I've discovered a way to make a green tea drink, it's delicious & refreshing. I froze plain yogurt (lightly sweetened with maple syrup) in a baking sheet, broke it up into pieces, saved in a freezer bag. Then:
Take a few pieces of frozen yogurt (approx. 1 cup), add 2 level teaspoons of green tea powder and top it up with soya milk (approx. 2 cups) & add a tablespoon of maple syrup (or to taste), whip it up with a hand-held blender and voila, a great healthy drink. Recommend it!
(I used unsweetened organic soya milk.)

leeds: now I'm dying for this. Sounds great!

Thank you, Sara Kate, for this open thread. I'd emailed earlier about pumpkin seed oil. This gives me the forum.

I had not known about pumpkin seed oil. A friend from Vienna brought some. Goodness, this is wonderful. Apparently its great drizzled on salad (best not heated) and I put it on a soy cheese sandwhich! Very, very nutty aroma and flavor. Wanted to put it on my wrist as a body scent!

Any recipes with it? Any suggestions as to the best source of it in the US? I see several organic sources on the web but have no prior experience with it. I do know that it is higher in EFA's than flax oil which doesn't have the incredible flavor of this.

JMarieb -- I'm looking for a relialbe online store to buy slightly off beat thing like this as well. Maybe someone has a suggestion?

At the Martha show taping yesterday, I got flax meal. Didn't sound too appetizing, but I was amazed by the health benefits when I read the packaging.

My question is: Is there a nice way to cook with yams? Cookbooks seem to say that the real sweet potato is much better, moister, but it seems that it's yams that are readily available. I'm going to make the pork loin wrapped in bacon from this month's Gourmet for a dinner on Sunday and I thought some orange potatoes would be pretty. I can't take that sugary, marshmellow dreck people whip up for thanksgiving. I read somewhere about braising them in some cream. That could be mellow and go with the roast?

I'm going to be cooking my second pass at a big ole stir-fry for a bunch of folks while brewing. Since I have a bunch of turkey fryers that will spit out enough heat to fry a wok, it's nice to actually be able to use a large wok. It's really easy to throw together a big pan of food for a crew of hungry brewers.

Here's my recipe

¼ cup Rice Wine
½ tsp Cornstarch
1.5lbs Pork Shoulder
1 bunch Aspargus, rinsed, cut on the bias, 1 inch long
1 bunch Chinese broccoli, rinsed, cut on the bias
1 bunch Bok Choy, rinsed, slices in half
2 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
4 cloves Garlic, minced or pressed
1 Tbsp Ginger, minced
2 Red Bell Pepper, julienned
Sauce
1 Tbsp Oyster Sauce
1 tsp Chili Garlic sauce
1 tsp Soy Sauce
1 tsp Black Vinegar

Combine the rice wine and cornstarch in a Ziploc bag.

Cut the pork into ½ inch steaks and cut the steaks into thin matchsticks. Place into the bag and marinate for 10 minutes.

Stir together the sauce ingredients.

Heat 2-3 inches of water in the wok over high heat on the burner. Once boiling, add the greens and boil to tender (about 1 minute). Remove and keep warm.

Clean out the wok and dry by heating to smoking. Add 1 Tbsp of oil and the pork and let it sit for a minute before rapidly stir frying to brown. Remove to a plate.

Add the remaining oil and garlic and ginger. Rapidly stir with a spatula until the ginger is aromatic.

Add the peppers, stir until barely softened. Add the pork and greens and stir for 30 seconds. Add the sauce and stir through till thickened and coating.

Chris,
I make flax meal (it's ground-up flax only, right?) by grinding flax seeds in a coffee grinder that I use for spices & flax seeds only. It works really well, then I just add it to batter for muffins, cakes etc - can't even tell it's there & so good for you! (apparently the whole seeds keep longer than the ground up seeds...)

Can't wait to get a copy of this month's Gourmet featuring Montreal. I tried to get a copy but it has sold out around my office in downtown Montreal. I'll get a copy tonight; I'm thrilled!

