blue_dolphin

Polenta topped with collards, boiled egg and some meat picked from the smoked hock cooked with the collards. That's a moat of collard potlikker surrounding the polenta

Yes, just regular polenta, no binders. Here is a recipe. For this purpose, I use a little less water than I usually do when cooking the polenta - 3.5 cups of water/1 cup dry polenta instead of the 4 cups I'd usually use. Not that it matters, but I cook the polenta in the Instant Pot, pot-in-pot, manual, high pressure, 15 min then 10 min slow release before opening, aka, the @Anna N method! Then I use oiled fingers to pat it out on parchment paper to ~ 1/3 inch thick. Or you can roll it between two lightly oiled sheets. Or press it into a pie plate to make a polenta pie crust. 1 cup dry polenta will press out into two 10-inch rounds or one big one. I prefer the smaller size. Put the crusts in the fridge to firm up for at least an hour or overnight. I put the baking steel into the middle of the oven and pre-heat to 475°F. My oven has a convect-roast setting that uses both upper and lower elements so that's what I use. Brush the top of the crust with a little olive oil and slide it, on the parchment paper, on to the steel. Bake until the edges start to crisp up and it looks sizzle-y all over. That takes ~ 10 minutes for me, the recipe says 15. Pull the crust out, add the toppings and return to the steel for another 5-10 min, until the toppings are done to your liking. I've had the crust slide off the parchment directly on to the steel. It released just fine and was not the disaster I feared but I'm not recommending that. WRT toppings, I wouldn't recommend anything overly saucy - think tomatoes instead of tomato sauce and I recommend a light sprinkle of cheese directly on the crust, then add other toppings, followed by a little more cheese. The recipe I linked to says this is a knife and fork dish. In my hands, making the smaller, 10-inch crusts, going light on the toppings and baking on the steel, I get slices that can easily be picked up and eaten out of hand. Edited to add that it's not pizza, but it's not bad either!

I've been cooking from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee recently and decided to pizza-fy a few recipes from the book, just for fun. There's a recipe in the book for the classic Braised Summer Squash with Onions that includes rosemary for a bit of a twist. The squash was so soft and tender that I pretty much treated it as a chunky sauce here. I added red bell peppers for texture and sprinkled on just a little diced country ham to contrast with the sweet veg and stay in keeping with the southern cooking theme. Next, I took 2 Jubilee recipes that feature dried corn and put them on a polenta crust instead of making the grits or cornmeal dumplings the recipes specify. In terms of flavor and texture, the Low Country Shrimp & Grits adapted quite well. It would have been much better with smaller shrimp but this is what I had. I put a smallish amount of cheese (cheddar, as the recipe uses in the grits, and a little mozzarella) and some cherry tomatoes on the crust mid-bake, then added the shrimp when it came out of the oven. Small shrimp would have made these slices easy to pick up and eat. The other recipe I messed with was for Collard Greens with(out) Cornmeal Dumplings and it also worked well. The book calls for smoked ham hocks to make the Smoky Soul Stock that the greens are cooked in. The hock meat was was tender and still flavorful so I used some of that along with the collards to top the "pizza" and let the crust stand in for the dumplings. A few cherry tomato halves would have added a welcome acid note. Most polenta pizza recipes bake the crust on a baking sheet. I put it on parchment and slid that on to a pre-heated steel which yielded a crust that was crisper on the bottom with slices that could easily be picked up and eaten our of hand.

Please make the walnut bread and send me a loaf! I bought the book years ago in part because I missed that bread but have yet to make it!

Over at this link, eG member @CanadianHomeChef suggests a temp of 275°F for caramelized onions. I have done this with my Paragon using the mat and it worked fine. I just did a skillet full, not a huge deep pot.

Obviously not @rotuts but as he says, it's all about the salt level. If I wanted max ham flavor in my casserole, I would not soak the ham. I would assume that the little diced bits will give up some salt to the dish during cooking so I'd adjust or eliminate other sources of salt. I do give the biscuit slices a soak before I heat them up for breakfast sandwiches but they're not cooked in a casserole.

Island Banana Bread from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee. Lots of flavor from the cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, molasses and vanilla. I used walnuts instead of pecans, Empress dates instead of Medjools and baked 3 mini loaves so I can stash 2 in the freezer.

