What's cooking? part 4

I need to get some berries. I am in the mood to bake some berry tarts.

I see blackberries glistening ripely everywhere lately! Unfortunately, always along the busiest roadways. But 'tis the season to pick 'em!

I'm always impressed when we on ILCook manage to rustle up a thread long enough to warrant continuing.

I think a blackberry crumble may well be in the offing. Possibly with cream.

Jaq, let's go picking. I know a few spots.

what's cooking? Lxy's Ethiopian Experiment. We found a deli up the street that sells fresh injera and have been going crazy with the spicy beans and weird cottage cheese and collared greens

I've been in France for two weeks - a culinary holiday (as all of mine end up being anyway). Ragout of lamb with flageolet beans, huge piles of mussels, enormous oysters, rabbit in red wine, etc etc. Please don't make me go home!

jergins, when is good for berry-picking? We are bumbershooting on the weekend but I could maybe escape some of it.

I think, if I ever went to France, I would never want to leave.

You guys, I am really tore down about the death of Michael Jackson (beer and whisky writer). This is like when D. Boon died.

Jaq - I lived there for a year and I didn't want to leave either (had to come back for studies). Having seen your posts on here, I think you'd be in heaven there; fantastic quality meats, really great traditional recipes etc etc.

Tonight: tired Friday food - fried chicken with some kind of pasta, probably chilli flakes, basil and a couple of other things. Friday night is my lazy cooking night before I let loose on the weekend. If only I didn't have a job...

I can see myself at customs - "how long are you visiting for?" "oh, until I'm done eating" :)

As part of our beef, we got some giant packages of chuck steak, which I haven't been real sure what to do with. I ground some up last night with some pork fat and made very tasty and juicy hamburgers.

Fresh home-made gnocchi (well, "home-made" by Italian pasta store around corner) with pancetta in cream sauce as main course. I can feel my arteries quivering with dread.

Gnocchi and creamy sauces = made in heaven. Did anyone see Nigella Express last night? She's still cooking in denim jackets (why?) and was a bit too smiley for me, but there were some lovely recipes (including gnocchi and a creamy sauce, which is what reminded me).

Last night - pork burgers and enormous mounds of green veg covered in a sauce made from the meat juices. Matt, all you need to do is have loads of veg with your sauce - it's a well known fact that vegetables absorb the calories in fatty food (I had a friend once who believed me when I said this).

I made Tep's vinegar chicken tonight! It was pretty good, although my flat now fairly reeks of vinegar.

"Did anyone see Nigella Express last night?"

Nope. :-( Missed it.

Just lunched on a fennel, chicken and pea soup with stock from the roast bird we had a couple of days ago. There's still a bit of meat left for butties with piccalili later, too. Chicken really does live to give.

oh i am so jealous of you people!
my new life: taking lunch and dinner with me to work/school as i don't get home til 10 pm most nights. i need to find recipes that make long-keeping, easy-traveling leftovers. i need to start cooking things on the weekend to use all week but at the same time not get sick of eating the same thing all the time. this is difficult.

there has been a lot of pbj and carrots.

Matt, do (did) you make stock from chicken bones after they've been roasted (like, for a roast chicken)? I've never done this, but now that I'm asking, it seems rather obvious--there's definitely still gonna be lots of chicken flavor in those bones right?

Too right.

There's actually more flavour after roasting any sort of bones for stock. Think of it in terms of making soup: you want to get a bit of colour on the veg before it hits the stock so you roast/fry/whatever it first. Same with the bones, more flavour comes out after they've been cooked.

That said, chicken stock is a tricky bugger at times. You're better off saving the bones from a few roasted birds (unless you're one of the lucky sods like me who has a butcher who saves gizzards and pluck)if you're planning on making a good amount. As a general rule of thumb I find that one chicken carcass plus a few bits of veg will make enough stock for soup for two, risotto for four at a push. But no more than that. ILCook may well disagree.

Apologies for slight derail forthcoming.

Deli update for those that are interested: we get our yay or nay from the council on Oct 4th.

By an astonishing cosmic coincidence my wife is due to give birth....on Oct 4th.

Can anyone recommend any meals for extreme stress? Chicken soup is a given.

Apparently I will never make a decent rhubarb pie/crisp/crumble/cobbler.

I'm thinking I might need to cook the rhubarb first for a while before pie-ifying it.

Matt, go for roasted mashed yams w/ loads of butter. Very comforting, just sweet enough, incredibly tasty.

Chris, what's up with the rhubarb then? Does it stay hard and crunchy?

When I want something comforting it tends to be pot roast of some type - no thinking, just brown meat off, add wine/stock and veg/flavours etc etc, leave in oven for indeterminate amount of time. But I've never tried to open a deli and be pregnant at the same time - maybe this requires a whole new level of anti-stress food. Diazepam sandwiches maybe?

So long as they're with pickle, I'm there.

Yes, the rhubarb stayed hard and crunchy, and ended up in this big pool of liquid. I put it in for a further 15 or so minutes and it came out soft and tasty enough, though I had to scoop it out with a slotted spoon. Fortunately this was not for public consumption. It tasted fine but it was not quite what I was hoping for.

Last night - shredded cabbage cooked down with bacon and onions, served with caramelised sausages (because one pork product isn't enough) and boiled potatoes. It was delicious; I ate what was on my plate then went to the kitchen and had second of cabbage and bacon straight out of the pan with a fork. Me greedy.

Pan helpings are the best, though.

Yeah, why is that? I think it's because it feels illicit somehow, like eating a cake before it's cooled or something.

Anyway, tonight - curry curry curry curry curry i.e. a lot of curry (accompanied by about a hundredweight of lime pickle - the king of pickles).

Did anyone see Nigella Express last night?

I saw it last night and almost swore never to watch it again because of those little pre- or post- recorded grunts and moans whenever they show something bubbling on the stove and her... well, just her fucking annoyingness. But then she made a chocolate mousse with marshmallows and she's got me back, for one more episode at least.

Yeah, I used to love her previous shows when she was totally (or at least it seemed) natural. In this series she's like a slutty wooden doll or something - smiling weirdly at the camera non-stop, as if someone's told her everyone'll switch off if she drops it. And so smug! Jeez, you're not the only one who can cook quickly. But I still keep watching - like you say, she has the odd totally yummy moment which makes you want to watch again.

Tonight - chicken karahi. I'm starving already (two hours till I get home to cook).

we watched Nigella on watch again, I think I came to the conclusion that she was whacked off her gourd on goofballs

I'm trying to use up what we have in the house, so it doesn't have to be packed and moved. Last night, a frozen pesto pizza with additional toppings of herbed salami, dollops of homemade pesto, and piles of shredded mystery cheeses.

Tonight, from the depths of the freezer: chicken enchiladas and asparagus risotto (both originally from Trader Joe's, I think). There are 2 bags of some sort of frozen berry in there - maybe I'll make up a crumble for tomorrow's breakfast. Everything else appears to be large hunks of meat (which is what we seem to specialize in). Oh, and 2 largish bags of pork fat for rendering into lard.

I heart Jaq because she makes crumble for breakfast (here it's for puddings only, as far as I'm aware). Are you moving Jaq? I get perverse pleasure from finding inventive ways of using up random ingredients before you move. "Hmm, custard and lamb shoulder, what can I make?"

Porkpie, Nigella's definitely got a kind of wide-eyed vibe about her in this series. Couple that with the weird rictus grin = weird TV.

Tomorrow - Saturday Kitchen with Rick Stein on it (my absolute favourite chef ever). Best excuse for a lazy morning eating poached eggs and watching TV (er, a bit like most Saturdays).

Crumble, it's not just for pudding! Delicious and nutritious! (see also: fruit pies and custard)

We're moving on Monday to a loft space with a great kitchen (that looks like it's never been used). It's very industrial - maple butcher block countertops, diamond plate (like industrial non-skid flooring) bar and cabinets, the cabinets are rolling toolchests, good quality gas stovetop/oven and refrigerator/freezer, well laid out. I'm very very excited about it. I'm giving up a kitchen that is larger, but relatively cumbersome to work in - the refrigerator door can't open far enough to get the produce bins out, the low cabinets aren't good for pots and pans due to weird half-shelves, etc. It does have a lot of counterspace and a big walk-in pantry that will be missed.

I've cooked for Rick Stein. Lovely bloke, liked the food so much he bought me a pint.

(full disclosure, it was only a bowl of chips when he popped into a pub I was KP-ing at as a bairn, nevertheless).

Jaq. I am very envious.

I was thinking about you when we were in there Tuesday, Matt, because the place is set up so it could make a sweet restaurant - you could fit 10 tables for 4 in there easily and have a counter/bar setup too. People would have to walk through the kitchen to get to the toilet though, so that's not so good :)

I know you're busy, but we'll try to stick to this one long enough for you and Mrs. Matt and your little sweetpea to get over here for a visit.

god that sounds like kitchen heaven. i should take a picture of the corner of my living room that is called 'kitchen' but is impossible to cook anything in :(

Cor, that'd be good.

Not just to perv over the kitchen, obviously :)

Perv on this!

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/illiterati/1393983951/"; title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1363/1393983951_56ba566003.jpg"; width="500" height="375" alt="Kitchen" /></a>

Well crap. Damn BBCode.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1363/1393983951_56ba566003.jpg

Here's the whole set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/illiterati/sets/72157602039756246/

nice!
jealous!!

phwoar, look at the worktops on that

do people recommend those rolling butcher block/shelving units? there is really nowhere to prep in my kitchen and now that it looks like i'm staying here a while, i'm thinking of getting one.

we have one. it's great, but it apparently was nightmarish to assemble. that's ikea for you though...

oh - re: food at school, al said that within 5-6 blocks of bc on nostrand are a bunch of west indian joints, and if you want to walk further then the famous difara's pizza is about a 15-20 minute hike.

(difara's is on ave j, btw, in the midst of a bunch of israeli places.)

ooooh interesting. thank you so much! and al, too!
i will pose these ideas to class mates for days where we have a little more time between work and class.

I like my butcher block work table thingy.

Jaq's new kitchen is drooly.

Oh the ironing! In this neighborhood, I may never have to cook again, because there are places to eat EVERYWHERE! So far we've tried out Texas barbecue, 2 sandwich cafes (one that uses Salumi meats nom nom nom), an italian place that also does breakfast, and an indian place last night.

how's the texas bbq in seattle?

not esp. great, but not awful. There's a bunch of smokehouses down past the stadiums, so they get their meat from one of them. They do up the chickens in the restaurant, but they're just rotisserried, not really 'cued. The really great place we've found is Willie's Taste of Soul down on Beacon, but he does Carolina-style (and does all his own smoking).

willie sounds like a man after my own heart.

Willie's a great guy - next time we are there I'll try to take a picture of the shrine he has up to his gramma who is "Baking for the Angels Now". He uses her recipes for the red velvet cake and 7-up cake and the pecan pie they sell. Maybe also for the yams I think, which are sweet and yummy enough to be dessert. He also does custom smoking, so if we ever again have a whole pig, I'll have him smoke up the hocks and one of the hams.

Hallelujah, it's fig time: I bought eight yesterday and if I can resist eating them raw with dollops of mascarpone, I'll make ice-cream this weekend. One of Nigel's books has a Nigella recipe in it (ah, chums) which calls for 125ml of muscat, 125ml of double cream, 125g of caster sugar and eight figs. Now there's a recipe for memorising. Best of all, there's no cooking involved - you just whizz it all up, churn and freeze.

I started a batch of tea pickles last night. Except I am not sure what kind of tea I used. So who knows. Sadly I am out of lapsang souchong, which is what I used last time, many years ago.

I'm churning the fig and muscat ice-cream right now and my god, it tastes like Christmas. I'll be surprised if there's any left this time tomorrow.

That. Sounds. Fantastic.

I have successfully negotiated making my own sausages, and by God it's relatively easy. And they taste so good.

Surprisingly, not that much cheaper than buying them in packs, although I suppose when you start upscaling quantities you can see the savings - I just did a kilo to start with.

A couple more trial attempts with the basic recipe and I'll be ready to start experimenting.

goat cheese/beet salad and pasta with fresh basil pesto and beet greens on saturday night. i'm so into the many varieties of beets available at the greenmarket at the moment. this most recent meal was made with bull's blood beets, which are enormous, more red than purple, and have more flavorful greens than the standard guys.

i was craving slavic comfort food after seeing eastern promises yesterday, so that set the theme for dinner: sliced heirloom tomatoes with sour cream; quick cucumber pickle with red wine vinegar, sugar, and dill; grated beets, garlic, walnuts, and hardboiled egg dressed with sour cream and real mayonnaise; and a warm carrot salad with garlic and cumin that frankly owed more to morocco than kiev. second course: sauteed sauerkraut and mushroom pierogies.

Goddammit I have this new cookbook and its recipes are very short and to the point, which is nice, but it means if you miss ONE word everything can go crazy. Like, say, how they want COOKED beets in the beet and bechamel recipe, even though you bake it for a while after you add the bechamel.

I made the best of it and it was edible, but goddamn. I = idiot.

Deli update for those that are interested: we get our yay or nay from the council on Oct 4th.

somewhat ahead of time, council says yes

off we jolly well go, then

Congratulations!!!!!! Hope it goes great guns from day 1.

