blue_dolphin

Raw Winter Squash with Brown Butter, Pecans and Currants (I subbed walnuts and raisins for those last two items) from Six Seasons p 377. The recipe calls for using a vegetable peeler to shave the squash into thin ribbons but suggests a thin julienne as an alternative. I decided to try both to see what I liked. That would be the julienne, though that would make it more of a slaw, it's what I would do if I make it again. Currants (raisins in my case) get soaked in red wine vinegar for at least 30 min, that mixture is then tossed with the squash, scallions and red chile, seasoned and tasted before adding the brown butter p 36, olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, mint and toasted pecans (walnuts here). I'm not totally head-over-heels in love with this as a main-dish salad. I ate it for my lunch today and tried adding a bit of feta or ricotta but neither of them were quite right. I think it would make a very different, fresh-tasting side dish at Thanksgiving, maybe substituting dried cranberries for the currants.

Did it again Boiled small potatoes, smashed, drizzled with olive oil and crisped in the CSO. Topped with ricotta, leftover wilted kale (from Six Seasons) and a soft boiled egg. This was pretty good without the egg, but it's breakfast and all There was also this small amuse bouche to amuse moi while the egg was boiling: A little two-bite potato, treated as above but topped with a dab of pimento cheese and returned to the warm oven to melt. Could have just eaten more of these for breakfast!

Thanks for the link to that article! I also enjoyed reading this one that was linked to: How Phantom Thread Made Toast Irritating I'm planning to see Phantom Thread this week and usually avoid reading commentary until after I've seen the film but I'm glad I read both of these articles first.

All the potato talk in this thread got me wanting some. That and a condiment overload in my fridge yielded this mess: I boiled a few small potatoes, smashed them and crisped them up in chicken fat, topped with a dollop of the whipped ricotta from Six Seasons (homemade ricotta whipped with salt, pepper and olive oil), soft-boiled eggs and some carrot-top salsa verde leftover from another Six Seasons recipe.

@rarerollingobject, as usual, your baked items are works of art. As is the dog, in a slightly different way !

Two more kale recipes from Six Seasons. First up is The Kale Salad That Started It All p 309. Not the best kale salad I've had but quick and easy. Dressed only with crushed garlic, olive oil, lemon juice and chile flakes and topped with Pecorino Romano and the Dry Breadcrumbs p 30. I'd play around with this recipe again. I'm wondering how it would taste with some of the vinegar-soaked raisins used in the recipe below. The next recipe is titled, "Wilted Kale, Alone or Pickled on Cheese Toast" p 311. I liked this a lot. I don't understand the title. Golden raisins (regular specimens here) are plumped in white wine vinegar for an hour and eventually tossed with kale that's been sautéed with garlic and a generous amount of olive oil - 1/4 cup oil/8oz kale. This is to sit for another hour or two so it seems to me the kale is getting pickled whether it goes on toast or not. It's suggested that more olive oil be added to the kale/raisin/vinegar mixture at this point. I did not do so. Next, we are to spread grilled bread (toasted, here) with a thick layer of the Whipped Ricotta p 37 (ricotta, blended with olive oil, salt and pepper), top with "a juicy mountain of kale" and toasted walnuts and finish with yet more olive oil. I used my Misto to dispense the smallest drizzle of olive oil, but I don't think it was necessary. As I said, I thought this was quite good. The regular raisins almost blend into the kale, color-wise, so I'm sure the golden raisins would have made for a nicer visual, but either way, after marinating in vinegar, they bring a nice punch of sweet-sour flavor. I've had mixed feelings about that whipped ricotta. Tasted on its own, I was dismayed that I'd wasted lovely homemade ricotta and made it all heavy and oily. It turned into a lovely sauce in the Pasta with Broccoli & Sausage p 179. I found it unappealingly heavy again in the Farro & Roasted Carrot Salad p 291 but I liked it here on the toast. That said, I don't think I'd make it again just for this dish and would likely choose one of the suggested alternates - fresh sheep or goat cheese. I think a plain ricotta would be good, too. I'll try that as I have some in the fridge. The main thing I'd do differently concerns the kale. The recipe says the leaves should be torn into big pieces. If you're going to put this on toast, it would be better to chop it smaller, unless you have razor-sharp teeth that can cut through that "juicy mountain of kale" without having stray leaves landing on your chin and/or nice clean shirt . I knew this, but followed the recipe anyway because I was being a sheep

I'm not @weinoo, but if I had this lovely set-up, that's exactly the way I'd put the knives. If the points were facing down, towards the counter, I'm sure I'd run my hand into them while tidying the errant coffee grounds on the countertop.

