Thanks for the Crepes

Now that my memory has been stirred, I think this is the first alcoholic beverage I ever tasted. I found the jug under the stairs of the basement while doing the laundry. I don't remember the "Hearty" part, but definitely recall the (Ernest and Julio) Gallo Burgundy part and and the green glass gallon jug. Seems like there was a pretty picture of grapes on the label, too, although I can't swear to it 47 years later. I didn't like it, so only took a sip. What did I know? I was eleven years old. Also found a copy of the "Kama Sutra" down in the basement around that time, and it was way too early for me to appreciate that too. I still remember the word "yoni", though and picked up the meaning from the context. That basement was a treasure trove for a curious kid doing the drudge work of family laundry for sure, though. Hobart mixers are the bomb. We had a couple in the school cafeteria where I worked to get free lunch. It was gigantic, and if I had fallen in somehow, it was perfectly capable of pureeing me. The lunch ladies warned me many times to stay away, emphasizing how dangerous they could be. I'm sure if they made a home version, it would be perfect for kneading bread or mixing stiff cookie doughs, or pureeing small animals, like hapless counter cats. These things were so sturdily built workhorses. In a dream world, far away from my actual life, I would want a pizza oven. Pizza to me is only perfect for the time it takes to eat a slice or two, even if it is cooked to perfection. Good pizza is in my top favorite foods, along with perfectly cooked beef steak. There are many other things, but those two keep returning to the top of my focus.

Well, @Katie Meadow, Although this will not be a treatise on the history of fast food, I will give my take on why I occasionally crave Taco Bell. We have a very large Hispanic community here. Surprisingly, North Carolina is a very attractive magnet for them, and many have settled here and started businesses, including restaurants. Just in walking distance, I have Esmeralda Grill, Rancho Grande, El Cuscatleco and Tacos Estilo Hildago, and many more. They offer authentic Mexican and Salvadoran dishes and are very excellent, as you can see from the Yelp ratings. My current fave is Esmeralda for the cachete de res (beef cheek) tacos in house made tortillas that are served so hot they are hard to handle at first. A close second is Rancho Grande for their made to order specialties and salsa bar. I love authentic Latino cuisine, and am very lucky to have access to it! I also crave Taco Bell sometimes. It's out of my walking distance, and I miss it. There are only a few things I like there though, and they have priced the false bottomed-3 oz. containers of Pintos and Cheese out of my tolerance. I'm not payin' you $1.19 for that little bit of beans with a mere dusting of cheddar which I can make at home for a few pennies. I used to like them when they were 59 cents for 8 ounces. I still want their "hard" taco with a little ground beef, lots of lettuce and a dusting of cheddar, though. If you're doing takeout, the taco shell will be steamed in its paper wrapper and almost as soft as a proper Mexican corn tortilla. Weird thing is though, it still tastes good, even hours later? I have read the "seasoned beef mixture" is only 80% ground beef. I don't doubt it, but I've never followed it up. I think I really don't want to know. I think this is a combination of their abundant budget for marketing and food chemists. They come up with things that are far cheaper to supply and market them to the masses and actually make them taste good and craveable sometimes. I have never seen Taco Bell ads that say they are Tex-Mex, but that certainly doesn't mean they haven't happened. I agree that Tex-Mex or just Southwestern American takes on Mexican cuisine have become an admirable thing in their own right. If Taco Bell actually ever did try to cash in on that with an ad campaign I missed, it's just part of their marketing, and nothing to do with reality. Tex-Mex sounds a lot better than Americanized Mexican or dumbed-down Mexican, dontcha think? I also have never seen American cheese at Taco Bell, let alone Velveeta. They seem to use a mild to medium cheddar, at least in my area.

