@John Cole:
Because I disapprove of bad jokes, I shall not be asking if that butter tray is also available in iron butterfly or badfinger.
6.
Betty Cracker
@John Cole: It looks boulder-like because he bakes it in a Dutch oven and uses wheat bran (I think?) to keep it from sticking to the sides. It may look like a lichen-encrusted rock, but it tastes delicious!
@Amir Khalid: Did you just Cavuto mark a bad joke?
9.
MattF
I’ve discovered Charlie Stross’ ‘Laundry’ novels– beginning, in media res, with The Fuller Memorandum. Then Atrocity Archives, and now reading Jennifer Morgue. Eldritch horror + science fiction + satire on bureaucracy + Stross definitely knows how to keep a plot moving. Good stuff.
10.
Gin & Tonic
@John Cole: It’s Florida. All they have is sand, so if he wants stones, he has to make them.
11.
Phylllis
We have a new principal in my district. I’ve found myself referring to her, to myself, as Princess VanAstorButt. She was late to a meeting this morning, and came in the door asking me why I didn’t remind her. I think I must have made a ‘bitchplease’ face at her before I could stop myself.
12.
BGinCHI
Some cappellini on top and that would look exactly like Trump’s head.
Inside and out.
13.
pamelabrown53
The fresh baked bread ,the butter dish in the background along with all the other sundry items, plus the butcher block counter top speak to me of home and comfort. I like your values. Betty.
14.
Germy Shoemangler
We have a romeo and juliet situation in our house. At least, it was a romeo and juliet situation, until what I found this morning out our bedroom window.
There is a one-eyed, rather large cat that has been appearing in our yard. He stands in the same spot and stares through our downstairs side window. Our cat, strictly a housecat, waits at the front window for hours. If she spots him, she runs downstairs to the side window and jumps up and down. “How cute,” I thought. Until this morning.
This morning I looked out our bedroom window. It is over a back, roofed porch. There was cat poop on the roof, a foot or so away from our window. Our room has a small cat ledge by that window. It’s one of our cat’s favorite places to sit and watch the yard.
Did this cat climb the tree next to our back porch, walk across the roof and leave a poop as a love offering to our girl? Or is he asserting territorial dominance? I confess the cat mind and cat logic are mysteries to me.
It looks boulder-like because he bakes it in a Dutch oven and uses wheat bran (I think?) to keep it from sticking to the sides.
Bran is a common way of keeping it from sticking, but usually you’re worried about it sticking to the cloth you use to cover it while it’s rising. If you put it in a hot pot the way you do when baking in a dutch oven, you don’t have to worry about sticking. FWIW, you can use flour instead of bran, which gives the finished product a different appearance.
20.
Betty Cracker
@pamelabrown53: Thank you! We installed those counters and my daughter and I put up the tile on the wall ourselves. If you know where to look, you can see where we screwed up. But we like it.
I notice with great approval the bottle of Tabasco on the counter. That is the only spice I cook with, and I put it on just about everything except oatmeal… at least on purpose.
The smell of baking bread is the olfactory equivalent of a hug.
@WaterGirl: My husband is a hot sauce fanatic. We probably have a dozen different store bought brands around here, and twice a year, he makes his own from homegrown peppers. We have a waiting list for his famous homemade hot sauces.
My sister-in-law is Jamaican, and her father was a hot sauce nut too, but he would never agree that any sauce he tried was actually hot. Well, my husband made a batch for him once that was so damn hot even the old Jamaican had to admit it!
He also made that hot pepper sauce to the right of the Tabasco in the photo above. It is wonderful on greens.
G has been idly paging through his until now unused copy of “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day,” so I’m hoping to have some gluteny goodness to report on soon. He sometimes has to contemplate these kind of steps for a while. ;-)
@Betty Cracker: I was not a fan of hot sauce until I moved to Santa Fe in 1977 and discovered the wonders of Hatch green and red chiles. I moved back to Albuquerque in 1995 and renewed the love affair. We arrived in October just in time to buy the roasted chiles that people sell out of cookers in shopping center parking lots; it smelled like cheap pot and added a dimension to everything we cooked.
