blue_dolphin

Somehow I gave away all my popsicles. It was 97°F here yesterday and it's currently 96°F. Clearly, something had to be done. Out to the lime tree to pick some early specimens and turn them into these Lime Pie Pops: The recipe for these is from Fany Gerson's Paletas. They are supposed to be coated in graham cracker crumbs. That may or may not happen before I bag them up.

Finally pulled out my Paragon. I've been using this recipe for homemade whole milk ricotta-like cheese. Holding the temp @ ~ 185°F for 20 min after adding the acid does seem to improve the yield but was fiddly for me to do without overshooting, which resulted in a dry and less creamy cheese. What a pleasure it was to just set the temp, add the acid when it beeped and then let it go! Nice yield and perfect texture! I'd planned to keep this thing out in the garage but I think I may want it close by!

I had a roommate who could fold fitted sheets into exactly the same size rectangle as the flat sheets. He also loved to iron and vacuum. I often regret not marrying him.

I was worried this deal was too good to be true but I got a shipping notice for my VP215 yesterday so it's getting closer to reality! It's coming via UPS and supposedly will be delivered this coming Friday afternoon. I asked to have it left at the back door - I could only choose from a drop-down, not enter any comments. Fingers crossed! My combo pack of 3 mil bags from Vacuumsealersunlimited arrived yesterday!

I use my blendtec quite often. Getting the smaller and ridiculously overpriced Twister jars certainly increased my usage. I got this one and a smaller one they're not currently offering on some kind of a deal. Those jars and the spatula that comes with should be part of the original equip.

This week's episode is a road trip to Tijuana with Victor Delgado and Jorge Alvarez-Tostado, owners of Tacos 1986, now in downtown LA. The Times article includes a recipe for their Tacos al Hongo, vegan mushroom tacos and salsa macha.

I don't have a Vitamin but I've used my Blendtec to make the classic Gordon Ramsay broccoli soup recipe as written and with various other vegetables. It absolutely lets beautiful vegetables shine. Fresh sugar snap peas were particularly nice. If you've got lovely peas, I'm sure this would make a lovely soup of them, too. I wouldn't try it with any veg that are old, tired or otherwise sub par.

This recipe turned up on Food52 not long ago: The Best Gluten-Free Pasta Recipe, According to a Chef It uses a LOT of egg yolks!

Today's lunch was a veggie pizza al taglio. Crust recipe from Marc Vetri's Mastering Pizza. 20% whole grain, stone ground spelt flour, 20% Italian 00 pizza flour and 60% Gold Medal bread flour. The spelt was an intentional experiment, the Italian flour was only added because I ran out of bread flour and it was Gold Medal only because the store was out of King Arthur bread flour. Thanks to @Duvel for posting the link to the video up thread. I practiced the over-the-arm dough transfer shown in the video with a towel first and it worked like a charm with the dough. Much better than the way I had been doing it. Toppings: tomato sauce (passata + salt and a little olive oil), gold cherry tomatoes, red and green bell peppers, mushrooms, kalamata olives, red onion, mozzarella & a little Parm. More mozz was added at the half way point.

Veggie pizza al taglio

Wow, that apple kugel looks amazing, @shain! Cinnamon Spice Cake from Odette Williams's Simple Cake. The kindle version of this book is currently $2.99 on amazon.com but not amazon.ca It's all spelt flour with olive oil, applesauce and milk and the usual baking suspects. I used Penzy's pie spice in lieu of cinnamon and nutmeg but forgot the orange zest. I was concerned that it would be heavy but it's a very light, flavorful snack cake, perfect with a cup of coffee. I made a half recipe in a 9 x 9" pan, so it's a little thinner that it would be if one baked the full recipe in the 9 x 13" pan called for but perfect for cutting into smaller squares and eating out of hand. The crumb is light and tender. Moist but not at all wet. The book gives options for adding walnuts, pecans or ginger and allspice, dusting with confectioners's sugar, or brushing with melted butter and cinnamon sugar (calling them cinnamon donut cakes), frosting with cream cheese frosting or serving warm with caramel sauce and ice cream. She also gives time and size options for baking in a round pan, individual mini Bundts or cupcake tins.

The Kindle version of Odette William's book Simple Cake has been at $2.99 for a while on amazon.com (sadly, not on amazon.ca) The recipes are indeed simple although she gives a lot of variations for most of the recipes. It's been the book of the month for the Food52 baking cookbook club and has been very well received. I made the Cinnamon Spice Cake (posted over here) and was very pleased with the result.

The full first episode of this second season of The Chef Show is available on YouTube for those non-Netflix subscribers among us:

In addition to resurrecting a weekly, stand-alone food section, the LA Times recently launched a 10-week series of short videos titled "Off Menu." In the first episode, Thai Town restauranteur Jazz Singsanong, owner of Jitlada, accompanies the host, Lucas Peterson to a giant Los Angeles Asian market to shop then back to her restaurant to cook some home style dishes. It's available freely on YouTube, though the accompanying recipe for nam prik goong may be behind a paywall. I had to laugh when he said that you could find anything at LAX-C, the market they visited. It may be true that everything is there but I can attest that finding it in that huge market can be quite another thing!

