Thanks for the Crepes

Love Anaheims! They are my favorite pepper to stuff, and just don't care for poblanos. I used a grapefruit spoon to get the seeds and membranes out of my Hatch last night. It was good stuffed with four ounces of ground chuck, precooked with about as much minced white onion, a mild but flavorful red chili powder, salt and black pepper and topped with Colby-Jack. I still didn't like it as much as my preferred Anaheims for this application, but it was very good. I was amazed at how much stuffing this pepper as long as my dinner plate held and had slit and deseeded another pepper, but put it back in the fridge after realizing I had enough filling to slightly overstuff one or significantly understuff two. I served the stuffed Hatch with delicata squash, refried beans from the freezer with provolone cheese and a flour tortilla. This was my first experience with delicata squash, and I'm always excited about a new experience. Sadly though, I'm not enamored with delicata. It has a texture like kabocha to me. Dry and mealy, even with the butter I put on it. I'll eat the other one I bought, but if it's not a lot better, I think I'll spend my time with spaghetti or butternut squash from now on.

What kind of peppers do you use for this? You cut the stem end off and scoop out the seeds and membranes before filling? Was the abalone raw? Not that I'll be able to get abalone, but I might think of a suitable substitute that would work. You already said the shrimp was cooked from raw, so I'm assuming the abalone was too, but just in case someone who can actually get abalone reads this, it might me helpful. Also maybe to folks like me thinking of maybe sliced clam as a substitute.

That was lucky! I wonder if they were trying to sting the backhoe? I don't think yellow jackets are the sharpest knife in the drawer. That doesn't keep them from being a humongous problem at times, though. Like @Nyleve Baar said, they are jerks! Glad no one was stung, and I hope you can get your major plumbing SNAFU resolved quickly and without too much expense and trauma.

This is unconventional and does not involve the egg white batter or skinning of the peppers before stuffing. They aren't even fried, but I based my favorite version on a Tex Mex place that used to be good, but has really declined over many years. I'm in the camp that can chow down on raw peppers as long as they aren't too hot happily. I can't imagine a pepper being tough, especially after having been peeled with heat and then fried or baked. I know I'm bucking tradition, though, and many, many people prefer the peeled and partially precooked method. I don't peel bell peppers when I stuff them or precook them in any way, but rather stuff them raw and then bake. That is what I do with Anaheims, and that's the way Los Tres Magueyes restuarant's product sold as "chili relleno" is made. There's is just the slit unpeeled pepper with seeds stuffed with precooked, seasoned ground beef and topped with white cheese and baked. I actually like these better than the traditional chili rellenos, as first I don't care for poblanos and second the traditional egg batter kind can be pretty greasy. Add that grease to the amount of solid cheese the typical poblano can hold, and it turns into a very heavy dish to me. I'm going to make some Hatch stuffed with precooked ground meat and onion and topped with cheese soon. The Hatch, though, I will carefully deseed because mine are pretty durn hot. I tried making these with raw meat one time, but it was dense and not too good, like a meat loaf without a proper panade. I'll have to "bake" mine in the Dutch oven or microwave this time, but especially the Dutch oven should work fine. Yeah, seafood and cheese would make a great filling, I think! I like to lighten up my cheese and onion enchiladas with a little grated, salted and drained zucchini, and I think that would not go awry with chili rellenos either. I make Garden Stuffed Peppers from my old "Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book". This is bells stuffed with baby lima beans, onions, corn tomatoes, and I've added a little oregano and topped it with cheddar cheese over the years. I'll bet a few black beans, onions, corn and tomatoes with cooked ground meat or seafood and/or cheese would make a respectable chili relleno too. Not strictly traditional, of course, but I bet it would be delicious.

