Category:

recipes

Norwegian Butter Squares

by Diane Duane August 25, 2023

Just posting this recipe here so that it can be found a little more readily. A tip of the virtual hat to the source on Tumblr, @locusimperium.

The ones in the above image were baked in an all-crunchy-edges brownie pan, but these bake perfectly satisfactorily in the recommended 9×12 inch sheet pan. They’re just fine plain, though the addition of a little ground cinnamon and cloves works well too.

Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares

1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado / raw sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9×13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.

Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.

Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.

These tend not to hang around long, but if you think they might survive in your local environment for more than a couple of days, keep them in a cookie tin.

August 25, 2023

Fanfic Rye Bagels

by Diane Duane April 3, 2022

So I was wandering through Tumblr (as I do at least once a day, occasionally leaving evidence that I’ve been there) and ran across someone’s rather plaintive message to Neil Gaiman:

Hi Neil

Why did you stop making bagels?

What did the bagels ever do to you?

Neil came back in the linked thread with a perfectly sound explanation (he went to New Zealand and left his sourdough starter behind) and went on to reload his recipe, along with a brief discussion of his method for a lovely solid rye sourdough bagel. And there was much rejoicing.

That said… after the last couple of years, some of us could be forgiven for being, frankly, up to here with sourdough. Peter and I have been routinely baking our bread at home bi- or tri-weekly since 2010 or thereabouts (using this recipe) and I’m happy to say that the lockdown-associated bread shortages of the early pandemic weren’t something that affected us particularly… except that sometimes yeast was harder to find for a little while. And when people heard about that, the first thing they usually said, in great excitement, was “But have you heard about sourdough?!” After a while this got kind of old. I’m glad that phase seems to have passed.

That said: Neil’s opinions have for a long while struck me as worth listening to, so it seemed like this recipe was something I should look into… since as a relocated New Yorker I’ve long had a bit of a thing for rye baking in general, and a good Jewish rye loaf in particular. So, dark rye bagels? Absolutely. Time to get busy.

The only problem at my end (since this recipe only came up on my Tumblr dash last week) was that there hadn’t been time to generate a sourdough of any great vintage… and I didn’t feel like waiting around. There was cream cheese in the fridge getting lonely.

So I cheated, and adapted Neil’s recipe to move a little faster for the initially-sourdough-starterless. This take isn’t going to perfectly duplicate Neil’s take, but it’s close enough to it to be considered (at the very least) an affectionate fanfic version.

The ingredients are essentially the same as those in Neil’s notes, but with a little spoofing in the initial stage. Here’s how his original take opens:

100 ml starter
200 grams rye flour
220 ml water
Mix well, cover with cling film, leave overnight.

The only problem here comes if you don’t have any starter (which I didn’t). So I made a simple pre-ferment along the lines of a levain or sponge. A true levain would itself be made of a little sourdough, but it’s possible to fake it if you’re in a rush or temporarily bereft of true sourdough starter. ]

The levain consisted of:

100g of flour (either all rye, or half rye, half white [wheat] flour)
100 ml of water
1 12-g package of instant dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar

I mixed the yeast and the flour together in a jar, added the water, and beat it all together: then put the jar’s lid loosely on it and put it in a warm spot (in this case, near the radiator by my desk in the living room) to allow the yeast time to wake up and get active. If I’d been more patient I’d have left it for four to six hours, but in this case the yeast got very active very quickly, and it seemed to me as if two hours would be enough. Your yeast’s level of activity may differ, of course (especially if you’ve had it around for a little while). But generally speaking the sugar will kick the yeast into action without too much trouble.

When the mixture has bubbled up at least enthusiastically enough for what’s in the jar to double, and you’ve got all your other ingredients together, stir the starter down. Mix into it:

1 tablespoon of maple syrup (or honey or agave syrup or molasses…), mixed into 2 tablespoons of water

(If like me you’re someone who has trouble with fruit syrups, the molasses will work well with this. Or you might want to use bakers’ malt syrup instead.)

Then combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl:

50g buckwheat flour
50g barley flour
300g rye flour
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 package instant dry yeast

When these are well combined, dump all the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix together very well. You should get a very stiff dough; toward the end of the process you may find it easier to mix it with your hands than with a spoon. (If for some reason it feels too sloppy, add a little more rye flour, a tablespoon or so at a time, until it firms up.) Here’s more or less what it’ll look like.

When you’ve finished the mixing, cover the bowl with plastic wrap / clingfilm or a shower cap and leave in a warm place for at least a couple of hours. Don’t expect this dough to double up the way a bread dough will—there’s nowhere near enough gluten in it for that. It’ll swell a bit, and if you’ve left fingerprints in it, they’ll start to flatten out, but that’s about it.

When the rising time is done, find a big pot (a wide one is best so as not to crowd the bagels; they need room to cruise around while they’re boiling. I used our biggest Le Creuset-ish casserole). Fill the pot with water and put it on to boil. You want a gentle boil for this at first, just up from the simmer. Add another tablespoon of your preferred syrup to it when it comes up to the boil. …Also: prepare a medium-sized baking tray by lining it with baking parchment and sprinkling it with flour or semolina.

Now preheat your oven to 220C / 450F (for a regular oven (or 200C / 400F for a fan oven), and position a rack in the middle of it.

Fill a small water bowl to wet your hands in (and maybe have some paper towels ready too, because this business can get fairly sticky). Wet your hands and pull out a lump of dough about the size of a baseball or cricket ball. Roll it between your hands without compressing it too much: then flatten it gently between your hands into a thick-hamburger-ish shape. With two or three fingers, push a hole through the middle of it, and then smooth the outsides of the nascent bagel and the inside of the hole. (There’s just no way to write about this without incurring a certain level of innuendo, is there…)

Keep wetting your hands as you prepare four of these. (Neil’s point about this being like working with modeling clay is well taken. But really sticky modeling clay…) When the water’s boiling gently, slide the proto-bagels in one at a time. They’ll immediately sink, and after thirty seconds or a minute or so they should start rising gently to the surface.

Let them have a couple of minutes on their first side while you prepare the remaining bagels. (We got seven out of our batch of dough.) At the end of the first two minutes they’ll have begun puffing up. Nudge the bagels over onto their other sides and start the timer for another two minutes.