Moving to Miami meant giving it up; Cuban food does not have the same flair for the dramatic, but I have friends send me CARE packages from New Mexico to keep my senses honed. My only wish is to find a place to get the ingredients for posole, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a real serving of it.
32.
p.a.
Knead!
33.
p.a.
@pamelabrown53: I think I see Malkin’s reflection in the tile. Release the dogs Betty!
I notice with great approval the bottle of Tabasco on the counter. That is the only spice I cook with, and I put it on just about everything except oatmeal… at least on purpose.
You need to learn about the wonders of rooster sauce.
37.
PurpleGirl
@nellcote: Oh, wow. That’s great. Now that’s something I’ll share on FB.
New Mexican posole (aka pozole) is not the only kind out there. I’ve had a lot of tasty posoles here in So Cal. Just sayin’.
39.
Elizabelle
Sad. We are down one anchor panda in DC. The smaller, more fragile cub did not survive. Hope the remaining panda does well (it’s being cared for by mom panda; she’d abandoned the tinier one, as nature would dictate….)
Come on panda baby. Thrive.
40.
Felonius Monk
Tabasco is good — the Cracker family gets a gold star. Bread looks mighty inviting. May I inquire what repast might be accompanying that fine looking loaf?
Goes back many, many decades 9and wasn’t radioactive as in at a dangerous level.
Thing was that certain colors (it may have been one particular color) were crafted using uranium oxide (not just for Fiesta Ware, but commonly). Supplies of that ingredient dried up almost overnight when the Manhattan Project got going.
Hazy if that color was discontinued, but might have been. Otherwise, substitutes to get close to it were used thereafter and became the norm.
IIRC, if wasn’t until after the public knew about the A-bombs that the urban legend of radioactive Fiesta Ware was spread, such gossip convincing the company to refrain from going back to using the oxide.
/more than you wanted to know
42.
NotMax
Betty, has he ever tried making fresh pizza dough?
Same skillset.
43.
Betty Cracker
@Felonius Monk: Not sure. I think a sandwich of some sort would be our best bet.
Look as if might be nice for open-faced roast beef sandwiches, slathered in gravy.
/salivating
46.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: He has. Our local grocery store’s bakery sells a pretty good pizza dough, so we buy from them more than we make our own, but the mister makes a fine pizza dough from scratch.
47.
boatboy_srq
Sigh. Fresh bread. Bakeries around here svck, and the housemate has gone zero-calories zero-starch (sugar was way high) so we’re nearly bread-free regardless. That loaf looks yummy though.
Only made it once myself. Recipe might well have come from the Joy of Cooking.
Regardless, was remarkably simple and unscrewuppable. Patience is the key ingredient.
As the statute of limitations has long since run out, can confess that was living in a place with maybe a half-dozen others at the time and some of them insisted on baking a pie or two liberally sprinkled with what looked like oregano, but wasn’t.
@NotMax: The radioactive red Fiesta ware is not an urban legend. It was one of our favorite radioactivity demos for visiting high school kids to the physics dept, the Geiger counter used to go wild in its vicinity.
Sigh. Didn’t say the existence of radioactivity was an urban legend, rather that the level posed from the traces of uranium oxide presented a miniscule danger from exposure.
IIRC, the federal government worked with Fiesta Ware and other manufacturers who used uranium oxide to concoct a story for them as to why the red disappeared from store shelves, just in case some in the public put 2 and 2 together re: government commandeering the entire supply.
I made the best zucchini bread the other day, standard recipe for 2 loaves but substituted 1/2 cup buttermilk for one of the three eggs called for. Perfection, and I think my new go-to recipe for quickbreads.
Made in West (by Gawd) Virginia! We’ve seen Fiesta Ware in restaurants all over the country. Family owned, union made!
