Toliver

Thank you for posting about the currant tomato plant living on. I am so happy to hear that they've made a little someone happy and I know my mom will be thrilled with the news. I'm surprised they aren't a more popular plant (eg, used in classroom gardens) since they're just the perfect size for the little ones to eat. I have a friend who had no luck with pumpkins until the year a volunteer popped up on her compost pile (like your cantaloupes). Go figure!

The white gravy that can come with chicken fried steak might not contain a drop of the rendered fat from the steak. A lot of restaurants use crumbled sausage and the rendered fat from the sausage as the base for their white gravy. Biscuits and gravy (a typical breakfast item around here) will have a sausage based white gravy. I agree that white gravy can sometimes be heavy. You have to be in the mood for it and have to be able to remain motionless for a while after eating it. edited for spellling

I think the main difference between a white sauce and a white gravy is that the white gravy usually uses drippings/rendered fat from the meat (or from another meat, for example, like sausage) and can be made in the same pan used to cook the meat entree. Of course, there are different ways to make the gravies but it supposed to be about economy and efficiency (why dirty another pan? Why throw out that chicken fat from the skillet when it can be used for gravy?). Whereas a white sauce is usually made in a separate pan and normally doesn't use a rendered fat. Generally they use butter for the fat. Of course, there are exceptions but I think this is the main difference between the two.

Doritos Collisions: Cheesy Enchilada and Sour Cream We have a winner. The cheesy enchilada chips are quite cheesy (ie, a lot of orange cheese powder ) and have a dash of spice to them (cumin, maybe?). While the sour cream chips don't have a sour cream tang, they do have an overall creamy, almost cheesy, flavor to them. All together, a good combination. Thumbs up.

Mary Janes. I never see them in the candy aisle in the stores, but there are bags of them at Halloween. You can order them on the retro candy web sites, but my jones for them is sated for the year every Halloween.

Word, from another cupcake consumer. Don't be stingy with the frosting, baby. Slather it to excess and you will be fondly remembered in last wills and testaments.

It may not be your heat source that's the problem. If it comes out too soggy it could be due to the rice retaining too much moisture. Have you tried skipping a day and make the fried rice on day 3? Refrigerating the rice an extra day may remove more moisture from the rice. Freezing would zap moisture, too.

The first time I make a recipe, I follow it exactly. If it turns out great, I'll continue to follow the recipe exactly. But if I find the end result lacking or if I think of a way to improve it or Gild the Lily, I'll make changes.

Regarding the veggies I used to be guilty of this, as well. But now I make it a point that when I get home from grocery shopping, I will cut and prep whatever veggies I can right then and there. I have a small tall plastic pitcher that I fill with water and holds my prepped celery and radishes (change the water every 2 to 3 days). Cauliflower and/or broccoli gets cut up and put into a ziploc bag. The veggies get eaten since prepping them is half the battle some days. And don't throw the rice out. Use it for an easy fried rice, or rice pudding or save to add to soups or salads.

I have a Pampered Chef version of the Slap Chop. I use it whenever I need a quantity that would be a pain to cut by hand, but not enough to warrant taking out the food processor and cleaning afterwards. The problem I have with the chopper, is that it is not uniform in it's cutting. I primarily use it if I am cooking the veggies. It works great for a mirepoix, or as is more often the case with me, the cajun trinity. If I am concerned even a little about presentation (e.g. in a salad), I reach for a knife. I don't need uniformity of a dice when making a salad for myself. It's just me, afterall. I'm easy to please that way. edited to add: I do have knife skills thanks to the eGCI knife skills course and a class I took at a local kitchen store. But I choose to use the Slap Chop because it's quick and the end results are satisfactory for my needs.

Dude, The Slap Chop Bing Bang Boom. Done. I use mine all the time. Makes chopping veggies for the salad easy peasy.

My brother makes twice-baked sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. Note that these aren't the orange-fleshed yams but are the yellow-fleshed potatoes. He uses a blend of whatever he has on hand. I call him our "Mother Hubbard Gourmet" because he can take whatever's left in the cupboard or refrigerator and make something incredible and delicious out of it. Last year he used roasted garlic, cream cheese, a little milk, scallions and some crumbled bacon to refill the potatoes. He's a savant in the kitchen.

I agree with this advice. Talk it over and see if changes can be made so you can learn. If that doesn't happen, life is too short. Wish them the best and move on. Learn somewhere else. The sooner the better for your life and your career.

You get bonus points for showing your food-related ink in the photo.

Regarding the original posters question of why use egg whites, I think the "why" is because it acts as a glue to adhere the spice(s) to the nuts. When baked, it will dry to a clear coating. Also, egg whites are pretty much neutral in flavor. So yes, prasantrin, I think you should still use egg whites whether you're making sweet or savory nuts.

