Thanks for the Crepes

@FeChef I think your excellent-sounding dish would work in a crockpot too, of course with a lot more time. The way I would do it is to introduce the flour to dredge the seasoned roast and then sear it in a skillet before placing in the crock, preferably in some of its own slowly rendered fat. That's what I do with pot roast too, just because I dislike the raw flour taste when I try to thicken with it later in the cooking process. If I'm lazy that day, I throw the roast sometimes even pretty frozen into the pot. The juices are thinner, still delicious, and that is what crusty bread is made for. @Suzee How did your recook on the pot roast turn out?

Hi, Suzee. I am too ignorant of Kombucha to take you up on your offer immediately, but I am very intrigued by this new (to me) possibility. I first learned of it when member @gfron1 posted about it here. Then, when searching for his thread, I also ran across this one. I'm pretty sure I won't be the only member with high interest if you choose to share your experience and knowledge about this esoteric brew, and I surely wish you would. There was no real discussion on the two threads I linked of recipes and procedures to proceed to make your own at home like you do. Please do share. I love tart flavors, so this might be right up my alley. I would love to take you up on your generous offer with more information, so that I would be able to justice to your scobie.

Okay, so I'm going to take my rep at eG down several notches here, but it is what it is. I heard about the "McPick2" limited time special at McD's from @Toliver upthread/topic. I had some errands to run in the shopping center adjacent to McD tonight, and it sounded like a good deal, so that is what we had for dinner, day before payday and all. My husband and I each got two McDoubles and a small french fry. They were over a thousand calorie meals, but it's not like we eat like that every night, and it's all I ate for the day. I'm still not the least bit hungry. They honor the deal in multiples of 2 over two per person, so we each had a dinner neither of us could finish for $3.23 each, and I didn't have to cook for a change. I can't say it was a great meal, but it was sure a good value. The raccoons were happy too with our leftovers: burger from me and fries from the husband. So thanks, Toliver.

@heidih It's obvious that Heidi and the rest of the Californians are eating up all the cauliflower, and I don't blame them! We get Ocean Mist Brand here too, but the cheapest I've ever seen a head is $2.50. I thought about getting a head at $3.69 in late November, but cheaped out, and now I could kick myself, because I certainly can't afford some of the prices posted here until they get more reasonable. That's okay, though, because I have access to many other veggies that are delicious roasted too, although I do love me some roasted cauliflower. Thanks to the this long e-G thread/topic, cauliflower moved from a meh vegetable to a coveted one. I frequently have to trim brown or blackish spots a little where the head has contacted the plastic wrapper and moisture condensed in the fridge. I've seen them in the store like that too, but only buy if they are pristine white. The discoloration isn't deep at all, and no harm has ever come to any of us how ate the trimmed cauliflower.

I had never heard of or seen this fish, but it sounds delicious. According to wiki, it has a range from Nova Scotia to South America, so it's not impossible that it might appear at my local NC fish shop. I will keep an eye out, and ask about it next time I visit the shop. I know I have never seen one for sale or caught on any NC salt-water fishing boat I've been out on, although there were lots of red and silver snappers coming on board.

Suzee, I hope your roast turns out well after the second cook. I cook boneless chuck roasts in my circa 1982 Rival Crock Pot a lot, and according to the recipe in the owner's manual/recipe booklet that came with it, it calls for 5 hours on HIGH or 10-12 hours on LOW. It makes a big difference what setting you're cooking with. My experience is with the low setting, and I have even cooked from partially frozen on the low setting in the glazed clay crock with the recommended 1 cup of liquid to prevent thermal shock. I always have had excellent results when following the suggested time. I have read that older crockpots like mine cook at a lower temp on the low setting than the newer ones, so that would make a difference too. Their recipe says to add veggies at the same time as the roast, but I find the veggies except for the onions overcooked that way. I fish the roast out and add carrots, potatoes and celery to the bottom of the pot in the liquid a couple or three hours before the end of cooking time when the pot is at a boil on low. Then I place the roast back in the pot on top. After adding the veggies, I might kick it up to high until it reboils, then switch back to low, if I'm in a hurry. It always makes a delicious meal and all it needs is some good, crusty bread to soak up the juices. I have noticed that chuck and even rib eye steak and roast cuts can be tougher lately than they used to be. The crock pot has always been an effective tool for dealing with tough cuts in my experience, anyway.

@mmille24 Very nice leoparding on your pizza. Do you mind telling jealous people like me how you achieved it?

Welcome to eGullet, JD-adk! Please tell us more about your organic farm and what you will be cooking in your new kitchen.

blue_dolphin, Great looking breakfast! I love your creativity with your leftovers. As a small household, we eat many leftovers, which I try to resurrect into new and interesting dishes, but I think I would get boring fast if I posted every dinner to the Dinner thread/topic. We don't waste food around my house. I might rethink that when I come up with a successful use for leftovers. Others may appreciate ideas to use their own. I didn't know that there was a name for your egg/potato dish until recently, but that is an Idaho Sunrise.

liuzhou, That is a very enlightening article. It leaves me a bit stunned, and makes me consider myself lucky that I don't have to resort to the disgusting cheats mentioned to get appetizing food on the table. Of course, I do understand that it's professional food photography and marketing, and the things they have to do like setting up lighting just right take time. They're not worried about wasting an entire turkey that gave up its life for the purpose of getting a marketable photo, but "Stylists don’t waste real booze..." At least they've got their priorities straight.?

