Recipes

You can buy potted mint plants that you can stick on the kitchen window, assuming you A; Have a Kitchen window and B; It gets sunlight.

Put in a larger pot (and with good quality compost) and that will not only give you fresh mint close at hand. But also a nice smelling plant in the kitchen.

There are a couple of other herbs you can buy in pots, so a window box filled with them will provide decoration as well as fresh herbs when and if you need them. Naturally this isn't going to be enough to use everyday, but a fresh leaf or two coupled with dried leaves can make all the difference.

Basil, parsley and most "woody" herbs seem to grow if you give em a bit of food, even from cheapy supermarket pots, don't bother with the cheap dill though, it dies too easily.

Yes that's true, it has more to do with my liking for Sprats, Sardines,pilchards etc and their dislike if anything that "looks back " at then from the plate. The only fish they will eat is a filler, loin or steak.

Any recommendations on how to grill pork chops? Now that the weather is FINALLY getting better, I want to fire up grill and the wife will be getting some chops later this week.

I have to ask this now: What is it with Americans and your apples and cinnamon? A lot of people say there's no such thing as American cuisine, but you guys use both individual ingredients and that specific combination more than anyone else in the world that I know of.

Off the top of my head I think that apples were one particular crop that the fledgling USA had in abundance, so it got used rather a lot.

Cinnamon I'm less sure of. I don't think it is/was grown in the US, in fact I think most of it came/comes from the far East. However in the days of sail merchant ships returning to Europe would have sailed up the East Coast of the US to take advantage of the prevailing winds* My best guess is that ships returning from the East would often need or decide to stop off in US ports before heading back across the Atlantic, and selling some of their cargo (possibly picking up grain from the US in the process) would make sense.

By the time the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, hence bypassing the need for ships to go around Africa and up the Atlantic, the West Coast ports of the US were not only open for business but were connected to the new rail network. So Cinnamon was probably easier to import to LA and San Francisco and then to the rest of the country via rail. The larger Asian population on the west coast (a result of the Californian Gold Rush) might also have given a ready market for such spices on the West Coast. Meaning that by the time the rail network was capable of supporting the transportation of spices to the East coast (and elsewhere in the US) all importers had to do was increase the amount of spices being imported as the framework for the trade was already well established.


(*The trade winds in the North Atlantic move in a clockwise direction, so it was easier and faster for ships to head towards South America then North through the Caribbean and up the East Coast of the US before heading East towards Europe.)

They are a good combination of flavors, and they go well with pork.

apples are also a relatively plentiful fruit, here, thanks to the efforts of Johnny Appleseed (who was a real person, though not so silly as the popular entertainment industry would have you believe. he was more a salesman than a dreamer.

They traded with Japan, which was in the Pacific.

I should have been slightly more specific in the route I gave. Ships headed around the Cape of Good Hope and up into the Atlantic and from there passed up the West Coast of Africa until just shy of the equator, then turned West and went around the Northern Atlantic in a clockwise direction. (In both cases following the prevailing winds).

Cinnamon was at one point one of the principal goods transported by the VOC, this being around the same time that New York was a Dutch possession. An educated guess would be that it was the Dutch who first imported Cinnamon into the future USA, with the British East India Company taking over around the time the future city ended up in English hands.

In both cases it would make sense for some cinnamon to have been traded in North America, since it was a low volume, high cost cargo and off the top of my head New York would have been the first major port ships returning from the Far East would have encountered since the Cape. At this point they would probably have been low on provisions and possibly looking to repair/refit prior to attempting crossing the Atlantic. In this context it would make sense for Captains to sell some of their cargo to pay for provisions and repairs.

This at least is an educated guess.

We now return you to the topic in question.

Apples are also have a very mild flavor, so the are commonly used as a cheap way to bulk up other foods with a minimal change in flavor.