Thanks for the Crepes

@Panaderia Canadiense might be the reigning queen of high altitude baking here on eG. She recently went through an earthquake and is trying to help in assistance and recovery efforts, but she would be the first person I would ask about baking anything sky high above sea level. She runs a successful profesional bakery in Ambato, Ecuador.

My favorite way for asparagus now is to boil it. I like the thicker ones. I used to be able to get pretty thin pencil asparagus that was good and very tender, but since most of the thin stuff is imported here from Chile now, it just doesn't even approximate asparagus for me anymore. Too stringy. I serve whole spears in these cute preheated oven proof, oval-shaped, fluted-edge individual casseroles I found at the the Dollar General for, you guessed it, a dollar. I cook up an over easy fried egg in more butter than is necessary, so I have extra to serve poured over the asparagus. After I plate the asparagus spears, I plop a fried egg on top, drizzle over the melted butter, and serve it with a lemon wedge. It makes for a very pretty presentation. To properly enjoy this dish, one must take a knife and fork and totally demolish the lovely dish by cutting the asparagus into short lengths and the eggs into small bits. Then you mix it all up and squeeze the lemon over. It's not nearly as pretty now, but oh brother, is it good!

Hi @kapoorkaran441and welcome to the forum! I love Indian food too, and although I am very inexperienced, I try to cook it at home. Perhaps you would care to read and share your thoughts on my recent topic Indian Vegetables. I recently got access to Indian ingredients, and some of the vegetables are completely unfamiliar to me. I would be grateful for your advice.

I can see this group is eating very well, as usual. @liamsaunt, I sure want some of your lovely grilled pizzas. Mean old grill, taking half the pepperoni one. I hate it when that happens. @BonVivant, your steamed pork buns are far from ugly to me, but very inviting to eat. @HungryChris, Your marinated rotisserie chicken looks delectable. The potato gets a bad rap, but you would be surprised at how much Vitamin C it has. Notice the Nutrition Data link puts it firmly in the vegetable category. It's really the sour cream and butter most of us love to add that add the calories. Yesterday I made homefried potatoes. I found the prettiest little white new potatoes at the Indian grocer for 99 cents/lb the other day with pristine, almost translucent thin tan skins. The skin did not peel off with a brush like it will when you dig them yourself and cook them that day, but they were extremely fresh for store bought. I left the skin on. To me homefries are 3/8" raw dice and fried until golden brown, quite crispy outside and creamy on the inside. It's a dish you can almost never get in made well in a restaurant, at least around here. I guess they have to make too many at a time, so they come out sort of steamed and not crispy or very brown at all. I never order them out. It takes 30 minutes to fry just two servings in a 12" skillet, so I see why they can't do it that way commercially. I fried the potatoes up in some duck fat and used what was left in the pan to cook over easy eggs. Sliced banana and strawberries were served alongside. Tonight was broiled pork steak with rosemary, sweet potatoes nuked in their jackets with just butter and salt, and a succotash-like medley of baby limas, corn, red bell pepper, and caramelized onion.

I found another update on that sight from adiesenjie's link. This one affects people in my area. Seems onions are the problem with this one, and since I despise frozen onions, and always use fresh, I'm not affected. I do shop at Food Lion and buy Pictsweet frozen vegetables frequently. They are premium quality. Some of the commenters have their tinfoil hats on about Monsanto and others who have a huge financial interest in spraying our food supply with more and more pesticides perhaps committing industrial sabotage against organic competition. I'm not breaking out my tinfoil hat quite yet, but it is making me wonder.

I agree, kayb, but the breakfast looks mighty fine too. Fresh squeezed juice! I'm in.

Yes, it takes a very special kind of person to work in healthcare everyday and hold up to it. Aren't we all glad that they are there when we need them, though? Beautiful lunch, and great score on the breast bones, Kerry. They would make a great addition to a pot of beans, it looks like. I would have wanted to buy some for the freezer.