Chris and all
you're question actually made me freak out at my desk a bit
just seeing the word yam makes me quiver in horror!
i don't know why i hate them SO much, but i do
it's comletely irrational, i know, but it reminds me of an article in either the Times or NY Mag a few months ago about what chefs ban from their kitchens
one said bell peppers, i think there was another that said dill, etc, etc

so, i humbly ask: what is the one totally irrational ingredient that you simply CANNOT abide?

obviously, we all know my answer.

oh, and leeds get the gourmet -- it is GOREGOUS and packed full with tons of yummy sounding (and straightup simple) recipes!

Chris: I use organic red garnet yams exclusively. They're wonderful. I don't like sugary marshmallowy things either but red garnets are best just roasted (so that the caramelization just comes out) and garnished with a bit of butter - and they don't even need that. I have found, however, that a few sprinkles of Maldon Salt (English) perfectly enhances the sweetness of the yam. Maldon salt is flaked salt. It give a nice little burst in your mouth and is even excellent with chocolate.

I've looked at several online organic retailers and several have pumpking seed oil. I just need to decide which is the best and most reliable.

If you're near a Whole Foods, I'm sure they carry it. I'll try mine.

Note: An excellent way to cook yams is to cut them like french fries (before they're cooked) and roast them. Very yummy and snappy.

Ann:

EEL........

No other dialogue necessary from me on this one.

eel when it's unagi, yum
eel when it's in the movie Tin Drum . . . eeeeeeeeee!

yams are great roasted like (or with) any root vegetable - a light toss with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. It takes 45 mins to an hour. great with roasted fennel, brussel sprouts, white potato, onions, garlic in the skins etc etc.

also good as a mash with chipotle peppers and cream - mashed sweeeet potato that is - for cooking I don't find there is a difference. we get garnet, japanese, and ruby at my food coop and so far I buy them interchangeably.

According to the Bittman cookbook and I forget where else I've heard this lately, sweet potatoes are so much better than yams. The Urban Organic site says I'm getting sweet potatoes, but I guess I'll see what I'm really getting when I pick up my box tonight (Week 2 of my Urban Organic experiment!)

Ann and all, I don't really love sweet potatoes either, but after reading the Montreal Gourmet, I thought they would go really well with the bacon-roasted maple pork loin thing.

Speaking of sweet potatoes and the new issue of Gourmet, they also show a fluffy egg thing and they put sweet potato hash on top. Maybe I will use the Urban ORganic sweet potatoes for the hash . . . and do Yukon Gold mashed potatoes for the pork dinner. I love that I'm not the only one who thinks about these little things!

mmmmm... now that i'm thinking about that bacon wrapped pork loin, i'm thinking roasted brussel sprouts drizzled with jmarieb's pumpkin seed oil (or maybe walnut oil!) with the mashed peas and potatoes also from that issue

oh man, i'm a poker "widow" tonight, and i thought i had settled on making myself a really decadent pasta dinner with some wine, but now i'm thinking again

is it too decadent to make pork loin for one??

The Gourmet pork loin is supposed to brine for 8 hours or more so I guess you can't have that tonight :-( Seems like it would be such a fun indulgent dinner for one though.

I used to make a pork loin stuffed with apircuts and rubbed with cumin and ginger that was pretty good, but it had such a tendancy to get dry. It let me down a few times.

The brussel sprouts sound like they would be great. An earthy balance and a pretty green color and they could roast in the oven with the pork. But, I'm trying to have fun with the limitations of the Urban ORganic box and use what I'm getting this week.

But the sprouts remind me, I'm also getting rainbow chard!

Chris: I used to hate yams + sweet potatoes, too, but that's because I had only ever had them when they were made to taste even sweeter. Now I find that the best way to eat yams is to bake them. The ghetto grocery store by my old apartment had yams the size of my head so sometimes I would eat a baked yam for dinner. I would cook it through in the microwave, then pop it in the oven to crisp it up and eat it with salt, pepper and cottage cheese. Also, how's the Urban Organic thing going? My husband and I decided we'd give it a shot -- I think our first box comes on Monday. If I find we're throwing too much away at the end of each week, then I'll cancel.

