Smithy

I'm on their mailing list and have been considering buying from them. I like their sales pitch. I haven't bought anything from them yet, though.

What should one do if the bread dough absolutely, positively refuses to develop gluten strands? I was using a sourdough starter - well refreshed - from a local restaurant. The flour was a combination of (admittedly old) King Arthur Bread Flour and artisan Whole Wheat flour from Barrio Bread in Tucson. Does the age of flour affect more than taste? After I allowed the mixed dough to loll about like some overprivileged child, with the occasional prodding and folding, I finally decided that hours had been enough time. I worked vital wheat gluten into the mix. I went about my business. Later, when I saw that dough continuing to be slack, I kneaded it and worked in more flour. Eventually, it went into a very hot Dutch oven that had preheated in the big kitchen oven. The flavor is good. The texture would be better if I'd been more patient. (I DID punch out the big bubbles during the last kneading.) My question still remains: if one's dough refuses to advance past the shaggy stage, despite hours of mixing and resting with good flour and a good scale and a recipe from a class, where should that person look for improvement?

Tonight's dinner came from the second of the meal kits I purchased yesterday: Laab Moo from the New Scenic Cafe, a delightful restaurant near where we live. I had already started chopping the romaine lettuce into our typical bite-sized bits when I remembered that larb/laab/larp/lahp (according to what I've read) is intended to be scooped into lettuce leaves and eaten out of hand. Not going to happen in this household. I kept chopping, but I won't present this dinner as a typical laab. Whatever. We liked it. The flavors were great!

Thank you! We got it at Williams-Sonoma a long time ago, under the pattern name "Bistro" (or maybe "Cafe"). Over time some of the handles began to crack. By then WS only carried it in obvious plastic, colors black, white, maybe blue?.... I found a replacement at Chefs Catalog a few years back. Chefs called it Bistro.

Dinner from a kit last night: my first kit service, ordered from The New Scenic Cafe, a local restaurant. You can read more about the kits I ordered in this post, if you wish. I ordered their soup and salad kit, which doesn't offer soup choices ("you just have to trust us!"). The soups were generous offerings of Indian-Spiced Tomato soup, and Creamy Red Pepper Curry soup. The salad was easily assembled, from some of the best romaine lettuce I've had in a while. At random, I picked the Indian-Spiced Tomato Soup and gave him the Creamy Red Pepper Soup. As it happened each of us preferred our own soup. What a great marriage! The bread was a couple of their sourdough buns. I should have reheated them in dry heat, I fear; the steam from the CSO seems to have toughened the crust. Flavor was good, though. Dead easy, and delicious!

I've never tried a meal kit service before. Blue Apron and some of the others had interesting-looking recipes and offerings, but I never saw the point of generating that extra waste. Yesterday, I tried my first meal kit as part of our shelter-in-place-but-help-the-local-restaurants plan. The New Scenic Cafe, up the shore from Duluth, offers meal kits rather than take-out. I ordered two: Soup-and-Salad for last night, and Laab Moo for tonight. Here's the haul as it was loaded into my car: I also requested sourdough starter, which is available for free, since I threw mine away in a fit of pique a year or so ago. The soup and salad kit was quite generous. I looked at those soups and that salad kit and thought, "we won't get through all this in one night!" We didn't. No worries! It was all good. I was especially impressed by the quality of the lettuce. We usually buy romaine hearts, and had just opened a package earlier in the day. This romaine was leagues better than our grocery store pick! Instructions are included. Heating soup is not difficult, nor is making a salad. That was the point of last night's selections, since Friday night is our news-junkie TV watching night. I didn't do the bread any favors, alas, the Cuisinart Steam Oven's steam simply made good crusty bread tough. Flavor was good, though. I'll post the actual dinner in the Dinner topic. Tonight: Laab Moo. Despite over a decade of reading about Laab here and deciding twice or thrice to try it, I never have. Tonight is the night.

I made asparagus soup the other day. It was delicious. My photographs didn't do it justice, though. I posted about it here on the dinner topic. I'll make it again and post a better photo later. In the meantime, I want to recommend the recipe for Asparagus Soup, courtesy of @JAZ and @Dave the Cook: Asparagus Soup.

We started a similar topic here: New options for online learning and socializing. Feel free to add to the list of noteworthy chefs and their courses!

Amazon has quite a selection of them. Here are three: OXO 1241881 Silicone Spoon Spatula, White/Black Di Oro Seamless Series Pro Grade Silicone Spoon Spatula - BPA Free Pro-Grade Non-Stick 600ºF Rachael Ray 55780 Silicone Spoonula, Red I also see them around in kitchen shops - at least, I did the last time I was in one - and in various discount stores. I don't have any specific recommendations for brands.

