Spices That Go Together, by Tamarind

When I do indian, i typically do garam masala + turmeric + red chili powder + cumin seeds + cumin + coriander, added to chopped onions sauteed in oil w garlic and ginger.

Li, Penzeys is a mail order brand with really good, CHEAP spices and blends. I hear they have really fun spice blends and it's easy to just sprinkle them on veggies or whatever you're making. They have physical stores too, but i don't know if there are any in the LA area

http://penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/shophome.htm

Spices That Go Together, by Pickelhead

Salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary: basic roast chicken seasoning. (add breadcrumbs to make nuggets or flour to make fried chicken)

Salt, pepper, thyme, basil: basic tomato sauce seasoning.

Salt, pepper, thyme, fennel, oregano: pizza sauce

Cayenne, chili powder, paprika: hot and warm - I throw some into meatloaf when I have a head cold, to give it a nice kick.

Bay leaves, cloves, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon: warm and sweet Indian

Cumin, coriander, ginger, cayenne, garlic: basic Indian masala

Spices That Go Together, by Verbal Remedy

Cumin & oregano & chile powder (Mexican)

Rosemary & garlic & lemon (Italian)

Star anise & garlic (Vietnamese)

Thyme, rosemary, oregano, garlic (good ol' fashioned meat seasoning)

Lavender, marjoram, rosemary, sage, tarragon (Provencal)

Sage & garlic (yum)

How to Harvest Pomegranate Seeds by Verbal Remedy

I learned the trick to harvesting these little suckers without looking like a murder happened in your kitchen when I was at the cooking school @ Rancho La Puerta last Nov. Fill large bowl with cold water. Slice pom in half. Pick up pom half, plunge into cold water and pull the seeds out with your fingers underwater. Easy as pie and they're just as pretty as can be.

Whatcha Got On Hand Salmon by PaganMama

Li, here's a quick 'n' easy fish dish you might like to try. It's very much a whatcha got on hand dish more than a recipe. But basically I take a couple of salmon filets and cut a slit almost all the way through the center, horizontally, to make a pocket. Then I chop up fresh spinach (or frozen would work just fine) and mix that with (here's the DYI part) garlic, chopped onion, chopped red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, maybe some feta, black olives, pine nuts -- whatever goodies you have on hand and think would taste good together. Stuff as much as you can into the "pockets" and put the rest under the filets in a pan. Roast until the fish flakes easily -- not long, probably 8-10 minutes. With some rice or couscous on the side, this makes a yummy and good-looking meal.

Spanish-style Salad by Bookseller

I had an incredible Spanish-style salad last week that would go really well with that. It was endive and watercress, thin slices of skin-on red apples, thin slices of manchego cheese, TOASTED walnuts (really important to toast them), and -- the best part -- a healthy sprinkling of pomegranate seeds. The seeds were beautiful and Valentines-y, like little red jewels, but they were also delicious, little pops of sweetness. The dressing was just a basic herb vinaigrette, maybe a little thyme -- no mustard, no balsamic. It was one of the best salads I've ever had. Subbing fresh goat cheese for the manchego would probably work well also.

Japanese Pickles (asazuke) by Sammy

What I usually make is called "asazuke" which means "shallow pickling." This means it can be eaten even after just half-a-day of pickling, and it's not as salty as regular Japanese pickles so you can eat lots of it almost like a salad.

It helps if you have a container like this to press the vegetable down while pickling, but as long as you have some kind of weight on it (a big stone?), it'll do.

So. You just cut up the vegetable you want to pickle -- Japanese turnip (sliced thin), cucumber (chopped in chunks), carrot (sliced thin), and cabbage are good ones to start with -- and place them in a container. If using a container size like what I linked to, you mix in about 1.5 teaspoons of salt -- mix well -- and about 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp vinegar, some chopped ginger, 1 whole chili pepper (small one), and you're done. If you have access to it, you can also add kombu , cut in 2x2 inch squares to the mix. (Sometimes kombu has this white powdery stuff on it. If so, wipe it off with vinegar before adding it into your pickle mix.) Done.

Kat's Book Recommendations

Ooh, I loved Balzac and the Little Seamstress for those who have yet to read it. I was glad to be reminded of it by the Otter. My neighbor wrote Eat the Document which was finalist for the National Book Award last year. Even if she weren't my neighbor, I'd recommend the book. It's about a woman who went underground and created a new life post-Weatherman type of stuff and the issues that arose. Great writing.