Thanks for sharing everything all along - the result looks like a great place to cook! I especially love the drawers, an area where my kitchen is sadly deficient.

I've been catching missed episodes on Bravo, I didn't realize they were on the Food Network, too. I've been watching since the beginning and following along with the recaps here. My most and least favorite challenges have been Quickfires. I really liked the one where the chefs had to recreate one of the most complicated dishes on their own restaurant menus in less than 30 minutes. My least favorite was the kids' menu challenge where they're supposed to elevate a children's menu item into something sophisticated and healthy. That part of the challenge by itself was great but forcing the chefs to use tiny pots, pans and utensils was silly. I was glad that wasn't a sudden-death quickfire. I'm cheering for Carrie. Not sure she has what it takes to win but I love her attitude. She had the good sense to choose a coherent team for Restaurant Wars and I loved her in the camping challenge. I like Chris, too, and would like to see more of his cooking. I love Brother Luck's name but he did seem a bit shady for hiding the plastic wrap from Tu in Last Chance Kitchen. He's still doing well there so maybe he'll be back.

I agree. It's kinda rich with the sausage and cheese but with just the fennel and apples, it's not heavy and starchy. Next up for me is the Kale and Mushroom Lasagna from Six Seasons p 314. I really liked it but will make some adjustments. Like most lasagne recipes, it's better the next day so don't hesitate to make it ahead. I've made enough lightly sauced lasagne recipes (like my favorite lasagne al pesto) using no-bake pasta to know that getting the moisture level right is a balancing act. Other reviews for this recipe confirmed that might be an issue here so I made a "tester" lasagna in a loaf pan. I often do this when I want to try out flavor or sauce combinations and find that 1/3 of a recipe designed for a 9" x 13" pan will make up nicely in a standard loaf pan. Makes plenty to serve 2 - 3 and can easily be baked in the CSO or other toaster-type ovens. The layers here, starting from the bottom are: velouté, noodle, mushroom (duxelles), sautéed kale, noodle, ricotta + lemon zest, noodle, velouté and finally grated parmesan. I baked it at 375°F, covered with foil for the first 30 min, then an additional 15 min uncovered to brown the top. The recipe itself fails to mention a specific temperature or whether it should be covered or not. Three changes I will try next time: 1. The kale layer wasn't as delicious as it could have been. Maybe my fault for under salting. I will use my customary method of blanching the leaves in boiling water, chopping and then sautéing in olive oil with a bit of garlic and red chile. 2. All the umami-rich parmesan went on top. I'd add a sprinkle between the layers, or at least on top of the kale. The flavors did blend better the next day, but I'd still like to give them a head start. 3. I thought the velouté was too thin, so I cooked it down to reduce it. My mistake, the thinner sauce would have added needed moisture to the dish. I'll also consider making a bit more sauce.

I followed up on that suggestion in Six Seasons and used spring onions I bought at yesterday's farmers market and the Artichoke Mayonnaise p 42 for this take on James Beard's onion sandwiches: I should have made one with regular mayo for a side-by-side comparison but in any case, they were tasty little fellows! I also finished off some vegetables by trying a couple of recipes. Burnt Carrots with Honey, Black Pepper and Almonds p 294. I don't particularly care for cooked carrots but was curious about the method of roasting them until they are very dark brown, then cutting them into chunks and marinating briefly with white wine vinegar before they get drizzled with honey, dotted with butter and returned to the oven until they are fully tender. Served topped with chopped, toasted almonds. This recipe is in the "late season" carrots section so I expect it would have been better with larger carrots than the smaller spring carrots I had. Glad I tried it. Probably won't do it again. Another curiosity for me was the Fried Cauliflower with Spicy Fish-Sauce Sauce p 194. The recipe calls for deep frying the cauliflower florets (not breaded or battered, just dropped into the oil) until they are dark brown. I don't usually deep fry things so I made a variation with roasted cauliflower instead. Overall, I thought this was OK but not an enormous upgrade over the deliciousness that results from a lovely fresh cauliflower, sliced and roasted to golden brown with olive oil, salt & pepper. That's pretty great right there, in my book. After frying (or in my case, roasting) the cauliflower is tossed with chopped fresh garlic that's been soaking in olive oil and some of the Spicy Fish Sauce Sauce p 43. As suggested, I made the sauce the day before so I could taste and adjust it before using. I'm glad I did as it's really salty so I held back on salting the cauliflower. Also, the sauce has quite a bit of garlic in it so I'm not sure the additional fresh garlic is necessary. I tried it both ways and preferred it with less fresh garlic added to the cauliflower. I had some of the chopped, toasted almonds handy so I tossed some of them with the cauliflower and found the crunch to be a good addition. Perhaps the deep frying brings more crunch and magic to the dish but I probably won't try that. Here are the ingredients for the Spicy Fish Sauce Sauce I used serrano and manzano chiles in the sauce. The recipe says to use a mix of colors. Not sure why - you can see the colors in the photo below but they all turn sort of brown after sitting overnight. This morning, I made the Roasted Fennel with Apples, Taleggio Cheese and Almonds p 157. I like this one a lot. This recipe also includes fennel sausage (or as I substituted, Italian sausage plus fennel seeds) which gets crumbled and browned. Sliced fennel is shallow steam/sautéed with a little olive oil, garlic and chile flakes. Sausage, fennel, thin apple wedges, chopped, toasted almonds, fresh thyme and some of the Taleggio cheese all get turned into a baking dish and topped with more cheese, dry breadcrumbs p 30 and dotted with butter, then baked. I loved all the textures in this dish and would certainly make it again.

