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blue_dolphin

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  1. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Yesterday was broccoli mac & cheese Today was another gingerbread waffle, fresh blueberries, Greek yogurt with lemon and honey
  2. I agree. Especially with her jam cookbook scheduled to come out next week. The timing made me wonder if someone really had an ax to grind but there seems to be enough truth to be very disturbing.
  3. I've missed the writing of @russ parsons in the LA Times since he departed that publication so I was delighted to read this article from him in The Irish Times: A US food writer moved to Ireland. Here’s what he found Brought me back to my first trip to Ireland. I was not expecting great food and then I discovered Irish butter ... and cheese and bacon and salmon and potatoes ... simple ingredients with real flavor.
  4. I never had tots until last week when I bought some for a recipe. My, they are quite good. I have to acknowledge the great minds in this topic for my brunch tots today: Filled with sour cream, topped with salmon roe and served with scrambled eggs.
  5. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Nice to see the tot love over here in the breakfast thread! I'm pretty much a tot novice. For sure, my first time to buy them and cook them at home. It was slim pickings at my local Walmart Neighborhood Market. Walmart brand "Taters" only, though I did have a choice of a 2 lb or 5 lb bag. Someone told me the more disc-shaped type that @Anna N pictured have a better crispy surface area:interior ratio but these seem quite satisfactory. I bought the 2 lb bag thinking it would last a lifetime but I'm making good progress and can see a re-purchase in my future! There is a whole tot topic over here although, aside from a few devotees, it hasn't seen a ton of tot love lately. It was in that thread that I found the idea for today's tot Sunday brunch special Scrambled eggs with sour cream filled tots topped with salmon roe. Cut a slit in the top of the tot, squeeze from the ends to open it up, pipe in the sour cream and, lacking actual caviar, top with roe. You may also note that's not a coffee mug in the background. This was washed down with a nice glass of bubbly - the Trader Joe's Reserve Brut Rosé North Coast Sparkling Wine that I buy when it's available over the holidays and hoard for celebrations. I realized that we're more than half way to next year's supply and with no parties, I haven't made much of a dent in my stash. These days, fancy tots are as good excuse as I'm likely to get!
  6. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Totchos with a boiled egg Tots, roasted poblano and red bell peppers, pickled jalapeños, cheese topped with a boiled egg & cheese sauce
  7. Not surprising, I guess, with brick & mortar shops already struggling before the virus pushed everything online. I used to love poking around in their big Seattle store - always crammed with stuff. I liked that they had a set-up where you could try out the knives for fit and balance. I also liked that they regularly hosted cookbook authors in the stores. My store didn't tend to be too busy so we often were able to chat with the authors for quite a while. My local Thousand Oaks store isn't on the closure list yet when bigger nearby shopping destinations like Santa Barbara, Pasadena, Glendale and Westwood are closing. Maybe due to higher rents and more competition in those other areas.
  8. Nice looking tomato sauce, @kayb! Hope your lids turn up in time. There was a while there when they were out of stock in lots of places and were selling for outrageous prices. That seems to have passed. I am not much of a canner put am determined to put up some of the stewed tomatoes from Deep Run Roots this year when the local farmstand does their pick your own Roma special for 25 cents/lb. That's not til Labor Day weekend so I've got time to get my jars & lids in order!
  9. If you've got something in a glass bottle with a wire bale closure and think the contents may have begun to ferment, I'd recommend leaving the wire bale closure open or at least place the bottle into a secondary container large enough to contain the contents in case the bottle fails. I almost put this over in the "I will never...." thread but forgot. I recently had a liter of elderflower cordial distribute itself all over the inside of my fridge. It was on the top shelf, in the back and ended up all over everything on every shelf, including all the door bins. You don't want to clean up a sticky mess like that!
  10. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Tots again In addition to broccoli and red bell pepper, I added pickled jalapeños and replaced most of the grated cheddar with a drizzle of a queso-like sauce. The sauce is from Chris Shepherd's book Cook like a Local where he uses it a Chile Tater Tot Casserole and something called Lamburger Helper. The sauce has onion, garlic, Crystal hot sauce and sambal oelek in addition to cheddar cheese and heavy cream. It is very rich and very delicious. From others who have made it, the tot casserole turns the tots rather mushy. Some people like it that way. Fans of the crispy tot have turned it into something more like totchos than a casserole and I plan to try that. The recipe is available online here: Chile Tater Tot Casserole Interior view:
  11. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Are there rules for breakfast? People with purple hair don't care .....🙃 Perhaps more conforming, today, I made a scaled down, 2-egg version of this Veggie-Packed Tater Tot Breakfast Bake
  12. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Tuna salad sandwich & pickles
  13. Phew! The green is only a sort of tinted white chocolate on the outside. I was afraid there was going to be a green peanut butter filling inside! And sign me up for a tasting of the (likely awful artificial) strawberry filled Vampire Kisses - they look quite deadly!
  14. Last week, as reported over in the pizza toppings topic, I used the classic slow-cooked summer squash & onions as a pizza sauce. For the squash, I followed Toni Tipton-Martin's recipe from Jubilee which uses butter, olive oil and rosemary. When I tasted the sweetness of the cooked squash, my thoughts went to additions like feta, olives, preserved lemon but I wanted to stick with the southern theme, so I added red bell peppers and diced country ham.
  15. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Spiced maple broiled peach from Nik Sharma's Season with a gingerbread waffle from yesterday Nik makes a vanilla bean crème fraîche to go with the peaches. I subbed Greek yogurt with grated lemon zest and a drop of vanilla extract. The spiced maple-vinegar syrup has rainbow peppercorns, fennel and coriander seeds added to maple syrup and apple cider vinegar.
  16. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Gingerbread waffles & cream from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee with sausage & fresh peach slices I get the sausages at the local farmers market. They're made by a German family and they named this variety "Irish Bratwurst" which makes me laugh. They also have an "Italian Bratwurst" and, of course, a "German Bratwurst," among their many offerings.
  17. blue_dolphin

    Breakfast 2020!

