blue_dolphin

Wow - I had no idea! Is it a general holiday or do people have to arrange time off from work for this, ahem, religious observance? I had no idea there was such a thing as a liquor belt. The things I learn here! Today’s lunch was the Fish in Paper, Spring Edition from Ari Kolender's How to Cook the Finest Things in the Sea, recipe available online here. Before cooking: And after, with a handful of tiny tomatoes thrown in for color: He suggests serving this with crusty bread and it was indeed perfect for sopping up the liquid that’s steamed out of the fish, veg and aromatics inside the parchment, no dilution, pure flavor!

French toast made from a loaf of sourdough so stale that I ended up letting the slice sit overnight in the egg:milk mixture when it became clear it wasn’t going to soften in time for yesterday’s breakfast 😮 The sausage patty was a freezer remnant from a while back when I used an Aldi breakfast sausage chub to freeze up a batch of thin patties I could cook quickly, right from frozen for breakfast sandwiches. Time to make another batch.

Here's another new item I tried, the Tarongino Frizzante Sparkling Orange Wine from Spain @ $12.99. I can see this being popular at summer parties when you want something cool and festive but don’t want to get smashed. It’s not a sugar bomb as I feared and I liked it more than I expected. This is not an orange wine that gets its color from skin contact but is actually made by fermenting muscadet grape juice and Valencia orange juice together after macerating them with the orange peels. It also comes in a still version @ $9.99. They are both low alcohol, 6.9 ABV for this one and 51 calories/5 oz serving. I saw the still version a few weeks ago and thought it sounded awful, then read a review of the frizzante that sounded more appealing. As you can see, it’s the color of an orange popsicle and it has some of that taste, too. There’s some sweetness but it’s not cloying and is balanced by the acidity and a hint of bitterness from the zest or peels. I enjoyed sipping a chilled glass on a rather hot afternoon. TJ's has a nice Vinho Verde from Portugal that’s my choice for an afternoon sipper and for something a little more frizzante, I’ll take their Giardino Pinot Grigio delle Venezie Vivace Rosé, both $5.99

My French butter cookie comparison was rather flawed. I have the smaller, classic St. Michel galettes and the TJ's are more similar to the larger St. Michel Grandes Galettes which I’ve had but don’t have on hand at the moment. Going from memory, TJ's are denser and kind of hard. I’m not a dunker, but I would dunk these. The St. Michel are crisp but not as hard. As predicted by @weinoo, I give the edge to St. Michel. My flawed comparison photos: The TJ's box has 3 packets of 4 larger cookies (on the left) while the classic St. Michel has 4 packets of 5 smaller cookies (on the right). The St. Michel Grandes Galettes also come in packets of 4 like the TJ's. Closer view: Ingredients are similar.

It’s also on sale here: $2.49

These are the Israeli and Greek fetas in brine that I get at TJ's. Both much better than that cow feta she tasted. The Israeli stuff has a cute little plastic basket inside the tub so you can easily lift it from the brine but the Greek gives you more cheese for the same price. The Greek is my go-to but both are good. When it comes to sharp cheddar-type cheeses, the Cabot Extra Sharp $7.99/lb) English Coastal Cheddar ($8.99/lb) and even the Kerrygold Dubliner ($9.99/lb) have more oomph than the New Zealand Sharp Cheddar ($6.99/lb) that she tasted which is a nice cheese but very soft and mild. I bought the English Coastal, some Unexpected Cheddar and 1000 day Gouda. New to me this AM are these French butter cookies ($3.49) pictured here with the St. Michel brand I usually pick up elsewhere. I will conduct a side-by-side tasting and report back.

Yes, that’s another of my favorites , though it’s not always available.

Aside from the Silver Goat chèvre that I mentioned, the stores in my area carry both a Greek and an Israeli sheep’s milk feta in brine that are both excellent and way better than the cow feta she tasted. Both were MIA for a while but have been back for some months. She tasted a New Zealand ‘sharp’ Cheddar and found it wanting. I agree that one is not very sharp but it’s not a bad cheese and they usually have good, sharp options from Canada, Vermont or New York. I’ll check what’s available next trip and update. She gave props to the Parm, I agree, but I also regularly buy the Pecorino Romano and think it’s excellent. I’ll pop in to the store tomorrow to refresh my memory!

This video popped up in my YouTube feed the other day. While she doesn’t taste ALL the TJ cheeses (some of my go-tos are missing), I’m seriously impressed at her ability to taste so many cheeses while wearing very bright red lipstick 💋 I thought she was fair in evaluating the flavored cheeses that weren’t to her taste. I don’t really love cheeses with added flavors either. And I like all of her top picks. As far as convincing me to try a TJ's cheese that I haven’t already tried, that might be the goat cheese with herbs. The basic Silver Goat chèvre is my go-to from TJ's and I avoid the flavored stuff. I was a little surprised that she deemed the TJ's full fat ricotta gritty and, honestly, on her insistence that ricotta be “full fat” since the original Italian stuff that we rarely, if ever, see here is made from whey. Whatever. I make a full fat ricotta-like stuff from the recipe in Bestia that's very creamy and delicious but I find the TJs stuff better than any supermarket option I’ve tried.

Ah, I totally missed that “backcountry” meant camping and assumed it referred to anywhere outside of the true South! I wonder if you could doctor them up a bit with powdered milk (the full fat kind) or some dreaded green can “cheese”? Luckily, the outdoors makes everything taste better so there’s that. This grits talk made me want some so I made an NYT Cooking recipe for Blackened Fish With Quick Grits with Marsh Hen Mill Jimmy Red grits instead of quick grits. I use Vivian Howard's Foolproof Grits recipe from Deep Run Roots which uses a double boiler so no scorch risk from an inattentive dolphin. This was fresh rockfish from my weekly fish share but I’ve made it with a variety of fish.

I’m in awe of you for undertaking and sharing your grand adventure with us but this little sentence makes me very happy:

@SLB, have you tried cooking, portioning and freezing? I haven’t but maybe I should. If you’re cooking a full meal and start the grits first, it’s not a big deal to wait 40-50 minutes but if you just want a bowl of grits for breakfast, that’s different.

In Simple French Food (1974), on p 266, Richard Olney said, “An onion panade is surely the ancestor and still the best of all the onion soups.” Being Richard Olney, he has more to say and includes a recipe for onion panade. Here’s a bit: Edited to add that in 2005, @russ parsons wrote this about Olney's recipe in an LA Times piece about favorite cookbooks:

I continued the sheet-pan theme with this Sheet-Pan Baked Feta With Broccolini, Tomatoes and Lemon from NYT Cooking. I added chickpeas to the pan and served it over farro.

This is Ali Slagle's sheet-pan feta with chickpeas and tomatoes from NYT Cooking: If I’d been monitoring more closely, I might have pulled it out earlier and missed the bits of char on the chickpeas. Per the header notes, I added cauliflower and olives. Served on arugula, lightly dressed with salt, lemon juice and olive oil. Flatbread is my usual fluffy and crisp flatbread from Andy Baraghani's The Cook You Want To Be. I will make this again.