Smithy

My best friend has been visiting, and tonight was our last night to try new recipes together. We chose another New York Times recipe: Eggplant Chickpea Salad with Olive Dressing. (The recipe should be unlocked in this link.) Basically, you cut chunks of eggplant into 1" cubes, add a couple cans of chickpeas that have been drained and patted dry. Put them on a sheetpan, toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and crushed fennel seeds, and roast at 450F until the eggplant is soft and the chickpeas are starting to crisp. In the meantime, make a vinaigrette of lemon juice and olive oil, and mix that with chopped olives and finely chopped shallot or the equivalent amount of red onion. Serve the lot over chopped or torn lettuce. Top that with crumbled feta cheese and, if you wish, yogurt. (The recipe says "drizzle" with the yogurt, but it calls for full-fat yogurt. I only have Greek yogurt, which isn't amenable to drizzling. So it goes.) Garnish with herbs if you have them. We both liked it, to different degrees, and with different adjustments. She thought the fennel seed was overpowering, and she would prefer rice or beans to the lettuce. I loved the lettuce and didn't find the seasoning too strong, except in a couple of bites. Maybe we didn't mix things well enough. She would have added more roasted vegetables (red bell peppers, for instance). We think that a tahini sauce would do better than the yogurt, and we both thought it needed crunch of some sort: toasted walnuts or pine nuts. A trick I learned from her tonight was to ease the punch of fresh onion by soaking it in vinegar for at least 10 minutes, then draining it, before adding to a recipe as fresh onion. Without that vinegar soak she gets a violent headache although she loves the flavor. With the vinegar soak she gets the flavor without the headache. I'll keep that in mind. I do think it tamed the onion's punch without robbing it of flavor.

I am very, very impressed with what you're doing and how well you're doing it! Since you're looking for ideas, and given the photos you've posted, I wonder whether you've done any sort of baked potato casserole, with cheese, cream, even maybe an appropriate meat? Here's where I got the idea for something I wanted to try duplicating sometime, and this recipe looked like a good starting point for my attempts at duplication. (I still haven't gotten to it.) What about macaroni and cheese, with ham if you can find it? Tuna and noodle casserole? My best friend and her husband have cooked on occasion for a homeless shelter in their area. One she remembers is called "Dump and Bake Chicken Alfredo". They literally dumped all the ingredients into the pan, baked and served. She remembers chunks of raw chicken, pasta, milk, and either cream of chicken or cream of mushroom soup. (She's looking right now for the recipe to see what the cooking time and temperature is, but not finding it.) There is a meatball and marinara sauce version that starts with cooked meatballs. She says that when they've made that dish they've assembled it, baked and been ready to serve all within an hour. Edited to add: she hasn't found the chicken recipe, but she sent me a meatball and rice recipe. I've attached a PDF of it. Dump and Bake Italian Meatball and Rice Casserole.PDF

We cut potatoes into chunks, usually nuked them a few minutes to give them a head start, then lined the bottom of a Dutch oven or slow cooker with them. We put the seasoned pork roast atop the potatoes, then packed enough chunks of potato around the edges to keep the pork from contacting the sides of the pot. The seasoning was generally one packet of the Onion Soup mix; then sometimes we'd pour another packet over the whole thing. (That depended on the whim of the day and the size of the pork roast.) The potato chunk sizes varied over the years; we ranged from slightly larger than 1" chunks (say, cutting a spud into eighths) down to 1/2" dice. If the chunks were small dice we'd skip the microwave step. At the most we'd add a cup of water to the bottom of the pot; usually the meat itself would release enough moisture to cook the potatoes and make a tasty gravy. I think we experimented with finely chopped onion, and maybe with chunks of carrot or celery, thrown into the mix, but at its simplest it was just the pork and potatoes with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix...which is now called Lipton's Recipe Secrets, incidentally. In our earliest days together he did this all in a Crock Pot, then took the extra step of making gravy from the defatted juices after the cooking was complete. In later years we skipped that step. As I recall it was the classic gravy process: make a roux, pour the defatted juices into the pan, stir until it started to thicken, season with Worcestershire sauce. In later years we just enjoyed the juices without the gravy. You can see the setup in this picture. You can also see how he set up using the Crock Pot in this picture. The main difference there was that he added sauerkraut after the potatoes and meat had mostly cooked, and he did not make gravy. I'm pretty sure he didn't use the onion soup mix in this case.

Some fine word-wrangling there, sir. 🙂 As I mentioned a few posts earlier, my best friend is visiting and we've had several dinners to try. Last night, and today for lunch, it was the Spicy Chickpeas with Sundried Tomatoes and Olives, from @JAZ's Super-Easy Instant Pot Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I'm afraid my photo of the leftovers this time is no better than previous photos (so I won't show it), but the stuff is darned good. Harissa gives it a nice citrusy kick, and the recipe is really very easy. I think I prefer it with my own cooked chickpeas rather than canned, but in a hurry the canned are fine.