Excellent news! Will have to pop in when we bring the nipper up north, when are you hoping to open? Are you going to wait until your little bundle turns up before getting down to serious business?

congratulations, matt.

excellent soup last night: a large bunch of orange and yellow carrots, a huge red bell pepper, a small red chili, a large chunk of ginger, and much garlic and shallot, all simmered with a water/stock mixture then whizzed with my best friend, the immersion blender.

that sounds a tasty soup indeed

Vicky: we're looking to open by mid-Nov now, a few weeks to get the lease sorted and then the shopfitters move in. It's worked out quite handily as baby is due in a week, so I get a few weeks of fatherhood under my belt before I have to throw myself back into running a kitchen.

indonesian-style rice noodles for dinner last night: chopped string beans (sadly, no long beans at the greenmarket yesterday), coarsely grated carrot, giant bird chili, and a shallot/garlic/ginger paste all sauteed together until the veg were softened a bit, then simmered with about a cup of coconut milk, some brown sugar, and a few glugs of extra dark soy. cooked rice noodles and two beaten eggs were added at the very end. next time i'm going to use shrimp paste in the sauce as well. it needed a little bit of funk.

lauren, all your stuff sounds SO GOOD!

I finally cooked something in the new kitchen last night. Mr. Jaq was off for his first piano lesson and it seemed ridic to head out when I knew there was all this pantry stuff in various boxes - I just had to find it. Dug up a bag of bowtie pasta, had a partial jar of sundried tomatoes in olive oil in the fridge, also the stub end of a herb-coated salami. Found some pine nuts in with some of the bathroom stuff (?) and there was a handful of pregrated parmesan in a bag in the freezer for some reason. Boiled, chopped, sliced, dry-roasted, and mixed it all together, and it was lovely. Got a few more piles of things sorted while the pasta was boiling, but it's still not even halfway.

thanks, jaq! it's been really, really good to get back into cooking again. i''ve been trying to do more veg dishes, since lots of weekend grilling this summer meant overconsumption of meat. that's not good healthwise, and i also ended up having a minor crisis of conscience about eating too much unethically-produced stuff.

New Adventures In Sossidges

(but I bet that linking doesn't work, unlike the sossies hoho)

Bluddy knew it. Oh well, they're in this thread:

Not location specific, No rules: Welcome to ILX heaven

Yes, I know it's a long one.

kale and white bean stew w/ a little bit of chorizo. gorgeous kale at the greenmarket now! so robust and just picture-perfect. we got about 3lbs of cleaned greens from a $2 bunch.

Tonight - neck of lamb stew. I like to keep it simple, just slow cooked in some wine, stock, rosemary and served with pasta. Now that the nights are really drawing in, I'm craving warming wintery stuff and this will definitely fit the bill.

Kale is good on this side of the Atlantic too - sunny Yorkshire has a glut of the stuff at the moment. Bought (and ate) a bunch at the weekend that looked like a triffid, yummy iron goodness.

i made ed's mutton stewed in red wine, which was delicious. the last 20 minutes or so i cooked it on very high heat with lid off, so the sauce got thick and a bit syrupy. yay!

(the recipe is on the the autumn drinks thread on ile, by the way.)

stew sounds good,lauren.
I'm just waiting for autumn to actually hit the northeast before i get to start making all the yummy stews and braises.

i know - it was actually way too warm and summery yesterday for that dish, but i really wanted to try it.

Stew season has been delayed but the temp should fall 30 degrees by Wednesday. I cannot wait.

Need a veal stew recipe if anyone has one.

Chestnut time in Yurp -- found some good looking chestnut linguine from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and did them up with a slightly modified Jamie Oliver recipe: olive oil, Italian sausages (just the meat), white wine, lemon juice and zest, parsley, butter and gobs of Parmesan, and some seasonings I will not reveal. It was absolutely fantastic, totally Autumn-y. And worked surprisingly well as breakfast the next morning when I re-heated it in my wok with some scrambled eggs.

i've never had chestnut linguine, but it sounds great.

a light pasta for the last of the warm weather: calamari (cooked on the grill pan) and really nutty arugula tossed with small shells, sauteed garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice.

There are workable recipes for chestnut pasta on the web.

hmm, so i see. i also found a few places nearby that sell it fresh during the late fall, so i might just be lazy and wait until i can buy it. although if i had a bag of chestnut flour, i also could make castagnaccio...

My pickles, they did not turn out so well. I need to remember for next time: Diversity! Smaller batches! Test test test!

Welcome home dinner for Mrs Coastaltown featuring stuff she hasn't had for a while: Starter of mussels in tomato, smoked paprika and saffron broth, main of rare duck breast on a bed of diced sweet potato, savoy cabbage and chorizo, fried with garlic and a spot of cider vinegar. We'd have a filthy Vacherin for afters but we're too full.

Bolognese, which has been bubbling most of the afternoon while I started decorating my bedroom. Only 40 minutes to go...

carrot muffins. Matt, your post reminds me I still haven't had any sushi since Aidan arrived...

yesterday: a big pot of middle eastern-style lentil soup with greens and lots of lemon juice, to use up a head of treviso radicchio that was still hanging around despite having yielded half a dozen salads.

friday: linguine with beet greens, again. it seems to have become my default dish. the beets themselves were roasted and eaten with blue cheese.

i wasn't planning on cooking last night, but responsibility was delegated to me at the last minute. chicken thighs were already in a jerk marinade, so i broiled those and served with mashed sweet potatoes and braised kale. i love kale, even if it is kind of a pain to deal with a big bushy bunch of it.

I keep seeing stuff in newspapers about ways to make kale palatable, talking about it like The New Brussels Sprouts or something. Why the hate? I don't understand - I love kale (and sprouts for that matter).

i don't get it, either. i love "gross" vegetables like kale, sprouts, and cabbage.

I finally used the oven at our new place! To my surprise and chagrin, IT'S ELECTRIC! The range top is gas, and I assumed.....too much I guess.

It still roasted a 6 lb chicken and 4 yams just fine.

It also has a "convect" button?

Dangerous! My ex got really into the convect possibilities with his hyperfancy oven. I was never convinced it was worthwhile.

brussel sprouts on the stalk have hit the greenmarket, and i'm very happy. last night i braised some and tossed them in a mustard/butter sauce and served alongside sunday dinner leftovers (shepherd's pie with mashed yam topping). fall perfection!

Jaq it sounds like you TOTALLY lucked out! Gas is tops for range, but electric is way better for oven (cooks much more evenly). And you have convection! Awesome!

N.B. I have never actually used a convection oven.

Co-worker was telling me today how awesome the convecting is for making dried stuff and also for roasting. It sounds like it might mess with baking, but I am eager to try it out!

I totally agree; gas hob plus electric oven is the best combo. Being stuck with an electric hob, I am jealous.

Tonight - boned chicken thighs stuffed with stilton, wrapped in Parma ham and roasted. Served with creamy wine sauce, cue drooling a la Homer.

I must also cast a positive vote for kale and all its miraculous nutritional value + tastiness.

It sounds like it might mess with baking

I've heard they're great for baking because the air circulation means your cakes come out level (in my gas oven they rise more on one side than the other) and things cook as fast at the bottom as they do at the top.

I'm going to bake up some custard tonight, and am definitely doing bread this weekend. Someone recommended using the convect during the preheat, because it is so much quicker and more even. I also keep my cast iron pizza griddle on the bottom rack to add mass, which also helps to keep the heat more even and steady.

My sister (who readily admits to not being much of a cook) had issues with her convection oven apparently. Like a roast chicken that had beautiful golden brown skin, but was pretty much raw within. Operator error, more likely than not.

Convection is fine for baking, just adjust temp and cooking temp downwards by about 5-10%.

I am also the proud owner of a convection oven, which is thus far marvellous. It has like eight different settings depending on what you are cooking, like only using the bottom element if you're doing pizza and don't want the top all crispy. I have not done cakes yet as no-one around to eat them, but Madchen and her other half have an invitation to come round for dinner some time and I might attempt some sort of cakey thing for that.

What an excellent idea :)

Last night I made celery and pancetta risotto, with chopped celery leaves stirred through it at the last minute and lots of grated pecorino on top. It was aces.

We've been all about the autumnal veg this week - butternut squash risotto, pumpkin, sweet potato and mushroom lasagne, and a beef stew in the slow cooker with potatoes, carrots, swede and parsnips.

chickpeas are currently soaking for egyptian chickpea soup mmmm

also going to make a vegetable-chicken soup tonight

and artichokes yum

Pumpkin custard, 5-layer bars (I was missing pecans and coconut, but they are still really good), and my first loaf of bread in the new place. I've got to work out this convection business - I turned it on (and turned the temp way down) for the bars, but they got really brown really fast. I feared what it would do to my bread, so left it off. I'm anxious to try it for cookies (or other small batch things), so I can experiment.

Linguine alla vongole tonight! It was great!

comfort dinner for a pal who has been working too hard: roasted beets with gorgonzola and some red oak leaf lettuce thrown in for greenery. then: pasta with kale and chickpeas, which sounds virtuous but was actually a caloric nightmare sauced with heavy cream and parmesan. very savory, but so rich that my friend and i only finished about 1/3 of the dish between us (very atypical). i used bionaturae pasta (http://www.bionaturae.com/pasta.html) for the first time and was quite impressed. i think it's going to be my default dried pasta from now on.

the night before last i made a vegetable curry using the recipe off the bag of my recently-purchased "hot bengal" powder from kalustyan's. i was a bit suspicious because it didn't sound like much, but it turned out very well. using fresh, high-quality spices really makes a difference, i think. i've got to work on using stuff up within a reasonable timeframe and not letting things go stale. the obvious way to do that is to not purchase too much, but damn it - spice shopping is so much fun!

Tonight - lasagne leftovers from last night. Leftovers = always great. This one was good because I put a whole bottle of red wine in the meat sauce and cooked it for about a million years (two hours, but still). We had leftover sauce once I'd put the lasagne together, which I ate with a ladle while the lasagne was cooking. This made me very happy.

This weekend - slow-roasted pork belly. End of this weekend - heart attack through having eaten about a kilo of crackling.

mmmmmmmmm crackling

A giant pot of black beans/soup, with celery/bell pepp/tomato/onion/garlic and a few dashes of red wine vinegar in the chicken stock base. Over long-grain rice with a little greek yogurt stirred in. God, lunch makes me so happy.

I am going to salt-roast some pork tonight, as seen here and here.

A question - I've jellied some chicken stock (is that what I mean? I've reduced it so it's jelly at room temperature). How long can I now keep it in the fridge? Instinctively I would say ages but I'm not sure how long that would be.

I've kept my homemade jellied stock for upwards of 6 months in the back of the fridge. when you concentrate it that much, the salts prevent molds and things from gaining a foothold.

Cool, thanks - it seemed like it should keep for months. Nothing like risotto/gravy/soup made with your own stock!

Kahlua pork chops and mashed potatoes last night, yum.

One of my favorite salads tonight: rocket and red chard, cubes of roasted sweet potato, goat's cheese, pecans, and avocado (admittedly didn't add much tonight--ripe but flavorless). Mmmmmmmm.

does anyone else think that avocados have been really poor this year? we've gotten loads that have gone from unripe to brown mush with no stop in between, and a fair few that have seemed ripe but actually been a flavorless, watery mess.

yes, actually. Waitrose had all of these 'perfectly ripe' avocados (which are, of course, avocados that haven't sold yet, and thus they can charge twice as much for), and today I had a really hard time picking one, 'cause they were all basically rotten-soft gross.

i just made myself feel better about the sad state of avocados by cooking a bunch of absolutely awesome fall veg: giant winter squash, turnips, purple cauliflower, sweet potatoes, and rainbow carrots. the last two went into a soup with curry and coconut milk while the others were roasted to be eaten with leftover wild mushroom risotto.

yes, lauren! the few avocados i bought (the prices are insane save my random trips to fairway) were really not very good at all.

your fall veggies sound wonderful, though!

i am all about roasting brussel sprouts this fall

I was in CA in...June? and the avocados and stone fruits were SO GOOD that when I came back I craved them all summer...but they just weren't the same here.

There wasn't any bread in the house for breakfast yesterday, but there were plenty of eggs so I baked a dutch baby. The convection is magic - normal bake time is 25 minutes at 425 deg F and this one was puffy and done in 15 min at 400 deg F. So tasty, with butter and a sprinkle of lemon juice and a drift of powdered sugar. Also, so good to be cooking in my own kitchen for a few days.

This afternoon I'm making up a pot roast - we stopped in at Pike Place Market to make some groceries yesterday and I went overboard on gorgeous vegetables: beets, yukon gold taters, baby bok choi, fennel. I leave again on Monday, need to get all these roasted/sauteed/eaten before then!

so far tonight - teriyake salmon (slightly over cooked unfortunately) on top of a soba and green bean salad thing, mug of miso with red pepper, spring onion and chilli on the side.

For tomorrow - chilli, using chuck steak, pinto beans and aduki beans. Heated up again tomorrow it should be ace.