Dinner today was a couple of McDonald's double cheeseburgers. Hold the ketchup, mustard and onions, please, plus a medium fries and ice water, which is free with a food purchase and critical to hydration and body temp control on a four mile hike. The restaurant is right in the vicinity of the liquor store (though I didn't need anything there today) and the Harris Teeter grocery store where I picked up strawberries, delicata squash (which will be my first experience with it) seltzer water and a few other things. I have been using the promotional offers that are printed on the receipts when you make any purchase at McDonald's to fill out an online survey for a buy one sandwich get one free offer. Once you complete the survey, they give you a validation code you fill in and the receipt is good for the discount for thirty days from the date of your visit. You must complete the survey within seven days of your visit, and that reminds me. I need to go get today's receipt from my backpack so I can make that deadline. McDonald's quality is very low. But I'll tell you what, getting all the calories and protein I need for the day for $3.25 including tax is pretty awesome. The food, both burgers and fries, was reasonably but not ideally warm today. That was an exception. Burgers are usually out of safe temp for holding. First table I attempted to sit at was pretty clean, but not perfect. Food temp and tables not clean is something I have been complaining about. Today was the first time I saw any results. I did complain a while back about no hooks in the ladies restroom stall to hang a purse or backpack and they have since installed them in both stalls. I keep expecting them to say we don't want to hear any more from you, but they have been honoring the discount for a long time now over many months. If you are going to eat at McDonald's and your outlet offers this discount in return for completing a survey, which may even get some actual results, you might want to look into it. You can get any sandwich of your choice free of equal or lesser value. Even the all day breakfast ones. I did eat about a cup of strawberries later after I got home, but they were only 46 calories and healthier than anything else I had today at McD's. French fries do have potassium, though, which you need if you are asking your muscles to walk four miles.

@liuzhou, You are right about this, of course. Anytime they damned well please, but the concentration of when they are all doing it together begins before dawn. I lived on my paternal grandparents farm for a while, and they kept a lot of laying hens as well as about 1 rooster for every 8 or so hens because they wanted chicks. I am not a morning person and never have been. This one particular rooster that used to hop through a hole in the screen and plastic on the back screen porch, which was my room at the time became my nemesis. (There was a propane heater in the room and it was Louisiana so it never got very cold. I also had piles of handmade quilts on the old steel bedstead and feather bed, so I was always warm and comfortable.) I believe that devil rooster cut the hole in the screen with his beak so he could come to my bedside and crow me into consciousness while I would be groggy from sleep so I wouldn't be able to get it together enough to effect his demise. I did try, but that wily bastard always hopped back out the hole before I could rouse myself enough to kill him. It didn't help that you needed to check your footware for scorpions before slipping into them. It could also be quite shocking in winter to get out from under the cozy quilts and be exposed to the much colder air temp in my back porch room. It was like a joke, and to this day, I don't understand what that rooster got out of it. He seemed mean WAY beyond his tiny intelligence. I did get revenge at the next chicken butchering where my grandpa slung him around by the head until his body flung across the chicken yard. Very tasty and organic free range chix. We never had beehives on that farm, but lots and lots of bees, which are critical to pollinating the crops we grew there. People really don't seem to realize how important bees are to our very survival. If they go, we will follow them shortly.

Yeah, the Johnsonville, Smithfeild or other similar sausages do not keep well in the freezer either, or at least my freezers. I think sausage like other ground meats needs to be consumed pretty quickly for best quality. I mean you can dump a lot of preservatives into like hot dogs or something, but to me that destroys the quality from the get go. Also sausages can be a dumping ground for meat by products (sorry, but we are all familiar with the phrase "lips and assholes"). I really don't know and don't want to know whether the dumping ground is really that extreme, but I am almost certain the bean counters at large publicly held corporations take liberties on many ground meats with less than desirable cuts. I'm lucky in that I have access to a grocer who still grinds beef, chuck, round, sirloin and usually pork every day fresh. I learned here on eG that I can add sage, black or red pepper, fennel seed, garlic or whatever else I want to freshly ground pork and make my own sausage without worrying about stuffing it into a casing. That, I have found, is the good stuff to me.