When the boiling time for the first batch of bagels is done, use a slotted spoon to fish them out of the water, drain them well, and put them on the baking tray. Add the remaining bagels to the water and repeat the above process.

When all the bagels are on the tray, you might like to sprinkle them with some favorite seed or other seasoning. (I used caraway, toasted sesame seeds and Maldon salt on ours.) Then put them in the oven and give them 15 minutes on one side. Pull them out, use tongs or a spatula to turn them, and put them back in to bake for bake for another 5-7 minutes, or until they’re brown enough to suit you.

Remove them to a rack and let them cool thoroughly.

These have a lovely dark, nutty flavor that really goes well with savory things—fish (plain or smoked), meats, cheeses, and meat spreads or patés. (Our spread up top has fairly simple things — cream cheese on that front half, butter and paté of French cornichon pickles on the back. The cream cheese was really good.)

…Enjoy!

April 3, 2022

Baking Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Parmesan Biscuit Recipes

by Diane Duane September 27, 2021

It’s looking like the Owl Springs Partnership site needs a reaming out (asst’d technical issues) so I’m relocating some stuff for safety’s sake.

Our Parmesan biscuit recipes have been there: posting them here for the interested. (This way if the URLs change over there, I can always just instruct the site to redirect them here.)

September 27, 2021

Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Two Wild Boar Recipes

by Diane Duane August 28, 2021

I’m putting these here so I don’t lose them (again. EYEROLL). They come out of a collection of nearly a hundred thousand Meal-Master format recipes that I accumulated/accreted over a couple of decades, from multilingual sources. Most of them I’m sure have been ported over into Paprika, which I’m using now for mass recipe storage. But every now and then something turns up that I’ve forgotten about… like these, which were squirreled away in a file simply named “BOARS.TXT.” (Remember when a file name before-the-period couldn’t be more than eight characters long? Remember? …Ah me.)

…The first one is interesting, if of no use to me at the Middle Kingdoms-recipes end of things due to the presence of chocolate. (The Kingdoms’ continent doesn’t have the bean growing anywhere, though it does exist elsewhere on their alternate Earth — thus making them of some interest to other non-Solar species, [as it has on other alternate Earths, such as ours…] once the word gets out. So it’s probably a good thing that the Kingdoms have a nascent space program*). One of Peter’s signature recipes, additionally, has an interesting take on pork and chocolate, so there’s a resonance to that. …But the second one is more to the point (in both that universe and this one), and has serious potential.

Anyway. The recipes: (which I’m not reformatting in any way: if by some wild chance you’re one of those stubborn people still using Meal-Master, you should be able to import these straight in.)

Wild Boar in Sweet and Sour Chocolate Sauce

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Wild Boar in Sweet & Sour Chocolate Sauce
Categories: Meats
Yield: 1 Servings

5 lb Wild boar or 5 lb. beef pot
Roast
2 Carrots
2 Stalks celery
2 Onions
1 Bottle (25.4 oz.) aged
Chianti Classico
1/4 c Extra-virgin olive oil
1 tb Juniper berries
2 Bay leaves
1 ts Black pepper
Salt
1 c Raisins
1/2 c Sugar
4 Cloves garlic, coarsely
Chopped
1/2 c Red wine vinegar
1/2 c Grated bitter chocolate
1 c Dried prunes
1 c Pine nuts
1 c Cream Sherry

Place meat in large baking dish. Coarsely chop 1 carrot, 1 stalk
celery, & 1 onion, & add to meat. Pour wine over meat & vegetables,
cover, & marinate 24 hours, turning occasionally. Drain meat,
reserving marinade. Pat meat dry with paper towels. Brown in olive
oil over high heat. Strain marinade, reserving wine & discarding
vegetables. Pour wine over meat. Chop remaining carrot, celery, &
onion & add to meat with juniper berries, 1 bay leaf, pepper, & salt
to taste. Cook over low heat 3 hours or until tender (1 1/2 to 2
hours for beef). Allow meat to cool in cooking liquid, skimming off
fat that forms on surface. Cut cooled meat into pieces, discarding
bone. Strain marinade & place liquid & meat back in pan. Soak raisins
in warm water until plumped. Drain. Caramelize sugar in pan with
garlic, remaining bay leaf, & 1 Tbls. water. Warm vinegar, then add
with chocolate to sauce & bring to boil. Boil 2 minutes. Add sauce to
mat with raisins, prunes, pine nuts, & cream Sherry. Cook 10 minutes.
Remove meat & keep warm. Continue cooking sauce until reduced to
desired thickness. Remove bay leaves. Slice meat & pour sauce over.
Note: Recipe may also be used for venison, rabbit, & aged beef.

MMMMM

Roast Wild Boar with Fig, Date and Walnut Stuffing

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Roast Wild Boar with Fig Date & Walnut Stuffing
Categories: Game, Meats
Yield: 10 Servings

Stephen Ceideburg

MMMMM--------------------------STUFFING-------------------------------
2 c Fresh black figs
1 c Fresh date
1 c Coarsely chopped, lightly
-roasted walnuts

MMMMM----------------------------MEAT---------------------------------
10 lb Boar hind**
1 tb Olive oil
Crushed thyme to taste
Salt to taste

MMMMM---------------------------SAUCE--------------------------------
2 c Port wine
1 c Zinfandel
1/2 c Sugar
1 c Chopped fresh or dried figs
1 tb Chopped shallots
2 c Demi-glace (reduced stock)
1 tb Unsalted butter
Salt to taste

Combine stuffing ingredients in a food processor and chop coarsely.
Set aside.

Remove the bone from the boar hind and meticulously clean tendons and
fat from inside the leg. Stuff with half the stuffing mixture and
neatly reform the leg to its original shape. Using butcher's twine,
truss the boar. Rub the surface of roast with a bit of olive oil;
season with thyme and salt. Place on a rack in a shallow roasting
pan. Roast in a 350 degree F. oven approx- imately I hour, or until
the internal temperature reaches 140 degree F.

Remove roast from oven and let rest 20 minutes before carving.

Sauce: Combine port, Zinfandel, sugar and figs in a heavy bottomed
saucepan. Cook over high heat until the mixture reaches the
consistency of a conserve. Puree in a blender, and strain through a
fine sieve. Set aside.

