Smithy

I mentioned earlier that lunch is usually as predictable as breakfast. This is because one of our strategies for keeping weight down (and allowing us to do most of our splurging in the evening) is to have a container of green salad ready to go. If one of us is very hungry (as I was after shoveling and chopping ice today) and there isn't a salad ready, then it's likely to be chunks of cheese or leftovers or some other more fattening food. Today, in fact, I settled for rosemary bread smeared with cheese while I was preparing the salad. Here are the fixings, before being rinsed, drained, chopped and so on: And here's the container of salad, ready for several days' meals: We add cherry tomatoes, olives and croutons as we see fit, and have our own preferred salad dressings. The tub-worth stays crisp thanks to having been washed, well-drained, and sealed. (My darling was worried that I'm showing the seamy underside of our food habits: salad for several days at once! Oh, the horror!)

Glad to do it, Anna, and thanks for the welcome! I'll have to show the photos in a couple of stages, but here's a start. The "overview" photo that shows the entire kitchen didn't come out - I must remember to take the sunshade off when I'm using a flash. Basically, the kitchen island provides the main counter space, holds the dishwasher, and more or less divides the work area from the eating area. We don't have a dining room, and probably never will. The working triangle (stove, sink, refrigerator) are all on the work side of the island. Many of the skillets are stored in easy reach and easy view. My darling wanted an overhead pot rack above the island when we remodeled, and I drew the line at that. There used to be a china hutch where the pots are hanging now, and it had to move around the corner into the living room when we remodeled. It's still in easy reach, just doesn't show from the kitchen. We remodeled a few years ago. Remodeling was quite the operation: "Don't ask me dear," said my darling, "it's your kitchen and your tastes, so you do it as you wish." Well, that didn't seem quite right, since he has to live here too, but it turned out we had very different ideas about what the final project should look like. (We did, however, agree on working to keep the maple leaf wallpaper that you and some others spotted in the teaser photos. We couldn't find anything we liked nearly as well.) All in all we're very happy with the outcome, but we aren't eager to go through the process again.

You have a real knack for finding great places to eat...and I love the quality of the photos! Thanks for this topic!

Those silicone lids in the upper left are some I looked at before deciding on the lily pads. I was trying to remember whether they were contraindicated for microwave, regular oven, or both. Apparently it's both?...and since when did "need" come into the picture? ;-) Since I had to drain my squash puree, it sounds as though I should have roasted the squash uncovered in the first place. Is that what you do? The cookbook was silent on the issue, and I feared the squash would be too dry.

Hi, Smithy. Are you able to get your hands on whole fish ? Have you tried using the carcass for a quick stock (30 mins), reduced as appropriate and used to thin the sauce ? Blether, thanks for the suggestion. I don't usually get whole fish but it sounds like a good idea. Would you use aromatics in that stock? If so, which?

When we're at home in Minnesota, our ocean fish access is by way of the local grocery stores. We have a couple of stores and a butcher shop that get excellent fish and seafood. Some of it comes from locals who go up to Alaska and fish commercially during part of the year. In addition, there are the usual packages of frozen fish in the freezer section. I plan to be visiting my favorite shops and grocery stores during the week, and posting about them. I have to show off the area, now, don't I?

Crikey, now it's raining outside. The road, our driveway, and the deck are becoming skating rinks. Half the roof load just let go in a calamitous avalanche that shook the house; fortunately nobody was outside. Now I need to go out and start clearing the deck before it freezes with that ice coat. This morning's breakfast was fairly typical: sliced avocado mashed on crackers (my current faves are Carr's Rosemary), with a squirt of lemon juice and a sprinkling of Spike seasoned salt. Fresh orange slices on the side. I won't bother posting about this much during the week; some other day I'll post about my darling's breakfast. As I noted upthread, we're usually pretty casual about breakfast most days. Time to go shovel, and refill the bird feeders.

