blue_dolphin

Indeed. I have a chunk of Vella Golden Bear dry jack that's acquired the properties of glass. @andiesenji recommended steaming to soften hard cheeses and I need to give that method a try.

Yep. The Mouli-Julienne is what I use also. Takes a little bit of elbow grease, though maybe that's because I've been using mine for over 40 years....and the actual elbows for even longer! I have a couple of microplanes (this (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) or this (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)) or use a veg peeler for shavings and curls.

I'm sure you are correct. The Kindle preview was loading quite slowly so it’s likely I only thought it was complete. I’ll try again. Edited to add that as @Anna N pointed out, the Kindle preview does indeed include the bacon recipe. I was just not patient enough to wait for it to finish loading. The hardcover preview does not have the recipe.

My Red Boat book arrived today. I wasn't sure what to expect - a fancy promotional brochure or an actual cookbook? There's certainly a good bit of company/family pride going on but it's a real book. I'm not thrilled about the combo of colored pages that have a bit of a sheen and a rather fine font used for some of the text. Shouldn't be a problem in kitchen light but it wasn't so easy to read over on the sofa. There's a sample of the introduction available via Amazon's Look Inside feature here: The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook: Beloved Recipes from the Family Behind the Purest Fish Sauce (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). You can choose to preview the hardcover version and see the page colors or the Kindle version which is blessedly free of colored backgrounds and multiple fonts. No recipes in either preview though.

Welcome to eG, @fabritius! I'm not a wine expert nor have I made this particular soup but I think I'd enjoy the nutty taste of a nice Amontillado sherry with it. I like your riesling idea as well. My "when in doubt" wine is a Grüner Veltliner but I think it would just taste sour next to that soup.

Thanks for those tips! I had a couple of rolls that didn't fit into my pan and considered trying to freeze them in single-serving portions. I ended up tossing them out but I'll keep your technique in mind for next time.

With a nudge from @Smithy's Princessmobile Cinnamon Buns, I decided to try the Sausage-Stuffed Honey Buns from Deep Run Roots p 376. These are a nice sweet treat, especially warm from the oven, but a little bit of a production. Aside from the sticky dough challenge I've encountered with all of Vivian's yeast-powered recipes, nothing was particularly difficult but I seemed to end up with a lot of dirty dishes Basically, you make a honey-sweetened yeasted dough, roll it out into a rectangle, top with a filling of cooked sausage, honey, brown sugar and butter, roll and slice. The slices are arranged in a cake pan containing a honey glaze flavored with orange juice and zest and thyme. After baking, the pan gets inverted so there's a sticky honey glaze on the top. I reduced the sweetening by about half and find them plenty sweet. I really can't imagine them made with the full amount. The glaze alone calls for 2 cups of honey - that's about a pound and a half! The full recipe makes 20 buns. Vivian says to use 2 round cake pans but does not say what size. I found a version of the recipe online where they reduced the amount of glaze by half and put all the buns into a 12-inch cast iron skillet. There's also a comment there that says the sausage filling was too sweet. I set out to make a half recipe, 10 buns. I used half the recommended amount of glaze and for the filling, I used the recipe indicated amount of sausage but reduced all the other ingredients by half so instead of a honey-butter spread, I have coated sausage crumbles but I thought it came out fine. On the dough, I can only say that Vivian's baker is either a wizard with sticky doughs or scoops up 150g cups of flour. The recipe gives cups, I always measure 125g/cup if no weights are given and with her recipes, I always need more flour. Sometimes a lot more. I reduced the honey a little in the dough and I forgot to add the tablespoon of sugar. Here we have the dough topped with the sausage filling. This would be much more of a buttery spread if I'd used the full amount. Rolled and sliced. It was a pretty squishy roll. Here, the rolls are in the pan with the glaze on the bottom, have proofed for half an hour and are ready for the oven: They get baked, covered with foil, for 30 min, then an additional 15 min uncovered. Out of the oven: Inverted on to a plate. Sorry for the unsightly reflections. This recipe doesn't include any modifications for letting the dough sit overnight for morning baking. I'm going to try wrapping up the roll of dough and refrigerating it overnight. In the AM, I'll slice, arrange the slices in the pan with the glaze, cover and proof. It will probably take at least 90 min - 2 hrs instead of the 30 min when starting with warm dough but still do-able for a late breakfast or brunch.