Did the potroast tonight - lardons, garlic, sundried tomatoes, peppercorns, juniper berries, allspice, bay, 1 bottle Valpolicella. 2 hours in the oven. Done with oven-fried yukon gold taters (slice in 1/2, dab of lard underneath each, soft butter spread on top, sprinkles of salt, ground black pepper, thyme, roasted in a cast iron skillet). The beauty of convection had these crispy on the outside and silky inside in 45 min @ 300 deg F. I'm sold.

Accompanied by sauteed beet greens (so festive!) and steamed fennel. And additional bottle of Valpolicella.

http://orangette.blogspot.com/2007/10/sneaky-sneaky.html

^^^OTM

Sossidges tonight! This may not seem like much, but after three weeks of ready meals it is a victory for Miss Cripple here.

uh oh - have you been incapacitated?

i've made a few pasta dishes over the past week: one from alice waters using cored brussel sprouts (great, but boy was it a pain to core those little guys) and a very inauthentic soba noodle dish involving sesame sauce and a lot of quick-pickled kirby cucumbers. i just picked up some eggs from the greenmarket, so i think tonight is going to be fritatta night. with carmelized onion, perhaps?

This week: chicken and onion risotto, lancashire hotpot, po' boys, apple and blackberry crumble, pecan and cranberry bread and butter pudding, rocchetti with upholland pancetta and mushrooms, chestnut and chorizo soup, mushroom and garstang blue soup, houmous, tabbouleh, lots of roast chicken, kale and parsley fritatta, smoked mackerel fishcakes with tzatziki, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast, salmon and chilli tagliatelle, bouillabaisse, poulet au pot, more pancakes than I care to remember, enough full english breakfasts to kill several men, roast mushroom butties galore.

Guess whose finally opened his deli?

tonight the old standby spaghetti & meatballs, my son's favorite also his grndfather who's coming over. I use ground veal w/a bit of parmesan easy on the breadcrumbs splash of milk and nutmeg, garlicky marinara.

jaq's pot roast sounds like food o the gods. I love my convention option but you've really got to WATCH IT.

convention = convection

Congrats Matt! I wish I lived in your neighborhood, all that sounds fantastic.

Congratulations, Matt, that all sounds amazing. Do you have a recipe to share for your chorizo and chestnut soup - I made a chestnut soup for Christmas last year which was lovely, but could do with something different this year and that might just be it!

gah, I haven't cooked anything in weeks due to the despair of hotel living, but now I am back home and have just fried up some side pork for breakfast.

Matt, that's fantastic! Mr. Jaq and I are talking about some sort of UK sojourn in 2008 and will come and eat all yr foodz when that happens!

Term is over, and now I am starting to enter my kitchen again. Onion soup today. Num num onions.

what to do w/boring bland old boneless chicken breasts? tonight I rubbed em w/a paste made of cilantro oliver oil chili powder cumin & coriander (dried) 1 clove garlic minced S&P. cored & chopped a 1 lb package of tomatoes then spread them around/on top of the chicken breasts in a pyrex dish. 450 over for 20 minutes, not bad served with curry couscous and steamed spinach. from Mark Bittman w/a few adjustments.

If I have to have boneless chicken breasts (and I do, because it's the only part of the bird my wife will eat), I generally pound them flat, dredge in seasoned flour, brown and set aside, turn the fond into a sauce with whatever is tasty and at hand. Add the chicken back, simmer a few minutes, serve chicken and sauce with a starch.

Or I make chicken curry soup.

Ooh, Deli Matt sounds fab!

uh oh - have you been incapacitated?

I fell arse over tit over double-fractured ankle on the way home from work last month. The cast is off now, but I'm still extremely hobbly. Last night's cooking was done by Domino's I'm afraid. Still, I'm going to bring out the mulling spice ice-cream recipe for a party on Saturday night.

omg! so sorry to hear that but glad you're on the mend. some mulled wine along with the spiced ice cream will probably speed recovery.

best dish so far: rice/spinach/ginger/garlic mix. da frigging yum.

tonights meal =

smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich
i.e. two discs of derbyshire oatcake enclosing 2 salmon rashers (lovely smoked salmon we get at work) with rocket and a bit of wasabi creme fraiche

Then cassoulet:
a bit different to norm as MiL doesn't do pork so it had lamb and garlic sausages, some great little lamb chops and some confit duck legs and gizzards, nice crisp crust too which helps - washed down with an excellent Irouleguy.

Pudding was going to be a pannetone bread and butter pudding but my timings were cack, so we'r cracking into a bottle of port instead

i made a quick curry with string beans, a little onion and chicken tonight. served with brown rice. it was kind of not so great.

who has the best easy curry recipe? my friend makes a great one with sour cream. i tried with yogurt tonight but it ended up a bit odd and i think i overseasoned :(

Easiest and always good:

1. Fry mix of minced onion+garlic+ginger+chili in neutral oil.
2. When soft, add spices (like a tablespoon of curry powder, or your own mixtrue). Fry for a minute, until quite dry.
3. Add a can of coconut milk. Bring to boil, let cook down 10-15 minutes until reduced by a bunch.
4. Now you can add whatever protein you want (chunks of boneless chicken, shrimp, etc.) and cook in the simmering liquid. When that's done, you're done. Squeeze over some lime, add some cilantro if you want/have any.

thank you. yes, that is easy but i am also looking for something without coconut milk (sorry i should have said that before) because it's more than likely i won't have that on hand at any given time when i decide i want to throw a bunch of random crap into a curry.

what i've been doing lately:

1) chop up a bunch of veg (and whatever protein you're using) and mix in a bowl with a good quality curry powder. make sure all pieces are more or less dusted and let sit for half an hour or so.
2) chop and fry garlic/onion/ginger/etc as g00blar says.
3) add veg and saute. if you've got meat in there, you want it to sear and brown a bit.
4) add some moisture (ie, water or broth) and cook covered for a bit until veg soften up.
5) cook with lid off for a bit to reduce sauce.

For some reason lately I've been really into chilaquiles, either tomato or tomatillo, with chicken, slices of onion, queso añejo, and a fried egg on top.

Roast butternut squash with harissa and goat cheese or drained yogurt is pretty good too.

And roast brussel sprouts, sometimes with fish sauce, chili, and mint. Or at least salt, pepper, oil, and lemon juice.

^^#1 sounds wild! I roast sprouts w/garlic or shallots olive oil S&P and finish w/a little stock.

gonna make my annual xmas ham here @ my sisters w/old fashioned pineapple glaze/rings and radioactive maraschino cherries

i went through a phase of having a baked sweet potato with crumbled goat or feta cheese and some kind of chili condiment for dinner at least 3x a week, but i never thought of trying it with squash for some reason. good idea. and i heartily endorse the fish sauce/chili/mint combo for sprouts - so, so tasty.

i'm about to go on deviled egg duty for a cocktail party. xmas is gonna be duck, with a prune/apple stuffing.

I was on deviled egg duty as usual this year for the family get-together, and did something a little different. I seasoned up some shrimp with garlic, chili powder, cayenne, S&P, and sauteed them in a crazy amount of butter...took the shrimp out, turned the butter into a sauce with some key lime juice and white wine. Coarsely chopped the shrimp, combined with sauce, and put a spoonful of that in each egg half before I piped the egg yolk part on top.

Christmas things are about to be cooked. Meringues, cranberry sauce, bread sauce and giblet stock. I think that's all I'm doing today other than prepping so that I don't have too much to do tomorrow other than make soup and cook the turkey/veg and assemble things.

I'm making up pumpkin pudding today. I'm also supposed to provide roast potatoes - I guess it makes sense to roast them today and reheat them (after transporting them south 60 miles) tomorrow.

in the process of making Xmas pudding ice cream, and the Agen prunes are soaking in a mixture of armagnac and port ready for pudding.

Also Pigs in blankets are ready for P&M's later on (yes yes, we're having two dinners:) )

Dinner tomorrow will be foie gras (bloc only unfortunately) on brioche toast, followed by a rack of lamb, Cavolo nero with bacon, maple carrots and potatoes (either dauphinoise or Boulangere - haven't decided yet) washed down by a Ravenswood Zinfandel.

and then the pud mentioned above.

Hopefully It'll go down ok - I've been feeling bloody awful for days

Can someone please remind me -- or better yet, give me some sort of mnemonic -- for the test of whether eggs are still usable (for, you know, making cookies in this instance). It has to do with whether it floats in water, right? Or doesn't float? Sigh.

Fresh eggs will sink to the bottom of fresh water. This is because the air cell in the large end is small to non-existent. As an egg ages, the air cell grows larger - a 2 or 3-week old egg will float pointed side down, but still be mostly underwater. Eggs that float mostly above the water are probably too old to be used.

Eggs make good cookies for 5-6 weeks, if they've been stored in the fridge, but the freshest eggs make the best meringue.

How about the mnemonic "fester" (Fresh Eggs Sink; Tired Eggs Rise)?

The eggs were no good, so I made cardamom shortbread instead. But, well, maybe I'll remember "fester"...

Hopefully It'll go down ok - I've been feeling bloody awful for days

I trust it did, and that you're better, it all sounds absolutely phenomenal.

Christmas dinner at Coastal towers was a roast goose, with shredded sprouts fried with pine-nuts and a local pancetta. As a result everything since has been cooked in goose fat, hurray.

Halibut steak steamed over fennel and white wine. Sauteed fennel as a side and slices of yummy pumpernickel.

God i love fennel

chicken & garlic stew -- chick parts and two heads of g cut up in cloves braised in stock w/ a little cinnamon

the other day I made ziti w/sauted califlower & garlic & red onion, finished w/mint and grated parm. tasty.

Anyone have a recommendation for temp/time for roasting a half leg of lamb? 620g/1.5 lbs, bone-in.

From memory (ie. best check with others) half an hour per 500g at 180 degrees.

Dinner tonight: pork shoulder roast rubbed with cracked black pepper and thyme, carrots braised in butter/maple/caraway/black pepper.

I made these brownies tonight; they're cooling RIGHT NOW.

Pretty damn good, even if they're sort of falling apart. Dark chocolate+espresso makes them "complex", but I wouldn't have minded if they were a bit more straightforwardly sweet chocolate goo.

I owed the GF over for a special dinner (she's been cooking up a storm for us), so for my first major meal for us I pained over the following menu:

1) SALAD: a winter salad with baby arugula, microgreens, pomegranate seeds and shaved almonds with a meyer lemon/olive oil dressing. garnished with some red and yellow and orange mini peppers (semi-sweet).

2) APP 1: prawn cocktail with straight cocktail sauce adding a little south east asian chili-garlic sauce for a little more mmmmmmmmm.

3) APP 2: apple cured bacon wrapped brussel sprouts. cheated on the bacon by microwaving it half-way (sacrilege!) and then wrapping around the partially-steamed sprouts. i had some left over prawns so i wrapped a couple of these too and threw the shrimp and sprouts in a frying pan with some butter/olive oil and browned them up.

4) STARCH 1: fingerling potatoes with oyster, shiitake and maitake mushrooms. boiled the potatoes til nearly done and then threw in the soaked mushrooms for flavor. added some parsley. finished it off by draining then simmering the potatoes in the mushroom broth with a little butter, salt and pepper and more parsley.

5) ENTREE: local wild halibut. got a nice medium-belly cut from my hook-up at the fish market. soaked this in juice of 3 meyer lemons for a little more than 20 minutes. folded some foil underneath and then threw it in the broiler for a little more than 10 minutes (the lemon juice starts to boil). garnished with cilantro, a couple more of the mini peppers, and served on a bed of

6) STARCH 2: the coup d'grace: my mother's grits recipe, dressed up with a teeny bit of truffle oil and some saffron. this came out super good as well as...

7) VEGETABLE: side of yellow zucchini. crisp, super sweet and just a dash of salt on top for flavor.

8) DESSERT: hand-packed pomegranate/tangerine gelato from the folks at Ciao Bella (ex-NYC gelateria whom i love), with a few pomegranate seeds for garnish, and a splash of framboise liqueur.

We split a bottle of a bone dry Reisling from Santa Cruz.

Good times.

I did the popcorn in the paper lunchbag with staples thing the other night.
it turned out AWESOME.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_11374,00.html

hooorrraaaay alton brown

staples + microwave = O_o

office staples are shorter than the wavelength of the microwaves and thus don't spark

Yay Alton! None of that respiratory illness causing fake butter smell.

i will call that tip 'great' precisely because dr. morbius won't see me use it, and ream me out.

Steve Shasta, your grits w/ truffle oil and saffron sounds intensely good (well, as does everything else in that menu).

I'm getting back into the daily rhythm of cooking - today, oatmeal for breakfast (the long-cooking kind); thinly sliced and sauteed redskin potatoes with chopped green olives and feta cheese for lunch; homemade egg noodles with leftover pot roast for dinner.

I also bought 20 lbs of winter pears back in late October and have approx. 8 lbs left in the bottom of the fridge - new favorite breakfast treat is a peeled and sliced pear topped with a big spoon of thick greek honey yogurt. yum.