There was an article on the Cosmic Crisp in the LATimes the other day: Move over, Honeycrisp: New Cosmic Crisp apple to debut at grocery stores It noted: I'll keep an eye out to see if any of them make their way down here. Meanwhile, I'm still eating some of the Macs I bought when I was back in northern NY a few weeks ago. I can buy Macs at the local farmers market here in So Cal but they're never as good as the ones from home!

That Groupon is no longer available so I guess it's just as well that it wasn't a good fit.

This guy put his wife's iPhone in Jello and it still worked.

Yesterday, @Kerry Beal shared a menu offering a Cherry Negroni using Dillon's Cherry Gin, which sounds interesting but isn't something I've seen around here But it got me to thinking about a Sloe Gin Negroni. I found 2 previous mentions here on eG. This one suggested using a standard recipe with "half a measure of sloe gin" while this one omitted regular gin and went with equal parts sloe gin, campari and sweet vermouth plus some orange bitters. I picked a recipe from the Sipsmith website: equal parts London dry gin (I used Tanquery), sloe gin (Plymouth), Campari and sweet vermouth (Cocchi) with an orange wedge. I quite liked it.

I usually keep the little tins of TJ's smoked trout on hand for making appetizers. I think they're $2.99/tin. The other day a friend served these smoked rainbow trout fillets at a gathering she hosted. I don't think they're new but I'd never noticed them before. Quite good so I'm recommending them if you like smoked fish but don't smoke it yourself or have easy access to superior products. They're in the refrigerated section by the smoked salmon, etc. $7.99 for that 8 oz package. The tinned fish is skinless but the other has the skin on as you can see from the back of the package: I don't usually go for the frozen foods but I tried 2 of them a few weeks back when I was staying in an empty house. There were appliances in the kitchen but nothing else. I actually had to go buy a knife, fork and spoon. Anyway, I picked up this Paneer Tikka Masala with Spinach Basmati Rice. It heats up very quickly in the microwave, less than 5 min, so it would be good for a quick work lunch. As you can see in the photo below, it's a lot more saucy than the photo on the box. I thought it was quite good though the amount of sodium on the label is rather alarming. Needed some chutney or something for a bit of spice/acid/sweet contrast. I had some apple salsa which did the trick. I'd buy it again if I was in a similar situation and not worried about sodium. The other new-to-me item that I tried was this Burrata, Prosciutto & Arugula flatbread @ $4.99. It was a bit of a disappointment. I was actually impressed by the quality of the toppings but the flatbread was meh to me. No flavor, no chew and the texture was either doughy (with less baking time) or unpleasantly cracker-y and hard with more. Also, for something that's supposed to be quick, the instructions say to first remove it from the box and let it sit at RT for 20 minutes before it goes into the oven. If I've got that much time, I could make something better. You put the prosciutto on after it comes out of the oven. If you get this, it would be wise to cut it into smaller pieces and distribute it more evenly rather than my artistic replication of the box photo. The cheeses were nothing like a fresh creamy Burrata but certainly a step up from the rubbery mozz that's on most frozen stuff. I've seen good reviews of this online so maybe I was just in some kind of cranky mood. Maybe I'll try it again someday but at this point, I don't recommend it.

This very effective description brings me great sadness 😢 ....sniff, sniff 😢

Pizza with Naples dough @ 70% hydration from Mastering Pizza and topping from the Pizza Bianca with potato, anchovy and sage in Ottolenghi's Simple. Also known by me as chip & dip pizza as the topping starts with a layer of mascarpone mixed with pecorino Romano, anchovy, sage and lemon zest. That's not pepperoni. I used a mix of red, yellow and purple potatoes.

Another thanks for posting that, @Franci. I need to go set up some of this dough so I can make it tomorrow! It's certainly not as authentic as yours but I've been making the al taglio dough @ 80% hydration from Marc Vetri's Mastering Pizza which he also credits to Gabriele Bonci. 500g bread flour (I've been adding 20% stone ground whole grain flour), 400ml water, 4 g dry yeast, and 15g salt. He dissolves the salt in a 50 ml portion of the water and adds it during the second round of turns and folds. All together, the dough gets three sets of turns and folds over the course of 1.5 - 2 hrs, then a fridge ferment for 12-36 hrs before being shaped and put into half sheet pans (45 x 33 cm, I've been using 2 quarter sheet pans instead) to bake @ 500°F, placing the sheet pans on a pre-heated baking steel.

Mine will be living out in the garage but I'll probably need to hire someone to help me get it out there!

Ditto the thanks, @Coogles. I just ordered one. I never thought I could justify the price of one of a chamber vac. This is still a splurge but I couldn't resist the deal!

I just ordered one. Thanks, @fledflew!