Tropicalsenior

Just thought that I would share this, And wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

It's gotten a little better but in the past, all we could get was the tops. I asked somebody in the Farmers Market why they never sold the white part of the onion and they said that they cut off the top and then the bottom grew out again so they could cut it off and sell It again. Quite a few years ago there was a man in the market that sold the tops of chives and I talked to him into bringing me several bunches with roots on them. I took them home and planted them and had a nice little chive patch for about 7 years until we got too much rain one year and it just drowned them. That's okay, I can't use them now anyway.

Since we're talking about master stock here, it's in a completely different category than forever soup and, yes, you can State the age by the time that you have had it going. It's richness depends on how often that you use it. The Chinese do not keep it simmering constantly. I wish that @liuzhou would weigh in and let us know how the Chinese preserve it between uses. I have a jar of shabu-shabu sauce base in my refrigerator that I have had going for almost 20 years. I learned it from a Japanese woman in Seattle. It is crushed garlic and crushed limes cut in half covered in soy sauce. I replenish the soy sauce as I use it and replace the garlic and lime about every 5 years. I use it as a base for dip for potstickers and in some sauces that I make. It has an indescribably rich flavor that just seems to get better all the time.

The recipe sounds good and with your adaptations it sounds even better. It does have two teaspoons of sugar at the end that it does not account for. Do you put in additional sugar or just ignore the discrepancy?

That's what I use, too. Garlic powder, especially here in the tropics just turns into nasty clumps.

That sounds like my late husband. I always said that when he got loose in the kitchen, it took an act of Congress to clean up after him.

I seem to use my FP for breadcrumbs most of the time. I make my own bread and it just kills me to see any of the bread get moldy. Also I like my bread crumbs to be quite coarse, more like panko. I sift out the finer ones and use them to coat cake pans instead of flour. I find that the cakes don't stick as much.

You can pack a few of those into your suitcase when you come to visit.

Oops. Sorry I didn't edit this well enough that was $1.75. And it's us dollars.

I managed to find some gorgeous ones here last week for $75 a pound. I bought two kilos.

Happy to oblige. I just happened to have it sitting in the hallway ready to go grocery shopping. He also made the hallway table and the niche above it.

One restaurant that I worked in had a standalone stock pot in one corner of the kitchen. It was about 30 gallons, I would estimate. It had a fine screen that hung about halfway down the pot that would be hauled out periodically and dumped. All vegetable scraps, bones, meat scraps, and pan drippings went into the pot. There was a spigot at the bottom to draw off the stock. I remember that on a cold Winter's day there was nothing better than a good cup of bullion to keep you warm. It had been going for about 15 years before I started work there and that was in 1973. To my knowledge the restaurant is still open so that would make it about 64 years old if it is still going.

That pork chop looks perfect, nice and moist with at least a little browning.

There is a lot of good advice on tempering chocolate and using cocoa butter in this topic. Maybe there's something here that will help.

I like that patina. At least that's what I tell myself when I look up there and see that dark crust forming and I think about scouring them out.

It sounds like you have chosen an ambitious project for your retirement. Your candies are absolutely gorgeous. What part of the country are you in? I hope that you will check out some other forums and share some of your recipes with us, not just for candy but some of your restaurant favorites.

Oh dear! I'm afraid if that were mine I would just have to forget that I had a celler. Stairs are completely out of my league. Fortunately, our house is on all one level and years ago my husband made me a rolling cart. It was originally to use for my sewing machine but it has turned out to be the best thing that he ever made for me. I use it all the time to bring groceries in from the car. I can roll it right up to the trunk and put everything on it. And I usually have a lot of bags because I have the checkers all trained to only fill them about half full. If we are eating in the dining room, I use it to take in all my dishes to set the table, once again with all the food, and afterwards I put a dish tub on it and bring back in all the dishes.

Welcome to eG. Those are beautiful. I'm not into making candy so I hope that you will venture further into the topics on eG and meet the rest of us. I think that you will like it here.

Another cell phone feature that older people don't take enough advantage of is dictation. All smartphones have it and it sure is a lot easier than trying to hunt and Peck on that tiny little keyboard. If I didn't have that you would hear from me once a year at Christmas time when I wished you "hoppy halidabs."

I also photograph and enlarge hard to read directions that I would be using all the time. I keep them in a photo file so that it is easy to refer back to them instead of hunting for a magnifying glass or enlarging them every time you need to read them. That and the flashlight feature on a cell phone can be a big help to those that are visually impaired. I used my flashlight feature today to read the menu at lunch in a restaurant that was definitely light deficient. Otherwise I would have had to have somebody read the menu for me.

I think as we get older, the trick is not so much to work less it is to work smarter. I never move from one part of the kitchen or to one part of the house with empty hands. I make every trip count. One thing that I have started to do is to set up a tray before I start to finish my dinner with everything to set the table. Plates, silverware, napkins, and all my serving spoons that I will be using. That way I have one trip to the table and done.

Buckets and buckets of hummus.

I can't even have the hope that mine will die anytime soon. A friend of mine bought the same one at the same time that I did. He has used it 7 days a week in his restaurant and it still shows no sign of giving up.

Not exactly a sheet pan meal but one of my favorite things to do is a meatloaf meal. When I make a small meatloaf just big enough for the two of us, I put it in a large glass loaf pan. I put the meatloaf in one half and put parboiled potatoes and carrots shaken with oil and some type of seasoning mix in the other half. Bake at 350° for about 30 minutes and you have a whole meal.

I've had quite a few years of learning to cope with this. Carlos lived with us for several years when my husband was alive and I would prepare a dish up to a point and then separate a portion out for him before I added the onions and garlic. When he rented a room for me after my husband died, I decided that I just was not going to make two meals, one with and one without, and I would learn to eat what he could eat. I just found that it was not going to be Bland and that I would learn to compensate with other seasonings and textures. Thank goodness, he is an adventurous eater which isn't common in Latin American people. I've had a few pretty colossal failures and he doesn't bat an eye.