blue_dolphin

I haven’t seen them either but will look. There's a smaller company called Earth & Vine that sells some nice preserves with chiles. I quite like the red bell pepper with ancho chili jam. That one and several other varieties are available at my Whole Foods.

I'm sorry to hear that. Mine (knock on wood) is still working. When I purchased it I figured I'd be SOL if anything happened to it.

Yeah. McDonald's regular size burgers are really thin and get cooked from frozen. Or at least they did back when I worked there in high school.....it's been a while 🙃

The Amazon.com listing for this book offers a generous sample of the content via the "Look Inside" feature. I purchased the kindle edition of The Tinned Fish Cookbook, last month after Evan Kleiman interviewed the author, Bart van Olphen, on her podcast (link to episode here) I wanted to try using some tinned fish other than tuna and anchovies and thought this would be handy for some ideas. I have yet to procure the actual fish though! Edited to add that when I go to Amazon.ca, I can also see a "Look Inside" feature but it only offers a few pages of the book while Amazon.com offers many pages. Curious.

Bean, cheese & bacon breakfast tacos, with and without the addition of pickled onions and manzana peppers Recipes for borracho beans, flour tortillas, pickled onions and peppers all from Josef Centeno's book, Amá.

Worked on my iPad with Safari

Today's breakfast was the chorizo & egg tacos that I set out to make yesterday but turned into quesadillas instead. Tía Carmen's Flour Tortillas and Grandma Alice's Chipotle Chorizo from Josef Centeno's Amá.

I hope you have an enjoyable market experience! I've been going every week for my major shopping. It's not as much fun as it used to be but I want to continue to support the local farmers. At my market, there's a limit to how many people can be within the perimeter of each stall so you need to queue up at the more popular ones. My market has marked the position of the queues for each stall on the pavement with chalk X-marks 6 feet apart. To avoid having the queues block the main walkway, they are sometimes in directions that are less than intuitive but they've increased the # of market staff to herd us shoppers in the right direction. I always like to chat with the vendors and you really have to limit that. It's awkward with the masks, especially when there are language differences to begin with and and I feel uncomfortable holding up the queue. But being out in the fresh air and seeing all the beautiful produce coming in certainly beats any other shopping experience these days!

I would say make your chorizo & eggs the way you like, heat a large flour tortilla in a skillet, sprinkle with grated cheddar, cover half with the eggs, fold it in half and give it a minute to get all stuck together. I made the recipe for Grandma Alice's Chipotle Chorizo in Josef Centeno's Amá (recipe available online at this link) using a nice piece of pork belly and let that sit in the fridge for a day before cooking. It's quite tasty and I do recommend the recipe if you want to make your own. I intended to use some in breakfast tacos from the book but I was missing an ingredient to make the fresh tortillas. I had some in the freezer but they were too big for tacos so I switched to quesadillas. I like crispy so I wasn't disappointed. For one 9.5 inch tortilla, I scrambled 2 eggs, 1 large green onion, thinly sliced and ~ 1/3 cup of chorizo and used a little less than an ounce of grated cheddar. As you can see in the photo, the amount of filling is generous so you could certainly cut that down if you wanted. Pork belly, pre-grind: Spices: Chorizo - possibly a lifetime supply!

Chorizo and eggs, quesadilla-style

Ditto the Fromage Fort recommendation. I've used this recipe from David Lebovitz with varying cheese mixtures and good results each time. If your cheeses are less interesting, Melissa Clark has a recipe for Jalapeño Fromage Fort in her recent book. The recipe is available online here (scroll down) Edited to add that I've had only one cheese that completely resisted my efforts to grate it with my mouli-juilenne. It's an old dry jack (Vella Golden Bear) that was rock hard when I bought it and has become like glass over time. I will be trying @andiesenji's steaming method on it very soon! If that fails, it will be joining the Parm rinds in soups!

There's not a ton of clearance between the hand that's pressing down on the tamper that pushes the food down towards the cutting disk and the angled handle that you're turning with your other hand. I can imagine that being an issue for those with larger hands.