Combine shallots and a splash of port in a heavy-bottomed saucepan
and cook until almost dry. Add the fig-port syrup and demi-glace.
Cook until reduced by half. Season with salt and whisk in butter.

Carve roast and garnish each serving with a portion of the remaining
stuffing, a bit of sauce and, if desired, fresh black figs.

PER SERVING: 505 calories, 52 g protein, 34 g carbohydrate, 16 g fat
(4 g saturated), 173 mg cholesterol, 127 mg sodium, 4 g fiber.

From Rosemary Campiformio, St. Orres, Gualala

Heidi Haughy Cusik writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, 12/18/91.

Posted by Stephen Ceideburg

MMMMM

** That’s probably “hindquarter”, if we’re talking about ten pounds of meat.

***

…There’s also a recipe here that starts out as a marinade and winds up with cooking instructions as well. I include it here so I don’t have to worry about anything useful having been left in the legacy .txt file…

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Wild Boar
Categories: Meats
Yield: 6 Servings

1 cn Condensed consomme'
2 c Cider vinegar
8 c Red wine
1 1/2 ts Ground black pepper
2 tb Salt
2 Bay leaves
1 ts Crumbled thyme
2 Garlic cloves; chopped
8 Juniper berries
1 Piece wild boar meat
(about 5 pounds)
6 Carrots
Scraped and quartered
2 lg Onions; quartered
4 Celery stalks
Cut into 2-inch lengths
1 cn Condensed beef broth
1/3 c Currant jelly
1/2 c Flour; mixed with
3/4 c Water

Combine consomme', vinegar, wine, pepper, salt, bay leaves, thyme,
garlic, and juniper berries in a glass or enamel bowl. Place boar
meat into marinade. Let marinate for 2 days at room temperature.
Place meat and marinade in a large kettle. Cover and simmer for 2 to
2-1/2 hours or until meat is almost tender. Add carrots, onions,
celery. Cover and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20
minutes. Remove meat and vegetables and keep warm. Add beef broth,
currant jelly, and flour mixture to pan liquid. Stir until sauce
bubbles and thickens slightly. Let sauce cook at a boil until it
becomes the thickness of a good brown gravy. Pour hot gravy over
portions of sliced boar and vegetables. Serve with Chestnut Puree.

MMMMM

…So, en guete, y’all.

*…What do you mean, “what space program”? They have Dragons, don’t they?

August 28, 2021

Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Triple Vanilla Ice Cream(s)

by Diane Duane May 31, 2021

This recipe, in a number of variants, is a favorite around here. I’ve referred to it here and there online, but realized (when I went looking, per a request) that I’d never actually posted a full recipe. So here it is.

It’s based on the “sweet cream base #1” recipe from the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book (which we picked up when it first came out, and I’m really pleased to be able to tell you is still in print. There’s also a Kindle edition, which is a nice plus).

The recipe for this goes as follows:

2 cups / 475ml heavy or whipping cream
1 cup / 240ml milk
2 large eggs
3/4 cup / 170g sugar

Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend. (Makes one quart.)

If (as may be the case) you aren’t comfortable with using uncooked eggs, or just don’t want them in there at all, there is also Sweet Cream Base #2:

2 cups / 475ml heavy or whipping cream
2/3 cup / 160ml half and half
3/4 cup / 170g sugar

Pour the cream into a mixing bowl. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time; then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the half and half and whisk until completely blended. Makes one quart.

Now, as for the three vanillas: Generally speaking, my idea, when I started doing this, was to use three vanillas from different regions, or at the very least, three vanillas made using different styles of preservation/processing… the general idea being that, if it all worked out, the flavor of the finished product would present a sort of spectrum of vanilla flavors instead of one flat background effect.

The three vanillas I routinely try to use tend to go this way:

(a) An alcoholic-based vanilla extract. I routinely use Nielson-Massey, though frankly there are a lot of far cheaper ones that will do as well, considering that a number of vanillas are involved in this procedure.

(b) A different form of vanilla, ideally of a different origin, and usually in a paste form. (I like this one, which we get from our local grocery.)

(c) At least one fresh vanilla bean. (Meaning, unprocessed except by the usual drying and curing that’s part of preparing the seed pod of the vanilla orchid.) (You can grow them, did you know? But apparently they require very specific conditions and are not easy to work with. See this article for details. There’s also a useful article here with a lot of basic background on vanilla and its harvesting and preparation. Yet another of those products that one tends to take for granted, while at the production end it’s amazingly labor-intensive…)

(d) And sometimes I might go for a fourth vanilla, if I had another form around.. such as, for example, a vanilla powder. Or: I make a pretty fair vanilla whiskey. Recipe: Slice open a vanilla pod. Scrape out the seeds in the usual manner. Chop up the pod. Put all of this in a little bottle — maybe about 100ml, tops — and add whiskey. […Generally I wouldn’t use too smokey a whiskey for this: mostly I use one of the more innocuous Irish whiskeys like Powers or Paddy’s.]) Leave this alone in a cupboard for at least a month or so. This is what mine looks like at the moment (and you should have seen how dark it was before I topped it up just now!). As you use it, you add more vanilla beans and top it up with more whiskey. (And there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with other alcohols. Vodka occurs immediately, or Polish pure spirit, as something that would more or less stay out of the way of the flavor of the vanilla. All the same, now I’m thinking about vanilla gin… Hmm.)

…Anyway. A reminder from the food chemistry department as regards alcohol in ice cream: if you add more than about a quarter cup of alcohol (60ml, give or take) to a given quart of ice cream mix, it will function as antifreeze and you’re likely to wind up with a very sweet and lovely slushie, but not much more. So don’t get carried away. Do your math as you put the vanillas together.

I have little experience with non-machine-based ice cream making, so if you have a recipe for a no-machine version that you like, just make a very plain one and add a couple or a few of your chosen vanillas to it. If you’ve got a machine, the procedure is simple: to your basic mixture, add the vanillas you prefer, whisk them in, and freeze as usual. If vanilla powder is one of your chosen ingredients, I’d mix about half of it into the initial mixture, and sprinkle in the rest of it close to the end of the freezing period, as the ice cream’s firming up. Over the next 48-72 hours in the freezer (assuming you like to leave your ice cream alone for a bit to let it develop its flavor), the dry vanilla’s flavor will intensify.

