blue_dolphin

Sorry, I remember you asked about this in another thread and I meant to make some so I could take photos to answer with. I suspect they are more properly called roasted onions, though I take them a good bit farther than my starting recipe does. Not entirely interchangeable with pan caramelized but they work in many applications. I've got onions, a bit of time and weather cool enough to turn on the oven so I'll respond in a day or so and you can decide if they suit.

Per the IP Ultra manual, the time range for the on the slow-cook function is 2 - 20 hours so you are correct there. It looks like you can program something longer, but I'm not familiar with that. I caramelize onions in a pan on the stovetop or in the oven. Since trying Kenji's (no longer recommended) pressure cooker method, I've stuck with the basics!

I enjoyed this recent NYT article and thought others might as well: Kimchi Making at Home Was Going Out of Style. Rural Towns to the Rescue. I liked enterprise of the rural folks in passing along a tradition of kimchi making that's dying out in urban centers and doing it in a profitable way. I also liked their Covid-pivot of setting up in single-family tents in a stadium to keep the festival going this year.

I was going to suggest spot cleaning only 😂

Not all of us sleep in a gourmet foods emporium 🙃 Vivian mentioned making sure ingredients specified were widely available. No salt packed anchovies at my Walmart, though they do stock black garlic. Food stylists can run amok but I took the photo that accompanies the LGD recipe as a suggestion as to an acceptable hot sauce brand. I used Crystal brand (which always makes me think of its regular appearances on @HungryChris's breakfast table) in my first batch and Inner Beauty in the second. Inner Beauty is rather distinctive but with everything else going on in there, I didn't taste a huge difference. Making no attestations as to the rightness of my mind, I used a food processor to make LGD. Huh, I thought, as I read the recipe, I'd normally just use a knife but, just this once, I'll follow the recipe and use the food processor. And, dang, if I didn't think it worked a treat. So much so that when I made my second batch, I used the processor again. My first choice was slightly influenced by the ginormous bunches of herbs laid out next to a chef's knife in need of sharpening but the second batch was all about the ease. And, sane or not, I'm one who will happily use a knife to cut dozens of carrots into fine julienne rather than shred them with any device. Do tell, why did she create them? Edited to add that while I was happy to use mine for LGD, I honestly think that food processors are the work of the devil. They are such a pain to clean that I'll almost always turn to a knife or blender instead. I believe that if God herself had been involved, we would have something much better. Last night's dinner was a variation of the Naked Burgers with a Cheese Toupee & Spinach Crown p 21, featuring LGD These are pork burgers, distinctively seasoned with cumin, topped with Swiss cheese, charred red onion and spinach that's sautéed in olive oil and butter with garlic, mushrooms and mixed with a scoop of LGD before it goes on the burger. The recipe makes 8 oz burgers and serves them on a plate. I went with 4 oz and put mine on a bun. I forgot to buy mushrooms so I melted a slice of the double-mushroom butter from Six Seasons into the pan with the garlic before wilting the greens. I subbed arugula for spinach as it needed to be used. I really enjoyed this. Loved the charred onion. The combination of LDG and butter is just as green vegetable-friendly here as in the asparagus recipe. The cumin in the burger was interesting and made me think these would be good made with lamb. Vivian suggests turkey or beef as alternative meats. I've got another burger shaped so I'll try to get some mushrooms and have that one without a bun.

More commonly stirred, rather than shaken: Kangaroo Cocktail is apparently an earlier name for the drink but I can't imagine you'd have a lot of success ordering one by that name! Edited to add that I guess your version would actually be a Shaken Dirty Kangaroo 😂

Or just click the link in the post immediately prior...🙃

Based on articles like the one below, I'm hoping things will even out more quickly this time. Grocery store rationing is back, but relax: The supply chain is doing fine

Nice segment on CBS Sunday Morning today: Heirloom Beans from Napa Valley to your mailbox

I've had it for way more than 3 years but almost never use my stick blender. The Blendtec gets used all the time. More recent purchases that I don't use are the vacuum sealer and the Phillips Avance grill. I really need to find a handier storage location for the grill as I used it the other day and wondered why it's been so long.

I spied a serving's worth of fresh pasta that I'd stashed in the freezer. Cooked it up, tossed with zucchini, sugar snap peas, roasted red pepper, a dab of Vivian Howard's Herbdacious pesto-like stuff made with mixed herbs and roasted garlic, and a sprinkle of feta. Hit the spot!

Good suggestion, @rotuts! I've watched every episode of Deep Run Roots and Somewhere South several times but now that I have the book, I should watch again. I'll say that I was delighted to see that This Will Make It Taste Good features Vivian's own spin (using her Citrus Shine) on Von Diaz's recipe for coconut-braised collards that appeared in an episode of Somewhere South. I'm looking forward to trying it soon!

