I'm about to use my leftover beans to make some vegetarian tamales.

Hot damn! Thanks, Jenna! Now I know what I'll make the next time I have a hankering for butternut squash ravioli!

Hmm...I think, given the consenus on powdered sage, that I'll go with the fresh. I've seen the pasta with leaves in it before and it is quite beautiful. Since sage leaves are so stiff, I think I'll just mince the bejeezus out of two or three leaves and add it that way to the pasta dough. The dough should be pleasantly speckled.

The squash filling is butternut squash roasted with an onion, and then smashed up together. It also has neufchatel cheese and seasoned breadcrumbs. So I'm thinking it's tough enough to stand up to the sage!

Howdy all,

I made a butternut squash filling for some ravioli I am going to make, and then it occurred to me--what if I added sage powder to the pasta dough itself? Has anyone done this? Of course, I'd have to add just the right amount or it would taste like I made Pine Tree Ravioli.

--B. Toast

What if you plumped up some raisins in orange juice and threw them in? With some orange zest, cinnamon, and a tiny bit of cardamom, that might be good.

If you are giving gifts to alcohol-drinking folks, homemade limoncello is nice. Of course, I live in a lemon-growing area, so the lemons are free for me. :) That star anise vodka sounds good as well.

One year when my sister was in college I made her the base for ginger pancakes and sealed it in a bag. All she needed to do was to add the wet ingredients.

My hubby doesn't eat meat. Every once in a while I run across a recipe that sounds great, but contains gelatin, like the "booze pie" recipe in the New York Times Magazine today (9/29/06). The agar-agar I've seen in 99 Ranch and other places is made from seaweed, so that is fine, but I'm not sure how I would do the conversion from gelatin in a recipe. Suggestions for any other products are welcome as well. Thanks!

Another vote for New England Cheesemaking Supply from me. If you e-mail Jim, their tech guy--cheese tech, that is--he gets back to you pretty quick with some really good info. If your boyfriend is interested in making more than just ricotta or mozzarella, then you might consider getting the book Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll, who is the owner of New England Cheesemaking Supply. I really like that book, as it covers all kinds of cheeses. I'm sure there are other wonderful books and websites from other suppliers as well. NE Cheesmaking is just the one I happen to have experience with, so I can recommend them.

Junie D, I sure hope you will tell us how the nocino turns out. I have been tempted to make it for a while, but keep forgetting to get the green walnuts at the right time!

And as for other infused vodkas, I remember reading in the New York Times about a bubblegum infused vodka that was one of the specialties of a bar in Manhattan. I think they stuck wads of Big League Chew in the bottles, which made me think of two things: I sure hope they didn't chew it first, or otherwise that will be one bar I will not be visiting the next time I go to NYC; and from an organic chemistry standpoint, I don't know what the vodka would do to the gum, and if something weird might infuse out or be formed as well.

I think the original applejack was a killer, and I mean literally. Just pulling the ice out of a fermented juice leaves you with a higher-proof alcohol along with some nasty, nasty stuff! You can bet anything called applejack today is not made in the traditional way of freezing it. But I can understand why they would use the word applejack, as it has kind of a nice ring to it.

The book Charcuterie also has a duck prosciutto that I have been thinking about making for a while now. I don't know if you're interested in a non-ham prosciutto, but if you are, I'll tell you how it goes. Plus, it's a lot smaller, which is my primary reason for choosing it!

Yes, it's absolutely fabulous, a friend of mine makes wine. A LOT of wine. He is making over fifty cases this year. And it is good! I was over at his house when he brought by gallons of tiny wine grapes that had been picked that morning. If you have never seen this on the small-scale before, it is very interesting. The wine grapes are bright and tasty and filled with enormous seeds. He and his mother dumped these pounds and pounds of grapes into the destemmer/crusher, and the juice and skins ran out the bottom into gigantic buckets, which are all bubbling away in his garage.

Ahem. Sorry. I just got carried away in it all. I will be bottling with him in a few weeks, so if anyone is interested to hear more, I can ramble on about that as well.

But now to my question: I was thinking about the grape pomace, which is still in the buckets fermenting away with the juice, as he is making red wine. Once he pours off the wine, I will be making Tomme au Marc, which is a cheese that is aged in the skins and seeds of the grapes. But all that pomace got me to wondering if there were any other foods made with grape pomace? I am also making olives, and I wondered if there were any olives that were made with leftover grape bits. And I would make grappa if it wasn't illegal to make it at home in the US!

--B. Toast

Heck, now I know what I'll be doing for the next several weekends! Fantastic!

Does anyone make their own mustard? I love all kinds of mustard, and I keep staring at the different fancy mustards taking up space in my fridge and thinking, "I bet I could make that."

It's thoughts like that that let to me curing my own bacon. Now I need some mustard for it!

For all you brewers out there, what are your favorite beers to brew? And why? I got asked this question a little while ago, and it made me wonder what other folks thought.