Thread: Valencia oranges! Bing cherries! lobster ravioli! pomegranatesalsa!

On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:37:44 -0400, Kate Connally <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Lately - the last few years - I almost never see Valencia
>oranges in the stores.

Now that you made me think about it, you're right! It used to be very
easy to find Valencia oranges. I guess all those trees that died
after various freezes were replanted with navels.

--
I love cooking with wine.
Sometimes I even put it in the food.

In article <h2inoq$s94$[email protected]>,
Kate Connally <[email protected]> wrote:

> And Tuesday night I got some Jardine's Pomegranate Salsa
> at a local gourment grocery.

What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
--
-Barb, Mother Superior, HOSSSPoJ
http://web.me.com/barbschaller - good news 4-6-2009
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
-Philo of Alexandria

"Melba's Jammin' wrote
> Kate Connally wrote:
>
>> And Tuesday night I got some Jardine's Pomegranate Salsa
>> at a local gourment grocery.
>
> What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
> it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
>
>
Pomegranite juice with diced onions and Beta vulgaris., a pinch of black
pepper and a smidge of honey. Yummy in your tummy!

"Melba's Jammin'" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]..

..
>
> What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
> it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
> --


Our supermarket has all sorts of fruit salsa. It's just salsa with that
particular ingredient added. I buoght the peach one last week. Not for me.
Too sweet.

speaking of eccentricity in cooking, nice article

Date: Sep 13, 2007 9:57 PM
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/food/...t_on_cake.html

Southerners are sweet on cake
By Charles Perry
Los Angeles Times


Caramel glaze spills down a brown-sugar pound cake, one of 64
hard-to-resist recipes in "Southern Cakes." Most are easy but sinfully rich.
In a climate like the American South's, you'd think people would want
light, refreshing desserts - sorbets, maybe. Actually, Southerners are
crazy for cake.

They make fruitcakes, angel cakes, chocolate cakes, pound cakes, layer
cakes of all kinds (they can't get enough of coconut cakes). They have
varieties you may never have heard of, such as Lane cake (a white cake
with fluffy white frosting and a custardy coconut, raisin and nut
filling), and they keep inventing more.

Some are homey treats based on molasses or dried fruit, but the majority
are madly rich. Most of the 64 recipes in Nancie McDermott's
just-published Southern Cakes call for reckless quantities of cream,
butter, sugar and eggs.

The resulting cakes tower grandly, they're plushly frosted, they ooze
filling. Just try to resist them. It will be a lesson in humility.

McDermott, who lived in Irvine and Carlsbad, Calif., from 1985 to 1999,
learned about Thai food while serving in the Peace Corps and is best
known for her half dozen books on Southeast Asian cooking. Then she
surprised Southern California's foodies by moving back to her home state
of North Carolina.

The Asian cookbooks kept coming, but now here's Southern Cakes, showing
that the persimmon doesn't fall far from the tree. On returning to the
South, she writes, she has enjoyed taking "a long, sweet look at
Southern food in general and Southern baking in particular."

For a generation, people have been amazingly impressed when anybody
makes a cake from scratch. In fact, as I found when cooking my way
through eight recipes in this book, it's absurdly easy. Your mixer
creams the butter and sugar with no effort from you, then you mix in the
eggs, liquid and flour, and bingo: batter. The baking part is no more
difficult than with a mix.

True, frostings can be more troublesome, and I tend to trust a candy
thermometer when higher densities of sugar syrup are involved, rather
than relying on the traditional method of evaluating thread or soft-ball
stages. My main criticism of McDermott's book is that I wish she had put
in temperatures more often for the frostings. Otherwise, these recipes
are very well worked out, written clearly enough for a novice to handle.

There is a specific Southern repertoire of cakes, such as the fabled
Lady Baltimore (a white cake with seven-minute frosting and fruits and
nuts in the filling). Still, a lot of Southern cakes are local
variations on ideas familiar elsewhere. Everybody makes devil's food
cake, right? Ah, but not necessarily with a whipped-cream filling, as in
Celestial chocolate cake.

The thing Southern cake-makers are perhaps best known for is a goofy
fondness for strange ingredients. They may put in mayonnaise (well, it's
basically egg yolks, oil and lemon juice, so why not?) or even tomato
soup. "Southern cooks don't keep the key ingredient a mystery,"
McDermott writes. "We find quirkiness attractive, and tomato soup cake
is pretty, easy and simply delicious."

