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Last meal before we leave our MEX home for a month. Grilled blackened salmon with Asian apple slaw (could have used some cilantro but our fridge is cleaned out) and raspberry chipotle sauce.

You wouldn't be able to live very well in Montana. When I lived there, everywhere I went they served sweet potato salad made with sweet pickle relish and Durkee's sauce. I much preferred it over their ubiquitous sauerkraut salad.

I too dislike sweet potatoes in almost every possible circumstance. That salad sounds detestable! When I was in San Diego last week Mr. BFF made a potato salad that I didn't photograph but did like very much. It had a touch of mayonnaise -- not much -- and chopped kimchi. Gave it a nice reddish color and a good kick.

I fully understand you meant potato salads that are sweet. However your post reminded me of something that happened several years ago. I was visiting a Renaissance festival where I knew a lot of people. One of them offered me some potato salad but since I wasn't a participant, I declined. Afterwards I discovered that it made from sweet potatoes, which I really dislike. I'm glad I declined.

Once in a blue moon Facebook shows me something good.

Making the best use of the space you have can sometimes be a real dilemma. I have a drop leaf in my (teeny little) kitchen next to the sink, but the most important addition we did when we first bought the Pleasure-Way van was to put a plastic cutting board over the cooktop. We have a 2-burner cooktop, and my spouse found a cutting board that fit exactly (what are the odds of that?) and put little square blocks underneath to raise it over the actual burner. We remove it, obviously, when it's time to cook. It has greatly improved my ability to keep my temper while preparing a meal. The pull-out pantry has a finished top that I can use in a pinch. However, cooking in such a confined space requires me to "sequence" the process. What order should I use to be the most efficient? So I have to think on it for a bit before I start. Any cutting-up of vegetables or meat, preparing any starch (rice, potatoes) and starting to cook (which occupies one of my 2 burners), where to put dirty pots and prep utensils when they're not needed (the floor) should of course be done first. With luck everything gets done at the right time, and then I turn over the dishwashing tasks to my spouse. (I have to say I covet your oven, that extra space, and most of all your refrigerator.)

Ditto

I would. Not all plastics used in refrigerated packaging are heat safe.

Am sure I've read about this question before, but my searches aren't working. Just purchased a dozen duck legs from d'Artagnan which I want to sous vide. Each package has two legs, so a perfect division. The legs will go in a 3.5 mil vacuum sealer bag for later freezing. They'll be cooked 160ºF for 28 hours. What I don't know is whether to remove the original packaging first?

A couple from this week: Tacos bowls with black beans, corn, peppers and onions, cilantro lime rice, and guacamole Vegetable korma with cauliflower, carrots, and spinach. Served with garlic-cilantro naan and maharajah rice

I tried several version/brands of pickled onions and THESE completely blew me away.

@Smithy We do get sprats here in China but imported, like yours from the Baltic region. Yours were Latvian as is this brand available here or from Russia. They are also often mislabelled as herring or even sardines. In fact the Chinese name for them 西鲱 (xī fēi), literally translates as 'Western herring'. The two species do inhabit the same waters but are unrelated. The same Chinese name is also sometimes used for yet another unrelated species, shad. Confusion reigns.

My son cooked mezze rigatoni with a tuna tomato base sauce. It was delicious. He hadn’t heard of the ‘no cheese with seafood’ Italian rule so he piled the cheddar on which made it even more delicious. Ha!

As Douglas Adams put it, "Have you ever read the instructions on a pack of toothpicks?" Allergen-labeling law in the US (and Canada) boils down to "if it contains one of these major allergens,* it MUST be labeled accordingly." And sometimes you get these silly situations, like a jar of fish containing fish or Costco recalling butter because it's missing the "contains milk" statement. But there absolutely are people capable of not understanding that a "sprat" is a fish, or that anchovies in Worcestershire sauce or Caesar dressing mean you can't serve it to someone with a seafood allergy. It's not so much the people with allergies (because they'll usually know), it's the dim but well-meaning friends, neighbours, co-workers etc. Not to mention the idiots who think "I'm so tired of his 'allergy' bullshit, I'll feed him some deliberately so show him it's all in his head." And yes, sadly, that happens far too often (in my limited circle of acquaintance, I can think of three incidents just within the past few years). Similarly, some chains won't accept a food product for sale unless it has a freshness date printed on it, hence the various wags on social media joking about their salt being past its date. That one, I'll grant you, is pretty silly. *Eight in the US, ten in Canada

Dang! looks really good!

