I make this lamb stew with dried cranberries and plums (inspired by a dish in The Hunger Games) and it is absolutely delicious. My wife requests it frequently. Enjoy! http://goo.gl/6mhWy

Re damaging the blades: coffee grinders are designed to grind coffee beans, which are relatively soft, but they still grind almost all spices beautifully and without any damage. I've used my $10 one for over 20 years. The one exception in my experience is cinnamon: I strongly suggest you do not try to use a coffee grinder to grind stick cinnamon into powder. It is just a little too hard and in my opinion could damage the blades. I just buy pre-ground cinnamon powder.

As for dosa batter, I use a food processor to grind my soaked dal and rice and my batter comes out silky smooth. Just be sure you let the food processor run for at least 2-3 minutes for each batch.

The one specialized tool I used for Indian cooking is a portable folding proofing box from Brod & Taylor. it is large enough to accommodate a large mixing bowl of dosa batter, its water tray keeps the environment so moist the batter doesn't even have to be covered while fermenting, and it keeps the temp at exactly 90F. It makes fermenting dosa batter trivial no matter what the wildly varying ambient temp in my kitchen.

If you have access to a smoker, this chilled smoked avocado soup with smoked shrimp is fantastic.

http://www.cookshack.com/chilled-smok...

We're having it for dinner tonight, and tomorrow I'm smoking up a bunch of avocados and shrimp to vacuum pack and freeze for summer chilled soup.

I periodically purée a can or 3 and freeze it in an oiled plastic ice cube tray. Then I dump the cubes (~1 tablespoon each) in a ziploc and put it in the freezer. Whenever I make any soup, stew, chili, even risotto sometimes I just grab a cube or 2 and drop it into the pot. Easy, lasts forever (or would if I didn't use so much). I do the same with leftover canned tomato paste, although it is wise to put that in a separate bag and label them, and I wouldn't count on the tomato paste staying fresh-tasting for more than 2-3 months.

Avoid the issue. The chain Smart & Final (and, I'm sure, all restaurant supply stores) have boxes of 100 food prep gloves for cheap. I use them whenever I handle hot peppers. I also use them whenever I handle raw chicken/pork. Part of the reason is that I have eczema, so open cuts on my hands are common, but mostly it is just damned convenient. Work w/problem materials, strip gloves off, done!

I was born and raised in the Deep South, but I'm a convert to this stuff:

http://www.qbfoods.com/lemonaise.html

I use the Lite version, and it is still awesome. Especially on a tomato sandwich made as specified. Although even though I'm a salt and pepper addict, I make my tomato sandwiches without either. Just good bread, Lemonaise, and proper tomatoes. Completely agree about dripping down the arm being an indicator of correctness.

I grew up mostly on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, so most of our only-in-our-family dishes revolved around seafood:

Leftover fried fish filets (almost always popeye mullet), room temperature, with syrup on them for breakfast. My parents brought this idea back from a little motel where they stayed in Florida; it was the motel's sick twisted Continental breakfast equivalent. ;-)

Oysters (naked, not breaded) and small link sausages cooked together in a skillet, served with eggs scrambled in the grease/juices left in the pan.

Large thin fish filet (usually king mackerel) topped with minced garlic, butter, and strips of bacon and broiled in the oven. This was always breakfast.

Ground beef, Campbell's Pork and Beans, chopped onion, generous dollop of yellow mustard, touch of ketchup, Tabasco. As a teenager I could eat my weight in this stuff; couldn't get enough.

Baloney sandwiches with yellow mustard, Tabasco, and lots of potato chips smooshed inside.

We ran a small gill net to catch mullet. We would butterfly and smoke them over pecan wood in an old refrigerator converted for the purpose, then freeze them. One ever-present option for breakfast was to heat up a smoked fish in the oven (those were the pre-microwave days). Great with grits.

If you think they're good grilled, try smoking them. We share a huge avocado tree with our neighbors, and every winter when the crop comes in I halve avocados, throw them in my Bradley smoker along with some P&D shrimp, and make this soup:

http://cookshack.publishpath.com/chil...

For the excess, I scoop out the avocado meat, add the lime juice, vacuum pack and freeze (I pack and freeze the smoked shrimp separately). Come summer, we can make this chilled soup from the freezer; it is ideal for hot weather.

Did anyone else catch Kummer saying, just after the waiter left their table at his first meal, in the most faux-incredulous and officious tone possible, "His KLAIR-ette, not his klair-AY?"

Yes, Mr. Kummer, you pretentious twit. Claret is an English word. It may be derived from the French word for "pale", but it is not a French word, and it is pronounced KLAIR-ette. Look in any dictionary, or in Wikipedia.

What a git.

A little late, but this soup is fantastic. I have had nothing but raves about it. If you make a double recipe and roast extra garlic cloves for other uses, you can easily use well over 100 cloves of garlic:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/foo...

A few suggested (and well-tested) modifications:

When roasting the garlic cloves in the oven, use enough oil to completely cover the garlic. Drain it off afterwards and you've got lovely roasted garlic olive oil for other uses. Feel free to roast more cloves than the recipe calls for and use them for an appetizer or something else.

I either mix shallots and onions or, more often, replace all the onions with shallots.

Instead of adding Parmesan cheese, I just throw a couple of good-sized chunks of Parmesan rind in while the soup is cooking, then remove them before adding the cream. I went to my local upscale supermarket, talked to the person in charge of the cheeses, and got her to save me a lot of Parmesan rinds which I then vacuum-packed and froze, so I always have them on hand to toss into soups or sauces. Cheaper than using just the cheese itself, same flavor, and the rinds are not wasted.