OMG! I had to eat this product as a kid. It was reviling enough without canned hot dogs added, but the sauce was so sweet, I am almost positive that this experience is what causes me to reduce the sugar in every single baked good recipe I follow today. For your amusement and nostalgia here's a short YouTube recording of a 1966 commercial, that aired constantly when I was a child of seven. Me and my siblings sang that little jingle a lot, although I wasn't exposed to this actual abomination of Italian food until a few years later. Ack, they briefly mention the version with sliced franks at the end. If I ever had to eat this iteration, I have blocked it entirely from my memory, mercifully. "Uh oh, Spaghettios!". They got one thing right! Still not making fun of anyone's way of coping with a limited budget. I would be the last to do so, as mine is so limited now, but I still think Spaghettios just suck. Well overcooked over al dente little rings of anelli pasta in a way too sweet sauce with no onion or garlic, that I ever detected. Okay. For documentation purposes, here's a link to Campbell's site for the ingredients, so my palate is not as sensitive as I thought. The "onion extract" is the last ingredient on the list. Way down from high fructose corn syrup. And no parm anywhere. They use cheddar. Yum. Look up the ones with sliced franks if you want to. I. Just. Can't. But yeah, we all do what we have to do to survive. And nothing wrong with anelli in Italian wedding soup and so on at all. It is hard to find around here, but Creamette makes a version, I have found occasionally, and I like it very much in soups, cooked properly.

I'm linking to this post in the Dinner thread because it will be easier to find here and is all about a sandwich cookbook from 1909! You can actually flip through all the pages which I did, skimming. Some stuff is weird or scary, but there is a lot of stuff I would eat in there. 400 different ideas for sandwiches and canapes from back then. Thanks @liuzhou.

Yeah, that's what I thought, as a US person who doesn't really intuitively get the metric system. I think it's just a mistake and they meant cm instead of mm, and the translation into Imperial went off from there. I have made that mistake myself, so it can happen. Still it does not bode well for the reliability of this cookbook to be a source of guidance.

This is my favorite kind of spinach, but it does not seem to be popular, and the only source I've found is Harris Teeter grocery, who carries it under their own brand. It's not always in stock, and when it is, it is sometimes not acceptable for purchase. When I can score a good bag of it, I am so happy! I like this kind better in salads. The thick stems are actually the best part with a sweet vegetal flavor and not fibrous or woody at all to me. I think a spinach salad needs a slightly sweet vinaigrette with bacon, hard boiled eggs, onion and tomatoes. The leaves are much thicker than the common spinach. If you can find it, it's very much worth the pursuit. One of the easiest ways to enjoy spinach is to cook up what I still call Poke Salad. This is a dish from the Louisiana roots on my father's side of the family. Saute a little onion, not too much, in butter. Add eggs and scramble over low heat. When the eggs are getting nearly done, add your chopped spinach and continue scrambling. Top with cheese if you like, but it's not necessary for a nutritious and satisfying dish. When I was growing up in Springhill, LA, the custom was to forage pokeweed leaves when they were young to make the dish. Since learning more about the toxicity of this plant, I no longer think it's worth the risk, so Poke Salad is made with spinach in my house now. I'm still here after eating pokeweed in my youth and so are many others who follow the long tradition in Louisiana. Another favorite dish with spinach is spanakopita. It's spinach and feta cheese with herbs and onions enfolded in buttery phyllo thin pastry sheets. Divine, if made right. It's a labor of love though. Whenever I work with phyllo, the air in my kitchen turns blue. It's frustrating, but worth it in the end. Spinach quiche is also good, and must contain onion and cheese, for me. It can be a custard without a crust, though, if you are cutting calories. Also spinach crepes, enchiladas and lasagne. I love spinach too! And of course creamed spinach. I made a post on the dinner thread years ago where I had made creamed spinach with just a little onion sauteed in butter then a flour roux with a little milk and added the chopped spinach. My husband and I both agreed that it was transformed from okay to very special when I added a little grated Monterey Jack cheese the next day for the leftovers. I will never leave cheese out again. Also don't add too much milk, because the spinach will release its own juices into this dish as it cooks. I'll be looking forward to other suggestions for one of my favorite ingredients, which also happens to be a nutrition powerhouse.

Good luck with this project @home-cook.

