Thanks for the Crepes

Chicken cacciatore from the freezer, served over thin spaghetti. I made this batch of Chix Cach last month and ate two portions. I ate the first one the night I cooked it, then ate another a few days later that was stashed in the fridge. I froze two more, so now there is one left. It sure is challenging cooking for one. I bought the smallest package of chicken thighs on offer: four. I do love this dish, though, so I will definitely not let that last portion go to waste.

You have a dark sense of humor, Arey, but always bring a smile or laugh. I still have a cartoon that was published in "Playboy" back in the 70's in a file somewhere. It's caption is "... and that's when things really got tough." The graphic is patrons sitting in a bar. The bartender has hung himself and the only other patron, besides the tie- askew, rumpled-hair speaker, has slit his throat and is slumped on the bar with the knife discarded beside his hand. I found it hilarious and still do. This earthly existence place can be rough! but that experience varies among individuals. YMMV If the boy wants to cut a jelly donut, just let him. Let's help one another. Here is one that could easily be turned up and leaned together with the filling side up and presented on a plate with a sprig of mint, as I suggested above. Or, the little brother wouldn't have to go without a treat.

Maybe think a little smaller dream at first anyway? While a glass walkway would be a lifetime memory for most of the patrons at a restaurant that had one, isn't that also extremely expensive? I know you would love to settle down and not have to haul your equipment hither and yon. I would love to see you establish a permanent venue to share your talent with everyone. You might want to start off with more basics and then go from there, though. I wish you much good fortune.

Perhaps from a friend who was previously invited to dinner and received seriously over/undercooked meat? Hint, hint. Apparently it fell on deaf ears.

I have been hoping someone who is knowledgeable would open a thread like this! I recently found out what fenugreek/methi is. Oh, I had read the words and tasted the ingredient many times at Udipi Cafe here in Cary. I even owned some in a curry powder in my pantry. It was only when I bought some Swad Methi Khari Biscuits and posted about it here that I made a connection of the flavour to the names that I knew what the words meant. I felt like Helen Keller at the well pump! So yes I am very interested. I will be learning much more than I can contribute at this point except for unbridled enthusiasm for all things Indian cooking and ingredients. I even started a topic on Indian Vegetables. I have great access to restaurants and grocers for food and ingredients in my area because we have recently acquired a thriving community of Indians, but not much previous exposure so very little knowledge about this cusine. So yah!

@Kim Shook, I am sorry for the loss of your friend and one of our members. Please take comfort that she is not in pain any longer. TftC

I'm delighted to hear that you will have more to say about the intriguing cuisine you're enjoying. I was getting frustrated Googling for more info and having nothing but Vietnamese language sites come up, complete with diacritics I did not include in my search and then not being able to translate. I completely understand now, and thank you for taking time to do this, and I'll be looking forward to more education on Vietnamese food once you return home. Are your hydroponic gardens going to be okay while you're gone? Have a great time! It looks like you are off to an awesome start.

It does not look like a disaster to me, and I'm sure your in-laws will see the love in it, as I do.

I had to buy a 1 pound container of Badia ground black pepper. I usually buy it in the 7 oz. container, but they're frequently out of this size, so I got the larger size, figuring I'd go through it by myself in a year, well within expiration date and good, fragrant flavor. So I poured the pepper from the larger container into the 7 oz. one I keep in the kitchen. When I replaced the pop-off shaker lid on this container, I thought to myself, "That doesn't seem like it has a very secure hold, but I've been worried about that before, and it has worked fine." The very first time I tried to use it was, luckily, over the sink where I had a steak on its styrofoam tray I cooked yesterday and wanted to season before I did so. I do it in the sink because it's easier to clean the oversprinke of salt and pepper in the sink than it is on the counter. Well. Y'all know what happened, given the thread I'm posting this in. I lost a couple, three ounces of great pepper, because it couldn't be salvaged after dumping out on raw meat. I'm going to keep the larger 7 oz. container in the pantry closet in the foyer. I threw out the treacherous sprinkler top and filled up a smaller container with a sprinkler top that is actually hard to pop off and snaps back on securely. Note to self: when your gut tells you you have a disaster in the making, please listen to it. The good news is the steak was fine. Pepper is easy to dust off a raw ribeye, and I love pepper anyway. Could've been a lot worse if this was a soup or something. So lesson learned.

