blue_dolphin

Maybe because:

Me, too. Currently 4 on the dining table, 5 on the kitchen island and 4 on the coffee table. That's fairly typical.

A while back, I posted a photo of the cover I cut from a sheet of mylar covered styrofoam insulation. The one I posted is a small cooler, I also have a larger one if needed and made the same sort of lid for it. I already had these items on hand. I don't have a Joule, but it should work fine.

Grilled cheese sandwich on homemade bread with Manchego cheese, Serrano ham and quince paste

Once again, taking guidance from @Anna N, I took my slice of leftover pizza (Fava, ricotta & lemon from Cool Beans if anyone is interested) out back for a change of scenery before I chowed down. We took in the orange tree And the echium Apologies for my failure to remove the original mint leaves and replace them with perky, fresh ones.

I thought that video was pretty good. For me, the most valuable take away was to plan ahead and set up your workspace before starting this stuff. Duh, I know. I have good working knowledge of aseptic technique but my "work brain" was apparently left behind in the lab and I kept messing up my grocery handling when I was more or less winging it in my kitchen instead of sitting at a laminar flow hood! After watching that the other day, I did much better.

No cook pasta sounds crunchy 🙃

Egg salad sandwich again

Yes, I bought one during their Kickstarter campaign for around $100. It arrived during a long stretch of very hot weather when I couldn't think of cranking up the oven so I put it out in the garage and promptly forgot all about it until I saw your comment pop up the other day. Thanks, os much for mentioning it, there is no telling how long it would have languished out there. No Marie Kondo-ing has ever happened in my garage! Having been reminded, I figured I should at least try it before responding so I've done that. I'll need to play around with it a bit but in general, it works as the promoters claimed and I like it. Super easy to take the bread out of the pan and peel off the silicone liner. A nicely shaped loaf with excellent crust all the way around. The current price of the LoafNest on Amazon is $199, a significantly larger investment. I re-read this thread there was a lot of concern about the offset handles. They might look a bit odd, but in practice, they work just fine. When I pick it up wearing oven gloves and cup my hands around the base unit, my thumbs naturally stabilize the handles of the lid. It's not a stretch to do so. All the recipes in the manufacturer booklet use 500g flour which makes a loaf size that is a good size for me. When I drop a loaf of this size into a dutch oven, it would always spread into a flatter loaf. These slices are good for smallish sandwiches. Again, good for me. All the recipes in the booklet are super simple: Mix, rise, transfer to the pre-heated pot and bake. No kneading, no turns and folds, no shaping at all. Unless your yeast is dead, they're probably pretty foolproof. They strongly recommend following one of their recipes for the first bake and I did, pretty much. I used 50% bread flour and 50% spelt flour and used leftover whey from some homemade "ricotta" as the liquid. Here is my loaf: The loaf is about 8.5 inches long, 5.25 inches wide and it rose to a little over 4 inches tall. And the crumb: The interior isn't doughy at all but still moister than I would like. Next time, I'll remove the lid for the last 15 min or so of the bake as I usually do with a dutch oven and make sure to temp the loaf before I remove it, something I forgot to do here. This will be fine for toast and sandwiches but I'd like to play around with other recipes to get more gluten development and probably use a second rise. To easily transfer shaped dough into the liner, a small, oval proofing basket would be handy. I'm going to try and rig something up and if that doesn't work, I'll break down and buy one. I'm taking my time with experimenting because of challenge of getting bread flour around here but once that's solved, I look forward to playing around some more.

Yes, very similar here in Ventura County. All the farmers markets are still open. No sampling. No displaying cut fruit. No feeling up all the produce - you touch it, you buy it! You have to queue up (well separated) at a lot of the stands. The market staff are quite committed to supporting the farmers and keeping the markets open as "essential." They've set up a lot of extra hand-washing stations, separated the stands and go around 'policing' the guidelines. I do worry about some of the farmers who are in their 70s as it's a lot of exposure to people and cash handling, even taking precautions as they do.

