Veggies!

That is sweet! (Also smart, if they want us to keep cooking for them, LOL!)

Ohhhhhh I did not know that there was a Raison and Currant Code. I confess that I put raisons and currents in a few things like Sicilian stuffed mushroom caps, stuffing and salads. ewwwww about the tuna salad picante. I also am not fussy about smashed potatos mostly cuz people peel them before they smash them thus removing the tasty part.

Nice stories. My brother got his first in-the-shell peanuts at a baseball game from a guy sitting behind us. Complained to my mom he didn't like them (with the shells). The guy behind us almost killed himself laughing, but gave my brother some more so that he could learn to shell them. Part of the reason he got the name the "Galloping Gourmess."

Raisins are good in stews.

In Barcelona, they cook spinach with currants -- always dried when I had it. It may not have been currant season when I was there -- very, very hot weather -- in October. Once I recovered from the shock of having currants in my spinach, I liked it that way. You might want to try it, dahlia. I might try your steamed broccoli, currants and apples. DH would probably like it, too.
I support the general opinion that raisins don't belong in tuna salad! Geez! Who thought that one up? I never liked carrot and raisin salad which was de rigueur at Girl Scout camp when I was a kid. I might like it better now, but not sure. But I love raisins in lots of other stuff. Recently purchased a dish at the deli at Trader Joe's called Tsimmes. It is a side dish for the current Jewish holiday which I cannot spell but it starts with Rosh. Here is a recipe very similar to the one at Whole Foods, but the one at Whole Foods had more kinds of dried fruits -- maybe some prunes. It was delish! DH loved it as well. Will try to make my own next time:

http://www.simple-vegetarian-recipes.com/vegetables-sweet-potato-tsimmes.html

I think currants are more versatile than raisins because they are smaller.

I am not fond of Waldorf salad because of the mixture of celery and apples. To me they don't belong together and even worse they, IMHO, shouldn't be combined with mayonnaise. And neither should nuts be combined with mayonnaise. This is my personal rule. I don't like sweet pickles in my tuna salad either.

The rules for combining sweet and savory are complex and personal.

"The rules for combining sweet and savory are complex and personal."

Would you kindly enter that in the Great Book of Quotes, please Dahlia? It is so concisely and beautifully put.

Aw, thanks picante. Here is an iris, just for you.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/13503/

Golly, I didn't know I named myself after an iris, PJ! Thanks!

Well, we had a chicken stew with raisins in it last night! It is supposedly a recipe from Veracruz with Spanish influence. It has raisins, almonds and green olives. ( onions, tomatoes.) It was good. Fowl is more partial to fruit than fish is, I think, but fish is great with fruit salsa. It is a very complex and personal equation.

"The rules for combining sweet and savory are complex and personal." has been duly entered in the Great Book of Quotes. picante I like your dahlia too http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/168725/

Raisins don't go well with Iris.

To me Waldorf salad is better with a type of nuts other than Walnuts, and not with mayonaise. Yogurt with a touch of honey is an improvement over mayo in fruit salads.

I like fruity vinegars in fruit salad and lemon for zing.

You guys are brilliant with what goes together. All I can tell you is what doesn't:
raisins & mustard

Hmmm. Never tried raisins and mustard -- maybe they could be combined with fruits and vegetables for a sort of East Indian chutney -- kind of like piccadilly which is probably an Indian invention anyhow. You can put a lot of weird things together in Indian food and have it come out tasting great. But I agree, forget raisins and mustard for everything else.

Picante, you picked some nice flowers to name yourself after. You probably used your psychic abilities to come up with hour name.

Raisins, olives and almonds sound wonderful with chicken and very Spanish indeed. Grapes, olives and almonds are among the most common crops in Spain. Your DH is definitely talented.

Raisins and mustard combined with cloves and brown sugar make a ham glaze! I do not like raisin and carrot salad at all. I have seen raisins in cole slaw, too. Yick! Dparsons, when we have Waldorf salad I have mine without mayo, too. I like walnuts, though. I had a nice salad with endive, thinly sliced apples and the cheese I like but can never remember the name of. Kind of like blue cheese only better. And pine nuts. I think it was called "Autumn salad". D.H. is a good cook. It's true. One time he put raisons in black-eyed peas! That was awful. I don't know why he did that to this day.

Roquefort? Or Stilton? (We love cheeses...).

