Smithy

I need to ask: is this what's meant by "avocado toast" in restaurants, or do they gussy it up somehow? This is my typical breakfast. The Spike seasoning to the side is my preferred seasoned salt for avocado, with a squeeze of lemon. Lately I've been cutting back on the salt and lemon, and enjoying the simple mellow goodness of the avocado on its own.

Thank you very much for bringing this topic back up. I've had the print book for years, and I recently purchased the Kindle version when it was on sale. I need to explore it all more. Her panade recipes were major revelations for me, and of course the roasted chicken is superb. There's a lot more that I need to explore, and you're giving me inspiration to do so.

Yesterday I went to lunch with some new friends at The Press Cafe & Bistro in Yuma, Arizona. The place has been around a while, but this was my first visit. I ordered one of their pressed sandwiches, "The Picacho": hummus, artichoke, avocado, feta, tomato, red onion and baby greens pressed between hot focaccia. It was delicious, and more than I could reasonably eat. I brought half the sandwich home. The remains begged to be reheated for breakfast. I got out my cast iron skillet, oiled and started heating it, and contemplated the sandwich. Most of the avocado had fallen out and been eaten during yesterday's lunch, so I added fresh slices to get the balance right. Breakfast was just as unwieldy and delicious as lunch was yesterday. The combination of ingredients was outstanding. I'm adding it to my list of sandwich variants.

Welcome, smithgirl! As Darienne says above, this is a great place to ask questions and get answers. There are also many topics in which questions have also been asked and answered...and sometimes debated. If you have any questions about where to find things in the forums, or how to use the forums, feel free to ask a host (I am one) privately, by Personal Messenger, or else ask in the Moderation and Policy Discussion forum, where software questions are asked and answered. What kind of food do you like to eat?

I love avocadoes! In salads, on toast, smeared on crackers, in guacamole or ceviche. None of those treatments requires cooking. However, I've seen some cooked applications that also look great and this will be a good incentive for me to try. Several years ago, member @Dejah posted about stuffed, fried avocados. Here is her original post with a picture of the results, and here are her instructions. I've had this bookmarked for an embarrassingly long time without trying it, but I'm in a good position to do so in the next few days. Beautiful Haas avocadoes have come available in the grocery store, and I have several ripening for the event. I've put the links here in case someone else (Dejah, perhaps?) wants to have a go at it too.

Can you post pictures of the bottom, or interior, or else give measurements? Does it have any markings? I agree with @lindag that it doesn't look like a deep-dish pie pan. It reminds me a bit of an aluminum bowl my grandmother used to use for her bean-snapping, although that was smaller than yours appears to be. It also reminds me of one half of the Wearever pan set she had, where one pan fit atop another to make a lid for a Dutch oven.

Some extra-wide extra-eggy noodles (an impulse purchase at World Market) and some New York Style TM Calabrese sausages from a favorite grocery store starred in last night's skillet dinner. Supporting characters were the last of last summer's roasted cherry tomatoes using @ElainaA's recipe, grated parmesan, garlic, asparagus and parsley, and a touch of cream. We are glad to have leftovers. I wish I could get this sausage at home.

I'm essentially in @cdh's boat. I'm such a tentative "maybe" that I haven't wanted to speak up to influence the vote. That said, the July dates are the best for me. If I can get there inexpensively enough, I'm there. Please keep us updated as to deadlines for registration at Bulrush, as well as reasonable lead times for finding a decent hotel.

@heidih, if you get a chance, could you please show what your mustard looks like in isolation? I can't make it out in your pictures and I'm curious as to how it looks compared to the desert mustard that's flourishing where we are. I've collected a few leaves here and there - the plant life is too sparse for me to want to take much - and it adds a nice rockety accent to my salads.

There have been a few discussions over the years about scaling recipes up, changing pan size, and so on. A careful search will turn them up, and you should feel free to follow up even on old topics. Here are two you may find useful: Scaling cake recipes. Any magic? Scaling from an 8 inch to a 9 inch pan

You are correct. I emailed myself a link to that post so I'd be able to find it later.