Nice!

Got some nice apricots from the farmers market and turned them into these Apricot, Honey & Ginger pops I'm looking forward to seeing some new creations from @pastrygirl & @JeanneCake!

As @heidih said, it's apparently the texture. The LA Times recently did a spread on vegan Mexican restaurants and included this recipe for vegan jackfruit "carnitas" . The header notes say, "Here, jackfruit takes on the same shredded texture as pork. This dish calls for a good amount of oil to give the jackfruit carnitas the same fatty texture and richness of pork" I've got a can of jackfruit in the cupboard so I may give this one a try.....it could turn up right here in the breakfast thread 🙃

Scrambled eggs, mushrooms, toasted sourdough baguette

I did. My older Dartos cleaned up easily right from the start but the recent ones took me multiple rounds of hot, soapy water, Barkeepers Friend, Goo Gone and steel wool. Here's a before and an after.

That would be my top recommendation, in part because of the videos that he made to accompany the book. I've found them very helpful. Measurements are in both grams and cups/spoons.

Same breakfast yesterday and today. French baked eggs with smoked salmon and tarragon cream from Melissa Clark's Dinner in French. The leek, tarragon and cream mixture that goes into the bottom of the ramekins is delicious. Managed to overcook the eggs both times and today I overdid the toast a little, too. Need to work on my timing 🙃 The day before that, I had seafood stuffed potato balls from my freezer's panedemic stash. Mexican sriracha which I've been putting on everything lately from Josef Centano's cookbook Amá.

I received Alexander Smalls most recent cookbook, Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen, today and it's as delightful to read as his voice is to listen to. I love how the chapters progress from Jazz (appetizers) through Spirituals (rice, pasta & grits) and Gospel (greens & vegetables) to Opera (fish & seafood), Divas (meat & chicken) and Jukebox Music (bread, biscuits & muffins) and finally end with Serenades (desserts) with a full playlist for each of those sections.

For the sweet potatoes, this is something that I've been wanting to try after someone reviewed it favorably in another cooking group. Sweet Potato and Ricotta "Cookies" from Vij’s Indian: Our Stories, Spices and Cherished Recipes by Meeru Dhalwala and Vikram Vij of the well known Vancouver restaurants. Sounds like a fun recipe to play around with. The egg price you quoted above is very much in line with what organic, pasture farmed eggs sell for at Whole Foods and what I pay at my local farmers market. I think I posted elsewhere that while I like supporting my local farmers and humane animal husbandry, I drew the line at Apricot Lane Farms eggs @ $14/dozen 🙄. There are much less expensive eggs sold here at the supermarkets, though I haven't seen anything as low as some of the comparison quotes mentioned. I've paid a similar price to yours for Neuske's bacon and seen plenty of pricy olive oil but the OJ and pickles are at a level I haven't encountered.

Thanks! I recommend People's Pops if you're going to splash out on a book. I wrote a little review* of it shortly after I purchased and still refer to it often. I think you could start a popsicle business with that book! * Edited to add that if you go back to that old post, you can see an example of what happens if the molds are sitting in too warm water that doesn't go all the way up to the top of the molds. By the time the top part softened up enough to release, the bottom parts were all melty!

I have the same plastic molds that you do. The Peoples Pops book says they used those for their business for 3 years before switching to specialized molds that sit in a super cold alcohol bath for quick chilling. I imagine the stainless steel molds would chill more quickly than plastic even in a regular freezer. What seems to help me get them out cleanly is to put the mold into a container of room temp or barely tepid water, not hot, so it's not melting too fast. I use a shoebox-sized plastic tub so I don't need to fill up the whole sink. Secondly, make sure the water goes all the way up to the top of the mold. Otherwise, by the time the top part loosens enough to pull them out, the bottom has gotten too melty. I keep checking them until I can pull one out, then remove the mold from the water, quickly pull out all the pops and place them on a parchment or waxed paper lined cookie sheet that I keep in the freezer. I put that back in the freezer for a bit to firm up the surface again before I wrap or bag them up. Also, I don't use the lid that comes with that plastic mold. If even just 1 or 2 sticks get knocked askew and freeze like that then it's a pain to remove the lid. I just set a timer for 30-45 min and put the sticks in at that point. The only pops that haven't released cleanly when I've done that are the fudgsicles from the recipe on Serious Eats and she says to grease the molds, a step I've skipped. They contain gelatin so they're almost more a frozen pudding than an ice pop. I did get them out but they left stuff stuck to the mold, especially when I made some extra boozy variations with Chartreuse - they tasted great though!

