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Visiting SIL was curious about the sorrel we have growing in a pot, so we made a sorrel overload meal. Arroz verde with sorrel, cilantro, roasted chile Poblano, fried onions and garlic, and chicken stock, finished with cubed/fried plantain. Mrs. C made ground beef with some sort of sorrel sauce. Quite tasty mixed together! We also had a sliced local tomato, which I missed in the cell phone pic. SIL said she wasn't very hungry but went back for seconds, and is now talking about growing sorrel when she returns home.

First full day back in Ajijic after 5+ weeks in AZ which included surgery that ended well with a good pathology report. Celebrated our return at a Hole In The Wall place within a 10 minute walk from home where we've enjoyed many MXN meals. I had enmoladas de pollo, chicken (no cheese or other stuff inside, just white meat chicken) stuffed into in-house corn tortillas, smothered in the best molé sauce outside of Oaxaca. So much chicken in it, I could only eat two, brought the 3rd one home for a future snack. Mi esposo had an arrachera baguette (marinated skirt steak) that was huge; he couldn't finish all the fries (took them home, too!).

Not only that, the shop I mostly order from delivers for free! My much more local shop (i.e. the one in our commercial strip) has some nice wines as well...https://www.vinvero.com/

Ah, I knew about the one store liquor or wine license rule and that TJ's had one wine shop in NY but didn’t realize it had closed. Luckily, you have many superior options close by!

Norm, your hosting skills are unmatched!

Sadly, that can't happen here. According to AI: No, Trader Joe's cannot sell wine in most of its New York locations. Due to New York state law, grocery stores in New York are generally limited to selling beer. Trader Joe's, like other chains, is restricted to only one location in the state where they can sell wine or liquor. This single location, which was previously the Union Square wine shop, is now closed. The Trader Joe's I shop at has a fairly extensive beer selection, and a few ciders as well.

Eggplant---with asiago and Provel cheese/ we also added cooked turkey meat. My own sauce

@weinoo---found that Blanco in London/ not easily found in states. I drink more the Rose'

@JoNorvelleWalker Id say if you get ' skinless ' : dont air dry , you are drying the meat . season w your favorite's , but try a wet seasoning then IDS on a much higher heat : like CSO'ing , w smoke and heat pull for juicyness , rather than low and slow smoking. have not done that yet.

@JoNorvelleWalker not necessarily. it was an experiment . I know you get most of your groceries ' on line ' but consider looking into generic bacon , the full 1 lbs version that version has ' fat cap ' ends , which are trimmed off for the 12 0z versioons. you want those . then , if you can , de-salt the whole lbs , 24 hrs , very cold water to keep the fat firm , in the refig. changing the water once or twice . then use that ' pork belly ' to shield longer term IDS meats. tie them up . stretch the bacon ! something to think about. works vey well . does not need to be thick at all . or use chicken skin that comes w the ckicken // turkey .

Last month Charlie said he wanted to invite people over for his birthday. We had it last Saturday. He asked for Korean food mostly but would like it if I cooked something in the smoker too. I got , some thin sliced shoulder for pork bulgogi, some thin sliced ribeye for beef bulgogi and marinated them for three days. I got a 4 or 5 pound shoulder roast for pulled pork. I told Charlie that I was going to smoke a shoulder roast because I thought people were getting a little tired of ribs. He said the only person tired of your ribs is you, everybody else will want you to make some, so I got a couple slabs or loin back ribs and smoked them as well. I didn't take very many pictures. I did take a picture of the pork roast and a couple pictures of how I converted the smoker for a large grilling area. I have grill grates that fit the smoker. They are ridged on one side and smooth on the other side. I've had them since before there were Blackstone grills. I use them when I need a large flat grilling surface. They were expensive. I probably could have bought a Blackstone for about what they cost. Anyway, sorry I didn't take many pictures. We had, besides the meats, two kinds of kimchi, rice, vinegar based coleslaw, BBQ beans, and hamburger buns so people who wanted, could make sandwiches with the pulled pork.