@Ann_T, it looks wonderful as usual. I'm especially interested in the Peri-Peri garlic mayonnaise. Did you make it from scratch? Did you have Peri-Peri sauce (as I do, in some cabinet somewhere) and simply add it to the mayonnaise? Some instructions would be welcome.

Can you / he be more specific about that citrus basil mix? It sounds like an interesting combination.

Most of the food in this topic is plated so beautifully that I feel like a piker when I post. Nonetheless I have a couple of dinner successes to share. First up: prime rib. In one May week my darling and I celebrate both our birthdays and our anniversary. His daughter decided to recognize the event - his birthday in particular - with a massive gift: nearly 14 pounds of prime rib! This would be a marvelous party food. Under other circumstances the entire family would have been here to celebrate with us. Since they weren't, I cut that rib into smaller, more manageable chunks. The first prime rib dinner came last weekend. Unctuous. Tender. Fatty. Delicious. The photo makes it look overcooked, but blame the camera and photographer; there was a lot of "rare" in that meat and we have leftovers! The accompaniment was smashed potatoes drizzled with ramp oil. A less-than-satisfying dinner came on another night when we tried yet again to cook country-style ribs in the slow cooker, bathed in barbecue sauce. I've never been a big fan of this recipe, but it used to be one of his favorites. Somehow, sometime over the years, either the slow cooker temperatures have changed or the pork has gotten too lean. We were disappointed again: dry, cottony meat with little flavor. I was too dispirited to take a photo. Tonight, however, I dealt with the leftovers: chopped the meat into small bites, heated them slowly in the leftover juices and a touch more sauce, and served over rice. Not bad. I added hot sauce and salt to my portion, to cut down on the sweetness of the barbecue sauce; he loved his as it was. The REAL star of tonight's dinner comes courtesy of a discussion in April about what to do with asparagus ends. I've been saving the ends in the freezer. The latest batch of asparagus I bought wasn't great, and it needed to be used before it got any worse. It was time to try one of several suggestions, and I opted for @Dave the Cook's suggestion of soup. This is a terrific recipe and I'm glad I finally tried it. It was the big hit of the evening for both of us: better than the asparagus alone would have been, and quite flavorful. There is, however, the matter of plating....or bowling, in this case... Of course a garnish would have helped. Asparagus tips (none survived). Croutons. Fresh herbs. Something! But no, you'll just have to look at a creamy, silky, faintly green soup that is not pea soup. For the recipe and a proper photo, go here.

I think this is the post in question.

Sorry these questions got lost in the shuffle! Kosher salt is a fairly coarse salt. It gets its name not because it is a kosher material but because it's used for drawing blood out of meat...i.e. for koshering the meat. For more information see this article in kitchn.com.

@Shelby this is strictly free association because of the name, since I haven't tried the black caviar beans. Would they work in cowboy caviar?

I went with The Saffron Tales and the Smoke, Roots...Appalachian cookbook. When exactly I think I'll read, much less cook from, the extensive digital library I've already accumulated is a mystery. Does that stop me from looking, and sometimes pulling the trigger? Nope.

So did I.

Those are some great links. I didn't know the source of the word "fajita" so I learned something, and the Acapulco web site looks very informative. Casablanca looks like it would have been a lot of fun. Another restaurant I never had the pleasure of knowing, because I'd moved away by the time it opened.

@liamsaunt: Curry powder in a CSA box! That would never have occurred to me!

We're Philistines (forgive the cross-cultural reference) when it comes to excuses for holidays. Nonetheless, I visited the local butcher shop and found their chicken, prepped for fajitas. It took some fine-tuning (finer chopping; more vegetables, juice and sauce) to satisfy me, but for party food that turned into party-for-two-food it wasn't bad. We'll ignore the tortillas for any leftovers. Rice will be grand. A microwave and spoon may suffice.

It sounds delicious! It makes me think of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean food, which have quite a bit of overlap.

Sorry, not my speed!

The discussion about crumpets finally inspired me to try making my own. It was a bit of an adventure. It's so long since I needed to sift anything that I couldn't remember where I stored my sifter. The search had a side benefit: I found a food mill I'll need in a few days before I remembered where the sifter is kept. For a bit more about the process, and for a link to the recipe I used (thanks to @Franci) see this post. Here's the finished result: When I bite into a crumpet slathered with butter and said butter squirts me in the face, I figure I've gotten the holes right.

@Franci: thanks for that recommendation, many years ago! I got around to making crumpets using that recipe, and they are quite good. It's fun watching the bubbles start to form, and then set. Here's the action, and most of the finished batch: And here's the money shot. I've eaten two, slathered with butter. Very rich. Delicious. How shall I store these things? Wrapped tightly and frozen?

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for pointing me back to the pertinent info.