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2561. wonkers2 - 1/25/2005 8:00:38 PM Pelle, many thanks for the information! 2562. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 3:29:07 PM So hubby managed to dig up his mother's old waffle iron. Cookbook with it costs all of 15 cents. Thing is dated back to 1937. The scary part is it's not automatic...no light, no thermostat. Just plug it in and keep fingers crossed. Will be fun to play with it.
More interesting though, the cookbook included recipes for cookies, biscuits, muffins and such to be made in the waffle iron....can you imagine??
I'm sure my mother's is long gone. It was a heavy old thing, but modern enough to have a thermostat light so waffles were rarely burned.
If these don't work, I'll have to hunt some flea markets to see if i can't find a good one. 2563. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 5:01:50 PM Hubby's mom had a high tolerance for such things seeing as the old gas stove from the 20s in their nyc apartment also had no thermostat....she would open the oven door and wave her hand to try to judge the temp.
Hubby, consequently has a high tolerance for burned food. I can remember the first time i made kasha for him he said it didn't taste right. I remember all the blackened kasha stuck to the bottom of his mom's frying pan. I told him, yes, this one isn't burned!
Oh and I remember the donnybrook in his family over whether the peas were burned as his father declared, or 'brown from the mushrooms' as his mother declared.
Nothing quite like family, eh? 2564. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 8:04:49 PM So with valentine's day coming, we're going out to dinner. Only thing is who wants to eat out on a monday night? So we're going the sat before to a new restaurant...new to us anyway that is supposed to be very good, very expensive and very romantic. I was checking out the menu and got hungry right away.
Tenderloin of Beef - rubbed with roasted garlic, pepper and shallots over a bed of braised celery and spinach dressed with a Merlot fresh tarragon sauce accompanied by pecorino and Yukon gold potato tart
Chicken Scaloppine - topped with shaved prosciutto, basil and smoked mozzarella, dressed with a lemon caper brown butter sauce accompanied by roasted pepper risotto
Sea Scallops - baked with portobello mushrooms, baby spinach and Mountain gorgonzola cream topped with crisp garlic oregano crumbs accompanied with steamed Jasmine rice and baby vegetables
Is it valentine's day yet??? 2565. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 8:05:37 PM Never thought of it before, but I guess combing the on line menus from restaurants is a way to get entertaining ideas for dinner parties. Hmmmm. 2566. resonance - 1/26/2005 10:45:42 PM So when I make tomato sauce I usually make a nice, chunky marinara -- you know, sauteeing onions and garlic and bell pepper up in olive oil, stirring in whole peeled and seeded tomatoes, maybe pureeing a few, adding plenty of basil and some oregano and salt and pepper and red pepper flakes and a little of this and a little of that, a nice bit of parsley in at the end. I'm not a fan of sweet tomato sauce at all and like working with a battuto.
It turns out that my fiancee, however, is a big fan of what she calls 'smooth, velvety red sauce'. I essayed that last night complete with vague instructions from her -- basically a cruda with meat, finished with butter, no chunks, not bitter or acid. Smooth. Velvety. You know, like they make it where she's from.
It came out quite good according to her but not precisely correct. She just kind of wrinkles her face up quizzically when I ask her how it's different from what she used to get from a Delaware County restaurant. I love her with all my heart, fellow correspondents, but she isn't a big help when it comes to figuring out these things.
So. If anyone has any tricks of the trade for a smooth velvety red sauce, I wanna hear them. 2567. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 11:22:34 PM can't help res...i'm a chunky sauce type myself. I like bits of whatever i'm eating running through the sauce for 2 reasons...tastes better and less chopping! 2568. judithathome - 1/26/2005 11:31:54 PM Buy a VitaMixer...everything comes out smooth from that sucker. 2569. resonance - 1/26/2005 11:37:23 PM The blender I have could probably puree gravel. The texture was good and the sauce tasted great -- it just wasn't exactly what she remembered. Maybe next time I'll add more bay and onion. 2570. thoughtful - 1/26/2005 11:45:38 PM well, if they used ragu it would be smooth. I remember once hubby brought home 'chef marco' sauce cause it was a real bargain. one taste and it brought back days in the school cafeteria. I didn't know they bottled institutional flavors for sale in the store. Blecch!!!
I remember reading/hearing one time that a ketchup co (heinz?) was trying to make the perfect ketchup...come to find out it didn't sell well. See in the usual process, the ketchup gets burned and it turns out people like the burned flavor. So they went back to the "less-than-perfect" burned ketchup and it sold better. Go figure. 2571. alistairConnor - 1/26/2005 11:58:03 PM topped with shaved prosciutto
but I like my prosciutto hairy, dammit! 2572. wonkers2 - 1/27/2005 5:16:14 AM Cap'n Dirty sez, "No shaved prosciutto fer me neither!" 2573. resonance - 1/27/2005 7:41:10 AM In the words of John Lennon, "Stop dragging things down to your own level," you unspeakably vile chimps. WTF, is nothing sacred?
I have made marinara sauce with bacon (you know, dicing up bacon, tossing a handful of it into the pan, half-cooking it then throwing in the onion and garlic -- in other words using the bacon where you'd use olive oil). It was very good, although different to say the least. I think it would have been a good sauce for, say, ravioli with some sharp pungent filling.
2574. resonance - 1/27/2005 7:42:43 AM You know if you deep fry capers they turn into little rosette looking things? They taste nutty, too.
2575. Dubai Vol - 1/27/2005 5:22:27 PM 
Just back from the World Aerobatics Championships in beautiful Al Ain, which is in the middle of the desert. Amazing stuff, five hours a day of non-stop aerobatics. It's not like an airshow so much as a serious competition where the public is invited to watch. The routines are done to music, and it's realy a bit like figure skating in that everybody is doing similar stunts, just choreographed differently and with enough skill that really only a knowledgeable judge can tell the difference. I must say that the planes they use these days are just amazing, with so much power that they can go vertical, and come to a stop, then just hang on the prop. The teams are more photogenic, but the solo guys do things that you just shouldn't be able to do with an aircraft.
2576. Macnas - 1/27/2005 5:33:12 PM Sounds good. 2577. Jenerator - 1/27/2005 10:17:22 PM Res,
Run the sauce through a sieve. 2578. resonance - 1/27/2005 10:28:33 PM ...
...nevermind. 2579. robertjayb - 1/27/2005 10:35:35 PM ...must say that the planes they use these days are just amazing, with so much power that they can go vertical, and come to a stop, then just hang on the prop. The teams are more photogenic, but the solo guys do things that you just shouldn't be able to do with an aircraft.
I love that stuff but after seeing a performance at the Experimental Aircraft Association Flyin at Oshkosh, my favorite solo guy is:
Oops! Pretty clearly not a guy...
2580. resonance - 1/27/2005 11:25:49 PM In one of the Microsoft Flight Simulators they have Patty Wagstaff's aeronautics airplane (something called an Extra 300 or the like) done up in her personal paint scheme.
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If no one has any useful advice about the red sauce I'll just stick with what I'm doing. Like I said, I have it close to what she remembers and the texture is fine, just the flavor is a touch different from what she remembers from the restaurant and she can't really say what the difference is.
The recipe I used, so you know, was roughly the following:
1 lb extra-lean ground beef
1 qt peeled and de-seeded plum tomatoes
~1/3 medium onion
4 cloves garlic
6 black olives
~2 T parsley
~1 t whole sugar
~1/4 c dry red wine
basil
oregano
rosemary
marjoram
bay
salt
pepper
butter
olive oil
The solid ingredients were pureed very thoroughly.
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