I've had very good luck with Hass avocados I buy for about 99 cents from our local Food Lion. Most of the ones on offer these days are already blackish-looking. I buy the greenest one I can and then put it out with the tomatoes on the counter. When it's ripe I'll refrigerate it and haven't had a bit of problem if I use it within a week. I have occasionally had problems, especially in winter, so I can feel your pain with the unusable avocado you were looking forward to, Jo. I hate it when that happens.

Glorious looking food, Kim, especially that lovely ham. Gorgeous! There were local tomatoes that looked really good on the display marked "Local Goodness" in the Food Lion a couple of days ago. I picked up a zucchini, an ear of corn, and some peaches, which have been really good here this year. I bypassed the large local tomatoes in favor of the 1 pound clamshell of Campari tomatoes over on the display with avocados, other tomatoes,garlic and stuff. Those Campari were $2.49 and they taste like summer garden grown tomatoes. Sweet and juicy. I know you have access to Food Lion, so maybe your local store offers them too. I love tomatoes, but especially in a tomato sandwich, less than stellar ones can be very disappointing. Campari's are about golf ball size. This makes them great to control leftover partial tomatoes. They last over a week on my counter, just getting better with time. This batch was branded Sunset, but all the Camparis, regardless of brand, have been wonderful. I paid a lot more per pound last month for a supposedly heirloom tomato that looked like one, complete with pleated shoulders and brownish tint. It was juicy, but brought no flavor at all to the party. I'm sticking with Camparis until I walk down to my seafood outlet. Their summer tomatoes taste like they are grown in the family that owns the shop's backyard. Camparis are just as good, though.

Also you all are both moneyed foreigners to be impressed. I would be surprised if it wasn't different back then for the average Russian citizen. But what do I know, because I've never been there? I will say that dissidents, at least from media reports here, even if they are rich and powerful like the energy giant guy, wasn't it Gazprom? can be crushed like bugs there. That's pretty scary. But again, what do I know? chefmd's report reflects a different picture than what we consume in our media, and I am loving it. It is an inside peek to the country from an expatriate that we will never see in our media.

At least you can correct that with your smuggled stuff. Please come home soon!

Bon Vivant, May I ask what these sprouts are? Chives? I love sprouts, clover, alafalfa, mung bean, radish, bring it on! But I've never seen anything like the ones you have there on offer in the US. Caviar is either prohibitively expensive or pretty terrible here, or both, so I can't suppress a little jealousy. The best I've ever had is when I lucked out on a couple of occasions and found roe inside a female Maine lobster. You can tell them apart by the "swimmerets" under the tail. The females are softer, so it is easy to remember. I always look for females, but they do not always have roe. It is a better chance than the males, though, who will never have it. Finding the roe is like the best bonus on what is already a delicious splurge meal.