Ann: Apparently I'm getting pickier as I get older. But there are only a few things that I am completely opposed to: red peppers, goat cheese and milk. The thought of drinking a glass of milk makes me gag.

I know that it's almost heresy, but I have a huge problem with fish. I can eat shellfish and tuna from a can, but if it tastes or looks like fish it gives me the willies. When I was a kid, I threw up just LOOKING at a red snapper fillet. On occasion I will try to eat it, and I have to tell myself "chew, chew, swallow" to get it down. My husband thinks I'm nuts. On a trip to Hong Kong, I had crab, octopus, and squid... no problem, but fish, no way.

i have that problem with eggs. i have no intellectual aversion to them, or dislike their taste or texture. my tummy just doesn't want them.

Ok, I am worried that this question is just too obvious, but I am not a cook and this has been really bugging me for a while. So here goes.

I don't cook very much (it always seems like so much work for just little old me), but I make a lot of salads. I make my own croutons because mine taste better than the ones they charge scandalous prices for at the grocery store. I just cube sourdough bread and mix it up with some olive oil, garlic salt, black pepper, and usually a little dried basil; bake it all in the oven until they start to turn yummy brown. Oh, that makes a salad a salad, I'm telling you.

The problem is thus: when I store them (in tupperware or a ziploc bag) they get all mushy the next day and I end up having to re-toast the croutons. This isn't usually a problem, especially as it makes my kitchen smell all yummy again, but every now and again I'm not watching what I am doing so carefully and the first round gets a little crunchy... so a second round of baking is sometimes out of the question. Am I a total moron? Is there some magic way to store croutons so they stay crunchy? and other people are somehow born with this innate knowledge, while I continue to struggle with mushy or burned croutons time after time after time? Help!

the only food that genuinely skeeves me is raw tomatoes. as i've gotten older, i can appreciate salsa (because it's awesome) and even a thin slice in a tuna sand. But to this day, watching someone bite into a whole tomato--yes, even those "straight from the garden"--makes me want to vom.

on another, less billious note, i made another sloppy lisa soup this weekend. this was one was a slightly more complicated version of mark bittman's "lightening-quick" fish soup. Not bad! I think the teaspoon of fennel seeds and healthy dose of red wine in the broth helped it enormously.

hey aquarabbit
i don't have any first hand experience with storing homemade croutons, but i think what i'm getting from your description is that there's too much moisture being trapped in the bag
perhaps you should try putting one of those brown sugar saver that sara kate posted about back in january, or maybe some of those little anti-dessicant packets that come in, um, stuff (i think they come with shoes and bags and other things) i think they're okay to be near food b/c i'm pretty sure i've seen them before
i like your solution best however, re-toasting and making the apt smell all yummy again is awesome

oh, and btw, if you love rabbits have you ever seen brooklyn bunny before? its a webcam of a dwarf bunny named roebling -- google him, he just might be a new muse for your artwork!

aquarabbit,
What about storing them in a paper bag? I agree, I think the plastic is trapping in moisture.

re: croutons
I cool them completely & then store them in an airtight metal container, as I would cookies.
It works for me. I agree they are tons better than store-bought, like most stuff.
I made pita chips recently which I store in the same way. Take pita bread, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with a mix of herbs/spices of your choice. Cut into triangles. Bake until crispy. Great for dipping, with soups/salads, or just munching..

so, i resisted making myself a whole pork loin for my evening of solo dining, and instead opted for ahem, "poker widow pasta"
it was really, really good, and just what i was craving
i also made a pot-a-fowl on saturday night for the two of us
recipes and PICTURES (finally!) linked in my name
happy monday ya'll!

Thanks for the advice everyone! As a non-cookie-maker, I never would have thought of a metal container. I will definitely try that out.

Ann... the Brooklyn Bunny is too cute. Thanks for the tip!