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We've had a few meals this week featuring roast peppers. I made a pork and green chili stew with roasted anaheim, poblano and jalapeno peppers earlier in the week that I've enjoyed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was a little on the spicy side for my wife and one dinner serving was her limit. I also roasted some meaty red peppers that were combined with grilled vegetables, marinated artichoke hearts, sautéed oyster mushrooms and cotija cheese that was served on toasted focaccia bread from Craft Bakery. The cheese was added to the mushrooms while they were cooking and developed a great crust similar to halloumi.

I am not 100% sold on cheese yet, am using RD Supremo for my next round of pies. I used Galbani, was a bit greasy, and I used Grande and it was very good, but I am just at the start of the cheese situation. For sauce, I settled on Tomato Magic, which has been a blessing for a number of other edible treates around my house... Including as a base for salsa (Nothing fancy, restaurant style, but it's quite good) and marinara. I used 7-11 and while they are kissing cousins, I liked Tomato Magic a bit more. All I do is add a bit of salt, oregeno and basil, 7 ounces for my 13.5"-14 inch pizza. I use 1/4" lb cheese and 1/4 pound ground pork with sausage herb mix. The steel is the key. While I have yet to achieve the perfect (ah, the mind, so fickle!) pie, they are quite good and even when not quite great, I find they are better because the dough is crucial to the taste. I do a minimum 4 day cold ferment. Not a lot of movement, but the dough ends up being just right for NH Apizza. Presently I am waiting for an oven... so I am at a stall.

I hope you like it! The sauce only takes a few minutes to mix up, then the fish marinades in it for 15-30 min which allows plenty of time to cook some rice and veg or make a salad so it’s a very relaxed meal.

Definitely going to try this and thanks for the tip on doubling the sauce. We call my youngest sister Double Saucy. She loves to cook and eat but automatically doubles or triples the sauce and in restaurant always, always asks for double sauce.

@blue_dolphin, thanks! I just saved that recipe!

Thanks! I’ve made this several times and really like it. I’ve also recommended it to friends who love it, too. Super easy but looks almost dinner party worthy. I used black cod today but have used other fish with good results. If you decide to make it, I recommend doubling up on the sauce ingredients so there’s plenty to go with the rice.

That looks fabulous! What did you think of it?

Coconut Fish and Tomato Bake by Yewande Komolafe from New York Times Cooking over rice with a side of Stewed Spring Vegetables (fava beans, asparagus, snap peas and broccolini) from Good Things by Samin Nosrat

No worries. You accidentally pressed one of the hottest of my hot buttons, as you probably gathered. I was somewhat concerned I might have overdone it, in fact. When I was a kid, the farmers my family rented from (our closest neighbours) had a small dairy farm, and I used to watch in fascination as my friends' mom would pour the milk into the electric separator (a big freestanding centrifuge, in the corner of the kitchen) to separate the milk and cream. She always brought hers up to a near-boil, though, before using it.

Why would a USA government agency be controlling anything in China? They have no jurisdiction outside the USA. If these were to be exported to the USA, then surely whoever is reselling them would be responsible for any legalities being complied with. Anyway, they are currently being aimed at China's domestic market.

My version of Jungle Juice was similar, with everclear but we’d throw in a handle of vodka for a fancy touch and dump koolaid mix into the same plastic bin. Fill it up in the dorm shower then toss bags of ice into it. Fruit was for suckers.

For a plasma to be generated, there has to be two exposed high voltage points. For a plasma to be generated, typically a high frequency magnetic induction field will be involved, which may interfere with other electronic devises. FCC=Federal Communications Commission, a USA government division which controls and certifies any device which generates electro-magnetic fields. dcarch

Now that's really something. I had to Google how you were "not dunking on" me. Never heard that one before. No, I'm not dunked upon. Actually Ed lived on a farm until he was 6 or 7 and was raised on raw milk. I lived in an apartment in Montreal and have always loathed drinking milk. Still in his mid-eighties, Ed could not have a cookie or a piece of cake without a glass of milk (always pasteurized). Yuk, I say. Our daughter lives as far off the grid as she can in downtown Toronto....she'd much rather live on the farm...and we actually live as far off the grid as possible in the middle of nowhere. And now Ed actually drinks oat milk. Again I say yuk. So I did read all the source material and have never tasted raw milk and have no intention of ever doing so. Thanks for going to so much trouble on my behalf.

