browniebaker

My quickest, cheapest meal has to be a quesadilla and salad. When the whole family gets home late from errands and cub scouts and ballet, and the children are screaming hungry, I heat up the cast-iron skillet, put in a tortilla, slice some pepper jack cheese on top (and add scallions or other seasonings if there's time), slap another tortilla on top, flip it once, and am done. The salad is quick, too, of course. Oddly, this is not only the cheapest and quickest meal but also my children's favorite meal -- well, isn't that convenient? My children also love scrambled eggs, and that is another cheap and fast dinner in a pinch. They even prefer scrambled eggs to omelettes, and who am I to dissuade them from choosing the easier-to-make dish? Yesterday afternoon I spent three hours making chili, including dicing chuck and roasting peppers over an open flame, and it seemed a lot of time to spend cooking, but I read the Sunday paper during the cooking so that it wasn't all work, and now I have four meals' worth in the freezer, for a very quick meal on weekdays. For the primary cook in this household, there's nothing like the security of having a freezer full of ready meals. edit: spelling

Dark, oily canned tuna Finely chopped celery Hellman's mayonnaise Salt Ground black pepper Soft white bread Nothing else

I didn't know this thread existed. And I can't believe it thrives. The top five Chinese restaurants in America? Chinese cuisine is very broad, comprising diverse regional styles of cooking. Equally diverse are the restaurants and the different regional styles of Chinese cooking that they present. This is like asking what are the top five "European-style" or "continental" restaurants in America. Impossible. I'd consider the question if there were categories, for Szechuan, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Hunanese, Shanghainese, Peking-style, Mongolian, Hakka, Hawaiian-Chinese, Singaporean-Chinese, etc.

OK, I just went and found a random baby pic online, draw your own conclusions. EDIT: Hmmmm, pic won't load. Try this. Thank you, Sherribabee. Separated at birth!

So how come my three-year-old just now saw the photo of Vengroff's roasted chicken scroll by, pointed to the computer screen, and said, "Baby!"? LOL! That's the honesty of children for you.

Burnt? Hardly. It's moist and evenly cooked from breast to thigh, with a crisp golden brown skin. Once you quarter it, it looks like every other roast chicken--but it tastes better. Certainly the chicken's not burnt, but have you seen burned human skin? A burned baby looks just like that. I am sure your chicken was as delicious as you say, but I am sorry to say that the limb-configuration that Chef Fowke's trussing method produces is, to me, unappetizing. Really.

OMG, it looks just like a burnt baby! Shudder! After seeing the pictures, now I know I'll never truss like that. Edit: In fact, I am feeling a bit queasy. Can't get the image out of my head.

Montgomery County (Maryland) schools are cancelled Thursday, and were scheduled to be closed Friday anyway. I haven't done a thing to prepare, as the whole pile of supplies I set aside in the basement against terrorism attacks is still there. I thought it would come in handy some day.

Because I have purposely limited my cookbooks to only whatever will fit on the two to three feet of countertop to the left of my refrigerator, I have had to buy only cookbooks I really believe I will cook from and to give away any that I find that I do not cook from. Of the approximately 30 cookbooks I own, I probably cook regularly from 25 of them, whether it be using recipes straight from the book or using the recipe as a reference regarding seasonings, cooking method, timing, etc. I like to have cookbooks that have recipes for the same dishes, so that I can do some comparative studies before cooking. Edit: I forgot to say, I just plain like to read cookbooks, too.

I just now finished watching Dr. Phil and Katie Couric's two-hour TV show on NBC called "Survival of the Fittest," all about not using food as an emotional crutch, and I almost want to take back what I said earlier in this thread about pie or a stack of pancakes being the balm for a broken heart. But probably all I need is a few hours to get over Dr. Phil's good advice! For me, food definitely is love, and I need a fix nearly every day. Whose heart isn't wounded just a little, here and there, every day?

Have you checked at Eastern Market? The farmers there often have interesting varieties, and if they don't have what you want on hand, they might be able to procure it for you. Sigh. I miss that market. Used to live 3 blocks away. Thanks for the tip. I'll try it. This could be the year I finally try the famed Northern Spy.

for cooking and baking: Rome Beauty for eating out of hand: Gala (I like the hard crunch and sweetness of it.) Would like to try the Northern Spy for baking pies, but have not come across it in the D.C. area where I live. Perhaps I need to drive out somewhere.

You know how you buy a fryer chicken in a bag and underneath the chicken is a spongy absorbent pad that soaks up its body fluids? Last night I thought I'd give it a good squeeze before throwing it in the garbage can, so it wouldn't drip in the can. Chicken fluids squirted three feet up, all over my kitchen cabinets.

Definitely do not miss having dinner at the Michelin-three-star Lameloise in Chagny. It is worth a drive out of your way. On our wedding trip in 1995, my husband and I enjoyed the most incredible dinner there, surpassing all dinners we had had and have since had. It remains our touchstone. Staying at the inn upstairs would be nice, especially when one waddles out of the restaurant at 11:00 and can't face driving! See the restaurant's website at Lameloise.