Well, arguably, not in some more enlightened ones. However, raising backyard chickens is legal here, but if one of my in earshot neighbors decided to keep roosters, I'm not going to say what I'm thinking because you would think I am a violent and crazy person. Roosters start crowing before dawn and they are LOUD. Depending on the topography they can be heard from 1/4 to a mile and possibly more like across a lake or pond or something. Honeybees really aren't dangerous to us though. Now yellow jackets, are a different story. Run over one of their ground nests with a lawnmower or have your horse step on one of them and they will pursue and sting you en masse like the devils they are. I'm also not surprised they are not as picky about their sustenance as honey bees. Neither critter is going to score high on an intelligence scale, but yellow jackets have a mean gene for sure. I'm pretty sure honey bees are smarter than yellow jackets too, although I have zero evidence to make an argument with, though. I sort of like honeybees. I sort of like them a lot.

b/s chicken thighs? Butter and salt? Do they have a Bachelor of Science? It does sound like a good chicken sandwich, though.

Hey @louwings, I cooked up a mess of fried medium shrimp and french fries tonight. The shrimp were just lightly dusted with flour and tail on and the fries were thin cut. I made homemade tartar sauce to go with and preceded it with a salad with lemon vinaigrette dressing. I also tend to cook a lot of Mexican or Tex-Mex food because I just like it a lot. I also like Indian although I am learning in this area, but it certainly appeals enough to me to keep pursuing it. I am late to the party on this cuisine, having only been introduced to it when Indian immigrants started opening restaurants around here. It's astounding what their ancient culture does with vegetables. We have at least one member and I think actually three that are currently active from Sydney Australia. Isn't that where there is this absolutely amazing seafood market unrivaled in the world except maybe for Japan? Where does your salmon come from? Our best available get shipped in from Alaska or our Pacific Northwest and is wild. People are trying to farm it, but it doesn't taste as good, doesn't seem to provide as good nutrition as the wild caught fish, and there are reports that diseases concentrated in the farming conditions can harm the wild population. I love a nice thick salmon steak cut crosswise across the spine of the fish bone-in and skin-on done over charcoal. This is so good. I have a food memory from steaks just like this done over charcoal one Easter that I will remember forever. So many places like to take the bones out. I hate that. They practically fall out when cooked, keep the flesh from drying out and I love the tasty gelatinous stuff surrounding them that I enjoy while eating the salmon steak.

Well I got beat to it again by liuzhou with this link to the Cookbooks How Many Do You Own thread. I've never posted there, I don't think, because I only have about forty, most of mine are old and not trendy. I do own Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". That is about as trendy as I get. I like it fine, but it's not my favorite nor most referred to. My collection is dwarfed by many of the members' descriptions and photos of their cookbook libraries on that thread. We all do realize that forty cookbooks is a lot by "normal" (non-eGullet) standards, right? I still do use my cookbooks. The net is invaluable for researching a new dish, technique or ingredient, and I love YouTube videos on how to make dosas, pizzelles or naan or whatever. I've been known to go down a rabbit hole watching Indian street food videos for hours. I still do refer to my cookbooks though frequently. My old copy of "The Joy of Cooking" is quite distressed from my love for it and frequent use. I just hauled it out tonight to make sure I hadn't forgotten an ingredient in my tartar sauce. I hadn't.

You beat me to it! I was going to say abstract rendition of a T-Rex. It certainly reminded me of one too. I wouldn't want to meet up with either a T-Rex or a mean person behind that pot grabber tool. *Shiver* BTW I wish more things were over engineered these days instead of woefully the opposite.

Hi @louwings, Welcome to the eGullet forums. This is the best food forum to learn about cuisines and food cultures of the world and share your knowledge. We have members from all over the world, and you will learn something new every day here. Please tell us about the foods you like to cook and eat. Do you cook at home or eat out in restaurants a lot? Where in the world are you, and what kind of ingredients are available to you? It's always interesting to learn what other members have at their disposal for raw materials in recipes.

