blue_dolphin

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.

From the website: and

I treated myself to a copy of Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). It's a small book, with an entry for each day of the year. Some are a paragraph, some just a few words, others a full page or a bit longer. A couple of recipes or cooking descriptions that suffice for one appear but it’s not at all a cookbook. Most of the reviews I’ve read are quite positive. This reviewer (Review: Feast on this) is less so, writing, “Adler’s yearlong food-themed meditation practice felt like an exhaustive stream of consciousness.” I don’t doubt that might be the case if one were to read through in one go, but I’ve enjoyed Adler’s writing in An Everlasting Meal (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) and The Everlasting Meal Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) so I expect to enjoy dipping into this one over the course of the year.

Try this: Or this: https://youtu.be/39qXNscf9ts?si=6xb3RDncemnmJUKh

That same episode sold me on 108 Asian Cookies. I want to try the Thai tea ice cream sandwiches!

You didn’t ask me, but if you scroll down on this page, you’ll find a table with steam oven cooking times for different types of rice.

If you can’t find it, you might consider Powdered Brewery Wash (PBW), another stain removing cleaner available in home brewing supply places. It’s kind of a fragrance-free, extra strength OxiClean type cleaner. Quite good at removing tea stains from mugs. I believe Diversol also sanitizes but PBW is primarily a cleaner and stain remover.

I’m not particularly knowledgeable but I’m a pretty good looker-upper and the yellow stuff is a protective membrane made of koilin that lines the inside of the gizzard to protect the muscle from acidic stomach secretions and any grit, stones or other sharp material. The muscular gizzard contracts to sort of grind up whatever’s passed through the stomach. It can pass the material back to the stomach for more enzymatic digestion or on to the intestine. Apparently people make a tea from that gizzard lining and use it to treat digestive ailments. This Amazon listing for them (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) includes what looks like a Chinese name for them so maybe @liuzhou is familiar with that usage.

I haven’t done a shape for shape comparison but used the Etto sedani with leftover sausage, porcini and truffle sauce for a quick lunch and was quite pleased. I cooked it for 2 min less than the shortest recommended time on the box, tasted, gave it 1 more min before finishing it in the sauce.

I can’t really compare with the master of re-invention, @C. sapidus, but I did make a nice pasta lunch from leftovers I took home from a delicious gnocchi with porcini mushrooms, sausage and truffles that I enjoyed at a local Italian restaurant. I ended up eating all the gnocchi but there was a lot of sausage and sauce left. I added a big handful of arugula.

Like so:

Almost bought a turkey at Aldi today. Jennie-O brand frozen birds for 0.77/lb. Most were big but I was tempted by a little 13 pounder. Could have had some entertainment for 10 bucks but I resisted!

Come December, my daily hot beverages go in one of these: These 3 Glühwein mugs from Munich Christmas markets get used for hot cider in the evening, perhaps with a shot of extra warmth!