mhays's Profile

We made POD (pie on demand) in tiny mason jars at the end of November; we were able to have pies for all the family gatherings through Christmas. Not only is pie terrific this way, but cheesecake works just as well; we did a chocolate/vanilla swirl cheescake and baked it in a water bath (easy to do with the jars!).

You can do this in either the 4oz jelly jars (for tiny ones) or the 8oz wide mouth jars.

I'll second the puree idea: not only soup, but frozen spinach is a great place to start for palak paneer.

I also find that frozen vegetables, thawed under a warm water rinse, make a great add-in for salads: frozen corn, baby peas, and sometimes skinny green beans work well this way.

I keep a lot of frozen veggies around to add in to dishes that I find lacking in vegetable content: frozen collards go in pulled pork, frozen blackeye peas go into rice, frozen spinach or artichokes can go into a pasta dish or dip, etc.

If you want to avoid plastic, I am guessing you could easily freeze your stock in metal containers. For instance, you could use the aluminum pie-pans either with foil on top or by wrapping two of them together. You'd have to freeze the stock in something else first (I like doing mine in ice-cube trays.)

I concur that there are too many variables here to make this work: jar composition, shape, temperatures, etc. I think you'd be better off re-using your spaghetti sauce jars in the pantry or fridge, and just not use them this way.

I'll third or fourth ganache...however, what about chocolate transfer lettering? I did it for a Portal cake (the "sprinkles" were all the things listed in the game) You just draw your words (cursive is best, of course) on paper and cover it with parchment. Depending on how you do this, you might want to flip the words over so you're writing with chocolate in reverse, but you don't have to.

Melt chocolate in your choice of colors (you can color white chocolate with powdered food coloring) get a pastry bag or heavy-duty zip-top bag with a very small hole, write out your letters and put them in the fridge.

Then you either peel them off carefully and set them on your cake (if you did thick letters that come off easily and you did it without flipping your words) or if you're going in reverse, cut out the parchment around each word, press each word directly into the cheesecake and carefully peel the parchment off, leaving your words in the correct way!

We used to buy a quarter, and then went down to an eighth - it is a LOT of meat, we finally gave it up because it was more beef than I wanted us to be eating on a regular basis. A quarter was more than two large, completely full laundry baskets of meat and took the three of us well over a year to finish - we were giving meat away.

I can't remember the exact proportion, but you get a LOT of braising cuts, and not a whole lot of steaks - and steaks and roasts are typically smaller (from a younger animal.) than you find in the grocery store. You can request that a lot of the braising cuts be part of the ground beef, if it's easier to do that - but be aware that the types of meat you put in ground beef affect its flavor (we decided to grind most of the arm roasts and other hindquarter cuts one year - I didn't like it as well.)

Also, be aware that offal is not a given - you have to ask for stuff like the heart or the liver. Sometimes a butcher will make it into sausage for you.

What I did like about it was that the meat was definitely of a different quality than grocery-store beef - it had a much more grassy flavor (ours was pasture-raised and corn-finished.) See here: http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=16710

I have also been hunting for jerky recipes for my Food Desert series. I did make Yaki Onigiri with a reconstituted beef jerky filling that were pretty good.

There is a famous Peruvian dish (the word comes from Peruvian "Ch'arki") Charquican - made from dehydrated potatoes and jerky. I keep meaning to try it, but haven't yet found a recipe I like.

I'm sorry - are you KIDDING? $17 for three pieces of oilcloth that you can't use to wrap up meat? A CASE of food-service-grade plastic wrap costs less.

I use plastic wrap for only two things: to pound meat, and to roll sushi. For all the storage purposes that this wrap might be useful for, I use Korean-style snap-lock containers (which are available in glass for those who are afraid of plastic.)

Seriously. I'm all for reusable alternatives, but this is just plain silly not to mention wasteful.

(Waffle irons are actually much more versatile than you would think. See http://www.waffleizer.com/) Oops! Beaten by cupcakemuffin as I was typing!

For instance, if you don't mind having squares instead of stripes on your panini, that's one use. Hash browns is another. Waffleizer has a lot of wacky stuff, but it gives you some good ideas.

Slow cookers are great, but less so as we head into summer months. I use mine for beans all the time - my favorite slow-cooker dish is Moros y Cristianos.

You could combine uses of your electric kettle and your fondue pot to make shabu-shabu (again a kind of cold-weather dish, but fun!) If you do that, use your slow cooker to make the rice!

I really like to experiment and explore when I cook - I often go out hunting for something I know nothing about and don't know how to do.

I usually start by tracking photographs - not because photos lead me to the best recipe, but because looking at an image search gives you an idea of what you should be looking for.

I then take a look at the recipe ratios - do they seem off? Are the other recipes I'm comparing it to similar?

Then I look for the simplest scratch-made version (points off for prepared-food shortcuts.) I usually start there.

Simple meals take less than 30 minutes. If you aren't doing 17 different things at once and have ingredients that don't take too long to cook, you can get it done.

For instance, seared pork chops, couscous, and a side of succotash (using frozen edamame and corn.) shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes from the time you start taking stuff out of your fridge.

Meats and starches take the longest to cook, so that's where you look for timesavers: think cutlets of any meat, tiny pastas that cook fast, warming pre-cooked, frozen rice or barley, fish, polenta, or eggs.