I saw this one pop up the other day on Leite's Culinaria. Edited to add that the testers and comments have positive things to say about it. Here's another one that doesn't include any dairy from Nicole on Baking Bites

After reading this: I followed Kim's link and read this in the recipe introduction: So, before I ate my egg salad on toast, I performed the @Kim Shook egg salad test: I didn't necessarily follow the protocol for making the egg salad but I think it's at least, "Not Wet"

The location would indeed be good for that. Not sure I could fashion shelving that would be both attractive and earthquake safe and the cats would surely figure the shelves were for them. And I'd miss the art I currently have in that spot but I do have other options. Behind that pantry/fridge/oven wall is a hallway. There's a closet with shelves, 3 ft wide, 2 ft deep, aka the linen closet, though I have cat food, light bulbs, tools and all sorts of junk in there but no linens. That's one option but the deep shelves make it annoying to find bottles in the back. I have a lot of bottles - as my non-cocktailian, Tito's-drinking brother remarked, "you've got more weird bottles in here than anyone I know, but nothing to actually drink! 🙃 But immediately next to that, behind the fridge and oven, lurks another hallway closet that was designed as a laundry closet. 6.5 feet wide by 32 inches deep with low 7 ft ceilings due to ductwork running above.. A previous owner moved the laundry out to the garage but the hookups for water, electricity and gas remain. I use it for wine storage & mops & brooms but it's not well utilized. If money were free flowing, I'd convert that closet into little wet bar with a wine fridge and an under cabinet ice maker that would allow me to have plenty of ice without hogging up all the freezer space in the kitchen. Lacking the funds for that, I can still put some Metro-type shelving in there to accommodate my liquor collection. It's right around the corner from that buffet, so I can still use the top surface as my cocktail making station. Just need to get my butt in gear and do it!

I'm hoping that posting these photos will give me a nudge to sort things out and post some "afters." My main pantry lives behind these doors and has become ridiculously overcrowded. Luckily, it's all hidden from the casual visitor....well, it would be if I had casual visitors anymore! To the left, in the photo above, in the adjacent family room, you can see a buffet that I currently use for liquor, cocktail glasses, etc. If I can find another place for that stuff, I could use it for auxiliary kitchen storage. My Paragon induction burner and Phillips grill could live in there, along with some plastic bins or tubs of baking ingredients. Let's see if I can do something about that. Below, you can see the overcrowding. I'm pretty sure that every section contains some thing that doesn't belong so I really need to pull everything out and get it back in order. When taking this photo, I spied a can of pineapple juice in the wrong place. It's something I've been looking for but sadly had a best-by date in 2014 🙄 On the left side, the top shelf has large bottles of vinegar. Going down from there on the pull-out sections: 1. pasta, 2. more pasta with canned tomatoes, 3. vinegars (I recently counted 25 🙄) 4. sauces, 5. canned and jarred goods, 6. rice, grains & beans On the right side, the top shelf has 5 lb flour containers. Going down from there are 1. sugars, honey and sweet baking ingredients, 2. speciality flours & starches, 3. oils and a few vinegars too tall for the the vinegar section, 4. nut butters, misc baking ingredients, 5. cocktail bitters, misc canning & pickling supplies, 6. nuts & dried fruits Apron hanging at the ready inside the left door. Here's a photo with a pull-out pulled out: Above the oven is this deep cabinet that's not well used because I can only reach the stuff in the front Crackers & salty snacks on the top shelf, cereal & sweet snacks on the bottom. Both shelves have some random items that belong over in the pantry cabinet but got stashed here due to overcrowding. I believe we have covered spices before. This section has only become more overcrowded since I last photographed it. All in all, a rather ridiculous amount of food for one person, no? The cookbook shelves are also out of control and need either a serious purge or purchase of another book shelf. I justify it all by saying that I don't have too many other hobbies and I have to eat anyway! My house is a 1966 mid-century modern and the kitchen was an unfortunate remodel done in 2009, just before I bought the house. It's relatively functional but the shaker-style cabinets and the warm red/orange color are completely wrong for the house. Back up in the first photo, you can see the cooler wood tones of the open wood ceiling and the dark-stained posts and beams that are exposed throughout the house. I hate that orangey color! The granite countertops are also not appropriate for the house but their color is less offensive. I'd hoped to reface the cabinets with something from Semihandmade but leaving my job early left me without those handy dandy bonus checks that could fund it - darn! At some point, that fridge is going to die and replacing it may force me to address the cabinets as well.