I made Mrs. Mary Lloyd Young's yeast rolls for dinner tonight. Thanks to@kaybfor this recipe. I baked a few in the CSO on the bread cycle at 350 F for 25 minutes. Next time will go about 22 minutes, I think, and made a note of this on my paper copy of the recipe. A few too many of these lovely rolls and a mess of butterbeans made a very fine dinner. The rest of the dough is freezing on a cookie sheet to be bagged and stored to bake up later. Thanks again for the freezer clean out thread, or I would not have had room to individually freeze the rest of the rolls.

Tonight's dinner was a lot of vegetables, onion, garlic, a nice jalapeno, some red bell pepper, three mushrooms, some broccoli and the snow peas I bought in anticipation of cooking a stir fry dish with shrimp. There was also half of a carrot involved here, so it turned out to be a very colorful and tasty dish served over jasmine rice with a generous sauce made with chicken broth, soy sauce and thickened with corn starch. I like this kind of dinner very much, but expect to wake up quite hungry. I expect it was quite healthy and nutritious, though, and low in calories.

There is also the huevos divorciados dish that came to my mind first when the discussion turned to separating red from green chilis. I like this particular dish with a line of good frioles refritos running across the plate between each egg on it's own tortilla to keep the "divorce" of flavors from mingling. As a vegetarian, Lisa, this is something you might be interested in trying, if you haven't already. It's simple, but very delicious. Erm? not sure if you eat eggs. Maybe replace with refried beans, if not. As for me, I put both jalapenos and red chilis in a red chili, and love it that way. Mine must also have beans of contrasting colors, ideally.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally gets a craving for Shake N Bake. I also go for squash or sweet potato and brussels sprouts with pork too. I recently did one of my giant chicken leg quarters in the CSO with a Shake N Bake coating. It was partly because I was craving it, but partly because I thought it would keep the chicken fat popping all over the oven down. It didn't. So now I have to clean the oven again. It makes me less inclined to cook chicken in there because it makes such a mess every time. I've been eating a lot of spinach either raw in salads or wilted in a stir fry and corn on the cob while it lasts here. It's still quite good, but not sure that it's local anymore.

@Kim Shook, I wanted someone with more professional experience to chime in first before I added my two cents. My family of six used to not refrigerate cakes or pies, but with a hungry, growing family with four kids, it was rare for a cake or pie to last 36 hours or so. Now I refrigerate them. I also think @jmacnaughtan's advice is good for the best result. That would mean peeling and slicing the apples during dinner prep, though, as they'd turn brown otherwise. I have often set a timer and baked a dessert while everyone ate dinner though. I think your guests are lucky based on the description of the dessert. It sounds delicious.

Wow! The Sous Vide Everything crew seems to be well sponsored, so they can do a lot of experimenting for our enjoyment. The next video after the Lion Fish one is about sous vide strip steaks done three ways with both liquid nitrogen, a flame thrower and deep frying involved. They seem to have this tiger by the tail and are having a lot of fun doing it. And yeah, @boilsover, one can do a soft-boiled egg in the traditional way after much practice and experimenting, but they can also do that perfectly every time again after much practice and experimenting with sous vide. Also, I do not know that it would be practical to home pasteurize eggs like seems to be possible with sous vide for a proper Caesar Salad or chocolate mousse with conventional methods. I made Caesar Salad once with a coddled egg, and was very grateful after thoroughly enjoying it that I didn't succumb to salmonella poisoning. Perhaps with sous vide I will be able to go places without fear that were off limits due to health concerns before. Plus who doesn't like a way to make less tender and cheaper cuts of beef more appealling?

Thanks for sharing the uplifting story of your cousin's recovery and the celebration of that. I agree about the sign! All directions or routes ... wonder what that was supposed to mean? I'd still be lost.

Yep, she's still queen of the shiny crumb bread. It is beautiful!

