quiet1

I am so jealous. I'm not allowed to garden due to being immune compromised because of the medication I take for my arthritis. And no one else in the house has enough of a green thumb to help. (The biggest risk is a fungal lung infection, which are exactly no fun at all and don't have great survival rates. So the chance is relatively small but not worth risking.)

I don't recall hearing the term 'traybake' in this context when I lived in England - perhaps it tends to be regional? I was mostly nearish London. However, whatever you call it, that looks delicious and I am going to make a note to try it next time I find the good kielbasa in the store, as I am all in favor of limited mess meals for busy days. I think I'd probably start the potatoes first, then add the sausage assuming it is pre-cooked? Roast potatoes always seem to take forever for me.

It's a thing with a name! I thought my mom just made it up. I will have to see what she says. (It is entirely possible she got the dish from her mother, who was mostly a reluctant cook but frequently managed to surprise people by knowing odd bits of 'proper' cooking techniques and terminology. Like she taught me very young that flour and butter to thicken a sauce or gravy is called a roux, and everyone was very baffled because that was just not the kind of information anyone ever saw her collecting. She didn't read cookbooks, etc. So she could totally have picked up a French dish somewhere and adopted it and no one realized.) (I realize that now the term 'roux' is not nearly as unexpected, but this was before celebrity chefs were huge and there was an entire channel just for cooking shows, you know? My grandmother's neighbors just learned to cook from their mothers and didn't much stray from whatever dishes those were. Which generally produced acceptable food, or very tasty food even, but they wouldn't have been able to explain to you the proper terms for techniques and so on.) We used to make it just with sauerkraut but I don't care for sauerkraut particularly much and my mom is on a low sodium diet and sauerkraut is not a low sodium food, so the last couple of years we've mixed it with cabbage to dilute the sauerkraut some and it works pretty well. I think the sauerkraut only works best if you have very strongly flavored sausages like a smoked kielbasa, but one of our local stores makes a fresh kielbasa this time of year that has the right flavors but isn't as assertive, and that works better with the sauerkraut/cabbage blend. Also the leftover sauerkraut/cabbage blend seems to get eaten faster than just sauerkraut, which is kind of important as there aren't that many of us but my mom only knows how to make the dish in size Fill The Dutch Oven. So we have lots of leftovers. For my mom this year we had some leaner pork chops in the mix, since sausages and hot dogs and bacon are all rather inherently salty, and the blander pork as a foil to the stronger flavors of the sausages is nice, but I think would have worked better with a fattier cut of pork, or with the pork added later in the cooking. Wasn't bad, though. My mom had hers with a baked potato to further reduce the total salt content of her meal, and apparently it was very nice. I have a photo but my phone died so I will have to share it later.

Seeing as how I just spent 4 days in the hospital wired up because I got a GI thing and my heart rate decided to sit at 120-130 at rest and took the better part of 3 days to return to normal, which was no fun at all, I wouldn't risk it. It's a bummer, but it isn't worth the risk if someone does get sick. (And I will note I have no history of heart problems at all, it was strictly a precaution. That kind of heart rate in someone with existing issues can be very bad news indeed, and it is quite possible to have a heart issue without being aware of it day to day.)

Mine currently has dividers - so far I've only labeled one section for the Instant Pot and one for SV but I'm going to use another for recipes that are word of mouth from family or that I've made up, to keep track of them, probably another for ideas and recipes to try from cookbooks (just recipe name and book and page number, I'm not copying the whole thing out until I know it is good.) With the disc binding, which I have bits and pieces of kicking around because I use a smaller size disc bound book for my planner, I can always swap in bigger disks or pull a section out to make a separate notebook, so it seemed a good way to get started. I am currently waiting on dot grid pages for it, though, which I much prefer but only have in half page size. Right now it has some spare sample ruled pages from Levenger so I could get started using it. (I considered printing my own dot grid pages but my printer is being cranky so I decided not to fuss with it.) But I like dot grid because you have much more flexibility in how you organize things and it helps if you want to make a chart, but my writing doesn't end up going drunkenly down the page sideways as happens when I use blank paper. I'm considering a recipe binder also (recipes typed in or copied and put in page protectors in a 3 ring binder) for other people in the house to use, but we will see if that materializes. I'm not giving them my notebook for sure, I'll never get it back.

Just for @rotuts - I got a kitchen notebook. (Actually, I put it together from bits I had already which is why it isn't a red lab notebook.) Hopefully it will help me keep track of things to try and notes from things I read here.

If you're doing it for something you plan to use separated eggs in anyway, and you put the eggs in a baggie either way, it seems like it is just the order of mess making that changes, not the mess?

