pre-cured version.

Jin and Huevos... sounds like we need a couple of contributions to the recipe archive. These recipes MUST NOT be lost to humankind.

I just remembered a great grits/polenta thing that my great aunt used to make when I was a kid. Actually, she called it corn meal mush but it was cooked the same way. She made it rather thick. After it cooled, she would form it into these round, flattened "cakes" about 3 inches across and about 3/4 an inch thick. These were then fried until golden brown. For some reason we called them "bump-bides". I have no idea where that came from. They were served as a side dish with ham and greens maybe, or for breakfast with cane syrup. If we had a big fresh ham or some other hunk of pork to roast, she would trim the fat (it didn't come pretrimmed in those days), make cracklin's, mix the cracklin's in, and then fry them in the rendered lard. That was our favorite.

Go to a restaurant supply place. I finally got smart and did that. I now have very heavy aluminum 1/2 sheet and 1/4 sheet pans that perform flawlessy, don't warp in the oven, and cost about $6 apiece. Last trip there I noticed that their cake pans and such looked just as good.