… And that’s it! Noting of course that adding fruit to this mixture (either in the ice cream, or on top) works really well.

Enjoy!

(Disclosure: We’re in the Amazon Associates program, so if you use the Amazon link(s) above and buy something with it, we get a wee tiny commission. Just so you know.)

May 31, 2021

Food recipes

Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”

by Diane Duane November 23, 2020

It occurred to me that it’d be smart to import this post from EuropeanCuisines.com, it being the time of year to think about such things.

Some years back, EuroCuisineLady and EuroCuisineGuy went on a cookbook-buying visit to Hay-on-Wye, world-famous Town of Used Bookstores. The return trip nearly broke the suspension of our little Fiat Uno, whose rear end was stuffed full of old cookbooks of every description.

One great pleasure – as always, if you’re a used-book buyer – was finding the unsuspected treasures secreted among the pages: old articles, notes, the scrawled notations of cooks of years gone by. Sometimes these additions were more unexpected than usual.

Out of one book of UK dairy recipes fell, without warning, a holiday brochure from the Scottish Federation of Grocers’ and Independent Provisioners’ Associations. Some study suggested that it dates back to about 1954 or a little later, that being the earliest postwar date when food rationing would have been over and enough goods would have gotten into the newly replenished stores to make an advertising campaign worthwhile.

The brochure features recipes (among others) for the traditional dense UK-ish Christmas Cake, as well as for the essentially Scots Hogmanay dessert Black Bun, and also has small sections discussing Scottish holiday customs, and some ads for locally available comestibles. There is also a useful check-offable shopping list, and a contest for young readers with a prize of a ten-shilling money order – which was serious money, back in the day.

A table of contents:

The Festival of Yule

Christmas Cake

Almond Paste

Royal Icing

Christmas Honey Biscuits (Polish)

Mrs. Black’s Plum Pudding

Brandy Butter (For Plum Pudding)

Foamy Sauce (For Plum Pudding)

Christmas Sundaes

Cranberry Sauce

Orange Salad (with Goose)

Christmas Salad (with Turkey)

Hogmanay Fare

Shortbread

Black Bun

Scotch Currant Loaf

As the holiday season approaches, we’ve scanned this brochure and saved it as an Adobe Acrobat .PDF file for download. To prevent strain on our own hosting provider’s servers, we’re hosting the file at our storage space at box.com.

Enjoy!

November 23, 2020

Baking cooking recipes

From the Baking-While-You-Write Department: Spicy Apple Pie

by Diane Duane October 16, 2020

The following recipe was improvised on the fly on the evening of October 16, 2020, and unfolded on Twitter. I don’t allow my tweets to be unrolled (because the companies that do that make money off my labor without giving me any). But I’m happy to share the recipe, and the process, here in my own web space, with anyone who’s interested.

***

Status report, Baking-While-You-Write dep’t: These three Bramleys weigh 1100g (that biggest one is nearly half a kilo all by itself. I FEEL AN APPLE PIE COMING ON.

Apples like these mean that half-measures will not be sufficient. Meaning: I GOT LARD OUT TO DEFROST. This is going to be one of those *serious pie crusts.* 🙂

…Step one: apples sliced on the mandoline and put down in acidulated water while I make the pie crust and watch the evening news / aka “the How F*cked Are We Tonight Show”.

Now: pie crust. 3:1 ratio, roughly: 1.5 c all purpose flour / 0.5 c lard: a tbs of butter to change up the materials chemistry a little (the butter adds a smidgen of steam to the equation): 4-5 tbs of water (with lemon juice) (and a bit more if necessary) to bring it together.

…I do this in the Cuisinart / Magimix. The only caution if you do this is to be careful not to overwork it. Add the liquid a tablespoon or so at a time between 15-30 sec pulses until the dough gathers. Then: 30-60 minutes to rest in the fridge.

…The other caution is to mind the sharp bits of the blade when washing it. 🙂 This is a new Cuisinart blade, and it just collected from me what we refer to around here as “steel fee”: i.e. every new sharp in the house seems to get each user once. (shrug) Just the way it goes.

…So now I get to spend half an hour or so waiting for the dough to rest. This I will spend (a) wrestling with a new 3D set that’s already giving me grief and (b) watching this evening’s Star Trek episode, which of course, like all the rest of TOS, was Never Political. (snicker)

…Right. So the apples are draining and it’s time to consider the spicery. Tonight this involves normal granulated/white sugar, demerara sugar (light brown), soft dark brown sugar, ground ginger, ground cinnamon and ground cloves: and in the mortar, blade mace…

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkeQTuGXEAE-ubS?format=jpg&name=medium

…and long pepper (Piper longum). Those get ground up and added to the others, along with about 1.5 T of cornstarch that will help the juices released during cooking stay more or less where they are. Finally, berry allspice (in the grinder up top, by itself) will go in too.

…So now to business with the crust. Dough separated 2/3 (for the bottom crust) to 1/3 (for the top). The pie dish is a prezzie from Katie, Séan and Ruadraigh McGrath (yes, *that* Katie McGrath: the family were our nearish neighbors when we were living on that side of Wicklow.)

…Bottom crust in place. It is possible to get very scenic with the layering of the apples, but (a) these are indeed a bit on the old/fragile side and (b) I couldn’t be bothered right now. First layer in…

…and first layer of seasoning.

Layer 2.

Butter and seasoning.

Final layer.

Butter and seasoning. …You will notice that I didn’t trim the crust. This is because I expect this pie to ooze like crazy (and there’s already a pan positioned in the preheating oven to catch the drips).

That bottom crust gets folded in; the top crust will be pinched to it to seal.

Et voilà. …Pierced for venting because this seems a sensible approach for any pie from which catastrophic collapse during baking is expected. (It’s fairly tall, and those apples really are a bit on the old side and are going to give up a lot of their water.)

..Right. Timer should go shortly. Catastrophic collapse (why am I hearing this in Spock’s voice all of a sudden?) “–catastrophic collapse in four, three, two, one–” (SFX: SHAKE/RATTLE/HUM, camera SHAKE, crew LURCH from side to side and fall out of their chairs–)

And so: pie. (@scalzi) …Dripped as expected, but the oven remains clean. …I’ll wait half an hour or so to let it stabilize and then cut a slice.

