Dante

Chicken tacos with sour cream/lime/cilantro sauce, air fried seasoned potatoes, and yuca with garlic/onion sauce

experimenting with a new fried rice recipe

Hi! I've recently found myself the recipient of ten pounds of basic russet potatoes. I love the things but need to use them up before any go bad and I don't want to just fall back on my usual mainstays (mashed, fries, hasselback, potato pancakes,home fries, tofu-and-potatoes-in-miso-gravy) ,and want to avoid getting sick of potatoes as much as possible, so I want to mix it up more. Does anyone have any particular favourites spotlighting potatoes that they'd like to share?

Sesame tofu and veggies over rice

Thank you! It's basically one of my Frankenstein recipes, where I realize that I have a bunch of recipes for the same thing and then go through them, compare and contrast, and then combine what I feel are the best parts of all of them,then test, analyze, and refine from there. I saw that the Egg Shop Fried Chicken recipe used both a brine and a buttermilk marinade, and added a drizzle of honey at the end. Substituting pickle brine for regular brine has been a thing for a while, and it only made sense to use my own pickle brine, and then I decided to swap out the honey for a maple/bourbon/butter drizzle. I prefer rice flour to wheat flour for frying as I feel it gives a crispier coating, and then added the spice blend alleged to be the KFC herbs-and-spices. It sounds like a lot of steps but it's much easier than it seems, as most of the components are basically throw-ingredients-together-in-a-container-mix-them-and-apply,so, following brining and marinade, at the actual cooking stage it's just dredge in flour, fry, drizzle, and then add sauce.

Air fried chicken with a pickle brine brining (from my own homemade pickles), buttermilk marinade, seasoned rice flour coating, and bourbon/maple/butter drizzle to finish, topped with a mayo/mustard/bbq sauce. Side of steamed rapini.

Veggies and air fried tofu in a peanut/lime sauce over noodles.

Thank you! I tend to be pretty eclectic. Not much one for "tradition". Plus, my pantry tends to be pretty eclectic as well, so I have a pretty broad selection of stuff on hand.

Thank you! I'll confess that part of this was me throwing together what I could work with. It all synergized remarkably well. If I were to do anything different, I'd have made it saucier somehow, as the dumplings, while tasty, turned out a bit on the dry side.

Air fried chicken (brined, marinated in seasoned buttermilk, coated with rice flour), with oven-roasted tomatoes and mashed potatoes with steamed kale mixed in

Poached chicken with scallions, onion, and scrambled egg cooked in the poaching broth, over rice

Semolina, ricotta,and dill dumplings, accompanied by sauteed Brussels sprouts and noodles with fried shallots and oyster sauce

Cheeseburger w/canned chipotles in adobo mixed in with the meat, steamed snow peas on the side.

Quenelles with "melting potatoes" (basically thick sliced, seared, then braised) and edamame

Pulled pork sandwich with Shasha sauce, sides of grits and corn

in essence, and I had figured there would be a lot of overlap with other Southern styles, and that it had become more cultural than racial as it spread. But I still see "Soul Food" described as its own entity, which made me curious about it.

No one in particular, just something I want to explore in general. See how it diverges from the other Southern styles I'm more familiar with.

I confess I have not much experience with authentic soul food, entirely due to lack of access (the furthest South I've ever lived is DC, and that was only for three years, and most of my ventures to the South have been to NOLA), but I've been curious about the cuisine for some time.

Thank you for the list! And, indeed, no one book on anything will do, but I want to start somewhere.

Therein lies part of my problem. And that I know sod-all about the topic to begin with. I have familiarity with a couple of other styles of Southern USA cooking, NOLA Creole, and Lowcountry, but not this one.

Exactly what it says on the tin... If I were to buy one book on Soul Food, what should I get?

Pork tenderloin Stroganoff

Mac and Cheese with smoked paprika, corn, black beans, diced tomatoes, and a drizzle of the adobo sauce from the chipotles that I used for the sauce for the mushroom tacos.

Mushroom tacos with sauce of pineapple, chipotle, cumin, smoked paprika, and lime juice. Slow sauteed baby carrots on the side.

Tonight's dinner: tofu saltado