Wade's BBQed Beef, by Laliita

Hey Otters, I have to tell you about the awesome beef Wade made last night. It's about the third or fourth time he's done it, and it's always drool-worthy.

Smoked/BBQed beef:

Buy smoker chips (of your prefered "flavour"; Wade used both apple and hickory last night) and make three foil packages of 'em, using about one Cup of chips per packet. (Be sure to use heavy duty foil.) Put two or three holes in each package.

Put two packages on either side of ONE burner, where they'll be exposed to the flame. (As long as you're using heavy foil, the flames won't burn through.) DISABLE THE OTHER BURNER.

Place the third package on the rack above the functioning burner. (It will take longer to heat up, and will add lots more smoke later in the cooking process.)

Rub your roast with olive oil and whatever spice you'd like. (Wade used Montreal Steak Spice last night.)

Place the roast on the "cold" side of the BBQ (where you've disabled one burner).

Aim for a BBQ temp of 350°, and smoke/cook the roast for as long as it takes to cook to your desired doneness.

We used a rather cheap cut of roast last night (it was an eye of round), and man oh man did it turn out tender, and the smoked flavour is to die for.

Wade used our electric meat cutter to carve thin slices, and we served the meat with crusty buns and mustard and horse radish etc. (with salads and whatnot as well). People couldn't get enough of the goodness!

Tourtiere by Bibbety

Tourtiere (from the "Canadian Living Cookbook")

Pastry for double crust pie (9 or 10 inches). Traditionally, it is lard pastry.

1 1/2 lb. ground pork I onion chopped 2 cloves garlic minced 1 tsp salt 1/4 tsp each pepper, dried thyme and savoury 1/4 tsp cloves 1/4 tsp allspice I small crumbled bay leaf 3/4 cup chicken stock

In skillet, brown pork, stirring with fork to break meat up finely and draining fat. Add onion, garlic, salt, and spices and saute further until onion is softened. Add stock. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning. Cool.

Pour filling into prepared pastry lined pie plate. Cover with top crust, seal and flute edges. Cut a few slashes in crust to let steam escape. Bake in 425 oven for about 30 minutes, or until well browned.

Variations:

You can use a mixture of different types of meat. Obviously pork should predominate, but veal or beef can make up part of the mixture. I'm using half a pound of ground lean beef, for example.

The original recipe specified water as the liquid, but I find using stock give a real richness to the pie.

You can also vary the spices. It think though, it's important to have cloves and allspice.

I cut out little pastry stars for the top and do an egg wash.

You can also make tiny little tarts with this. The cookbook says this will make about seventy-two 1 1/4 inch tarts.

Tips on Roasting Turkey Quickly by bookseller

If you do decide to roast, rather than going in the bag route [a roasting bag had been suggested earlier in the discussion. ed.], you might consider cutting the beast up into breast halves and thighs and drummers and wings. It would cook much more quickly that way. And FWIW, if you decide you absolutely have to make it the day before, I'd take the breast off when the turkey is done, and refrigerate it in turkey broth. THe next day, slice the breast and reheat it on the stovetop in the broth -- otherwise it will dry out like crazy. If you think the white-meat people will miss the crisp skin, take the skin off before you slice the breast, and stick it in the oven with the dark meat. The skin will crisp up, and the dark meat can handle the oven's dry heat a second time.

My No Bake Fruit Cake by Grizzled Adams

3 shots of Black Seal Bermuda Rum

3 Maraschino Cherries

Ice

Throw that all together in a nice Old Fashion glass and enjoy. If ya gotta have cake, dip a twinkee init.

Lemon Pancakes by shell

OK, here's the pancake recipe. It's from "Joy of Cooking"; I love their basic and buttermilk pancake recipes too.

LEMON PANCAKES

Whisk together in a large bowl:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Whisk together in another bowl:
3/4 cup sour cream
1/3 cup milk
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 large egg
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Pour the wet ingredients over the dry and whisk together, mixing just until combined.

Fold in: grated zest of 2 lemons

They're delicious with a little honey drizzled on top.

Using parmesan Rinds in Soup by bookseller

I save my parm rinds in the freezer, and toss them into soup. I typically cut the rinds into chunks -- maybe 1.5" -- before putting them in, and I don't pick them out; while they give up a lot of their flavor in the cooking, they retain some, and turn into interesting, unexpected, vaguely cheesy chewies. My sense is that they don't add a specific cheese flavor so much as they deepen the overall flavor, in the same way that adding anchovies can. Besides which, there's something that pleases me about making use of something that would otherwise get thrown away -- you know, because I'm so inherently frugal (has coughing fit from laughing hysterically).

