blue_dolphin

The more cookbooks I read and Google recipe searches I run, the more I think there's nothing really new, that everything's been done before, by someone, somewhere. That said, I get a lot of enjoyment and inspiration from my cookbooks, from recipes I find online and from what I see folks cooking here, whether the dishes meet another's standards for real creativity or not. Deb Perleman, who writes the Smitten Kitchen blog, regularly draws on the inspiration of others for the recipes on the blog. She credits the source and generally presents a modified version, formatted and discussed in a different way than the original. Her cookbooks contain a lot of material not previously published on the blog but you can be pretty sure that there are similar recipes out there, somewhere. Rehashing? Of course, but I still enjoy trying them when one piques my interest. When I look over the books on my shelves, the authors whose recipes are most readily available online are Yotam Ottolenghi, Diana Henry and Melissa Clark, all due more to their newspaper columns than blogs. There are a lot of Alison Roman recipes out there, too, because she's written widely for a number of years. I'm not aware that she has a blog, but I'll look for it!

Amazon can be quite handy but as a household of three (which includes two cats), there is no value for me in Costco.

No, thank you.

I saw this noted on EYB the other day and finally got around to listening to the first two episodes of Yotam Ottolenghi's podcast, Simple Pleasures. The premise is that a different guest visits him to chat and eat a meal. The first guest was Nadiya Hussain, who won the Great British Bake Off a few seasons back and the second episode features Nigella Lawson. Not sure if this will just be a limited run to flog his new book, Simple - his website has a link to a recipe from the book for each episode - or if it will continue. The slow-cooked chicken with a crisp corn crust from the Nigella Lawson episode sounds awfully good!

I suspect this PSA will be in my mind during my next visit to the local Goodwill shop: A great reason to cheer

It was pretty incredible! I should have taken a photo of the brie, bacon and figs on the bread before I put it together - so much decadence smooshed together in that sandwich!

Fig, bacon and brie grilled cheese Based on this Blackberry, Bacon, and Brie Grilled Cheese from Fine Cooking but using some of the figs in caramelized honey that I made the other day. No butter on the bread, instead it's fried in bacon drippings - oh yeah!

Good point. The ChefAlarm comes with a single hole clip. I bought the separate clip for the Dot, before I had the ChefAlarm.

Spiced Black Lentil Salad with Oil-Packed Tuna, Radishes and Purple Potatoes from Dining In p 134. Looks pretty but kind of a meh salad for me. This starts out with the recipe for Spiced Lentils with Spring Onions p 133. The lentils are nicely seasoned and would be a fine side dish on their own. Though this is not suggested in the recipe, I tossed the potatoes and beans with some of the spiced garlic oil used for the lentils but should have done so while they were still warm.

Not sure if this has been reported already or not but the frozen puff pastry has returned, at least to my TJ's. It disappeared immediately after the holidays - like there was none left on Jan 2 - last year so I didn't get a chance to stock up. I will have to be more diligent this year.

According to Eat Your Books, 11 of 148 recipes in Dining In call for legumes, including 2 of the 6 recipes I've posted. Seven of them use beans. One of the 7 bean recipes calls for both beans and black eyed peas and and an additional 3 recipes call for lentils. One recipe calls for split peas. To further your perception, I expect I'll make another lentil dish today

It looks like the stirrer mechanism is rather different than a standard stir bar that can fly off the magnet and end up quivering at the far edge of the vessel instead of actually stirring.

The Thermoworks Dot also has an alarm. I have both the Dot and the ChefAlarm and the additional buttons make the ChefAlarm easier to set for alarms. They sell the $4 multi-hole clip to hold the probe and it works well, though similar clips are also available elsewhere.

Sadly, it's not homemade bread. Happily though, that toast is made from a Glenn Country Rosemary Batard from Roan Mills, operated by the folks who run Kenter Canyon Farms. They grow and mill the grains and bake the bread locally, in Fillmore.

@JAZ - I'd vote yes for both sections you mention - vegetables & sides and beans & grains. I know there is a whole lotta love out there for the one-pot IP miracle meal and there are some great examples just above in this thread with @ElsieD's pasta and @mgaretz's stew. As lovely as they are, a cookbook based entirely on that concept doesn't appeal enormously to me because of the challenge of cooking all elements to my taste. On the other hand, being able to expedite a potato salad, rice dish or grains is much more appealing to me. Also, a new IP user may find side dishes an easier entry point to the IP than committing to an entire meal. Just my 2 cents...I'm firmly in the camp that believes the IP is a great cooking tool but not a miracle meal machine, so take it for what it's worth!