I got drunk munchies last night and decided to use my little square cast iron pan to make a bunch of bacon, then chopped up a tomato and grated some emmentaler into a bowl, ripped up the bacon and mashed it all together on a couple of toasted burger buns. I had no lettuce but it was num. BACHELOR MAGIC

Oniony meatloaf in the oven right now, smells so good. No ketchup in the house though. Will lime pickle be an adequate substitute? We'll see.

my current favorite condiment: lime pickle mixed with real mayo.

hey shasta what was the name of the riesling?
i'm on a quest to find as many good dry wines (red or white) as possible right now.

family members planted / ran / owned husch vineyards, and i can vouch for the quality

Lots of Washington state wineries do nice dry rieslings - Columbia Crest, Chateau St. Michelle, Covey Run, Hogue. I think all those are distributed nationally now.

i'm not usually a riesling person, but if it's dry enough i will give it a shot!

i am going to a dinner party tonight where there will be an assortment of dishes including a lemon roasted chicken (i've had this by the hostess before and is amazing) and also lasagna (i don't know how these two came together). i'm about to go wine shopping, i guess i could take red or white (or both!) but i want it to be good. i get very nervous about dinner parties with people that know things about food or wine because i don't want them to judge me on my cheap wine-buying or lack of knowlege!

http://www.nataliemaclean.com/matcher/

^fun

Maybe it's a vegetable lasagna for the anti-carnivorous? If you can find a white that's a blend of marsanne and roussanne, it would complement the lemon chicken. Sometimes hard to find though!

btw, off-dry rieslings and gewurtztraminers go really really well with spicy Thai and Indian dishes - the slightly sweet acid is magic with the spicy chiliness.

Ooh, Nat Maclean's great, and does a really fun wine newsletter as well. She focuses on canadian releases, and there's some great stuff from the Okanagan region in British Columbia (sweet ice wines usually).

my father is iming me about this: http://www.markwestwines.com/

fun!

t,

bonny doon pacific rim dry riesling

it's like $7 at trader joes too. pretty killer.

ss

cream scones in the oven

cream scone in my belly

i made potato donuts and glaze yesterday!!

steve!

i have been drinking that for years! in fact, i have half a bottle in the fridge now and took a bottle to the party the other night (along w/ a bottle of the mark west pinot, which went over well but seemed very sweet to me because it followed a super dry crianza).

6.99 a bottle ain't bad! i first learned of it a few years ago when a friend brought it to my dinner party because the bottle is pretty.

t,

if you ever come to SF i will take you to the vineyard, it's a trip.

ss

I bought a bottle of Argentine Malbec to cook with for like $11 but ended up drinking it instead and it was great! Maybe it was the 2003 Alamos? Can't remember and I threw the bottle out already...

A couple of weekends ago I went crazy making a recipe for Thai chicken soup but couldn't find curry leaves or black cumin so I made without...and then got to the end of several hours of work/simmering and realized it was exactly like the curry that I normally make and I liked it better w coconut milk, so I just turned it into a saucey curry and served over rice. Delicious, but a waste of an afternoon. I do need to find the other ingreds, though....

Other than that I'm a total faker, I've been craving guacamole and "fully loaded" potato skins, ie apparently I think I'm eating at some kind of pub EVERY DAY. Luckily I almost always have potatoes, cheddar, scallions, bacon in the freezer, and sour cream on hand. :D

i only had enough spinach pasta for one person, so i gave that to the mister, but we both ate the following (mine was over plain fresh spinach):

giant sea scallops
pancetta
cremini mushrooms

sauce:
butter/white wine/garlic/pancetta grease/red pepper flakes/parmesan/herbs (+ salt/pepper on everything, of course)

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom

i had coconut sorbet for dessert, but it was not homemade. this meal is not remotely impressive but for some reason it really hit the spot. it's what was cooking.

that sounds lovely!!

steve, if i ever drag myself out to the west coast i will take you up on that! bonny doon makes mouths happy! p.s. i am still tickled that we both like the same wine :)

pasta with toasted almonds and breadcrumbs in a sage butter sauce!

t, you should try gravina. it's a white from apulia, very moderately priced and tending towards the very dry; green with a bit of mineral. you may have to order, though, as it's not very common here. bar veloce had one on the menu several years ago, which is how i was introduced.

sounds lovely

do you guys have a youtube/vlog? i think lauren would be a natural! :-D

I have a friend who used to do this but she moved to hawaii and got a boyfriend and she never cooks anymore!

it's my dream to have a talk show.

i would love a lauren talk show! i might even figure out how to set up my vcr to record!

A sort-of quiche/frittata thing for dinner tonight: layer of thinly sliced yukon gold potatoes started in a hot skillet, then a few handfuls of chopped up broccoli tossed on top. 5 well-beaten eggs with a 1/2 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of water, and 1/3 cup of flour beaten in, as well as a pinch of salt. Then some grated emmenthaler and Beecher's flagship mixed in and the batter poured over the potato and broccoli in the skillet. A quick grind of black pepper and the whole thing popped into a 325 oven for 1/2 hour. Puffed up nicely and very tasty.

That sounds lovely!

Do you have a mandolin? I have a slicing blade on the food processor but I never use it except for apple pies, because then I have to wash the whole thing.

I had one, but never used it. I think I sent it to Abbott when we moved the last time and I was paring down the kitchen. I just use my chef knife now - I'd need a lot of practice to make the slices even though :) It helps to cut the potatoes in 1/2 first, so they are steady.

We are having people over for dinner tonight, with a vegivore restriction (but not vegan): sweet potato bisque with cayenne-nutmeg cream fraiche, green salad with roasted beets, mac-n-cheese, chocolate galette for dessert (from Trader Joe's - I didn't think I'd be up to making dessert too). nom nom nom!

I think an ILCooking group blog would be fun. That's what I think.

Also I have not been cooking much, still. Blah.

i wish i had a mandolin!!!!! i don't even have a proper grater right now. i have a zyliss, but no proper grater.

also group blogging would be grebt.

i have also not been cooking much.

some day when i get back in the habit of buying groceries though... let's do it!

count me in the group blog thing. need some stimulus/inspiration cooking-wise, for the sake of convenience I've been over-relying on old favorites for that daily 6:00 PM challenge w/my family of fussy eaters.

I would do this group blogging. The idea should maybe have its own thread.

Had a taste for taco salad last night, and we had tortilla chips left over from the party last week. Sauted a lb of ground beef with a little lard (the meat we have is really lean), chopped onion, cumin, cayenne, oregano, epazote, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and a lot of smoked spanish paprika. Mixed a 1/3 cup of masa in 2/3 cup of water and let it sit while things were browning, then mixed into the meat with an additional cup of water. Let that simmer for an hour, until everything was nicely thickened. Took it off the heat and stirred in a handful of chopped cilantro. Layers of chips in bowls, then greens, then meat, then grated cheese, then salsa if wanted. Hit the spot.

i've been craving nachos lately. it's a once every 5 yrs or so thing with me. we've likewise got a ton of chips (leftovers from superbowling) so perhaps i should follow your example. lord knows i need to cook something. mr has been doing all of the food prep for the past month.

Pork chops, as the man said, taste good. I did mine on a hot grillpan with rosemary tonight and soaked up the juices with mashed spuds.

Tonight, six for dinner:

Cheese, olives.
Aioli, with baby vegetables (carrots, fennel, green beans) and hard-boiled eggs to dip in it.
Chicken liver pate on little toasts.
Paella with the good chorizo from Brindisa and cherry tomatoes on top, pace Bittman.
Apple tart.

I got work to do.

you certainly do. what's your pate recipe? i'm always looking for good ones.

by the way, mark bittman's scampi recipe (from his fish book) rules. the double dose of garlic is a great touch:

saute thinly-sliced garlic in 3/4 of cup of good olive oil until golden
add 1-1.5lbs jumbo shrimp, several cloves of minced garlic, and 3/4 of a cup of chopped parsley
when the undersides of the shrimp turn pink, flip 'em, add a tablespoon of sherry vinegar, and cook a few more minutes until done.

i wasn't planning on have that for dinner last night, but since the freezer melted down we had to save what we could (including a bag of giant prawns). looking forward to the leftovers (with spinach/feta/olive orzo) for lunch.

i use a similiar bittman recipe for scallops - quick soak in olive oil/sherry vinegar/chopped garlic then flash-saute in hot pan and finish with parsley. it's a favorite.

Ooh that DOES sound good. And basic. I have shrimp as well, threw them into a pot w/ spaghetti, snow peas, & a shitload of grated parmesan. Topped w/ fresh tomato.

I'm roasting a chicken for dinner tonight. Inner debate is raging: layer cake vs. brownies w/ cake having a slight advantage. I LOVE working at home!

layer cake is more fun to decorate.

true, and more special somehow.

Also, layer of raspberry between layers of white cake covered in chocolate glaze = totally yum

so, layer cake WINS!

So the dinner turned out pretty good, with just a couple of bumps in the road. The aioli needed A LOT more lemon juice then I thought, but after I added it until it tasted right, the consistency was way to liquidy. A lot of last minute time and energy was spent trying to get it back to the thickness of mayonnaise (mostly by my wife, it must be said, who was quite fixated on it being too thin). I didn't mind at all; it still tasted great on the hard-boiled eggs and veggies, even though it was drippy. The pate turned out great, smooth, rich, and well-seasoned.

After starting paella for six in the super-huge pan I've never used before (this was after the guests arrived, mind), I realized that it does not fit in our little British oven (the handle is way too big). I only panicked a little before (again) my wife came to the rescue and we transfered it into two smaller pans--they fit, just. The paella was fine, but not as great as it's been when I've made it for just the two of us. Possible reasons include the chorizo not being as good (I've never used this particular kind before), my saffron being old and a bit dried up, and the uneven heat in the crazy hueg pan leading to some blackening early on, which led to some bitterness, I think. Everyone else seemed to like it, though.

The apple tart was awesome, as always :)

The pate recipe was from Amanda Hesser's book; it's really easy:

Saute half an onion and a whole, smashed clove of garlic in olive oil on medium-high for a minute. Add a pinch of red pepper (I used pimenton instead, to go with the paella), and continue cooking until the onion and garlic are soft. Add 1 lb chicken livers, cook for a minute, add salt, then turn over to cook for another minute. Add 1/2 cup of sherry, then reduce heat so that it gently simmers. Cook for 20-25 minutes until livers are just cooked through. Put everything in yr cuisinart and puree, adding olive oil to get the right consistency.

tonight we had goose hash pie, supoib.

Browning some lamb and pine nut sausages, to then be braised in red wine.

making popovers now, with this ridiculously simple james beard recipe. i'll post it if they turn out well.

well, i left them in the oven for just a minute too long (fuck!), so they're a little overdone on the outside, but the insides are delicious. they taste like popovers.

easiest popover recipe ever:

2 eggs
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
2 Tablespoons melted butter

Beat the eggs lightly and beat in the flour and salt. Stir in the milk. Blend to make a fairly smooth batter. Add melted butter. Pour into buttered muffin tins, filling each about 2/3 full. Place into your unheated oven, close the door, then turn that sucker to 425 degrees. Bake 30 to 35 minutes. (mine would have been perfect at 29 min!)

I have a (borrowed) house all to myself and thought I'd cook a masterpiece...but I'm in the house of a health-conscious vegan, I can't even find any sugar for my morning tea, and she doesn't have a roasting pan, a sauce pot with a lid that fits, or, apparently, a cheese grater.

God help me.

Oh dear. Trying to cook in a kitchen like that would drive me crazy. Also, I would want to fry bacon and stuff.

I found a giant canning-style spatterware stock-pot, covered in dust. I wonder if I should even try braising beef in it....

Will it fit in the oven? Keep the temp low (the pot walls are sure to be thin) and it should work okay.

I actually think it might be too big for the oven! I have to go try but it's a little "efficiency" stove. This is what happens when real estate goes up: kitchens go down.

hah yes. 0 counter space here. so sad.

i was going to make a pasta sauce that ended up being slightly ratatouille-ish in texture and full of zucchini and really delicious this week. i should do this every week with slight variations!

omg, I made mayonnaise by hand tonight with a whisk. owowowowow. Also, the only oil I had was extra virgin olive, so it ended up really cloying. Cravings must be served though.

i think the 'blog should have a 'favorite mistakes' or 'biggest kitchen cock-ups' theme this week

what oil do you usually make mayo with? out of curiosity, i've never made it.

A blend of a lighter oil with some olive oil is pretty good for mayo, like 1/2 canola and 1/2 olive. You want oil that tastes nice on its own because that's the flavor that really comes through in a mayo (this always surprises me).

remy, I like that idea :)

Oh, you mean like the time I put piping hot black bean soup into the food processor and ended up scrubbing it off my kitchen walls for weeks?

Did the lid blow off Laurel? or did the bowl explode?

in the oven right now, another tagine-like stew - 1.5 lb cubed and browned beef stew meat, 1/2 a chopped and browned onion, cumin, coriander, cloves, paprika all ground up, a small handful of currants, a small handful of pine nuts, 4 quarters of preserved lemon scraped and chopped, water to cover and socked covered into a 325 F oven for a good long while.

No, the hot liquid just seeped out of every seam and crack to splatter across the room. lol basic materials science

Jaq, I made something similar (tho less detailed) the other day with cubed stew beef, chickpeas, tomato paste, onion/garlic/carrot, lemon peel, cumin, etc. Supposed to have raisins and kalamata olives but I couldn't find the olives at Polish grocery and as the kitchen belongs to an Australian there was no cinnamon in the cupboards. Maybe just cos I cut too many corners but I rly don't like the flavor v much? Maybe I try again w/ pine nuts, olives, and proper seasonings. Less lemon.