@rotuts, what do you think of it? I have been unimpressed with the bourbon barrel aged wines. I like many wines; I generally like bourbon; however, the combination has left me cold.

My darling and I liked to split the roast into 3 pieces: one boneless; one with the bone; and one bunch of pieces already cut into chunks to be marinated, skewered and cooked as souvlaki. The souvlaki (kebabs) were my favorite treatment because I liked the marinade and I liked serving the meat and sauce over a pilaf. My darling, who was more of the meat-and-potatoes persuasion, generally did one roast atop potatoes, all seasoned with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix. The other he'd usually do with potatoes again, but add sauerkraut toward the end. Each of those setups would give us leftovers for at least another meal apiece. On one or two occasions we had the boneless portion cut into thick pork steaks, then baked them in a breading. Here are a few examples, possibly with a repeat: Pork roast and potatoes The way we had it cut (never mind muscle groups) Pork roast with onion soup

My best friend is visiting from San Diego, and we have a series of delicious recipes queued up for dinners while she's here. Last night it was a New York Times recipe for Lemony Greek Chicken, Spinach and Potato Stew (gift article in the link). Delicious, and easy. Ground chicken, onions, garlic, lemon juice, chicken broth, frozen spinach, and seasonings (oregano, dill, rosemary, salt, red pepperf). Topped with crumbles of feta cheese. To go with it, we chopped celery, red bell pepper, red cabbage, and kalamata olives, and tossed them with her preferred vinaigrette: red wine vinegar, red balsamic vinegar, olive oil, mustard, garlic. It was all easy and delicious, and we had plenty of leftovers. She's having some for lunch as I write this, and notes that the stew has thickened noticeably. Sorry the pictures didn't come out well, but the dinner is worth commemorating anyway. Edited to add: the flavors are even better, and the stew thicker, the next day.

Yes, the pattern on that boule is striking!

If no jaccard, can you just pound the heck out of the duck breast with a meat mallet?

Thanks for the warning about the sweetness. Is your recipe as posted for a half batch or a full batch?

Helping @Tropicalsenior out here, because for some reason her link doesn't go directly where it should: Gourmet Mustard.

Martha Stewart has elicited commentary here for years, both on the pro- and con (heh) side. Whether you like her or not, you must admit that she's been a prolific cookbook writer. 101 cookbooks! Who knew? I certainly didn't. The Washington Post recently published an article stating that she's going to re-release her very first book, Entertaining, long after it's been out of print. The idea is that the 20-somethings now might get as much enjoyment and inspiration from it as those who were 20-something when it first came out in 1982. I have admired the photos of spreads she's put on, and in my copy of The Cake Bible (Rose Levy Berenbaum) there is an admirable wedding cake designed and executed by Ms. Stewart. Nonetheless I've never aspired to be her or to emulate her. Heck...I look around at my house at this moment and wonder whether I'll manage to get the floors vacuumed before my best friend arrives for a visit tomorrow! I therefore found this article in the Washington Post quite entertaining. After 101 books, Martha Stewart is re-pitching her first one to Gen Z by Jura Koncius I've posted the link as a gift article, but some of you have indicated in other posts that the paywall is insurmountable. With that in mind, I've copied and here pasted the paragraph I found especially entertaining, about Ms. Koncius's first party. She had settled on a menu titled "Cocktails for 25". She wrote: I can see myself all too clearly in that incident. Anyone else going to look into the book? Or do you already have the original?

That looks like something I'd enjoy, but I bet I won't be able to find it at the local stores. One of the things that frustrated eG's last attempt at collective wine tasting was we rarely could find the exact same wine, due to distribution vagaries. Still, I'll look for this one. Or did you bring it back from overseas?

It's quite possible that I didn't taste "the right" (for my tastes) zins when I was there. Years ago, my darling and I and 3 other couples liked to get together for wine tastings and dinners at each others' homes. One of our members, by far the wealthiest and best-traveled, asserted that no wine was worth purchasing, in his opinion, unless it cost at least $20 and was from France. His sole exception was Ridge. By the time our group got around to zinfandels, we'd begun doing blind tests: one host member would bag the bottles and the other host member would number them, so that we could all enjoy the mystery of ranking and tasting. Our zin testing set included Sutter Home at $4.99, Ridge at, oh, $28? and two zins priced in the mid-teens. We all ranked them according to our preferences. I forget which one was got the most votes for "best" but I think it was one of the mid-teens bottles, probably Seghesio's Old Vines Zin. I knew at once the Sutter Home; ro me it tasted like Buzz Saw in a Bottle. But THAT one was our wine snob's favorite! He was very gracious when the bottles were revealed and he saw he'd picked the cheapest of the bunch. 😆

Western maybe, but not Montana. My mother used to do that same salad, using iceberg lettuce. i don't know whether she brought that idea with her from Florida, where she'd grown up, or learned it in California, where my father grew up and where we lived.