apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

whats the difference between quick cooking tapioca and regular tapioca and can I substitute regular for quick cooking in a cake recipe

the only think I know about tapioca is it works well in blueberry pie as a thickener. but I think that's the instant kind.

two words you need to know at the Greenmarket on Friday:
husk. tomato.

they are only around for a couple weeks; avail last friday. tiny, sweet, sort of pear-tasting tomatoes. love. love. love.

not tomatillos, which are green and tart. husk tomatoes are yellow and the size of a cherry tomato.
a vendor on the north end of Union Sq (by B&N) has/had them.

guido,
Silly question: what do you do with those yellow tomatoes (in their cute husks). I think they're called ground tomatoes.
Anyway, I've seen them & tasted one, but don't know how to use them. How do you prepare them, in a salad, cooked or what?

No questions from me...just celebrating getting a red Le Creuset dutch oven for my birthday. And from my mother-in-law, no less (they are good for something). Yay!

michelle of montreal, good gift! i also have a red lecreuset dutch over and it's amazing...i use it all the time, there's just something that makes me feel so good when i'm home on a chilly day making a stew and the house smells of good things. very satisfying.

We scored the Kithenaid stand mixer from Monday's Scavenger post. Any recipe suggestions for breaking it in this weekend?

So, how do you conquer a patty pan squash? It's shape is confusing me. Do you cook the whole thing? chop it? Prep ideas/

For patty pans, I grate them and incorporate them into a "thick" pancake batter and either pan fry 'cakes' or form balls and deep fry as 'fritters.' Serve with sour cream and/or salsa.

Grated patty pan freezes well also.

I use patty pans just like any summer squash - stir fries, veggie lasagne, etc. I usually prep them by slicing a disc off the bottom so that it will sit flat, then slice into 1/4" ribbons. If I want smaller pieces, I stack the ribbons up and halve or quarter them.

leeds, about those husk tomatoes
we ate a bunch of them out of the bag, marveling at the flavor and trying to place it...the rest, raw in salads - a toasted couscous with veg that needed a sweet component for instance.
you could use them in a raw salsa too

it's the novelty, in the middle of high season for regular tomatoes. not that I'm actually sick of having great tomatoes, but . . . you know

I'm also a fan of those green zebra heirlooms

I'm growing green zebras in a pot this year and they did wonderfully. I've shied away from full size tomatoes and stuck with Sweet Million cherries, but this year I branched out a little.

I used them and some of the cherry tomatoes to make a raw tomato, caper, olive, parsley, basil and fennel seed pasta out of Downie's "Cooking the Roman Way". Yum. Good hot or cold and used 3 lbs of tomatoes for 1 lb of pasta, which was good, since the cherry tomato plant goes nuts whenever it gets warm.


regards,
trillium

Last night, I made the family blueberry loaf cake from the recent recipe post here. It is incredible! I actually ruined the look of it because I didn't use the parchment paper (lesson learned), but it is still edible and so tasty. Thanks!

meat, the home cure
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/how_to/the_art_of_the_cure.php

the writer makes guanciale in his NYC apt
(which I find hilarious)

crazy:)! thanks guido. I love his description of the cooked product: "crispy puff of porkiness".
the husk tomatoes: they have a very particular taste & I always wondered what it'd go well with.
The couscous/veg use seems great.
I'll be on the lookout for green zebra tomatoes, never had one!

not to be the party pooper, but aren't husk tomatoes more closely related to tomatillos and therefore cape gooseberries and therefore not tomatoes at all??

i believe they're all in the nightshade family, but, then again, so are peppers and tobacco!

i think the ones you guys are talking about are more commonly known as ground cherries....
either way, yes, they're yummy!

i've had a wicked rough week, i plan on cooking nothing until maybe sunday night
i'm all about letting anyone but me expend energy when i'm finally flung from the office each day
its been a DOOZIE.

MyNameisEarlGrey,

Glad you enjoyed our family blueberry cake (I'm the Sheena who submitted the recipe). It's been so nice and cool lately, it's hard for me to avoid firing up the oven and baking one every week! Definitely use the parchment next time, and it should come out of the pan perfectly (I learned the hard way on that too... I thought it was just an unnecessary step that my grandmother did out of habit, in spite of the advent of Teflon... that'll teach me to ignore the wisdom of my elders!).

Does anyone have experience cooking bitter melon?

In a burst of cross-cultural adventurousness, I bought one at the farmer's market last week. I used half of it to make "beef with bitter melon", a dish my husband remembered from his youth. My husband really liked the result. I, however, found it too bitter for my taste, even at a 1/2 cup melon to 1.5 lbs beef. So now I have half a bitter melon sitting in my fridge - what should I do with it?

