Subj: 483 ground beef stuff
Sriracha [...] ketchup

There are I suppose times when you don't need the heat of
straight-up hot sauce, but for me those days would be few and
far between,

I do like Sriracha straight up on some things. Potato salad and

I could see potato or mac salad garnished with
zigzags of sriracha and mustonaisse. I wonder what
blue squeeze-bottle sauce one could add to make it
into a patriotic salad. Speaking of which, why don't
you Canadians have July 4? [joke]

hummus both spring to mind. The blend is nice on fried eggs,
burgers, meatloaf, mac&cheese and so on, where tomato is welcome.

There are Thai sweet/hot sauces that use tomato as well.

Roslind like mild chile heat; me, usually medium. So I use a bit in
cooking and add more to my portion at the table.

In my old age extremely hot things are causing
trouble, though I still tolerate higher than
average levels of what Bonnie calls hottity.
It used to be a ring of fire issue: now the
motility starts long before, and the afterburn
stage is long past.

Subject: 486 food inflation

we get Mexican and South American produce

So do I. Caribbean too.

trade patterns that are vestiges from the glory days of the
Commonwealth.

Very much so. Also immigration patterns. Yellowknife has far more
Jamaicans (30) than Mexicans (0).

Is there a Mexican restaurant?

The romaine producers should have started marketing it as a
cooking vegetable. In Asia it has been used almost exclusively
as a cooked dish.

I sometimes add it to Dutch style split green pea soup. It just
melts into the broth and disappears. I learned that from Farmer
Bill's mom when I was a kid.

The French have also paired lettuces with peas, as
the greenery moderates that nitrogenous taste.

Williams & Humbert is okay.

It's the least expensive of the real sherries around here. And now
the only one as the tastes of younger buyers are changing the makeup
of what's on the shelves.

I wouldn't put it squarely at the bottom of the pile.
Down here, Savory and James occupied the lower end
of the market. It was a revelation when the JCR
discovered that one could get twice as much booze
for the same money as when the previous regime was
squandering dough on Hawker's and Harvey's.

While we were there Roslind picked up a bottle of Kracken; she
has broken up with the Captain.

There is a whole genre of Japanese pornography involving
octopuses.

She claims not to have any attraction to that kind of Kracken.

The type example is a woodcut by one of the greats
of the genre, Hiroshige or Hokusai or their equal;
It's an odd phenomenon that reflects more on the
Japanese male psyche than anything else.

Subj: 491 sweet potatoes

in a spicy tomato sauce, in a tomato or yogurt based curry
sauce or extending those last two concepts, a tomato or dairy
based soup.

Tomatified sweet potatoes, they're not my thing.

I must confess I usually reserve that sort of treatment for pumpkin
and other winter squashes but have occasionally substituted sweet
potato and been satisfied with the results.

To me it seems to be masking the virtues of the sweet
potato. I'd have no objection to such treatment of
regular potatoes; in fact I was given a vegetable stew
of eggplant, carrots, and regular potatoes (seasoned
with garlic and onion, of course) and found myself
eating the potatoes with alacrity. Of course, when
invited to salvage the leftovers, I added ground beef and
red chile flakes, which further improved the dish, but it
was by no means bad just with potatoes and tomatoes.

They had neither onions nor garlic, nor any dried herbs

Roslind is planting various herb seeds today in planters on our
south facing desk, now that the danger of frost is remote.

Remote but not nonexistent. The standard long-term forecasts
for this summer show way higher than normal temperatures in
the upper midwest down through maybe Oklahoma and cooler than
usual on both coasts - though at Lilli's it's forecast to be
98 today (mid-50s, i.e. 10-15, at night). Here in Massachusetts
it looks to be pretty ideal in temperature for at least the
next week, though this evening there are supposed to be rains
severe enough to cause flooding.

Subj: 493 overflowxn

I wonder what woodchuck chuck tastes like.

It's a ground squirrel, It has red meat and tastes like fatty hare, especially fatty in the fall just before it goes into hibernation.

Fatty hare sounds good, though as the chuck is the
foreleg and shoulder part, maybe there would be less
fat there. How much would a woodchuck haunch ... ?

Subj: 495 ancestry

I am 1/16 Scottish and just 1/16 German. But I attribute my
current taste in childhood comfort food to growing up in an
neighbourhood that was half Scottish and half Irish.

It doesn't seem to have done you any harm.

My tastes broadened considerably after I left home and I started
cooking for myself.

And having African roommates and hanging around with
degenerates and crazies on the cooking echo ... .

Saus Prik
cat: sauce, hot
yield: 1 qt +

12 oz seedless golden raisins
6 Tb white vinegar
5 ts hot chile flakes
12 garlic cloves
1 ts salt
2 fresh red hot chile peppers
1 c canned tomatoes with juice
12 oz red plum jam
9 oz pineapple juice
4 Tb brown sugar

Blend first 7 ingredients until smooth. Pour into a
saucepan with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to
a boil, stirring constantly. Simmer for 20 min. Pack
into sterilized jars. Will keep 2 months.

I found this sauce way too tomatoey and not hot enough,
which means that you might like it. And having read
Iris's post about antioxidants or whatever in tomatoes,
I guess we should eat all the tomatoes we can get our
hands on.

Jennifer Brennan's Original Thai Cookbook, adapted.
Originally posted by me to Jim Weller, 8/18/1995; subsequently
fixed by increasing the vinegar, hot chile, and garlic.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
* Origin: Fido Since 1991 | QWK by Web | BBS.FIDOSYSOP.ORG (1:123/140)