Deryn, Do any of your neighbors have an interest in your rhubarb so it doesn't go to waste? I sure would if I lived near you. It could be a way to get to know them better, and perhaps get food discussions going. It's always a good thing to know your neighbors. A neighbor of mine, actually about a fifteen minute walk round trip, let's me take rosemary from her massive shrub because she has way more than she can use. I really appreciate it. Rosemary I can get in the store is just sad in comparison, expensive, and sold in quantities I can't use without waste.

You are so funny, PanaCan. I your creative cakes too. So glad you are okay to make this little girl's birthday special.

This quote comes from "The Joy of Cooking" by Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker, last copyright date 1997: "This dish [Chicken Tetrazinni] was created nearly a century ago by the great French chef Auguste Escoffier in honor of the legendary opera star Luisa Tetrazinni." My well-tested recipe comes from the "Betty Crocker Cookbook", last copyright date 1976: Chicken Tetrazinni 1/4 c butter or margarine (use butter, of course, and I’ve also used chicken fat) 1/4 c all-purpose flour 1/2 t salt (this will depend on the salt level of your broth) 1/4 t pepper 1 c chicken broth 1 c whipping cream (I use 2 % milk, and it’s delicious) 2 T sherry (I use 1/4 c good chardonnay) 7 oz [dry] spaghetti cooked and drained 2 cups cubed chicken or turkey 1 can (3 oz) sliced mushrooms drained 1/2 c grated Parmesan cheese Heat oven to 350 F. Melt butter in large saucepan over low heat. Blend in flour, salt and pepper. I like to cook this for a while until it’s smooth, bubbly, and has turned into a light blond roux. Remove from heat and stir in broth and cream or milk if that’s what you choose to use. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly until it thickens and boils and simmer 1 minute. Stir in wine, spaghetti, chicken and mushrooms. Pour into greased 2 quart casserole. Sprinkle with Parmesan evenly. Bake uncovered 30 minutes or until bubbly. If it hasn’t browned, they say to briefly broil it, but mine always browns nicely by the time it boils. Your oven my be different. They say 6 servings, but we get more like 4 in my house, and we are older and not heavy eaters any longer. Might be different if you used cream, but my husband has a stent, so ... This is a creamy umami bomb with homemade broth, chicken, mushrooms and Parm! I like to add a little more (like a 1/4 c each of broth and milk) because I like it creamy. I’ve also made it with fresh sliced sauteed mushrooms, and it’s even better, but very delectable even with canned ones. I’ve also made it with a chicken bouillion cube when I was younger, before I learned that making your own stock was worth it, and it’s still a good dish. It’s been too long since I made it. I bought a fresh roasting chicken today, so I know what’s happening with some of the leftovers. I hope if you make this that you will enjoy it as much as I have over 40 years.

Thank you very much for this links on the recipes for laukhi/dudhi/bottle gourd, and also for the advice on bitter melon. Also for your recommendation for idly prep. I have stainless ramekins and a stainless expandable steamer I can put into a variety of my stainless pots. Perhaps some of my small glass prep/serving bowls might also work in the lower temps in a steamer, and result in a similarly shaped product to the traditional equipment. So I really appreciate all of your interesting ideas. I did think that all fermented products continued to produce gases, so if you care to expand on your thoughts about a bulging container being a reject, I would read with interest. I would not be surprised if employees came around to "burp" these tightly sealed Chinese takeout style quart containers periodically. I know I can't throw a yeast dough for fermentation in one, because it will pop the seal every time. @huirayhas already kindly advised me that the kind of bitter melon/gourd I can get is extremely bitter. @Lisa Shock, also mentioned that it must be sliced very thinly and pre-soaked to remove some of the bitterness. Hmm... If yer skeered, just say yer skeerd.

Thanks @GlorifiedRiceand @huiray. I think this might be the drumstick vegetable. I will look for it next time I get to an Indian grocer. We have several around here, but I don't recall seeing it before. Since they are so long I think I would remember, but perhaps not. I would never have thought of making a dessert from dudhi, so good idea, but for all I know, all halwa is not sweet. I really like the carrot version at the restaurant. I so appreciate any information on Indian vegetables and tips on turning them into something delicious. I'm just recently seeing the ingredients, so have not had a reason to learn about them before.