@Ann_T your bread always looks gorgeous but these are really over the top! I would love to be able to get the same sourdough results that you do but because of my oven limitations I just can't get the heat that it needs. I do all my baking in a small countertop oven that only gets up to about 425° . I do have a full size range and oven but I seldom use it because of the heat factor and because I'm so old I've gotten too lazy to clear out everything that I had stored in it every time I want to bake. My little oven gets hot enough to do the basics so I have to live with that. Your new bread baker looks wonderful. How hot does your oven need to be for that? I hadn't finished my first loaf of yeasted gingerbread when I made the second one but the first one didn't go to waste. I Made bread pudding in the instant pot with what was left. It isn't terribly photogenic but it sure smells good. I'll serve it with my favorite caramel sauce, Caramel Silk in a Jar. I make this in the microwave. It is so easy and so good.

Bean sprouts, Mexican chorizo, and eggs with shallots, garlic, and red chiles. Fish sauce, cilantro, cumin, black pepper, and garam masala for flavor.

@Tropicalsenior, I agree with @blue_dolphin. That is a beautiful loaf. I love the idea of the ginger. It has been over two weeks since I baked bread. Fed my "scrapings" in the jar yesterday morning and made a batch of sourdough last night. Left on the counter overnight and baked this morning. I got to use my new cast iron bread baker. I had wanted one of these for a while, ever since I saw the Challenger a few years ago. BUT wasn't prepared to pay the price for the Challenger.. By the time the duty and the exchange was factored in, the Challenger price was over $700 Canadian. I found one that is almost identical to the Challenger, just slightly larger from Crucible Cookware Company and the price was $137.00 including free shipping. I also liked the fact that the Crucible had 6 handles rather than 4. I ordered directly from the company. Baked a large batard in the Crucible and a boule in the Netherton Spun Iron Cloche.

This is what I remember of the northern Caribbean this time of year. If your luck was like ours, years ago, the day you leave will be glorious - 80 degrees with the sun shining! In any case, your weather there is certainly better than at home right now! Here in NYC (not as bad as Boston) we have a high of a sweltering 32 degrees, coming off of a high of 17 the other day. But I wonder if the polar vortex that is affecting much of the US (including Florida) is affecting you now? I am part of a facebook group of mango tree growers - many are in Florida and the whole discussion right now is about wrapping trees to keep them from dying when it's below freezing... in Florida!!!

Adding, "seafood mushrooms" shouldn't be eaten raw. They won't do you any harm, but are bitter. Cooking tames the bitterness completely.

