I love my Penzeys! Great products in the volume and prices I like too.
Furthermore, the small political messages on the receipts are spot on.
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Nice, I’ll have to check them out. To add a couple more,
for bulk herbs & spices its hard to beat Monterey Bay Spice Co. (Shipping can get you, so make your order worth it.)
For some items Nuts.com is good too.
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One of my oldest friends always serves chili with rice, and doesn’t understand what is unusual about that - he says his (large) extended family all do it, and always have. I’ve never seen anyone else around here (mid-Atlantic coast) serve it that way.
@LutherBlisset, you may have found the connection - the family mentioned above is originally from Germany, although the last of them actually born in Germany passed away several years ago.
@fnordius, yes, ancho chile powder for the win! Mom taught me to use a quarter cup (that’s 60ml in old-timey European units) per pot of chile. Beans or no beans, ground meat or chopped, it’s the chile powder that makes it.
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Oh, you nearly charmed me, just for ruining everything by using “cups” (a size I only accept, and grudgingly, in relation to haberdashery) and using ground ancho. If you are actually storing ground Capsicum, i.e. not using all of a batch directly from a fresh container packed under protective atmosphere, you are doing it wrong. Bah. 
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It was cold, wet and windy yesterday, so I thought it was a good time for soup.
I made a variant of this:
…although I can’t stand celery, so I replaced that with extra carrots. And my sour cream was moldy, so I left out the cream.
Nevertheless: spectacularly nommy. After wolfing it down, I spent the next half hour on the couch basking in contented fullness.
First chance to use my immersion blender, too. Very handy little toy.
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Interesting, I’ll try blending the veggies first next time; it never had occured to me to do that.
Otherwise that’s more or less how I make [insert ALL THE SOUPS gif], except I usually leave 1/3 or so unblended because I like to have some chunks in my soup, and I usually skip the croûtons.
“Immersion blender” had me stumped until I realized that it’s just a Pürierstab. Any kitchen should have one, it’s like a magic wand. (Which is a brand name for a popular model.)
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is it the flavor or the texture of celery? my wife can’t stand the texture of cooked celery but, to her, dishes that i typically use it in didn’t taste right without it. i started using large, easily removable lengths of celery in the simmering stage and then took it out before either the puree or serving stage.
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Flavour.
It may be one of those weird genetic hypertaster phenomena, like the “coriander/cilantro tastes like soap” thing. The tiniest amount of celery in anything makes it taste horrid to me.
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okay, no help for that then.
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I don’t care for celery, either…I wouldn’t say that it tastes “horrid” to me, though, but I just don’t like it.
Something trendy here lately is “uncured” bacon with “no added nitrates”. So what they do is add celery juice, because it’s naturally full of nitrates! Sometimes that kind of bacon tastes so intensely of celery to me that I find it really unpalatable.
As we said earlier, celery is a natural source of sodium nitrate. (Notice that no one is currently claiming that celery causes cancer or that people should reduce their intake of celery.) But by adding celery juice to their hot dogs, manufacturers can make products loaded with sodium nitrate while legally being able to claim “no added nitrates.” This is, of course, because all the nitrates are in the celery juice.
These supposedly “natural” or “organic” products sometimes contain twice as much sodium nitrate, even up to a whopping ten times as much sodium nitrate, as conventional products.
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Penzeys ftw! All family and friends have received at least 1 Penzeys gift from us, and our cabinet is chock full of it. They are the BEST. A clear case of consciously spending more for 1. The highest quality spice and 2. A cause I can believe in.
And on the pepper mill discussion, I’ve had a few. The best I’ve found so far, for the money, is the OXO Good Grips for $12. It doesn’t have a large capacity, but it’s easy to fill. The large handle means it’s easy to grind a lot of pepper quickly. The smooth cylindrical Mills require a lot of arm torque and it’s hard to grind enough during active cooking. They are more suited to tableside single serving grinding. With the long handle, it’s like grind grind grind for about ten seconds and there’s more than enough pepper coming out. And $12 is perfect. I have not had any of the OXO equipment break, but if it did, I am not out very much money.
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Sounds like a lad mag
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That’s quite interesting. Celery, especially slightly roasted or long-cooked, is to the best of my knowledge a natural source of glutamate. As you will know, this triggers your umami receptors, and boosts other tastes.
Since you can get sodium glutamate basically at every other Asia supermarket, usually, it would be interesting to experiment with that. Adding tiny amounts of glutamate to your veggies might be a way to find out what exactly puts you off celery - and first of all, if it’s the glutamate itself. Which it shouldn’t, since you would also dislike parmesan and the likes, long-cooked tomato dishes, etc.
Regarding the cilantro thing, I guess you heard about the genetic basis of that differently tastes, haven’t you?
Just FTR, @anon3072533, it isn’t full of nitrates, to the best of my knowledge. That would not be healthy, at all. You are mixing up glutamate (see above, often used as sodium glutamate) with nitrates.
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Hmm…but they put celery in bacon in order to preserve it (to prevent botulism) — which is what nitrates/nitrites do.
As far as I know, sodium glutamate is simply a flavor-enhancer, and not a preservative…
Please note that I’m not here to argue about the health aspects of nitrates/nitrites in food 
I’m saying I don’t like the taste of celery in my bacon. And just for the curious, I’m linking to info about why celery is being put into bacon (which is: because consumers are afraid of added nitrates/nitrites in their cured meats being possibly unhealthy, and adding celery is a way for the manufacturers to add nitrates/nitrites without having to say so on the label [at least in the U.S.]).
Some more info about celery being used because of its naturally-occurring nitrates:
“Until industry provides strong evidence that nitrites in celery juice have different biologic effects than nitrites from other sources, it’s very misleading to label these as nitrite-free,” he [Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University] says.
So, here’s a consumer tip: When you see a “no nitrates added” label, look for an asterisk pointing to fine print that may say something like “no nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder.” That asterisk basically contradicts the nitrate-free claim.
Again, I’m not arguing anything about the relative safety of nitrates/nitrates. Just saying it’s the reason they’re ruining good bacon with the taste of celery these days.
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Nitrosamines are the real worry - adding vitamin C with nitrites more-or-less solves that.
Nitrates, OTOH, have been weakly linked to pancreatic cancer IIRC. For myself, I go with nitrite/vitamin C and call it a day.
On the topic of “ruined bacon”, though - the prevalence of “uncured bacon” is IMHO responsible for way more “ruining” of bacon to me - it’s surprisingly difficult to find hot-smoked, cured bacon, which AFAIAC is the only thing properly called bacon (or, well, peameal/back bacon counts too, but is an entirely different thing).
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Tried pizza in a cast iron skillet last night. Put skillet in cold oven and brought up to 500* ( how do you make a degree symbol? ) Slid pizza off peel onto oiled skillet back in oven at 500* for 9 minutes.
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Today was a food-related day. Slaughtered, butchered, and packed two sheep. Same thing tomorrow.
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On a Mac keyboard: press “option” and the number 0 at the same time.
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Thermodynamic cooking?
If I take a frozen sausage and put it in a cold pan of water, when the water comes to a boil is the sausage cooked?
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Cold smoked, uncured bacon can then be frozen and sold that way. But most uncured stuff I see is sold unfrozen and so shelf life is limited. Most of the bacon I have tried that way is too smoky, which is nasty. I think they are overcompensating. I’d rather just have the regular stuff but less often, since it is probably better to move towards a mostly plant based diet, for our own health and the planet’s. Bacon is yummy so I can’t give it up entirely. I don’t mind reducing. In any event, I refuse to eat anything that tastes bad, and so should everyone else.
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