I always figured cooking was like biochemistry and baking/candy was more like physics 🙃

Dishoom toasts whole spices for their garam masala at 50 C or th slowest gas setting for 2.5 hours. Limited setting options here so I used 125 F. Then poppy seeds and rose petals are added to the pan, oven is switched off and the mixture sits in the oven to cool for 30 min before grinding. Seems on the low & slow side of things but I did it and was happy with the results.

I like to fold or hang each item as I take it out of the dryer while I marvel that I have my very own washer and dryer and don't need to go to a laundromat or a shared apartment laundry room so I'm not averse to the task and can't speak for @kayb, but people who have large families and especially with small kids, the sheer volume of laundry can get pretty overwhelming and I'd imagine it could leave a negativity that would persist even after those little ones are launched and on their own. Growing up, our neighbors had 8 kids. It was the job of the youngest to do the laundry on Saturday. They dumped all the clean laundry in the living room and each kid was expected to collect and fold their own items from the massive pile. It was a sight to behold but surely would have put me off!

This is the current state of my "recently purchased" cookbook shelf: Some are new releases, others older editions but new to me. I like to keep them here until I've gotten to know them fairly well either through cooking or lots of reading. The book between Black Food and Zoe's Ghana Kitchen is Mumbai Modern. A 2022 resolution is to limit new purchases until I've cleared this shelf and these books are all filed by subject. I reserve the right to make exceptions 🙃

And don't forget volume 2 of that set: The use of full color, step-by-step photos on almost every page of these books was a truly lavish choice at a time (vol 1 came out in 1987) when color illustrations were often still limited to a few sections and demonstrates his commitment to teaching. This set is a treat!

I like that one, too. If I remember correctly, this book also contains his recommendation to use the NYT Sunday Style section as a clean and hygienic surface for draining bacon as one can be assured no one has ever touched it.

I plan to treat myself to a copy, too. Nice interview with co-author and chef Diep Tran on Evan Kleiman's Good Food: Fish sauce: One man’s equivalent to a midlife crisis Maserati

I don't despise hand-washing dishes as much as @SLB but I've become quite accustomed to the convenience. When I moved into this house ~ 12 years ago, I installed one of the 2-drawer Fisher-Paykel dishwashers. I just love it and run it almost every day. If I do a round of baking or anything involving the big food processor, I can just fill up one of the drawers, turn it on and be done with the mess. More importantly, it uses WAY less water than I do washing and rinsing by hand which is important here in drought-land.

Yum! @Smithy, those cinnamon buns look great and your recipe sleuthing is truly impressive! When I pulled out Deep Run Roots the other day, I spied the recipe for Sausage-Stuffed Honey Buns that has long intrigued me. They look like cinnamon rolls but with caramelized sausage in the filling. Vivian describes them as being like a side of sausage with pancakes. Your post gives me a nudge to see how well I can reduce the recipe to a reasonable size for a single-person household! Edited to add that that recipe makes 20 buns!

I made a big batch of this salad for Christmas Eve dinner with my cousins and thought I’d give it another mention because it holds up so nicely on a buffet table. I used a colorful watermelon radish instead of the regular ones and subbed in shallots for the green onions. This morning, I piled some of the leftovers onto a smoked turkey sandwich and it was delish. Made me think you could easily toss in some cooked chicken, turkey or ham and make this into a great main-dish salad.

I totally agree with Gabrielle's voice (which I love) coming through in Prune and that it seems like her instructions for her restaurant dishes. I borrowed it and Blood Bones and Butter from my local library to read and probably will do so again until I break down and buy a copy. I also enjoyed BB&B. Do keep an eye out for Prune. I suspect you'd enjoy it, too.

In her recipe for a Lemon Sheet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, Carla Lalli Music uses a method she calls "reverse creaming" that she says will reduce the aeration of the butter and result in a more tender cake (due to less gluten development) with a denser crumb (less aeration) that rises evenly, with no dome. Obviously not the thing if you are looking for super light and airy but could be worth a try if it suits your goals. A video of Carla making the cake is available here on YouTube. Below the video, there's a link to a page where you can download a pdf of the recipe. It's from her recent book, That Sounds So Good.

