browniebaker

Absolutely the most embarrassing: Chinese buffet restaurants. I love them. I grew up on them, and they are associated with childhood and happy occasions. But, in mitigation of my crime, please consider that I only frequent good Chinese buffet restaurants -- there are good and bad ones, you know! Other embarrassments: Fritos stirred into my chili, or just Fritos with cheddar cheese melted on top. Seafood salad made with surimi (fake crab) and loads of sweetened mayonnaise.

Growing up with a mother who always stocked our pantry with waffle cones for eating ice cream at home, the sugar cone was what I as a child always chose when I went out for ice cream. Sugar cones were therefore special and exotic. Sugar cones were also what contained my favorite ice-cream treat, the Nutty Buddy. Now that I've long been an adult and love feeling like a child again, I choose the waffle cone all the time, whether at home or out. I buy the pack of waffle cones that some in pink, green, and brown, just as my mother did. Actually, I think waffle cones just taste better. The crispness and lightness are a good foil for the creaminess of ice cream. Sugar cones just don't tatse very good to me now, often having the texture of damp cardboard, especially once you reach the bottom of the cone. And with sugar cones, there's the annoying drip of melted ice cream through the hole. As a mother now, I like the neatness of the hole-less waffle cone (cup, rather?) with a flat bottom, that can be set on the table.

In the autumn I love to bake sweet-potato pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, apple cobbler, apple dumplings, gingerbread, sticky toffee pudding, sticky gingerbread pudding, and fruitcake (which counts as an autumn dessert since I can't wait until Christmas to eat some).

I'd tell the chef that his/her version was "almost as good as the one my Aunt Effie makes."

Okay, I'll eat, but I don't love, all the assertive, coarse and wiry, sharp and spicy greens in many fancy mixed-green salads. Eating arugula is like chewing weeds. The only greens I really love in my salads are mild and tender Bibb and red leaf, and even crisp but still mild Romaine. Even iceberg is better than arugula.

Yea, when I was little and not allowed to use the oven or rangetop, my making of grilled-cheese sandwiches consisted of peeling the plastic wrap from a slice of processed American cheese and quickly slipping it between two slices of white sandwich-loaf bread that had just pop up fropm the toaster, letting the heat from the slices melt the cheese. I had to be quick, though, or it would be just a plain cheese sandwich.

Ingredients for meatballs: ground pork, beef, and turkey, or only one or two of the above if that is all I have on hand; bread crumbs soaked in milk; eggs, or only egg whites if I have some that need using up; grated parmesan; minced garlic; chopped flat-leaf parley; dried basil; dried oregano; ground black pepper; cayenne; and salt. Walnut-size meatballs. The kids like them small, one-bite. I used to fry them in the pan before adding to the sauce, but once I tried them simply booked in the sauce, the family was hooked. They like the ultra-tender meatballs that result. Less bother for me, so I love it. We like dried thin spaghetti. As for sauce, I take the noodles out of the water just before it reaches al-dente stage and cook them in the sauce for about a minute or two, until ,the texture is right. I like how the sauce permeates the noodle, and never liked the look of naked noodle.

Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany, by Ben Schott, who wrote Schott's Original Miscellany. This is a great little read if you like useful and un-useful nuggets of trivia. Good to dip into when you have a free minute, with not too much mental concentration required.

Coming from a long line of fishermen, I am embarrassed not to love fish ('though I do like it). Unlike my ancestors, I grew up in a land-locked place. I will do almost anything to avoid cleaning or even handling a fish. Ironically, my chagrin at not loving to eat fish does not prevent me from looking down on meat-and-potatoes types who don't eat fish for no reason other than that fish is too exotic. I guess I distinguish myself as someone who can appreciate the gastronomical appeal of fish, as opposed to some supposedly unsophisticated rube who cannot appreciate it at all!

I like the concept of tsen, which is Mandarin for "proper." That may be what my parents mean when they taste a classic Chinese dish and pronounce it well-made. They never say that if the chef or cook has taken creative liberties with the ingredients or cooking method of a dish. Traditionally, Confucian Chinese society was very conformist, and the concept of authenticity in cooking reflects this conformism. Here's a good column on the concept of tsen in Chinese cooking.

Chunky Jif smeared on just-toasted white or egg bread, with or without Smucker's strawberry jam, and eating immediately Also, the same on untoasted same Why Jif and Smucker's? Blame it on my mother. It's what I liked then and what I like now.

Let me ask you this: if you have been eating brownies all your life and somebody just cooked some brownies for you, would you be able to tell how good they would probably taste just by taking a look at them? Frankly, no, I wouldn't be able to tell. In my experience, some of the ugliest foods are the tastiest. But I find the Eastern Bakery mooncakes not only comely but tasty. I bought mine from the shop, nearly every week for the three months that I lived in the area in spring of 2001. And since then my husband has brought them home maybe once or twice a year when he goes to S.F. They don't do mail-order, as far as I know, so there's no issue, as you raise, of their saving the best for mail-orders. I just have never seen at Eastern Bakery the misshapen, un-shiny mooncakes you describe. Also, I know it's useful sometimes to judge a purveyor by how many people are lined up to get in, but that benchmark is sometimes an indicator not of quality but of trendiness or popularity (not the same thing as quality, in my book); witness the crazy long lines at your local Cheesecake Factory. So I try not to judge food based on popularity.