Boiled egg, mashed with butter on toast and topped with crumbled bacon

The other day, I made the Peperonata from Six Seasons p 247. This photo is what we call pre-Peperonata, my mise en place for the recipe: The cherry tomatoes were late to the class photo and also took forever to burst - I had to smash them then cook further to reduce the liquid they released. In the end, I overcooked it so a lot of the peppers disintegrated but it's a super concentrated flavor bomb and I'm sure I'll find some uses for it. Here's one use - smashed beans on toast topped with some of that peperonata: Edited to add another use - on polenta

Melon and Goat Cheese with Red Wine and Lavender Dressing from Diana Henry's How to Eat a Peach. This is nice enough. Easy to put together and pretty on the plate but not as interesting as I thought it might be. Maybe my lavender wasn't up to snuff. Slices of melon are drizzled with lavender-infused/honey sweetened red wine and goat cheese. In the photo in the book, the red wine dressing looks rich and syrupy - as if it was a reduction - but there is no instruction to reduce it. Mine looked more like I spilled red wine on my melon 😮. Diana Henry confirmed on Instagram that spilled wine was about right so I guess that's as it should be.

Spicy, Garlicky White Beans from Dining In p 155. This is basically a just a quick way to turn canned beans into something tasty. What's not going to be tasty after cooking in chicken fat with a bunch of garlic and chile pepper and crushed fennel? I do believe most canned white beans would disintegrate with this treatment but I used Rancho Gordo Marcella beans and used care in stirring them. After carefully preserving their shape, I smashed them on to some toast, topped them with peperonata and called it breakfast:

Caramelized Honey & Fig pops using figs and honey from a recipe I tried yesterday. I sweetened plain Greek yogurt with some of the caramelized honey and blended in a few figs - I scooped out the flesh to avoid too much dark skin - and sliced more honeyed figs to put into the molds. I drizzled caramelized honey into the molds but it stuck and didn't come out so I added more after I unmolded them. Edited to add that the pop on the far left didn't get any figs in the mold - I got tired of trying to slice and place them!

I made the Caramelized Honey with Figs and (without the) Ice Cream from Dining In p 278. They are quite nice. The flavor of the fresh figs comes through quite clearly as compared to recipes where they are poached in wine with spices. The recipe says the honey should be cooked until it's a dark amber, the color of good maple syrup. Here's my test plate, with a drop of maple syrup in the middle. I confess that I didn't actually have the maple syrup to compare while cooking as I couldn't get the cap off the bottle without waiting for hot water so I took a guess. Could have gone a little longer maybe but I didn't want to scorch it. Has a subtle caramel flavor. I had a few figs on polenta with goat cheese and walnuts for my breakfast. I'm going to make some caramelized honey and fig popsicles with some of them. Watch the popsicle thread for developments in that area!

Cantaloupe with Arugula and Black Olives from Dining In p 99. This sweet-savory salad is both interesting to look at and to eat. Couldn't be easier - throw some arugula and melon on a platter, squeeze a lemon and snip some chives over the top and drizzle with finely chopped oil-cured olives (I would have preferred them cut into thin slivers) and olive oil. S & P and you're done. I used a beautiful, fragrant Ambrosia melon from a local farm that was the star of the show. If the melon isn't super ripe and delicious, this will fall flat, as the header notes suggest.

Me, too! I really appreciate the comments from others so I try to be good about entering them myself, as long as I've stuck fairly close to the recipes.

Including a few by me!

Today's breakfast was the Olive Oil-Fried Lentils with Cherry Tomatoes and a Chile-Fried Egg from Dining In p 139. The prep seemed fussy for a bowl of lentils with a fried egg on top but paid off big time with the most flavorful lentils I've ever made. The lentils pick up tons of flavor from the garlic and shallot that are slowly cooked before adding the cherry tomatoes and cooked further until the tomatoes release their juices before adding the lentils and cooking further still until the lentils start to crisp. Meanwhile, the red onion slices are picking up their own great flavors from their marinade of lime juice and fish sauce. The crispy egg and chopped, roasted peanuts (which I forgot to add until after I took the photo) bring both texture and flavor and that final drizzle of chile oil and squeeze of lime juice tie it all together. The header notes mention having cooked lentils on hand but that's not a step that saves time here as they cook up in the time it takes to chop everything and get the garlic-shallot-tomato mixture ready. In estimating how much is a pint of cherry tomatoes, I suspect I used too many but it's tomato season so it's all good. The recipe can be found online at this link to the Winston-Salem Journal (which made me answer a couple of questions but was otherwise innocuous)