blue_dolphin

I also love visiting food markets of all kind, including supermarkets when I'm traveling. Thanks for taking us along on your trips, @BonVivant. I love the beautiful farm, countryside and town scenes - beautiful country! Leftovers from Saturday's ZEF BBQ pick-up: Smoked turkey with cherry relish and baby greens on a brioche bun spread with sesame mayo. A sweet potato salad on the side. I made the cherry relish from an older recipe found in the LA Times. It was lacking something. I added more onion, more vinegar and a jalapeño, which helped but I think horseradish might have been the way to go.

I thought it was a booth in a Turkish bazaar!

I love one of those tarts for any meal!

I think this is the set:

Not @Annie_H, but I've had these 10" ones for years: Reptile Feeding Tongs (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) At $6.99 for a set of 2 pairs, one straight, one angled, they are hardly precision instruments, but they do the job, which is mostly retrieving a piece of vegetable from under the pot without burning my fingers. Haven't used them to plate pasta but they have been very handy to have around. Also, the reviews about feeding reptiles and using them to eat Flaming Hot Cheetos without getting orange fingers are pretty hilarious.

Bought a bottle of this "French Fizz" from TJ's last week. $5.99. They also have a rosé. I have previously confessed that I'm a sucker for reusable bottles which is why I bought it even though it doesn't even say "wine" on the label. Turns out, it's a perfectly fine, light white wine to sip on a hot summer afternoon. Alcohol level is 10.5%, also suited to warm weather. Not going to knock anyone's socks off but $5.99. And after I got home, I realized it does indeed say "wine" in small print on the back label 🙃

I tried a bag of these little lemon cookie thins from Aldi and enjoyed them. Picked up another bag and added the key lime and coconut versions today. They also have a chocolate chip version. Thin and crisp. Nice flavor, not too sweet. $2.45 for a bag of ~ 24 cookies. The ingredients are all pronounceable:

I can relate, though I believe you are at an entirely different level in both the size of your collection and its distribution throughout your abode. Mine are all either in the kitchen or garage aside from the bean pots that reside on the cookbook shelves as objets d'art when not in use. And if they're in the garage, I should get rid of them. Except maybe the turkey roaster. What about Dutch ovens, cocottes, braziers, paella pans and tajines? Are they all included in your count? Hmmm. I might not be as far away from 60 as I first thought.

Speaking of too much meat, I just picked up a ZEF Dawg - a sausage version of ZEF BBQ's homemade spam, pickled onions, coconut curry sauce, roasted pineapple & scallions and furikake on a King's Hawaiian roll. Holy moly, photos just don't convey the size of that thing! The dawg is a little over 1.5" in diameter. Those are actually 3 King's Hawaiian rolls, not separated, so I cut it in three and will see what I can do!

Yesterday's breakfast was a half brioche bun with a leftover portion of that mushroom/chicken liver combo that I posted just upthread. I was still a bit hungry so I added some asparagus spears tarted up with Sally Schmitt's sesame mayo from Six California Kitchens. This stuff isn't going to change anyone's life but gosh, it's so dang easy. It's just a tablespoon of toasted sesame oil whisked into a cup of mayo (or if you're me, a scant tsp in 1/4 cup) and topped with toasted sesame seeds. Good enough and also enough leftover that I had the same today with the addition of a soft boiled egg and Campari tomato. Toasted a slice of baguette to clean up the plate.

Not sure anyone else would consider this fun but I finally broke down and ordered a box of half-sheet size parchment paper and it delights me every time I pull out a sheet and don't have to fight with it to stay flat. Why the heck did I wait so long? I thought it would be a nuisance to store the big flat box, I got paralyzed by the many offerings on Amazon. I don't consider myself a baker. So I just kept on buying another roll when it was on sale at Target. No more - I have seen the light!

No spoilers here. I was looking forward to last night's finale and enjoyed watching. I could have done without the horseback riding but otherwise, like the rest of the season, it was pretty much all about the food. No big interpersonal dramatics, real or edit-induced. I was impressed at the diversity of the panel that shared the finale dinner with the judges: Alexander Smalls, Bricia Lopez, Gregory Gourdet, Ed Lee. Thought they all had interesting input and wished I could have heard more from them.

When your tin of fish comes inside its own box …with gold accents, no less…you fancy!