The replacement grill/griddle is sold separately and is a lot cheaper than a baking steel. I have cooked pizza on the grill even before we got the grill/griddle. It's too hot here in the summer to be futzing around with a very hot oven inside running against the A/C. Everyone says you can throw the raw dough right on the grill for a few minutes until in stiffens up, flip onto a platter, quickly place your (not too heavy) toppings on the cooked side of the dough return the pizza to the grill, and close the lid to finish the pizza. I'm sure this can be done, but I haven't tried it. I like a high hydration dough for pizza, and thin crust, and I hate failure. I came up with this cheat on the same method: I found a thin, flat, rectangular steel pan that has a shallow rim on three sides and heavy wire handles on the two ends. It also has holes all over it like a perforated pizza pan. It looks something like this: Mine is 11" x 14". It was also cheap. I got it at Dollar General for less than $5 when they stock a bunch of patio and gardening stuff in the spring. You still have to cook the first side of the dough, then flip and top, but it makes it a lot easier than trying to drape raw dough onto a hot grill with bare hands. The pan is also great for grilling asparagus, green onions, shrimp or any other small stuff you don't want to lose into the fire.

Great looking pizzas all, but my personal pick is No. 4! Very nice. I don't have a pizza steel or stone either. The stones are too fragile for me, and why should I buy a pizza steel when I already have a perfectly good reversible flat griddle/ribbed grill of enameled cast iron that goes with our outdoor gas grill? I store it right on the very bottom shelf all the time. It's too heavy to be moving around all the time. I put a piece of foil over the top of it simply because I'd rather throw the foil out instead of clean up after a messy broil. It takes a little longer to preheat the oven, but the oven then retains heat better, and I haven't burned the bottoms of cookies or biscuits since I started keeping the cast iron plate in there. It absorbs and deflects the heat from the cycling bottom heating element. The flat side up works great for pizza.

Steve, that is one extremely attractive oyster po boy! I'm still trying to recover from a food coma from an excellent NYE dinner, but it's still not stopping me from drooling over your photos. I can't stop looking at it. This will be on my agenda soon after I recover from my overindulgence.

Hee Hee! If I'd had two dozen, I would be in a real coma.

Okay, we have a Patel Brothers market less than a mile away from our house. Are you saying this might be a place to find good mangosteens? Or should I just give up for finding any in the US as I had concluded earlier? What did you mean by Gujarati? Mr. Google says it's an Indo-Aryan people, mostly from the Gujarat western state of India, and their language. I have several other Indian markets close too, where I constantly find produce that I am completely ignorant of, but would love to learn about. So if that is a good place to hunt decent mangosteens, please kindly share your knowledge. Asia is a huge continent (the hugest) and people don't mean any harm or insult by referring to it without more specificity. Most folks realize it also includes Siberia, and I don't think anyone is looking for mangosteens from there.

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant (Torerro's in Cary) for NYE dinner. I got my usual carne asada, which is delicious skirt steak served with frijoles and rice with lettuce, pico de gallo, guacamole, grilled jalepeno and green onion, really fresh lime, flour tortillas, plus the free chips and salsa. I always bring a baggie with a finely chopped jalapeno to add to the salsa which makes it perfect to me. The husband had the carne asada burritos. Both of us had plenty of leftovers to take home and I had two frozen margaritas. They really make those well there. You can taste and feel that there is plenty of tequilla in there, but they still taste really good. Needless to say, I am nearly in a food coma, but I had a lot of fun getting here! Best of all, after I caught our hard-working waitress and pressed $10 into her hand as she passed by (I like to see the tips go to the waitstaff) on another pass by, she said "gracias, senorita". What lady my age doesn't appreciate being called senorita or miss? Happy New Year!

Well, my husband can't successfully turn my broken thermostat oven from broil to bake, and it's an old 70's model which is labeled quite clearly in actual English and has NO electronics. Because the T-stat is broken, temperature must be regulated with a timer, oven thermometer and manually manipulating the temp like a wood fire. I asked him one time when I was washing chicken (yes, I still do, carefully) or something (maybe kneading dough) that would have taken a long hand wash and dry to give me what I thought was a little hand. No go. I had to go ahead and do the extensive hand wash/dry and do it myself. The whole time, the timer alarm is going off. I do not even know if it's passive aggressive, but who is that oblivious? I don't ask for even the slightest, simplest help in the kitchen anymore. Somehow we have been together for 17 years, going hard on 18 on Valentines Day in 2016. Go figure?