…The image of the Perfect Slice will appear in the morning, when the pie has had a chance to cool completely.

Thanks for having a look! 🙂

October 16, 2020

Food, restaurants and cooking Home life recipes

Peter’s Isolation Goulasch

by Diane Duane April 4, 2020

(Appearing here because his own site is down for restructuring at the moment.)

Himself says:

This is a “what was available in the house” reduction from my main goulash recipe, based on a combination of Gyorg Lang, Karoly Gundel, a few Hungarian things run through Google Translate and some tweaks by me…

Ingredients

2 tbs lard or sunflower/corn/ ordinary olive oil. (Not Extra Virgin, you’re wasting it.)
2 large onions, chopped coarsely
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed (mince the garlic and caraway together with rocking knife technique – the sticky garlic keeps the seeds from flying about. A bit, anyway.)
1 lb / .5kg stewing beef in 1 inch / 30mm cubes (which is usually how it’s sold)
3 tbsp Hungarian paprika, if possible 1 tbsp Hot, 2 tbsp Sweet (or 2 tbsp regular Supervalu paprika and 1 tbsp Cayenne. Don’t use smoked paprika unless using European sausage like kabanossi or kielbasa instead of beef, then go for it, the result is yummy.)
2 tins chopped tomatoes and ½ tin water
1 green pepper, seeded and cubed
4 potatoes, peeled and cubed

Method:

Melt the lard in a heavy pot and sweat the onions until soft, glossy and turning golden. Add the garlic and caraway and stir-fry for a few more minutes. Add the beef and stir-fry until all the cubes have changed colour.

Remove from the heat and let sit for a couple of minutes, then add the paprika (paprika + excess heat = bitterness.) Stir well together, add the tomatoes and water, return to the heat, bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and leave for about 2 hours.

Check the beef for tenderness. It should be at the “a bit more will be perfect” stage, so add the pepper and potatoes and give it a bit more; about 20 minutes should do.

Serve topped with a dollop of sour cream (ours was 30% fat Lithuanian from Eurospar, delish!) over buttered noodles, rice, mashed potatoes, tarhonya (Hungarian “egg barley”, a very small pasta similar to orzo)…

Or what we did tonight: “Bratkartoffel” – potatoes cut into ½ inch dice and slowly pan-fried until crunchy outside and soft inside, then sprinkled with salt and pepper. We finished ours in the oven – 20 mins at 180° C/ 355° F – for less greasiness; NB that this also makes a great snack by itself (try sprinkling with curry powder, spice bag mix, sea salt & cider vinegar, whatever) and using the oven makes them far less trouble than deep-frying home-made chips.

April 4, 2020

Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Not Really Hungarian Pork Chops

by Diane Duane March 13, 2020

Every now and then, in the work surrounding the slow retooling of the EuropeanCuisines.com website, I wind up doing some casual detective work to try to find the source of a recipe that, though I’d like to include it, just doesn’t feel… right somehow. This week’s case is a recipe that’s labeled “Hungarian”, but isn’t a genuine traditional recipe. It’s nice, though, and a good supper dish or easy-to-throw-together entree, so it’s worth keeping around and sharing even if I can’t put it on EC.com as a true product of its purported culture.

Backstory: The site’s previous image for our tarhonya recipe was crap, and I wanted to reshoot it. So this we did. But a bowlful of plain pasta isn’t all that interesting: I preferred to show it plated up as a side. As it happens, there were a couple of pork cutlets in the fridge… so (with an eye to the gradual approach of dinnertime) I went looking for some Hungarian recipe in which to use them, but came up empty. In fact I couldn’t find anything Hungarian that was pork-cutlet-oriented except for one recipe that made me suspicious by its rarity. It appears in an eating-for-one cookbook by the redoubtable Delia Smith.

In the back of my mind as I looked the recipe over was the thought that probably every cuisine has ingredients that are used so frequently that a casual observer would be tempted to automatically associate them with it when used in combination. That looks like what’s happened here, as the only Hungarian thing about this recipe is that it uses paprika, caraway and sour cream together. So I’m tempted to think that Delia either invented this, or had something like it elsewhere and decided to publish the recipe with the “Hungarian” label.

Delia’s version in the One Is Fun cookbook calls for the cooking to be done in a roasting tin. Since it involves preheating the cooking fat/oil, this struck me as a great way to cover the inside of the oven with a lot of spattering that would need cleaning up after. So—besides altering amounts so that this recipe works for two people instead of one—I did it in a lidded casserole. I think this works better because it also helps the pork stay a little moister/juicier than otherwise: not a bad idea if you’re working with pork that’s fairly lean.

The ingredients:

2 thick pork chops or a single piece of pork loin (about 500g / 1 pound)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (though you could use lard if you have any, and feel like edging even closer toward a Hungarian approach: it’s very much the preferred fat in their cuisine)
1 large potato or a couple of medium-sized ones, peeled and sliced maybe 5mm or 1/4 inch thick
2 medium onions, peeled, one sliced 5mm / 1/4 inch thick, the other one halved
2 tablespoons mild paprika, or (if you like it a bit hotter) 1 tablespoon hot paprika, one tablespoon regular (Note: smoked paprika works fine for this)
1 teaspoon caraway seeds: more like a tablespoon of them, if you’re a caraway fan
2-3 teaspoons butter
100 ml (or more) of a good thick sour cream: or yogurt if you prefer it. Thin with a couple of teaspoons or a tablespoon of water or milk, if necessary, to make it a little bit pourable.
Salt and fresh-ground black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F / 180C. Find a heavy lidded casserole and put it (without the lid) n the oven to preheat along with it.

Peel and slice the potatoes: peel and slice/halve the onions. If you (like me) suffer from Onions Make Me Cry syndrome, do yourself a favor before you start work on this recipe and stick the onions in the freezer for twenty minutes or half an hour. This lowers the vapor pressure of the gas they’ll release when you cut them, and gives you a fighting chance to get the work done before the gas warfare starts to impair your functioning.

On a plate or in a shallow bowl, combine the paprika, caraway seeds, and some salt and pepper. Dry your pork steak or cutlets off with paper towels and press each side of the cutlets or pork steak into the spice mixture to coat them.

