Smithy

I can't find my original post about this, but I found a vacuum-packed bag in the freezer labeled "Boneless Pork Shoulder, 2 lb 1-1/2 oz" with the notation "131F 3.5 hrs". It, er, also is dated April 2022! But it looked good, except that I maybe detected some frost developing in the bag. Out it came, and into the refrigerator. Today I finished thawing it in another sous vide bath at 131F. It probably got about 2 hours' worth but that was just me doing other chores and figuring it would all come up to temperature. I wish I'd taken a picture of the sealed bag after thawing and before opening. There was 1 to 2 cups' worth of juice. I tasted it, saved some, gave the dog a taste. Maybe I'll use it for gravy, maybe not. I took a slice and made it into a grilled dinner sandwich shown here. The rest of it you can see peeking out from the bag before I rewrapped it and put it into the refrigerator. Why exactly I did this particular work is difficult to tell now. My husband was still alive then, and we had different ideas about how pork roast should be cooked (his was good, but he considered it the One and Only Way whereas I liked to experiment.) We liked pork sandwiches. Maybe that's what I had in mind. Tonight's dinner sandwich is good, but this would also lend itself to a quick reheat with gravy from the drippings. At any rate: 131F for 3.5 hours gave me the exact texture and doneness that I wanted. If I can find my notebook, I'll enter it!

Griddled dinner sandwich made from a slice of sous vide pork roast (more information here). The condiments are mayo, mustard, butter on the outside, pepper jack cheese all before griddling. After griddling, I added spinach and sauerkraut. Delicious. Filling. I've eaten about half, and the rest may be tomorrow's lunch. The potato salad comes from a recipe in Samin Nosrat's Good Things (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I didn't have the dill or celery she specified, so I settled for quick-pickled red onion. More discussion about that recipe here.

Following up on this, I'll note that when the potatoes thawed they became very spongy and released a lot of moisture. The photo below is of the spuds, cut up to be boiled for a potato salad, with the dark bits cut away. I do not recommend the "freeze in the subzero garage" method of preservation although the potatoes still seem to be edible. I'll report on the resulting potato salad elsewhere. Edited to add: the resulting potato salad is good, but I think mainly because of the dressing. I think the potatoes have lost more of their flavor at this point. Still, as a vessel for a good salad dressing they aren't bad!

I went out to the garage just now (-10F) and loosened a few potatoes for cooking today. At this point they're so frozen that they're comical: when they clack against each other, they sound exactly like billiard balls!

Lunch today is a very similar salad to yesterday's: roasted vegetables, cooked chickpeas, and (this is a change) a few bites of Juusto cheese, all gently reheated in the microwave oven, then tossed with spinach and dressed with the above-mentioned Creamy Sesame Ginger Dressing. What's especially interesting is that the dressing is even better now that it's had time to sit in the refrigerator overnight. What a delightful blend of flavors! (The rewarmed Juusto helps, too.)

Do you mean the curing involved the spices you named, or that's what came after the cure? More to the point...how did you cure that salmon? It looks delicious.

@YvetteMT, sometimes, nothing but a good beef chuck roast will do. And yours looks like just the ticket!

I'm certainly seeing what you mean about needing to make stuff in advance and then having it ready to go for...something. Today I made the Creamy Sesame-Ginger Dressing, then realized I didn't quite know what to do with it. By late afternoon, after I'd finished chores, I was hangry. Still didn't know what to do with that dressing! But I had a bunch of roasted vegetables, and put it over them. Quite good. More detail in the Salad topic.

I spent a little time today making a new-to-me salad dressing, and a lot of time shoveling snow and doing other outside chores, and when I came inside I was too hangry to think straight. Dinner was a sandwich with salami, turkey, and 2 kinds of cheese, griddled on my panini press, and a roasted vegetable salad described here. Unfussy. Easy. Appropriate for dinner when the time arrives and I haven't prepared. Interestingly enough, while I was looking for items with which to make a rice dish using those roasted vegetables and some kind of meat, I excavated packages of meat and fish that definitely will be making appearances here before too many more days. But none of them was thawed, and I needed quick and easy tonight.

I didn't get to that today after all, although I tried some of the dressing with mashed potatoes from the refrigerator and found it was a worthy lunch. I did start to pull potatoes from my frozen bucket in the garage, but they are so hard-frozen together that I figure I'll go after them with a chisel tomorrow. 🙂 What I did do today was make her Creamy Sesame Ginger Dressing, with the intent of having more than one dressing available in the refrigerator. After that I worked on outside chores, and when I came back inside (having given up on the potatoes) I was HANGRY. And not sure what to eat, but it needed to be quick. I pulled together a salad of already-roasted vegetables -- handy things to have in the refrigerator -- and chickpeas, heated them in the microwave, tossed in some spinach, and dressed with that sesame-ginger dressing. The dressing is another keeper. I had doubts about it when I was tasting it by itself, but atop those vegetables it's a fine dressing indeed.

Wait, not to be nitpicky but wasn't it only 7 years ago? See here.

I'm sure they add to the production costs, and hardbound books have heavy competition. Still, they're a nice touch and for my tastes they add value, both utilitarian and aesthetic.

Well. I love the look and layout of this book, and one of the small details that I find charming is the ribbon bookmark. Except I wish there were at least 2 of them. (I already have Post-It Notes (TM) sticking out of a bunch of pages. On the other hand, her earlier book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat doesn't have ANY ribbons. I wish it did.

I thought I'd read this somewhere, but couldn't remember for sure and made a full batch of the House Dressing tonight! I don't think I'll have any trouble using it up, though. 😀 It's a nice dressing, and a nice change from my usual vinaigrette.

Oh, that totally makes sense! And as it happens, I have a glut of potatoes right now. Thanks for mentioning it!