Thanks, Shelby and Dejah! Those silicone covers are getting to be easier to find. When I first discovered them - mid-summer 2012, I think - they were hard to find and the one store that carried them had trouble keeping them in stock because they were such hot sellers. Now they're much easier to find, and they probably can be found at almost any kitchen store. If not, they can certainly be purchased from Amazon: individually in different sizes and shapes, and sets as well. Here's a set: http://www.amazon.com/Charles-VIANCIN-Lilypad-Silicone-Suction/dp/B005RQ4WQA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389547007&sr=8-1&keywords=charles+viancin+silicone+lids The designs keep expanding: round shapes can be lily pads (still my favorite), hibiscus or sunflowers. Ooh, I just spotted red poppy rounds! Dejah, last night's version of Roadway Inn Fish used these approximate proportions and steps: 1 c. Meyer lemon juice 1/2 - 3/4 stick butter - 4 - 6 tbsp 1-2 tbsp Trader Joe's Aioli Garlic Mustard Sauce 1/2 - 3/4 c water 2 large cod fillets (other firm white fish also works; we do this with swai and talapia, but sole is far too fragile; thin fillets work better than thick) Preheat an oven to a low (keep warm) setting - last night I used 175F - and put plates in it to begin warming. A warming drawer would also work, but mine is full of pans. Pat the fillets dry. (Sometimes I've seasoned them with salt and ground white pepper, but last night I didn't bother.) In a large pan, melt ~2 tbsp butter over medium-high heat. When it is melted and just starting to brown, add the fish. Cook just until brown, flip and cook until the other side is lightly browned. Remove the fish to the plates, and put them in the oven to finish cooking. Keeping the pan heat at medium high, pour in the lemon juice to deglaze. After the brown bits are scraped up and the pan bottom is clean, start adding butter, a couple of tablespoons at a time. Whisk, stir, or use some other implement to keep it mixing. At this point it pays to lower the heat so the sauce is just simmering and the butter doesn't burn. I had a very large pan last night, so the liquids concentrated quickly. Stir in the mustard. As the sauce cooks down, start adding water a few splashes at a time (if pressed, I'd say about 1/8 cup at a time, but it's arbitrary). The idea is to stretch the sauce so that it's not quite so concentrated on the lemon flavor but there's plenty to spoon over the fish. If you put in too much water it'll be thin, and will need to be cooked down. With too little water there won't be enough sauce. Remove the plates from the oven, drain off any water that may have come out of this fish as it finished cooking, and spoon the sauce over the fish. Serve and enjoy! Tasting and cooking notes: This recipe is decidedly a work in progress. We keep records usually of what we did and what we thought, but at the moment I can't find them, nor could I last night. I thought the lemon was a bit too concentrated in the finished sauce - that's saying a lot for me - and my darling thought it perfect. That's unusual; as a rule I prefer things more tart and he prefers them more sweet. I tamed the tartness with salt at the table; he liked it as was but then added Worcestershire and liked that too. Sometimes we use more butter, more mustard, or something to thin the sauce other than water. I suppose the sauce could be thinned with something like broth, or possibly cream, but we've usually ended up with a broken sauce when we tried cream. Sometimes we chop garlic and add it to the sauce. The Trader Joe's Garlic Aioli Mustard Sauce (yes, I know that's a redundant name) is a favorite condiment we keep on hand, but one could use minced garlic and dijon mustard instead. It looks prettier if garnished with minced parsley, but I couldn't be bothered last night. I prefer a stainless steel pan for this cookery, so I can get a good fond for the sauce; my darling prefers a nonstick pan so he doesn't have to clean it. I use a whisk to keep the sauce incorporated; he hates dirtying up any more implements than he must, so he uses the spatula. I'm curious to see whether this explanation looks intelligible to any reader. If anyone has questions or comments, feel free to post them!

Interesting. America's Test Kitchen made a good case in a class I'm taking for searing first then low-temperature roasting. mgwater's link above makes a good case for the opposite sequence. Granted, the ATK is for a low-cost roast instead of a prime rib or tenderloin. Looks like some side-by-side testing is in order...but not with a prime rib at the outset. sabg, do please let us know what you did and how it turned out.

Good for you! It's a lot of fun. When you get to it, you'll be able to get a lot of advice here in eGullet, if you want it.

Is it because you have an "in" with the stock person, or do they allow you to purchase it? I suppose I'll have to ask my local universities, if I decide to pursue this, what their policy is.

Thank you! It was cod filet this time, but it also works with other firm-fleshed, mild white fish. By the way: Welcome to eGullet! I feel honored that you selected my blog for your first post.

Good advice, gfweb. Where does one go to get liquid nitrogen with which to fill the carboy, or the thermos bottle, or the dewer, for home use? Is it becoming widely available outside the major cities? I'm curious about this, having only ever acquired LN2 in small quantities from the university chem lab.

