Hey good lookin', what's cookin'?

Mango salad is not just easy to make, it's kind of fun.  You need a bit of red onion, sliced as thin as you can, some cilantro, some lime juice, some fish sauce, some chilis if you're into that sort of thing (mango actually cuts the heat pretty well), a bit of brown sugar, and the only tough thing to find:  an unripe mango.  Any mango you'd eat for dessert is automatically too ripe for this.  But a nice tough hard one is great.

Then you peel the mango with a vegetable peeler, and on one of the flat sides, make a series of cuts, end to end, right down to the "bone", about 3mm apart.  Then, the fun!  Take a very sharp knife, hold the mango in one hand, and with the knife "flick" across the top of the mango, taking of nice thin little strips as you do.  Do this down to the "bone" and then flip and repeat on the other side.  Mix ingredients in a bowl, let sit for a half hour or so, and dig in.

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I'm sure I could find an unripe melon at one of the nearby southeast Asian shops.

Mango!  Or else you just invented something new!  :)

Now if only there was some sort of tasty thing to do with an unripe avocado.  Not much of a problem finding those.

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Have you ever bought Red Boat Fish Sauce, a premium brand (and much more expensive than others) but said to have a very complex flavour?

Never heard of it before, but now I MUST find it.  :)

Sadly, I checked at three of the four grocers in Chinatown today and none carried it.  The fourth might, as they tend to have a slightly different selection of things, but then again they might not. 

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at a low ebb on imagination when it comes to food right now.

I get that way about four times a year, near the end of every season.  Right now I'm almost grilled out, and yet it's a bit too early for stews and such.  What I think I need most of all is for someone to discover a new, tasty animal -- it seems like we're always saying "well, we had chicken yesterday, and beef the day before..."

I recently bought up a bunch of frozen chicken breast at NoFrills -- about a kilogram or so for about five bucks.  It's not something I'd usually buy frozen, but the price got me curious!  Probably not nice enough for the grill, but possibly OK for soup or curry or sandwiches.  Tonight I'm going to smash up a fresh curry paste in the mortar and make an ad hoc chicken curry with somen noodles.  Maybe a bit of thai basil from the garden, if any is still thriving. 

I also picked up a bag of fresh lime leaf today that'll definitely have a role in this.  I like to buy a bag of fresh and do whatever I can with it, then put the remainder in a colander and let the leaves dry out for storage.  It's one of those "once a year" things.

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I wonder what wild pushmi-pullyu tastes like?

Probably leaner and more gamey than farmed pushmi-pullyu.

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A friend gave me a Cuisinart mandoline - she bought it and never used it. This friend is mildly addicted to buying gadgets.

Well, I hope you learn to play it!  I'm sure there are plenty of Québecois folk songs that call for one.

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I'm sure it would be good for making coleslaw - or curtido - which I'd been making by hand with a sharp knife as a grater turns the cabbage to mush. Ideas?

Jokes aside, I have a pretty decent one.  I don't get it out all that often, partly because I don't mind having to use a knife, and partly because it means having to wash three things instead of one (and OK, partly because I know how badly it wants to shred my fingers) but it IS good for some things.

Anything you want julienned both finely and consistently (eg: shredded carrot, or as you say coleslaw or for that matter, sauerkraut). 

I also use it with the smallest transverse blade (the "rakey" looking blade) to cut up potatoes for latkas.  When you cut the potatoes so nicely, you can easily make a vegan latka -- a sprinkle of flour on the spuds is more than enough to bind them, no egg needed.  I'll usually add a bit of similarly cut carrot or yam.

Also, if you want to make scalloped potatoes, you can slice them as thin as a potato chip and they all just sort of fuse together into a delicious creamy mass when cooked.  And I guess, if you can do that, you can also make potato chips!

Anyway, keep it, but don't throw your knives away.  :)

Sounds like you have cabbage, and a mandoline.  If you've got some non-iodized salt (sea salt or kosher salt) and a few mason jars, try your hand at sauerkraut!

Homemade sauerkraut would take nearly a year to get even half as "sour" as storebought (unless you cheat, like they do, with some vinegar).  But even a few weeks in, it's naturally probiotic, very digestible, and actually pretty awesome in slaw.  I know that cabbage is affordable and available all year 'round, but it's still kind of fun to preserve some.  It's fascinating to me how it stays crisp and fresh long after a head of cabbage in a plastic bag would have gone to the green bin.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'mma mention it again:  I have a nice little old timey recipe book for preserving that has a great sauerkraut recipe that begins with "66 cabbages..."  Naturally it just ASSUMES you have a barrel.  :)

So last year, if I recall correctly, I was out of ketchup, and NoFrills had the monstrous, 1.5 l bottle of Heinz on sale for about three bucks, so I bought it -- that's about 2/3 off and I couldn't resist.

Now it's almost gone, so today I bought a bottle of French's!  I'm dying to try it.  I was dying to try it last year, too, but when you have a litre and a half in the fridge, you don't really need another bottle.

Curiously, NoFrills had a 750ml bottle of French's for $2.97, and a one litre bottle of French's for... $2.97.

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It would take us at least a year to eat that much ketchup!

Oh, I hear you!  It took us about a year too!  We only really eat it on:

-  french fries of whatever sort, or junk-food equivalent (e.g. "tater tots")

- grilled cheese sandwiches

- fried egg sandwiches (or "westerns")

-  some smoked rib or smoked chicken glazes that call for some

It's not really my "go to" gloop.

