browniebaker

Gee, thanks, Marlene! And, thank you, Toasted, for what looks like a terrific recipe. Can't wait to get a couple of avocados.

A recipe need only be written to be protected under the copyright laws of the U.S.; publication is not necessary for copyright portection to apply. Jotting down a recipe on a scrap of paper is sufficient to make that writing yours. The list of ingredients and quantities thereof can stay the same. What needs to be changed is the description of the food or the method of preparation. This is no big undertaking. Please post the avocado mousse recipe. It's nearly reaching legendary status by now!

Aaah, raisins have a special place in my heart, as my late grandmother's favorite sweet treat. The only place I don't love raisins is in rice pudding; it's unappealing, how the brown of the raisin bleeds into the cream of the pudding. But I love: Raisins in Japanese fruit pie (which is not Japanese at all but distinctly of the American South): it's raisins, shredded coconut, and chopped pecans in a chess filling, and it's heaven. Raisins in oatmeal cookies: chocolate chips in an oatmeal cookie are just wrong. Raisins in fruitcakes: the raisins are where the boozy goodness resides Raisins in Country Captain Chicken: the raisins are just the right foil for the curry. Raisins in raisin-carrot-apple salad: this cafeteria-classic wouldn't have the requisite chew and sweetness without the raisins.

Isn't a tiddy oggie simply a cornish pastie? Tiddy oggy is Cornish pasty minus beef, plus cheese. Priddy oggy is Cornish pasty minus beef, plus pork.

Cheese-onion-and-potato pasty = tiddy oggy.

A good index is key! So is a binding that both is durable and opens flat. Wipeable covers are good. Archival-quality paper that does not yellow is a plus.

My problem is not so much trying new recipes when I have guests, but tinkering with my tried and true recipes in order to make something etxra-special for guests. More peaches than usual in my muffins? The muffins sank in the middle and were soggy inside. Couldn't bring myself to serve the concave muffins, and served boring old toast instead, with apologies. I tell myself "never again," but I don't believe that.

I love buffets; grew up on them. My family are pros at buffets. Every Christmas when my husband, our children, and I go home to visit my parents and brothers, it's serious buffet time: three or four restaurants in ten days. My husband did not grow up on buffets and thinks my family is weird. Strategy is key. Father, a doctor, says eating slowly and stretching out the meal is the way to eat more. Everyone drinks only water, no fillers such as sweet tea or soda. And definitely no wine or beer -- too filling -- so we decline when the owner of the restaurant offers to send some complimentary drinks over. Buffets create some performance-anxiety, though. Father and mother both take buffets so seriously that recriminations rain down on you if they see food on your plate that they consider cheap fillers. Choose breads, potatoes, or pasta, and they will say they really don't get their money's worth when bringing you out to eat here. Fail to choose the food they consider delicacies -- crab, lobster, scallops, sushi, shrimp -- and they say the same. Eat too little in quantity, and they say the same. But eat too much, and Father starts feeling bad for the restaurant's losing money. Can't win. About wasting food Father and Mother go overboard. Heaven forbid you should leave a morsel uneaten. With just one mussel left on his plate, my brother realized he was too full to eat another bite. Recriminations rained down. Then Father and Mother "auctioned" off the lone mussel to whoever could still eat it. "Anyone, anyone?" I took the mussel, to take the heat off my brother, and my husband rolled his eyes at my parents and at me (for caving in to their excessive demands). I prefer eating at buffets alone or with my little children; there's no one to make judgments about my food choices.

When I was eight, I drank down a glass of Hawaiian Punch, only to see at the bottom of my glass a well-preserved, pinkish grasshopper.

Humans -- but I have never been pushed to my limits.

Does your shortbread recipe include salt, either in salted butter or added separately? I have several British cookbooks that call for unsalted butter and no salt. In fact, I grew up with unsalted shortbread. But now I wonder, would it taste better lightly salted, as so many foods do? Also, what's traditional in Scottish shortbread, salt or no salt?

About the waistline: I can empathize. But the awful truth is that your waistline will never be what it was. Blame it on childbearing and aging, both. I have had two children, one when I was 32 and one when I was 36. Both times, I diligently lost all the pregnancy weight until I was back to my pre-pregnancy 120 pounds (I'm 5' 4".). I also exercised the abdominal muscles. Even though I weighed the same amount as before, I just could never wear my belt at the same notch as before -- and never will again, I now acknowledge. My ob-gyn says the rib cage can expand during pregnancy to accomodate the growing baby, and the rib cage may never contract afterwards. Then there's the effect of aging: muscles lose tone and middles thicken. My therapist said to throw out the old clothes that kept reminding me that my waistline wasn't the same. Other than this, I just want say that calorie-reduction and exercise are the only things that worked for me. There's no magic to dieting. It's painful, yes, but you will feel better about yourself in the long run if you lose the weight. I applaud your determination to get your weight back down beofre the next pregnancy. Who says women have to keep a few pounds after each pregnancy? Good luck to you!

Pie.

Only buttermilk. And it has to be real. The powdered buttermilk is not thick enough. Whipped egg whites folded into the batter. Only White Lily all-purpose flour. a soft flour that makes the most tender of pancakes.