    Polenta topped with collards, boiled egg and some meat picked from the smoked hock cooked with the collards. That's a moat of collard potlikker surrounding the polenta
  18. Yes, just regular polenta, no binders. Here is a recipe. For this purpose, I use a little less water than I usually do when cooking the polenta - 3.5 cups of water/1 cup dry polenta instead of the 4 cups I'd usually use. Not that it matters, but I cook the polenta in the Instant Pot, pot-in-pot, manual, high pressure, 15 min then 10 min slow release before opening, aka, the @Anna N method! Then I use oiled fingers to pat it out on parchment paper to ~ 1/3 inch thick. Or you can roll it between two lightly oiled sheets. Or press it into a pie plate to make a polenta pie crust. 1 cup dry polenta will press out into two 10-inch rounds or one big one. I prefer the smaller size. Put the crusts in the fridge to firm up for at least an hour or overnight. I put the baking steel into the middle of the oven and pre-heat to 475°F. My oven has a convect-roast setting that uses both upper and lower elements so that's what I use. Brush the top of the crust with a little olive oil and slide it, on the parchment paper, on to the steel. Bake until the edges start to crisp up and it looks sizzle-y all over. That takes ~ 10 minutes for me, the recipe says 15. Pull the crust out, add the toppings and return to the steel for another 5-10 min, until the toppings are done to your liking. I've had the crust slide off the parchment directly on to the steel. It released just fine and was not the disaster I feared but I'm not recommending that. WRT toppings, I wouldn't recommend anything overly saucy - think tomatoes instead of tomato sauce and I recommend a light sprinkle of cheese directly on the crust, then add other toppings, followed by a little more cheese. The recipe I linked to says this is a knife and fork dish. In my hands, making the smaller, 10-inch crusts, going light on the toppings and baking on the steel, I get slices that can easily be picked up and eaten out of hand. Edited to add that it's not pizza, but it's not bad either!
  19. I've been cooking from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee recently and decided to pizza-fy a few recipes from the book, just for fun. There's a recipe in the book for the classic Braised Summer Squash with Onions that includes rosemary for a bit of a twist. The squash was so soft and tender that I pretty much treated it as a chunky sauce here. I added red bell peppers for texture and sprinkled on just a little diced country ham to contrast with the sweet veg and stay in keeping with the southern cooking theme. Next, I took 2 Jubilee recipes that feature dried corn and put them on a polenta crust instead of making the grits or cornmeal dumplings the recipes specify. In terms of flavor and texture, the Low Country Shrimp & Grits adapted quite well. It would have been much better with smaller shrimp but this is what I had. I put a smallish amount of cheese (cheddar, as the recipe uses in the grits, and a little mozzarella) and some cherry tomatoes on the crust mid-bake, then added the shrimp when it came out of the oven. Small shrimp would have made these slices easy to pick up and eat. The other recipe I messed with was for Collard Greens with(out) Cornmeal Dumplings and it also worked well. The book calls for smoked ham hocks to make the Smoky Soul Stock that the greens are cooked in. The hock meat was was tender and still flavorful so I used some of that along with the collards to top the "pizza" and let the crust stand in for the dumplings. A few cherry tomato halves would have added a welcome acid note. Most polenta pizza recipes bake the crust on a baking sheet. I put it on parchment and slid that on to a pre-heated steel which yielded a crust that was crisper on the bottom with slices that could easily be picked up and eaten our of hand.
  20. Please make the walnut bread and send me a loaf! I bought the book years ago in part because I missed that bread but have yet to make it!
  21. Over at this link, eG member @CanadianHomeChef suggests a temp of 275°F for caramelized onions. I have done this with my Paragon using the mat and it worked fine. I just did a skillet full, not a huge deep pot.
  22. Obviously not @rotuts but as he says, it's all about the salt level. If I wanted max ham flavor in my casserole, I would not soak the ham. I would assume that the little diced bits will give up some salt to the dish during cooking so I'd adjust or eliminate other sources of salt. I do give the biscuit slices a soak before I heat them up for breakfast sandwiches but they're not cooked in a casserole.
  23. Island Banana Bread from Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee. Lots of flavor from the cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, molasses and vanilla. I used walnuts instead of pecans, Empress dates instead of Medjools and baked 3 mini loaves so I can stash 2 in the freezer.
  24. Nice!
  25. Got some nice apricots from the farmers market and turned them into these Apricot, Honey & Ginger pops I'm looking forward to seeing some new creations from @pastrygirl & @JeanneCake!
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