Do you think six hours is necessary?

@JoNorvelleWalker Thinking about this : the legs I used were mostly covered by skin. that skin was inedible , but MC found it , sliced up , quite tasty. the exposed meat's surface , did have a bit of a chew to it , and some of that got trimmed for MC . so , try it again w a thigh w skin. and if you get that extra skin flap , tie it around the any thigh thats exposed. that might work.

I wonder why our results were so different?

@JoNorvelleWalker that's a shame. you might iPot them for stock ? adding the tough spare ribs ?

These thighs were skinless -- not what I ordered. Sometimes Whole Foods is like that. Now for the sad part: the thighs were removed from smoke after exactly six hours. They were dry, hard, and practically indistinguishable from my most recent sparerib disaster. They hurt my teeth. Nothing like your drumstick pictures. The Penzeys spice rubs were nice though.

Trader Joe's had a nice private label Bandol rosé earlier this summer @12.99. I polished off my last bottle over the weekend. Unfortunately, I think it’s sold out now but it’s worth trying if you happen to spot any.

I really should know a ton of things that I don’t. Pizzeria Bonci looks terrific. I was only there to drop the kid off and he had a list of wants including Chicago Pizza and Italian beef. Anyway, I just catered to him. But I’ll check out Bonci if I’m ever back in Chicago and I appreciate the recommendation

Nor would I.

You should know that there are 3 locations of the fantastic Pizzeria Bonci in the greater Chicago area.

