Smithy

Welcome, Chris. We look forward to your contributions. Do you care to tell more about your job as a server? Do your long-range plans include the restaurant business in some capacity?

Those are gorgeous. Is the oozy sauce a peanut butter sauce, then? I could imagine it being caramel, but your description suggests otherwise.

Oh, that's too funny for words. I love the way the friend started getting customers to ask for the nonexistent gummy bear brats until the butcher called his bluff. I'm not a Gummi Bear fan, but I can imagine this giving a sweet-and-sour or sweet-and-spicy combination that could be nice. Even the butcher thinks it's weird - but hey, if it's a hit, good for him.

Nice, Shelby. Did you form the taco bowls yourself, and are those standard flour tortillas? They look like they have an extra color/flavoring.

Newfangled or old-fashioned, the meals both look excellent. I don't suppose you made notes on the wines with which each dish was paired, did you?

Thank you! Next question: why is there a lighter 'seam' on the inside curve of the sausage? My best guess is that it's casing that pulled away from the stuffing as it tightened and curled.

I'm going back several posts now, but I want in particular to compliment you (and the photographic subject) on the geometry and composition of the photos of the candied fruit man. He made the nice display, but you captured it beautifully in two photos. In the same series is a photo of a lovely woman who sells warm blood sausages. I take the 'warm blood' part literally, and that leads to the question of how recently and thoroughly they're cooked, and how they're held at the correct temperature, and whether I'm completely misunderstanding your description. More information, please!

Thanks for the additional information. I look forward to the full recipe, once you've polished it enough to post it. The nectarine compote looks as though it was made from white nectarines. Is that correct? I generally find that I love their sugary sweetness but get better results using yellow nectarines in pies, ice cream or jams; the white nectarines aren't as tart and they seem to fade to a sugary nothing when cooked. If you can figure out a way to get good apricot flavor without having a backyard tree of the right type of apricot, please post about it. I'm bitterly disappointed in the stuff that gets grown and shipped commercially, although SobaAddict70 recently found good ones in San Francisco. Could you intensify it with dried apricots that have been soaked and pureed? That may be counterproductive for a mousse; I don't know enough about that process.

This is probably a good start. Pom brand pomegranate juice should be easy to find in your grocery stores, and you can start from there.

Yeah, the Polar Vortex literally sat over the western pointy end of Lake Superior yesterday, so it's no surprise you're getting it today. Cheer up: by tomorrow you'll be having beautiful fall weather! I love what the two of you do with eggs and leftovers. I'd love to be joining you for breakfast (or lunch or dinner) and taking a few tips from you on photography as well as cooking or baking. When you get around to the bahn mi baguettes, I'd love some discussion about how the ingredients work together. I haven't been back to the bahn mi topic to see what I can learn about dough conditioners, but they seem to be very important. Is ascorbic acid used as a dough conditioner?

It will change the flavor and texture somewhat, but I'm not sure how much. Low-fat mayo usually has more sweetener to compensate for the flavor lost by reducing fat. Sometimes it also has an extra thickener. Somebody else probably knows more about the effects; we can hope they'll chime in.

It helps bind the ingredients. You'll notice that some recipes use bread crumbs and some use eggs, largely for the same purpose although each has its own effect on flavor and moisture.

Today was one of those late rush dinners around our house. I discovered that the leftover sauce from my pork loin last week was an excellent foil for the Mexican chorizo sausages and horseradish bratwursts that we pulled out of the freezer. The sauce looks just as muddy brown and unlovely as it did when I made it, but it has a tart fruitiness that played nicely off the spicy sausages. No wonder the chutneys do so well: they'd taste at least as good, and look much better! ;-)

ChocoMom, I would love to be presented with a cake like that, birthday or otherwise. It's beautiful! (I'm going to have to try that cake, just for the fun of trying to get the explosions right.) That's a fun cake stand, too.

...and here I was swooning over the voluptuous beauty and flavors of that cake. Your standards and mine are certainly different! :-D

Welcome to eGullet, spipet. Is that a sous vide egg atop the steak? It looks a little too firmly sculpted, yet malleable, to have been poached. If I'm way off base, we'll blame it on your photo! ;-)

I hadn't heard that about microfiber. I've washed my microfiber cleaning cloths for glasses (i.e. spectacles) with no apparent ill effect. I make sure not to use fabric softener on them. Eventually they seem to lose their wonderful cleaning properties, but they do that even more quickly if I don't wash them periodically. I too wash my oven mitts occasionally, usually in a vain attempt to revive their good looks. I should just buy new ones, but good ones are darned expensive.

That makes sense. It looks from the photo as though the cloth did burn somewhat. Do you think that helps impart a smoky flavor to the meat? Or am I misreading the photo?

That all looks delicious, as usual. Thank you for posting links to some of your recipe inspirations; I'm learning a lot from you and those links. Here's a question about the lomo al trapo: the instructions in the page you linked say to cover the cloth with salt out to within 1 inch of the edge of the cloth. It looks as though the cloth wraps around the meat more than once. Doesn't that result in a lot of salt trapped between cloth layers and not in contact with the meat at all? Do you think that's wasted salt, or does it somehow affect the meat anyway?

MikeMac, do you have any particular favorite foods or drinks from the big time? Any photos to share? What is scorpion pizza? Surely not a pizza with fried scorpions? :-)

I am going to look for those squash in our farmers' markets. The yellow/green color change gives those squash a lovely geometry. Do they have a distinctive flavor?

That's beautiful, FauxPas. I love the napkin, too: it's lovely on its own, and perfect with the salad!

That sounds like a great reason for a festival, sooner than the harvest festivals that happen around the time of the harvest moon. Moon cakes, moon pies, melons cut into moon crescents, what else would go along with a Supermoon festival? A luminous drink of some sort?

Well, working backward because one should always do dessert first: that chocolate cake looks fabulous, but it isn't what I think of as a fondant. I thought fondant was a glossy coating akin to frosting? Educate me, please, or else I'll resort to Google later. Those candies are truly glorious! Definitely WOW-worthy. How did the walnut-raisin bread turn out? It was obviously edible. Was it as brickish as feared, or did Anna save the day with it? Those fries look like something I absolutely, positively want to make at home. [i ignored the ketchup, but thanks for the warning! ;-)] Methods, please? Anna mentioned an oil blanch for starters. I'm looking forward to your contribution on the rhubarb topic. We northerners need to keep that one going, it seems. Finally: Jacksoup, welcome! It's good that you came out of lurking; you chose a worthy first topic for the event. Here's hoping you post more.

Blether, thank you for posting the proportions and ingredients. I don't think I can get pork belly so inexpensively here (you're right, that's a good price) but if I can, I'll give this sausage recipe a try.