Can you say a little more about how these are made? What kind of cheese you use, etc. Google showed me several recipes and most were boiled and white-looking. These look much more appealing, like they were either baked or fried.

Yesterday, @Chris Hennes started a thread on Cooking with Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India. For those who would like to join in, or just follow along, I'm seeing the Kindle version of the book, Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking, selling on Amazon.com for $4.99. I'm a US Prime member, not sure what others will see. I checked Amazon.ca and unfortunately, it was not the same price.

My haul from this week's farmers market. Sorry about the afternoon glare. Clockwise from top left: Eggs, spring onions, Easter radishes, fennel, black kale, cilantro, celery (very large, leafy celery!), Meyer lemons and cara cara oranges.

I'm not sure how you plan to use the Absinthe but most of the cocktails I've made with it just use it as a rinse so you might want to go really small with that one. My local Total Wine has 50 ml and 100 ml bottles available. That might free up enough $ for another bottle. I'd want to add a rye (Rittenhouse is affordable and good for cocktails) and/or bourbon and a sweet vermouth (you can go with a 375 here) to your collection. Tequila is also missing but I'm not sure if you are interested in that or not.

I peel the onions and slice them about 1/4 inch thick. Separate the rings; then toss them with olive oil (~ 1.5 - 2T oil per lb of onions), salt & pepper and transfer to an oiled oven-safe dish. Cover with the dish with foil and bake for 30 minutes @ 375°F. Remove the foil, give the onions a stir, cover, and return the dish to the oven for 15 minutes. Stir again and return to the oven, uncovered, stirring every 10-15 min until the onions are done to your taste. This is a modification of a Deborah Madison recipe for Roasted Onions with Sage from her cookbook, The Savory Way. That recipe adds fresh sage leaves and balsamic vinegar to the mix and I tend to cut those onions thicker ~ 1/2" thick. I often put 2 pans of onions into the oven at the same time - one with the seasonings and the other plain.

I also tried that recipe for caramelized onions. I think I posted about it over in the Instant Pot topic but never added it here. I ended up with a large amount of liquid after the pressure cooking step and it took such a long period of stirring on the Sauté function (almost 40 minutes) that the onions had pretty much turned into a paste. I was disappointed as I'd been expecting onions, not onion purée and the claim of "caramelized onions in 30 minutes" turned out to be bogus in my hands. However, I froze it in ice cube trays and it was handy to thaw out a cube or two and get that great caramelized flavor in an instant. Smeared on a flatbread, sprinkled with grated cheese and broiled - yum! But it was an onion purée, not caramelized onions. I went back to my usual oven method for making actual caramelized onions.

A very good friend of mine gave me the recipe for her "top secret" family masala and it contains fenugreek - and 15 other ingredients. It is delicious!

