Smithy

I wish I had access to an Egyptian restaurant! That bosbossa (sp?) looks good. So does the chicken.

I'd like to say I shall never again put buttermilk rather than half-and-half in my coffee, but it was my husband who made that foul mistake when he kindly poured some for me. Too bad it was the last of the coffee for the day.

@sartoric, I think of shatta as the Egyptian (or perhaps more broadly Arabic) chili pepper. What is it in this case?

My DIL has a Vitamix and I've gotten to play with it a bit. I rather envy her the appliance, but like you I find the jar very inconvenient to clean. I would like it much better if it had a screw-off base like my (admittedly not high-powered) Oster blender. Fortunately for me, it's not my problem...it's hers!

I think it will be interesting to compare parboiling, as in ElsieD's preparation, with the precooking in 300F oil that the Buttermilk & Bourbon recipe uses. If the results are the same, I'd much rather go with water...but, as Dave and Heidi just mentioned, maybe neither step is important.

A few posts ago I promised to show you a new-to-me green bean recipe my friend and I tried in San Diego. Last night I cooked that dish, but there was so much kitchen chaos that my only photo is of dinner. Not that it's a difficult recipe, but it has a technique that I think is a real winner. For the recipe and full description of the steps, go to Green Bean Salad with Toasted Almonds & Feta on the Cookie + Kate website. The new step to me is something Kate says she "borrowed" from America's Test Kitchen: steam the beans in a covered skillet with a little water, and when they're nearly tender then lift the lid and cook off the water. I can tell you from a near-disaster that this is no time to be distracted! Once the water boils off the beans can burn quickly. I had to remove the beans and clean the skillet it to get the char off before adding the dressing. Anyway, the basic steps are: toast the nuts in a dry skillet, then remove them to a small dish add the beans and water (and a bit of salt) to the skillet, cover and steam until nearly tender, then remove the lid and cook the water off meanwhile, mix up a vinaigrette when the bean water is cooked off, add the vinaigrette, nuts and some feta, and toss garnish with more feta, lemon zest and some basil (I didn't have any), then serve. The recipe scaler has a hilarious algorithm error. I told Kate about it in my comments; she thanked me and may get around to correcting it. I immortalized it for your amusement in case she does. The green beans were a hit last night, and so were the pork steaks. (His shirt says "I'm not arguing I'm just explaining why I'm right". We got them for each other!)

I'd never have thought of boiling the wings first. I may have to try that. @ElsieD's wings look delicious!

Thanks for that information. What internal temperature would you use in this case?

Look at that sun move north! Unfortunately, the wind is still howling. It lulled briefly yesterday evening - enough that my darling said "we could have cooked over a campfire!" By then I had made other plans for dinner. Sometime in the night the wind came up again - unusual for nighttime - and despite the furnace it was cold. Well, cold by our standards. 50F outside right now, with the wind chill making it more like 40F. I know, I won't get much sympathy. I didn't get around to doing the green beans yesterday as I'd planned, but I did try out a recipe that @Ann_T has shown to great advantage on the Dinner topic: Parmesan Crusted Halibut, as posted on her web site. I am not as good a cook as Ann_T. The recipe looks so easy. Set up 3 bowls: one with flour, one with egg wash, one with a mixture of shredded parmesan, panko and lemon zest. Dredge, dip, then coat each filet. Pan-fry until one side develops a good golden brown crust, then flip the filets and put the pan into a 450F oven until the fish centers are "pearly white and opaque". My first issue was oven space. We also wanted Tater Tots, and they bake at the same 450F. The oven has only 1 rack, but I thought I could make the baking sheet of Tots and the pan of fish share that rack. I was mistaken. I had given the Tots a head start by 15 or 20 minutes, but still had to stack them atop the skillet while the fish finished cooking in the oven. (Doesn't the fish look beautiful after the initial flip?) The problem with this method was that I had no easy way to check the fish without disturbing the tots. The recipe doesn't give a time estimate for how long the fish will take to arrive at that "pearly white and opaque" stage. I can tell you now that it's well under 10 minutes. Pretty, isn't it? Travesty of travesties, the fish was terribly overcooked. Hard, flavorless meat. Halibut isn't among my fish favorites anyway, but what little flavor it had was certainly cooked out because of my ineptitude. There ensued at the table a long, circular dissection of the dish. My darling was, and still is today, convinced that the fish filets were too thick for this method. I couldn't get him to acknowledge that a thinner filet would have been even more overcooked! To be honest, I think for him it's more about the coating than the fish itself. The coating itself is fabulous, and the method is easy. I will try this again, probably with thinner filets, almost certainly with different fish. (I think - and hope - we're out of halibut now.) I think with a thinner fish I'll just pan-fry it on both sides and forget the oven. Then I'll have the oven available for tots, or better still for Ann_T's oven fries. I also think I'll try that coating on chicken. Parmesan-crusted chicken, anyone? I think that will be excellent.