I was not scared by the decade-old pastry sample displayed in their window, Gary, and did go into the store to look at the "real" thing. I think their owner has not heard of companies who can make plastic model of your real food item for the purpose of placing in display window. But you didn't actually taste any of Eastern Bakery's mooncakes before passing judgment? Your description sounds nothing like the mooncakes I know and love from Eastern Bakery. De gustibus .... In my side-by-side taste-test three years ago, AA Bakery's mixed-nut mooncake filling was not as tasty as Eastern Bakery's. Again, de gustibus .... I e-mailed Sheng Kee after seeing no mixed-nut mooncakes in the boxed sets offered on their website. Today I got a reply stating that Sheng Kee doesn't make any mixed-nut mooncakes. Huh? How can that be? Mixed-nut mooncakes are a traditional flavor, nothing off the wall, and I would expect a venerable bakery like Sheng Kee to offer them. Kee Wah's website, I see, offers mixed-nut mooncakes in several varieties, including single-yolk and double-yolk. However, all of them contain Virginia ham! I don't usually have ham in my mooncakes, but maybe I'll try these.

Whatever you do, use melted butter instead of creamed butter, to keep the characteristically dense texture of carrot cake. Creaming the butter would give a totally different, fluffy texture. I use half butter and half vegetable oil, but you should experiment to see what you like. You might find that substituting butter for all the vegetable oil results in a cake with too much butter flavor. After all, there is a LOT of vegetable oil in most carrot cake recipes. (I must confess, my favorite carrot cake recipe is one that I developed by including only 2/3 the fat (i.e., vegetable oil) called for in the usual recipe, and substituting butter for half of the oil.)

Yes, I think carrot cake originated in a period when health-foods were all the craze. Wasn't it very popular in the 70s? Carrot cake as health-food -- that's a laugh!

Yes, I know that my eating mooncakes alone is totally incorrect. It's a bad thing, like drinking alone. Mooncakes are meant for eating with family and friends while gazing at the moon, which I also do (in addition to my private feast!). As for the tea: I wouldn't dream of having mooncakes without the accompaniment of a delicate, flowery China tea. The night of the festival, we find the room in the house that has the best view of the moon through a window, and we set up an indoor picnic before that window. My kids think it's a lark and love it. I really look forward to the this annual event, about as much as Thanksgiving (United States holiday) and Christmas. Thanks, hzrt8w, for the Kee Wah Bakery link. Sheng Kee (Taiwanese, and my (Taiwanese) parents' choice as the gold standard in mooncakes) or Kee Wah (Hong-Kong-based)? Wow, this is going to be fun, just researching the issue and deciding! Maybe both? I'm thinking a side-by-side taste-test is in order -- all in the name of scientific research, of course!

Egad, does ANYONE ever take a bite out of a whole mooncake? Just doesn't seem right. Like buttering a whole slice of bread and biting off it. Even I go through the motions of cutting the mooncake in quarters before inhaling the whole thing!

Yeah, right, BB. I'm guessing it was one of those "I-don't-dare-come-back-without-it" kinds of "surprise." Gary, you must be my kind of husband!

Last mid-autumn moon festival (for lack of a business trip to S.F.), I bought a box of four Shengkee mooncakes from my local Chinese grocery, and they were delicious. There were two egg-yolk-lotus-seed and two red-bean-with-pine-nuts. However, I found no mixed-nut mooncakes of the Shengkee brand or any other brand at the grocery, so I picked up two mixed-nut at Maria's, a chain Chinese bakery just outside D.C. in Rockville, Maryland. Did I regret this purchase or what?! The mixed-nut filling was syrupy and cloyingly sweet, with no subtlety of flavors at all. The pastry around the filling was blah. I could barely choke it down. Terrible. I'm spoiled by Eastern Bakery's mixed-nut mooncakes, which are peerless in my book. But I am going to try to mail-order mixed-nut mooncakes this year from Shengkee. Thanks, Chengb02, for putting the idea in my head!

You ate 2 in one sitting, and didn't lay down the rest of the day? And on top of that, you had room for about half of another one later? Whoa. Yep. "Sandwiched" between the dawn snack of two mooncakes and the evening dessert of about half a mooncake was my town's annual July 4th picnic of pulled pork barbecue, burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, corn on the cob, slaw, chips, and Ben & Jerry's ice cream bars, of all of which I partook liberally. Mooncakes and BBQ -- what a perfect Fourth of July it was! But, goodness, this revived mooncake thread is just killing me! I haven't been able to stop thinking about mooncakes for the past two hours! Need a mooncake, now.

Ooh, it's almost that time of year again! What day is mid-autumn this year? On July 3 my husband came home from a business trip to S.F. with a terrific surprise for me: a box of four mooncakes from Eastern Bakery!!! To die for! Two mixed-nut, and two double-yoke- lotus-seed. I snarfed two in the wee a.m. hours, all by myself, while everyone else slept, then shared the remaining two with the kids and the husband for dessert that day, after dinner. I am so selfish and greedy when it comes to mooncakes! Oh, how I wished Eastern Bakery did mail-orders!

Not to be confused with steel wool, which you should NOT use, or you will destroy the smooth and shiny finish of your pan.

I'd say that, at the high temperature of 500 degrees F, you've got some smoke and oily vapors swirling around in that oven. That would explain why the outside and inside of the pan are getting brown. My roasting pan gets not only spatters but areas of diffuse, vague browning, which I attribute to the smoke and oily vapors in the oven during roasting. I don't sweat it too much and don't bother to clean it off completely but, then again, my Kitchen-Etc.-housebrand stainless-steel roasting pan costs a lot less than yours. Like everything, I chalk it up to the Detritus of Living.

I'm one who likes my cheesecake plain, no crust or fruit. Any fruit just seems to overwhelm the delicate flavor of the cheesecake. In all those fancy fruity cheesecakes, it seems that the cheesecake serves as just a vehicle for the fruit on top or mixed throughout. What a shame. If I had to have a fruity cheesecake, I would prefer the fruit be on the side or on top, so I could isolate the fruit and avoid eating it!

Oil spatters are getting baked on. I use a solution of baking soda and vinegar. Let it fizz. Soak. Scrub.