Ah, I get it! Slow on the uptake. Sorry!

I was joking. Why do they have to point out a jar of fish contains fish?

What would you expect instead? (I don't see a discussion of sprats in your topic about Fish Etc. in China, so i'm in the dark.)

A little lunch Stewed river snails, chicken and pickled bamboo Crayfish with Ginger and Chilli

I was shocked to see your jar of Baltic sprats contains fish!! 🐡

This may be too many updates at once, but I'm getting ready to move and want to follow up on the remaining pork tenderloin tips. They'd been marinating since yesterday, and I absolutely, positively had to cook them today. This despite the heat and my getting-ready-to-go activities. In the collage below: a layer of mushrooms (purchased yesterday on my final, really final local grocery shopping trip that I haven't shown yet) covered by the marinated meat. On further reflection I decided to add the marinade to the cooking mix instead of cooking it down for later use. I put it in my Descoware dish, brought it briefly to a boil on stovetop, then put it into the oven at the lowest possible temperature. Then I went off to do other chores. The lower right image in the collage shows the cooked meat, but doesn't really show the sauce well. I had cooked rice on the stove. The sauce and meat went atop the rice, and some of my chopped chopped herbs went atop that. It also needed more soy sauce, then lemon and butter. Not bad. Not one for the "must repeat" books, but it has promise. The interesting thing is the texture of the meat. Nobody would accuse this of being tough. It was fork-tender. Was it mealy? Some might say so. I dunno. I didn't object to the earlier high-heat fast-cook treatment of a few days ago. My darling and my best friend might prefer this texture. I'll have to try side-by-side treatments with a broader jury.

Yesterday was a public holiday, the first of five, if you count next weekend, as the Chinese do. However, today is the main day May 1st, the international Labour Day. Yesterday, two of the last students I taught before retiring came to visit. I have cooked for them in the past, but this time they wanted to cook for me to demonstrate they had learned something besides linguistics. Well, one of them wanted to cook; the other was assigned washing and chopping duties. She is now a PhD student and lives on campus in Guilin without cooking facilities. Here is last night’s dinner The Spread Beef, Asparagus and Matsutake Steamed Shrimp Steamed Grass Carp Clam, Pork and Greenery Soup This was morning glory but I have no idea how she cooked it. Unfortunately, it was inedible. It turned out she tasted it then salted it but thought it needed a little sugar to lift it - a common Chinese practice. Unfortunately, she thought a container of sea salt in my kitchen was actually the sugar and re-salted it in error. They were mystified as to why I have more than one kind of salt (I have four). So, they gained a lesson on saltistics. This caused more hilarity than grief and we had too much food anyway and everything else was more than fine! The chef

We are heading out there for our first visit of 2025 starting next Friday and I will of course report on any new dining developments we encounter. On a dining-adjacent note, the local papers have been advertising the A24 open casting call for the movie adaptation of Kitchen Confidential, which is going to star Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain. The casting call is for men of all ages with kitchen experience, no acting experience required, and filming starts in Provincetown next month.

I am delighted with the vinyl flooring in this trailer. I may see about adding a small vacuum cleaner to collect the loose fluff (I kept the old stick vacuum from the previous trailer) but in truth a broom and mop (Swiffer) do most of what a vacuum could do. Depending on the layout, might you add a drop leaf to the counter? That's what we did with the last trailer. My darling very carefully measured the thickness of our Boos Block cutting board, then mounted two very sturdy drop-down shelf brackets to support it. That made a huge difference in the working space for the previous Princessmobile. You can see an end view here (scroll down a bit) and a couple of top views here and here to see what I mean. We had to remove the board and drop the supports in order to bring the kitchen glide in and move, but once we were in place we kept them up all the time.

A small tart with raspberries three ways, Raspberry jam was spread on the bottom of the crust prior to placing on the tightly packed raspberries . These were dusted with raspberry confectionery sugar, tart was baked and then lightly brushed with clementine jam.