Get a good grip on making fresh pasta, including the filled kind, in less than 5 hours, and make it pretty enough for company. Get a really good sourdough starter established, and keep it fed, and use it. Learn how to make an olive oil/rosemary bread at least as good as the San Luis Bakery Sourdough Olive Oil and Rosemary bread that I can get from, of all places, the Save-Mart stores in Visalia. It sounds like heresy, but I think that bread is better than the La Brea Bakery version we get here in Duluth. Surely I can do as well?

I drained somewhere between 1/2 cup and 1 cup of liquid from the squash puree before putting it into the refrigerator. It's a beautiful orange color, and now as firm as I think the cookbook recommends. After several days of heavy meals, it was time for something light tonight. That's shorthand for saying it needed to be quick. I trimmed some green beans, chopped some bacon, and began one of my favorite, time-honored methods of cooking green beans. This is more or less the method my grandmother used, and in her pot set, although I didn't simmer the beans nearly as long as she used to. When my darling used to travel routinely to Egypt for research, we discovered a then-new hotel in Luxor called the New Radwan Hotel. it was beautifully constructed, conveniently close to the train station and the hub of activity in town, and within easy walking distance of the Corniche (roadway and walkway along the Nile). The restaurant was outstanding. Once we began to express our admiration of the food, the chef and his staff went all out to impress us; our dinner plates were often garnished with tomatoes carved into roses or jack-o-lanterns, complete with lit candles. One of our favorite dishes there was a white fish drizzled with some sauce of lemon, butter, garlic, and - we were told - mustard, although it was too subtle for us to detect. Once we came home we tried - oh, how we tried - to duplicate that dish. The memory of the original has morphed as surely as our recipe, until we've had no choice but to rename it, from "New Radwan Fish" to "Roadway Inn Fish", with no disrespect meant to the USA motel chain. I have a pile of Meyer lemons, culled from a tree that froze badly during California's recent freeze. Meyers, with their sweeter flavor, come closer to the Egyptian lemons than the Lisbons generally raised where I grew up. If you like using lemons or limes and can find a vintage lemon squeezer like this, buy it. Don't hesitate. I was appalled when, some years back, a new version of these was being sold for some $40 or $50. Mine is a family heirloom (some women inherit jewelry; I got the cookware) but I've found plenty like it on eBay and given them to friends who I knew would appreciate the gift. Dinner: Roadway Inn Fish, Green Beans and Bacon, and New England brand Brown Bread toast. Edited for spelling. No doubt I'll find some grammar thang as soon as I hit "save".

I do wonder whether the handles on the larger lily pads are sturdy enough to use for regular handing. I store the larger pads in a drawer rather than stress the handles too much. Do you know whether I'm being appropriately or overly cautious?I now have a beautiful, smooth squash puree thanks to a food mill. It seems a bit moist. The recipe says to use bread crumbs to thicken if necessary, but since I just realized I'm out of Parmesan cheese <scowl> I'm letting it drain prior to being put away for now. Actually it's too late for me to start messing with mixing fresh pasta dough and forming the raviolis tonight, anyway; I'm slow enough at all this that I tend to make the filling one day and use it a day or two later.

Andi gives a good description of their utility. As for the temperature range, the label says Max +428 F /+220C; Min -40F / -40C. The label also says not for use over open flame or near "oven resistances".

We're pretty casual about breakfast and lunch. Today we had leftovers from last night's "dinner and a movie" evening with friends. In the interests of keeping things simple (who, me?) I'd bought some fried chicken and oven-roasted vegetables from one of our supermarket delis. The chicken is nothing but bones and delicious memory, but there were vegetables left for lunch.

That is a Charles Viancin silicone "banana leaf" pan cover. These things are wonderful: dishwasher safe, microwave safe, oven proof, flexible and (to my mind) whimsically pretty. They have a very smooth bottom so that they make a tight enough seal to a smooth-rimmed bowl or dish that nothing can come in unless you lift the lid. On the other hand they allow air out, so they're also good covers for things like proofing bread. I keep finding uses for different sizes and styles. i generally find the round shapes more useful, so have more lily pads.