ETA: That load of bread is so gorgeous! I wish I could bake bread that pretty, IF it also tastes that good.
Betty, you are a lucky girl to have that bread in the house!
62.
WaterGirl
@gogol’s wife: I laughed out loud at the idea of using the cooling rack under your laptop, but that’s actually pretty clever!
@Mustang Bobby: @Betty Cracker: I actually love hot stuff, it’s just that for me tabasco seems to hit just one note. Hatch peppers from new mexico – yes!
I grew so many hot peppers this year that I’m pretty sure that even with the ones I’ve given away, the rest will not fit in my freezer. Scaling back next year, but not too much!
Baud
Smell the fresh air.
John Cole
He baked a stone?
Have the same Fiestaware butter tray, although in deep purple.
Juju
I have a cow butter dish, but the rest of my dishes are Fiesta Ware.
Elizabelle
But with anchor pandas.
HT to JPL from previous thread.
Amir Khalid
@John Cole:
Because I disapprove of bad jokes, I shall not be asking if that butter tray is also available in iron butterfly or badfinger.
Betty Cracker
@John Cole: It looks boulder-like because he bakes it in a Dutch oven and uses wheat bran (I think?) to keep it from sticking to the sides. It may look like a lichen-encrusted rock, but it tastes delicious!
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Cute.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: Did you just Cavuto mark a bad joke?
MattF
I’ve discovered Charlie Stross’ ‘Laundry’ novels– beginning, in media res, with The Fuller Memorandum. Then Atrocity Archives, and now reading Jennifer Morgue. Eldritch horror + science fiction + satire on bureaucracy + Stross definitely knows how to keep a plot moving. Good stuff.
Gin & Tonic
@John Cole: It’s Florida. All they have is sand, so if he wants stones, he has to make them.
Phylllis
We have a new principal in my district. I’ve found myself referring to her, to myself, as Princess VanAstorButt. She was late to a meeting this morning, and came in the door asking me why I didn’t remind her. I think I must have made a ‘bitchplease’ face at her before I could stop myself.
BGinCHI
Some cappellini on top and that would look exactly like Trump’s head.
Inside and out.
pamelabrown53
The fresh baked bread ,the butter dish in the background along with all the other sundry items, plus the butcher block counter top speak to me of home and comfort. I like your values. Betty.
Germy Shoemangler
We have a romeo and juliet situation in our house. At least, it was a romeo and juliet situation, until what I found this morning out our bedroom window.
There is a one-eyed, rather large cat that has been appearing in our yard. He stands in the same spot and stares through our downstairs side window. Our cat, strictly a housecat, waits at the front window for hours. If she spots him, she runs downstairs to the side window and jumps up and down. “How cute,” I thought. Until this morning.
This morning I looked out our bedroom window. It is over a back, roofed porch. There was cat poop on the roof, a foot or so away from our window. Our room has a small cat ledge by that window. It’s one of our cat’s favorite places to sit and watch the yard.
Did this cat climb the tree next to our back porch, walk across the roof and leave a poop as a love offering to our girl? Or is he asserting territorial dominance? I confess the cat mind and cat logic are mysteries to me.
schrodinger's cat
I have an identical cooling rack. FYI some of the older Fiesta ware used radioactive glazes.
JPL
@BGinCHI: Well someone saw Trump’s face in their margarine, so why not in bread.
Bobby Thomson
John, what’s up with the site and its slowness? Talk to us.
BGinCHI
@JPL: “Everything’s better… with Trump’s noggin on it.”
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Bran is a common way of keeping it from sticking, but usually you’re worried about it sticking to the cloth you use to cover it while it’s rising. If you put it in a hot pot the way you do when baking in a dutch oven, you don’t have to worry about sticking. FWIW, you can use flour instead of bran, which gives the finished product a different appearance.
