Pickling salt is a finer grain compared to Kosher. If your following a recipe and its stating an exact measure of pickling salt, and you use Kosher, the amount will not be the same. Pickling salt also dissolves quicker. If you can tomatoes as a sauce or juice, there is a better way with a lot less labor and time. The use of a Roma food strainer will work very well. The tomatoes need absolutely no prepping, peeling or anything else, unless the are to big for the hopper, then you cut them. When I canned tomatoes from 200 plants, it would a have taken days to get them all peeled and mashed. Usually I like thick sauces, as I cut the tomatoes open, dig out most of the liquid and seeds, and run through Roma (Villaware), and the skins and seeds are passed out the end as waste. The sauce is quite thick and doesn't need as much cooking down to get it thick. Instead of lemon juice, I use citric acid. I just don't want a lemon taste in my tomatoes, no matter how small it might be. Also, I add the citric and salt to the empty jars just before they are being filled. In this way, your sure that the acid level is exact as well as salt. Cooking the tomatoes down with the salt and acid at the begining, can increase the acidity and saltiness. For apple sauce or other apple recipes, I like adding an acid blend of citic, malic and tarteric. This can help safety if the apples are overripe or low in acid. Additionally, ascorbic acid should be used with apples as it helps retain color.

Temp recovery is a big deal. Put food in a pot or pan, and the temperature drops. You will get bad results cooking at the new, lower temperature, no matter what you're cooking. You want to bring the temp back up as fast as possible--whether you're frying, boiling pasta or whatever. A lot of supermarket meats are also now injected with all sorts of liquids to make them fake-moist. When you start to cook they throw off all that liquid, and now you are steaming or boiling your pork chop. Not good. You want to crank it up for a second and get rid of that water, and for that you need a reasonable BTU burner. What, you may ask, did people do when they cooked all those meals on old stoves with 9K burners? They made good food but it took MORE: - More cooking medium (bigger pots of boiling water, more fat in the pan) - More time ( preheating pans or whatnot) - More batches of food (also requiring more time)

I bring the water to a boil at just under my stove's highest heat, because somewhere, sometime, I also heard not to use the highest heat.(That seems to be what discolors stainless.) It boils plenty fast anyway. It's the temperature they are talking about, not the boiling. I've called the all clad cust svc # 800-255-2523 several times. They were always great to deal with. They were the ones who told me about Bar Keepers Friend. It is a good friend, takes away anything stuck or discolored. Things do stick if the pan is not hot enough ( let it get hot on a med or a med hi heat) when you are sauteeing, usually it will release on its own. Get the pan hot, then add the oil, when it shimmers add the meat.

I used to do wood stove cooking/baking demos back in the day. It's definately easier to cook a stewy roasty type dish than bake. Baking is the holy grail of woodstove cooking. The tough part is the oven doesn't heat evenly. The side close to the fire box gets hotter than the other side, so need to turn halfway through baking. It is also difficult to maintain steady heat. You want med. sized HARD wood logs for baking. Actually not the hardest. Can't quite remember what's good for what, I do know ELM is best for baking, but elm wood is hard to come by. Can't remember for sure the others. Maple for frying. You don't want a super big log for baking either, that will get too hot. You can get an oven thermometer to test the temp., or use the hand method. I can't quite remember how long you're supposed to try holding your hand in the oven to test it but it isn't very long. Look online you can probably find old timey tips for judging oven temps. I can't remember them off the top of my head. I just waited until I had a nice, even, med. sized fire going. You can't judge the baking times by what is printed in a modern recipe, you have to keep a closer eye on the baking things, and like I said, turn halfway. But you can't be opening the oven all the time either, that messes up the heat too. So it's a balancing act. The more you do it the more you get a feel for how your oven works in tandem with the fire box and the type of fire you have going. Cakes are really difficult. Something like a cobbler or crisp works well. Fruit bars with a crumb topping and short or crumby crust were good too. My best dessert was maple pecan bars. Cookies are OK, so are pies. Potroast is great. Cheesey liquidy casseroles good too, something like scalloped potatoes, etc. Really, the only thing that was really, really hard was a nice light well risen cake. It can be done but I never quite managed to finesse that one. But then I hardly ever can manage a cake in a modern oven. I did bannana maple oatmeal quick bread too, that was OK.