My mom has a pork dish she MUST have every New Year so that is in the oven now - bacon, kielbasa, bratwurst, pork chops, and all pork hot dogs browned and then braised in a slow oven in sauerkraut and shredded cabbage and onion and apple and a glug of apple cider (this year I had hard cider so I put some of that in, too.) Served with vegetables and potatoes and some good mustard and some crusty rolls for those who prefer to turn their sausages into a sandwich. We will also have snack foods for sustenance while staying up watching the festivities on TV - just fresh vegetables and chips and dip and whatever other leftovers turn up that make for good nibbling.

What about separating the eggs first and then just pasturizing the yolks or whites in a baggie? (Wondering about this based on the comment about the yolks breaking a little more easily post pasteurization.)

'My housemate grew up vegetarian in various countries in the Middle East and Europe and he has some great stories about what is and isn't vegetarian based on different chef ideas. In France once his parents said they were allergic to egg (because the idea that someone would just elect not to eat eggs was impossible, apparently) and the response was 'well, that only has a little bit of egg in it. And in some countries (Morocco for example) you have to be precise as something like chicken is not considered the same as meat. Tbh this is one reason I'm far less adventurous about eating out and trying new foods - especially when traveling - than I'd like to be. I have a shellfish allergy and the outcome would not be pleasant if I got even a little bit of shellfish. (I can't even be in the room where someone is cooking it without having issues.) I keep hoping the medical researchers come up with something so it won't kill me so I can do more food traveling without so much paranoia. Anyway, for dinner tonight the resident kiddo really wanted Mexican from a local bar place, so since we were in the middle of reorganizing part of the kitchen anyway (I have too many spices to store nicely, it is a serious issue) we did takeout. I had nachos with beef and cheese and guacamole. Not at all particularly traditional Mexican, but a tasty treat. My mom got a fish burrito with their diablo sauce and regretted it, which is interesting because she has a high tolerance for spice. So now I know to avoid the diablo sauce carefully, since I am way more of a chili wimp.

Thanks. My mom is immune compromised so pasturizing eggs for her would be a nice thing to do and I haven't played with my Anova nearly enough.

Do you just plunk the eggs in the water bath loose in shell and let the circulator do it's thing?

If we're mentioning gifts we gave other people, we will be here for a while, this was a cookbook heavy gift giving year for me. Most successful was a collection of 'healthy' cookbooks for my mother, who is on a low-sodium diet. I recruited my housemates and my dad and we all worked through a pile of books at the local Barnes and Noble to whittle it down to books that had nutritional information, mostly dishes under 500mg of sodium per serving, and looked like they would be reasonable edible. (Some of the books look like someone started with a chicken breast and threw the kitchen sink on it as long as the sink was unsalted, the flavor combinations were just weird in bad ways.) We haven't cooked from any of them yet because of holiday-related meals and leftovers, but as soon as she opened them my mom kept getting distracted from the rest of the present opening by wanting to read through her new books, which is usually a good sign. I also gave a few personal interest type cookbooks (one of the Splendid Table ones for my dad, who often listens to the show even though he isn't much of a cook, and a Scandinavian one for my mom that she is reading for interest as much as for recipes, for example) and then my other big cookbook gift was a copy of the Cook's Illustrated Meat book, which I selected after consultation with folks here to make sure I was reviewing a good selection of meat related content. The recipient is my housemate who is a 'recovered' vegetarian - raised vegetarian, started eating meat as an adult - and as such likes meat but has no idea how to select/store/cook/serve it. There are a number of meat specific cookbooks (I spent far longer than I should have reading the River Cottage one even after I'd ruled it out as a gift) but the CI one seemed the right tone and approach. So we will see what happens next time he decides to cook for the house. (His son ended up buying him an America's Tesf Kitchen book too - What Good Cooks Know - which I suspect is far too entry level for most eGullet folks but does look right in line with what a relative kitchen newbie needs to understand to get the best results in the kitchen.) ETA - can't get Amazon link to work from my iPad for some reason.

There is a recipe for homemade grenadine in Morgenthaler's book that looks interesting. I used to get a grenadine when I lived in England that wasn't too sweet (for a syrup, I mean - the sweet didn't overwhelm the flavor) but darn if I can remember the brand now. I actually mostly used it to make sorbet - a small amount really helped round out the flavor of fresh pomegranate juice without making it taste like frozen grenadine.

This is a dangerous thread. We eat a lot of popsicles of the purchased all fruit variety and for some reason it never occurred to me we could make our own...