I've mentioned that we have largely gone away from using our grow-out cages on the lawn for our adolescent bunnies, because we'd had a problem with the coccidia parasite (adults survive it handily, but it's dangerous for the growing youngsters). We've modified one of the cages so it stays up off the ground, and have used it for our current litter of half-grown kits via Hazel (the "princesses" and their brothers were a slightly older litter from Hilda, and they mostly were sold as pets). This cage isn't made of all wire, like the ones I've built. My father-in-law constructed it with a wooden frame and chicken wire on all six sides. It's a good piece of equipment, though I plan to modify it this off-season to make it more practical. A little while ago, just after I returned from NS, a few of the bunnies were sorely tempted by the fresh clover growing just out of their reach, and pushed hard enough on the wire in their attempts at snacking that the wire (now rusted in a couple of places) gave way. We retrieved all but one escapee, and there was enough slack in the wire that I was able to re-staple it to the frame using a less-rusted area. Well, this morning when I went to feed them, I found that they'd repeated their efforts and there were no fewer than four of the little guys happily roaming the lawn and, in one case, patrolling the space between my garden beds (but not, thankfully, eating the garden itself). Now, I've mentioned in the past that handling our bunnies frequently has many benefits, up to and including the day of our final, fatal betrayal of their trust. This morning provided a really vigorous endorsement of that strategy, because when the little ones saw me coming with my bucket of water they all hopped happily right to my feet, and waited to be picked up and cuddled. I don't need to tell you, this scenario was vastly superior to chasing the little critters around with a net or some such. It came close on the heels of an endorsement from the lady in Nova Scotia who'd bought four of the "princesses" from me at the end of June. They were for her and a friend, and they're utterly in love. She's bought rabbits from other growers down in NS before, and ended up rehoming them, because they simply weren't human-friendly enough to fit in as pets. That was not at all an issue with ours, of course. She says she'll be buying from us exclusively in future, for herself and her friends, because ours are so sweet-natured. So that was nice. As I mentioned upthread I'm keeping a spreadsheet this year, to monitor our expenditures and income re the critters and the garden. It's a work in progress, and I keep tweaking it as I go, so that it reflects our income and expenses with some reasonable degree of accuracy. At present we're sitting at a modest -$470-odd year to date, with sales keeping us reasonably close to the break-even point. That's not entirely accurate, because the running total still includes what I've spent on my garden, and I want to split that off from the amounts involved in the rabbits and poultry. With the critters, I want to get a handle on how our expenses and sales balance each other out, without taking into account the "deemed market value" of the meat itself. It's all well and good to know that a frozen rabbit sells for +/- $10/lb, but I want to know what our actual costs are when year-end rolls around. At that point I'll have a cumulative total of our meat harvest for the year, give or take a few quail. Once I know how many pounds of rabbit and chicken we put in the freezer, and how many quail, I can do subtotals of my cost for each critter and work out what our actual cost was per pound of meat. We'll also look at the approximate market value for those same pounds of meat, and as long as they're close we'll call it a win (because of course ours will be higher-quality than what we'd usually get at the store). That "deemed value" reckoning will also apply to the eggs we get from the quail and hens, with supermarket cost running around $5/doz (I think) right now. Our actual cost for the eggs will be hard to figure, but I'll probably work it backward from the percentage of our flock that will become year-round tenants (a dozen or so, plus five or six silkies that are just pets) vs the number we're growing out for the freezer (40-ish). I'll know what our total costs are for the birds, and just declare that percentage of it to be our cost for eggs. With the garden harvest it's another whole story, of course, because we don't sell any of that as we do with the rabbits, birds, and eggs. In that instance I'm just recording our harvests as I make them (ie, 700g of green beans yesterday), and I'll work out a "deemed value" from the supermarket pricing. We should come out to a reasonably favorable position, because I focus less on commodity things like carrots/potatoes and more on those items that cost us more at the supermarket. Bunches of chard or kale, for example, typically run $3.99 for most of the year, so it doesn't take long for a freezer full of greens to add up to a lot of saved money. If our costs are outrunning our sales by >$500 at this point, I'm pretty happy with that. We'll have 40-odd chickens in the freezer at 3-4 pounds each, so that's 120-150 pounds. Current price in my neck of the woods is about $6.99/lb IIRC for chicken (when not on sale), and higher for boneless, skinless breasts, so we're easily looking at upwards of $700 in value there (not counting the premium one would ordinarily pay for locally-raised, not water-chilled, etc etc). Add in the dollar value of a couple of hundred pounds of rabbit at $10/lb, and the quail at... whatever figure I decide on, per quail... and we're probably coming out well ahead by year-end. One final note, which will amuse some of you. When we had our early-season litters my GF carefully picked and segregated a number of breeding trios, consisting of one buck and two unrelated does, which we offered up for sale to anyone wanting to raise their own rabbits. If we sold them all we'd do it again, and if not, well, we'd call that trio our next-generation set of breeders. We did, in fact, end up with one trio left over, consisting of a black doe, a brown doe, and a white buck. As I've mentioned, my GF tries to keep the names coherent within a given generation, and we're currently on names starting with H. So when I walked into the room, one day recently, she was contemplating H names for the buck. "Hector? Horace? Harvey?..." and she was startled when I burst out loudly "Harvey! Yes, perfect! The white buck *has* to be Harvey!" She was mystified, until I sent her this link. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/

@JoNorvelleWalker, I recall you are wanting/needing the meat to be soft. Give the 3-2-1 concept for ribs a shot. This method is supposed to produce very soft/pull off the bone meat. Rough idea- 3 hours at 180F (IT of 160). Then wrap the ribs in foil (or pink paper) with a liquid- beer, apple juice etc and cook another 2 hours @225F (IT of 205F). Then unwrap the ribs, cover with sauce and cook another hour. I do not cook ribs this way but I know many that do and swear by it for softer meat

Congrats to the nephew on grad school in Chicago. I just dropped my oldest off at University of Chicago (my undergrad) for a week at a course on civil discourse. its a super city for students. Attached some pictures of pizzeria Due. Only pics without the kid in them. (I don’t post pics of the kids online) sorry to make it two posts. I’m too dumb to make the text the way I wanted (not a ringing endorsement of my selection of schools, but not really their fault)

bacon&eggs for dinner . . .