When the oven’s ready, remove your casserole, pour in the oil or fat you’re going to be using (give the lard a moment to melt if you haven’t already melted it in the microwave) and arrange the sliced onions in the casserole; then add the sliced potatoes. Snug those two half pieces of onion down into this business, and perch the pork on top of them. (This stratagem holds the meat a little out of the cooking juices and helps those juices rise up and steam the bottom of it.)

Top the piece(s) of meat with the butter, give everything another grind or so of pepper, and sprinkle the remaining spice-coating mixture over the meat and the layers of potato and onion. Sock the casserole into the oven and bake for 30 minutes.

At this point, pull the casserole out of the oven and pour the sour cream over the meat; then return the casserole to the oven, lidded again. Bake for another fifteen minutes.

And that’s it! Get it out of the oven and serve it forth. If you feel inclined, garnish the servings with a little more sour cream and paprika, and a sprinkle of caraway.

Enjoy!

March 13, 2020

books Food Food, restaurants and cooking recipes Writing

Ludwig Bemelmans’ NY Oyster Bar Shellfish Pan Roast Recipe

by Diane Duane November 25, 2019

I love Ludwig Bemelmans for many reasons that usually have more to do with writing and his challenging career arc than with food (more details here). But this post’s about the food, and a specific favorite recipe.

In his collection of “slice-of-culinary-life” writings La Bonne Table, Bemelmans passes on a bit of info that many New Yorkers, or visitors to the city, would be glad to have: the original recipe for one version of the famous shellfish pan roast served at Grand Central Terminal’s venerable Oyster Bar and Restaurant (a venue much appreciated by the cats in the Feline Wizardry series, as well as by the series’s author, who ate there as often as she could afford to while living and working in Manhattan).

So here’s the image of the page in La Bonne Table where the recipe/method appears, and a transcription of the method. Bemelmans gives the version for the clam pan roast. For an oyster panroast like the one in the header image, I just substitute canned oysters and enough fish stock or consommé to equal the amount of clam broth Bemelmans quotes. All kinds of shellfish work brilliantly in this (and if you’re actually in the Oyster Bar some time and feel inclined toward this dish, you might like to order the combination one, which has a little bit of everything). I’ve broken up the original block of his text for readability’s sake: may his kindly shade forgive me.

We went to rake for cockles, which are like our clams, except for their globular structure, and they taste like Little Necks. I gave the hostess a recipe, which I found in Grand Central Station’s sea-food bar, where a Greek chef who makes it wrote it down for me and showed me how it’s made. It is one of the best things to eat, simple to make– in fact, nobody can go wrong. It’s a meal in itself, and it costs very little.

You need paprika, chili sauce, sherry wine; also celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, butter according to your taste, and clams. I use cherrystones, which are washed and brushed, and then placed in a deep pan with their own liquid. For each portion of eight, add one pat of butter, a tablespoon of chili sauce, 1/2 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of lemon juice and 1/2 cup of clam broth. Add a dash of celery salt and paprika.

Stir all this over a low fire for three minutes. Then add four ounces of light cream or heavy cream, according to your taste, and one ounce of sherry wine, and keep stirring. When it comes to the boiling point, pour it over dry toast in individual bowls. Add a pat of butter and a dash of paprika and it is ready to serve.

If you have made too much of it, put the remainder in a container in your refrigerator. It will be as good, warmed up, a week or a month* later. It’s called Clam Pan Roast, if you ever want to order it at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar. I understand the recipe originally came from Maine.

(This post originally appeared at the author’s Tumblr, and is reproduced here so people who [correctly] aren’t wild about their ToS as regards data sharing don’t have to go over there.)

*I love his enthusiasm here, but frankly I wouldn’t leave this in the fridge for any month. A few days maybe. (Though it must be said, I couldn’t leave it alone that long anyway. It’s really good.)

November 25, 2019

cooking Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Two Recipes for Chicken With Lots Of Cloves Of Garlic

by Diane Duane July 6, 2019

I had an ask-box message from AislinnSiofra on my Tumblr a while back pointing out that both Peter and I have sometimes mentioned making these dishes on our blogs, but never actually given the recipes. Time to remedy that omission.

Both these recipes come from Richard Olney’s fabulous classic cookbook Simple French Food, which I think everybody should have in their collection if they’re interested in cooking at all. It’s not just because Olney’s recipes are wonderful (and they really are). For me, it’s partly a stylistic issue. All through the book he throws away, casually, effortlessly, not so much recipes, but methods for turning out terrific dishes. More than that, though: this was the man who went to court to determine once and for all what part of a recipe was copyrightable, thereby doing all cookbook writers since a signal service. (Short version of the story: it’s not the ingredient list that’s copyrightable, but the description of what to do with the ingredients–the method, and the language of the method. Olney was really tired of his recipes being being ripped off, and with good reason, as his voice as a cookbook writer is unique. So he stood up and went to law over the issue, and all cookbook writers after him should be grateful.)

Anyway! The chicken. These recipes appear back to back on a single page of the Penguin paperback edition of Simple French Food, and though they both have lots of garlic in them, they are as different as night from day. One of them is what you expect of a Garlic-With-Forty-Cloves recipe on first hearing: something brash, rustic, rambunctious, and unapologetically in-your-face. The other is a far subtler business — the first chance most people ever get, I think, to experience garlic as a root vegetable, with its aggressiveness tamed but not entirely banished. Both recipes are really good. I encourage all readers of this post to try both and find out which they like better.

Here’s the first one, which in Olney is simply titled:

Garlic Chicken / (Poules ‘aux 40 gousses d’Ail’)

Ingredients:

1 chicken, cut up as for a sauté (or 4 legs, thighs and drumsticks, separated)
4 heads firm garlic, broken into cloves, cleared of loose hulls, but unpeeled
15cl / 0.25 pint olive oil [this is a UK pint: so, 5 fluid ounces for the US readership, or 150ml)
Salt, pepper
1 tsp finely crumbled mixed dried herbs (thyme, oregano, savory)
1 large bouquet garni: large branch celery, parsley and root (if available), bay leaf, leek greens, small branch lovage (if available)
Flour for dough

Chuck the whole lot of this excerpt the herbs into a casserole. Turn or stir to coat everything with the oil. Shove the herbs into the center and fill all the other spaces with garlic cloves.