I have a pair of steam-proof oven gloves (with fingers, not mitts) that I find super handy for this kind of thing - if I'm careful I can hold the paper towel in my gloved hand and rub directly, which helps sometimes with making sure to get right into corners. (Less an issue on the Darto pans because they are nicely rounded, but with cast iron that has more of a corner, being able to get right in there is useful.) I may have just ordered another Darto because I needed the 27 also and there was still free shipping... (It was between the 27 and the 34 paella pan. Still not convinced I went with the right one, but the 34 seems like it might be a touch too big.)

Gave my new pan a test run this morning - still not totally seasoned (I only did 4 coats and am using the stove and not heating it too much, so I expect to require patience) but even so my eggs released quite happily once they had enough cooking time. Didn't even really need to be washed, just wiped out. I'm seriously pondering getting a larger one too.

I do think people make more fuss out of it than necessary, but not everyone can do home sharpening freehand, either. I have grip issues due to arthritis and would have trouble maintaining the right angle and would probably end up chewing up the edge of my knife, which would suck. That's a big part of why I'm hesitant to try myself, when I used to sharpen at home fine - I don't want to end up with a mess I have to pay someone else to fix anyway. I think the EdgePro fixes the angles for you, so probably I could manage with one of them, but that isn't a cheap set up to get started with, and I have enough other stuff going on that I'd rather just hand them off to someone and get them back in a much better state and be done with it for now. That said, perhaps my housemate has an interest - he doesn't have the same grip issues so if he is willing to try he might do a respectable job - but he also has stuff going on so may not want to mess with knife sharpening supplies right now. I know there are sharpeners you can get where you just pull the knife through, but I haven't had good luck with them in the past and there is also something about them I irrationally dislike, so I'm not prepared to give up and get one just yet.

I'll keep an eye out for that one.

There are also quite helpful resources that take a lot of the calculation out of it for you - I was just playing with the Sous Vide Dash app to figure out cooking time for a beef tenderloin and you basically just put in a few measurements like start temp of the meat and size and desired doneness and it gives you all the info you need to set things up, plus lets you see how the process is going with regards to safety. (I want to cook the meat to rare/med-rare but hold it at temp long enough to kill bacteria all the way through, because my mom is immune compromised. The little chart shows me when the exterior is 'safe' and when the interior has gotten to a suitable safety level for the various common pathogens, it's pretty nifty.) And to be fair, I'm not sure I would have bothered had I not been dealing with immune compromised people where being able to take the guesswork out of if something is cooked long enough is a big bonus.

That just looks tasty.

'This is the one I ended up going with, after checking several out in person so I could flip around to different sections. It seemed the most appropriate option in terms of practical aspects and readability. (I had to make myself put down the River Cottage book, but that was because I wanted to read it, not because it would have been a good gift.) It definitely isn't what I would call exciting, but seems like just what you need if you don't already know a ton. His son also found him a book from America's Test Kitchen called something like "What Good Cooks Know" and between those two it looks like he should have a good place to start which will let him branch out to other cookbooks and recipes later, having learned the terminology and skills and so on. Since kiddo needs to learn to cook too, I think they are going to tackle both books together as a father-son activity.

We have a lovely beef tenderloin and a delayed plan for a festive dinner, and I can't decide how to cook it. Sear and then oven, or SV? Might try my hand at bearnaise sauce, too. (I used to make it quite successfully but I'm out of practice so I'm a little nervous.)

Late addition to the gift came today - I ordered a copy of a homemade cocktail recipe journal called Spirt, Mixer, Glass, & Garnish which was slightly delayed in shipping. (https://store.fourlinesupply.com/collections/frontpage/products/spirit-mixer-glass-garnish-homemade-cocktail-recipe-journal) It is pretty cute - maybe a bit pricy for what it is but I don't think they are printing massive quantities to get the best bulk discounts, and it doesn't feel cheap. For most people, probably a plain notebook would do the trick for making notes, but I liked the idea of some guidance for a newbie with sections to be filled in like ingredients and notes and so on. The sections of blank pages are also divided by primary spirit, which will help keep it somewhat organized. i kind of want something similar for myself now, actually. I might borrow the concept and make myself some printable pages to put in a binder - not as spiffy looking but still a good way to keep track of ideas and notes.

Our problem is access. The part of the pipes that freeze is sandwiched between a concrete slab underneath and the floor and cabinets above, so to get at them we'd have to remove floor or maybe come at them by cutting into the exterior wall. Someone just wasn't thinking when they installed the kitchen. We have the bits we can get at insulated, and when it is really cold we leave the water on a bit and aim a space heater into the cabinet under the sink to try to keep the pipes warmer. I did a bit of seasoning of my DARTO pan last night - I think it needs a couple more layers before use, but I'm already thinking maybe I need one size up too.