First attempt at making and using the House Dressing from Samin Nosrat's Good Things (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I didn't bother trying any of her salad suggestions, as such: the salad is spinach, olives, tomatoes, a hard boiled egg, mushrooms and croutons. The "House Dressing" is a honey/mustard sherry vinaigrette. One of the interesting steps about it is that you finely dice a shallot, rinse it, then soak in the vinegar and a bit of warm water for a couple of minutes before whisking in the rest of the ingredients. I think the soak helped tame the shallot a bit. When I tasted the dressing by itself to adjust seasonings, I thought it would all be a bit much (too much vinegar, too much shallot) but atop the salad it tastes wonderful. I'll have no trouble using this batch. Edited to add: @blue_dolphin links to the dressing recipe in this post.

Do you think the squid ink pasta brings more than color to the dish?

@Shelby, I have to laugh about the boudin. I've tried it a few times, purchased in Cajun or Cajun-adjacent territory, and will admit that I've never really taken to it. When I saw your photo above I thought, "hey, that looks pretty good!" Now I know it doesn't count. 😄 (Edited to add: your disappointment is probably like mine the few times I've tried chorizo made in northern Minnesota!)

I wish I'd remembered (or looked for) this topic last October, when I received a 5-gallon bucket of russet potatoes! My DIL and her family had been out to a potato patch after the harvester had gone through, and they quickly scooped up buckets and bags of the things. I've been working away at my stash since then and marveling at the sturdiness of the potatoes. I didn't think to try burying them in sand, though. They're just in the same bucket they came in. Since I'm in northern Minnesota, they're quite frozen now. There may be some degradation in quality, but as long as I wash and process them from frozen they're holding up pretty well.

They're sitting in a 5-gallon bucket in an unheated garage. Here, at this time of year, it means they're all frozen. I mean, really frozen. When I bring some in to wash them I get a glaze of ice on the exterior when the water hits them! There's some degradation in texture -- that is, as I scrub them some of the peel comes loose as that layer thaws -- and there may be some loss of flavor by now, but it's an interesting experiment. They're certainly edible. Incidentally, these are russets. I've no idea whether more waxy potatoes would behave the same way. Edited to add: I've just rediscovered a topic on potato storage, here. I wish I'd thought of it last October!

I'm still trying to work through the bucket of potatoes given me last October. Sometime last week I boiled a bunch and mashed them, peels and all. I had the idea of making potato madeleines (see this old topic) but decided I didn't have the energy for such fussiness. Besides, they probably aren't smooth enough with all that peel. So...potato ball fritters! I rolled them in a mixture of bread crumbs, corn meal, garlic salt and oregano, then deep fried in my Fry Baby. I know I've shown this before but I'm showing it again. The "dipping sauce" that's working out best is mayonnaise and Boursin with garlic and cheese. The pictures aren't pretty, but the flavor is good. Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and not nearly as watery as the original mash.

This is a paraphrase of Mario Batali's Molto Italiano (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). The recipe name is Red Cabbage Braised in Vinegar (p.424) and I have a note on it that it's "Excellent!" although I confess I'd forgotten all about it. Cut a medium head of red cabbage into 1/2" strips. Thinly slice a medium red onion. Saute the onion and 2T caraway seeds in hot olive oil until the onion is soft. Add the cabbage, 2T sugar, and 1/2c red vinegar; stir; cover, and cook until the cabbage is tender. He says that's about 20 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. He says it can be eaten warm or cool. I have no idea how well it would take to being frozen.

That does look good. I wonder how it would fare if frozen and then thawed and reheated sometime during the recovery from surgery? Edited to add: @blue_dolphin, you and I posted at the same time, so I'll ask you why you think it would be amenable. (I may try it myself!)

Welp. It's another bust, as far as I'm concerned. I bought this with a mixture of misgivings and hope. On the plus side: citrus! garlic! chicken! easy cooking and disposal! On the misgivings side: black beans and plantain...not that I actively dislike either, but they aren't on my list of favorite flavors. I'm sorry to report that the entire dish was on the gummy side. Did I simply overcook it, so the rice was overdone? I don't know. But I didn't especially like the plantains, and black beans are my least favorite of the legumes, and there was the gumminess of the overall dish. Any pleasure I might have gotten from the chicken and garlic was lost. Oh, and I neglected to gussy it up with cilantro as shown in the box photo, even though I just came from the grocery store and have some fresh. I ended up salting it, to drown out the sweetness of the plantains. I'm sure the sweetness would appeal to a lot of people, but it doesn't to me. On the bright side: here's another dish I tried once, for not much money, and won't need to try again. And hey, cleanup is easy!

I suspect you're very good at making sauces! Matching a sauce to the dish in question may be an issue, and I'm not sure I can help much with that. I need to explain that I'm on a crunchy cabbage slaw kick right now, thanks to @blue_dolphin and to my best friend, so cooked cabbage isn't really at the top of my mind. I think I could cheerfully live on a nice, crunchy slaw (cabbage, celery, carrots, radishes, peanuts or walnuts thrown in) with a good dressing for many days. That said, and given that you're looking at cooked dishes to freeze, thaw and reheat, I'd give some thought to flavor compatibilities and personal tastes. Would you like beef and cabbage together? I don't find the idea especially appealing, but if you do then the demi-glace might be an idea. Is the cabbage supposed to be the star, or a supporting actor? If the star, then I think the first two sauce ideas sound like good ways to gussy it up. I do think the potatoes and Gruyere sound more like a way to hide the cabbage than to celebrate it. There are recipes also for braised cabbage, with or without chicken. If that appeals, I'll post the one I have. It takes the dish into the acidic region thanks to vinegar.