Here was the procedure for the cukes, per my friend: Peel 2 medium to large cucumbers. Slice them very thinly (I think it was the smallest slot on my mandoline; basically, you want the slices so thin they're flexible and almost transparent.) Put them into a bowl. Whisk about 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp sugar into about 1/2 cup vinegar. The friend who taught my friend this recipe used white wine vinegar, but we didn't have any. I don't remember whether we used rice vinegar, white vinegar, red wine vinegar or a mixture, but we decided later that the vinegar type probably doesn't matter. At any rate, it needs to be enough to cover the cucumbers, but just barely. Pour the mixture over the cuke slices and let them marinade for at least an hour. You want them to collapse and "wilt" somewhat in the marinade. Drain the cukes and squeeze the excess moisture out. Make little golf ball-sized mounds, squeezing with your fingers to shape them and drain out a bit more moisture. Place on a plate. Garnish with something of a contrasting color: I said sumac, but actually hers was so dark she used a little sprinkling of ground red pepper flakes instead.

Yes, I'll definitely do the cukes again when it gets warmer! I will say, however, that we were glad to have a large kitchen, plenty of counter space, and three of us working on dinner. He handled the couscous and rice, she handled the chicken and the cukes, I did the green beans - and we were barely ready when company arrived. The cukes can be done up to a day in advance, I think. I'll get clarification on that point.

On my way out of San Diego I found a Ralph's grocery and a World Market. I was on the hunt for Berbere spice from World Market, having discovered that the blends are not all created equal. They were out. There were MASSIVE gaps in their supplies! Ralph's grocery store claimed online that they carried the Greenland feta cheese we like. We're nearly out. Unfortunately, that must be another Ralph's in San Diego. This one didn't have it. Still, it's an impressive store and I took a few pictures to give y'all a glimpse of yet another very nice grocery store. Their cheese selection is in a special area set off by itself, and the selection is massive. I didn't photograph the deli section, which was just as large, but some of their snack sausages were near the cheeses. I confess: I'd never thought of mac 'n' cheese as being a shredded cheese mix worth buying. I still don't. The produce area is gorgeous. This is just a very small sample: Finally, for @rotuts, here's their olive bar. Keep in mind this is Southern California, in an area where masks are requested required although shopowners have given up enforcing it. They seem to have decided that some folks are okay with serving their own and others want it already packaged. Still...no Greenland feta cheese. I bought a sandwich for the road (roasted chicken, lettuce on a very nutty whole grain bread) and hit the road.

Backing up a little bit: while I was in San Diego my best friend and I cooked some fine meals and thoroughly enjoyed our visiting. For one dinner party we had a chicken tagine made more or less according to a recipe in Elizabeth Bard's charming Lunch in Paris: a Love Story, with Recipes (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), and served over couscous or rice depending on each guest's taste. The side dishes were a smashingly good green bean dish, and very thinly sliced cucumbers that had been marinated in vinegar for a few hours then drained, squeezed and shaped into little cones garnished with sumac. I'm cooking that green bean dish tonight, so I'll tell more about it in another post. Here's the recipe, as a placeholder: Green Bean Salad with Toasted Almonds and Feta. The need for the cucumbers to be thinly sliced sparked an email discussion about whether I had a mandoline that I could bring along, and was it really a mandoline or a madeleine? I'm afraid my email answer led to umbrage being taken, but we had some laughs about it later. We spent a lot of time discussing the virtues of various mandolines; if she buys one she'll want one that can also julienne. I came very near to pulling the trigger to buy one that would do that (mine is a cheapo adjustable slicer) and now, of course, all my online adverts are for mandolines! We had one rather strange lunch in which she pulled out a package from the freezer that must have been left behind by their housesitter while they were away for the holidays. Don't you love all the warning labels? We cooked it per directions, split it up, and decided that it needed crunch. Sunflower seeds did the trick. The best we could say about this was that it was innocuous. Not bad, but not something either of us would seek out. At least we got it out of the freezer!