Betty Cracker
@pamelabrown53: Thank you! We installed those counters and my daughter and I put up the tile on the wall ourselves. If you know where to look, you can see where we screwed up. But we like it.
Roger Moore
@Bobby Thomson:
I suspect there’s some kind of misbehaving script on the page. That’s what usually causes these problems.
Mustang Bobby
I notice with great approval the bottle of Tabasco on the counter. That is the only spice I cook with, and I put it on just about everything except oatmeal… at least on purpose.
The smell of baking bread is the olfactory equivalent of a hug.
WaterGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: Me, too. (same cooling rack)
WaterGirl
@Mustang Bobby:
If you’re trying to make your mom happy and find a nice fellow to settle down with, maybe don’t lead with the Tabasco thing? :-)
Edit: I saw the Tabasco on the counter and my first though was bloody marys.
Mustang Bobby
@WaterGirl: Heh, I’ll remember that.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: My husband is a hot sauce fanatic. We probably have a dozen different store bought brands around here, and twice a year, he makes his own from homegrown peppers. We have a waiting list for his famous homemade hot sauces.
My sister-in-law is Jamaican, and her father was a hot sauce nut too, but he would never agree that any sauce he tried was actually hot. Well, my husband made a batch for him once that was so damn hot even the old Jamaican had to admit it!
He also made that hot pepper sauce to the right of the Tabasco in the photo above. It is wonderful on greens.
nellcote
Custom Cat Purrs! :)
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
G has been idly paging through his until now unused copy of “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day,” so I’m hoping to have some gluteny goodness to report on soon. He sometimes has to contemplate these kind of steps for a while. ;-)
BGinCHI
@Betty Cracker: Isn’t your hubby from Buffalo?
I’m surprised he doesn’t just put Frank’s Red Hot on everything.
p.a.
@Betty Cracker: is that the no-kneed recipe from the NYT?
Mustang Bobby
@Betty Cracker: I was not a fan of hot sauce until I moved to Santa Fe in 1977 and discovered the wonders of Hatch green and red chiles. I moved back to Albuquerque in 1995 and renewed the love affair. We arrived in October just in time to buy the roasted chiles that people sell out of cookers in shopping center parking lots; it smelled like cheap pot and added a dimension to everything we cooked.
Moving to Miami meant giving it up; Cuban food does not have the same flair for the dramatic, but I have friends send me CARE packages from New Mexico to keep my senses honed. My only wish is to find a place to get the ingredients for posole, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a real serving of it.
p.a.
Knead!
p.a.
@pamelabrown53: I think I see Malkin’s reflection in the tile. Release the dogs Betty!
p.a.
@schrodinger’s cat: “transfer (food item) to a warm plate”.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Ohhhhh…we can get super powers! Just like the comics…
Roger Moore
@Mustang Bobby:
You need to learn about the wonders of rooster sauce.
PurpleGirl
@nellcote: Oh, wow. That’s great. Now that’s something I’ll share on FB.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Mustang Bobby:
New Mexican posole (aka pozole) is not the only kind out there. I’ve had a lot of tasty posoles here in So Cal. Just sayin’.
Elizabelle
Sad. We are down one anchor panda in DC. The smaller, more fragile cub did not survive. Hope the remaining panda does well (it’s being cared for by mom panda; she’d abandoned the tinier one, as nature would dictate….)
Come on panda baby. Thrive.
Felonius Monk
Tabasco is good — the Cracker family gets a gold star. Bread looks mighty inviting. May I inquire what repast might be accompanying that fine looking loaf?
NotMax
@schrodinge’s cat
Goes back many, many decades 9and wasn’t radioactive as in at a dangerous level.
Thing was that certain colors (it may have been one particular color) were crafted using uranium oxide (not just for Fiesta Ware, but commonly). Supplies of that ingredient dried up almost overnight when the Manhattan Project got going.
Hazy if that color was discontinued, but might have been. Otherwise, substitutes to get close to it were used thereafter and became the norm.
