The food safety questions on Mondays are intended to deal with recommended safety practices, which I'm sure I haven't always followed, either.
I can recall two times when while hiding Easter eggs we found eggs that had been hidden a year earlier. Needless to say, we handled them carefully and disposed of them.
But I'm also reminded of a cartoon, probably from The New Yorker, in a store where there's a jar of "100 Year Eggs" on the counter, and a customer is asking, "Are they fresh?"
You have my sympathies, the last time I did a ham it came out crunchy, and that's not a good thing.
This time I wrapped it in foil, lowered the initial temperature and heated it for about 90 minutes after marinating it in pineapple juice for 2 days. It was perfect, the rye bread was great, and the potatoes au gratin were probably the best I've made. We also had some strawberries for dessert.
We had a stir-fry for supper tonight.
It's a bit more work to clean up after making it, though I just throw the food processor bowl and lid into the dishwasher, but that bread is great toasted.
Hash brown potatoes are sometimes made this way, though most of the time what gets called hash browns are just fried slices of potatoes, usually with some onions. (An improvement on this is Lyonnaise potatoes.)
My mother's favorite post-Thanksgiving meal was potato pancakes made with left-over mashed potatoes and covered with gravy.
Larger supermarkets may have sections catering to vegans and people who are lactose-intolerant, but a health food store might be a better option, if there's one around.
I'm going to have to order Peter's new Perfect Pan Pizza book when it comes out next month.
Creme fraiche is kind of like sour cream, but a bit smoother and less likely to curdle. It's rather pricey.
My wife has a 'Christmas Coffee Cake' recipe that calls for sour cream that was her grandmother's Christmas treat. We've made it a few times but my wife was always disappointed with the taste. Her grandmother was a farm wife and I think she used real sour cream, not that cultured stuff they sell these days.
I've thought about either trying to sour some fresh cream, make some creme fraiche (I've got a recipe for it) or buy some at the store and try that in the recipe, I think it might come closer to what she remembers, although some remembered tastes may be more memory than taste.
I've the quizzes for Saturday and Sunday set, and I've got a few ideas I need to complete the research on for next week. I want to get a bit ahead so that when summer travel and activities start I've got them ready.
I've got marbled rye bread planned for tomorrow (so we can have it with Easter ham), but I want to make another loaf of this bread soon, it makes great toast for peanut butter. Next time I think I'll cut it into 2 parts and freeze half, though, it goes bad fairly quickly.
I find having more than 2 kinds of fresh bread on hand tends to lead to at least one of them going bad, the two of just don't eat that much bread these days. So I tend to cut loaves in half and freeze most of a batch.
Parsnips are similar, nutritionally, to potatoes, though there's a little more sugar in them so they're slightly higher in calories and carbs.
Parsnip mash is a fairly common side dish in England.
I use them mainly to add a little sweetness to chicken stock. It's the ingredient that makes chicken soup taste 'right'.
I just finished shaping a 2nd batch of Hot Cross Buns (4 pans of 8 rolls each.)
OK, what on earth is a turkey-broccoli braid?
I wrote a blog post a while back on velouté (one of the five 'mother' sauces) and its similarity to gravy:
Have you looked into whether parsnips would also be an acceptable substitute for potatoes?
