GG Mora

Dayumm...I just want to bury my face in that tree and inhale deeply. Jealousy doesn't even begin to describe what I'm feeling. In one of the Chez Panisse cookbooks (could be "Chez Panisse Cooking") there's a recipe for Meyer Lemon Cake that I've always wanted to try. Looks like you could fuck it up several times over and still have lemons to spare.

Cass Elliot: Cassoulet (with a side of ham sandwich)

The answer to that would be, um, just about everything: garlic (???!!), onions, mushrooms, peppers, eggplant, beets, brussels sprouts, cabbage, any lettuce besides iceberg, any dressing besides bottled Italian, lamb, duck, goose, any organ meat, any seafood other than scallops, lobster or flounder/sole/cod/haddock, any "Italian" food other than Chef Boyardee or Franco-American, any "Chinese" food other than La Choy, any "Mexican" food other than Old El Paso, and so on and so on, but the big perplexing one – and perhaps Sconzo and I were separated at birth – was that I wouldn't eat any cheese that wasn't Velveeta (or similar cheezoid product) and melted. I've overcome every one of these aversions, or perhaps I should say "reversed" since I now embrace and crave all of the above. You should have seen me licking the Epoisses off my fingers a few weeks ago. Exception: bluefish. :gack: Edited to add: the mushrooms that changed my mind were psilocybe cubensis, grown with great attention to detail in a friend's dorm room.

Yes...we could call it the, um, Cheese Board.

This isn't a very good idea, unless you can find a way to dry out the kiwi slices. I once tried exactly what you proposed here. The kiwi continued to weep once the tart was assembled, and by the time it was served about 2 hours later, the whole thing was a runny, sodden mess.

I won't ask. Sorry to be so cryptic. It's not a slam or disrespectful. It originated in the newsgroup alt.coffee. Here is an explanation of the God shot. No, I didn't take it as disrespectful in the least. It's just that, having never encountered it before, I conjured up all sorts of entertaining imagery – you know, omnipotence, lightning bolts, cosmic practical jokes, that sort of thing. Sort of like when a long-ago boyfriend stayed up all night Christmas Eve doing coke with his friends; walking home Christmas morning past a church full of carol-singing cherubs, he (psychotically guilt-ridden) slipped on ice and broke his arm. That'd be a God Shot. For the record, I'm not remotely religious and envision The Powers That Be as a crowd of overworked cosmic pranksters. Spelling.

"Broiled" bluefish steaks (from fish bought frozen at the grocer's...this in mid-60's Charlotte, NC). Even now, the smell of bluefish cooking activates my gag reflex.

I won't ask. I'd like to nominate the S'mores making kit. What a bad idea on every count. A) S'mores require a campfire – there's no alternative. B) Do children really need another sugar/caffeine delivery system? This was a gift from my SIL – an otherwise bright and lovely person. It's still sitting in the box. We've decided to send her 2-year-old a toy drum for his birthday.

Re: Mr. Clean erasers.... Hmmmm...do they work on kids' cave paintings? Seems my husband's kids all have the crayon gene & a mother that thought coloring on the ceiling was healthy. We could, of course, just paint. Here's my helpful hint: next time something's cooked/burned onto a pot or pan, try scraping with a wooden spoon instead of any scrubber or metal utensil. I discovered this serendipitously when trying to gently remove a candymaking accident from a tin-lined copper pot. Now I go for the wooden spoon before anything else. It's a really nice way to treat Le Creuset.

Poutine: french fries with brown gravy and curd cheese. Greater than the sum of its parts.

We have four different pepper grinders: William Bounds "crusher": loaded with black pepeprcorns; has adjustment for 3 grinds – coarse, medium and fine. This one is my husband's favorite, as he prefers coarse-ground. The fine setting isn't fine enough for my preference. It's been going strong for 2 years, and hasn't required any tinkering. Wooden peppermill with Peugeot mechanism: loaded with Grains of Paradise, which aren't so interesting that I use them very often, so the peppermill isn't used much either. If it were a better machine, I'd probably bother to load it with pepper. A Frugal Gourmet (stop laughing, it was a gift) "Turkish coffee grinder" peppermill: FG bashing aside, this is a great grinder. I keep it loaded with white peppercorns, set on fine grind. The receptacle end and the rapid-action turn arm let me grind a whole lotta pepper in not a lot of time. Eminently adjustable. Getting the receptacle off and on is a bit unwieldly. 12+ years of service with no complaints, though not in daily, or even weekly, rotation. A classic Perfex pepper grinder: my fave. I keep it loaded with black peppercorns, set on fine-ish grind. It's kept by the stove for cooking, but it's cute enough to sit on the table. Also eminently adjustable, but needs to be taken apart and cleaned every so often. 15+ years of daily service with no flat tires. Overall, I prefer a grinder with a turn arm to one which requires twisting the top – they're much more mechanically adept (and faster).

French's Mustard. Ooh, sorry, that's different. But don't forget French Dressing. Or "Frenched" Rack of Lamb.

Since I turn to cookbooks mostly for technique and not for specific recipes, per se, I have to cast a vote for Anne Willan's "La Varenne Pratique". If you have your wits about you, you can get a pretty thorough culinary education from this one book. I learned enough from it to be able to hop into a professional kitchen -- albeit a small one far from the madding crowd, but French and hectic nonetheless. LVP is an excellent reference for the serious cook.

