blue_dolphin

OK. I've been thinking about using my Ninja Creami to make a Pacojet recipe for chicken liver paté. For some reason, it brings to mind Dan Aykroid's old Bass-o-matic sketch from SNL 🙃 but I think now is the time!

A little of both, I think. Radishes are about 2.5 - 2.75 inches in diameter. The sourdough loaf was a small-ish one.

Three toasts from Eric Kim's Korean American for a colorful start to a cloudy morning: Gochujang buttered radish toast, Roasted seaweed avocado toast and Soft scrambled egg toast.

Dutch baby with leftover gochujang salmon from Everyday Korean. This is one of several variations this book has for a one-egg, single-serving Dutch baby baked in a little 6-inch cast iron skillet. The photos in the book look like this, with the salmon piled after baking but the instructions say to add the salmon to the batter before pouring it into the pan. Apparently, I'm more of a visual than literal recipe-follower 🙃

I saw them in the store earlier in the week. I'll pick one up and give it the Judy bird treatment.

My most recent purchases: The end books are both new releases. The Magic of Tinned Fish came out last year and Summer Kitchens is from 2020. Author Kathy Barrow did a Zoom bagel demo (link available here on NowServingLA's event recordings page) and I liked that her recipes make 6 bagels, which seems fairly approachable, and I liked her process of mixing and shaping the dough in the evening followed by an overnight rise in the fridge then boiling and baking in the AM. I've enjoyed Eric Kim's writing in various places so I decided to spring for his book.

I got the wild caught, skin-on sockeye filets and thought they were pretty good. I don't know how they generally cut them but all the packs in the case were 24 oz and had 3 pieces, so about 8 oz each. All were thinner (.75 inch at the thick end) and closer to the tail than the thick slices shown in the featured photo for this item on the website. I also got grouper as I rarely see that around here. Packed in 6 oz pieces. I used one for a grilled grouper sandwich the other day and it was excellent. I noticed you gave a favorable mention to the mahi mahi so I'll try that next time and try some shrimp.

Roasted salmon with gochujang mayo from Everyday Korean with sugar snaps and Massa Organics brown rice. Quick, easy and flavorful. Salmon from Wild Fork. The gochujang mayo has mayo, oyster sauce, gochujang, fresh garlic and ginger.

The salmon was nice but didn’t lend appreciable flavor to the rice. I'm with you on crispy skin and would cook separately if I make it again.

I've never had an actual Cinnabon and the size is part of the reason. When I was working at UCLA, there was a Cinnabon-like place called TJ Cinnamons right around the corner from our building and whoever was in charge of getting meeting treats often picked up a tray of the little one-bite buns. They were so sweet that one bite was plenty for me.

Grains for Every Season: Baked Wild Rice with Salmon, Artichokes and Leeks p 303. The rice and vegetables alone are a very good dish. The flavors go very well with the salmon although I think it would be easier to cook the salmon on its own to better control doneness. The header notes say, "This dish is a stunner..." I can't say that my result reaches that level but I enjoyed it. The bottom is wild rice, leeks cut into long strips and artichoke hearts (the recipe calls for canned, I used TJ's frozen) tossed with Italian salad dressing (I used leftover preserved kumquat vinaigrette), grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, heavy cream or crème fraîche, and parsley and mint leaves. After baking that for 45 min, it gets sprinkled with more Parm and a salmon filet and returned to the oven to cook the salmon. The recipe says to use the 10 min/inch of thickness as a guide for cooking the salmon and then says to let it rest 10 min out of the oven, tented with foil. Since the salmon goes atop the hot rice, that cooking + resting time resulted in overcooked salmon, at least in my hands. I had an 8oz piece of salmon so I made a half recipe and baked it in the CSO. I should have lowered the shelf at the beginning as the veg were too close to the upper element and the top layer of veg & rice got a bit more brown than I would have preferred. I did lower it when I added the salmon.

Also not @heidih, but yes, it is possible! I use the recipe from James Beard's American Cookery. Like @Kim Shook's recipe, it starts with raw nuts so they toast right in the hot sugar mixture for the best flavor. You also need to take the sugar up to the hard crack stage to avoid any stickiness. Beard says 300F. He also advocates pouring onto a warmed marble slab or baking sheets. This prevents it from setting too fast and gives you time to spread, flip and stretch the brittle so it’s wafer-thin between the nuts. Finally, he cautions that brittle draws moisture so it’s important to store in airtight containers.

Grilled grouper sando with avocado and kimchi mayo

I paid a visit to the Wild Fork store this afternoon. I was impressed at the variety and thought the prices seemed generally OK. They had chicken hearts but no livers. There are rabbits on the website but none in the store. Otherwise, all kinds of stuff. Ground bison, elk, venison, wild boar, yak, ostrich, etc. Beef sweetbreads and good looking marrow bones. Good selection of veal, including veal osso buco. The only goat was unfortunately the usual bone-in chunks. I liked the way the pieces of fish are individually wrapped so I don't have to thaw a whole package to get one piece. I was intrigued by this bagged ground beef frozen in individual bits so you can just take out what you need. I was looking at a Marcella Hazan recipe for chicken liver pasta sauce that calls for 1/4 lb ground beef. Of course, I can go buy a small amount at Whole Foods when I get the livers but since I'm often barbering recipes down to one or two servings, I can imagine this product being handy. Unfortunately, they didn't have ground pork packed the same way. I bought salmon and grouper filets, hot Italian sausage, chorizo, a bag of frozen, diced tomatillos that I thought might be handy and some frozen spinach just because I needed some. I'll have to comb through posts here to see what people like.