Boereks by Sicut Cervus

Holiday appetizer: BOEREKS

(Turkish pastry, made every year by the thousands as a fundraiser, by the staff and parents of the nursery school all three of our kids went to. We usually buy four boxes of 2 dozen). They are made with fillo pastry, which you can buy frozen in l lb. boxes.

Read the instructions on the fillo box for how to defrost, handle and store fillo.

BOEREKS (50 boereks)

Filling:
6 oz. cream cheese
6 oz. feta cheese
2 eggs
2 - 3 T. milk
1 c. cottage cheese
2 T. Parmesan
1 c. parsley
2 T. dill
pinch salt

Mix all ingredients (a Cuisinart works fine)

To assemble: Use 1/2 lb. fillo, 1 stick butter. Melt the butter (microwave is safest and least messy).

Cut fillo sheets in quarters. Brush each sheet with butter; place a dab of filling about 1" from the near edge of each quarter, centered between left and right edges. Fold the right and left sides of the pastry sheet over the filling in thirds, resulting in a narrow shape 3 layers thick with the dab of filling tucked into the front end. Roll this up (neither very tightly nor very loosely) front to back. Place on a buttered baking sheet. Brush tops of rolls with melted butter.

May freeze at this point.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

If frozen, bake at 370 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

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Grilled Corn with Herbs and Lime Butter Sauce by Claire Carpenter

8 ears of corn in the husk 1/4 cup chopped mixed fresh herbs (chives, parsley, basil, sage, tarragon (I used basil)) 6 tablespoons lime butter sauce (to follow)

Prepare grill for cooking over moderate heat. Grill corn in husks on lightly oiled grill rack, turning, covered, until kernels are tender, 20 to 30 minutes. (You can skip the grilling and just boil the corn.) Remove corn from grill and let stand until cool enough to handle but still warm, about 10 minutes. Discard husks and stem ends from corn.Cut kernels off cobbs with a large knife and toss with herbs and lime butter sauce.

Lime Butter Sauce

1 large garlic clove, chopped 1/4 cup fresh lime juice 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp black pepper 1 stick unsalted butter

Puree garlic with lime juice, salt, and pepper in a blender until smooth. With motor running, add melted butter and blend until emulsified, about 30 seconds. This sauce can be used on just about anything - salmon, salad - you name it.

Thoughts on Thai Food by bookseller

My first thought was to say, Eeeps, if you're just starting to cook, don't start with Thai food -- the techniques and the flavors are so different from Western cooking. But then I thought about it, and I'm not at all sure it's a bad place to start. Making "authentic" Thai food might be a real bear, but if you're making curries, most of the time it's just making a particular kind of stew. You make the base -- which is a handful of chopped up ginger and shallot and lemongrass, sauteed in peanut oil or coconut oil -- you add some curry paste from a jar (no need to screw around making your own), and when it all smells really good you add in coconut milk and stock of some kind (fish stock, shrimp stock -- which you make by boiling up shrimp shells -- chicken stock, etc., all of which you can buy), let it cook together for a little bit, and then throw in pretty much any protein and veg you want, and let them simmer in this very flavorful liquid until they're cooked. And that's really it. You can tweak the hell out of it -- add more curry paste next time if you want it spicier, use more or less coconut milk, add tomatoes, more shallots, etc. Thai curries are traditionally very soupy, but I like a somewhat thicker sauce and less soup, so I usually add about four times as much protein and veg as a recipe calls for (upping the number of servings correspondingly), and sometimes I thicken it at the end by stirring in a teaspoon or two of cornstarch that has been dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of water or stock. Bring everything to a boil, while stirring, and the cornstarch will thicken the liquid into a nice glaze. It is SO not hard. My favorite version probably uses a ton of fish and seafood -- chunks of monkfish, maybe, and shrimp and clams and mussels and scallops -- and a ton of veggies, like snow peas and string beans and chunks of sweet potato or butternut squash and tomatoes and greens of some kind like cabbage or spinach. It's never the same and it's always good. Thai Kitchen makes a perfectly good jarred curry paste in three or four different "colors" -- red is traditionally used for meat, but try them out and see what you like. They're available even in crappy supermarkets in New York, so I bet you can find them easily. Serve the whole thing over rice or rice noodles, Boy can eat it, happy dinner.