If you can find preserved lemons (basically just quartered lemons packed in salt), try those instead of fresh lemon peel. The lemoniness is still there, but earthier and subtler. Rinse some of the salt off first though, I didn't do that the last time I used some and the stew was way over-salted.

I think for this one it would have added something to toast the pine nuts first, but it was tasty and plenty left over. I thought about chucking in some olives too, but only had giant green martini ones and that seemed a bit much. Do Australians have something against cinnamon?

I'll have to hit a Middle Eastern area for the lemons, I guess? The fresh peel is kind of jarring. I think I'll trade the chickpeas for pine nuts, they're not adding any taste and I don't like the grainy texture.

Apparently cinnamon is rly rare and not much used in Australia? Some Aussie on another thread was just bitching about the grossness of apple pie w/ cinnamon, which is obviously insane in the brain talk.

My hostess has about 4 kinds of flavored salt and 3 different curry mixes and 12 other random jars of spices but no cinnamon at all.

lamb meatballs with cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, corn meal, dried plum and walnut served w/ aromatic rice

(i sorta think flavored salt is a scam)

I'm totally trying again with dried cherries or something, I hate raisins. And maybe red wine? We're so on the same page, suddenly.

Yeah, probably have to hit a specialty market for the lemons - I think they are mostly Moroccan. I've been making them myself, but it takes 4 weeks before they are really ready to use. A mix of whatever those standard lemons in every US market everywhere + Meyer lemons, leaning toward more Meyer ones, turns out pretty well. Quarter, pack in kosher salt in a big glass canning jar, leave on the counter for 4 weeks, shaking every once in awhile.

Nice, remy, I like the idea of dried plum w/ lamb.

I could do worse, I suppose, than read ILCooking and Is That...Pie? before going to the market, but the influence was really obvious today: 6 big sea scallops (for that Bittman quick marinade and sear mentioned above), garlic, tomatoes, and pasta to go with the lamb shank I've been meaning to do something with (Gooblar's pasta w/ lamb riff), cabbage and crimini mushrooms (to try out my ham sub thoughts for Casuistry's cabbage noodles, except I forgot the cheap parm sprinkle and imitation balsamic).

i am really intrigued by this preserved lemon-ness!
i have never made a beef stew. i may have mentioned this previously, but i'm deathly afraid of cooking most meats because at the time i learned to cook for myself, i was vegetarian and so never really learned how to cook it properly. i would love it if a meat expert could blog something about basic meat preparation/best techniques/etc.

Yesterday I made baked salmon with a soy & honey glaze. It was divine.

That sounds good, Brainwasher. I did up those scallops last night - didn't have any sherry vinegar, so marinated in chopped garlic, lemon, olive oil for 10 minutes, then seared. The centers were warm but barely done - just right. I realized as I was marinating them I hadn't bought any vegetables to go with, so we had them with chunks of buttered pumpernickel on the side.

what's cooking? NOTHING. our fridge totally, completely melted down while we were away! save for a few condiments and a half pound of coffee beans, everything went in the trash (frozen ribeyes, i weep for thee). we're starting from scratch, grocery-wise, which is exhilarating in a very small way.

My biggest food failing is that I don't like the taste of olives, but I made a big batch of olive salad yesterday so I could make my wife a muffaletta. I ate a spoonful of it today and it was actually pretty good! I took a bite of the sandwich and it was pretty good too. So I think I just don't like olives straight, but as one ingredient in a larger work, maybe green olives aren't the antichrist after all. (Black olives, still awful.)

A typical muffuletta consists of one muffuletta loaf, split horizontally. The loaf is then covered with a marinated olive salad, then layers of capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler, and provolone. The sandwich is sometimes heated through to soften the provolone.

Wow.

oh they are so so so good!

I should have mentioned that the mushroom thing might work, but I don't like mushrooms, personally.

It was a modified muffaletta -- wheat hoagie roll, smoked turkey, ham, salami, olive salad, provolone. Nobody here knows what the hell capicola, mortadella or emmentaler are.

just some pasta with baby spinach and a ton of garlic and olive oil. i'm trying to be frugal.

rock if you are going to venture into olivedom, i would like to recommend black or calamata olives in a tomato sauce because lately i can not get enough of this. puttanesca, baby.

emmentaler? really? that's the first recipe i've seen that calls for it. mr lauren brought back olive salad from central grocery earlier this year, so we had a few great muffalettas.. we used a mild smoked ham instead of the mortadella (neither of us are fans), but did everything else pretty traditionally. for me, a really spicy cappicola is key.

Listening party tonight, the first one I've been able to attend in over a year of being invited! So I baked a batch of Ruth Reichl's artpark brownies,with my standard variation of 1 c butter and 1 scant cup dutch process cocoa instead of 5 oz of bakers chocolate.

I was so enraged by the shoddy Italian restaurant we went to for an office lunch on Friday that last night I cancelled it out with an It-fest dinner.

- Big plate of bresaola, salami, mozzarella, prosciutto, artichokes and sunblush tomatoes (cheat's starter)
- Meatballs and spaghetti
- Whipped thing of double cream, lemon curd and crushed amaretti
- Bottle of really good chianti

It was appreciated by the other half :)

Washing up took an hour this morning though :(

I must have had the same impulse, because I made a giant pan of ragu/bolognese sauce yesterday, adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recp intended for the meat sauce in a lasagna. Involved beef/veal/pork ground meat mix, and also several rounds of simmering liquids out at 30 minutes each = sauce took about two hours, all told (1 round of whole milk, 1 round of dry white wine, then add all the tomatoes & tomato juice, which then simmers down AGAIN).

Delicious but will have to make it more tomato-y next time as sauce is not sticking to meat super well.

Also the really genius part was rough-chopping all my mirepoix (+ garlic) and then shoving the entire lot into the food processor together to get a really fine chop with almost no work. NO MORE ONION MINCING, I AM SO GLAD.

i went on a cooking binge yesterday: black bean hummus; yellow split pea soup with cumin, coconut, ginger, and curry; and tofu provencale with quinoa and cauliflower (roasted with meyer lemon wedges). it wouldn't have occurred to me to cook tofu in that style, but it was great. following mark bittman's instructions, i cubed and fried a brick of extra firm then mixed it into a basic tomato/onion/garlic/red pepper/saffron sauce along with a generous handful of purple olives.

I had a lot of leftover basmati rice yesterday and made a nice rice salad (blanched carrots, corn, green onions, ham, chopped roma tomato, a handful of roasted mixed nuts, vinaigrette).

cooks illustrated recipes are like science experiments!

ok, need some creative menu planning/recipe help from you guys:

a couple "light" appetizers at my house on saturday evening. nothing too heavy , preferably pairable with champagne, and hopefully foolproof recipes since I'm not very skilled.

Get some puff pastry at Trader Joe's (it's frozen), cut into shapes, drop something delicious in the very center of each (tiny piece of brie+apricot jam, proscuitto+aged gruyere, dark chocolate drop, etc), bake at 425 for 10-15 min until all is puffy and crispy goodness. Keep whatever you put in the center small, I got overzealous with the St. Agur+fig spread and it ran all over the place.

Also, a big wheel of nice brie always goes well with champagne.

dates wrapped in bacon, baked @ 350 for half-hour or so, nice savory/sweet morsel. went well w/prosecco

it's worth springing for niman ranch or some other fancy/artisinal bacon on these

<3 u guys. :-D

i'll try to dig up my mother's famous miniature cheese toastie recipe for you. it turns pepperidge farm party white bread, processed cheese spread, butter, and dill into one of the most delicious things you'll ever taste.

If you can stuff some blue cheese into those bacon-wrapped dates, even better.

I had some blue-cheese-stuffed-guanciale-wrapped-dates at a pub a few weeks ago and they were, indeed, nom nom nom.

oops forgot the stuffing on those bacon/dates -- we used almonds but cheese would be nice too.

Buttered wholemeal or granary bread or toast, cut into little squares and topped with smoked salmon, ground black pepper and a squeeze of lemon is a great, quick canape to go with champagne.

not cooking (although I did just make a pretty decent lasagne) - had some apple cider doughnuts from Stew Leonards in Norwalk - absolutely fantastic - what a doughnut should be - cakey, and not tasting like KFC - I'm looking at you here Krispy Kreme.

Stew Leonards was a really really great supermarket, loads of great stuff..... but like, 3 different pastas, and no lasagne sheets????

Okay, y'all.... thanks mucho for all the advice.

I went experimental and I'll spare you the details of the failures, but the clear winner was the puff pastry in the following construction:

paper thin coppa (neck/shoulder pork meat)
cubed (chopped?) cooked prawn
cocktail sauce
puff pastry

we must have eaten about 50 of these before dinner.

thanks for the ideas. you guys are my puff pastry mistrixes.

I've had a few not-very-successful or delicious recipe experiments lately so I am VERY GRATIFIED to say that last night's turned out SWIMMINGLY. It was shrimp in "fiery" tomato sauce, ie sauce w/ orange bell peppers, anchovies, tomatoes canned and fresh, crushed red pepper and capers and thyme and lime-drenched shrimp, over linguine.

I really cannot stop eating it. I had a plateful, waited about two hours, then had some more.

Boston butt pork roast, which, next to spare ribs and belly, is the best tasting cut (and easiest to cook) imo. Coated with cracked black pepper and thyme, started at 425 F for 10 min, then heat soaked at 320 F for 3 hours (5 lb roast).

I dusted off our steamcooker and been trying out things. YUM YUM Man, how could I have neglected it? (Cue: massive amount of cleaning after dinner duh)

i am making meatloaf but i don't really know what i'm doing! how long do i cook? hah! it is a veal/pork/beef mix, ~ 2 lbs. at this point i can't even remember how long it's been in, but it still seems plenty moist.

Rigatoni bolognese AGAIN, with no skimping on the recipe this time (trans: I actually bought wine for the reduction and didn't drink it all first). SUBLIME.

tehresa - rule of thumb: 30 min/lb @ 350 F for something solid like meatloaf; 20 min/lb for something hollow like a chicken.

it ended up a bit overdone but not too much, but also a bit greasy. i think next time i might stick to just a leaner beef instead of the blend.

Theresa, I think meatloaf is supposed to have other things in it to keep the texture even and not too "meaty". Bread crubs, or bread chunks soaked in milk, or oatmeal, or whatever. And all your onions, garlic, parsley, etc for seasoning. I've never made it, though -- twenty years of home-style has ruined meatloaf for me.

i did have bread crumbs and egg, though i did not have any milk on hand (i was trying to remember ingredients in the store and spaced on the milk).

I don't do the soak-in-milk business, just meat (beef and pork generally), egg, onion, and bread bits. You really want some fat, otherwise it will end up a gray, dry loaf of bleh.

Taco night for eight the other night. Fillings:

Pork, simmered forever in just salted water, then shredded and simmered some more in a tomato-chipotle-garlic sauce.

Shredded chicken, simmered in homemade tomatillo sauce.

Gringo ground beef w cumin, chili, chipotle powder, tomatoes.

A ton of black beans cooked forever and mashed when refried.

It was goooooooood.

For my meatloaf, I saute onions, garlic and a little bit of tiny-diced carrots and let them cool. I don't like raw-onion flavor in my meatloaf, and the baking alone doesn't seem to be enough. The loaf: 1.75 lbs. ground chuck, 1 cup bread crumbs, 4 oz. tomato sauce, 2 eggs, sauteed aromatics, salt/pepper.

The sauce: 12 oz. tomato sauce, a little bit of water, and then the condiment cabinet: ketchup, yellow mustard, cider vinegar, worcestershire sauce, sriracha or tabasco, salt/pepper, a handful of brown sugar. I think that's everything. Pour the sauce over the meatloaf, 350 degrees for about 85-90 minutes. The sauce thickens up to a nice gravy for the mashed potatoes.

I've juiced and peeled and segmented and now I have the peels from six grapefruits and four big lemons for candying. They're off my aunt's trees in Arizona and have never been touched by food grade wax, so I wanted to eat more than just the insides.

genius!

There's a lot of exceedingly tasty sounding food on here, tacos and meatloaf and pork oh my...

last thursday I did bouillabaisse and poulet au pot for forty-five people, that was fun. More organising than actually cooking.

Holy crap, for reals? My friend used to freelance cater box lunches and prepared meals for 60-80 people, I have no idea how she did it.

Okay so today I cleaned and re-organized my kitchen, then I went on the most organized grocery trip I've done in a long time. The menu for the next week includes: oyster stew, hummus (always have a batch of that ready to go though), bourbon fried rice (unless I drink all the bourbon LOL), spinach & sundried tomato quiche, cornmeal skillet flatbread, whatever goofy shit happens in between. Also grilling steak, asparagus, potatoes, flatbread tomorrow before band practice*.

WHY THE REJUVINATED COOKING INTEREST? My roommate is all woe-is-me because our oven door shattered and hence we have no oven. He only ever eats frozen eazy-make foods, and out of one of those ridiculous kind of arguments only bros can have I was challenged to keep us well-fed sans oven. Which I don't think is much of a challenge but here we go nonetheless.