Borden's individually wrapped fat-free processed cheese slices, frozen for the past year. I was on a diet, okay?

When people tire of it, as they do of every fad or fashion, eventually. This fad of the restaurant-kitchen as show is related to the recent rise of the "celebrity chef." But the vaunted celebrity-chefs may be on their way down, if waning sales of celebrity-chef-authored cookbooks by in Britain are any indication. What goes up must come down. I waited out the mini-skirt fad, and eventually skirt hems did go down.

You need a good home-baked pie; there's real balm for the wounded heart in a pie. But if that's too much for one person (I eat a whole pie, but that's not for everyone), have a tower of pancakes slathered with good butter and good maple syrup.

Beautiful kitchen already! Just a suggestion: Hold the under-cabinet lights under the cabinets to make sure that placing them forward will not make them too visible. During my kitchen-remodeling, I had to have the under-cabinet lights placed in the middle of the underside of the cabinets, not the front, because front-placement would have made the light fixtures easily visible to someone standing far (10 feet or so) from the cabinets.

Mooncakes: Chinese; eaten once a year only for the mid-autumn moon festival (lunar calendar); pastry wrapped around sweet fillings of lotus paste, red-bean paste, mung-bean paste, date paste, or five-nut cake, all available with or without one or two salty preserved egg yolks; expensive. Moonpies: American (originating in Tennessee, where I grew up!); eaten year-round; marshmallow between cookies, all dipped in chocolate, and available in single-decker, double-decker, and mini; inexpensive. Both: irresistible and fattening. Love 'em both.

Leave the steel bench-scraper in the drying rack with the scraping edge up. Later, putting some utensils into the drying rack, I accidentally pressed down on the edge of the scraper and got a 1/8"-deep cut in the side of my hand that didn't stop bleeding for an hour.

I like all chocolate, milk, semisweet, and dark/bittersweet, but whereas milk or semisweet chocolate are easy to eat, the dark or bittersweet requires a little work on my part to get past the initial hardness against my teeth and bite of bitterness on my tongue. Other foods that, for me, require work to get past an initially disagreeable texture or flavor are sweets with alcohol in them; coffee; and, formerly, sharp blue cheese, which now requires no work to enjoy -- acclimation, maybe? Generally, I don't bother with foods that are hard for me to enjoy. Life is short.

I use the cake pans with the removeable inserts for just about everything. Mine are made by Parrish as part of their "Magic Line" of heavy-gauge aluminum pans. My old springforms never get used anymore. I like how easy to wash these are, as compared to the springforms with their latches and rims. I also like that these removable-bottom pans come in round, square, and rectangular shapes, a huge range of widths, and various heights. I use these for layer cakes, for ease of removal. I never have to use parchment anymore. I use these for brownies and other bar cookies, for ease of removal and for perfect corners. A 3" pan placed inside a larger, say 10", pan makes a great tube pan, which I use when baking fruitcakes; thus I avoid having to line a pan with foil before greasing it, and the fruitcake comes out of the pan easily. With cheesecakes, the removable bottoms without rims allow you to cut right on the bottoms. There's no need to transfer the cake. I use a plastic knife, though, so as not to mar the finish. I have baked with these pans in a water bath, but only with aluminum foil wrapped around the base, which I would also have to use with a springform anyway. I also like that Parrish sells the pans alone and the removable bottoms alone, so you can easily buy replacement parts.

Jinmyo, I know I'm your complete opposite when it comes to sweets. I do respect others' preferences for the savory over the sweet but your total dismissal of all sweets makes me feel very, very sorry for your missing out on a whole class of wonderful FOODS, yes, FOODS! This is from a saccharovore who yesterday drove fifteen miles and spent two hours picking out mooncakes and brought home six mooncakes for a family of two adults and two little children. Guess who's planning on eating most of the mooncakes this Thursday evening while gazing at the full moon? Sorry, Jinmyo.

When I use Plugra in shortbread, I definitely can taste the difference. The same is true for my pie crust; Plugra produces a crust that is not only flakier because of the higher fat content of the butter but also tastier. Because I buy grocery-store-brand unsalted butter on sale at $1.50 and Plugra at Trader Joe's for $2.99, for me Plugra is double the price of regular butter. I always use Plugra when baking for gifts or for entertaining. But I guess I would not use it in my brownies, in which the taste of the chocolate (used in large amounts) dominates.

The idea of a kitchen table or chef's table bores me. If I want to eat in the kitchen, I'll eat at home. This trend toward the restaurant as a show to watch has gone as far as it can, I hope, with the "The Restaurant" television show. Why do people need entertainment during dinner beyond the companionship of fellow diners at the table? I'm sitting out this whole trend, just as I sat out the whole mini-skirt trend of the '80s.