Oooo...LGD grilled cheese...yum! I listened to an interview with Vivian on a recent episode of the Radio Cherry Bombe podcast the other day. It reminded me that unlike so many restaurant chefs who use (credited or uncredited) co-authors, Vivian actually writes her own books. I very much enjoy her voice so find the new book and interviews like this to be very much like catching up with an old friend. The podcast is available here.

A bit chilly here this AM so I warmed up some leftover soup and bread Sweet potato, sauerkraut & bacon chowder and a monkey bread sort of thing made with caramelized onions. Both from Vivian Howard's book, This Will Make It Taste Good

Can't wait to see how you use that, @Shelby! Speaking of Herbdacious, last night I followed one of the "No Brainer" suggestions to use it on a pizza: I added zucchini, red onion and Taleggio cheese. Very pesto-like in this application.

I guess I could have left it with "annoying" but sometimes ya just gotta vent 🙃! 🤣😂🤣 I came very close to doing that! I had some pizza dough in the fridge and I almost made R-Rated onion pizza instead! I'm still delighted at having plenty of hot running water in the sink and the ability to toss everything in the dishwasher so that helped my mood!

Today's lunch combined 2 recipes from This Will Make It Taste Good Sweet Potato, Kraut & Bacon Chowder p 91, featuring the Can-Do Kraut p 68 and Pinch Me, Frenchie, p 40, a monkey bread sort of thing made with the R-Rated (aka caramelized) Onions p 38 The soup is good. A bit salty for my taste, but I think my kraut was a bit over salted. I can watch that more carefully next time. I thought it looked very appealing before puréeing: Next time, I will cut the potatoes smaller and run a knife through the kraut so I can skip the blender if I want. No complaints though. It tasted very rich and creamy so the heavy cream could be dialed back if desired. The Pinch Me, Frenchie was a big pain in the butt. In a small note in the book, Vivian says this would work with refrigerated biscuit dough. That could be a good thing to try. The end result is very tasty but the dough was annoying. I, of course, went with the dough recipe. It is very wet. Close to 80% hydration. Rather like a batter in the beginning than something that's supposed to be rolled into 1/2" balls that get dipped in oniony butter, then into cheese before they go into the pan for baking. Vivian's baker must be a dough wizard if she can handle this stuff. I ended up adding a bunch more flour and probably could have used even more as it was still soft and sticky. I ended up using a bench scraper to cut the dough into pieces that I rolled into logs and then cut off small pieces. A half inch ball is awfully small so I made them a bit bigger. I put them into the bowl with the melted butter and caramelized onions and gently spooned it over the balls to coat, then transferred them to a plate with the grated cheeses where I again used a spoon to sprinkle cheese over and turn them to coat. Instead of a bundt pan, I followed the alternate suggestion of making individual breads in a muffin tin. Once you have one layer of balls in place, which I read as more or less half of the dough, you're supposed to take 1/3 of the remaining onions and cheese and sprinkle them over the balls before you continue with the rest of the dough. When I got to that half way point with the dough, I had 3-4 balls in each muffin cup, all the melted butter was gone with just a small pile of onions left and almost all the cheese was gone. I took this to mean that I was already distributing enough onions and cheese so I skipped that step, melted a bit more butter and grated more cheese and continued with the rest of the dough. Here's how they looked at that point: While I've been calling them "balls," the dough was really too soft and sticky to properly roll them. They were more like blobs. Here they are when the first came out of the oven: It could be the extra butter I needed but it bubbled over so it would be wise to put the muffin tin on a sheet pan. I took one bread out of the tin and the bottom seemed a bit doughy. I loosened them all and sort of propped them on their sides to expose the bottoms and put them back in the oven for a while. That did the trick and here they are, nicely browned: Here's one pulled apart by a monkey: The bottom line is that they're good, but were so annoying, in my hands. I'm sure there's a better way to handle this and maybe I'll try something else. I made a full batch of the dough but only used half of it to make 12 muffin-sized breads so I've got the rest of the dough stashed in the fridge to play with another day. I'm thinking of puréeing some of the onions with the melted butter so I get a more even coating on each ball. That should leave some onions to put in the middle.

I have a bottle of their Amaro delle Sirene. I had no idea they had so many different products. Thanks for the link!

