Smithy

That salad looks very good. I'll have to try it on a much smaller scale for my own dinner one night! Or maybe wait until I have dinner guests and try it on them. My Thanksgiving plans, however, call for me to bring my green beans and bacon dish to a feast with friends. The gathering will only be 8 people, so it won't require 5 pounds of green beans as needed 2 years ago. (That was an adventure!) I've never had, or thought of, fermented Brussels Sprouts, but it makes sense that they would ferment like cabbage. I'll have to try it! Thanks for the recipe. As for your proposed additions: if you have people who like spicy heat, then add a couple of chili peppers as you suggest. Or mustard seeds? Ginger?

I wonder how the skin would affect the overall texture. Would it separate from the rest of the potato on the upper level? Would it get as crispy? One way to find out, I suppose. 😀

I've made that gratin, and I agree that it's delicious! Thanks for your link. I'm not generally a video watcher for recipes, but Kenji's discussion and demonstration were interesting. (I was fascinated to see him pour the sauce over the potatoes while the casserole dish was sitting atop the unprotected stove. That would be a sure recipe for me to spill onto the grate and make a mess!) I don't know whether folks who aren't NYT subscribers can see that video. In case they can't, here's a gift link to the recipe: Cheesy Hasselback Potato Gratin.

Go for it! Here's the topic:

This part made me laugh. And I can understand your feelilngs, especially if it's something like "this cornbread is much too sweet," which is my principal objection to most cornbread. Someone may be thinking that their goddess has clay feet after all. 😀 Remember, however: that cornbread must have passed muster with some taste-testers, so it isn't as though you served them something outrageously bad. Onward and upward!

My neighbors' neighbors had a commercial grove of them in central California, near where I grew up. I wasn't impressed with them when I tried them, but I'm a bit of a traditionalist (give me good Satsuma Mandarins, please) and it may also have been an off year. Those I tried weren't very juicy, although the zipper skin was as gratifying as with any of their brethren. What is your take on them? (If you commented on their quality uptopic, I apologize for missing it.)

Today was busy, with successfully-completed chores but not much down time. That won't sound unusual for working folks, but this mostly-retired woman found herself quite hungry, and with no desire for elaborate cooking, at the end of a packed day. Boy, I love my panini press. Dinner: A griddled salami and cheese sandwich with crisp outsides and crisp edges where the cheese had oozed and hit the griddle. Accompanied by a green salad and some woefully, horribly over-roasted vegetables from a couple of nights ago. Some of those vegetables are atop the green salad, where they provide more crunch than flavor. Well, maybe carbon / charcoal has nutritional value. 😉 But the rest of the salad is great, and the sandwich is unbeatable.

Turnips and turnip greens! I'd never think of putting those into a pasta dish! Thanks for the report....and for the prompt for me to make compound butter. Assuming I can find some freezer space. 🙂

@patti, I too am amazed at your energy and accomplishments. And the food does look good! As for reusing the plastic food containers: I think it's a great idea. Too many of those things are used once and then tossed. It's terribly wasteful. Reusing them makes good sense from an economic and environmental standpoint.

I've never heard of an orange tree that blossomed and fruited twice per year. What variety? Do you remember? Or do you just mean that the two trees bore fruit at different times, as a Navel and a Valencia would?

My parents had a Meyer lemon tree as well as a "normal" (Eureka, I think) lemon tree. The Eureka was by choice and planted near the house. The Meyer was an accidental inclusion in the orange saplings that they'd purchased for the grove. My sister and I loved that Meyer lemon tree and raided it every time we went home. Mom never liked it -- too insipid for her! Luckily for me, Meyers are now often available at the grocery stores.

I'll have you know that you are solely responsible for my buying bacon ends and pieces at the grocery store today.

That looks gorgeous and delicious, @Norm Matthews. Wonderful plating! Did you have any sort of sauce to go with the rice?

This is my current fave among Sauvignon Blancs. It's light and crisp, and although it has enough minerality to be noticeable I don't think it's as pronounced as many of the Marlboroughs. Goes well with chicken and probably fish although I haven't tried it. Sips very nicely on its own, too.

The third line from the bottom is 2 tbsp sweet paprika. And the almost-as-cryptic line below it is 2 tbsp Lawry's Seasoned Salt. It is good. We used it for breading pork steaks and chicken thighs, then oven-roasting them. Our own version of Shake'n'Bake. I'm glad you like its looks!

Me too, and I think I bought a bottle of that once for that reason. I don't remember what I thought of it, which probably means it was okay be not stellar. How do you like it?

Now that I think of it, it's the Bourbon Barrel aged Cab (I think from Josh Cellars) that I've tried, not the Zin that @rotuts likes so much. Once was enough on the Cab, but the grapes are different. Maybe I'm maligning that Zin unfairly. If I get a chance, maybe I'll try it out...but since I'm a couple hundred miles from the nearest TJ's, I'm not holding my breath!

It's taken over a year since his death, but I finally reached the point where I wanted pork steak. Not just pork steak, but pork steak cooked the way my darling preferred it. First, I had to make the breading mix we'd worked out and he'd codified in writing. (You can see why we never played Scrabble together.) Then I unearthed a pork steak I'd vacuum-packed and frozen about a month before he died. The procedure, once the breading is mixed, is: pat the pork steak dry, shake in a bag with about 1/4 cup breading mix. Bake at 425F for 25 minutes. I took the bony half for tonight, still more than I needed, and half of a twice-baked potato courtesy of his daughter. Red wine to accompany it. More than I needed. Delicious.

Thanks for the reminder on both the pizza beans and the chickpea recipe. I'd forgotten them, and agree that they might lend themselves well to this project. Another idea is for the Homesick Texan's Sunday Pinto Beans. It's dead easy, and delicious although as I reported here I found it much much too salty as originally written. I settled at 1/4 of the amount of salt she specified, but it's important to note that I wasn't using kosher salt. My fine salt by volume would have been considerably saltier. (Now that I'm reminded of this recipe, maybe I'll try it again -- and post the results somewhere.) Although the recipe is written without meat, I think it would be easy to add meat if you wanted.

Bean salad would fit that category. (3-bean, 5-bean, it goes by lots of names...mine usually relies on a vinaigrette dressing, and it benefits from sitting.) I'd be pleased to open a refrigerator and find that.

"Rivels"? More information, please. And is that a plural word or singular, as in one could have "a rivel"?

Mercy me. Oreo has set up a series of Thanksgiving-themed Oreo cookies! Here's the Oreo.com web announcement, complete with image of the product. For those who simply want to cut to the chase, I quote the parts from that announcement that bring me up short: I realize it's a market test. But I think, in this case, "unforgettable" would not be good.

Last night's dinner was a NYT recipe for roasted eggplant and chickpea salad with an olive dressing; I wrote about it and described the process here. My best friend, who was visiting, had comments about the fennel seed being overpowering, and she noted that she'd as soon omit the leafy greens and add more roasted vegetables. So that's what I'm having for lunch today. Oddly enough, I find the fennel more intrusive today; maybe we just didn't mix it well enough while roasting. It's still good. Will I omit the lettuce as I just did? Maybe, maybe not. She says she definitely will. Anyway, it's a good recipe. I'm glad I won't have finished all the leftovers quite yet!

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