My next frontier will be attempting to make yogurt, then butter, then cheese using fresh raw milk from a local farm. They have a Holstein herd, but one of their hands is starting to build a Jersey herd with an eye towards his own farm. He currently has two mature milking Jerseys and a pair of two-month old calves. The Jerseys get milked into the bulk tank along with the Holsteins, but I'm trying to negotiate for straight Jersey milk. It may require "bucket milking", but I'm eager to learn. I got Rikki Carrol's "Home Cheese Making" for Christmas, and I've made excellent contact with a number of Vermont cheese, butter and yogurt makers who might be willing to have an intern.

On the domestic front: tuna sandwich with peanut butter. Way better than it sounds, though. We call it a Mungo Sandwich.

It (the cure) always starts with as much Coke with ice as I can bear. If the hangover is severe, the rare-cheeseburger-and-fries cure follows, always accompanied by dark sunglasses. BTW, never ride in an elevator when you're severely hungover.

I probably didn't invent this, but in trying to find ways to use all the dulce de leche I made, it occured to me to mix a couple tablespoons of it into a mug of hot milk. Holy shit, it's good. Of course, DDL is best licked off a bare finger. For Christmas dinner, I had to improvise with what I had on hand, since I was flat dead broke (though redeemed by Friday morning...God the Comic). I pulled a small boneless pork loin roast out of the freezer, along with a lump of pancetta, a handful of pinenuts and a few globs of veal demi-glace. Some dried figs leftover from fruitcake-making were poached in a little white wine leftover from a previous dinner's risotto. I toasted the pinenuts, rendered the pancetta, and sautéed some garlic and shallots in the fat, then added the poached figs, the pinenuts and the rendered pancetta. Stuffed the pork loin with this and roasted it. For sauce, reduced the fig-poaching liquid and added the demi-glace, finished with butter. Made a quick gratin of two russet potatoes and a dribbling of heavy cream. Blanched & then sautéed some brussels sprouts. Washed it down with a bottle of Heitz Cab we'd been gifted with on Christmas Eve. Damned excellent for a dinner not pre-meditated. Maybe this belongs in another thread: Inventing A Holiday Dinner From What You Have On Hand.

Maybe they should run a contest for the new colors. You know, something like Martha Stewart araucana pastels. :choke: :gag: :strangle: :fall over dead:

Ooh, sore subject. I live in an area where there are numerous second homes with trophy kitchens – we're talking Viking or Wolf or DCS or Garland ranges, Subzero everything, double Fisher Paykel dishwashers, granite-marble-gold-plated countertops....the homes get used 2 – 4 weeks a year, the kitchens almost never. Makes me wanna puke. Especially when I get hired to cater dinner and find that nobody bothered to calibrate the oven...

Jackal - I've been happily and jealously reading along, but hadn't yet taken the time to comment. Yours is a fabulous blog, and represents an enviable lifestyle, even to someone who lives and cooks in beautifully rural Vermont. Puts my blog to shame, man. Having grown up Episcopalian in a church with an internationally renowned boys' choir, I can totally relate to the sound of the boy tenor heralding Christmas. Raises gooseflesh, no? Happy Christmas! GG

There's a silly old joke – it was one of my mother's favorites – about a guy in the hospital who is presented with a tray containing a cup of apple juice for him to drink and an empty jar for a urine sample. As soon as the nurse leaves the room, he pours the apple juice into the jar. When the nurse comes back, she holds the sample up to the light and says "Hmmm...looks a little cloudy". So the patient says "Here, gimme that – I'll run it through again" before tossing it back.

Or worse: write the most unconscionably twee menu description.

I'm down in the Manchester area. Never shopped at Gillingham's, though a beau once brought a nice Caymus Cab from there to dinner. My options are Manchester Discount Beverage (which is where I found the wine in question), Wines by George, Village Pantry du Logis and the various supermarkets. The first three have some interesting selections, but nowhere here would I find anything as grown up as a range of vintages. On occasion I get to Table and Vine in Northampton, MA, which has an excellent selection, and the prices are much better than those in Vermont.

I don't want to step on Mr. Steingarten's toes here, but I think I can suggest an answer to this. My father, who was born in 1924, was so grossed out by lamb that my mother was forbidden to cook it. I never inquired as to why, and just assumed it was an individual idiosyncracy. Recently, I reconnected with an aunt and uncle – my father's sister and her husband – and offered to cook dinner while I was a guest in their home. My aunt was open to anything I cared to cook; my uncle was open to anything I cared to cook except lamb, and he was adamant about this. I thought it was interesting that he should have the same aversion as my father (maybe my Grandmother did unspeakable things with lamb?), so I investigated. It turns out that during WWII, the US armed forces, or at least the Navy, served mutton as its primary protein source because it was cheap and plentiful. It's not hard to imagine how poorly prepared it might have been. My uncle said that the smell of lamb brought back every possible anti-Proustian sense memory connected with horrid mutton dishes, that he hadn't touched lamb since the war, and that he had forbidden his wife to cook it in the house or to order it in restaurants in his presence. My father also served in the Navy during WWII. I suspect a whole generation of American men have a similar aversion.

I look forward to dining in your restaurant someday. Big time congratulations!