blue_dolphin

P,B & J That's peanut butter, bacon and jalapeño 🙃 Inspired by the recipe in Max's Sandwich Book. I couldn't quite imagine the pickled peppers in this sandwich so I made a small one to see. Not bad, really. Max puts this sandwich in the breakfast section and suggests having it with a cheeky beer or, if it's really early, Campari & OJ, a morning beverage recommended by his dad because it looks like you're drinking grapefruit juice 🤣

It's really a fun book to read and get ideas from - hope you like it as much as I do!

One of my recent purchases is Max's Sandwich Book: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Perfection Between Two Slices of Bread (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Max Halley. The author is owner of Max's Sandwich Shop in London and is obsessed with mayo. The book includes a recipe for mayonnaise followed by 18 variations and I'm pretty sure there are a few others tucked here and there in the book. For the variations, he tends to give instructions for making both a whole batch or mixing up just a small amount for a single sandwich and he's completely fine with making the variations with Hellman's. The whole mayo section is only a few pages of the book so probably not worth a purchase for that alone. That said, I highly recommend the book. Max's writing style is a hoot as is his opinionated approach to sandwiches. See below for the Tuna Melt recipe: I'm not sure I'll make a ton of the sandwiches as written but the book has given me a ton of ideas.

Same as yesterday, a Vivian Howard banana/yogurt/cereal/strawberry/spiced nut parfait...dumped into a bowl instead of prettily layered.

I posted this over in the 2021 Cookbooks thread so I'll just copy it in here in case you want to follow that link to her cookie recipe and try making buckwheat chocolate chip cookies.

I made a new batch of V's Nuts p 266 with walnuts and used some in the Little Bit Scrappy, Little Bit Rock 'n' Roll... Parfait p 279 from This Will Make It Taste Good I used Grape Nuts for the cereal and strawberries for the fruit. The sweet/spicy nuts were an excellent addition to this fruit/yogurt/cereal breakfast bowl. Once I blitzed the full-fat Greek yogurt with the ripe banana, orange zest and juice, it was about the consistency of a smoothie, not something layer-able. I ended up straining the mixture and putting it in the iSi whip to make a yogurt foam. Fun, but next time I'll just put sliced banana in with the other fruit and skip the blender business.

There's my mistake. I Googled “Russell Williams Canada” And apologies to @Smithy for derailing the thread with my foolishness. Just made me laugh that the helpful responses did little to enlighten me!

From the answers in this thread and Google, I have learned that Russell Williams is a Canadian convicted murderer. Russell Williams is also an Aldershot institution. Aldershot is a town in Hampshire, England. Not sure why an Aldershot institution is named for a convicted murderer. Teachers from schools in Aldershot apparently meet at the Russell Williams Institution on PD day. PD day might be professional development day or personal development day but I'm not sure.

There were things I used to feel guilty buying or making just for myself. The pandemic has rid me of that particular guilt.

Buttermilk waffle, fresh strawberries from Harry's Berries topped with maple-sweetened sour cream

Mowgli Street Food (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) is currently $1.99 on Amazon.com and .ca. It's a fun book by barrister Nisha Katona who started the Mowgli Street Food restaurants in the UK. I bought the hard copy almost solely to make the Smoked Cardamom Old Fashioned but I've enjoyed cooking other recipes or just browsing for inspiration.

Amazon cookbook reviews are always a mixed bag but there are quite a few that echo your thoughts, one of them quite thorough and well-written.

Another Max Halley-inspired breakfast - this one the sausage and egg sandwich Crispy grilled sausage and jammy eggs dressed with a malt vinegar-hot sauce-mayo. I added a big handful of French-fried onion pieces. I put my sausages on the Philips grill before I realized that Max mixes part of the sausage fat into the mayo and uses the rest to fry the inside of the bread pieces so I unfortunately missed out on that added decadence. Next time!

They didn't work for me. I tried and failed with both the cherry pitter and chopstick. My cherry pitter isn't really designed to accommodate these large olives. I fished around in the jar and located a few small olives that I could orient correctly. It took all my strength and eventually broke the olive in two pieces. One small piece with a sharp fragment of pit went thru and the rest of the olive and most of the pit stayed on top. With the chopstick method, I usually set the cherries or olives on top of an empty bottle so the pits collect inside. With significant effort, I was eventually able to drive the olive into the bottle, pit and all. Here we are about half way there: I used the method @BeeZee described to cut up what I needed from this jar. The rest will become marinated olives I can nibble one.