Rokay, Thanks for the education, huiray and Jaymes. I won't look for them anymore here. Great minds think alike, Jaymes, because the "It's better to have loved..." quote was something I was going to say after you said this:

Wow! Gene deserves his Pulitzers. What a writer, that many of us may aspire to be. I'll be keeping an eye peeled for his work. Thanks again.

That is extremely interesting to me, as your oysters have looked very fresh to me, and I had absolutely no idea that they could be successfully frozen. Sometimes I've been known to over buy because my thrifty gene kicks in, and larger quantities are more economical, and have a hard time getting through them, though I have never wasted any. What an absolute boon to be able to pull these low-cal, high-protein treats, loaded with vitamin D and B12 out of the freezer whenever! I'll bet they are easier to open raw too. Brilliant! This is truly a gift of knowledge, so thank you Shelby.

Oh, cyalexa! You have disillusioned me and burst my bubble, but thanks. Next time I am presented with these, I will know better. Live and learn. My packages say "rehydrated" in very tiny print, but look fresh. At least they are from Sunny Creek Farm in Tryon, NC, and are labeled non-GMO, and do not list any other ingredients. I have gotten out of the habit of trying to read labels other than a quick glance at expiration dates through my training by shopping at Trader Joe's. The lines to access a product from the shelves are three or four deep sometimes, and you risk bodily harm by being obtuse to that. On the plus side, my husband unexpectedly invited me out to dinner tomorrow night for NYE. So that was a shakeup in ingredient management, but overall, something positive for me, since I rarely get to eat out. The curse of a good cook, I guess. I already had started thawing the hens, so they will be cooked along with the peas on NYD. I grock that they scratch backward, according to Digging Dog Farm. But you know what? This past year, 2015, has actually been up there with the worst in my life, so maybe "scratching backward" to better times is not so bad. I just follow the traditional Southern food customs sometimes for fun mostly anyway. I'm a scientist at heart, and a thrifty one, so Cornish hens for NYD. And @DiggingDogFarm you do know that cattle, may stand still at times, when they are grazing, which they have to do a lot to maintain their enormous bulk on low-energy food, move forward to get to the next fresh grass? Like horses, elephants, and other huge vegetarian grazers. Chickens also peck and move forward when foraging. I still love your cool saying a lot though! My sister calls hors d'oeuvres "horse divers" to this day because of something one of her (no longer) small children said.

I am fascinated by exotic (to me) foods, and have never had a mangosteen, so went Googling. It seems according to this acticle at Food52 and also according to Wikipedia, that fresh mangosteens are now legal for import into the US since 2007. I don't know about y'all, but I will be keeping an eye open for them at my local Asian Market.

Happy Anniversary, Shelby! For New Years Eve, we are having roast Cornish hens, dressing on the side, and haven't finalized other sides yet. Certainly a green vegetable. Probably my homemade sweet potato pie for dessert. This may have to be supplemented with a bit of kabocha squash because I just checked, and I only have two huge sweets, and I like a very full pie. For New Year's day, I found some fresh black eyed peas in the produce department for the first time in these parts, so really looking forward to that. Yay! I haven't had fresh peas in years. Cornbread for sure, and spinach because I don't care for overgrown collards. I'm sure bacon or ham will appear to please my husband, but to me, the star of this show is the peas. When I first moved here 29 years ago, the population was only 26,000, and my first New Years shop at several grocers resulted in shelves bare of black eyed peas in any form at all and no frozen pie crusts in the freezer case. Now there are nearly 6 times the amount of people here, and while there are many drawbacks to that development for this country girl, the food landscape is certainly not among them.

This happened to me one time when I was only about 18 or 19. I was browning some ground beef and forgot to put a colander under it before I dumped the whole kit into the dog food dish, which was clean, but already contained kibble. I only meant to drain the fat into his food. My trim, muscular dog who accompanied me on horseback rides nearly daily ate extremely well that night. I feel for you liuzhou, good stock takes a lot longer and is a lot more work than browning a pound of ground meat. Well, you know, Darienne, such lapses are not always age-related. (See my story of my brain abandoning me above, when I was in my late teens.) The brain is such an amazing, wonderful thing, but sometimes without any logical explanation, it seems to just check out and most of us have done something really dumb, which we want to kick ourselves for at least a time or two. I hope your lip heals nicely. Ouch!

I love it fried like chicken because that is what I grew up with. Ours were larger, meatier rabbits, but not tough; they were raised in hutches. Butcher, cut into pieces, salt, pepper, and other spice as desired, and let set a few minutes while doing other work. Dust with flour only, then brown in hot oil, my grandparents may well have used saved bacon fat? Put the cover on skillet with a few TBSP water until tender, then uncover to recrisp. I need to find a local source like gfron1 suggests, because commercial rabbit, IF you can find it is prohibitive around these parts too. Also I did not find the need to clean off the rabbit fat, but ours were farmed in hutches, not free range. They were not gamy at all, and I'm sensitive to that. They ate well. Occasionally they were turned out in a fenced area to romp, but I'd certainly not call it free range. They were well cared for up until butchering. Endearing animals if not the sharpest knife in the drawer.