I had forgotten about rice pudding, for some reason. I used to make it frequently many years ago, and have a favorite recipe from my old Betty Crocker cookbook. It's baked in the oven in a water bath and then topped with meringue and baked a few minutes more at a higher temp to set and brown the meringue. It calls for raisins, but I've made it with prunes chopped to the size of raisins, and that's really good too. It's good warm or cold, economical and has respectable protein for a dessert type dish. Time to break out that recipe again.

I made eggplant parm for dinner tonight. I had some delivered a few weeks ago from a local pizza joint that I really liked and wanted to get close to it. Theirs was sliced thin lengthwise and breaded, but not greasy. I went through all my recipes for eggplant parm, and decided to try the one from Irregardless Cafe in Raleigh. They opened in 1975 and put out a cookbook in 1994 as a fundraiser after a fire destroyed their kitchen. They also have meat and seafood, but their real specialty is vegetarian dishes. The recipe has you lightly salt and leave the eggplant to drain in a colander for at least 30 minutes and then coat with mayonaise and dredge in cornmeal, flour, parmesan cheese and lots of dried basil. Then you bake it at 450 F for about 20 minutes. I sliced it so thin it took two large cookie sheets to spread out a 1-1/3 pound eggplant. This came out really well, and close to the texture I was shooting for. I thought about it, and it made sense that a restaurant would bake off the eggplant instead of more labor intensive frying. I might try it with olive oil instead of mayo next time, because it was just weird putting that into eggplant parm. I don't know though, since the chef probably tested olive oil when he developed the recipe, and it was a light coating that did not seem to penetrate like oil does with eggplant. I liked the eggplant as is so well that I served it naked alongside thin spaghetti topped with the sauce and melted mozzarella. My husband really liked it too that way, and was excited that there was enough for his lunch tomorrow. I guess it was more oven-fried eggplant with a spaghetti marina side with cheese, but this was a winner.

Interesting forage @heidih. I had never heard of them before, and the fruits in the photo in you link sort of resembled tomatillos, but other images do not, and apparently there's no relation.

Man, oh man, ElainaA, I sure know what you're talking about when you say rocky soil. There were stone fences and structures all over the place. We once salvaged some large fieldstone from an old barn basement down the road from us and built a rock fence along both sides of the driveway. Ours was mortared, unlike the traditional old farm fences which were just expertly fitted together without mortar, and stood for many years. As far as I know, some are still standing. I lived about 5 or 6 hours away from where you live now in Jericho Vt. My dad was a real Type A, and built a wooden frame out of two by fours with four legs and a gently inclined top that had a sturdy wire mesh screen that had about 1/2" open squares between the wires. I dug the dirt with a spade (hardest job), my younger sister used the back of a garden garden rake to sift the soil back into the garden plot and roll the rocks down into a wheelbarrow at the lower end of the frame. My younger brother would empty the wheelbarrow of rock when it got full. This was the easiest job because he stood around watching the rest of us sweat most of the time. It was the most rock-free garden in the glacial rock drop area of New England, probably, and made me swear that I would never garden again after I escaped. I have had other gardens anyway, but never worked as hard.

Thank you so much, everyone for your information and links! @huiray, weirdly, I have not seen any of the three veggies in question at my Korean owned Pan-Asian grocery. They carry Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and of course lots of Korean products, but not these particular vegetables. The Indian grocer only carries the smaller variety of bitter gourd/melon. If you are in, or have access to Indianapolis, they have a population approximately 5-1/2 times the size of Cary. There were only about 40,000 people here when I came in 1986, and it was quite the monoculture. I just feel lucky that I have access to some of the things that I do now, so I am delighted that different ingredients that are challenging and interesting to me are showing up all the time. I know it's very limited compared to some of the members who live in larger cities, but I am embracing and trying to learn about what I can get here. I am like a kid in a candy store when I see vegetables I have never seen in my life before. I like bitter balanced out with other flavors up to a reasonable point, so it will be an exciting adventure to try these new-to-me items with expert help from the eG community. I have a lot to go on now, and many sources of information to explore.