ALSO: I guess it's worth mentioning that, even before the oven broke, I have been making flatbreads in the skillet; experimenting with mixes of maize flour, cornmeal, wheat flour, regular American white flour (almost always only flour + water for dough), also patting the dough with garam marsala or old bay or some other ridiculous spice blend depending on what I'm serving it with. Sometimes it's not so great but sometimes it is GREAT great. I feel like, having been gifted a 6-generations seasoned cast iron skillet it is my DUTY to work it to it's fullest.

Wait...mom, grandma, great-grandma, great-great...okay I guess that's only 4 + me = 5 generations. D'OH!

I support you in this endeavor, and salute your intrepid spirit.

Damn straight, and that sounds like an awesome skillet.

Laurel, yep. I seem to have diversified into outside catering without actually meaning to. It just sort of happened. The trick is to make something which you just need to lash in a giant pan

wow nicka pls to come cook me flatbreads - i can provide you with oven!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Odb_-_nigga_please.jpg

nicka pls - lol, next album title

The thing with the unleavened flatbreads is they are more like big glorified crackers or something; fun but not quite the substance I'm looking for...AND there's not really anywhere in my kitchen that stays warm enough for yeast dough to rise properly. I am trying something ridiculous today; I am making a sort of soda bread dough (with bicarbonate of soda + buttermilk as the activator) but rolling it out flat and skillet frying them. Hopefully it works out well...because I have a GURL I want to impress coming over.

There's this one vent in my bathroom that BLASTS heat and I bet dough would rise really well there but yeah right I am going to put dough on the floor of the bathroom.

nicka pls - lol, next album title

just thank me in the liner notes lol ;-)

that soda skillet bread sounds like an adventure!!!! good luck!

Nick, the last Cook's Illustrated I read had this tip: for keeping dough warm, get one of those microwaveable neck-wrap things full of gel or barley, heat it up as instructed, then wrap it around your rising bowl and cover the whole thing with a moistened tea-towel to prevent drying.

Let your yeast dough rise really slowly overnight and the yeasty flavors will astound you. Grease the surface well w/ softened butter or olive oil though so it doesn't dry out. Punch down, knead the butter in until the dough is smooth, coat again and let rise a second day for OMG deliciousness.

I just got home from my first trip of any length this year and have apparently forgotten how to cook. Breakfast was a disaster.

Also - use your cast iron pan to bake a round loaf in. Cast iron gives an astounding crust.

(I am all about the astoundishment today)

4 incredibly garlicky lamb + pine nut sausages browned in fat then braised in 1 cup of red wine and 1 can of diced tomatoes (slow oven for 2 hours), served over bowtie pasta with a tiny bit of parmesan cheese. So delicious and so easy.

Yum.

Duck sausage with champ and red wine gravy. Om nom nom.

Experiments in braising #4: extra-thick chuck steaks browned and braised in red wine, pan drippings, garlic, cracked black pepper, celery seed, whole allspice, black cardamom, bay, and a chunk of ginger. It smells amazing at the moment.

Except, then the gas got turned off for the building so it went in the fridge and we had take-out. Still no gas this morning = toast + tea for breakfast. Thankfully the kettle's electric.

Thank god for you Jaq, not only does that sound awesome but I feared I'd killed the board.

Anybody besides me tried the bandwagony Bittman bread recipe? I've done it three or four times I think and it really is realiably delicious - the only times I've gotten crumb like this is when I've done a poolish and even then it wasn't this proper, only problem with this loaf really is the bottom crust, which is too hard & kinda weird - and I'm using a casserole, not a Dutch oven, so that might be the problem

Yes, I did it a couple of times last year--turned out great once, not so great a second time (the second time I tried to make rye bread, probably used too much rye flour, and it came out as thin as a slipper and as heavy as a brick). The first time, although turning out stupendous bread, was also kind of a disaster, as the handle on the lid of my big pot melted in the oven. I finished it with aluminum foil on top, and ate it with fear that the fumes from melting plastic had infiltrated into the bread. All present at that dinner are still alive, so I suppose it turned out ok. Should make it again, now that I have a new--all metal--handle for my big pot.

I do remember the bottom crust being very hard, but not to the extent that it was a problem. No idea how to modulate that--Jaq?

I found and printed out that recipe, and will give it a shot as soon as I get past current deadlines. The enameled dutch oven I got for xmas will be perfect for baking it.

I'm also going to bust up a duck or a goose and confit the leg quarters.

Here we go again: Bittman points to another piece on home bread-baking, nay, a campaign for home bread-baking.

Just home from a weekend away - and the gas is STILL OFF. This truly sucks. The landlord called a minute ago and said the earliest it can be turned back on is Wednesday afternoon.

I will have a think about modulated crustiness though. I like to knead bread too much to try the Bittman no-knead thing.

i love spring break. tonight, i made whole wheat pasta with sauteed green squash, onions, garlic, tomatoes and salmon. mmm.

Thinking about bottom crust too hard business - possibly too high a temp causing this. If you're using a glass/pyrex casserole, try reducing the temp by 25 deg. Could also be too long a baking time - in that case you would increase the temp, again I would up it by 25 deg, and shorten the baking time by 10-15 min. If the interior of the loaf seems quite well done, you could just shorten the baking time without the increase in temp and see what you get. If the interior turns up too damp and stodgy, it will make good bread pudding still.

There are some after-the-fact things that can be done to crusts, brushing with butter/oil, misting with water, but those are for top crusts which form much differently than the bottom one.

Okra at the market today (+ fish & shrimps) = gumbo for dinner tonight. Yay for the gas company getting their act together finally! Now I can boil stuff again.

mmmm, gumbo. I like the Gumbo Zeb version with a base of greens. (mustard/collard for me.)

Rachel Ray was on at the gym the other day, making just that. Except in 30 minutes with excessive down-cleavage camera angles.

Baking brownies today for a friend's bon voyage party tonight. House smelling of rich chocolate-y goodness.

I've just started a Bittman no-knead loaf for baking tomorrow, and a loaf in the bread machine for comparison. (Same flour.)

And after reading G00blar's post on the cooking blog, I've gone out to get what I need for James Oseland's beef rendang. (I'm pretty sure I still have some lemongrass and galangal in the freezer.)

I would give a hundred bucks for Eugene Levy to reshoot some of Mark Bittman's "Minimalist" videos in his Bobby Bittman character from SCTV.

cosign.

Did you get candlenuts?

ha, no such thing here. I used macadamia nuts. Unfortunately, the chuck roast I used was a little too lean or something, because the meat just toughened up and toughened up as the sauce reduced. Flavor A+, Texture C-.

Huh. I bet that'll be a problem for me too (it's next on my list to make, tho I was hoping to find the elusive candlenuts)--even relatively fatty beef is pretty tough to find these days.

Mmmmm, roasting chicken in the oven, smells so good. Standard sprinkles of thyme, cayenne, and cracked black pepper.

First local asparagus of the season! Making hollandaise, steaming some up and serving with the leftover roast chicken.

i am waiting for mahi mahi to thaw and then i am going to attempt fish tacos for the first time ever!

this is exciting

Fish tacos! Do you marinate the fish in something?

i did a quick marinating in lime juice, olive oil, 21-spice seasoning, and some hot peppers. they came out yummy!!

put the fish in a whole wheat soft taco shell with cilantro, tomato, a little cheddar, salsa verde, lettuce, and greek yogurt as sour cream substitute.

^^Sounds awesome.

Made stock today; used the dark meat of the chicken for tonight's dinner;

Chicken salad+crispy bacon on toasted rye mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Needed to use up 2/3 lb ground beef, didn't want a burger and I'm the only one home for dinner tonight. So, browned it and added sun-dried tomatoes, green olives, preserved lemon, pine nuts, a load of typical tagine spices. Covered with water and am braising for 1.5 hours.

Olives + preserved lemon (even when rinsed off) = too salty. Also, when I tasted it at the 1/2 way mark, I threw in a handful of currants. And there's plenty left over for lunch later in the week.

i have two chicken breasts and a salmon fillet defrosting in the fridge right now to cook for my week's worth of never-at-home-dinners. any good marinade recommendations?

A spoonful of http://www.parkersdeli.co.uk/acatalog/hyjulianahotjerk.jpg and an equal quantity of olive oil.

Or a longtime fallback position is teriyaki marinade: 1 part veg. oil to 2 parts soy sauce, + garlic, + ginger, + brown sugar, + sherry, whizzed up in the blender.

i went with lime juice, chili paste, honey on one breast; balsamic vinegar, ginger and a dash of olive oil on another. for the salmon i rubbed with dill, salt, and lemon juice before cooking. my lunches/dinners are gonna rock this week.

Yay first asparagus

first lot was just steamed and eaten, I don't like to fuck with the first taste of asparagus I'll get all year (I don't want to get all seasonal bore about it, but asparagus really is fucking awful if imported so I do genuinely look forward to the four or five weeks I get to eat it each year, weather permitting). Second lot was made into a salad with new potatoes, a hard goat's cheese and soft boiled quail eggs, a little wholegrain mustard vinaigrette and off you bloody well go

I can't beat that, but tonight's london broil (ginger/garlic/sesame oil rub for six hours) with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli really hit the spot.

I'm thinking asparagus risotto, asparagus appointment, asparagus quiche - but I have to get back to the market for more asparagus first.

For dinner, I'm making up some meat pie things, filled with leftovers: roast pork, roast chicken, faux beef tagine from the other day. Veg will be either broccoli or blistered beans. Broccoli option is most likely.

asparagus appointment?

band name?

asparagus: v expensive here right now :(

Haha G00blar, no! It's a way of roasting asparagus from I think Alba over on ILE. Will have to find the thread.

Asparagus appointment

t, check out the greenmarket at usq. i got about a pound of organic from the farm i like for $4, and a few other stands were selling non-org for $3.50.

(it was fantastic, btw.)

woah that's awesome! i will do this next week if i can (not allowed to leave house from friday-tuesday except to go get my project bound at kinkos).

is there a best day for the greenmarket?

if you're housebound from fri-tues then i'd say wednesday is the best day for you to go. the vendor i mentioned (yuno's) should be there, plus weds is also knoll crest day - great eggs, fresh pasta, and whole chickens at $3.30/lb (cheaper than a factory chicken from key foods).

ok i should rephrase. probably next friday is the first day i could go. god, i hate my life right now.

A large chunk of halibut fillet (fresh off the boat and hacked from a 10-lb full side!) currently marinating in chopped garlic, black pepper, lemon juice and olive oil while my giant cast iron skillet is heating up to 400 deg F in the oven. Red leaf lettuce and heirloom tomato salad to accompany (the heirlooms are the ones that are deep red on the blossom end and striped dark green up near the stem, can't remember their proper name).

fishcakes made with smoked haddock, spot of mash, watercress and horseradish bunged on a quick salad of rocket and chicory

from my sister just now --
salad recipe:
greens, grape tomatoes, peppers, avocado, leftover salmon, quinoa, parsley, newman's reduced fat seame ginger dressing

sounds YUM

made my usual lasagne (turkey/mozzarella) with fresh spinach noodles (storebought) instead of the usual. boiled em for 1 minute, just a quick dunk, and the texture did come out nice and pliable after baking.

For some light appetizers (taking for drinks get-together tonight - hi jergins!), I'm making up some vietnamese/thai-style fresh rolls, filled with blanched fresh asparagus, jicama, carrot, and red leaf lettuce in addition to bean thread noodles. Trying to sort out some dipping sauces, aside from a standard peanut sauce - maybe a sweet/sour/chili mixture?

nam pla/lime juice/coriander/chilli?

If you can find 'kecap manis'--indonesian sweet soy sauce--a 3:1 mix of that with lime juice, with some sliced chilis in it, is the divine dipping sauce from the Oseland book.

Would use nam pla, but want to keep it vegetarian. I found this recipe for kecap manis - might try that with lime and chilis (dried or chili oil though, we've already made one shopping run today!)

Wow, the kecap manis is cooling now - does it ever smell fantastic! I substituted ginger for galangal, bay leaves for salam leaves and reduced the proportions, because I only had a 15 oz bottle of dark soy. Here's a tip though - carmelized sugar is freaking HOT, and when you pour room temp soy into it, it wants to splatter and foam all over the place. Make sure you use a pan that is plenty deep. Also, do not turn your back on a pan of sugar when it's on the fire, it can turn from crystals to burnt black char quicker than you think.

Wow indeed, that sounds exciting! I am, as usual, super-impressed by your resourcefulness.

ooh, I have a small hunk of galangal in the fridge that I was wondering what to do with.

Okay, final sauce was 3/4 c of kecap manis, 1/4 c of lime juice (+ some pulp from lime squeezing) and 1/2 tsp of sambal bajak which made for extra-spicy sauce goodness, a perfect foil for the light crispy sweetness of the carrot/jicama/asparagus fresh rolls. A++ will eat again (do need to remember that assembly time is approx. 8 min/roll though, and not try to make up a huge batch 45 minutes before the party is supposed to start!)

i want to eat at jaq's house!

oh wait--i have! and it was awesome!