Whew! I saw this today as well, Toliver, and went to the FDA link to see if my bag of spinach under the Harris Teeter Farmers Market brand was affected. I saw nothing about Harris Teeter or spinach on an eyeball and then a search for Harris Teeter, HT, and spinach. So I'm OK. But if you live in Canada or the US, you really might want to check this out. It is a very long list. Broccoli slaw would be my first worry, but far from the only one. We had a teen die of lysteria at Camp Seafarer for girls when I worked for the Capital Area YMCA in an administrative capacity, now called the YMCA of the Triangle. She must have had a compromised immune system because absolutely no one else out of over 3,000 people even got sick. But lysteria is no joke. It kills people. I sure would have hated to be out on the PR front that fell to one our VP's. If you are interested, and want to see the huge risks we managed at these incredible camps, click this link and scroll down to "Camp Video" on vimeo. Not only food service for thousands, but power boating and sailing for kids at the helm, kids horseback riding, kids going on zip lines, kids shooting guns and an archery range! It is mostly a rich kids camp, but we did sponsor some underprivileged kids in on scholarships. It must have been a complete whack of an experience compared to what they were used to. They do a lot of good, and for the riskiness of what they do, and the thrill for kids, almost non-existent harm.

I wasn't aware that carbonation enhanced absorption of whatever is in your stomach, although, without further research, I'm not willing to dispute it. The link sure seems inconclusive. For me, if I had one of these carbonation devices, I'd use it mostly for tap water to make my own seltzer without having to carry it on a four mile round trip on foot. I would sometimes mix that with vodka, I admit. There is a lot appeal to fizzy drinks that don't contain alcohol or caffeine. Just ask the mega rich Coca Cola Corp. or their investors. And yeah, a lot of the eG community is retired and some of us are more flush than others, but I don't know anyone in their right mind who wants to spend more than necessary to have a good end result.

Savory is very hard to find here in the states, and when I can find it, it is only in the dried form. I do love it and tend to hoard it because of the scarcity. It has a very nice flavor and I wish I could find it fresh or even dried more. I did try to grow in one year along with borage and both failed on me, although the other stuff I grew that year did just fine. I was very excited to find the seeds, so this was a great disappointment to me.

I had kind of a fun dinner tonight, although it probably doesn't take much to amuse me at this stage of life. I started off making a wilted spinach salad with bacon, hard boiled egg, onion and a Campari tomato dressed with a little bacon fat, vinegar, a smidge of sugar salt and pepper. I had found a bag of the curly, thick kind of spinach at Harris Teeter for the first time in a long time. Then while looking for smoked turkey legs or wings, I had to enlist the help of the meat/seafood counter man, and he confirmed they were out of them temporarily. I had spied fresh oysters in the shell for 99 cents a piece, though, so brought 6 of those home and steamed just until they popped. These were the first of the season for me and they were very good. Same price as the dedicated seafood store, but these had already been scrubbed well, and were fresh and delicious. I think the prevailing wisdom is to only clean them right before cooking, but I was going to be using these shortly after I got home, and it sure was a value added convenience to have them already scrubbed. I scored another 4-pack of fresh white sweetcorn and cooked up an ear to have on the cob with butter while the Athens branded Spanakopita I found in the freezer case at Harris Teeter baked in the CSO. Once I took the Spanakopita out of the outer packaging, I thought, "This looks exactly like the Trader Joe's Spanakopita". I mean the product, the foil tray and the plastic overwrap, the number of triangles (12) and the weight (12 oz.) looks exactly the same. Guess what? They taste the same too, and I think it's the same manufacturer. Only difference is the Athens was $6.99 and I think I only paid $3.99 for TJ's the last time I was there a couple years ago. Gotta love TJ's for quality and value! But if you can't get to TJ's the Athens brand is just as good, albeit more expensive. Dinner was rounded out with a couple slices of Band of Bakers jalapeno cheddar bread with the salad and oysters and a few huge blackberries for dessert. The berries were from MegaBerry out of Mexico and had a lot of good flavor. I love leisurely grazing dinners like this, and between preparing, eating, cleaning up between courses, it took over 3 hours. Three hours well spent, say I.

