blue_dolphin

My Mouli-julienne was one of my first kitchen purchases for my college apartment. I still have it, still use it regularly and it still works fine. Quite a sturdy little thing. My only repair has been to the plastic knob on the end of the crank which developed a hole that the crank poked through. I patched it up with a little Sugru. My mom had the all metal version with a wooden knob like this one:

I made some of the very rich creamy ricotta from Bestia yesterday, spread some on a slice of toasted seeded sourdough, topped with fresh Mission figs from the farmers market and a drizzle of Mike’s hot honey.

Ginger-garlic fish parcels from Vietnamese Food Any Day by Andrea Nguyen I used sockeye salmon from my weekly fish share and increased the recipe amount of baby bok choy. Seasonings are ginger matchsticks, sliced garlic, black pepper, soy sauce and oyster sauce. Quick, easy and delicious.

I made the mistake of running into TJ's this morning before breakfast and bought a cheesecake Kringle. Had a slice for breakfast along with fruit from the farmers market: Santa Rosa plums, Brooks and Ranier cherries and a variety of pluerry (plum cherry hybrid) whose name escapes me.

I made the mistake of running into TJ's this morning before breakfast and came back with 2 unnecessary items. Pistachio & Fior di Latte gelato-style dessert ($4.99) and one of the Cheesecake Kringles ($9.99) making their annual summertime appearance. I should have looked at the ingredients as it's lot of stuff you’d never find in real gelato. Kinda like making ice cream with Coffee Mate vs real dairy. Pistachio is subtle. The flavors don’t taste bad but the mouthfeel gives the composition away. The cheesecake Kringle isn’t new but I hadn’t tried it. Kinda like a cheese Danish. It doesn’t replace pecan as my favorite. That missing piece was breakfast 🙃 The rest has been sliced up and frozen and should last me til the pecan comes back in Nov-Dec.

Looks similar to this convection oven: https://www.amazon.com/-/zh_TW/FSE-COH-3100WPRO-單甲板電動對流烤箱-烤盤容量-半尺寸/dp/B0BRTFY71Q

This morning, one of my neighbors posted in our neighborhood Facebook group asking if anyone wanted some Suriname cherries. My first step was to come here where I found a couple of posts from @shain (whose posts I miss and hope is Ok) in this topic and over in the gardening topic which convinced me they’re edible. I also found an old post in a topic about unusual ice cream flavors that mentioned making a sorbet with chilies. Interesting! So I went over to meet my neighbor and picked these from 3 different trees in his yard: Sorry for the poor focus. As @shain mentioned, when they’re ripe, the fruits fall right off the tree so it was more like catching them than picking! My neighbor said that last year, the dark variety were the biggest but this year, that tree produced a plethora of tiny fruit instead. I believe they are from the same Eugenia family as the Rio Grande cherry that I posted about upthread. These are smaller but also more flavorful. The flavors of the fruit from the three different trees were distinctly different but I think I will combine them and try the sorbet idea. The pit is pretty big so it may be just one serving!

For years, I walked to work, 4-6 miles, depending in my route, through Santa Monica to UCLA. Much of my walk was in areas filled with 2- and 3-storey apartment buildings and I was often surprised how frequently i picked up the scent of bacon since I thought of it as a weekend treat. I was kinda jealous of those mid-week bacon eaters. Never got a whiff of it when I walked through the pricey areas. Maybe because their houses were set back from the sidewalk or maybe they didn’t appreciate the pig as much as the rest of us!

No, I don’t have that one. Sounds good though!

I only have a couple of Sunset cookbooks (Cookies and Brunch come to mind) but I would happily snap up any of them! I was introduced to Sunset magazine when I was a kid and used to cat sit for neighbors who were originally from California. They wanted me to hang out and give their orange tabby Tobermory (aka Toby) plenty of attention, not just feed and leave, and paid me the princely sum of $2.50/day. That compares to babysitting 2-5 feral children for 50 cents/hour so it was easy money! Back to Sunset, they subscribed to the magazine and also had some of the cookbooks so I’d always grab some to read and sit on the floor with Toby for hours. The homes, the gardens and the food featured in Sunset could have been from a foreign country for little me in the frozen reaches of northern NY! It was really like visiting another world. Their home was decorated with mid century modern furniture with interesting artifacts from their travels that I could trace out on a huge world map they used to mark each trip with colored push pins. They were both college professors and used to book passage on cargo ships and go all over the place. I got my own subscription to Sunset when I moved out here but it’s always been linked to Toby and his interesting guardians!

Boozy mushrooms on toast from Diana Henry’s Simple, a favorite of mine - the book and the mushrooms!

Benton's Country Hams released a limited offering of smoky bacon scented dryer sheets for Fathers Day. Ten individually vacuum sealed sheets bundled with a T-shirt and 3 packs of bacon for $75 If you think that's a better idea than I do, I’m sorry to inform you that they sold out but you can find a link here to sign up to be notified of the next release: https://www.bentonssmokedsheets.com

Scrambled smoky duck eggs on sourdough from Ottolenghi's Plenty This recipe calls for dried chipotle peppers, soaked and roughly torn, green onions, garlic, tomatoes to be sautéed first, then scrambled along with the duck eggs, spooned over toasted sourdough and garnished with cilantro. Sour cream is to be served alongside but I subbed Greek yogurt. Not bad but I think dried chipotles are better used in either a spice blend or in a longer cooked dish like beans or a stew. I’d prefer a chipotle in adobo here.

To be clear, the “they” who wrote that blurb is someone from the US retailer, Mala Market, which also carries Megachef Thai oyster sauce.

I've heard good things about Yangjiang Extra Pure Fujian Oyster Sauce from China but haven’t tried it yet.