I never did make those berry tarts.

hot-smoked bluefish. we caught a 7-pounder over the weekend!

^^^would devour

Inspired by Ed's drum-grilling on the WDYLL thread, am marinating cubes of lamb in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, coriander, cumin, oregano, and mint. Will grill tonight, but unfortunately on a grill pan on the stove. Would trade left arm for a charcoal grill.

geeta!!!! Come visit again; I will cook for you any time - that was a very fun evening.

Lamb was better than great; should make this once a week all summer.

things i am making this weekend:
salmon & asparagus
japanese curry w/ beef
kale, chorizo and white bean soup
strawberry shortcake on biscuits

i can't believe how many groceries i just bought!

does anyone have any advice with what to do with the salmon? i was planning to broil w/ cajunny spices and then put maple syrup on for the last minute, but i forgot to get maple syrup. maybe i will try it with honey instead? it's pretty thin so maybe i should pan roast it?

If you've got some brown sugar, you could sprinkle that on at the last minute then run it under the broiler - the darker, caramel-ier flavor of that would go better than honey, I think. I'm still kind of tenuous about cooking fish, but high temp roasting (450 deg F) in a hot cast iron skillet for 10 min/inch of fillet thickness has been doing me pretty well lately, even for less oily fish like halibut.

mm i need a cast iron skillet. i will definitely do it with brown sugar instead oh honey, that is a fantastic idea.

They are sooo cheap! Heavy as hell though, they will build your muscles up - I have to use 2 hands on my 14" one (great for bacon and steaks). The 10" one is my go-to pan for pretty much everything else (cornbread, hamburgers, dutch babies, potato rosti). I've also got a 6" saute pan (mostly used for eggs), a huge pizza pan/griddle (also great for baking round loaves of bread on, or biscuits) and a special one that makes triangular wedges (scones I guess, or cornbread in theory - it's too specialized and fussy so I don't use it much).

i need themmmm. i made a brown sugar mixture with sriracha and lemon for the salmon b/c i am bored.

I'm doing Leek Fritters. The recipe is by Yotam Ottolenghi (and here incidentally). I don't know if they're in his new book, which looks lovely and interesting, but I've done other things by him and they all turned out good.

yum. all of this sounds so yum. i have to think up something to take to a party on monday. i was thinking of tabouleh but someone already mentioned a cous cous salad and i think w/ the bulgar, it might end up too similar.

The fresh rolls I took last weekend were a big hit, and also vegan. Labor-intensive though.

yeah i don't feel like anything too labor-intensive right now... i'll have to brainstorm today.

Ned, those leek fritters sound yummy - what is a banana shallot?

tza, a big pile of larb nuea (thai spiced ground beef) and a bunch of lettuce or cabbage leaves? Non-veg though. I'm still working on my veg repetoire.

i think there will be plenty of grilled meats, so i was thinking a side dish or dessert item would be best. or, i can just grab a bottle of wine.

i'm making a japanese beef curry tonight. mmm i want it now.

me too! hah

oh and the salmon turned out really well. thanks jaq for the brown sugar idea. the glaze was perfect!

Yay for summer fish cooking! It was nice out today, overcast and cool, so we walked up to the market, had lunch and then made some groceries: milk, butter, and cream per usual, apples for Mr. Jaq's lunch, nectarines for me, an eggplant, rhubarb to make into a crisp w/the remaining strawberries from last week, 6 huge scallops and a 1.5" thick ahi steak. For dinner, I coated the ahi with olive oil, then pressed it in a mixture of white and black sesame seeds while the cast iron pan sat on a medium flame warming up (about 15 minutes, I wanted it good and hot). Seared for 5 minutes on each side (perfectly rare) and served with the kecap manis dipping sauce (3:1 w/ lime juice and sambal to taste). A simple salad of red leaf lettuce - made a nice light summer meal and didn't heat the place up too much.

oh my god i want scallops. probably my favorite fruit of the sea. today we made hamburgers and hot dogs on a little grill on ian's fire escape. well, ian did all of the grilling but i made margaritas at least.

i had scallops over the weekend, proper local ones. so good! some went into a bouillabaisse - pictures on ITP?.

lauren, that bouillabaisse looks incredibly good!

thanks! it was delicious. i'm very happy to be cooking with fresh seafood. clams in chili-coconut broth and tons of grilled squid next weekend, i think.

Are you cleaning the squid yourself? I keep looking at the whole ones in the asian market, but haven't tackled one yet.

oh wow that looks amazing!

i do clean it myself, yes. the market i like doesn't do it for you. it's actually not difficult. there are pretty clear directions available online and in seafood cookbooks. the four basic steps are remove head from body, remove beak/head from tentacles, remove cartiledge/guts from body, and remove skin (which comes off very easily). it's a little ooky, but no more so than dealing with any kind of flesh. i think it's much easier than carving a chicken, for instance.

Thanks lauren, that's encouraging.

link to the bouillabaisse pix?

http://isthatpie.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/seafood-lust/

Seared scallops tonight, after a quick marinade in olive oil, minced garlic, ginger, lime juice, thai chili pepper (birdseye?). Finished with chopped mint and cilantro. So so good.

yum! i need to buy some fresh seafood apparently!

i made salad with romaine, edamame, tomato, cucumber, orange sections, and a ginger dressing.

yeah those scallops sound great, will try it w/a milder chili for the timid palates in my household.

It was a good riff on your olive oil/lemon/garlic/parsley prep, m, which I've been using since you posted it.

I've got to make up that rhubarb/strawberry crisp today or the strawberries will be too far gone. But it's also warmed up again, so feels far too hot to cook. Dilemma. I am thinking this honey-flavored greek yoghurt will be excellent with it though.

so much rhubarb in the greenmarket this week. i'd like to try a crisp, but i'm very lazy when it comes to baking.

Jaq, does anyone in Seattle have air conditioning?

Crisps are the easiest baked fruit thing I know how to do. Chop fruit (or if berries, just pick over and rinse), layer in casserole, sprinkle with sugar (maybe some lemon juice if fruit is over-ripe), maybe dot with some butter (totally optional), make a streusel topping of some sort (1.5 cup of some mix of flours/semolina/rolled oats/other grains, 1 cup of white/brown sugar, 1-2 tsp of cinnamon/clove/allspice/nutmeg/other sweet spice, 1/2 tsp salt, all blended together; cut in 1-2 sticks of butter), sprinkle topping over the fruit layer, bake @ 350 F for 30-45 min. Eat hot, warm, or cold, plain or with cream/yoghurt/ice cream, for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

It's very rare here Rock. Our gym has it, thankfully. I've yet to live in an apartment or house here that has it though (out of 8 places we've lived around the city).

And to be fair, this is the first place we've lived where we really couldn't catch a breeze through the place. There have been few days when we felt desperate for cool in our other places.

thanks, jaq! btw, one of my best friends just moved back to portland after several years in austin, tx and is complaining of being cold!

Ha lauren, your friend's blood needs a week or so to thicken back up :) We're getting some thunderstorms this afternoon, so it cooled off some. I jumped at the chance to reduce a gallon of stock I'd had in the fridge (down to a nice solid cup) and make up the strawberry rhubarb crisp - 3 big stalks of rhubarb, about 2 cups of strawberries, made into 2 4-quart ramekins with streusel topping (rolled oats, white flour, whole wheat flour, white and brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, allspice, mace, 1.5 sticks of butter). Smells really delicious right now!

That crisp was deeelicious with a little scoop of rich greek yoghurt. Nice thick rolled oats (Snoqualmie brand, if you're in the PNW) gave a crunch and toasty nuttiness and the fruit turned a shocking pink color.

i think i'm going to make a rhubarb relish over the weekend. since i'm not much of a dessert person, trying a savory recipe seems like a better bet.

That could be fun - it can be so puckeringly sour! I remember eating stalks of it from the neighbor's patch with salt when I was a kid.

my gf last night made an open faced sandwich of sorts involving bread lightly brushed in garlic w/asparagus and an egg sunnyside up. i contributed arugula with a strawberry vinaigrette i made.

also made macadamia crusted mahi mahi w/a mango cream sauce.

Cold eggplant salad (a riff on Bittman's and another use for the ever-so-tasty kecap manis)

i did jaq's scallop variation w/sesame oil instead of olive, a big hit.

hoping this will be a gateway dish to more asian influences, get me out of the italian-american rut.

Stopped at the butcher's today for sausages, and they had fresh chicken livers for $1.99/pound. I made up a bourbon chicken liver pate, seasoned with garlic, thyme, and black pepper. It's cooling in the fridge under its coat of clarified butter now, but early tastes indicate success.

That turned out really well:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3264/2559224394_bbe8168b89.jpg

wau!

Pretty cheap too - $2 for livers, $2 for butter, maybe $2 for seasonings+bourbon?

i made some tilapia with lemon and an herbed crust the other night. served with green beans, onion, garlic, tomato, artichoke hearts, and olive sauteed with some olive oil, and a splash of lemon and white wine. it was very yummy. the leftover vegetable sautee was really great cold over lettuce for dinner last night.

my camera broke. phone pics suck :( but it was really pretty.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3122/2559362818_507ec03e2d.jpg

Man that sounds really good - I have got to start doing more with fish.

We are just now eating more of the pate, with a cold couple of pours of gewurtz (Bargetto 2005 I got from Wine Woot awhile ago). Hello Saturday afternoon!

I have been in some kind of cooking frenzy today - I made popovers for the first time:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3062/2559217323_bb63e14563_o.jpg

and also a batch of chicken stock. Popovers are just one more thing to add to the list of yummy stuff made with basically just eggs, milk, and flour (crepes, Yorkshire pudding, baked pancakes aka dutch babies, waffles - to name a few of the others).

whoa HUEG! Like, almost life-sized!

This has given me an idea for a really really long Is That...Pie? post.

Re; yr pate, jaq, I made opne recently with ox liver, beer and caramelised onion, the liver cost 50p!

God I love pate.

I am definitely making the next pate with dark rum - I think that will be awesome. I don't know I've ever seen ox anything over here, except oxtail but that is just from regular beef cattle. My butcher is from some Slavic country and was so pleased when I bought the chicken livers - I'm going to see if he carries tongue and some other exotica (for the US); it's difficult to get things like trotters and beef cheeks and skin-on pork belly most places.

i have decided i want to make cioppino. any tips? it seems daunting.

Mr. Jaq used to make it all the time! But we haven't had it for an age. It seemed pretty straightforward - I'll ask him when he gets back from the gym.

do you have a recipe?

if you're okay with bouillabaisse instead of cioppino, then i'd recommend mark bittman's recipe. it's a long list of ingredients, but it's actually very straightforward.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2DD163CF936A35751C1A9679C8B63

Alas, Mr. Jaq doesn't remember a) how to make it or b) where he found the recipe. No wonder we haven't had it since forever.

you can totally play with the amount and types of shellfish involved, btw. last time i made it, for example, i didn't include a flaky, white-fleshed fish - just the monkfish. also, i cut down the amount of shellfish and added a pound of squid. i like strong flavors, though, so i was pretty liberal with the seasoning measurements (including saffron, which i don't consider to be optional).

yeah, it seems like something you can play around with a lot and still have it turn out yum. i have just been browsing recipes... some of them call for making your own fish stock to use in it, and i don't know if i have that in me! (now all those years of being pissed that my dad's tupperware container's labled 'fish stock' were crowding up the freezer like giant chunks of wasted space are coming back to haunt me!)

i like bittman's take on the issue of stock:

Though some will argue that bouillabaisse must contain fish stock, any time you add a few pounds of fish to a simmering stew there is enough fish essence to make stock superfluous. If additional liquid is needed, water will do just fine.

that said, if you're going to put shrimp into the dish then you can improvise a stock using the shells pretty easily and quickly.

it's difficult to get things like trotters and beef cheeks and skin-on pork belly most places.

I'm in a state of shock over this. Come to the Old Country and we'll cook parts of the animal it never even knew it had.

I made the best korokke I've made ever yesterday. For bento lunches.

one of my local greengrocers sells bags of shiitake mushrooms the size of my head, for a pittance, so every day for about the past week I've been eating them fried up in a kind of rudimentary teriyaki sauce -- equal amounts cooking sake, mirin and soy sauce, plus some sugar, a pinch of salt, and a dash of ginger. It's sliiimy but so good.

I made some excellent rockfish last night based on this:
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/food5_rockfish.html#herb

Except I used v. little mustard, added milk to the batter, and we didn't have regular potato chips, just Salt & Vinegar kettle chips, and I like everything blackened so I used a lot of pepper and some paprika and etc.

one day I am going to have my standardized seasoning blends so I don't have to go scrabbling through the spice cupboard every time I break out a frying pan

served on orzo with hearts of palm salad (TY GF) it ruled except for the one bone I swallowed

Last night I improvised a whole bunch of hearty, Sunday dinner AWESOME.

Crockpot required, approximate cooking time 6 hours on low.

Chicken rub:
Paprika, kosher salt, pepper, lemon pepper

Sauce:
Can of condensed Cream of mushroom soup, 1/2 cup sour cream, 1/2 cup chicken stock, hot dry mustard, generous squirts of Sriracha hot sauce.

