C. sapidus

We enjoyed guacamole, leftover Mexican rice, and a chorizo omelet, with El Yucateco habanero salsa . . . . . . and harvested the last chiles of the season.

Exactly (except for the part about the lipstick). When exploring a new cuisine or cookbook, I usually follow a single recipe pretty closely. The goal is twofold: 1) make edible food, and 2) learn about the cuisine, the author, the dish, the techniques, key seasoning combinations, etc. When it comes to food (and, um, pretty much everything else), I realize that my ignorance vastly exceeds my knowledge. As the dude said, recognition of ignorance is the first step to wisdom (or something like that). When cooking a familiar style of food, I am much more likely to mix and match several recipes, or just wing it (but your question wasn't about winging it).

Dr. J: Ceviche with jicama does sound like a nice twist. Peter the eater: Muchas gracias, and lovely goat. Shrimp stir-fried with garlic-cilantro-white pepper paste and briefly simmered with fish sauce, sugar, and water. Bacon-fried rice with lime and fried shallots.

Mexican Everyday, by Rick Bayless (eGullet-friendly Amazon link). Mr. Bayless does an excellent job of using shortcuts without compromising taste. This makes a lot more Mexican food (one of my first loves) possible on weeknights. Probably cheaper than Tracey's stove, too.

Kim Shook: Here you go - jicama salad for lime-cilantro dressing (click). Mexican Everyday tonight: grilled flank steak with garlicky ancho chile rub, served with grilled plantains, red onions, roasted tomatillo-chipotle salsa, and Mexican red rice. Next time I will chop and saute the red onions – grilling them is a pain. Elder son ate a ton of steak and regretted it during basketball practice.

doctortim: Thanks, your Indian dinners were inspirational. If you borrow Classic Indian Cooking, do try Ms. Sahni’s dum aloo, vindaloo, and sookha keema. Basmati rice with cloves, cardamom, and saffron – mmm, edible air freshener. I still like jasmine rice, which has its own lovely aroma, for SE Asian and Chinese food. Tracey: Good luck on the new stove. And, um, floor and stuff. Mexican tonight: Veracruz-style fish with tomatoes, onions, roasted bell peppers, pickled jalapenos, garlic, chopped green olives, and capers. White rice pilaf with onions and garlic, roasted Poblano chile strips, and guacamole served on the side. Pescado a la Veracruzana, arroz blanco, guacamole, chile Poblano rajas

Four Mexican-themed books for me, including one on the way. Zarela Martinez – Zarela’s Veracruz: Mexico’s Simplest Cuisine Susana Trilling – Seasons of My Heart: A Culinary Journey through Oaxaca, Mexico Aida Gabilondo – Mexican Family Cooking (I checked this book out of the library years ago, and it includes my go-to flan recipe) The fourth book is only tangentially related to food, but inspired by Rachel Laudan's recent foodblog and culinary history research: Charles Mann - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus

Nakji: It looks like your heat-cutting tofu has been sprinkled with chiles. Jamie Lee: Gotta love fried rice! Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking was one of my first cookbooks. I have been searching for Indian food that met the boys’ approval, and tonight’s dinner succeeded wildly. We made chicken smothered in aromatic herbs and almonds (badaami murgh), broccoli smothered in garlic oil (hare gobhi ki sabzi), and basmati rice. The chicken murgh featured crunchy slivered almonds, rich almond butter, tangy tomatoes, and a potpourri of aromas from brown-fried onions, garlic, ginger, cardamom pods, stick cinnamon, whole cloves, cilantro, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cayenne pepper. The broccoli was simply glazed with garlic oil and a touch of earthy turmeric, with whole cloves of golden-fried garlic as a bonus.

Gai lan (Chinese kale/broccoli), blanched and stir-fried with black beans, garlic, rice vinegar, oyster sauce, and dried Thai chiles. This satisfied my craving for fermented black beans and garlic quite nicely. We also ate a few “Yin and yang” peanuts – a mix of honey-roasted and wasabi-encrusted. This was the first time I have cooked with gai lan, and I liked it. I hope the Asian market continues to carry it.

A pipian is somewhere between a seed-thickened soup and a simple mole. Toasted, ground, unhulled pumpkin seeds are more typical thickeners, but other nuts and seeds (even chile seeds) are also used, alone or in combination. We used this recipe (click). I seriously doubt that tahini is traditional in pipian, but I have been repeatedly surprised by Mexican cuisine. Mexico uses and produces sesame seeds, which were introduced early in the colonial period. Sesame seeds are used in baked goods and to thicken certain moles and pipians. Source: Diana Kennedy, The Art of Mexican Cooking. By the way, your dinner looks right up my alley. I love sausage and onions, and potato salad with little or no mayonnaise sounds quite appealing. I suppose that adding bacon to the potato salad would have been pork overload.

Susan in FL: The low 70s – how ever will you survive? Monavano: Sorry, I have to break the string of lovely fall food. Tonight’s dinner was from Mexican Everyday. The main course was walleye fillets and potatoes simmered in a green sesame pipian. Three shortcuts made the pipian suitable for a rushed weeknight – jarred tomatillo salsa, microwaved potatoes, and tahini as a thickener. Grownups liked, kids not so much. We finished with a crunchy, tangy jicama salad with watercress, romaine, and lime-cilantro dressing. We will definitely make this again.