Alas, I feel bad for the maligned raisin... once such a lovely grape, touched by the sun and the wind, only to ripen into an even sweeter treat. Often used as a metaphor for a wrinkly face (also often maligned, wrinkly faces at their best show where the smiles have been). Whilst I don't LOVE raisins unconditionally, I do love them in turkey stuffing (especially golden raisins), cookies, and sometimes in a sauce.

Sort of off topic, I do love green grapes halved in tuna or chicken salad.

Gorgonzola! Yum. I like raisins in oatmeal, oatmeal cookies and by themselves. I like green grapes in chicken and tuna salad, too. That started in the 80's I think because I don't recall anyone doing that when I was young. And we ate tuna salad way too often! in my opinion. : )

Yes, I remember the "grapes in everything" sixties. I remember once my former DH and I picked up a very hippy-like lady who was hitchhiking from Taos to Santa Fe. She was bragging about a new dish she had come up with -- scrambled eggs with grapes. We both had to control our barf reflex.
Don't get me wrong, I love grapes, but not in my scrambled eggs! I love raisins, too, especially the golden ones. But they don't belong in everything. Neither do grapes.
Different cultures come up with different food combos. Raisins with olives and almonds is very typically Spanish. It is a combo we would never have come up with in the US, but which is a stalwart in Spain. We can appreciate it though.
Gorgonzola! Yes I agree, roybird. that autumn salad would be fabulous. Gorgonzola is like bleu cheese but creamier. It is wonderful in salads, especially with apples or pears. Some pine nuts don't hurt a bit.
Raisins in black-eyed peas! Yetch! Did he invent that himself? Sounds horrid. Artists -- and I believe good cooks are artists -- need to experiment and that means have failures. Raisins in black -eyed peas sound like a failure to me. Did Kevin realize this wasn't his best recipe of all time?

He thought it was interesting.

Changing the subject mildly back to (fruits and) veggies, Zerbeebee and I ate a Pear last night! Bart the pear tree produced two pears (1st season but I couldn't bring myself to cut them off with Zerbeebee all excited about them). The first one reached optimal ripeness so I cut it in half and we ate it. Most delicious. Very sweet but mild in flavor. Zerbeebee and I were both quite pleased. Next year will be good.

mmmmmm

My seckel pear has 3 pears, not quite ready as far as I can tell. It has better years. Many were damaged by the hail and fell off. My Orcas pear has none. Same problem. But my new little quince has its first 3 Quinces. they are very large and attractive. All I have to do is wait for them to turn yellow. Do I pick them if it looks like they will freeze? Beats me. Anybody know?

Hoping for more fruit next year. This year was not a good fruit year though I did get a nice crop of tiny peaches.

Any year with peaches is a good year.

Yup, dparsons - we gotta do all we can to keep the kids interested in growing things!

That's interesting. I've never eaten a quince. They sound prickly.

Still less amazing than the process an olive must go through before it is edible.

Thanks, dparsons! Not only did I learn what I had to do to get edible quinces, I learned the meaning of a new word -- bletting. I had heard the word, but never knew what it meant. I will wait for the next frost -- which may be pretty soon.

I think blett sounds like what it describes so is a perfect word. I must be sure to check to see if a fruit might be bletting before I toss it. Right now I think the black bananas in the fruit bowl may be bletting themselves into bananabread. Cool!

Pourable bananas make great banana bread.

Indeed they do!

"Blett" and "bleet" are both onomatopoetic.
So is "woof", but not "bow-wow". But that's just my opinion.

Thats a word for the day!

Gotta remember to look that one up... onomatopoetic.

It's on the List of Words that Roll off the Tongue. One of my favorites to say. Along with "sphygmomanometer".

That one's a verbal escher sketch.

wikipedia's definition... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia

Huh! I did not know that!

bletting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletting

sphygmomanometer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphygmomanometer

Whew! You all taught me a lot, today!

I like it. Talking fruits. I'm listening to hear if my bananas say 'Blett'.

Thanks, bsavage. As a former English teacher I thought I knew what onomatopoeia, but I didn't understand why bletting was onomatopoeic until I read the definition of bletting. Now I think I get it. Blet is the sound you make when you see or smell something which has bletted -- like a banana ripe for banana bread, but not much else.
So I have left my quinces ( all 3 of them) out on the tree for the hard, more or less, freeze, last night and will be checking them for bletting. Will they look like black bananas? Doing things for the first time is always difficult. Why don't I have a friend or relative to show me when a quince is ready to be eaten or cooked? Oh well, I will have to figure it out for myself. At least this isn't a medlar. I will pass on the knowledge once I get it.