It is a very tasty thing as is and will be fun to play with - maybe add some kalamata olives, or diced pear and brie, or little cubes of roasted squash and blue cheese or..... I can say the leftovers (should you have any ) are good at room temp or rewarmed in the CSO - I did one slice for 3 min on steam-bake @ 350°F to warm it nicely. Last night's dinner was the Cauliflower Ragu from Six Seasons p 189. Or, since I failed to follow the recipe WRT cooking times, it was a variation on the Cauliflower Ragu. It was very good and I would make it again. I like the concept of cooking most of the cauliflower with onions, garlic, red chile, white wine and rosemary until it becomes a sauce. The rest of the cauliflower is added later and cooked until very tender, at which point, the pasta is added and finished with butter, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese. The saga of my failure to follow directions: I chopped the onion, cauliflower and cauliflower leaves, heated the olive oil and tossed in the smashed garlic and red chile flakes. Then I went to get the "unoaked white wine." Hmmm. I have a lot of wine on hand but not much white. I found a lightly oaked Chardonnay and some Champagne, both fairly expensive bottles and neither of which were what I wanted to drink with this. The pinot noir I planned to drink would have turned the cauliflower pink and I wasn't sure how it would fare during the fairly long cooking time. I have both vermouth and sherry on hand but didn't like the idea of either in this dish. I finally settled on a dry rosé. I figured 1/2 cup of rosé probably wouldn't impart all that much color to all that cauliflower. By the time I returned to the kitchen, the garlic and chile flakes were looking awfully dark so I pitched them and started again. Once everything was in the pan, I adjusted the heat to a low simmer and flounced off to the other room with a glass of chilled rosé and a tiny wedge of yesterday's onion tart and dove into the recently published "France is a Feast" featuring the photographs of Paul Child. Sigh....what beautiful photography! Sigh....what is that delicious aroma of deeply caramelized onions? Sigh....am in in France? Oops! I was supposed to be popping into the kitchen occasionally to stir the cauliflower while it cooked for about 25 minutes. It is now almost an hour since I set everything to simmer ! I investigate and find that thanks to a nice heavy bottom pan and a low simmer setting, the onions are nicely caramelized and any cauliflower touching the bottom has turned a nice golden brown but nothing tastes or smells burned. So I continue and the dish ends up tasting delicious. It's much more of a brown color than the recipe in the book but still has the almost disintegrated cauliflower sauce with more tender cauliflower. Someday, I'll try it again per the recipe.

You might consider using a fine microplane to shred the ginger and maximize the surface area exposed to the liquid. It's what I've done to make non-alcoholic ginger syrup. And it certainly speeds up extraction of citrus zests for limoncello and the like.

This is the Onion and Pancetta Tart from Six Seasons p 352. The crust is a walnut vision of the Pecan Dough on p 49 and it's buttery and delicious. I was afraid that the full 5T of sugar would make it taste more like a shortbread cookie than a savory crust so I went down from 5T to 2T and was happy with it. I tend to leave pie crust to the doughboy but this one really makes the tart so I'm happy I made it, even though it is very tender and crumbly. I was tempted to use a pie pan but the thin tart pan was a better choice as unlike a quiche, the filling is mostly onions with just one egg yolk, 1/2 cup heavy cream and 2 oz gruyere cheese - just enough to hold the onions together. I used a very large onion and should have quartered instead of just halving it before slicing to minimize the long onion strings that annoyed me when trying to make nice slices but otherwise, everything worked well.

Farro and Roasted Carrot Salad with Apricots, Pistachios, and Whipped Ricotta from Six Seasons p 290. Carrots are roasted (CSO, steam-bake, 425°F, 15 min), farro, per the recipe on p 50, is lightly toasted in olive oil with a garlic clove and red chile flakes before adding water, salt and bay leaf. I did that in a small skillet, then transferred to the Instant Pot (pot-in-pot, 5' manual, high pressure). Thinly sliced red onion, chopped, dried apricots, parsley, toasted pistachios and ricotta salata or feta plus olive oil and white wine vinegar complete the salad, which is served on a smear of whipped ricotta p 37. I was mildly entertained that while the book is always having me soak scallions in ice water, something I've never done before, there is no mention of doing the same with the red onion in this recipe - and I always give raw red onions the ice bath treatment for salads - go figure! I liked the added flavor from the garlic and chile in the farro and while I enjoyed the dish, it didn't quite tickle my taste buds as much as the carrot dish with carrot-top salsa verde, avocado and squid that I made yesterday. I'm not a fan of cooked carrots so my enthusiasm for yesterday's dish is actually more surprising than my ambivalence towards this one.

The coffee and 6 mile walk are inspiring to me! Beef jerky....not so much

Sounds sadly like the situation with many white flowers that lack the vigor and fragrance of their pigmented relatives. Ah well. Your move to combine it with other squashes was a wise choice. My lunch was a crabmeat salad made with the artichoke mayonnaise from Six Seasons on a mini croissant (TJ's frozen, rise overnight & bake). Some chunks of avocado in there, too. The sandwich was lovely but I am also most delighted with my new thrift shop oval plate!

That looks really good! I've seen those white squashes at the farmers market but never purchased one so I didn't realize how light the flesh is compared with a regular green-skinned acorn squash. How do they taste?