Make a thick, solid sealing dough with flour and water and a little oil. Roll it out sausage-like on a work surface, wet the casserole edges a little, press the rope of dough around it, and shove the lid down on top. Bake at 350F/180C for 45 minutes. Bring it to the table and break the seal there.

Olney adds, “The garlic, squeezed from its hull and spread onto grilled crisp slices of rough country bread as one eats the chicken, will be appreciated by all who do not share the mental antigarlic quirk; if the bread can be grilled over hot coals, the light smoky flavor will be found to marry particularly well with the garlic puree. …For variety’s sake, turn, quarter and choke 3 or 4 tender young artichokes, coating them immediately in the recipe’s olive oil before mixing all the ingredients together.”

…I love the way he just adds that afterthought.

Now the other one:

Braised Chicken Legs with Lemon (Poulet au Citron)

“The lemon and garlic alliance,” Olney says, “is borrowed from French Catalan cooking. Were the dish prepared in that country, Banyuls, a fortified wine vinified in much the same way as Port, would replace the white wine in this recipe.

“To create tidy shapes that cook evenly and do not sprawl in the pan, cut the knob-ends from the drumsticks and, pulling the skin to one side so as not to cut into it, partially sever the joint between each thigh and drumstick, cutting through the tendons without separating the two pieces.

“Serve a plain, uncondimented pilaf or parboiled and steamed rice as an accompaniment.”

Ingredients:

20 to 25 large, firm, crisp garlic cloves, peeled without crushing, parboiled for 5 minutes, and drained
60cl / 1 pint veal or chicken stock
4 chicken legs (thighs and drumsticks attached)
Salt, pepper
50g / 1.5 ounces butter
1 lemon, peeled (all white inner peel removed), thinly slices, seeds removed
2 tablespoons flour
15cl / 0.25 pint white wine

“Poach the parboiled garlic cloves for about 40 minutes in the stock, covered, kept at a slight simmer.

“Color the seasoned chicken legs in butter over medium heat (20-25 minutes) and transfer them to an oven casserole. Strain the stock to remove the garlic cloves, taking care not to damage them. Scatter the garlic over the chicken pieces, distribute the lemon slices, and put the casserole aside, covered, until the sauce is prepared.

“Remove any excess fat from the pan in which the chicken was browned (leaving just enough to absorb the flour), add the flour and cook, stirring, over low heat for a few moments. Deglaze with the white wine over high heat, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon; add the stock, and pour into a small saucepan: this is important, the small surface permitting a more rapid and complete skimming and degreasing of the sauce while preventing, at the same time, an exaggerated reduction. Skim for about 15 minutes, removing any traces of loose fat from the surface with absorbent paper. Pour the sauce over the chicken and its garnish and cook, covered, in a 375F / 190C oven for 40 to 45 minutes. The lemon will have completely disappeared into the sauce; the garlic cloves should be absolutely intact with a consistency of melting purée; the sauce must be tasted to be believed.”

…He’s not kidding. This dish is sublime. When you press one of these garlic cloves between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, it just kind of goes away in a little soft explosion of the mildest and subtlest imaginable garlic flavor.

Just one warning note about this dish, though. It will almost certainly give you the most aggressively garlicky farts you have ever experienced. (“Technicolor farts,” Peter calls them.) If you’re going to be in an enclosed space within eight hours or so with someone you want to torment, this is the recipe for you. …Otherwise, just make sure everyone in the area gets some, and you can all tease each other about the results when enough time after dinner has gone by.

Enjoy!

(PS: Apologies that we don’t seem to have any shots of either of these dishes in the digital image collection — I think what ones we had were caught in a disk crash some time back. We’re going to be cooking both of these next week so we can get new shots of them. Meanwhile, please bear with the stock photography…)

July 6, 2019

Home screen of Meal-Master, a recipe in Paprika

cooking Food recipes Software

Journey’s End: Moving From Meal-Master To Paprika

by Diane Duane May 3, 2017

I collect recipes. Lots of them. I used to use the venerable Meal-Master software for this, but over time it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. As a result I’ve been looking for somewhere better to put those recipes… and now I’ve found it. Details follow.

I cook for pleasure, as well as necessity. When Peter and I got married, on merging our libraries we found that something like 20% of the books in both libraries were cookbooks. The living room bookshelves are full of them, despite numerous attempts to winnow them down over the last few years. The general rule has been, “If nobody’s touched the book in five years, send it to the library.”

Somehow we still have 300 cookbooks in the living room.

it will therefore probably come as a surprise to nobody that my recipe collecting has for a good while also extended into the digital realm. For many years I used Meal-Master, devised by Scott Welliver, which in the ancient days of DOS was the preeminent software for people who collected recipes. It was, by our present standard, clunky and idiosyncratic, but it worked (and had huge capacity…64,000 recipes+). And there were lots and lots of scattered treasure troves of recipes all over the web, in many languages, waiting to be found and saved.

Episoft Systems, Welliver’s (now apparently defunct) company responsible for the software, kept updating it for many years until finally, with version 8.05 (in 1999), the Meal-Master software was declared copyrighted freeware and turned loose into the wild. As operating systems and platforms changed, Meal-Master became less and less useful and / or usable, and a lot of people started looking for software that would accept imports from MM’s old-school database structure and leave the recipes looking at least something like they had to start with.

Until I got to the point where I stopped actively collecting Meal-Master-format recipes, I managed to gather about 100,000 of them (and I get a sense from having seen other Meal-Master enthusiasts’ posts that my collection was actually a little on the small side). A few years ago, it occurred to me that I really needed to get active about trying to find some software to export them to, before everything moved on so far that the import could no longer be done. So I exported all my stored recipes into a series of files in the MM export format (with the .MMF suffix) and started looking for a new recipe storage candidate.