I had ribeye tonight too. I decided to break my rule about never cooking a steak over anything but charcoal, but that's a lot of work I wasn't in the mood for tonight. I made another two servings of seven layer salad, and after I fried Wright's applewood smoked bacon for the salad and a BLT in the near future, I thawed out a sub roll that I knew had been in the freezer too long for the coons and poured the grease over it and took it out to where they are used to finding my offerings well before sunset. This time I reserved both the grated cheddar and the bacon for the salad separately until time to mix up my portion I was eating tonight and for the leftover portion. I will also add the mayo again when ready to serve. Wright's bacon was more expensive than Hormel black label that I usually buy, and I wouldn't say I like it better. Part of that may be that I prefer thin sliced and Wright's only offers thick sliced. Maybe it will be better in the BLT. Without washing or wiping the bacon skillet, I used that to cook my ribeye for about four minutes a side, and a few minutes standing it up on the edges to sear those too and render the fat cap on one side. It turned out rare and surprised me with how good it was. Dessert was a local perfect, juice running down the chin, peach and a chocolate cupcake from the Food Lion Bakery. Surprisingly they are much better than the more expensive and, to me, nearly inedible pastry offerings at the higher end Harris Teeter. The coons got more than I did when I fell for a couple cake slices at a 2 for 1 sale offer from HT. No cooking tomorrow while I catch up with leftovers: half the steak, the other serving of seven layer salad and a fried chicken wing. When I go to food Lion, I usually get dinner before grocery shopping at a Chinese takeout where I can get 4 whole fried chicken wings with fries, which are all done to order and come out screaming hot from the fryer for only $6.50 including tax. I can never eat it all, so I have 1 or 2 wings leftover. I don't care for leftover fries so I use that as an excuse to eat the large order while they are at their best.

Thanks andie! I have a Bromwell carbon steel box grater I picked up a few years after the time you were down in Mexico and got yours. It is still sharp and I use it all the time. They still sell them, but now they will relieve you of the better part of $100 if you want one now. I would be surprised if I paid more than $1.99 for mine back then. I will give it a try next time, and if it works, I will be able to use the panela for more than tea. That rasp you linked to looks like the one we used on the horses hooves. I think it came from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and came with a wooden handle.

Yes, @kayb, I love muscadines and scuppernongs. They are native here, and it's only the past couple of years that they started showing up in grocery stores, but the year before that, I found them in, of all places, the Asian grocer. I bought twelve pounds that year. It was the first time I'd had them since I broke up with a long ago boyfriend who's family had both kinds growing on their land. No one else liked them. More for me. I love tart fruit, but most people seem to like a sweeter flavor profile. Great story about your mom's solution to getting the scuppernongs home. And yes, the grapevines are wild, as are the raspberries. You would not believe how verdant it is here this year, after several years of drought, that is so refreshing.

I tried clicking the offered Translate button, and of course that did not work at all. I still liked the video, and was reminded of your record of cooking in upright large bamboo tubes. I will also say that the narrator person's voice was quite melodic and pleasing, unlike some of the Chinese I have heard. Unsurprisingly, not a single cognate in the whole thing. Would @liuzhou be kind enough to tell us the dialect or whether that is common in China.

I don't know, but as a single person who has to make a four mile round trip on foot for groceries with a very limited budget, the service seems tempting. I have seen so many meals here that cost an average of $10. While they are cheaper than most restaurants, I can make them for a fraction of the cost at home, gathering my own ingredients and managing them efficiently. I have more time than money, though. It takes me a minimum of three hours to walk to a grocer, do shopping and come back home. If your time is limited and you have plenty of money, it's probably a good deal. I'm not even an avid meat eater, but they seem to be kind of skimpy on that.

Does anyone know if the microwave works with Panela. I love the taste, but it is most recalcitrant to even chipping of a piece with a grapefruit spoon for tea. Once you get a piece off, it dissolves fine in the tea, but it is horrible to get that piece off.