Today I was in an Indian grocer, and ran across this vegetable not for the first time. Does anyone know how to cook it, or some great recipes? It seems to be available pretty much year round. They finally had a sign with the name and price, which was dudi at 99 cents a pound. Google corrects me to dudhi. Is it squash? I can also get this, and this, but have no idea what to do with them. Anyone care to share knowledge and ideas? Also, yah! I noticed that they had dosa and idly batters in the refrigerator case from my favorite southern Indian restaurant that's not far from this market. It's $3.99 for a short quart, probably to give headroom so gases from the ferment don't explode the container. Some of the tops were bulging. I have no equipment to steam idly, but in the future, I might be able to make dosa at home. My attempts at making my own at home with raw ingredients have been pretty dismal and very disappointing compared with what I can get in the restaurant.

We have seen very pretty young and fresh green beans on sale here two weeks ago for 99 cents a pound. They don't even need the tail snipped off, just the stem end. @AlaMoi, sorry to hear that your local Giant seems to have lost its collective mind. Lots of grocery stores are lately taking to Walmart practices, and outsourcing meat prep. I walked out of Walmart after picking up a few produce items and hitting the meat dept. I wanted some ground chuck, and had to show my husband why we needed to leave immediately. Expiration date on ground meat a week out! No thanks. I'm still lucky enough to have one near me that grinds chuck daily. The store I go to offered these packages of creepy meat for a while, I guess to see if they could get away with it, but I see much less of them now, thank goodness. I saw one large bunch long beans in the Indian grocery where I stopped today, but didn't buy any because they were pretty browned and shriveled for my tastes. I think I got spoiled by growing my own green beans for years, and like them snappin' fresh.

@WalterG, I ate the last of my delicious cornbread for dinner tonight. I have made it with butter, olive oil when I want to flavor it with rosemary, or canola oil when I am budgeting. You could certainly use corn oil if you like. Tonight's cornbread had a couple of large (4") jalapenos chopped fine and stirred into the batter. If you want to substitute canned corn, first let me recommend thawed frozen corn as an alternative because it will taste fresher, and possibly be cheaper. I get a pound of it for 99 cents. If you're using a recipe that was specifically developed toward adding canned creamed corn, if you substitute corn kernels, you probably would have to up the liquid. However, if you are using a regular cornbread recipe that's designed to come out moist without inclusions, you could probably add corn kernels and leave the liquid at the same amount. All my cornbread recipes call for a 425 F preheated oven, including my favorite, arrived at over decades, which I'll give at the end of this post. Three seventy-five is not hot enough, but if you absolutely had to you might get acceptable results if you increased the baking time. It won't be optimum. I think the reason your cornbread is collapsing is because it just isn't done. It's risen but not set. Longer baking might correct the problem. Cornbread should be moist but not doughy, and definitely should not collapse like a fallen cake. Are you preheating the cast iron skillet along with the oven? If not you are setting yourself up for disaster! Cast iron accepts and then releases into the food an amazing amount of heat. If it's not preheated, combined with your reduced 375 oven temp, it's going to insulate your batter, and inhibit proper cooking. Baking soda is wasted if you are not using buttermilk or some other acidic ingredient. Baking powder is baking soda and cream of tarter, which is acidic, and that's what allows it to work, but soda can work if you use molasses, vinegar, lemon juice or another acid. adapted from Perfect Corn Bread from: "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook", copyright 1968 Preheat oven to 425 F If you are using a 10" cast iron pan, throw it in the oven when you turn it on, and just before pouring in batter, melt butter and swirl to coat. 2 eggs 1 c milk 3/4 t salt (I like 1 t, especially with vegetable inclusions) 2 T sugar (they say 1/4 cup, but I dislike sweet cornbread) Beat these ingredients together in medium mixing bowl. I use a hand whisk. 1/4 c shortening (not in mine) I never use shortening, so if I'm adding a liquid oil, I substitute the same amount, and whisk it in with the other liquid ingredients. If I use butter, I make sure it's at warm room temp and add it with the dry ingredients, which follow. Add to your bowl: 1 c all purpose flour 1 c yellow cornmeal (I like stone ground) 4 t baking powder Beat again until just smooth. Do NOT overbeat. Pour batter into pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. When it looks risen and golden brown, test with a toothpick in the middle. Toothpick should come out clean, dry and be quite hot to the touch immediately after pulling it out. I like to use a heavy steel non-stick 9" Wearever cakepan for my cornbread and just spray it with an oil spray like Pam, but I buy the bargain brand. It's never failed me, and I hope it works for you. I also think I have a cornmeal yeast loaf recipe kicking around, so let me know if you'd like it, but I suggest you try this one first. You've got one of those damned electronic ovens, don't you?