IIRC, if wasn’t until after the public knew about the A-bombs that the urban legend of radioactive Fiesta Ware was spread, such gossip convincing the company to refrain from going back to using the oxide.
/more than you wanted to know
NotMax
Betty, has he ever tried making fresh pizza dough?
Same skillset.
Betty Cracker
@Felonius Monk: Not sure. I think a sandwich of some sort would be our best bet.
Phylllis
@BGinCHI: Frank’s Red Hot for the win!
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Look as if might be nice for open-faced roast beef sandwiches, slathered in gravy.
/salivating
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: He has. Our local grocery store’s bakery sells a pretty good pizza dough, so we buy from them more than we make our own, but the mister makes a fine pizza dough from scratch.
boatboy_srq
Sigh. Fresh bread. Bakeries around here svck, and the housemate has gone zero-calories zero-starch (sugar was way high) so we’re nearly bread-free regardless. That loaf looks yummy though.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Coolness.
Only made it once myself. Recipe might well have come from the Joy of Cooking.
Regardless, was remarkably simple and unscrewuppable. Patience is the key ingredient.
As the statute of limitations has long since run out, can confess that was living in a place with maybe a half-dozen others at the time and some of them insisted on baking a pie or two liberally sprinkled with what looked like oregano, but wasn’t.
gogol's wife
@WaterGirl:
I have that cooling rack . . . under my laptop. I haven’t baked in a while.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: The radioactive red Fiesta ware is not an urban legend. It was one of our favorite radioactivity demos for visiting high school kids to the physics dept, the Geiger counter used to go wild in its vicinity.
NotMax
@gogol’s wife
Have an insert for a long casserole-type pan which is meant to be used when broiling.
It’s always been pressed into service as a cooling rack for baked goods instead.
Cooling rack under the laptop is clever.
Iowa Old Lady
That looks delicious. Why is no one at my house making that?
Elizabelle
It’s #NationalDogDay.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Sigh. Didn’t say the existence of radioactivity was an urban legend, rather that the level posed from the traces of uranium oxide presented a miniscule danger from exposure.
IIRC, the federal government worked with Fiesta Ware and other manufacturers who used uranium oxide to concoct a story for them as to why the red disappeared from store shelves, just in case some in the public put 2 and 2 together re: government commandeering the entire supply.
Roger Moore
@Iowa Old Lady:
You need to look in the mirror when you ask that question.
Zinsky
Looks delicious, Betty! You and your husband must have wonderful dinner parties. Can you invite me to the next one?? Please???
HumboldtBlue
Well, Mexico has given us some great music and some of the planet’s best food but they’ve never given us anything like Youngblood Brass Band
satby
I made the best zucchini bread the other day, standard recipe for 2 loaves but substituted 1/2 cup buttermilk for one of the three eggs called for. Perfection, and I think my new go-to recipe for quickbreads.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: Sorry, I misunderstood what you said.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
No harm, no foul.
J R in WV
@Juju:
Made in West (by Gawd) Virginia! We’ve seen Fiesta Ware in restaurants all over the country. Family owned, union made!
ETA: That load of bread is so gorgeous! I wish I could bake bread that pretty, IF it also tastes that good.
Betty, you are a lucky girl to have that bread in the house!
WaterGirl
@gogol’s wife: I laughed out loud at the idea of using the cooling rack under your laptop, but that’s actually pretty clever!
@Mustang Bobby: @Betty Cracker: I actually love hot stuff, it’s just that for me tabasco seems to hit just one note. Hatch peppers from new mexico – yes!
I grew so many hot peppers this year that I’m pretty sure that even with the ones I’ve given away, the rest will not fit in my freezer. Scaling back next year, but not too much!
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Pepper jelly?
Lurves me a dab of jalapeno jelly spread on slices of roast pork loin.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Sadly, I am not a jelly girl.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: Never thought of that use. I do like it with bagels and cream cheese.