I'm glad your wrists are still in great shape, Jo. I'm sort of having to conserve some irreplaceable things these days. I do miss the good old mechanical eggbeaters, and I think they were superior to the whisks we are reduced to now. YMMV

I found the old egg beaters easier on my wrist. The actions of your movement are multiplied by leverage and gears. Also, especially now, from an older, worn out perspective, the up and down wrist motion on the old manual egg beater is easier on the bones and cartilage than the sort of lateral grinding that goes on with a whisk, although, that is what I usually use now, because well-designed manual eggbeaters seem to be a thing of the past. These things, when they are well-designed, are the bomb, IMO. Of course, I now have a handheld Sunbeam mixer from the 80's that I still use, usually for cakes. Unfortunately, no old-fashioned, ergonomic eggbeater contraption in my culinary repertoire anymore. That's my loss, I think, especially as an older person, not resilient as I was in my youth.

I'm guessing here as a righty, who used one of these old-fashioned egg beaters in my youth and into my twenties. I think it's probably that the contraption is geared to work in one direction only. Righty's would use it overhand, and lefty's would be reduced to using it underhand, with weaker muscles in play. You could still do it, I just think it would not be as easy. I just "air guitared" the action with both hands, and I really think it would be more difficult to do it underhanded. YMMV. I liked these things, actually, but not sure I like the design of the Zyliss. It seems to have a very small handle on the lever that threatens busting one's knuckles on the shafts. The ones I used had a handle the full width of your hand at a perpendicular angle to the horizontal shafts and on a longer shaft out from the vertical shafts. Sort of like this first picture in the link and the third one. You could really crank on those without fear of bruising your knuckles. I believe ours was even more user friendly (for righty's) but can't find a pic. Mom was an RN and was all about ergonomics before it was really even an English word. Not sure that's so with the Zyliss, not to mention that the knob/handle looks a little carpel tunnel-inducing to me, if you used it much.

Thanks for sharing your cruise experience, @blue_dolphin. I hope you enjoyed yourself thoroughly! Somehow, though, I don't think rousting guests off the ship before dawn is part of the sales spiel. Sorry about that part. Hopefully, the rest made up for it. Is that a single strawberry in the silver goblet? And the croissant looks great, if offered way too early.

Sorry Paul, I've never been there or even in the state of CO unless I crossed through as a young military brat, which is possible. Here's a link to Trip Advisors' recommendations. I can't think of a member who currently lives in CO, although, I think we have at least one that used to. Hopefully, this will give you something to investigate and think about, and perhaps someone more experienced with the actual area will chime in, I hope. Here's a link to Yelp reviews on Durango too. I find Yelp much more helpful than Trip Advisor when dining locally. Ratings tend to be lower on Yelp generally than TA sometimes, because locals are less tolerant of overpricing for the area, I think. It takes some time to read all the reviews including the "not recommended" ones on Yelp, but I usually come away with a good picture of what to expect from the experience at the restaurant. Not to mention all the pictures on the Yelp site of actual food served to paying customers and taken by same tends to be a lot more than the TA site. Also Yelp has a place to specify whether the place is good for kids on the left side of the page not far from the top. Good luck, and I hope you find some great meals for your family!

@KennethT and @dcarch, hi guys, We Luddites are led to believe that LED lighting runs very cool compared to incandescent. Your erudite discourse bringing up this subject led me here, where the answers are all over the map. Can you enlighten us in respect to how much heat an LED light would generate vs. incandescent in a greenhouse environment, and in understandable layman's terms of course. I can only offer my personal observations that my LED TV seems to emit almost no heat and 100 W hoarded incandescent bulbs emit quit a bit of heat. And my 75 W incandescent grow lights emit a lot of heat as well. I used to use my friend's Easy Bake Oven to bake small cakes and things with only a 100 W incandescent light bulb, and Dad wired an insulated doghouse we built so we could heat it with a couple of them in VT.