I did like the Atoulfo mango that I had never had before, but found the description of it being less fibrous not so true after scraping the peels and seeds with my teeth, as is my wont. I picked up a mango which is the one most on offer here from Mexico, but haven't been able through searching to give it a name. It's the only one I've ever had access to though, before finding a different variety in the Indian grocer. Woo woo! it was only 59 cents! This is the cheapest price I have ever seen in my life going back to when I saw my first mango. You can believe that If I did not live alone and also picked up local peaches, which have been really good this year, and black, tree-ripened plums, I would have bought many more mangos. This is probably the largest by a small margin of any of this variety I've ever seen. It must be a very good year for mangos in Mexico. I'm sure they are cheap as dirt there if they can get all the way up here with all the beaks that need wetting to get here. I can't see where I said anything about the mulberry posts upthread. They are not sold that I know of anywhere commercially. When I lived in Virginia, we had cherry trees and a pear tree in out back yard, and one of the neighbors had a mulberry tree in their front yard. I used to eat them off the tree as a kid despite the warnings that I would be instantly poisoned. I don't know where this notion came from here, but it was pervasive, at least back then. I ate a carload of them over the season, though, and they're definitely not harmful. I only ate a few initially after all the other kids' dire warnings, but after that, I was on them. Strangely, even in the face of empirical evidence, the other kids never abandoned their erroneous belief. Has anyone heard of mulberries being on commercial offer here in the US, even in restaurants? Also I saw some unripe raspberries growing wild on the trek to the grocer today. They are right by the trailhead that starts across a series of three railroad tracks at a cut-through I use where they closed off automobile access a few years ago. It saves me going over a mile out of the way, but I'm willing to bet birds and other wildlife will get those berries before I do. I bet they will be good though. There are also a bunch of grapevines further down the route. Like everything else this year, with all the rain we've had, they are really thriving.

I got Japanese beetles here one year and they are the most destructive little %$&@!s I have ever encountered. I did buy some traps much like the ones ElainaA describes, but everything I was trying to grow that year that I didn't take inside was pretty much toast anyway. The good news is that the next year there were only a few which the traps were able to control, and after that, for about a decade, I have not seen one since, and if I ever do it will be way too soon. The wiki article says they aren't too destructive in Japan because of natural predators, but here they are much harder to control because we don't have those same predators.

I don't think you can really go wrong with extracting vanilla flavor from the beans in vodka. It works well and in my experience, does not go bad. If your extraction is too weak or too strong, you should be able to adjust it with no problems.

I did not even open your link to the video since, you said it would need translating. I am not even a novice, much less an expert at candy making, but I'm responding here to kick your post back up so maybe you can get some good advice from the people on here who are experts. Also I can add that there is more than one way to skin a cat (my mom's idiom, and she would never have contemplated really skinning a cat) or to heat a bowl. Oven, microwave and boil water in it, then wipe out, just pour stove top boiling water in in your sink, empty dishwasher on dry cycle. I too am afraid of blow torches, chainsaws and many other things. Besides, the intense heat of a blowtorch might be dangerous on a bowl, if that is what they're suggesting. My dad learned the hard way that you do not weld metal on a concrete garage floor. He wasn't hurt, but the explosion of the concrete was very scary to all of us. Then we had to repair the floor, so I'm with you. The blowtorch sounds like a bad idea.

@blbst36, If you're looking for ingredients to cook your own Mediterranean food at home, this place, Harmony Mediterranean Market in Cary, is very good. For restaurant food, there is Bosphorus and La Shish. I personally prefer Bosphorus, but La Shish is very popular as well. Baghdad Bakery makes a killer samoon bread fresh every day. There is Sea Depot, where you can buy fresh and local seafood. They will even fry it for you for takeout or you can carry your purchase back home and cook a delicious seafood dinner at home. The friendly family who owns this place is always willing to give you advice on cooking their seafood products. This recco is given with a word of caution, though. I once ordered clam strips here, and they were horrible and from the freezer, same for the fried mushrooms. Don't let them give you coleslaw as a side with a takeout order. It is most vile. You can't go wrong when you go for their fresh seafood choices, though. Just ask if you are having them fry something for you, and steer away from frozen choices. They also have frozen ducks intact with head and feet and frozen green lip mussels I've enjoyed. If you like oysters, they can deliver in the R months. My husband loved their hushpuppies, but I found them dense and I like mine fluffy with a little onion, which theirs do not have. Many wild caught choices available here, including catfish caught in Bond Lake right here in Cary. I recommend the fried okra as a side. Although the okra comes from the freezer, it's delicious. We have a wealth of ethnic grocers and restaurants in Cary, and if I can help you with further info on any cuisine you are interested in, just let me know.