blue_dolphin

This is me checking Whole Foods for their annual 12 Days of Cheese specials:

Stewy harissa chickpeas with winter squash from Good Things by Samin Nosrat. The recipe is also available online here. The sweetness of the squash, warm harissa and spices, earthy beans and bright sherry vinegar and lemon come together perfectly in this recipe and with very little effort. I used honeynut squash cut in wedges since they were so small and used Rancho Gordo Royal Coronas instead of chickpeas as I had some ready to go. I unintentionally omitted the olive oil added with the stock and didn’t miss it. Per the serving suggestions, I added a few cubes of the marinated feta, also from the book but it wasn’t really necessary and with all the flavors in the stew, I didn’t really taste the marinade.

Yeah, they tried 33 total and it seems like the under $65 group were less represented in the top tier! I might give the $7 Aldi version a try. Should be fine for French toast!

The NYT Wirecutter listed their favorite panettone here: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-panettone/ Not sure if there’s a paywall or not.

Mussels and orzo in a coconut and saffron stew from Mezcla by Ixta Belfrage. I loved this and will absolutely make it again. I used Thai bird chiles instead of Scotch bonnet and red bell pepper instead of yellow. The Calabrian chile paste was a great addition.

More mussels. This is the bucatini with fennel, salami, tomato, and mussels from Six Seasons of Pasta and I thought it was quite good. I thought the mussels might be overwhelmed by the other flavors but that wasn’t the case. They weren’t exactly the star of the show but it was an excellent ensemble performance!

I’d love an Earl Grey marmalade! Or maybe fig & bergamot preserves? Bergamot poached prunes?

Maybe. The sauce was light but very flavorful thanks to the oil from the garlic confit and several cloves of the garlic plus red chile flakes. The almonds are browned in that, then the beans went in with a bit of butter and cooked a few min to very lightly brown the butter before the white wine and mussels went in. The mussels got fished out, the broth reduced and garlic mashed before the pasta was added to finish cooking. The sauce was finished with parsley, lemon zest and juice and a final dab of butter to emulsify everything.

Like the green beans & potato recipe above, this one is also in the spring section but the fresh beans at my local farmers market have been beautiful lately and I got mussels in my weekly fish share so I made the pasta with green beans, garlic confit, mussels, and almonds from Six Seasons of Pasta. I enjoyed this, all the elements were excellent but it didn’t really come together as more than the sum of its parts like the green bean and potato recipe did. As usual, I doubled the amount of beans, with a mix of green and yellow beans and reduced the pasta from 4 oz/ serving to 3 oz.

I got a UPS email for a delivery tomorrow from USM CT CO BULLETPROOF MIDWEST which seems to be a logistics company handling shipments from Canada so maybe Goûter panettone is on the way sooner than I expected!

Thanks! In the book, he gives the option of making this with basil pesto so I’ll probably give that a try at some point, too.

Yum! Soup looks great and I think your cracker, peanut butter, and banana is an excellent choice. Crackers, PB and a piece of fruit could be breakfast!

Picking up Six Seasons of Pasta after a little break, I used the Etto brand sedani I recently got bought to make the pasta with new potatoes, green beans and sun-dried tomato and almond pesto. Cooking the potatoes, beans and pasta sequentially in the same pot of salted water was efficient and gave the potatoes time to absorb the pesto flavors. This would actually be a great potato & green bean dish even without the pasta. If you like a little veg with each bite of pasta as I do, I recommend at least doubling the beans. I made a half recipe with lots of extra beans for 2 generous servings. I didn’t need all the pesto to make it as saucy as I wanted.

I wonder if they ever catch on fire…

I ordered one apple pie and one SOMA panettone. As @ElsieD said, they’ll ship after Dec 15.