Anna,
While I have no experience in cooking bitter melon, I have much experience in the eating and not eating of it. In my (Chinese) family, there are those who like eating bitter melon and there are those who do not. I can't stand it. And it doesn't matter what different way my mom concocts to cook it, I still can't eat it. An (East)Indian friend says the same.

Let your husband eat the rest and never buy one again.

I am already talking about the next time that I make it! It's that good.

For those of you who weren't caring,

Tomatillos (P. ixocarpa), cape gooseberry (P. peruvian) and ground cherries or husk tomatoes (P. prunosa) are all members of the genus Physalis, which is a member of the solanaceae, along with tomatoes (Solanum lycopersum), peppers (Capsicum, spp.), tobbacco (Nicotiana tabacum), eggplants (Solanum melongena), potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), belladonna (Atropa bella-donna) and deadly nightshade (Solanum interius), among others.

Hi Anna,

I don't eat as much bitter melon as my spouse can, but I have come to appreciate its bitter qualities in time. Think of it as the Campari of the Asian vegetable world. I have found that if you parboil it in heavily salted water and then use it, it tastes more palatable. Did your beef with bitter melon have fermented black beans (dau see) in it too? The three together are a classic combination, and I like them even more in chow fun. Some other ways we eat it are stuffed with fish paste (along with other vegetables and tofu) in the S'pore/M'sian Hakka dish yong tau foo, and stir-fried with plenty of garlic, fish sauce, white pepper, and beaten eggs to eat on top of rice.

regards,
trillium

i've decided to take meat out of my diet for a while. can anyone recommend a great vegetarian cookbook?

Liz, I'm happy to read any suggestions you get. As a vegetarian, I've found that most of my favorite recipes are those found in omnivorous cookbooks (sometimes needing a little modification, but most awesome cookbooks offer up some great veggie optios peripherally).

What an exciting path for you! Good luck!

Tho my husband is an omnivore, I'm a vegetarian and we cook exclusively vegetarian at home. Altho, like Kate, many of our recipes come from regular, non-veg cookbooks, I have found a few vegetarian cookbooks I like. I think the lack of good exclusively veg. books is that so many of them seem to come from a 70s, macrobiotic type of view where you have to get your "complete protein" (read - beans and rice) and a lot of the recipes are bland and feel like you are punishing yourself for being vegetarian. So - here's some cookbooks I recommend:

Tho we haven't cooked from them in a while, we used to swear by the Moosewood series, particularly their "low-fat favorites" and "daily special" books (the daily special is a book of soups and salads). Several of these recipes, such as bean burgers and black bean and chipotle soup, are still regulars in our diet.

Another recommendation is anything by Martha Rose Sulman. We have 3 of her books, and tho only one (1000 best vegetarian recipes) is fully veg, all of her books have a lot of veg recipes. (we also own mexican light and provencal light).

This is a magazine, not a book, but Cooking Light's Inspired Vegetarian column is really good.

Finally, we don't own it, but I've heard lots of good things about Vegan with a Vengeance.

you know, my roommate had a moosewood cookbook, and everything in it was delicious but way higher in fat than i could eat every day.

someone recommended deborah madison's "vegetarian cooking for everyone" (the title is something like that). does anyone have any experience with it?

Anna: I'm echoing trillium on the matter of bitter melon. We have a bunch right now. Parboiling then scooping out the seeds definitely take some of the puck out.

trillium: Thanks for those recipes. I'm going to try the stir fry tonight.

Re transition to veg diet...

http://www.powells.com/s?kw=didi+emmons&x=0&y=0

I like Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons.

I also find that 'ethnic' cook books (spanish, japanese, etc) have tons of meatless side dishes (or easily modified recipes).

When assembled you have a great meal.

Also, sometimes it helps to focus on one or two ingredients like lentils, or quinoa, or green beans or zucchini for a week and try to find a bunch of recipes incorporating those ingredients.

Good luck!

Liz,
The traditional Moosewood cookbooks are high in fat, but the ones I recommended (Low Fat Favorites and Daily Special) are low calorie and low fat (and have nutrition info listed for each recipe). Not only am I a vegetarian, I've also been doing Weight Watchers for years, so all the stuff I recommended is fairly light. We also cook a lot of Indian food, much of which s already vegetarian.

genvieve:

thanks, i read your post too fast and missed that. :)

moosewood light. i'll check it out!