blue_dolphin

I agree. Anything from TJ's can disappear anytime but I haven't noted any seasonal pattern with the Dijon mustards.

I ordered one of those molds, too, and it arrived yesterday. I think I need some bigger nori sheets. Yours looks delicious, @Shelby! The bacon bread was not made by me. I bought it at Roan Mills, a local business that grows and mills the grains and bakes bread. They had samples of the bacon bread made with their Sonora Red Fife blend out last weekend and that lured me into buying a loaf. I sliced it and am hoarding it in the freezer. They really put quite a lot of bacon in it. I like it best when it's toasted and the bacon gets crisp and starts to sizzle.

Avocado toast with tomato The secret ingredient here is this bacon bread: See that? BACON! 🙃

Hey, @HungryChris, good to see you! I've been missing your breakfasts lately!

Pasta with Braised Bacon & Roasted Tomato Sauce from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 205. The recipe is available online at this link. This is a delicious, rustic and intensely flavorful pasta dish, basically a version of Pasta All'Amatriciana. The roasted tomato sauce is a keeper - a great, quick way to concentrate the flavor of canned tomatoes. Earlier in this topic, @snowangel raved about the braised bacon, suggesting its marvelous aroma may have helped sell her house and @sammy declared it the best bacon dish ever. In my opinion, the best bacon is perfectly cooked to shattering crispness in a perfect summertime BLT and there are easier and quicker ways to achieve the porky component in this dish than braising slab bacon for hours. The header notes say that guanciale was not available so the braised bacon was a substitute. It's much more readily available today so that would be an easy sub as would her suggested shortcut of using little strips of thickly sliced bacon - I'd soak the slices in water for a bit if it's a particularly smoky sort. I found a blog post that suggested just cooking the onions in rendered bacon fat to add that porky flavor for a very shortcut version. If you do decide to braise the bacon, do it a day ahead or early in the day as it takes some time and really needs to chill down thoroughly before you can slice it easily. The book says to brown the bacon "until slightly colored, a few minutes at most," but because I am appalled by pale, flabby pork fat on my plate, I let it crisp up nicely. Perhaps inappropriate for the dish, but very appropriate for this diner. I used bucatini as the pasta and sprinkled the dish with plenty of black pepper and pecorino romano (I love Judy's description of its flavor as "salty and feral") I made full batches of the sauce and the braised bacon, which is called for in several other recipes in the book, used what I needed and will save the leftovers from each separately.

Welcome to the club! Don't you have 2 in active use?

I suspect this salad from the Zuni Café Cookbook might be the sort of "Sunset Magazine kind of thing" that @Katie Meadow was thinking of in her comment above. It's the Butter Lettuce with Oranges, Avocado & Shallot Vinaigrette, to which I've added some grapefruit and radicchio. Simple and fresh tasting, this says winter in California to me. This uses up my ripe avocados so I need to wait for the next guys to be ready before I try that NYT salad.

Butter Lettuce with Oranges, Avocado & Shallot Vinaigrette from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 143 Another easy salad assembled from a few ingredients and a simple dressing where everything complements each other perfectly. The header notes say that a variation on this salad would be to use grapefruit and endive and sweeten the vinaigrette with honey or Chartruese. I didn't sweeten the dressing but sort of merged the two by using a mix of butter lettuce and radicchio with both Cara Cara oranges and white Oro Blanco grapefruit. She also suggests serving this with cold shrimp or crab and I wish I had some shrimp as they would have easily turned this into a main dish. Next time.

I also had buttermilk biscuits with ham for breakfast but I refuse to post a picture of my sorry biscuits next to @Ann_T's perfection!

I can't speak to that recipe as I haven't made it but if I saw an Italian recipe calling for fish sauce, I would assume they were using Colatura di alici, an authentically Italian ingredient.

