empresscallipygos's Profile

I have a pozole recipe that calls for cooked pork; mainly you just stew the cooked meat (4 cups shredded) along with a couple cans of hominy, some chicken broth, and chopped onion and garlic and chiles and etc.

Tasty, and it's also supposed to be good luck to eat that on New Year's Eve!

Is there a category for "pioneer"?

My extended family Thanksgiving has undergone some serious morphing over the past 20 years -- we started with one aunt and uncle hosting everyone else (my parents and brother, my 2 other sets of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and my grandparents) for a traditional meal at her house. But then:

1. That aunt and uncle moved 3000 miles across the country
2. Three cousins moved to Arizona, Los Angeles, and Ohio respectively
3. My brother moved to Los Angeles
4. Another cousin got married and mostly joins his in-laws now
5. First one grandparent, then another, passed away
6. Finally, my brother moved back east two years ago with his own family and alternates between his own in-laws and our own family

So some Thanksgivings, it's just my parents, one lone aunt, and me, so we say to hell with it and just go to a restaurant on Saturday. But my brother has started saying that the years he wants to be with us, HE wants to host.

So it is COMPLETELY uncharted territory in terms of food, which made for a golden opportunity to float a couple pie ideas. One aunt may still show up with a steamed cranberry pudding for dessert that's always gone over well, and another aunt may bring a number of side dishes, and since we are suppliers for Ocean Spray there will definitely be cranberries, but this is the golden opportunity for me to establish the new tradition of "Aunt Kim's apple cider cream pie".

Molasses sponge candy.

Attention New York City readers: has anyone seen a place where I may purchase quince? The closer to North Brooklyn, the better.

Eton mess went over like gangbusters at a dinner party I had recently (I'd planned it to accomodate a gluten-free friend who couldn't make it after all; I served to the other guests without saying that that's why I did it, and they wolfed it down). It also couldn't be easier: chop up strawberries, crush up a handful of meringue cookies (you can use purchased ones from the supermarket, even), and whip a cup of cream. Fold the strawberries and meringue bits into the whipped cream. Voila.

Baked apples are perfect now that it's fall.

Poached peaches and poached pears are also quite lovely.

Somewhere I've got a recipe for grilled peach halves with meringue cookies on the side. If you're making the meringues yourself, add some cinnamon to the meringue batter.

Bananas foster and cherries jubilee is very "show-stoppy" (c'mon, if you have flaming ANYTHING you look impressive). They do incorporate ice cream, but if you hold off putting the ice cream out and doing up the fruit until "dessert time", you may be able to get away with it.

Seconding (or, thirding) Jones "Pleasures of Cooking for One." What I liked is that it not only dealt with recipes, it also dealt with how to SHOP for solo eating -- because one of the problems you face is that you only want to eat one pork chop but they come in packs of six or whatever. Jones has a section of recipes grouped together, where you can cook the pork chops one night, and then use the leftovers in something else entirely different the next night, and...

I was in this. In fact, you can see me in the linked clip -- when the host of the segment is excitedly brandishing a cookie and saying, "Caramel Apple Bacon Cookies!", I'm the woman standing to her left and nodding, 'cos those were indeed my cookies.

....I knew the second I showed up that i was going to lose, though -- the rules were to just involve bacon in some capacity, and my "replace-the-nuts-with-candied-bacon-bits" fell far short of the bacon tamales, bacon spring rolls, bacon turtle candies, and the guy who smoked his own bacon in his Brooklyn back yard for two straight days using a smoker he'd jerryrigged from a beer keg or something.

(The winner of the contest was the bacon-bourbon ice cream they eat in the segment, the one that Diane Sawyer describes as "sounding like Kentucky Porn". I later ran into the guy who made it and he said he considers it a personal triumph that he made Diane Sawyer say "porn" on national television.)

In conclusion: Matt Timm's takedown contests are incredibly awesome; watch for them in a city near you.

....I think chocolate fountains should be banned period.

And I LIKE chocolate.

If I was a guest at someone's house, and they brought this out for a dessert, I wouldn't turn my nose up at it or think less of them because

a) they went to a bit of effort for me, and
b) I would get to eat ice cream.

And since when is someone giving you free ice cream a BAD thing?

I make mine, but largely because doing so encourages me to eat it more often. Also, I use a yogurt maker that parcels the yogurt out into small jars that are just the right size for taking to lunch.

I do prefer to drain each jar just a bit, though -- but that further encourages me to add a little jam to the bottom of each jar before I put the drained yogurt back in, and THAT is helping me get through a serious backlog of jam from last year's "wheeee i just taught myself how to make jam and now I have to make eighty-five squillion different kinds of jam" backlog.

So basically, making my own yogurt helps me clean my pantry.