I have a question about the reheating the prime rib, and then I want to go back to A & W since nobody else has responded. When you reheated the prime rib @135F for an hour, (a) did you simply reheat individual slices, or the whole thing and then slice? (b) how tightly did you seal the meat - full vacuum seal, or simply displacement method in a zip-lock style bag? The roast looks delightful. Now, back to your A & W question: yes, we still have them in the USA although I think they've lost a lot of market share to other chains. It was our family's preferred burger chain when I was growing up, and I especially remember the burgers and fries we'd get from them on a road trip. Ther sauce in particular was excellent. I had to go online to see whether any still exist, though. Thanks for showing the difference between their lettuce wraps and "the other chain's" lettuce wrap. That's a deal-maker right there!

The box of tissues sounds very Egyptian to me. I'm glad you enjoyed the food and the outing - and the goose story is hilarious!

I followed this tip, and a few others I picked up earlier in the topic or have assimilated over the years. I chopped green onions and put them into one dish. Into another dish I put chopped cilantro. I boiled the ravioli. While that water was heating I heated butter, and when the timing seemed right I started cooking sage leaves in the butter. I already had shredded parmesan cheese as an extra garnish. We added the garnishes at the table according to personal taste. My darling didn't bother with the cilantro (no surprise there) but thought the sage butter, grated parmesan and green onions were fine additions. We liked the final result. In truth, I'm not sure I would call this a wonderful stuffed pasta. The flavors were nice, but not spectacular. If I ever hit my stride on making my own stuffed pastas I'll be looking to produce better results. That said, I'd buy this again. It was better than many store-bought "fresh" stuffed pastas that we've tried. Your turn, @rotuts...

That sounds like something I'll have to look for when we're there next. Thanks for the article!

That sounds pretty tasty. When you cut the jalapenos, do you remove the seeds and ribs before smoking?

I can't usually contribute to this topic, but I happen to be near a Trader Joe's. I went for some of our beloved Aioli Garlic Mustard (yes, I know that's redundant) and came away with much more...no surprise there! The pasta is especially intriguing and I expect to cook it tomorrow. Now, what sort of sauce should go with chicken / poblano ravioli? Something light, I think, to let the ingredients shine through. Simply melted butter with garlic, some chile powder on the side just in case it's bland? Oil instead of butter?

A carne asada salad last night gave me a chance to find and use the last of the aforementioned tomatillo-chile salsa. Two previous grocery stops offered irresistable opportunities at marinated beef, and I couldn't resist either time. The first time I cooked some of it, we put it into tortillas along with the fixings. My darling thought that too much trouble. The next time, I put it into a salad. We both liked it that way, but that left us with tortillas still to be used. Last night, I wanted to finish the meat and get it out of the freezer. Here's the meat before chopping, starting to cook with onion, and finished to go over a salad. Yes, that's a lot of juice. I like wilted-lettuce and wilted-spinach salads, so I made sure to heat the marinade and cooking juice after the beef and onion were cooked, then augment them with citrus juice, a touch of oil and some red wine vinegar. The whole shebang went over the salad and got a good mixing. We dug in. He ate his as he would any salad; I ate mine in tortillas, with sour cream and the tomatillo salsa. The photos of the stuffed tortilla were not pretty, and I didn't keep them. But I will show what the salsa looked like. It was just as good as I'd remembered. I hope I'll be able to replicate it. I wrote notes on it, but even with notes too many of my impromptu successes survive only in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Nothing as elegant as chefmd is having, either in quality or presentation - but my, these are a wicked good discovery. Light, crisp, with a tart heat that puts taco-flavored chips to shame. I've never liked taco-flavored chips. These I can't leave alone.

I love your descriptions of the tour guide's presentations - and I'm glad you were able to buy some new glassware!

Oh, I know they're a major corporation. Nonetheless, when I see that name my immediate thought is of the earlier meaning: beautiful, good-natured, clueless er, person. Couple that with a package of something akin to Pop-TartsTM labeled as "Fine Pastry" - and the wrapper discarded on the desert at that! - and the juxtaposition was too much for me. (It may just be my strange sense of humor, and irritation at the trash I pick up in the wild lands.)

I'm sure the manufacturer didn't intend this to be funny, but it pegged my irony meter.

Careme sounds like he had about as much diplomacy as I normally do. There's a reason I never made it into middle management....