After @kayb mentioned Broadbent's biscuit slices, and wanting to get an order in before the weather gets too hot (after an order from Father's arrived with grease soaked clear through the box), I placed an order with Broadbent's to give them a try: My order: A slab of applewood smoked bacon (labeled 4-5 lbs, measured weight = 4 lbs 14 oz), 3 packs of the biscuit slices @kayb mentioned and their bacon sampler with a package each of hickory, maple, apple and hickory-pepper bacon. It seems the package of seasoning ends & pieces is a freebie. Nice. While the box was pristine, it still smelled pretty good: You may also have noted the paw in the upper left corner of my first photo. These guys were VERY interested! Sadly, it is the first Friday of Lent so no meat for me today 🙃

Yesterday, I made the citrus risotto from Zuni Café Cookbook (posted over here in the Zuni thread) which contains grapefruit, lime and a bit of mascarpone mixed in at the last minute. Leftover risotto obviously means arancini and I thought avocado would be a good pairing with these flavors so I made Avocado Citrus Arancini, served here with the Greenest Goddess Dip from Tartine All Day (recipe available online here) which also contains avocado. I added chopped, ripe avocado to the risotto, barely mixed so as to avoid turning everything green, and shaped the arancini around little dollops of mascarpone that I'd put in the freezer for a bit to firm them up. I dipped them in egg, then into a mix of panko and almond meal that I had spritzed with olive oil and pre-toasted in the oven. In my experience, the breading browns beautifully when fried but barely colors when baking, which was my plan for these guys. Here they are before going into the oven. And here's one cooked I think the avocado inside gets almost lost but the avocado dip is perfect with them.

I had to follow that very dark dish above with something light and pretty. This is the Citrus Risotto from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 196. Recipe available online here. The risotto is very pretty with the little flecks of pink grapefruit and the tartness of the citrus is balanced by the mascarpone that's added just before serving. Shrimp was a recommended accompaniment so I sautéed a few in butter with garlic and parsley. I do enjoy the descriptions Judy used to describe how things should appear during cooking. In the Romesco recipe, we are told to fry the bread until it is the color of cornflakes, something that delighted me when I turned mine over and they were exactly the color of cornflakes. Here, we are told that at one point, "The risotto should look like a shiny porridge of pearls." Perfect description for such a pretty dish!

Spicy Squid Stew with Red Wine & Roasted Peppers from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 338. This has been reported on previously by @Mottmott. The header notes say, "Here is a dish to challenge the dogma that the best cooking lets ingredients and flavors sing clearly in the finished dish....In this recipe....the murky, complicated result is delicious." Like the pasta dish I posted about immediately above, the flavors are intense and delicious but unlike that dish, no ingredient stands out - all the flavors are melded together, though the textures are still distinct.. I don't mind cleaning squid, but fishing 🙃the little ink sac out of the entrails that I usually discard without a look was not my favorite kitchen task. I do think the ink adds to the complexity of the dish. The recipe says that the finished stew should be rich and thick and by the time mine was really thick, there wasn't much of the sauce left. I used canned tomatoes and next time, I'll add enough of their liquid to submerge all the ingredients before starting the simmer so there will be more left at the end.

This is a broccoli-only version of the Pasta with Spicy Broccoli & Cauliflower from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 203. Recipe online here. Near the end of the recipe, we are instructed to "Taste - every flavor should be clamoring for dominance" and I felt this was true as I ate this - garlic, chili, olives, anchovy and capers are all waving their hands and saying, "Here I am, taste me!" At the same time, there's a great range of textures - some of the broccoli is very tender, some browned and crisp and other bits are still more tender-crisp, chewy pasta, crunchy breadcrumbs and those little flavor explosions mentioned above. @FrogPrincesse mentioned the fennel seed not playing well, I decided to add it anyway and it's surely there in the background but I didn't find it too much. Maybe my fennel seeds are too old? This isn't going to knock my go-to broccoli pasta off its pedestal but I will certainly make it again and look forward to playing with the ingredients as suggested in the header notes. I adjusted the amount of pasta downwards to 2 oz/serving and used oil-packed anchovies (instead of salted) and a mix of kalamata and oil-cured olives (instead of Niçoise, Gaeta or Nyons) but otherwise followed the recipe. Next time, I might up the capers or not rinse them as their acid punch was especially welcome. I'll add a small comment on the wine. I was surprised to see that a chardonnay was recommended as I would usually serve a red with these flavors. I'm not a fan of super-oaky chardonnay but I decided to open a bottle of Rusack 2016 Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay, Mt. Carmel Vineyard (review here), aged in oak, but not overwhelmingly so, and it was the perfect pairing where both the wine and the food make the other taste better. I had some red open to make the figs in red wine so I sampled that and it was another flavor fighting for dominance with everything else in the recipe.

@lemniscate or anyone else, how would you handle ventilation if you are moving hobs about? I like the idea of being able to reclaim that bench space but wonder about the exhaust hood issue.