Personally, I’d call you guys the Babes who Breakfast 😉

I'm sure you're right. I'm guessing it's a nomenclature that's somewhat common in UK shops but it would be nice to get your take on the original ingredient. Searching my own books for recipes that call for long green Turkish peppers, they're largely by UK authors or in books published in the UK.

Here's a recipe that's credited to her Sichuan book that calls for long green Turkish peppers: Dry fried “eels” (shiitake mushrooms) Eat Your Books lists 11 recipes from the book that call for the same.

Dana Cree's Hello My Name Is Ice Cream is an excellent book. I can’t speak to dairy-free.

Oxtails were on sale for $4.99/lb at a local international market. Not super cheap but not bad so that project should happen one of these days. In the meantime, here's another non-pâté: Cascaron with Chicken Liver Mousse and Guava Jelly from Sheldon Simeon's Cook Real Hawai'i. In the header note, Sheldon says he wanted to serve a Hawaiian riff on a chicken liver mousse. The mousse is super easy and made with sweet onion, miso and coconut milk, whiskey and hot sauce. Flavorful but also very light. The cascaron, on the other side, are on the heavy side compared with the crispy, dry toasts I usually have with chicken liver pâté. They're fried coconut-mochi fritters with a hard outside crust and chewy, mochi-like interior. Traditionally glazed in some sort of caramelized sugar syrup. Per the recipe, instead of a glaze, the guava jelly (I used guava jam) is piped into the cascaron and served with the mousse and furikake. I think it's probably easier to break them in half and top with the mousse, guava jelly and furikake to taste. I'd never pair these fritters with a heavier pâté but this actually works because the mousse is so light. Not sure I need to make it again but it was fun to eat, playing with the different ingredients so each bite was a bit different.

While Fortaleza tequila is widely available in my area of the US, you're quite correct on never finding Los Abuelos in the US. That was the original name when the company started but they ran into trademark issues with established rum brand Ron Abuelo and settled on Fortaleza as the name for international markets.

Do you put them in the dishwasher?

Your 19 May mushrooms made me do it!

Everything looks great @Kim Shook! May I ask what you brought home? I'm good with reheating frozen waffles and pancakes in the CSO but I usually think most breakfast stuff is best when it's hot off the ....well, whatever it was cooked on! So much so that breakfast out isn't something I usually go for. That looks perfect to me. I've never ordered a Reuben for fear of being served one of those meat bombs I can't get my jaw around! Edited to add that I realize I sound like an awful whiner in these comments. Probably true!

Yesterday's first meal was a bit late. Almost 11 by the time I stopped dillydallying and cooked Marcella Hazan's chicken liver sauce for pasta. The recipe is from her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and is available online at this link. Not a looker but really good. Since it was kinda brunch-time and a holiday to boot, I had a nice glass of pinot noir. Hmmm. Maybe I should have put this in lunch? But it was my first meal of the day....my break-fast meal! A major motivator in making that pasta dish was to reserve half the liver sauce and add it to Diana Henry's Toasted Brioche with Boozy Mushrooms from her book, Simple. I kinda wanted to make this first and hold the liver sauce over but decided to go with yesterday's dish first. I usually put Diana's mushrooms on toasted sourdough or other sturdy country bread but the addition of the liver sauce made the further decadence of brioche perfect. Well, if you can call a brioche bun from Aldi decadent 🤣 Worth waiting a day for!

Welcome to eGullet! For specific recommendations, it might help if you told us the name and brand of the gold tequila you're working with and what cocktails you've tried making with it. Some gold tequilas aren't 100% agave spirits, get their color from added caramel and aren't that great. It sounds as if you like the taste of this one on its own but not in the cocktails you've mixed with it and would like other options. There's a good discussion on Tequila Cocktails here that you might like to check out for ideas. The El Diablo cocktail is one that's mentioned and that I'd recommend trying if you haven't already. I've made it with both blanco and reposado tequila and both were good so it might be a promising candidate for your gold tequila.

I keep my most-used thermometer in a utensil crock next to the cooktop. There's not enough room for it to lie horizontally on the bottom but even there were, It does seem odd to place a long, narrow object on its side where it's surely both out of sight and out of reach. On the other hand, I manage to hide many tools from myself with even less effort!