@KennethT, I read this excellent account when you were posting it, and again tonight, and realized I had forgotten to thank you for spending the time and effort to take us all vicariously to Saigon. I'm just glad the topic wasn't locked and I still have a chance to do so. I must say that last photo of the non-traditional bahn mi looks divine! That shattering crisp crust! Oh lordy, if I could only cook bread half as good.

Welcome @Pham Tat Thanh, I too am very interested in hearing your take on Vietnamese food, ingredients and preparation. We have members from all over the world, and it's always exciting to me when someone from so far away from me joins the community. I know practically nothing about Vietnamese cuisine, but I will be eager to answer any question you may have in an area where I do have knowledge. I enjoyed your post in the Lunch thread, and I would love to partake of your good-looking dishes. Question? Your photo looks like what I would call broccoli, but you described it as boiled cauliflower, I think. Is that what is called cauliflower in your area? Here it looks like this. I like both vegetables, but I much prefer cauliflower, as I know it, roasted with a little oil as opposed to boiled.

@BonVivant, the marinade sounds delicious, and your photography is professional quality as usual. I just have to ask if that is the optimum way you like your pork, though? To each their own, but it looks a little dry to me. No offense meant at all. I often cook pork shoulder, and I like mine with a bit more moisture and a little fat left after most has been rendered off. I'm in complete awe of your perfection in cooking, ingredients and photography so this is why I dare to ask such an awkward question. I was a bit surprised, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.

I think twice-baked potatoes stuffed back into their own skins after mashing the insides with a little butter and milk, and with a little cheese and chives or scallions and a fresh, crisp, lightly dressed salad with fresh warm bread and butter are my favorite steak accompaniments. You may want something fancier with that expensive meat though, or something more Japanese, so YMMV. I would also grill the steak over charcoal or wood. I would not add a sauce with fat to this already very rich meat, I would want to let the awesome cut stand on its own. I'm one that when I rarely get a chance to enjoy good beef, I want only salt, pepper, sear and smoke from the wood fire and steak fat along with the beef flavor. Enjoy it whatever you do, you lucky dog!

@andiesenji, sorry about your "catfish" experience. Glad you were able to save yourself. What a shameful reaction by the manager! Fortunately, that kind of ignorance is becoming rarer as more people realize the liability to them involved, and that is a good thing. I didn't really get the whole allergy thing myself, until a lady I worked with at the YMCA who was directly involved in managing our afterschool programs for thousands of kids explained to me that some kids who walked into a movie theater where popcorn was cooked in peanut oil could instantly go into anaphylaxis. That hammered the point home that allergies are no joke to me. I just wish the picky eater, manipulator, control freak types did not exploit this, because it's what's makes folks not take it seriously. @kayb, you sound like the kind of person I would love to have working at any restaurant where I ate. Especially with an expensive and so delicious food as lobster, or even corn on the cob, margarine should be a crime.