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I have the recipe, might just do my own. Really should have started in July, though.

Tomorrow's probably close enough.  Get those raisins and currants and dried apricots and suchlike into some rum or brandy, and if you don't end up making fruitcake, have the best ice cream sundae ever.

Once turkey and spuds are a given, I'm with TB:  you NEED some awesome stuffing.  Personally, I'm partial to a simple sausage stuffing -- squeeze the filling out of a pack of breakfast links (or two, if your bird is huge) and fry up until brown.  Add a diced onion, some diced celery and cook until just soft.  Add a whack of stale bread, cut or torn into small chunks, some salt and pepper, and some sage or savoury (and/or the other herbs of your choice) and stir over heat until the bread has absorbed all the fat/liquid from the pan.  Let it cool, then pack as much of it into the cavity as possible -- really lean into it if you have to -- and then seal the cavity with a skewer or tie the drumsticks across the cavity with some kitchen twine.

If you don't like pork, try one or two lamb merguez sausages.  If you can find it, use dark pumpernickel bread, or a good rye bread.  And of course anything else you want to throw in is just value added.

For the vegetables, consider roasted instead of boiled/steamed/pureed/whatever.  Pick any or all of the following, and toss them into a heavy, oven safe pan or skillet with a goodly glug of olive oil and some salt and pepper and optional herbs:

-  carrots, peeled or not, cut in two inch lengths.

-  beets, peeled and quartered

-  brussels sprouts (you might even like them this way!) cleaned

-  parsnip (cut like the carrot, and maybe split on the really fat end)

-  large button or cremini mushrooms, whole

-  baby sweet peppers, if you can find them, whole, seeded

-  sweet potato or yam, peeled and cut in chunks

-  some cauliflower florets, about the size of a toonie

-  celeriac, fennel bulb, kohlrabi, or any other vegetable that looks like it came from the props closet from Alien

-  any sturdy and tasty vegetable I've forgotten or that you like

Shake the pan to make sure everything gets a bit of oil and seasoning, then cover with foil and roast in the oven with the bird for 30-45 minutes.  Remove foil, give the veg another shake, and roast for another 30 minutes or until cooked through nicely.  Some added butter never hurts right before serving.

It's a nice, and seasonal alternative to some of the other cooking methods.  And I'm not kidding when I say it might make a brussels sprouts believer out of you.

Somewhere I've got a half-dozen or so cookbooks from that era, part of a "Time-Life series" from the late sixties or some such, and man are they GLORIOUS.  I either found them, or bought them for 50 cents each or so.

The recipes are full of mini-marshmallows, Velveeta, ginger-ale, canned things, white sugar, aspic, maraschino cherries, processed meat and convenience.

The photos are to die for!  Imagine June Cleaver serving up "Candied Hawaiian Spam" to Ward and some kids straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting (all poorly offset printed in slightly too-saturated colours) and you've got the gestalt of it.  They're like opening a food time capsule.

I think I may have actually made things from the Fanny Farmer cookbook (c. 1896) but I don't think I ever made anything from those Time-Life books.  I totally agree that things went all "canned pear"-shaped in the 1960's, but that's what I love the most about those books!  And I totally agree that all eras' cookbooks say something about the social orders of their time -- again, why I love those books!

Also, realistically, whatever was big in the US in the late 60's was what was big in my little isolated chunk of Canada in the early 70's, which was when I was becoming aware of stuff and noticing stuff.  Part of our family -- my mother's sister and her husband and kids -- were early adopters of aerosol cheese and chocolate milk powder and Kraft recipes, so I guess I have a nostalgia for it that I can't really claim for the foods of the 40's and 30's and beyond.

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I think I'm around your age or a little older

I have the same sense.  Canada is almost exactly 100 years older than me.  You?

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Cheez Wiz and Kraft singles and the generic version of Tang were staples around our house.

Aww yiss!  When I was a kid, I started every day I could with a peanut butter and Cheez Whiz sandwich.

As an adult, I've bought it once or twice, out of nostalgia, but like most nostalgia, it's somehow not the same.

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The switch from canned veg to frozen was momentous. I'm so grateful my dad's uncle was a market gardener and my grandmother had a massive vegetable garden so there was affordable fresh stuff on the table half the year.

My parents were odd that way.  They'd scold my uncle for buying a frozen steak, then they'd use canned mushrooms in a recipe.  They'd buy fresh, real cheese, but then cook rice in a bag.  I think that whole decade was a big food mess.

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etween his uncle and mother's veggies, wild food like saskatoons and fiddlehead greens, fresh fish and venison, ducks and upland game birds, we escaped the canned, boring and bland some of the time.

I hear that.  My father, a construction worker, seemed to always "know a guy" who'd hunted some venison or moose, so we had venison and moose more often than most.  And living on a lake we ate lots of either bought our caught freshwater fish like perch and pickerel and trout.  But then also rice in a bag!!?

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He also knew the guy in Quappelle Valley who grew mushrooms when grocery stores only had them in cans, so now and then we'd get fresh ones. But tinned were just what everyone thought mushrooms were at the time.

Sometimes, when we'd visit some in-laws in Strathroy, the elders would make a road trip out to a mushroom farm nearby and grab up 5 lb boxes of fresh buttons -- us kids would eat as we wanted of them from the box and barely make a dent.  But still, there were canned mushrooms.  I guess the adults were "complicated".

And if I still like Cheez Whiz -- which I do -- maybe I'm also complicated?