The problem was that a lot of the software I found available at that point didn’t import the Meal-Master structure particularly well or flexibly. Routinely, in the process of the import, something froze or crashed it — usually because of one or another of the workarounds that MM fans had constructed over time to get around some of the program’s more rigid features. As a result, the imports I attempted at that point were mostly disastrous, and in frustration I put the project aside for a while. I was still twitching, though, at the thought of all those recipes lying around in a format that did me no good anymore — Windows 7 flatly refused to run Meal Master, and while Windows XP ran it all right, XP was rapidly approaching its end-of-life. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to pull all those recipes together — many in foreign languages, many from online sources that were long gone — and the situation niggled at me constantly.

Recently, though, a change in local circumstances pushed the issue to the fore again. Peter and I had spent some time, over the last year or so, discussing the fact that our EuropeanCuisines.com food-hobbyist website hadn’t had a serious makeover in several years. Additionally, we’ve been considering a change in direction for the site: more food blogging, and content pointed more toward those interested in doing something we have a fair amount of experience in — traveling to European destinations, renting small holiday places there, and cooking in them.

With that in mind, we were also looking at a complete restructure of our recipe section, with an eye to making it more structured and easy to find things in. Additionally, a whole lot of those 40,000 Meal-Master recipes of mine are European, and I wanted a way to restructure them for use on the EC.com website. Specifically I wanted a way to make them easy for people to download with a tap or click — and most especially, I wanted to make them easy for people to get at on mobile devices. After all, when you’re a tourist standing in the middle of a busy grocery in Munich or Bratislava or Oslo, you don’t want to have to be tearing your hair over the thought of that terrific recipe that you saw on whatever-that-website-was and not be able to get at it quickly, so that you can buy the ingredients, go to your holiday flat, and cook the damn thing.

So. With all this on my mind, last week I started searching again for something that would both import my Meal-Master recipes smoothly, and (eventually) work well in cooperation with the website. And what the hell? I found it. It’s Paprika.

(BTW, as a sometimes-food blogger I need to state here clearly for the record — and the usual legal reasons — that the only money to change hands here was me giving them my money. Not the other way around.)

Paprika has been around for a while, and that it took me this long to find it is probably just a function of my not having looked in the right places at the right times — or, alternately, that when I was looking most actively, I did not yet have my iPad. Which is where I found Paprika, in its app form. The software exists in both iOS and Android forms, and as a Windows desktop version. There is also a Mac version, which, not having a Mac, I haven’t tested (and there’s a Kindle Fire version too, which surprised me a bit). But the iOS version for the iPad is, not to put too fine a point on it, as slick as snot.

It is beautiful and glossy and well-set up, and does everything I could’ve hoped for and a great deal more. It is friendly to all the major online food and recipe sources; it’s compatible with a lot of the bigger food blogging sites, and also with the hRecipe microformat. (Which will matter when I start wrangling the converted recipes into the main EC.com website.) And best of all, from my point of view, one of the numerous recipe export format types it accepts is the .MMF file export type of Meal-Master.

When I saw this, my heart began to sing a little song — but I still needed to run some tests: I’d been disappointed too often before. I was willing enough, though, to venture €4.99 on the app for the iPad. And frankly that was one of the best just-shy-of-a-fivers I’ve ever laid down. Half an hour of working with the app told me that I wanted the desktop version of the program right now, whether it imported MMF recipes well or not. I went immediately to their website and bought the Windows desktop version.

I should say here that one thing I attempted with the iOS version before purchasing the Windows desktop program didn’t work terribly well. I very much wanted to test the app’s import ability on a small .mmf file that I had handy. But once I’d moved a copy of the .MMF file up into the Paprika app’s cloud, the app nonetheless seemed to have trouble seeing it. However, I was already so impressed by the way the app looked and handled that at that point I didn’t much care. I was more than willing to handle the Meal-Master imports from the desktop end. (Please note also that I’m not entirely certain that the failure to “see” the file in the cloud on the Pad didn’t have something to do with our famously dodgy rural / cellular broadband, which starts cutting up cranky when it rains, ffs. In Ireland this is not an advantage.)

As soon as I opened the Windows desktop version of the app, however, my hopes were raised again, as the import requirements looked extremely simple. It took about three mouse clicks and five minutes for Paprika to import a test .MMF file of 2000 recipes. They imported with all their categories intact — which had been one of my major concerns; tagging is everything in a recipe database — and perfectly formatted. None of them had any photos associated with them, obviously — Meal-Master had never been capable of anything of the kind — but Paprika will allow you to add images to recipes as you like. Having checked the imported recipes over in the big desktop machine, I sync’d them to Paprika’s cloud, and then sync’d the iPad to them. The sync went without any problems, and everything crossed over perfectly. (I have yet to do this for my HTC One as well, but I still have to get the Android version of the app for that. Later today perhaps.)

So I happily got to work on importing the rest of the recipes. It took me about an hour to pull in the 40,000-odd of them. At the end of the hour, I was left with a big, fat, beautiful-looking recipe collection that was ready for the next stage: reorganization. No surprise that it was going to need some of that, as some of the Meal-Master categories were a bit idiosyncratic, or just plain silly. And numerous categories needed to be spelled differently or rationalized for one preferred spelling (for example, I had recipes with about six different formats and spellings of the term “chile heads” for recipes that go back to the fabled Chile-Heads mailing list / newsgroup). Others needed to be eliminated entirely and their entries moved into other categories. But that was just going to be some organizational work that could be done in bits and pieces over time. At the end of that hour, I was one very happy cook.

One of the great strengths of Paprika is the way it syncs across devices. It’ll be a while yet before I sync my main collection up to the iPad and my phone, as I want to make sure that I’ve first thrown out any duplicates that may have crossed over, and finish the category reorganization. Then begins a slower project of curation, as one thing Peter and I want to do for our EuropeanCuisines.com visitors is make Paprika-friendly recipe collections available for easy download. That’s a project for future months, as we proceed with EC.com’s reorganization.

In the meantime, though, I can now with a light heart go about the house deleting the various installations of Meal-Master that had been tucked away in the guts of various of the machines, waiting for the day when I would finally find a way to make those squirreled-away recipes both available to other people and safe in a new format. My long search is finally over. (And now I’m also free to range around the web collecting more Meal-Master recipes, and making them both safe and available to others, before their format becomes lost entirely in the mists of time.)

So, to sum up: if you are a longtime Meal-Master user, or know one, I unreservedly commend Paprika to you as a way to go forward.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go kill some obsolete categories. 🙂

May 3, 2017

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