I appreciate your perspective on Indian breakfasts. Having never visited most of the places whose food I love to cook, I value comments (positive or at least somewhat constructively negative) from those who have direct experience with a cuisine. Looks good, and I hope we will be seeing more now that you have broken the breakfast barrier. For our breakfast, we reheated leftover chicken biryani and garlic naan (from a restaurant) and served it with jarred eggplant pickle and Sriracha.

Planned for dinner, this Thai salad of shrimp and apple eggplant made a quick and delicious breakfast instead.

This was based on a Thai Food recipe for salad of Murray trout with apple eggplant (yam pla gap makreua), substituting shrimp for trout (making it yam gung gap makreua?). We mashed garlic with salt, fried it until golden, and then added shrimp and a little water. When the shrimp turned pink, we killed the heat and mixed in thinly-sliced lemongrass and apple eggplant, mint leaves, shredded long-leaf coriander, lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, and roasted chile powder. Salad of shrimp and apple eggplant

Slice off the raised plastic disc with a knife. It will leave a hole big enough to dispense fish sauce by drips. If you are like me, you will enlarge the hole so that you can release great gushing glugs of fish sauce.

doctortim: That looks delicious - details, please? Butter chicken has been on my list since we had an incredible restaurant version that even younger son loved. Did you make your own tandoori chicken?

Marcia: Nice to see you posting again. The butternut squash coconut curry soup looked particularly lovely. Tonight we made a rare Italian meal, from Marcella Hazan: cartwheels with sausage, cream, and tomato; sauteed carrots with vinegar and oregano; and grilled Belgian endive. The box of pasta was labeled “choo choo wheels.” Eh, tasted good anyway.

Sunday night Mrs. C and the boys baked a salmon fillet with an absolutely delicious glaze of maple syrup, soy sauce, honey mustard, and ginger. Baked sweet potatoes with butter and brown sugar. Yum. Tonight we made spicy basil chicken (gai pad gaprow) . . . . . . and soup with ground buffalo, sauteed onions, bean sprouts, fish sauce, and long-leaf coriander (canh thit bo nau rau ram, or thereabouts). The soup tasted pretty good, but seemed to be missing something. I may play with the leftovers at breakfast.

Rona: Sorry, I can offer no help whatsoever on hoi tod. I hope someone else can answer, though. We are starting to get light frosts, so we harvested a good chunk of the garden for Kasma's spicy basil chicken (gai pad gaprow). This was chock-full of flavor, as it should be with 10 Thai chiles, 12 garlic cloves, sliced shallots, black soy, fish sauce, white pepper, and huge amounts of basil for a pound of minced chicken thighs. I loved it, but Mrs. C asked me to dial back the chiles next time. Edited for punctuation and politeness.

Dejah – What a beautiful dinner, and what lovely golden-brown chicken. Do you use a charcoal or gas grill? Also, great suggestion to make more of the highly addictive sauce for rendang. By the way, my clean-out-the-fridge stir-fries never look that good. A blues concert sounds like a great way to end the evening.

Doctortim – Your pasta experiments look beautiful, and I will happily take any ricotta-stuffed pasta that you don’t want. Apple crumble, from King Arthur Flour (click). It turned out dark for one or more of the following reasons: a) I am a cinnamon junkie; b) the oven walls were hot from using the broiler; and/or c) I forgot to add brown sugar to the topping (duh), and then over-worked it into more of a glop than a crumble. It still tasted good, and I mixed in some walnuts and finished the last of it for breakfast this AM. Ten servings? Hah! You notice that I didn’t post it on the Dessert thread, right?

Mrs. C requested slipper burgers (chapli kebabs - basically, spicy hamburgers) for dinner. We mixed ground lamb, ground chuck, and chorizo sausage with ground coriander, cumin, and cayenne and finely-minced onions, ginger, garlic, and a variety of chiles from the garden. The boys dislike cilantro, so we left that out. With the gas grill out of gas, I cooked them under the broiler. I ate mine on a toasted English muffin, topped with salsa and Mrs. C’s cabbage salad. The boys ate theirs on a hamburger bun with ketchup. Cabbage salad, chow chow pickle, and rice on the side. We had an extra boy tonight, so no pictures. This afternoon we made our annual fall pilgrimage to Pryor’s orchard, and brought back a half-bushel each of Stayman and Ida Red apples. This led to our annual apple crumble.

Dejah, I look forward to hearing about your coconut grilled chicken. Actually, I look forward to hearing about anything that you make. Anyway, Chris Amirault had some information about Thai basil versus lemon basil way back in Post #17 (click). Emphasis added below. . . . and . . .

This array of six knives works for our family and type of cooking, but I make no claims to universal applicability. In decreasing order of utility: 240 mm gyuto (chef’s knife) – mine 180 mm gyuto (chef’s knife) – Mrs. C and the boys prefer a shorter knife, and we frequently have two gyutos in action at once 90 mm paring knife 150 mm honesuki (boning knife) – we de-bone chicken or pork shoulder frequently and don’t want to chip the gyuto Bone cleaver – surprisingly useful for other tasks like bruising lemongrass and mincing or tenderizing meat 270 mm sujihiki (slicing/carving knife) – The gyuto could handle this task, but I prefer to use separate knives for meat and vegetables I agree with the principle of buying quality, but your four knives would not work for our style of cooking. If we were limited to four knives, we would choose a gyuto, paring knife, honesuki, and bone cleaver.

Kim - Thank you! The tomatoes are "ugly ripe", left out for a few days to soften. They are OK, but I am definitely missing real summer tomatoes. Only what, nine more months to wait?