blue_dolphin

It does not matter at all. Sorry to have mentioned it!

Warning: This post is NSFAN (not safe for @Anna N) 🤣 Tuna salad on lightly toasted baguette slices. Campari tomatoes on the side.

I have a Tramontina pan that looks just like that, in the 12-inch size. It's a good pan and that's a good price but note that it does not claim to be induction-compatible and mine is not.

Every component of that breakfast looks perfect to me, @Anna N! A bit of an unusual breakfast, even for me 🙃. Spaghetti with shrimp, sugar snap peas and red bell pepper in a tequila lime cream topped with cilantro gremolata. I had some tequila lime cream leftover from yesterday's lunch and wondered how it would work on pasta. Now I know!

I think you would enjoy the book. It's a lovely memoir of a cooking life and I thought of you as soon as I got it because I know you appreciate the story-telling aspect of cookbooks as I do although I didn’t know if you were able to do much reading. The first printing of the book sold out right away and some of the friends I chatted it up to had to go to much effort to get their copies but, thankfully they liked it. As to the potatoes, I agree they aren’t mind blowing. Barely a recipe, really: boil up some spuds, rough them up by tossing them about in the pan with butter and mustard and then pop them into the oven to brown and crisp. She said they hold well and indeed they did as my cilantro looked rather worse for the wear and so I had to run out to the store mid-cook. I love that her mom was putting these on the family table with fish back in the 1930s. I'll be filing it away as a back-pocket potato!

The mustard potato recipe is the first one in the book and is available via Amazon’s “look inside” feature.

Two recipes from Sally Schmitt's Six California Kitchens. Per her margin notes, I adapted her starter recipe for Scallops in Tequila Lime Cream with Cilantro Gremolata to a main course with grouper. On the side are the Mustard Potatoes, which she says her mother often served with fish, steamed sugar snaps and Campari tomatoes.

How nice to join @Anna N for breakfast here today! BLT on a toasted brioche bun I usually wait for better tomatoes than these Camparis from Trader Joe's but sometimes you just have to scratch an itch!

Cheese and spicy pepper stuffed potato ball, cooked up from my freezer stash, scrambled egg, Campari tomato

Current vintages of these wines are in my stores now. This is a photo from last year. Can't remember if I posted it or not. I admit to buying the French rosé on the left for the bottle. The labels, front and back, peel off extremely easily and it has a pink glass stopper. I re-used last year's for homemade cherry liqueur. Maybe some tequila por amante (strawberry-infused tequila) this year? Nice bottle to bring to a picnic or summer party and tastes just fine, this review concurs. It's $7.99, same price as last year. The Chilean rosé on the right is only $4.99 and a perfectly adequate summer slurp. Here's a brief review on that one.

I see it most often credited to Mason Hereford, chef at Turkey and the Wolf* in New Orleans, as in this BA article, but my sandwich mentor, Max Halley, also includes it in his cookbook (Ultimate Christmas Leftovers Sandwich)and in recipes he’s shared online like this modification with both gravy mayo and Bloody Mary ketchup or this braised beef sandwich. I’m not lining up to buy a Hellmans version but in the right hands, I think it’s a genius condiment! *Hereford's cookbook(eG-friendly Amazon.com link) will be out next month but I don’t see a gravy mayo recipe listed 😉

Turkey sandwiches?

What a treasure!

I dunno about Tuesday. As @heidih mentioned, I'm in an area where they sometimes shut off the power as a precautionary ass-covering measure but my guess about yesterday is a blown transformer somewhere due to foliage or an animal. They have been pretty careful about the former so I'd bet on a crispy critter. Indeed, local reports say that we are about 8 weeks ahead of "average" as measured by vegetation moisture levels. Witness last night's Laguna Nigel fire making very quick work of 20 homes so far. Sigh. Breakfast goes on here: egg salad sandwich with baby greens and crispy bacon on a brioche bun.

Just caught up with all the episodes and Last Chance Kitchen. As with last year, it’s been so much more enjoyable without the personality conflicts (real or edit-enhanced) that used to be prominently featured when the chefs were sharing a fancy house.

You’ve probably done this already but poking around on their website, I found a few different phone #s 1- 855-427-5122 1- 800-365-0135 1-877-646-5288 Not sure if one is better than another. A number of people on one of the Facebook groups have gotten replacement units though I don’t recall hearing this exact symptom described.

