chromedome

Milk that's on the turn is already slightly acidified by the bacteria, and when you heat it you create perfect curdling conditions (essentially, you're starting to make cheese). You're usually better off baking with it than trying to cook it.

Maltaise=Hollandaise with orange zest and juice. Traditionally made with blood oranges, but tourism season here doesn't coincide with blood orange season. I thought of it as a tip of the hat to that traditional duck/orange pairing.

When I was alone I'd mix up a standard batch of a dozen (baking powder version, not soda) and freeze the cut-but-unbaked biscuits in a ziploc bag. When I wanted one, I'd throw it straight from the freezer into my toaster oven.

It was a lazy Sunday, and we had breakfast (or I suppose, brunch) for dinner. Eggs Bennie made with smoked salmon is one of my sweetheart's favorites, so I make it for her at least once most months. It's actually got something of a history for us. I first met her as a customer, several years ago. My restaurant was in a small seaside in in a remote fishing village, and she and her then-husband stayed at the inn while house-hunting in the area. It was the end of the season and they were often my only guests, so I served them myself and we became well acquainted. The house they bought was just up the road from where my late wife and I lived at the time, and we all came to be good friends. She and her husband came up regularly on Sundays for the brunch, which included three variations on Eggs Bennie: The canonical version; one with duck-breast prosciutto and Maltaise rather than Hollandaise; and one with my house-cured gravlax. She liked the gravlax version, and ordered it every time. These many years later, after she and her husband split and I was widowed, we are together and I'm still making it for her. Tonight's edition had steamed broccoli and "smashed" baby new potatoes fried with onions.

Not exactly a thrift store thing, but as noted on a thread in the baking forum I scored a Zojirush BBCC-X20 used for $40. Not pennies-on-the-dollar, you understand, but I'll take it nonetheless.

They work amazingly well. For the first couple of days you'll still seem to have lots of flies, and then suddenly they'll almost completely disappear. You'll get a new hatch a few days later, but the same traps (unless they're totally clogged with wee corpses) will dispense with those as well. After that, just set 'em out as needed.

No, but I'll be curious to hear how it turns out. I suspect that, given the cookie dough will be much denser, it will sink to the bottom, but I've been wrong a time or two.

I hear you on the haze of fruit flies, @JoNorvelleWalker. Do you know about Truvia traps?

I love 'em all. Alas, they remain solitary pleasures for the most part. My ex-wife, late wife, current girlfriend and kids wouldn't have 'em on a bet.

I hear you. My favorite part of Jacques Pepin's memoirs was his description of his mother circling the town's market, then aggressively haggilng over the most "suspect" produce to get the lowest possible price. That, my friends, is old-school frugality. When my kids were little, there were many times when all of my produce came from the discount cart. I've always maintained that culinarily, time and money exist on a continuum. The more you have of one, the less you need of the other.

I should think a Sobey's there would be able to order it in for you, even if they don't regularly stock it.

...especially in light of today's DDoS attacks, thought to have been fueled by poorly-secured IoT devices. Boy, I just can't wait until all cars are connected in real time, too...

Dinner tonight was my childhood in a bowl...rabbit stew, and a fresh-baked biscuit. Not the prettiest thing I make, but tasty.

Really? I see beef tongue quite regularly at Superstore. It's whole or half, still in the skin, but they have it most weeks. I've only ever slow-cooked it whole and then peeled and sliced it once it was tender, but I've done the paper-thin thing with beef heart (which is similarly tough) so it makes perfect sense.

Oh, I did. I did.

Oh, I never actually bake in the machine. I just use 'em to do the grunt work, then I pan the dough and bake it conventionally. ETA: I should probably expand on that. I've found in the past that bread baked in the machine was unsatisfactory, and haven't done it in years. Instead I make a single batch of dough in my conventional machine, a double batch in the horizontal machine, and combine them. With the recipe I use for my daily sandwich bread, that yields five small 1-lb. loaves. I've not used a Zojirushi before, nor has anyone I know, so I'll probably make the experiment of baking in the Zo by way of a compare and contrast.

Elephant garlic is a whole 'nother thing. This is plain ol' Allium sativum, a specific hardneck cultivar called "Music" that grows very well here in Atlantic Canada (most of the commercial growers here plant it). My father's been hand-selecting the largest and most vigorous bulbs for a long time, so he now has his own sub-cultivar that's finely tuned to his own soil and microclimate. It's actually very close to the size of elephant garlic, but with the "full-fat" pungency of the real thing. The cloves aren't quite as long as those of elephant garlic, from top to bottom, but are otherwise just as plump.

...and, it's now in my kitchen. Maiden batch tomorrow.

Here you go...

A followup to my earlier post about garlic from my father's garden...I had occasion to fetch out a fresh bulb tonight while I was cooking. Here's the pictorial evidence:

I took my sweetie's oldest granddaughter (age 5) up the block to an abandoned apple tree, and filled a couple of shopping bags with small but surprisingly good apples. The young 'un, of course, wanted to throw away anything with the slightest imperfection. She decided we should make apple muffins out of them, so I obliged.

Yup. For me, this portion of the discussion could just as easily go in the "Never Again Will I..." thread.

I'm with you on the garlic thing. My father grows his own and has been selecting for size for 20-odd years, so one clove from his equals 2 to 3 (or more) from supermarket garlic. I've gotten up to 1/4 cup of finely minced garlic from one clove. Makes "far too much" far easier to achieve.

I should point out that not all hotel restaurants are run by the hotel. Company-owned spaces are often just there as an adjunct of the primary (room-renting) business. Independent operators leasing space in a hotel, as I was, are more motivated to turn a profit/attract a clientele in their own right.

Sometimes it's good to set a project aside for a little while, and come back to it with fresh eyes. You never know what your subconscious will come up with while you're working on other things.