@Kim Shook, that looks like bacon & egg perfection to me! Greek yogurt, farmers market strawberries, a cream scone and black coffee

The Gourmandaise School in Santa Monica regularly offers a "Bread Camp" at this time of year and are now going to do it via Instagram with daily lessons from March 30-Apr5 and live Q&A on Tues, Thurs, & Fri @ 11AM PDT (see here for more info.) Edited to add that the daily lessons are being loaded to their IGTV channel around 3 PM PDT, but are not live and can be watched at any time, in any order. The Q&A sessions are live. They said they would try to save them in a way they can be re-watched later. Might be a good learning opportunity, even if flour and yeast are hard to come by right now. Apricot Lane Farms, the farm in the documentary, "The Biggest Little Farm," now available on Netflix, had to cancel all their school group tours and are doing an Instagram Live "Fridays on the Farm," geared to kids but good for all and available to watch after the fact via IGTV. The first episode was a little bumpy but they seem to be getting it down. They did at least one live IG cooking session but don't seem to be saving those so I would not post about that aspect. Samin Nosrat, author of Salt Fat Acid Heat, has started a podcast with Hrishikesh Hirway, available through the usual podcast carriers called, "Home Cooking." The first episode was very easy listening, if not a real learning experience, but I do enjoy her upbeat personality.

I've been impressed recently as I watch people creating other ways to share their love of food and cooking in these days when in-person activities are curtailed or prohibited entirely so I'm starting this thread to call out and discuss some of the new options for online learning and social interactions. I'd love to see what others have found. David Lebovitz had to cancel his book tour for his new book, Drinking French, and has been doing delightful Instagram Live "Happy Hour" posts. They are live from Paris at 6 PM. Since that's 9 AM here, it's a bit early for even me to think of cocktails but he has them up on his regular feed so they can be enjoyed later - I've been "saving" them for a nightcap! I think this is the first one and if you click on that "View Channel" button, you can see the rest. Today is going to be a Chocolate Frappé.

Indeed. I'm down to my last few lids (plenty of bands) and have been watching the prices go up and availability disappear over the last few weeks. Like TP, I was sure it was just a blip that I should wait out but it seems to be continuing. There are a few frozen veg I keep handy - spinach, artichoke hearts, edamame, shelled fava beans,, TJ's fire roasted corn and sometimes a bag of peas for cold compresses. Maybe a few others from time to time. Mainly, I'm sticking to fresh and trying to support my local farmers and the markets they sell at. I realize that's not an option for those in the colder climes where there's not much local produce now.

I'd consider turnip greens or radish tops as both have a little bite. Collards or lacinato kale don't have the bite but have similar texture and should work.

Indeed. A couple of weeks ago, prior to all our current distancing stuff, a neighbor on my Nextdoor site posted that he had wrapped up his season for spiny lobsters early and offered a very low price on his last catch to folks who were willing to pick up from his garage because there was no market for them. I understand that a lot of the other fisherman also stopped, preferring to let the creatures grow for another year rather than harvesting something they would have to sell at a loss.

Taking inspiration from @Anna N's recent leftover pizza oeuvre, may I present a sliver of yesterday's Fava, Ricotta and Lemon Pizza? Note the wrinkled fingertips from constant handwashing!

Ditto that. 99 Ranch has them in their advert for this weekend @ $7.99/lb. Very sad for the fishing industry since their shipments to Asia diminished to almost nothing some time ago and now restaurant sales are pretty much zero as well.

It aired last night on my local PBS station. I don't have a way to access their live content (no cable, no over the air reception) but was able to watch it this AM via the PBS app on my Apple TV and I assume that would work on phones and tablets as well. Looks like the full episode is also available at this link.