Power was out when I got up this AM. I was happy to pull out the Hario hand grinder I purchased after a previous outage so I could make a cup o'joe. Then turned to the fridge for the chicken liver pâté I made yesterday. Power just came back on. Thank you, So Cal Edison!

My new cookbook, Six California Kitchens, has a recipe for oxtail terrine that I’ll try next. I like that she suggests to cook enough of the oxtail to serve on its own, then make the terrine the next day.

That’s what I assumed. US large eggs generally weigh ~ 56g in the shell and have ~ 50g of contents. I used 2 whole eggs plus 1 yolk for a half recipe but did not weigh them.

Mafalde with Marcella Hazan's Bolognese

Breakfast sando... From the bottom: lightly toasted brioche bun, kimchi mayo, avocado, crispy bacon, fried egg and a smear of gochujang butter on the top bun.

Yes, you should! Compared with pressing mixtures through a sieve or chinois, this was so easy and came out perfectly smooth!

I wanted to clarify my refractometer usage. I don't believe I can rely on my little hand-held unit to measure sugar levels in the fruit/sugar sorbet mixtures with any sort of precision or accuracy. I got it when I was playing around using lychees blended with lychee nectar and wanted to get a rough idea of what was going on when I combined them. I'm trying to note readings when I made sorbets but I haven't revisited that particular project so I have no revelations to report. Here's my most recent Ninja Creami project: Creamy mocha ice cream? No! It's silky smooth chicken liver pâté! I shared more deets over in the Pâté & Terrine cook-off here:

Well, it took a while but I finally got around to making the silky smooth chicken liver paté that I mentioned above. It was quite correctly pointed out that it's not a paté at all but I'm going share it with you here anyway. Feel free to delete if this is too far afield. I failed to take a video of the Bass-o-matic moment when the raw livers go into the blender with sautéed bacon, onion and shallot, raw eggs and seasonings, but lucky for you, the nice people at Modernist Pantry took care of that so you can watch: After the blender, the mixture goes for a 154°F swim in an immersion circulator, then placed into Pacojet containers (for them) or Ninja Creami containers (for me) with frozen butter cubes and frozen solidly before going for 2 spins in the machine. The first spin is done direct from the freezer and results in what looks like liver & butter sawdust. Then you let it warm up and respin to get something that is impressively silky smooth, especially since there's no straining or sieving involved. Between the bacon and butter, there's quite a lot of rich stuff in there that's not chicken liver and I would like to try with more liver but the overall flavor is very good. My recipe notes: I made a half recipe and got a total yield of ~ 650g which filled 2 one-cup (8oz) containers. The recipe lists a yield of 16 four-oz servings. If that was correct, I should have gotten 8 4-oz servings and that did not happen so they are wrong. Equal parts bourbon, cream sherry and Madiera are called for. I used bourbon, Amontillado and Pedro-Ximenez sherry. The recipe calls for 2.5 g (1.2 tsp) of Prague powder # 1. I know nothing of this stuff but my package said to use 1 tsp/5 lbs of meat and when I weighed 1 tsp, it was ~ 5.25 g so I'd recommend using the weight and/or consulting your packaging or other guidance. I weighed out 1.25g for my half recipe. The recipe says to run the Bass-o-matic until the mixture is smooth, about 4 minutes. After about 2 min in the Blendtec, my mixture was almost up to the cooking temp and was starting to thicken so I deemed that sufficient. After the sous vide step, the recipe says to pour the mix into the beakers containing frozen cubes of butter. My mix was quite thick and not of a pourable consistency so I divided it up between the 2 beakers, mixed the butter cubes in and flattened the top with a spatula, like so: After freezing overnight, I spun it in the Ninja Creami on the ice cream setting and got this: That's the liver & butter sawdust stage. I used a spatula to pack it back down like this: The recipe says to allow the mix to warm up to 60°F before the second spin. I decided to try at 40°F but could still see little flecks of butter so I think 60°F is a good recommendation. Here's what it looked like, direct from the machine, after the 60°F second spin. Very smooth, no visible butter bits.

Yes, thanks for taking us along! I’m another one who loves to peruse the menus. I would have gotten the grilled grouper sandwich at the Crab Shack and the crab cakes at Doc's. Might just make myself a grilled grouper sandwich today!