When making sandwiches lately, I've been remembering Max Halley's six word "secret of deliciousness," Hot, Cold, Sweet, Sour, Crunchy, Soft. He doesn't call out umami but certainly incorporates it in his recipes. Applies as nicely to banh mi as to the ham, egg & chips sandwich illustrated on the cover of his book.

This link should take you to an Eat Your Books list of recipes using bulgur you might peruse for ideas. Lots of tabbouleh, but other stuff, too.

And I have to say those Castelvetranos cling to their pits most annoyingly. With kalamatas and lots of others, I can press on the olives to smash them and easily remove the pits. Not those guys!

Hopefully the people you actually asked will weigh in and we can both learn what to do!

I have some of that vinegar. I just use the original cork to close the bottle. I only use the spout if I'm serving it at the table and then put the original cork back in for storage. I suppose you could get a tiny cork to stop up the pour spout. That's where I miss my lab days 🙃. Also, on mine, the pour spout was attached to the bottle by a black ribbon. I have never gotten one with feathers. I just pull the ribbon out and discard it. If there were feathers, I suppose I'd do the same.

Seems to be the peak of springtime cookbook publishing. In addition to the Eric Ripert book mentioned above, yesterday was pub-day for a number of other cookbooks. My copy of Los Angeles baker Roxana Jullapat's book Mother Grains (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) arrived and looks good. It's divided into chapters for barley, buckwheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, sorghum and wheat with an intro to the grain and its products used in baking followed by an assortment of both sweet and savory recipes using that grain. The chocolate chip cookie recipe from the book, including modifications for using each of the mother grains is available online here. I'm looking forward to learning from the book. A 10th Anniversary "new edition" of Ferran Adria's Family Meal (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). Not sure what makes this edition different from the original. Nigella Lawson's new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) seems to be getting a lot of press. John and Catherine Pawson, a UK couple who both have careers in design rather than cooking have a stylish-looking cookbook,Home Farm Cooking (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), out from Phaidon, home of stylish-looking cookbooks. Blogger/YouTube creator, Molly Baz, has a cookbook out, Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes to Repeat. On Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, I noticed that several recipes have QR codes that take you to videos on her site that demonstrate the techniques she's teaching. I don't think I'm the demographic for this book but it seems like a good way to provide visual instructional content without pages full of tiny photos. Not a cookbook, but very food-related, I'm tempted by Michelle Zauner's memoir, Crying in H Mart (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), an expansion of her New Yorker essay of the same name. Will ask my library to buy it.

Your version sounds excellent! You can certainly do the potatoes ahead. They are mostly for crunch and since they’re so tiny, they cool in a flash anyway so no need to try and have them hot. I would have used those potato sticks in a can but came up empty at a few stores. I have an Oxo V-slicer, kind of a mandoline-type thing and used that to cut the potatoes.

@torolover, for bag-free, low-temp cooking, have you considered the Anova Precision Oven?

The other day, I made an "inspired by" version of Max Halley's Ham, Egg & Chips Sandwich. Here, I went for the full monty and made the homemade piccalilli, bought malt vinegar to mix with the mayo and fried up some shoestring potatoes. He's got some good sandwich tricks here. Focaccia is indeed good for sandwiches. I don't have his recipe so I used Ottolenghi's. The ham is meat shredded from slow-braised hocks that gets warmed up in some of the braising broth. The piccalilli is something I don't think I've ever tried before and certainly haven't made but an excellent addition. In my previous sandwich, I subbed French fried onion pieces for the shoestring potato fries. The crispy crunch is nice either way.

Max Halley's Piccalilli. Recipe available online here. I made a half recipe and ended up with about a quart and a half. Based on availability, I used sugar snap peas instead of broad beans, Brussels sprouts instead of broccoli and yellow onion instead of red but otherwise followed the recipe. I didn't process it in any way, it's just going in the fridge. Tasty stuff.

Breakfast sandwich with ham, spinach & mushrooms, egg and French fried onion pieces on focaccia with mayo & Dijon. Inspired by Max Halley’s ham, egg & chips.