Huh? Have I been pronouncing some or all of these three words incorrectly all this time? Cumin: hard aspirated c, like a k sound, right? Chipotle: ch as in "chore," right? Cilantro: either soft c or ch as in "chore" is correct, I think. There's no alliteration here, unless someone can enlighten me about my mispronouncing a word. Help, please! Anyway, my holy trinities are: sweet potatoes, pecans, brown sugar ginger, scallion, soy sauce cheese, milk, noodles (mac 'n' cheese, lasagna, lukshen kugel)

We are eating the three gingerbread houses we made before Xmas. This could be several evenings' dessert.

Not Chinese loofah soup again! Mother has always grown Chinese vegetables in her garden. Often, in late summer, there would be a surplus of loofah, too many even to give away. Every night then, it was loofah soup, so we all got sick and tired of it.

About a year ago, I decided to treat myself (and family) to dinner out at a restaurant once a week. I used to allow dinner out just once a month, but I figured that life is short and I since we save by not having a housekeeper come by to do the cleaning and by keeping just one car, we deserve to eat out more. Gradually, though, the petty economizing measures started creeping in, as if in compensation for the weekend restaurant splurges. For example, I would pass up buying and cooking shrimp for dinner even if it was on sale, rationalizing that my family and I would be eating out in a few days and could eat shrimp at the restaurant. Instead of shrimp of something similarly expensive, I would make something simple and cheap, like sloppy joes, or spaghetti and meatballs. In short, knowing that we would be enjoying expensive culinary creations at restaurants every weekend gave me license to expend less money and less effort on my home-cooked meals. My small economies have lately come to include making the bread dough using water in which potatoes or pasta was boiled; keeping a "crumb bin" into which I sweep all the crumbs left on the cutting board after I slice bread and even the bread crumbs left on our plates after breakfast (family plates only, though!), and using the crumbs to make meatballs and meatloaves; and slicing open the near-empty mustard bottle to wipe it out with a slice of bread. How low have I gone? Recently I have embraced what I call my "bean cuisine." Beans instead of meat in a lot of dishes. Cheaper (and also healthier). I take a perverse pleasure in how many beans I can get away with putting into a dish instead of meat without my family knowing of the substitution. I am literally counting beans. If I go any lower, shoot me!

Between two layers of sponge cake I spread a nearly-as-thick layer of pastry cream, and I top it all with a not-too-thin chocolate glaze that sets smooth on the top and barely runs down the edges although not all the way down to the cake-plate. It's my husband's birthday cake of choice every year. So, neither creme anglaise nor bavarian cream. Pastry cream is the traditional filling for this cake.

From an early age, my mother's hot and sour soup spoiled me for any other version of it offered in any Chinese restaurant. The rest is intolerable brown glop. Once in a while. I think I'll have some in a restaurant, and I am always sorry.

Skchai, I don't know whether the French Rice Cake (which I have posted in the eGullet recipe forum as "Butter Mochi Cake" because it is neither French nor the crunchy dry dietetic puck I think of when I say "rice cake") is part of Taiwanese culinary tradition. Until I read this thread and learned that Hawaii had a tradition of butter mochi, I had thought it was just a westernized form of mochi or kueh. I do remember my grandmother in Taiwan serving us kids sweet kueh as a treat: rectangles of cake made with sweet-rice flour, sugar, and water, and pan-fried with a crisp crust. Sweet kueh is a traditional Tawianese sweet; that's for sure. I also know that my mother had never had butter mochi like this in Taiwan. She first learned of this when a Taiwanese-American woman taught this recipe to the doctors' wives at a wives' seminar at one of the annual reunions (about twenty years ago, in Chicago or D.C. -- I can't recall) of the United States branch of the alumni association of my father's medical school, National Taiwan Univeristy. The dropping of the red-bean paste: I drop it by scant teaspoonfuls all over the top of the batter, in no particular pattern, just aiming for even distribution as I work around and around the cake. I go around the cake maybe three or four times. I work quickly and do not delay in getting the cake into the oven, to prevent too much sinkage. Preventing sinkage is also the reason for tiny dollops. I end up with multiple dollops in each slice. The earlier-dropped dollops end up a little lower than the dollops dropped later, meaning just before I put it in the oven. After baking, you find that the red-bean paste stays in discrete dollops and does not blend into the batter at all. (Goodness, I am getting a craving for this cake just about now!) I have contemplated piping a thick ring of bean paste in the middle of the batter, but I think it would sink and have not tried that. Another idea I have had is to pour in about a third of the batter, bake until it has set, at least up against the pan, then pipe in the paste or drop in dollops of paste, pour in the rest of the batter, and bake until done. But I don't know whether the bottom section that was pre-baked would end up too dry. Too scared to try it. If you try either of these ideas or come up with a good method, would you please let me know? Mother sometimes brings this butter mochi to potlucks, and it is always a hit. She was incensed when her friend asked for the recipe and later showed up at a potluck with a pan of butter mochi -- problem was, this friend had stirred the red bean paste into the batter and was crediting my mother for the resultant vomit-colored mess! Mother still rants about this, fifteen years later. I hope you do try the recipe, as it is delicious!

Tang yuen is the correct Mandarin-dialect pronunciation of the term for the dumplings. The dumplings are not just Cantonese; the various Chinese provinces each have their versions of sweet or savory tang yuen.

Before it became a chain, Houston's started as a restaurant in Nashville, where I grew up, and a lot of Nashvillians I know still think of it as a one-off.

About three years ago, when my (Chinese immigrant) parents came to D.C. to visit me, I took them to lunch upstairs in the seafood part, and to this day they still rave about Tony Cheng's and the delicious meal they had there. The cooking was superb.

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