Remember that different kinds of veg take different amounts of time to cook. For example, if you're using butternut squash and snow peas, you'll want to cut the squash relatively small, and add it to the stew well before the snow peas, because the squash will take much longer to cook, and if you add them both at the same time, the snow peas will be limp and overcooked by the time the squash is done. Lemongrass and ginger are both very fibrous, so you'll want to peel them and then mince them really fine. If you have something like a mini-chopper, it can come in very handy here. If you use mollusks like clams or mussels, remember that you'll need to wash them ahead of time (if they're farmed, a quick rinse will be fine), throw away any clams whose shells won't close even if you tap them. And once they're cooked, throw away any where the shells AREN'T open. Seafood in general takes a very brief time to cook; aim for undercooking rather than overcooking.

OK, here's a seafood recipe by ivy

Get a pound of jumbo lump crabmeat. After you recover from spending the money, saute a bit of garlic and add a bunch of chopped chard. After it cooks down a bit, add a handful each of chopped chives and parsley. Meanwhile mix the crab with mayo, maybe a half-3/4 cup, and about the same amount of grated mild cheese over low heat. Stir in juice of one smallish lemon. Stir over heat until ingredients blend. Add the greens and stir, cook together for a few minutes. Sheer fabulosity.

More on Cabbage by bookseller

Ok, I was the person who posted about the cabbage, so I'll try to clarify:

Very lightly creamed cabbage (sauteed with a lot of onion, small amount of cream hard-boiled down) with good balsamic vinegar stirred in at the end off-heat

Assuming you're using a whole head of green cabbage (the hard, round one), shredded fine (knife, rather than food processor -- because I can't find the shredding blade for my food processor -- and cut as for coleslaw, with each shred no wider than 1/3 the width of your index finger). For that amount of cabbage, which will serve 4-6 people, I would use 2 medium-sized yellow onions, cut roughly the same size as the cabbage. I would stir them around in the pan in fat over medium-high heat for a while (15-20 minutes, but stirring only occasionally) until they turned a deep golden brown. Then add in the cabbage, and stir that around for a while; it will wilt down from an unimaginably huge pile to a merely big one; mix it in with the onions.

I would then add in perhaps 1/4 cup of cream. If your pile of cabbage and onions is such that this amount of cream amounts to a drop in a bucket, add more until you can definitely see spoonfuls of liquid cream -- not bowls-full, but what might be left in the cereal bowl after you finish all the cornflakes -- sloshing around on the bottom of the pan. With the lid off, turn the heat up to high; your goal here is to bring the cream to a boil and, by thereby evaporating the water in the cream, thicken the cream to the point where it clings to the cabbage and onion like a glaze. Stir away with your wooden spoon. Taste it -- you might want some salt and, if you're me, quite a bit of freshly ground black pepper. It should taste creamy and rather bland. That's when you stir in perhaps 2 tablespoons of good balsamic vinegar, to slice through the richness of the cream and the blandness of the vegetables and wake up your tongue.

Balsamic is one of those things where you really do get what you pay for. I'd get it at the gourmet store, rather than the supermarket, and buy the oldest stuff you can afford.

A small amount? How much is a small amount? What does that mean, hard-boiled down? Lid on or lid off? Which is the good balsamic vinegar? How do I know? From the price?

ETA "hard boil" meaning bring it to the most vigorous boil your stove will provide, over the highest possible heat, while stirring.

VERY IMPORTANT: Remember, anything with liquid -- stew, soup, vegetables in liquid (like cream), etc. -- the quantities are to your taste, and can always be corrected. If the consistency is too thin, boil the liquid down until it thickens, or use a thickener (flour, cornstarch, arrowroot). If it's too thick, add liquid (water, stock, juice, wine). If it's too salty, either dilute with liquid or cook for a while with a raw potato added; this will absorb the salt. If too much of one thing, balance with another, etc. It's all dependent on what YOU like.

Frozen Martini by Grizzled Adams

On my Quest for the frozen Martini, this one came out mityfine.

4 oz Luksusowa Potato Vodka
2oz Seagram's 102 proof Gin
1oz Martini&Rossie Vermouth
1 oz Olive"juice"
Rim the glass with lime/salt
2 of my famous Anchovie/bluecheese stuffed olives
Slice of lime

Lime slice and olives on a stick

Vodka,Gin,Vermouth,Olive Juice in blender with enough ice to make it frozen............crank that sucker up, install in glass............ENJOY!