Last night I baked some country style pork ribs that turned out great. I rubbed them with Montreal Steak Seasoning (of all things) and baked them covered for a little bit more than an hour. Then I uncovered them and slathered them with a BBQ sauce and returned them to the oven for about another half hour or so, turning the heat down a bit. They probably could have used more BBQ suace but they were still some delicious pork goodness. Accompanied with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli.

I'm not a consistent clipper. It has helped keep my food magazine collection at bay by forcing me to go through and, instead of keeping the entire issue, clip out recipes that sounded good to me and toss the rest of the magazine. This eventually led to the stopping my subscription to Bon Appetit as I found less and less recipes that interested me enough to cip them out. My mom, on the other hand, has a little wooden recipe box overstuffed with decades of clippings. A very small percentage of those clippings have actually been made by her. But what she did make have been winners and are still made to this day. A summertime favorite was a beef jerky recipe she clipped out of the newspaper decades ago. And Thanksgiving isn't the same without her recipes clipped from Women's Day magazine for Onion Casserole, Strawberry-Cranberry Jello Salad and a wonderful Cajun Turkey Gravy that my brother always makes.

I would love to learn more about this woman with the golden touch. Can we call out the bloodhounds?

Like the milk man of olden days, except he delivered baked goods. The Helms Man in our neighborhood didn't drive a van, per se. To me it had more of the shape of a hearse. It was a dull blue-ish gray color and had a bell that he would ring to announce that he was in your neighborhood. I think eventually the bell was replaced by the car horn. He'd swing open the back doors and there would be a stack of drawers, each drawer containing some sort of baked good, from loaves of bread to cookies to pastries, etc. The bottom drawer was filled with the penny candies (Mary Janes, Bazooka Bubble Gum, wax lips, and other assorted candies). Candy had to be in the bottom drawer because the clients for that drawer were usually the small kids from the neighborhood who weren't very tall.

Regarding rice noodles, I've posted about this before but I saw Martin Yan, in one of his PBS cooking series, make rice noodles in a basket steamer over his wok. The batter was relatively thin and he poured it onto what looked like a large banana leaf in a steaamer basket. The way he poured the batter reminded me a lot of crepe batter where the object is to not make it too thick. He then covered the basket and in a short while he had a rice "pancake" that he cut into noodle strips. He certainly made it look easy. I'm not sure if he put the noodles into a stir fry. This makes me wonder how fragile the fresh noodles are. If anyone attempts making rice noodles, please post your results.

I'm not a gardener either but I had success with my windowsill planter growing herbs. Luckily, I have a south-facing kitchen window with barely enough windowsill upon which to perch the planter I had bought. I grew the usual suspects...basil, oregano, chives, thyme. They all did quite well. I don't think zone really matters when it comes to indoor plants since your indoor temperature stays within a certain comfortable range. Exposure to the sun and making sure they're watered was all it took for my little garden to prosper. I'm not a big fan of mint but do recommend you give it its own planter/container. It has a tendancy to take over its growing space which is why it's not recommended for ground planting.

Amen to Hodad's. Once my brother gets a grip on his Hodad burger, he doesn't let go for anything. He even gets his daughter to feed him french fries (or their great onion rings) so he doesn't have to free his hands up. He has it down to an art, to say the least.

Alas, this is no longer correct. A short while ago there was an overhaul of the Taste of Home magazine and they began running ads. The magazine content was also tweaked and I think in the process it's lost some of the "charm" that made it such a unique magazine. The recipes they run now are a little more...uhm...adventurous now (Smoked Salmon-Dijon Créme Fraiche Canapés, anyone? ).

Bananas. I use a banana hanger and when I need to remove a banana from the hanging bunch, I use the shears to snip one off. I found that when I would just yank one banana off the bunch while on the hanger, sometimes the peels on the other bananas in the bunch, if too ripe, would start to split. Kitchen shears became the quickest solution.

I've posted this story before... Alex Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers NFL football team, arrived at the Star of the Sea restaurant. The Star of the Sea was an "Old School" fine dining restaurant overlooking San Diego Bay. The restaurant had a dress code for men requiring a suit and tie in order to dine there. When Mr. Spanos arrived he wasn't wearing the requisite suit and tie providing a dilemma for the restaurant. Stick to the dress code and turn away a high profile customer and let him take his business elsewhere or abolish the dress code? The dress code was done away with from that moment on. So a restaurant can stick to their guns and enforce the dress code and risk losing buisness (and potential business from friends and associates of those customers turned away), or they can drop the dress code and bring customers and their money into the restaurant. A sad footnote, the Star of the Sea restaurant eventually went out of business (it's now an "event" site for wedding receptions, etc).