Given the weather most of you are experiencing, I probably won't get much sympathy when I say that it was 45F last night and we're in the second day of a wind storm. Two nights ago a cold front went through and the trailer started rocking as the wind blew. This was yesterday's sunrise, and later on the same mountain range that disappeared due to blowing dust. We went to town despite the weather. It was Old Farts Discount Day at Fry's groceries, and boy did we save money! (Translation: that 10% discount justifies far too much spending.) There were gaps in the grocery aisles, but overall the place was well stocked and we got what we needed. I didn't take any photos inside the store this time. Seen on the way out of town: the vanished hills to the north (in the top picture) and part of a mural I keep wanting to show you. Maybe this way I'll remember to show you the whole thing. Seen between town and our campsite: the hard-working picking crews, out in that wind and dust, harvesting our winter crops. I think this one was cabbage, but it could have been cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, or several other row crops that are steadily planted, tended and harvested in what seems like astonishingly short times. Think of these people whenever you're eating fresh produce that, like me, you didn't grow yourself.

That is beautiful, @ElsieD! We're still carrying around the reworked persimmon puree / cream / etc from last fall, but haven't had occasion to fire up the machine because it hasn't been warm enough. I need posts like yours and @blue_dolphin's (and many others, sorry for leaving you out) to convince me to give the machine a whirl!

Let me add my welcome to the others'. My best friend and her husband spent 8 or 10 years in Capetown and I was able to visit there. Beautiful! I'll love reading about your food, cookery, and perhaps how it changes with the seasons.

I think Heidi answered it well. There's crazy stuff all around this country, but it doesn't seem to be as widespread as one would think from the news. (To be honest, I feel safer in the country than in cities! But that's my upbringing.) There are places we wouldn't consider camping, but the places we camp at seem safe - and everyone we've ever met has been delightful.

The pork roast just came out of the oven, and if it's beautiful I'll post a picture of it. Otherwise, I won't bother; you've seen it and had the cooking method described before. On the other hand, the latest iteration of fruit salad for his breakfast is a work of art, don't you think? 😁 I even chopped dates for it. Never let it be said that I leave him without provisions.

Tonight was supposed to be his turn to cook: the last half of the pork shoulder roast I bought in December that's been taking up freezer space. (As a rule I'd try to reserve it for souvlaki, but we haven't much wanted to do campfire cooking yet, so I relented on its use. Besides, I'll be leaving him alone for a few days and he's feeling a bit of food insecurity. If you could see the refrigerator and freezer you'd know how preposterous that is, but he wants what he wants.) Then the weather was nice, and the roast wasn't thawing fast enough, and we spent a good deal of the afternoon playing music with a neighbor, so it came down to quick dinner instead. I can now give a side-by-side comparison of the two kinds of frozen fish we have in the freezer: Van de Kamp's Beer Battered Fish filets, and Gorton's Crunchy Breaded Fish filets. Both fish are pollock, although I had to look harder at the Van de Kamp's package to figure that out. I'll admit that right off the bat I'm prejudiced: the shorter ingredient list is the reason I bought Gorton's in the first place. Still, he picked out the beer battered fish. He doesn't read ingredient lists (or corporate ownership labels), and marvels that I bother. One issue with a side-by-side test, when cooking them in the same pan, is that Gorton's was supposed to get a few minutes' less cooking. I didn't think to add them to the pan after giving the Van de Kamp's a head start. In the collage below, you can see the difference in color. On the left, the uncooked filets; on the right, finished. The panko-coated (Gorton's) filets were easier to turn; I could use tongs with them. The Van de Kamp's were flaky and tender and prone to falling apart. They demanded a spatula. This was a quick dinner to prepare. Once the oven was preheated, the filets cooked in 20 minutes. In the last 10 minutes, I cooked broccoli and cauliflower on stove top, with Berbera spice mix and butter and enough water to steam them until tender. Dinner: You can clearly see the difference in the fish color; the difference in texture is more subtle. The panko-coated fish were firmer as well as darker. Would the fish have been more comparable, if the beer-battered fish had been cooked longer? It will be worth finding out. In both cases the fish was flaky. This is the best pair of photos I could get. We liked the flavors. At first I preferred the beer-battered (Van de Kamp's) fish because it seemed just a touch more flavorful, but after a few bites I began to think the extra flavor was mostly salt. He preferred the panko-crusted (Gorton's) fish from start to finish, much to his surprise. The upshot: we'll be happy with either, for a quick nobody-feels-like-cooking dinner, but we're more likely to keep Gorton's around. There are other brands, and other treatments, so we'll probably try them. I draw the line at fish sticks, though!