I have one of the wooden-handled Danish whisks, too. I've had it for quite a few years and use it for pancakes, waffles, muffins & quick breads. It is pretty amazing how well it works since it looks like a piece of twisted wire coat hanger on a stick. No signs of coming apart here.

My top recommendation would go to Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons: A new way with vegetables. It is not strictly vegetarian as he uses anchovies here and there and even includes a recipe for Beef with Lots and Lots of Onions but it's mostly vegetarian and does very good things with vegetables. I've given it to 8 friends and even though it's been a couple of years, I still receive regular text messages with photos of what they are cooking from the book. He starts the book with a "go-to" section of sauces, pickles, compound butters and condiments that he draws on throughout the book. Some people think that's a sneaky way of hiding a recipe-in-a-recipe so be warned. There are photos of most dishes. We have a thread on cooking from it here. Joe Yonan's Cool Beans is a new title that is full of vegan bean recipes. Beautiful photos, too. I've enjoyed what I've cooked from it so far. Ottolenghi's Plenty and Plenty More have both been mentioned earlier in this thread and are both excellent. There's a "cooking from" thread on Plenty here . I thought there was one on Plenty More, but I can't find it. Both have tons of recipes with interesting flavor combinations and photos of a lot (though not all) of the dishes. If I were going to give either of those to an Ottolenghi novice who doesn't have access to ethnic groceries, I'd include a pantry gift of sumac, za'atar, pomegranate molasses, harissa, tahini and preserved lemons (or a recipe for that last one.) I don't see a recommendation for The Moosewood Restaurant Table upthread but it's a great book with a ton of (the cover says 250) recipes, most of which are fairly easy and not particularly time consuming. I'm quite fond of the Hummus with Preserved Lemon....all the dips are good. I love Deborah Madison, too, and I prefer her Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone to Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian but while the big tomes are good for reference, they don't draw me in as much as her other books. Vegetable Literacy is a beautiful book that will teach almost anyone a few new things about vegetables. The book is organized into "vegetable families" and there's an informative essay to begin each chapter so it's a good guide to substituting related veg in recipes. Her book, Local Flavors is a great farmers market companion. IMHO, The Greens Restaurant Cookbook, mentioned just above is on the restaurant-y side. For example, most of the soups require their own stocks. The results are generally worth the effort and there are quite a few recipes (Winter Squash Soup with Red Chili and Mint, Turnip Soup with Turnip Greens and Black Bean Chili) that I return to over and over but be aware that it's not entirely effortless cooking. My most used of her books is The Savory Way, which I've used a ton. Both of those are older books and lack photographs which I know is a deal breaker for some but they also happen to be my favorites. Finally, I'll put in a plug for another old favorite of mine, Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu. In this book, she promotes the idea of doing some prep work ahead so dinners are easy to put together at the end of the day. There are 50 menus and each one has a list of prep tasks that can be done 1, 2, or 3 days ahead. There are also quick pasta and stir fry meals, breakfasts and menus for vegetarian Thanksgiving, a vegetarian barbecue and a Seder, all meals that can confound those hosting vegetarian guests. Because of the menu planning aspect, this would be good for someone new to vegetarian cooking or someone who would like a bit of a nudge to get into menu planning or everyday cooking. There are some weekly menu plans at the end with advance tasks to do each day. No photos, the book is illustrated with Katzen's own artwork.

Hard water is pretty rough on dishwashers, too. I'd imagine it could be worth it in hard water areas. The last place I lived the water was awful. Even with a rinse aid, the dishwasher left spots and streaks on everything unless you yanked them out and towel dried everything as soon as it stopped.