I had a Romaine and Campari tomato salad with a fresh lemon juice vinaigrette dressing. I topped it with the last of the feta, but wound up picking it out. Guess I wasn't in the mood for feta. This was followed by a lovely thin-skinned almost perfect white potato purchased at Patel Brothers cut into thin french fries and fried in a twelve inch skillet in about half an inch of oil. When done, I fished them out into a paper towel lined glass petal bowl and immediately refilled the skillet with flour dusted medium peeled tail-on shrimps, about twenty or so. Enough to make the food cost bean counter at any restaurant cry, I assure you. This was served with fresh lemon wedges and homemade tartar sauce with minced white onion, dill gherkin, capers and flatleaf parsley in Duke's mayonnaise. So good and you can't buy a meal like this for any amount of money around here anymore.

This seemed the most appropriate place to share the success of a fellow Cary resident at the International Chocolate Awards in London. We are getting more and more on the food scene map every day that passes!

Hi @Neon_Sun, Welcome to the best culinary forum extant! Please tell us what you like to cook, where you are in the world and what you'd like to learn and share here.

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. My dinner was a taco salad with leftovers from last night because I'd planned for three tacos with refried bean with cheese and Mexican red rice from the freezer. I could only finish two tacos with the sides, but the leftover taco filling was good over a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and the reheated ground chuck, Hatch chili and onion taco filling. The hot filling melted a lot of the cheese, and this was very satisfying with a few white corn tortilla chips heated a bit in the Ducth oven. Then I had about a half cup of baby butter beans leftover from the night before and a fried egg sandwich on some very good bread. This is the way a lot of my dinners go. Weird combinations to use up leftovers. Many of them are good anyway, and I enjoyed this one very much. I am very happy to have cleaned out my freezer to a reasonable level and will be trying very hard to use ingredients before I buy more. The only time I make big batches of soups or stuff like vegetable curry is when I know I can stow all but one portion I consume that night in the freezer. I get so sick of leftovers that it begins to be very demoralizing if I let it. Used judiciously, the freezer is the single person's friend though. I know I have a delicious serving of veg curry in there for an easy dinner and just need to make a pot of rice or pasta to have a quickly prepared dinner. I'm actually looking forward to it and I can wait until I get in the mood to enjoy it. I just need to remember that everything in there needs to be used within three months or inedible stuff will just keep piling up until the freezer isn't very useful anymore and only holds old, inedible stuff, and a huge pile of food waste guilt.

Any reason you can't freeze it for later on?

We have urban bee hive projects here too, and I think it's a great idea. Of course Raleigh is also known as the City of Oaks and Cary, where I live, has even more green space. Durham has a bee project too. Just yesterday, I stopped at the side of the road to admire some particularly beautiful wildflowers and noticed a bee that liked them too. It would have made a good photo, because the bee was totally unconcerned about my presence and continued collecting nectar for the 30 or so seconds I observed her. BTW, about the only way to get stung by a honey bee is to step on them barefoot on a blooming clover lawn (did that inadvertently a few times as a kid) or disturb their hive. They are not aggressive unless they get crossed with the African bee strain which can happen. I'm sort of inclined to agree with @gfweb, though. NYC seems to offer few places to get natural nectar to this outsider. How far is Javits Center from Central Park, though? As I understand it, the park would have plenty of natural forage for bees. I have never myself seen a bee around a dumpster. Flies? all day long, but no bees.

Ha Ha! I dug mine out of a drawer with the tips and "instructions" stored inside the barrel. The box long ago deteriorated into uselessness, and is long gone. My instructions make references to flower and leaf tips, but never explained what they are. It also helpfully advises that novices may need to practice to get the decorations right. Ya think? I have only used the thing once or twice to decorate Christmas cookies. The instructions were not too much to absorb for me, but rather beyond vague and very useless to a young cook. I mean sheesh! You're telling me to use the flower tip for flowers and the leaf tip for leaves without telling me which is which? They do provide several recipes for icing, which I never used. I figured if the writers couldn't do any better with the instructions than they did, I'm not willing to trust a recipe from them. There is no manufacturer stamped anywhere on the hardware of the set or printed on the sad instructions. I'm still glad I bought it though no thanks to the included "instructions". Those Christmas cookies were beautiful, and I used them as ornaments on my tree for a couple of years.