Here we have the Red Devils p 114 that, unsurprisingly, use Red Weapons p 104 to flavor them. Like the deviled eggs in Deep Run Roots, these use both butter and mayo so they taste pretty rich to me. I also wanted to add more sour flavor (there's no mustard or vinegar, save for the Red Weapons liquid) but the yolk filling was already pretty soft so my options were a bit limited. Maybe I should have drained the chopped Red Weapons better? I dunno. I decided to take a page from Josef Centeno's Amá where he recommends mashing up leftover deviled eggs into egg salad for sandwiches. The bread helped balance the richness of the buttery yolk mixture and I went back and added more Red Weapons to top each of those open-faced sandwiches. No complaints.

I am nothing if not suggestible and this was an excellent suggestion. Today's breakfast was a grilled version of that Caesar Me Convinced topped with a crispy fried egg. Vivian cautioned that the dressing is best on the day it's made. I wouldn't necessarily advocate long term storage but this was fine after an overnight in the fridge. I'd almost forgotten about that Philips Avance grill which was gathering dust and cobwebs in a corner. It seemed to do an acceptable job though I've never had grilled romaine before so I'm not sure if my method was ideal - I just slapped it on the grill!

My first recommendation for veg-centric cookbooks is always Josh McFadden's Six Seasons (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). Some recipes use make-ahead items from the section of "Go-To" pantry recipes in the front of the book so some planning is helpful but the recipes themselves aren't difficult. There's a thread here on cooking from the book so you can take a look and see what you think. Four books that are not specifically veg-centric but which contain an ample number of veg recipes and were all very popular with the folks in my cookbook group who need to get family dinners on the table quickly are: Melissa Clark's Dinner: Changing the Game This one is quite a good bang for the cookbook buck as it really has a ton of recipes. Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen Everyday Julia Turshen's Small Victories:Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs and her second book may be even better for you, Now & Again: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers Diana Henry's Simple Edited to add that while I'm not cooking for a pile-o-kids, I've cooked a lot from those books and really like them, too. Back on the veg-centric track and an old favorite of mine, Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu. In this book, she promotes the idea of doing some small prep tasks ahead so dinners are easy to put together at the end of the day. There are 50 menus and each one has a list of prep work that can be done ahead. There are also quick pasta and stir fry meals, breakfasts and menus for vegetarian Thanksgiving, a vegetarian barbecue and a Seder. There are some weekly menu plans at the end with advance tasks to do each day. Two books that I haven't seen yet but sound right up your alley are Nigel Slater's Greenfeast: Spring, Summer and Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter, both feature seasonal, quick, easy, vegetarian suppers. The first one hasn't been released yet in the US, the second came out here in September but both were published in the UK last year and have a lot of good reviews.

Since when do you follow olive directives?

Keep reading. Many recipes with no olives to trouble you.

In addition to the basil and parsley, I used a mix of mint, cilantro and dill. I was pretty generous with them because I had barely enough basil. I think you can use what you like. I've got a ton of dill left and wondering how this would be with that as the main herb.

Drat! I know how you feel because I threw out a jar of salt preserved oranges not long ago. They'd bubbled quite a bit early on (I think because the oranges are sweeter that lemons so more fuel for the microbes) and enough of the brine was pushed out of the jar that the top segments weren't completely submerged. By the time I noticed, some of the top segments had started to discolor. Out of laziness, and assuming everything had gone bad, I cleaned up the overflow and set the jar aside to discard. I should have: a) been more attentive to pick this up and b) topped it off with fresh lemon juice/salt brine to keep everything submerged. Anyway, as I upended the jar over the bin, I was greeted by the most delightful citrus aroma as I looked sadly down on the beautiful and aromatic orange segments now nestled atop a pile of used cat litter. Live and learn. Not sure what your ambient temps are like. Vivian says around 70°F. That kraut website I mentioned above says: I'm challenged by the stable part. Like why is it summer again today (89°F) after a week of overnight freeze advisories? Sheesh! Moving on, today, I had a lovely summer lunch of the Caesar Me Convinced p 222. Herbdacious p 206 flavors the dressing. I made a half batch of the dressing. Mine is green, rather than yellow as the book photo shows. Not surprising given how bright green the Herbdacious is. Mine is also more of a paste, not something that is easily "drizzled" into the food processor or blender but I did my best and it's very good. Very, very good. Vivian says this is best on the day it's made. Not sure whether I'd test that and try it tomorrow or eat another salad for dinner! For the croutons, I followed one of the Herbdacious "No Brainer" tips and tossed some torn bread with it before toasting. Here they are pre-toast: And, for those still reading, my plumber arrived promptly at 7 AM as scheduled and I now have a new water heater, a freely draining sink and a shower valve that actually works. I've got a load of wash in the dryer and another in the washer, I'm ever so excited about loading all food processor parts used above into the dishwasher and running it. I'm going to give the kitchen a good scrubbing and then take a nice hot shower!