One Gorilla Kitchen

On Gefilte Fish

Bee (on the verge of potential pre-bedtime meltdown):  I'm hungry!

Slim:  Why don't you have some gefilte fish?

Me:  Wondering whether I will, in fact, ever eat the jar of gefilte fish I bought a couple of months ago.

Bee: I want 'filtafish!  I want 'filtafish!  I. Want. 'Filtafish!

Me:  It's chopped-up fish.

Bee: ...

        I don't want gefilte fish.

 

*    *    *    *    *    *

Also, it occurs to me, now, that I'm going to have to be the one who introduces her to the food of my ancestors.  Will look more closely at this recipe.  Also, ask my mother's friend for her recipe, because her gefilte fish is the best I've ever had.  (Which means better than exactly the following:  (1) gefilte fish in a jar, and (2) my paternal grandmother's gefilte fish, which I only grew to enjoy as a university student, but not consistently.  I say this to clarify that I am no gefilte fish expert.  Not at all.) 

Melting chocolate

Now is when I would call my mother to confirm that each square of Baker's(R) chocolate is an ounce.

Even melting chocolate in a small saucepan reminds me of her: 

The solid bars kissing the bottom of the pan-- you know when they just start to melt? 

The smell that wafts up, just at that point. 

Before the chocolate burns.

Reader tips: Tinfoil potatoes, Crispy kale chips and Korean beef shish kebab

Tinfoil potatoes

• Rebecca and co. add onion soup mix to their potatoes.
• Karen adds "lots" of chopped garlic, "a generous amount of cumin", chili powder and salt to hers.

Crispy kale chips:

• Erica figured out that 7-8 minutes in a convection oven set to 325 was long enough to crisp the kale.  She also said: 

delicious! we love them. even O. who isn't so into vegetables. but they are very crumbly so mostly he just squishes them to smitherines in his hand and them licks them off. not so elegant, but effective. thanks for helping me get some greens into him!  Heh.

• And Sister Carrie and I commiserated about how hard it is to sprinkle with the right amount of salt.  She said:

I made these last night! They turned out great. The thin ones practically melt in your mouth. I can see that getting the salt balanced is hard. Some had too much and some not enough. But they disappeared anyway.

I wondered if one of those fancy salts might have a milder zing (Fleur de sel? what's that like?) and Sister Carrie thought maybe bacon salt.  Which is ... er ... kosher, apparently?           

Korean beef shish kebab:

• Amina said:

FYI- This recipe works well even if you A) Don't read it all the way through and add the brown sugar to the marinade instead of massaging it into the beef B) You don't even have the energy to put the meat and peppers onto kebab sticks so you just make a stir fry and C) you don't have a bbq anyway. Thanks Alisa! 2 of 3 children ate it.

Thanks for the tips, guys!

How to soften rock-hard brown sugar

You know how your mother told you that you can put a slice of apple in a container of rock-hard brown sugar to soften it up?

She was right.

 

Reader tips: Cooking with tofu

In case you didn't see, I got some great advice for my "tofu-lemma" (credit to moi. for that one):

Kitchen wisdom, from Slim

Slim, telling Bee about Life in the Olden Days: 

        "The rubber spatula is the invention that ruined kids' lives forever."

Slim, explaining the pros and cons of licking batter off a wooden spoon over licking batter off a rubber spatula: 

        "It's better to lick wood."