Not my own invention, but last night, I made the Fava, Ricotta and Lemon Pizza from Joe Yonan's Cool Beans cookbook. The dough - I bought one of the refrigerated dough balls from TJ's for the first time - gets topped with dollops of a fava/toasted pistachio/mint pesto, ricotta, lemon slices and favas. More mint goes on after baking. This was good, but not great. That pesto was absolutely tongue-tingling delicious right out of the blender but muted after baking with the ricotta and everything else. I think these ingredients would shine more brightly on crostini or even pasta and I'd likely replace the lemon slices with slivers of preserved lemon.

This morning, I mixed up a half-batch of @tikidoc's Cream Scones with the candied grapefruit peel I made last week and fresh rosemary from my driveway. I baked 2 and ate them both. They are small 🙃. It's a good thing that I didn't bake more of them as I could easily eat one more. The rest are going in the freezer for future treats.

I agree that @TicTac's freezer contents are enviable. For some reason, I'm more entranced by this one 🙃:

About the easiest pasta sauce I know, Kale Sauce from Six Seasons served over fresh creste de gallo pasta from Roan Mills, a local grower/miller/baker/pasta maker. I added sugar snap peas, red bell pepper and a sprinkle of pine nuts, the last inspired by @Smithy who mentioned wanting a pine nuts to add to her pasta dish. I buy flour and bread regularly from Roan Mills but hadn't tried their pasta. They were recently shut out of some of the farmers markets that make up a lot of their business when the markets closed because of crowd control issues or in the case of the Santa Monica markets (very big for them), limited vendors to farmers only and suspended sales of prepared foods. This seemed a bit unfair in this case since Roan Mills actually grow the grains, then mill them and use them in their baked goods so they ARE farmers. Anyway, I wanted to support them and the pasta was very good. It also sounds like they are working with the Santa Monica people to find a solution which seemed to involve packaging their breads in plastic, of all things. Strange times!

Dug out some of the fruited bread I made for Xmas gifts out of the freezer on Saturday: That looks so good! When I was a kid, my dad often had to drive up to Montreal for work meetings and always stopped off at a bakery and brought back good bread. One of my favorites was very similar to yours and I absolutely loved to have it toasted for breakfast. Yum! Bocadillo de Despaña El Quixote or Sandwich of Dried Pork Loin, Manchego Cheese and Quince Paste from José Andrés' Made in Spain I never thought to put membrillo on a sandwich but I'll do it again.

I say any meal, anytime. Especially during a pandemic. And with that, I'm sharing 3 desserts that I enjoyed at the time when many would eat an evening meal. In each case, this WAS my evening meal. Apples in La Rioja wine from José Andrés' book, Made in Spain. The first time I made this, I just spooned the apples over the ice cream in a little bowl. Apple balls are made with a melon baller and poached in Rioja wine and brandy with sugar, cinnamon stick, bay leaf, rosemary and thyme. This was very good. I'm pretty sure apple would not be anyone's first guess as to what these fruits are. Then I decided I needed more entertainment so when I had the leftovers, I tarted everything up and put them in a fancy glass with the specified mint leaf garnish and some salvia lemonii flowers from my garden. Spherification of yogurt with clementines also from Made in Spain. Never was a spherification enthusiast way back when all the cool kids were doing it, but what the heck, it was fun to play around and make the yogurt balls. The clementine segments get bath of sweet muscat wine, orange zest and honey before getting spooned over the yogurt balls. Conveniently, my citrus trees are blooming so I had flowers to garnish. Next is a mash-up of the first recipe and one for Poached Asian Pears with Black Peppercorns from Everyday Korean in which the pears are poached with ginger, black peppercorns and a little honey. The header notes say that recipe is known to soothe sore throats so I thought it was appropriate to pandemic times. In addition to the ginger, peppercorns and honey, I added sweet muscat wine, pear eau de vie and a little lemon zest to the pear poaching liquid. I debated adding rosemary but I decided to skip it. This was also very good, although the pears weren't transformed in appearance like the apples in the first recipe. Jasmine on the plate. Blooming rather late this year.