Greetings! I started to title this blog "Notes from the Deep Freeze", but since Heidih posted the first teaser photo it's warmed up nearly 60 degrees F in the last 2 days: That's both good and bad. As long as it's very cold, the sky is usually clear and the roads are dry. On the other hand, when it warms up as it has now, you don't have to worry about freezing your beer or cola if you leave it outside more than 15 minutes. There is, as I type, a frozen caramel-colored slush inside our garage refrigerator, from a forgotten bottle of diet cola that froze and exploded in our absence. On the other, other hand, we'll have to start watching out for icicle-laden avalanches off the roof. Every "warm" day the glacier slides another inch or two: It didn't clear 0 Deg F between New Year's Eve and Jan 9. "Only a fool would live here," grouses my darling. I take (an admittedly perverse) pleasure in the extreme swing of the seasons, particularly now that I don't often *have* to go someplace when it's too cold, and I can warm the house up with kitchen projects.1 That's what I plan for much of this week. Last week, during the harshest temperatures, there was a lot of baking and roasting and soup-making. This week is likely to be much of the same. This afternoon's project is cutting and roasting squash to make a ravioli filling. These are the last of my butternut squash and a carnival squash from a neighbor down the road. Roasted, ready to become filling: The carnival will need to be peeled, but the butternut was very easy to peel before roasting. This squash filling is a recipe from the much-ballyhooed Amazon Link "Sauces and Shapes, Pasta the Italian Way" by Oretta Zanini de Vita and Maureen B. Fant. I've been enjoying the book's lively writing style, and this fall when I attempted ravioli for the first and second time they came out tasting very good, but looking terrible unless I used a mold. I'm not ready for the "free-form" pasta shapes they advocate yet. 1 Well okay, prolonged glamping in warmer climes also helps.

It has nothing to do with the oranges' being seedless. My father raised citrus - mostly, but not entirely, navel oranges. We always lamented the fact that the fruit suffered on its way through the packing house, and never tasted as good as fresh off the tree. I have been pleasantly surprised at the occasional Really Good navel out of the grocery store in oh, the last decade, so there may have been improvements in the handling and shipping and storage chain since then.Unfortunately, "get it off the tree" isn't practical for most of us. Here's what else I can tell you: first, and also not very helpful, some varieties of navel orange are better than others. Dad got fed up with one variety that had been very highly touted as being hardy and early to ripen, but turned out to be relatively bland. That information probably is useless, however: just try finding out which variety of orange you're buying, and see how far you get. I have that problem with summer stone fruit purchases. Second, and most useful: try to sniff the oranges before you buy. There is a distinct aroma of "fresh" vs "tired" that, once you learn it, will steer you clear of tired, flat oranges, clementines, minneolas, and so on. I don't know how to describe it, unfortunately; it isn't rot, it isn't fungus; it's just some missing or deteriorated high note. In addition, of course, there's the usual "heft test": fruit should feel heavy for its size. The sniff test, btw, seems to work best on the sweet citrus. I never detect that sort of flatness with lemons or limes, but it's obvious with those fruit I named as well as grapefruit. Back to lemons with seeds: I generally use a squeezer, but a mesh tea strainer catches the little devils otherwise. Those yellow plastic thingies claiming to contain lemon juice never come into my house! :-) Edited to correct the inevitable misspellings.

Tell us next year just how much stuff you got rid of. It'll be interesting to see if you still have the egg poacher, or if it has been replaced with something else, perhaps a watermelon seeder or other such useful gadget. I got rid of lots of things when I moved into my retirement apartment, yet I find myself accumulating more and more things. It seems that it's human nature to acquire things - or at least this human's nature. I believe that eGullet is an enabler. Oh, this makes me laugh! Yes, I have a great deal of cookware as a result of eGullet...and I was amazed last fall at the amount of stuff my mother had accumulated after downsizing and moving into an assisted living apartment. She was never on eGullet, but she'd find cool things anyway.

That's exactly what's happened to me: I can't see any of your photos, because a Photobucket advert keeps coming up instead. Everyone's comments on the contents makes me wish I could see them. Nonetheless, I'm impressed based on the descriptions.

I wouldn't worry much about residual detergent tastes if you follow the instructions ElsieD posted above. Another idea, if you're worried about residual fats or oils, is to sprinkle flour or cornstarch as an absorbent, then scrape, then clean as noted above. I don't know about you, but when I'm rolling doughs out on my granite top I'm already using a bit of flour for that "lightly floured surface". FWIW my granite countertop instructions also said to avoid ammonia-based cleaners because they'd mar the finish over time. I don't know whether that would also apply to marble.

The refrigerator in our trailer runs on LP or electricity. It runs fine either way, but maintains a slightly cooler temperature (a couple of degrees F max) on electricity. Based on my experience, an LP refrigerator should do just fine for you.