Raw milk has a handful of purported benefits that are poorly supported by research, vs an extremely well-documented history of causing significant illness and death. Pasteurization was/is one of the cornerstone public-health interventions (along with vaccines and improved sanitation) that brought down child mortality in particular from 100 per 1000 live births at the turn of the 20th century, to 0.77/1000 live births at the turn of the 21st (those are US numbers, because they're easier to find, but Canada's tracked pretty closely to the same percentages). I don't have any particular objection to a billionaire and his former-dancer wife setting up shop as salt-of-the-earth homesteaders, and selling their homegrown meats etc to their Instagram followers. It's a grift, but (shrug) if someone wants to order meat from them at a premium, vs the farmer down the road, that's their prerogative. Nothing to do with me. But I do get het up over the notion of deliberately promoting something that's known to be unsafe, whether as a money-maker (again, the dude could live very comfortably on his trust fund without needing to do this), or from ego, or whatever. The "schadenfreude" comes from knowing this guy could definitely have budgeted to hire a consultant and gotten it right the first time, but couldn't be bothered. I guess you could say that "putting lives in danger for fun and profit" rubs me the wrong way (anti-vaccine grifters also set me off badly, which probably will not be a shock to you given the foregoing). As it happens I'd just finished reading this article from Ars Technica when I came across a link to that People Magazine piece on social media, so the timing was especially apt. https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/ I've written a number of articles about outbreaks of foodborne illness during the time I've been freelancing, and there's been a pretty big body of research to pull from where raw milk is concerned. I'll drop a couple here, just 'cause, but this is one of my big hobby-horses so I'll exercise a bit of restraint. https://marlerclark.com/pdfs/raw-milk-jeh.pdf (The farm mentioned in this piece is especially influential, and has largely driven the rise in visibility for raw-milk consumption) https://www.livescience.com/health/viruses-infections-disease/new-report-details-one-of-the-biggest-raw-milk-related-outbreaks-in-recent-us-history ...and while this one isn't about people knowingly consuming raw milk, a mechanical failure allowed raw milk to mix with pasteurized milk, causing at least 12 known deaths, over 16,000 lab-diagnosed infections, and (after tracing the milk's distribution pattern) estimates of over 160,000 probable illnesses overall. https://theconversation.com/contaminated-milk-from-one-plant-in-illinois-sickened-thousands-with-salmonella-in-1985-as-outbreaks-rise-in-the-us-lessons-from-this-one-remain-true-254036 Please understand I'm not dunking on you, here. A lot of people are promoting the stuff, whether for mercenary reasons, or rote contrarianism, or because they've become True Believers; and obviously I don't know your daughter or her beliefs/influences on the matter. If you're interested, you can reach out in a private message and I can find some more links for you that either emphasize the science or actively debunk the main handful of bad-faith arguments that favor raw milk.

The weather never truly cleared yesterday. It remained cool and overcast for most of the day. I think we just picked a bad weather week for an island vacation. You cannot do anything about the weather though! We went for a walk around the neighborhood and ended up back at the beach during a brief period of sunshine. It was much too cold for us to swim, but some hardier souls were wading in the water. For dinner I had made a reservation at Ininfti at the Grace Bay Club. They are known for their wine list. I cannot drink anymore, but I thought it would be a treat for my husband to choose a really nice glass of wine from their extensive list. Getting over to the part of the island where the restaurant was took quite a while. Traffic is pretty bad on Turks and Caicos. There are no traffic lights, just double lane roundabouts, which leads to accidents, probably caused by tourists who don’t know how to drive in a roundabout. Anyway, once we got to the restaurant, the setting was lovely It was an open air setting on the beach, and it was cold! I was wearing a sweater and a jacket, and was still a bit chilled. The staff gave blankets to everyone to wrap up in. The menu, a bit hard to read unless you zoom in. Cocktail/mocktail We decided to share the tuna crispy rice and the toro roll They were not bad, but not the best version of either we have had either. For dinner husband had the lamb chops and I had the chili crab spaghetti. I was hoping it would be spicy, but it was not, at all. We decided to try a dessert The butterscotch tart. The coconut sorbet was very good. The tart itself reminded us of the tarts they make on St. John. Somehow they manage to fit triple the sugar you think would be able to go into such a small dessert. We were very glad we shared it. The sun is actually shining today so we are going out to a different part of the island to explore.

Yeah, I see it more as supplemental than the main coffee source. Great for that, IMO, and yours,too,it seems

So I looked up the item and then looked up the term and am not sure why you used the term with the item. We don't drink raw milk but our daughter has in the past and would no doubt do so if it were available to her.

Food recalls, "grifter schadenfreude" edition: https://people.com/ballerina-farm-halts-sale-of-raw-milk-after-failed-health-test-report-11897521

Thanks, @Shel_B. Yes, I suspect it will be more of an occasional use thing for me when I have guests. For example, if my sis and BIL spend the night and should happen to get up in the morning before I do, it is infinitely easier for them to pop in a capsule and make a cup rather than have to put the kettle on to heat water, grind the coffee beans, get the pot ready, etc. I may even house this downstairs where the guest room will be.

Duh! It says above it's "impervious to water splashes". What is FCC?