Now I really wish I had a chicken! Beans on toast here: Borracho beans and onions pickled with oregano indio. Scottish cheddar (Mull of Kintyre)

My mom had the old all-metal version. I have the orange plastic one shown in the video. I've had it for 40 years (bought it for my first kitchen as a college undergrad) and still use it regularly.

Whole milk ricotta? Or it's tangier cousin, queso fresco? Let me know if you want the latter recipe and I can paraphrase the recipe from Gonzalo Guzman's book Nopalito. It works well. Or maybe paneer?

Ditto on the cast iron envy and on the thrift shopping envy! I'm really enjoying David Lebovitz's book Drinking French. I'd like to give it to a number of friends along with a pair of cocktail glasses and an ingredient for a cocktail I think they'll like. I'd really like to get shopping for those glasses as I know it will take me a while to gather enough of them!

Potato & Egg Breakfast Taco with Mexican Salmorejo, Tomatillo Salsa and Borracho Beans, all from Josef Centeno's book, Amá Edited to add that the taco filling is sliced potato, sautéed with a bit of chopped bacon, shallot, serrano chile. Eggs get scrambled into the mix at the end with a sprinkle of cheddar when it goes into the tortillas. There's a recipe for homemade tortillas in the book but I was lazy and used store-bought. @shain, your beans on toast were on my mind all day yesterday so after I cooked these borracho beans last night, I made myself beans on toast for dinner with pickled onions and a bit of cheddar. It just hit the spot!

Thanks! All 50 cent - $1.00 thrift store finds! I have a nice little collection, all in ones, twos or threes, and love picking the glass as much as picking the cocktail to make!

Roasted cauliflower with Cilantro-Cashew Pesto from Josef Centeno's Amá With an egg on top

Oh my, where to begin???

Josef Centeno's book, Amá, includes a recipe for Broccolini Torrada that features broiled broccolini tossed with what he likens to a Mexican-inspired version of bagna cauda made with toasted walnuts and pecans, garlic, anchovy, olive oil, lime juice and zest, chiles, cilantro and a few other spices. I've been wanting to make it and put an egg on top but broccolini has been absent from my house for a while. I decided to go ahead and make it for breakfast today with broccoli instead. That sauce is certainly a flavor-bomb. I used TJ's Unexpected Cheddar for the "aged white cheddar" called for but it's really not necessary with everything else going on in that sauce.

Yeah, that might be a good idea. I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine and I can tell you from my experience yesterday that 2T of instant coffee can pack a wallop!

The wine distribution is tricky, isn't it? The thing I enjoy about tasting dinners is the opportunity to taste and compare multiple wines, something that doesn't work so well for 1 or 2 people. It would be easy enough to purchase the wines and distribute bottles along with the food but if it's only one or two people at a given location, they're unlikely to do justice to 4 or more open bottles of wine in a single evening. And it would be rather expensive, too! A local distillery partnered with a local chocolate maker on a Zoom liquor/chocolate pairing event. They went with 200 ml bottles of the their liquor items and the chocolates could be purchased in multiples so each person would have their own. But 4 open liquor bottles are pretty shelf stable compared with wine!

Over in the Dinner topic, @TdeV has posted about several Zoom wine tasting events that she has hosted for friends. The other day, I read this account from a blogger describing a Zoom wine tasting dinner she participated in through their country club. I'm not familiar with that particular club but I've attended similar dinners where the club hosts a winery, the chef prepares dishes to complement the wines and both the winemaker and chef introduce each course and its wine. There's generally an opportunity to purchase the wines at the club's wholesale prices. Here, they adapted the model with a multi-course take-out meal, paired wines and a Zoom meeting for the winemaker and chef to introduce the courses. I thought it was interesting to see how they translated that model into a remote activity. A lot of her photos are of the lovely table setting she arranged for her own family but I especially I liked seeing how they packaged each course and then how they looked when nicely plated. It surely is an intensive use of packaging materials but that seems to be the nature of any sort of take-out. In any case, I thought it was a fun way to celebrate a special occasion if the guests are in the same area.

Indeed it does and the bourbon-soaked date was a nice treat at the end! Thanks for that idea!