The "everyday" cakes include Ocracoke Island fig cake (a spice cake from
North Carolina's Outer Banks, made with figs and walnuts and topped with
a buttermilk glaze) and a blueberry cake (pretty much blueberry muffins
baked in a cake pan) from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Along with
these homey items, McDermott presents a couple of wild ones. Japanese
fruitcake is not Japanese in the slightest - it's four alternating
layers of fruited and plain cake with a filling of lemon coconut glaze.
This is one case in which McDermott's research has turned up no
explanation for the name. (I suspect people thought it looked like a
pagoda.)

For my money, the grandest-looking cakes in this book are the
brown-sugar pound cake baked in a tube pan with a lush mass of caramel
glaze drooling down its sides, and the classic coconut cake, with its
feathery, dazzling white frosting. When I brought the coconut cake to
the office, people in the street were literally lunging at it.

That's the thing about this book. I've always been a pie-oriented guy,
insofar as I've bothered with dessert at all. McDermott has made a
convert of me. She's shown me that if you want to impress people all to
heck, nothing beats a great big cake loaded with frosting.

Call me crazy. But first, have just one slice. . . .

On Jul 2, 11:37*am, Kate Connally <conna...@pitt.edu> wrote:
(snip)
> I also got a 3-lb. box of some of the most beautiful dark
> cherries I've seen in a while. *I will be stuffing my face
> with them this weekend
> Kate
>
Where were those cherries from? California cherries can be really
good, and cherries from Washington state are wonderful; but cherries
from the Flathead Valley close to Missoula were incredible. Huge,
almost black and so crisp they'd squirt cherry juice over many a white
shirt. There was a terrible freeze on the valley more than twenty
years ago that killed virtually all of the cherry trees. I keep
waiting and hoping the cherries come back. I'll just eat 'em
naked ;-)
Lynn in Fargo

On Jul 3, 12:26*pm, Lynn from Fargo Ografmorffig <lynng...@i29.net>
wrote:
> On Jul 2, 11:37*am, Kate Connally <conna...@pitt.edu> wrote:
> (snip)> I also got a 3-lb. box of some of the most beautiful dark
> > cherries I've seen in a while. *I will be stuffing my face
> > with them this weekend
> > Kate
>
> Where were those cherries from? *California cherries can be really
> good, and cherries from Washington state are wonderful; *but cherries
> from the Flathead Valley close to Missoula were incredible. *Huge,
> almost black and so crisp they'd squirt cherry juice over many a white
> shirt. *There was a terrible freeze on the valley more than twenty
> years ago that killed virtually all of the cherry trees. *I keep
> waiting and hoping the cherries come back. *I'll just eat 'em
> naked *;-)
> Lynn in Fargo

Oops! Missoula, Montana
L f F

In article <[email protected]> ,
"marika" <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Melba's Jammin'" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> > What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
> > it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
> > --
>
>
> Our supermarket has all sorts of fruit salsa. It's just salsa with that
> particular ingredient added. I buoght the peach one last week. Not for me.
> Too sweet.

(Inappropriate distribution to another group snipped)

I understand about fruit salsas. I think they're dumb, but I understand
them. I'm having trouble seeing pomegranate salsa ‹ all those
encased seeds, donchaknow.

-Barb

In article <UOp3m.599$[email protected]>,
"brooklyn1" <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Melba's Jammin' wrote
> > Kate Connally wrote:
> >
> >> And Tuesday night I got some Jardine's Pomegranate Salsa
> >> at a local gourment grocery.
> >
> > What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
> > it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
> >
> >
> Pomegranite juice with diced onions and Beta vulgaris., a pinch of black
> pepper and a smidge of honey. Yummy in your tummy!

Yuk, yuk, YUK!!! You prevert!!
--
-Barb, Mother Superior, HOSSSPoJ
http://web.me.com/barbschaller - good news 4-6-2009
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
-Philo of Alexandria

Melba's Jammin' wrote:
> In article <h2inoq$s94$[email protected]>,
> Kate Connally <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> And Tuesday night I got some Jardine's Pomegranate Salsa
>> at a local gourment grocery.
>
> What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
> it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!

Well, it's, um, salsa, um, with pomegranate juice
or seeds in it.