I make preserved lemons and other citrus every year and consider them a pantry staple. They are generally very salty as the preservation relies on the level of salt (and the acid) to deter the growth of any wee nasties. I only purchased them once and they were a bit less salty than the ones I make myself. I usually make up a small jar of a purée for seasoning but most often I use just the rind: rinse the lemon, remove the pulp and cut into dice or julienne. They look like little jewels! There's a recipe for preserved lemon aioli in Alon Shaya's book, Shaya, that is absolutely fantastic. In the book, he uses it on crab cakes but it's delicious with all sorts of seafood and vegetables. Recipe online here. That book also has a great preserved lemon vinaigrette. Preserved lemon hummus is great. I use a recipe from The Moosewood Restaurant Table. I've made a couple of compound butters with preserved lemon. One with capers from Zuni Cafe Cookbook and another from Prune. The latter recipe is available online here. I freeze it in logs so it's easy to cut off a disk to put on vegetables, broiled fish or seafood. They are excellent in rice/grain pilafs or salads. The Yellow Indian Woman Bean Salad with Bulgar and Preserved Lemon from Heirloom Beans and the New Leaf Pilaf from This Will Make It Taste Good are fine examples. Also in the latter book is Collards Break Character that includes preserved lime (lemon would work fine), green curry paste and coconut milk. Really delicious but watch the salt as both the citrus and the curry paste can add up. Fans of the dirty Martini may like to add a little preserved lemon brine instead of olive juice. In This Will Make It Taste Good, Vivian makes a Margarita with Salt on the Inside by making a simple syrup with preserved lemon. I've got this recipe for preserved lemon ice cream on my Ninja Creami list but haven't made it yet.

'Tis the season for "best of" lists. This one from The New Yorker brought a couple of books to my attention. I'll seek out Tables of Contents Community Cookbook: Notes and Recipes from Writers’ Home Kitchens, and Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). They both sound like good reads. Neither seem to have e-editions and both are currently out of stock at the places I've checked. Two others caught my eye (and ear)on Evan Kleiman's KCRW Good Food best books list, once again, maybe more for reading than cooking. Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Mayukh Sen and The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Danielle Dreilinger. I said they caught my ear because Evan interviewed both authors on her radio show/podcast: Mayukh Sen interview: Reflecting on the immigrant women who shaped how America eats Danielle Dreilinger interview: Beyond stirring and stitching: The women behind home economics I really liked the way Kitchen Arts & Letters bookshop crafted their lists: Really Popular Books that Deserved to be Popular Wonderful Books You May Not Have Heard About Great Reads Lastly, Eat Your Books asks independent cookbook shop owners from around the US and other countries to choose their own top picks. These are just lists, no commentary, but I always enjoy seeing the similarities and differences. The EYB list of lists is available at this link: Best cookbooks of 2021 by the experts And here's EYB's overall picks: Best Cookbooks of 2021

These are more in the small appliance category than "gadget" but eG is certainly the cause of their purchase: Cuisinart combi steam oven (and spare and accessories), my most used appliance Instant Pot and various accessories Paragon precision induction burner Philips electric grill Ninja Creami ANOVA circulator Vacuum sealer (2 of them!) Ooni pizza oven (still not set up because I haven't gotten a cart and gas tank for it) Smaller items: Refractometer (just arrived, haven't used it yet) Edge-Pro knife sharpener Darto pans (six, maybe?) iSi silicone spatulas & bowl scrapers (sadly no longer available) Danish dough whisk Stainless steel and silicone ball whisks Magic spoon (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) Zyliss corn cob scraper - rarely used and I'm kinda afraid of it Manual spiralizer - rarely used but kind fun when it is Tall skinny "asparagus" pot that I use with the Paragon for frying Many, many bargain ebooks resulting from @Toliver's posts over here and lots of paper cookbooks, too.

I'm not sure which recipe you are using. The one I recommended, Clyde Common’s Tequila-Sherry Egg Nog from Jeffery Morganthaler, calls for 12 eggs, uses a stand mixer and has an estimated yield of ~ 1 gal. I suspect an immersion blender would work if that's what you prefer. Edited to add that now I see you may be following the 1/6 scale recipe he gives for 2 servings. Sorry I missed that.

I mentioned elsewhere that I planned to get myself a treat from TJ's after getting my Covid booster and flu shot at the nearby drug store. I'm now vaxed and boosted and am home with my treat: I think I'll work on my hydration a bit before I sample it. Plus, it's a little early!

Yes, I believe it was. I gave it a good squeeze over everything and the flavor was still bright but more mellow and not as sharp as a fresh lemon. The whole business was packed in a plastic bag that was knotted so everything stayed submerged. I ate it as soon as I got home and was glad that I did because I'm not sure how everything would have held up to reheating.