This is the one we have: Vidalia Onion Chopper (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I'm not sure whether the brand matters so much as the technique; we broke the first one that my parents gave me after some time of abuse. It takes a fair amount of pressure to push the chopper lid down, and for me the best way to do it is to give the lid a sharp whack. However, it's imperative to hold the hinge end down firmly with one hand while smacking the open end with the other. If you don't keep pressure on the hinge end, then eventually the leverage of the stuff you're chopping will break a hinge. (If this doesn't make sense, ask and I'll post photos of what I mean.) It's also helpful to cut things into, say, 1-2 cm thickness before chopping so you aren't trying to push through too much at once. The thing we learned about cleaning is that onions leave debris that must be cleaned from the grid, but potatoes don't - and they'll clear most or all of the onion debris from the grid. If we only have to chop an onion, I'm likely to use a knife and he's likely to skip it - or else chop potatoes for the next batch of hash!

Clarification, in case it's needed: my friend and I are talking specifically about the kitchen implement that I know as a "mandoline". (She wants me to bring it when I visit in a few days.) She says she's seen it callled a "madeleine" on many a web page and she asked me which was the correct word to describe the tool in question. I was shocked, I tell you! Still, I thought I'd doublecheck with the assembled masses here in case our language is mutating. As it does.

Maybe you're my husband's long-lost sister!

My best friend says she's been seeing the word "madeleine" used on different web sites to describe the wicked-sharp precision slicing implement we know as a "mandoline". I can't find a dictionary reference to "madeleine" as anything other than a specific pastry or, thanks to Proust, something that evokes a memory. Are these bloggers corrupting the word and showing their ignorance like restaurant critics who say "restauranteur" instead of "restaurateur", or is this a definition of "madeleine" of which I was not previously aware?

I love it that you wrote "textural contrast". He simply says "crunch". 😄 You are a precise wordsmith, sir - a necessity in profesional writing. (I did understand what you meant with regard to when you want toast. He's much more hard-core about it. The rare exception is with chili or soup, which requires crackers instead of bread to provide the textural contrast crunch.)

It took me at least 15 years of marriage to start getting the obligatory toast into my long-term memory. My paternal grandfather was a "toast with dinner" person, but my father wasn't. I like bread with dinner if it's fresh and integral to the meal (garlic bread with pasta, or fresh warm bread to soak up a sauce) but otherwise just don't think about it. I can't tell you how many times I'd have dinner waiting, both of us sitting, and then realized I hadn't put bread in the toaster! Last night it was our version of tuna noodle hot dish. It's funny: I've been deciding that I simply don't need as many shapes of pasta in this trailer as we've been carrying around, and had decided to eliminate some. Egg noodles was one of the shapes to go. He says that his Bedouin guide always and only used elbow macaroni, no matter the dish, including this one. Besides, I reasoned, we have a pasta maker. I could make fresh noodles if I wanted. Last week I said "nertz" to that idea and bought egg noodles again. Extra wide. Perfect for our hot dish. I'm glad I did. I'll eliminate some other shape instead. Can you tell he was hungry? This morning's sunrise: more moisture in the air than yesterday.