Cooking when we're on our own, after several weeks of visiting family and friends, can lead to a lot of experimentation and fun. I finally got mac 'n' cheese 'n' ham right, using the remains of the ham I cooked us for New Year's. (I haven't shown you that ham yet. We're living backwards for now, like Merlin in The Once and Future King.) For once - and maybe for the future - I didn't overcook the pasta. The sauce was particularly rich, since I used the remains of heavy cream I'd purchased for a holiday baking product. Since we had to run the generator periodically, I experimented with the rice cooker. The jury's still out on that gizmo, but we liked this curry: I finally got around to trying Food 52's Spinach Madeline. Let me tell you, this is good stuff. It was so good that even my darling, who normally does not like cooked spinach and is lukewarm even to raw spinach, liked this dish. He liked it so much that I was surprised. That in turn led to a surprising argument. Togetherness can do strange things. When we calmed down, we agreed that the recipe is a keeper. We still agree, having done it again since then. The final noteworthy cookery from that location doesn't, unfortunately, have a photo but it has a great quote. I had some assorted chiles and tomatillos that I'd purchased oh, sometime before the turn of the year in order to make a tomatillo salsa. I wanted to braise chunks of pork or chicken in it. That stuff had languished in the refrigerator as we went on our whirlwind of holiday socializing, and needs must that it be used. Some of it was already in rugged shape. I roasted, peeled and seeded the surviving poblano, jalapeno and fresno chiles, and chopped the roasted flesh finely. I roasted tomatillos and did the same thing. I added finely chopped scallions, then mixed the lot with chile vinegar, white balsamic vinegar, Mexican lime juice and salt until the flavor and consistency seemed about right. I was trying to duplicate a tomatillo salsa left over from a Schwan's frozen fish dinner that we had both liked back in the fall. I still have some of that salsa as a standard. My salsa was much too light on the tomatillos to come close to Schwan's, but it made a great braising liquid for those pork chunks. It all went over rice. It was very good. My darling's comment, heretofore unuttered: "You know, we could lose a lot of weight if you cooked food that doesn't taste so good."

Death Valley is defined by the Panamint Range on the west and the Amargosa Range on the east. If you go directly over the Panamint Range, or (better still) use the paved road to drive over Towne Pass, you'll come to the Panamint Valley. It's a quiet place, almost entirely unoccupied because it's federal land. The northern and eastern edgesof the valley belong to the National Park System. Most of the rest is BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land. You can camp just about anywhere on the BLM land, as long as you stay within a certain distance of a road. We like the area for the open expanses, freedom to make noise without bothering neighbors, and the free air show: the China Lake firing range is due south, so we get a great view of the jets lining up for their practice runs, or practicing some of their aerial combat maneuvers. There is also, or was in the past (we aren't sure which) mining. Old quarries and mines abound, and you can get to some of them if you are a hardy enough traveler or have the right vehicle. We ran across this entertaining signs of life at a camping spot hidden behind some hills: At the north end of the Panamint Valley is the Panamint Springs Resort. Although it's within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park, it is privately owned and operated. Some fuel and a few groceries can be purchased there, although we didn't need the groceries. We had restocked (overstocked, in truth) the refrigerator and freezer before coming. We drove to the resort for beer one day, and for lunch another. Their drink refrigerators are well stocked. Nothing's cheap - as with Death Valley, this place is remote and the prices reflect that - but they stock a lot of specialty brews from what passes for local microbreweries. The restaurant has a bar area as well as a separate dining room. You can eat or drink in either area. The bar counter is fascinating and deserves a closer look. It's highly polished, heavily varnished, and made from a tree root system. It's old. It was rescued from a previous building and kept in place when this building was rebuilt after some calamity that neither of us remembers. A hole in the counter adds extra character, as well as a spill hazard for the unwary barkeep or customer. Here's a lower-view closeup of the root system. The menu isn't anything special, but they offered what we wanted: burgers, onions rings and fries. They were quite good. I don't remember what type of beer we had to go with them, but we enjoyed it all. We usually make dinner our main meal of the day, despite ideas that we might do better if dinner were light. That day, after such a heavy lunch, dinner was light.