1. Rub chicken breasts all over, place in bottom of crock pot.
2. Slice the five remaining mushrooms about to rot in the crisper, put on top of chicken.
3. Mix together sauces, pour in.
4. An hour or so before the end, add frozen cooked new potatoes.
5. Fifteen minutes before the end, add frozen peas, turn to HIGH.
6. Serve with veggies and enjoy!

The broth was delicious. While I was waiting for my boyfriend to get home I totally "buttered" a piece of bread with it. Nom nom.

I made pesto for the first time on Saturday! It was delicious! I can't believe I didn't try it years ago but I think I used to be nervous about basil (food issues). Does anyone have pesto suggestions etc to refine my next attempt?

HOT TIP from Montenegro, where I'm not really cooking at all, due to the fact that we're staying with my in-laws: my mother-in-law made chicken liver tonight, and it was excellent, not least because of the unusual yet totally right-on addition of fresh DILL. No joke, it totally works!

speaking of dill -- lemon-dill potato salad, you are a treat.

My dad is picking a 5-gallon bucket of green beans every other day and my mother is forcing me to take some off their hands, so in self-defense I stir-fried a bunch with a ton of garlic and a little soy sauce and sesame oil, to get away from the standard southern method. SO GOOD. Need to go buy more garlic now.

Funny you should say, I am IN LOVE with sesame oil right now. I'm saving $$ by eating Ramen noodles, but with steamed green beans and sliced scallions and sesame oil on everything, it doesn't taste like I'm skimping at all.

omg i want all the green beans!!!!!!!!!! they were like $3.49/lb in my veggie stand the other day :(

so after a week of fresh (and not to mention extremely affordable) ahi tuna sashimi and marlin ceviche, i am really not happy with the frozen seafood mix from trader joe's i sauteed to throw on salad for dinner. u_u

where in nyc can one find quality fish that is not like $20/lb?

blue moon at the union square greenmarket or pure vida at the mccarren park market. the gramercy fish market is very nice, but on the pricier side and (i assume) not convenient for you. i used to buy fish in chinatown, but you have to spend some time looking around for a store that you're comfortable with.

i started reading shark's fin and sichuan pepper over the weekend. it's very informative and interesting, although dunlop can get a bit "cheery englishwoman" at times for my taste. a nice selection of recipes are included. what's cooking? tomorrow night, it's going to be fish-fragrant aubergines.

Last night I made arepas (yellow corn) with smoked gouda, shredded chicken (leftover from lunch) and sofrito (leftover from something else I made a few days ago) and man was it good. They were little towers of taste:

sofrito
chicken
gouda
arepa
chicken
gouda
arepa

sauteed green beans on the side

yumz

next time i might mix the cheese in with the masarepa and then pan-fry them

nommm.

yeah, i need someone to teach me how to shop for and identify good fish before i could do chinatown.

this reminds me i forgot to take my frozen mahi mahi out to defrost for dinner tonight. damn it.

i'd recommend checking out the mccarren market this weekend. the fish/seafood that pure vida sell are caught by their boats (same w/ blue moon), so you're getting a very fresh product.

yeah, definitely! i keep meaning to go up there. must make a point of it this weekend.

Am trying to cook nutritious+delicious food for pregnant wife so have a big pot now bubbling with white beans, smoked ribs (yay montenegro!), onion, carrot, garlic. Will eat with steamed greens w olive oil and lemon. Not the most summery of dishes (it's a million degrees here), but I still think it's gonna be great.

i'd be astonished if it wasn't, that sounds awesome

today I made potted smoked mackerel with pickled cucumber, I'm fairly pleased with the results but it's too early to tell

did not get to mccarren last wekend bc of beach trip but hopefully this sat it is ON!

matt that combo sounds awesome!

Pregnant so soon?!??!??! Congrats, goob, I missed that one somehow.

Yeah you're telling me! Thanks; we're generally excited, but the excitement is punctuated by huge waves of fear and anxiety and nervous laughter. Oh, and nausea.

I'm loaded down with cherry tomatoes, mostly yellow ones -- if I can see my way through these work deadlines, I'm going to pickle a bunch of them. Don't see why it wouldn't work -- but I wonder if I should process the jars after I seal them or not. I want the tomatoes to retain their shape, so as little cooking as I can get away with will be good.

i bought huge bunches of radishes and cilantro at the greenmarket. i have some avocados for another attempt at guac for a party tonight and want radishes to be one of the dipping utensils. also string beans. and cucumbers (the latter two not from greenmarket).

i also got some nice fresh blueberries that i haven't figured out what i will do with yet.

Blueberry yoghurt cake om nom nom, faling that just toss them with a little shredded mint and a glob of creme fraiche

and thanks, the cucumber was possibly too acid a cure cos there was a lot of pepper in with the mackerel, but I started another batch today with some dill and thyme which I have high hopes of

last night i had some fresh blueberries with cucumber slices. yummy combo! wish i'd had mint and yogurt to go with.

I was making gazpacho this morning with the overload of tomatoes we have -- using a recipe that called for putting the blended veggies & bread through a fine strainer. That left me with a bowl full of tomato/cucumber/garlic/bread solids, so I thought I'd see if I could do anything with it.

Sauteed some chopped onion and more garlic in a lot of olive oil, added a big double spoonful of the tomato stuff, a spoonful of chili paste, a bit of sugar, some lime juice and a little water, then quickly cooked some big shrimps in the sauce, and threw in some leftover cooked noodles at the end and tossed it all together. I was worried that the cucumber would be a weird element in it, but it tasted great. The dissolved bread solids gave the sauce a nice thick stick-to-the-noodle texture.

ok I didn't write this down as usual because I'm an inveterate eyeballer/finger-taster but DAAAAMN I'm a genius tonight

seared crusted tuna!:
big hunka tuna bright pink and thawed
lotsa black pepper
lotsa parsley flakes
lotsa ground macadamia nuts with some herbs in it from whole foods
little sea salt
little paprika

rub all over the tuna and sear in buttered pan on low heat like five minutes a side, transfer to plate, slice and serve

WITH AMAZING SAUCE!:

sriracha and/or sweet chili garlic sauce
mango chutney
plain ol' white vinegar
sesame oil

sorry I got no proportions I was just basically emptying a few bottles and watching the pretty colors

SO GOOD

sounds zingy (in the good sense not the idiot lol sense)

we had a stall at a festival this weekend just gone and were knocking out belly pork butties with onion relish which went down a storm

take one pork belly, bone out the ribs and reserve for chef treats, score the skin incredibly heavily, cuts no more than 1cm apart, salt the skin more than seems necessary and leave for half an hour, brush excess salt off, sprinkle crushed coriander seed and mustard seed, glug olive oil all over and put in a stupidly hot oven until you've got good crackling, then turn the oven down and give it a bit more until it's cooked out (if you don't get the requisite crispiness from the oven portion it out and crisp it up under the grill)

onion relish: onions sweated down with ww vinegar, healthy slosh of balsamic, horseradish, mustard powder, paprika, chilli (I use a puree of roasted birdseye at work but dried flakes'll be fine), low heat, long time until it's kind of like jam

combine two between two slices of bread, buy a beer, watch some endearingly slapdash bands

Tonight I am making:
-Mussels steamed in coconut milk curry broth
-nasu shigiyaku (miso eggplant)
-sea scallops w/ salad greens (don't know what dressing to make so please give me ideas!)

Oh everything from the farmers market! Would it be weird if I put cippolini onions in the curry broth?

I'd go for some kind of fresh ginger/garlic/lime dressing for the salad w/ scallops. Don't know about cippolini onions being weird in curry, but sure sounds tasty.

Matt's pork belly sandwich sounds amazing.

Last night - spicy tofu and edamame beans. Hotter than hell in a good way (tongue tingled for about half an hour afterwards), and the tofu tasted good even to this confirmed carnivore.

the cippolini onions were delicious in the curry broth! perfect for scooping up in the outer scallop shell. the broth was soooooo good and i was very happy to have bread to dip in it.

the only thing that didn't come out so well were the eggplants, i need to revisit that recipe.

Cooked the inaugural pan of bacon in the new (to me) kitchen this morning! We have been eating out so much due to working/moving/traveling exhaustion/laziness. But I can tell this is going to be a very happy place to cook.

yay!

last night we were going to make some soup out of the leftover broth, but got full on bruschetta with tomato, shallots and salami

i've been making this frittata from farmer's market vegetables at breakfast and can't stop thinking about it all day!

2 eggs + a blop of milk
1 small tomato
1/3 of a bell pepper, chopped up small
1 green onion stalk
small handful cilantro
smoked paprika
salt + pepper

nom nom nom nom

Has it been another year already?

Are we really up to year five?

A sort-of quiche/frittata thing for dinner tonight: layer of thinly sliced yukon gold potatoes started in a hot skillet, then a few handfuls of chopped up broccoli tossed on top. 5 well-beaten eggs with a 1/2 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of water, and 1/3 cup of flour beaten in, as well as a pinch of salt. Then some grated emmenthaler and Beecher's flagship mixed in and the batter poured over the potato and broccoli in the skillet. A quick grind of black pepper and the whole thing popped into a 325 oven for 1/2 hour. Puffed up nicely and very tasty.

JAQ this sounds amazing (i was searching for quiche recipes)but i need some advice on how to adapt it. i hardly ever 'cook' (i mean, i make salads/sandwiches and i heat things, but that's really about it) but i have a craving for quiche.

we have: eggs, red onion, broccoli, little yellow potatoes, cheddar cheese, provolone, swiss cheese, grilled chicken, spinach, marinated red capsicum, soy milk, no skillet and no appropriate oven dish. i was thinking i could try making a small version of this in the microwave (sacrilege!) and fry the potatoes first. i don't really have any other basic pantry items like flour, tho. shall i just kind of attempt to slap this together and hope for the best?

i got a bunch of chard and multicolored potatoes (purple flesh! red flesh! wow!) and i think this week i will attempt some sort of squash/potato/chard bake or tart. maybe a good chance to experiment chickpea flour or something non-wheat in baking (though i have some wheat flour i should probably use up?).

I think that could work pretty well as long as you didn't try to cook one that was more than maybe 3 eggs worth. If it was too big, the edges would get all rubbery before the center was really cooked. I'd probably chop all the things you want to use for the filling fairly small too, and mix in with the eggs before pouring over the potato base, again so it cooks more evenly. And maybe bring the mixture closer to room temp before nuking (instead of having it all ice cold from the fridge). Another thing to try is to cook for 30-45 second bursts, then let it sit for 15-30 seconds for the temp to even out, then nuke again - again just to not overcook the eggs.

(xpost!)

Also just1n3 - you don't need to add the flour. It makes it more yorkshire pudding-like rather than quiche like.

if i make a large quiche tonight, how long will it keep for it? we don't have a medium-size baking dish, just a big sort of roasting pan, so i'm thinking about making a broad, think quiche frittata type of thing.

i'm a little worried about using soy milk - i think it might be way too sweet? might just leave it out all together.

Quiche will keep 3 or 4 days in the fridge, or wrap individual slices up airtight after it's cooled to room temp and freeze - they'll keep for a few months frozen and you can nuke as needed.

ok i'm gonna DO THIS! this could solve my lunch worries for the next week, at least.

oven temp?

if i heavily grease the roasting pan, will that prevent sticking?

making baked ziti for the first time. with sundried tomato chicken sausages and spinach.

results to follow.

Hmm - thought I posted about skipping the soy milk and just using eggs plus a little water and veg oil, don't know where that went to. Oven temp at 325 F, take it out when the center looks just barely set, then let the residual heat finish baking the center for 10 minutes before you cut it.

grease or oil the bottom of the pan before you layer the potatoes in for sure.

Whitey on the Moon, that sounds delicious.

I'm simmering fennel and oregano sausages in red wine, crushed plum tomatoes, sweated Walla Walla sweet onions and garlic right now. For dinner tonight over pasta. I feel kind of bad for italian food losing to mexican in the poll - it should have been a tie.

when can i come over

Oooh, I just got a call from my mother and will be picking up a couple of pounds of okra tomorrow. Some of you may say bleah but I say nom.

haha, if only I'd gotten my post in just before gbx's.

joke's on all of you bc i actually do get to go over!

<3

tza, blackberry crisp w/ vanilla ice cream too, for afters :)

oh yum okra - after you mentioned that awesome okra dry curry WmC, I look for it at every indian place I go. So good.

ok let's forget about my stupid frittata idea, i'm on my way over to jaq's

awesome!

i should get some okra.

has anyone ever used dragon beans? kind of purplish/white looking green beans? i also saw redder ones, called cranberry beans, but i chickened out and just got green beans.

haha i knew there had to be SOME way we could finally lure you up!
xpost

how do i caramelise some onions for my frittata

Those beans sound incredible! I've never seen them. We used to grow purple beans at my folks - they were just like green beans, only easier to pick because the purple pods stood out against the leaves. When cooked, they turned green. I've seen cranberry beans as dried beans, but not fresh! Uwajimaya sells those long beans, that are like 18" long green beans. They are sort of intimidating.

ok so i had okra a few times in uganda and it wasn't slimy??? i wanted an explanation, but i couldn't ask the cook for various reasons

http://oneblockwest.blogspot.com/2009/07/dragon-tongue-beans.html

i will have to get some next time!