(http://www.amazon.com/MJK83930-Creme-Savers-Candies-Strawberry/dp/B001PMCAG4)

When you said you had a dessert idea I pictured exactly what you made. I haven't thought about that in years. I know what I'll be buying tomorrow.

I have never broiled broccoli, but I will try that in the future.

Raw broccoli is good dipped into cheese fondue (made with nice emmentaler or gruyere cheese melted into white wine, thickened with cornstarch with cherry brandy, plus nutmeg, paprika, and white pepper). Much better than a cheese soup.

Broccoli is about the only cruciferous vegetable that our kids will eat (though one does like spinach). I never bought baby food, I used one of my three food processors (different sizes!). So I introduced my oldest to lots of veggies. The only pureed veggie my first born was literally repelled from was broccoli. BUT... all was not lost! The next time I mixed it with pureed pears and he loved it. So I now often mix pears (from my tree) in with broccoli and Brussels sprouts (and in roasted root veggies).

(I have a four-in-one pear tree with Comice, Orcas, Bosc and red Bartlett. I had a wonderful crop this year, with very little rot even into January (they were picked in October). I believe the only way to get a beautifully sweet buttery well ripened pear is to grow your own. I never liked pears much until I got my own tree.)

BTW you should try Yottam Ottelenghi's broccoli sesame salad, if you haven't already. It's divine! The broccoli slaw from Smitten Kitchen is a winner too; it involves a homemade ranch dressing so it's right up Molly's alley.

Can't say for sure from the podcast, but likely you're missing two crucial components of the hotchoc/cocoa experience. Suggest hershey's 'special dark' cocoa btw.

1 - probably needs to be thickened, esp using milk. Guar gum is your hydrocolloid of choice for this, and you will probably not find it at the megamart. This ought to be in your cuisine arsenal anyway; Barryfarms.com has pretty good prices on this sort of thing. If not lightly sprinkled on while stirring it tends to clump, and it's easy to use too much - 8X the thickening power of whimpy cornstarch.

2 - whip cream, superfine sugar (which you can make from regular sugar with a blender, food processor, or ultrasonic tissue homogenizer), and this is important at least 1/2 t ceylon cinnamon AKA 'real cinnamon'. A dash of cognac only makes things better. Molly has a labrat background and knows all about homogenizers, waycool a good one can liquify a mouse in 90 seconds, but don't put the mouse goo in the cocoa. On second thought throw down the gauntlet before Andrew Zimmern you try it first and let us know. Anyway ceylon cinnamon is another item you won't find in the megamart and ought to have onhand. Try Penzys. If you've never smelled it before has intense floral aromatics, which poof exposed to any heat. As you sip the cocoa and whipped topping the ceylon releases those aromatics in your mouth and puts major pleasin' torque to your olfactories. Serve this to guests but do not reveal its secrets. They will speak of you in hushed reverential tones ever after - enjoy:)

Happy New Year, and thx for the podcasts always a treat!

Check it out here: http://saturdayswithmaggy.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-lime-hoax-and-green-papaya-salad.html

Another bread and chocolate snack is chocoladehagelslag on buttered bread. They are chocolate sprinkles from the Netherlands (my husband's dad was from there). We used to get it at a German grocery in the U-District, but that in gone. I found them at the HT Market, an international supermarket, at the Oak Tree Center in North Seattle. They are located on the Indonesian aisle (which used to be Dutch). (I also pick up Mexican chocolate when I go there)

i love a good homemade banh mi on an absorbant baguette.

The saddest part of this show is that the price of pb has shot through the roof due to the drought in the South.

Pb with Braeburn apples, pb with pretzels, and pb with dark chocolate chips. Such good food!

Thanks for providing an entertaining alternative.

For me, it was the milk machines. My dining hall had these big stainless-steel dispensers that held plastic bags of 2%, skim, and chocolate milk. I have no idea how, but they made the milk incredibly cold and super-frothy. I grew up in Arizona, and our milk sometimes went bad in the summer because our old refrigerator had to work so hard against the heat. I developed a deep mistrust of printed dairy expiration dates. I can still see myself sitting in the dining hall with one glass of each kind of milk lined up across my tray ... "I am an adult. An adult drinking three different types of ice-cold milk ..."

Matthew, your Omelet Lady made me remember the Grab N Go Ladies at my school. Grab N Go was in the basement of the dining hall. Instead of using your meal plan for hot food, you could go there and pick out items to pack in a brown bag, like sandwiches, brownies, fruit, juice boxes. etc. Except that you only were allowed a certain number of items in certain combinations. (If item #1 is a bagel, item #2 cannot be a sandwich, unless item #3 is not a brownie, etc.) These were the Grab N Go Rules, which the The Ladies had sworn to uphold. They always peered suspiciously into my brown bag as I checked out. And yet for a select few, they would smile, glance sideways, and toss in an extra brownie. I never did figure out how to curry favor with them.

http://theactorsdiet.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/spreading-the-love/

oven-roast raw peanuts-- not the dry-roasted kind-- in a low oven to get the color you want.
throw in a food processor with ¾t sea salt (reserve one fourth of the nuts to add later if you want a non-creamy spread).
let er rip and let the machine do the work for you.
the oils will slowly release and make everything move the right way.
you can add any nut oil 1t at a time, though you wont need more than 1-2t.
the oil barely separates from the final product.
you can add pine nuts, or spices like coriander and cayenne to flavor as you like.

this quantity takes only a few minutes and fills a pint Ball jar almost perfectly.
any excess goes directly onto a piece of bread, or a marshmallow, or my finger.

eat it up, yum!

--Gooberngrape

Kiwi Pro Slice Peeler

The 'Waterfall Beef' that Andrew mentioned is like the one that was made at my very favourite (no longer open) Thai restaurant. It was fantastic and I still have dreams of it.

Sucrine (romaine)
Australe (blushed butterhead)
Pirat (blushed butterhead)
Double density (speckled romaine)
Outredgeous (romaine)
Oscarde (red oak looseleaf)
Winter Density (romaine)
Optima

Lander Hall had a stove on each floor, so some of us occasionally cooked. I helped one friend make Japanese "manju" (?) cookies which are sweet bean paste wrapped in dough and baked. During a spring break when there was no food service I attempted my very first beef stew on that stove using my only spice, black pepper. I put too much in it. Thirty years later friends who had it still talk about it.

I moved out of the dorms at the end of my sophomore year, but moved only a couple blocks away. So when friends had a Halloween party I made pies (two apple, two pumpkin). We had a parade of us walking down 12 Ave. NE with pies from my apartment to Lander Hall.

But no frozen yogurt machine? Did you donate it to Scripps? I used to hear complaints from that direction about the lack of yogurt.

I remember reheating some delivered pizza from the previous night by ironing the bottom of the pizza.

http://www.culinate.com/columns/bacon/miso

but not as much as I'd like.

they have corn popsicles in Korea