I'm back with an update on the "Damrosch" buckwheat crust that I shared above. It's on p 83 of Grains for Every Season. The header notes suggest using it for a quiche but I wasn't particularly thrilled. The buckwheat groats still had a nice toasty flavor but they got much softer from the custard than they did with the honey pie filling. As I mentioned, I decided to try sprinkling on a thin layer of grated parm after baking. While it didn't seal out the moisture, the buckwheat retained more texture than without and it added a nice layer of umami flavor. I would definitely recommend this step. Here's the buckwheat "crust" before the pre-bake step: After the pre-bake, I sprinkled on the parm and put it back in the oven for a few minutes to kind of tack it down. Here it is after that step and before filling:

That's correct. You are draining and pressing off that vinegary liquid but not rinsing. The first time I made it, I was convinced it would be too much but I ended up liking it a lot. Tangy but creamier than feta.

Here’s a paraphrase of the Nopalito recipe. It’s a good book and I recommend it. It calls for quite a lot of vinegar. I like the tang but I’m sure you could reduce it to suit your preferences. Heat 3/4 gallon milk to 170 F, stirring frequently. Add 1.25 cups of white vinegar. Stir gently with a wooden spoon for 2 min then remove from heat and let stand 20 min. Pour the milk into a cheese cloth-lined strainer (I use a nut milk bag) and let most of the liquid drain. Then gather up the cheesecloth and squeeze out the remaining liquid. Return the cheesecloth wrapped cheese to the strainer and set over a bowl with a weight on top of the cheese for ~ 1 hr to cool. Then unwrap and work in 3 t kosher salt (I use less), re-wrap, return to strainer with weight and refrigerate 8 hrs - overnight. The estimated yield is 3 cups.

Not at this time. Once I pay off the mortgage (Oct 2024, counting down!) I'd like to reface the kitchen cabinets and convert the adjacent, wider closet that used to house the laundry before a previous owner moved it out to the garage, into a wet bar with an ice maker and wine fridge. That would be the time to address that closet, maybe opening them up and treating it as one space like you mentioned doing.

The bi-fold doors really impede making full use of the space as pantry storage. The spaces are deep but the door blocks part of it so you can't have full-width pull-outs. I have a 27" deep, 3 ft wide closet around the corner from the kitchen that I'd like to dedicate to pantry/kitchen storage but those dang bifold doors block at least 6 inches which adds up when you consider it's 84" high.

With all the food and cooking magazines that Meredith had, it would seem they have significant recipe collections that I might be willing to subscribe to but after gutting the actual cooking expertise of those publications, would they actually invest in combining the various archives into something cohesive with user-friendly functionality? It would surely be an expensive proposition.

They opened a store in my area, too. I don't have the freezer space (nor appetite 🙃) to justify a big delivery order but I'd like to check out their stuff.

And queso fresco, though the recipe I use (from Nopalito) uses more vinegar, more salt and is also pressed like paneer so it's more firm, salty and tangy.

Around 3 weeks ago, several people in the Facebook Fine Cooking Community group reported receiving an email notification that their FC subscription had ended and will automatically convert to Food & Wine. They said there was a link to opt out and that it worked very easily. Sounds like you're not seeing this in your account, but when I go to the Fine Cooking website, scroll down to the bottom and click on "Manage My Subscription," I am taken to a magazines.com page with contact email addresses for various magazines that are ceasing publication. There used to be a "Subscribe" button at the top of the FC home page and there was also a "Subscribe" link down at the bottom. Both are gone.

Grains for Every Season: The "Damrosch" Buckwheat Crust p 83 and David Lebovitz's Salted Honey Pie p 82 The buckwheat crust is credited in the header notes to Barbara Damrosch who published the recipe in a cookbook she wrote with her husband, Eliot Coleman, The Four Season Farm Gardner's Cookbook. It's just uncooked buckwheat groats pressed into a buttered pie pan and pre-baked to lightly toast them. The recipe says that you can bake the filling directly in the crust without the pre-bake but it adds a toasty flavor and crispness that I think is important so I wouldn't skip it. It does, however, mean the buckwheat groats are rather loosely attached to the plate rather than being stuck in the butter so it would be wise to use caution in handling and pouring in the filling. As indicated, the filling is from a David Lebovitz recipe and is one he adapted from The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book. I used buckwheat honey to go along with the crust and the flavor comes through nicely. It gets sprinkled with sea salt before serving which helps temper the sweetness but it's still a very sweet pie so I'm glad I made a 1/3 scale recipe in this 6-inch pie pan - a very small slice is enough for me! The buckwheat groats have a nice crunch, even on the bottom of the pie. We'll see if that holds up after sitting overnight. The header notes say that the crust is also good for quiche so I made a small one with mushrooms, dandelion greens and leek, in an even smaller pie dish - a one-egg quiche! In this one, the buckwheat groats softened to more of the consistency of graham cracker crumbs, except for around the top edge where they stayed crisp. I might try sprinkling a thin layer of finely grated parm over the crust and popping it back into the oven a bit before filling to see if that might help "seal" out the moisture from the custard and add a bit of salt and flavor.

@weinoo's right about there being only one way to know for sure! What does CellarTracker have to say about your particular wines? As @liuzhou and @Norm Matthews pointed out storage conditions can have a big effect, but that would at least give you a start. You could also check with a wine shop that specializes in older vintages. They likely have someone on staff who's familiar with older Rioja's or can recommend someone to you. I have a friend who loves his wines and only collects first growth Bordeaux and a specific subset of Rioja's. There certainly are some that age well.