My motto is if you find the item in the grocer's freezer case, your homemade version will be better coming from your own freezer. I would certainly give it try. I'd fry, cool and lay out on a sheet pan in into the freezer until solidly frozen then package up for long term storage. And the fry, freeze, reheat from frozen in oven method is the way the commercial ones work and they aren't bad at all. I betcha yours will be even better. Edit: I just read the first prep instruction from the Serious Eats site: "Wearing gloves, if you have them ..." So casual and nonchalant. NO! If you do not have gloves to process that many peppers, go get some. Now. I just burnt myself with just three Hatches recently. You do need the gloves.

Me too!

Again, I don't know whether to hit the sad, like or confused button. I defaulted to Like. You mean that it was supposed to have solved the problem with unsafe emissions, but due to the CO2 detector's reaction, you don't think it really did?

Is that good news or bad news with the reduction after cleaning and tuning? When I had gas stoves (which I loved, but I have gotten used to electric) we didn't even have smoke detectors much less CO2 ones. The pilot lights even blew out sometimes, and I'm still here. The oven didn't have a pilot light and had to be lit with a kitchen match. I must admit that was kinda (OK a lot) scary. I had a cast iron kitchen match box holder that I'd picked up at a yard sale and treated with naval jelly to "derust" it mounted next to the stove on the wall. I remember buying a HUGE old used gas oven that was six or seven feet across from a used appliance store in Memphis. It had a Chrome piece across the top that reminded me of a car bumper with a clock that still worked mounted in the middle of the "bumper". The timer on the clock worked too. It was mechanical. There were what were probably warming cabinets with shelves on either side of the oven, but not knowing any better, I used them to store cookware. This one did not kill me either, and I paid less than a hundred dollars for it delivered. That was my favorite of all time, and I'm trying desperately and failing to remember the brand. It might have been a Tappan and sort of like this, but with a chrome car bumper at the top of it instead of the enamel one. It was a beauty and everyone who came into the house remarked on it. It also cooked like a dream. Oh how I wish I had that broiler back. It was in that bottom drawer you see in the linked photo. The top element broiler in an electric oven can't hold a candle to the bottom drawer broiler of a good gas stove! I looked for a used appliance place around here in modern times. Now it seems that people who want to "upgrade" or change the color or something donate to Habitat for Humanity or Goodwill or something. Or even give them away free on Craig's list or Freecycle. Ain't no such thing as a used appliance store anymore, but I used to get perfectly good durable goods that were actually durable from just such a brick and mortar place where you could go in and look through their offerings, back in the day. The great guy who was in business here for decades repairing appliances before they went digital has retired and gone out of business too. They sent someone out to my home to repair my early '90's washing machine when a drive gear went out. Maybe eight or nine years back at the most. The repair, which is whizzing along great, was less than $100. Without people like Mike, from Mike's Appliance Repair, I guess my old washer is now as disposable as the electronic planned obsolescence models. BTW, the mechanical irritating buzzer timer on my 1970's low end model electric stove still works. The plastic knob broke away maybe five years ago, but I keep a pair of pliers to twist the steel stem with next to the stove. I can set the three-electronic-beep timer on the microwave and be reading or something and be oblivious to it. The old GE mechanical buzzer always gets my attention after a few seconds, no matter how far away from reality I've let myself slip. That sucker will keep on buzzing irritatingly until ... Well I really don't know, because I've gotten quite delayed out at the grill in the backyard and it's still going when I get back. I'm just going to say it: They don't make 'em like they used to.

It depends on what type of freezer it's been in and how good said freezer is at preserving. I grew up with manual defrost deepfreezes that that would keep summer garden produce, unbaked apple pies from the fall apple harvest just down the road, and the beef we raised and slaughtered for two years just fine. These frostless fridge freezers I have now are not very good at their job. I had read several times that that type of freezer would only keep things good about three months. I think at this late stage, I'm finally getting that through my head. And yeah, I agree with DiggingDogFarm. It would be safe to eat. Whether it still tastes good is another story. I was also left with some larger pieces of meat in the freezer when my husband had to go to the nursing home. I got rid of them and now I only buy smaller portions, except whole chicken which are easy enough to cut into parts and freeze the individual pieces.