Thanks! There are a lot of gems in the book. We're the beneficiaries of someone who has seen every mistake and screw-up with these dishes in her restaurant and has taken the time to provide the details to prevent that happening. Makes the recipes seem a bit fussy, but few of them are actually difficult I haven't tried the panade yet but it's on my list for this month. Zuni is the book of the month for the Food 52 cookbook club that I participate in. I lobbied hard during the voting process so I'm delighted it was chosen and to spend a month combing through its pages and learning

I don't have any great recommendations. I use a basic OXO good grips model that I've had for years. But I had to thank you for resurrecting this discussion - some hilarious posts in the early part of the thread. I'll be chuckling over them for a good while!

Bite-sized cheese gougères stuffed with arugula, slow-scrambled eggs, oven-crisped prosciutto and pickled onions. All adapted from the Zuni Café Cookbook with more detail over here in the thread on that book.

Three Zuni Café Cookbook recipes that I modified slightly to make fancy little breakfast bites. New Year's Gougères with Arugula, Bacon & Carol's Pickled Onions p 116 Carol's Pickled Onions p 271 Slow-Scrambled Eggs with Bottarga & Variations p 182 Cheese gougères were one of the first things I included in a menu. I saw them in one of my mom's magazines and asked if I could make them for dinner. I remember wearing an apron, standing at the stove, on a chair and having my mom repeatedly take the spoon away from me because I wasn't beating in the eggs vigorously enough. I was very disappointed that I didn't get to do it all by myself! I made the gougères entirely as written, though they were probably a bit small as I got 30 instead of the estimated 20-24. I'm happy to have the extras for the freezer as they reheat very well. I'm out of bacon so I crisped up some prosciutto to stand in. The pickled onions are quick and easy (less fussy than the pickled red onions) but need to be made a day or so ahead. I like them a lot. There's some sugar in the brine but it's balanced well with the vinegar and sharp bite of the onions. I've never bothered to make slow-scrambled eggs, but needed to pass the time while the gougères were baking so I decided to scramble up 2 eggs per the Zuni recipe but without the bottarga. For a plate of eggs, I prefer soft curds rather than this very creamy texture but this was very easy to dish up on to the gougères using a little cookie scoop, actually the same one I used for the gougères. Generally, I'm not up for stirring a pan of eggs for 8-10 min but I loved the instruction to rub your wooden spoon with garlic first and I'm glad I tried it.

Not that I would turn my nose up to this meal at any time of day, here's a fairly breakfast-y breakfast: an omelet with some fruit on the side. Specifically, Madeline's Omelette with Mustard Croûtons & Beaufort Cheese from The Zuni Café Cookbook The salad is also adapted from the same cookbook - arugula, fennel, toasted almonds and Cara Cara oranges in a sherry vinaigrette.

This is a 2-egg version of the 12-egg 😮 Madeline's Omelette with Mustard Croûtons & Beaufort Cheese from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 174. It's kinda like having your toast INSIDE the omelette instead of on the side! I read all the instructions and they're a bit much with only 2 eggs in a little pan, but it still turned out fine. The recipe doesn't use a lot of cheese - only 1/3 oz for 2 eggs so I chose a tasty one - Trader Joe's Unexpected Cheddar - since a white Cheddar was one of the options. That amount was just perfect. I love cheese but omelettes that are full of heavy, molten cheese can be awfully stodgy. This made for a nice light meal. I had some dressing left over from the salad that I made the other day so I repeated it here with Cara Caras instead of blood oranges.

I hope you have a great experience there and let us know how it is! Here's another 40th anniversary article on Zuni Café, this one from the New York Times: Zuni Café at 40: Still a Home for the Eclectic

As promised, I made Shrimp Cooked in Romesco from The Zuni Café Cookbook p 334. This is a delicious, company-worthy dish. The Romesco sauce is rather time and kitchenware consuming but can, and should, be done ahead. Once that's done, the actual meal prep is very easy. There's a 30 min wait to allow the sauce to meld with the stock and wine. Just enough time to chop and cook the onions, set the table, warm the plates and relax with a glass of the wine you've chosen. The shrimp and spinach then cook in just a minute or two. A modification of this recipe is available online here. I wondered if this should be served with something like rice or orzo. With the bread in the Romesco, I didn't miss a separate starch but after polishing off the shrimp, I did reach for some crusty bread to wipe up all the sauce!

More of that Boiled Kale from yesterday, this time topped with a fried egg - the lovely Fried Egg in Breadcrumbs, also from The Zuni Café Cookbook.