The one I bought was D. L. Jardine's Pomegranate Salsa.
It's quite good, although I can't really taste the pomegranate
very much. It's like your basic tomato salsa but with
pomegranate juice added. It has a nice little heat to it.
Enough to make it interesting but not do a tonsillectomy by
capsaicin.

After getting this stuff I went on line and found a bunch
of pomegranate salsa recipes. They all use whole pomegranate
seeds and some also use some juice and they have other fruits
in them and sometimes tomatoes and lime juice and chiles and
other stuff. I copied a whole bunch of them. The sound
delicious and look beautiful in the pictures.

Kate

--
Kate Connally
“If I were as old as I feel, I’d be dead already.”
Goldfish: “The wholesome snack that smiles back,
Until you bite their heads off.”
What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?
mailto:[email protected]

Melba's Jammin' wrote:
> In article <[email protected]> ,
> "marika" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> "Melba's Jammin'" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>> What in the name of all this holy is pomegranate salsa? I'm not seeing
>>> it, Kate. What in Alex' name is in it? Oy!
>>> --
>>
>> Our supermarket has all sorts of fruit salsa. It's just salsa with that
>> particular ingredient added. I buoght the peach one last week. Not for me.
>> Too sweet.
>
> (Inappropriate distribution to another group snipped)
>
> I understand about fruit salsas. I think they're dumb, but I understand
> them. I'm having trouble seeing pomegranate salsa ‹ all those
> encased seeds, donchaknow.
>
> -Barb

This one doesn't have the whole seeds, just juice.

I love fruit salsas. I make a mean pineapple mango
salsa that is to die for.

Kate

--
Kate Connally
“If I were as old as I feel, I’d be dead already.”
Goldfish: “The wholesome snack that smiles back,
Until you bite their heads off.”
What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?
mailto:[email protected]

Lynn from Fargo Ografmorffig wrote:
> On Jul 2, 11:37 am, Kate Connally <conna...@pitt.edu> wrote:
> (snip)
>> I also got a 3-lb. box of some of the most beautiful dark
>> cherries I've seen in a while. I will be stuffing my face
>> with them this weekend
>> Kate
>>
> Where were those cherries from? California cherries can be really
> good, and cherries from Washington state are wonderful; but cherries
> from the Flathead Valley close to Missoula were incredible. Huge,
> almost black and so crisp they'd squirt cherry juice over many a white
> shirt. There was a terrible freeze on the valley more than twenty
> years ago that killed virtually all of the cherry trees. I keep
> waiting and hoping the cherries come back. I'll just eat 'em
> naked ;-)
> Lynn in Fargo
>

These were from Washington state. They were pretty good,
but even though almost every cherry was deep dark black
only about 1 in 5 was as sweet as I expected. The others
were a little tarter than really ripe cherries should be.
But I still enjoyed them. I ate about half the box and
then pitted and froze the balance. I'll make something
with them later.

kate

--
Kate Connally
“If I were as old as I feel, I’d be dead already.”
Goldfish: “The wholesome snack that smiles back,
Until you bite their heads off.”
What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?
mailto:[email protected]

Lynn from Fargo Ografmorffig wrote:
> On Jul 3, 12:26 pm, Lynn from Fargo Ografmorffig <lynng...@i29.net>
> wrote:
>> On Jul 2, 11:37 am, Kate Connally <conna...@pitt.edu> wrote:
>> (snip)> I also got a 3-lb. box of some of the most beautiful dark
>>> cherries I've seen in a while. I will be stuffing my face
>>> with them this weekend
>>> Kate
>> Where were those cherries from? California cherries can be really
>> good, and cherries from Washington state are wonderful; but cherries
>> from the Flathead Valley close to Missoula were incredible. Huge,
>> almost black and so crisp they'd squirt cherry juice over many a white
>> shirt. There was a terrible freeze on the valley more than twenty
>> years ago that killed virtually all of the cherry trees. I keep
>> waiting and hoping the cherries come back. I'll just eat 'em
>> naked ;-)
>> Lynn in Fargo
>
> Oops! Missoula, Montana
> L f F

Lynn, That's where I'm going on my trip. My sister lives
in Hamilton, Montana. She talks about the great cherries they
get there. But maybe there's not enough for "export" only for
the "natives".

kate

--
Kate Connally
“If I were as old as I feel, I’d be dead already.”
Goldfish: “The wholesome snack that smiles back,
Until you bite their heads off.”
What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?
mailto:[email protected]