empresscallipygos's Profile

That's....what I had always assumed it was, actually.

People think serving plain fruit is pretentious? Why? You want something that tastes good, and fruit tastes good, QED.

Then again, you're talking to someone who ate an entire punnet of strawberries for dinner last night, let alone just dessert, so...

"I must say I long for the days, when people came to dinner, they ate what the frazzled cook placed in front of them."

You'd want a guest of yours to eat something without complaint even if it was something that could KILL them?....Wow, please don't invite me to dinner at your place.

Honestly, it's a big food world out there, and somewhere in the world there's always something that accomodates any "food quirks" a guest could have. I see any kind of food restriction as a chance to explore something -- having vegetarian dinner guests encouraged me to check out the Moosewood cookbooks for the first time, and I got so into them that I regularly cook from them despite being an omnivore. A couple I know who are dear friends recently started going gluten-free: and accomdating that wasn't bad at all (that's how I discovered quinoa; and as for desserts, do you know how many traditional desserts are out there that are naturally gluten-free? Eton Mess, anyone? Flourless chocolate cake? Fruit and cheese?).

"Parents of young children creating and serving edible versions of things kids tend to try and eat but shouldn't because, I don't know, they're toxic?
Why would you do this? Seriously, someone give me one good reason."

If your child is already old enough to know that "I shouldn't eat REAL crayons, but FAKE ones make it fun to pretend."

Seriously, your average eight- or nine-year-old would probably not only get it that you're not suppopsed to eat real crayons, but would probably give you an eye-roll if you reminded them of that and say, "well, DUH, mom, I'm not a BABY."

@rosebud: Yep, just water and chocolate. The trick is:

You get a big bowl of ice, and set a medium-size empty bowl on top of it, touching the ice. Then you melt the chocolate and water together, and when it's melted, you pour it into that medium-size bowl and start whipping like crazy until it's the right texture.

Unfortunately, for my pie, the TJ pie crust WAS my "plan A" that failed. (Largely because someone [*cough* MY MOTHER *cough*] didn't thaw the frozen crust enough.) I unrolled it as best I could for my recipe, but still had a lot of places where the crust split and crumbled in the blind-baking process, and it was still crumbling on me when I baked the pie proper and was taking it out of the oven. And then, it didn't slice well -- the custard had seeped out of the pie and it was sticking to the bottom like crazy, so all the slices of that pie I served had structural integrity issues.

My "adopt, adapt and improve" method was to slather a hell of a lot of whipped cream on top to hide everything, spread the whipped cream all over each collapsed slice as I served it, and hope that the taste would outdo the look. Fortunately it did (and I also had a second pie which people dug into first, and that buttered people up).

"I am very interested to know if the author did nutritional analysis after using pre-cooked vegetables for a week. And were the numbers run through a nutritional calculator or samples submitted to a lab?"

I'm not sure about this question -- how would the date on which you cooked the vegetables impact nutrition loss?...If I cook a squash today but eat it tomorrow, vs. cooking and eating it tomorrow, I don't imagine the day's difference would be that great, would it?

One warning about beans - apparently there are some types of dried beans that SHOULDN'T be cooked in a slow-cooker without special handling. Kidney beans and some times of beans apparently have a mild non-fatal toxin that can build up if you cook them for a long time on "low" -- you wouldn't die, but you'd get something akin to food poisoning.

The way to combat this, I've read, is to sort of "pre-cook" the beans before putting them in the cooker -- soak them the way you would ordinarily, then rinse, add to a pot on the stove with fresh water, bring to a boil and boil them good for about ten minutes. THEN put them in the slow cooker and proceed with the recipe.

Judith Jones' THE PLEASURES OF COOKING FOR ONE is actually designed with this kind of "stretching leftovers" cooking in mind.

@ Therascalqueen: Here's the thing, though. If my husband (theoretical husband: I'm single) is in the kitchen, then I'm sitting on the couch with my feet up and a bloody mary in my hand. Which means I get to eat without having had to cook first.

I'm not seeing that there's a problem with that.