blue_dolphin

My haul from today's downtown Ventura Farmers Market. Not my closest market, but I was lured by the promise of cherries from Murray Farms up in Bakersfield. They were expensive but are packed with flavor. From top left: eggs, carrots, radishes, basil, strawberries (Seascapes from Harry's Berries), tomatoes, 1 Japanese and 3 Persian cucumbers, pea shoots and dill. Edited to add a link to this nice article about Harry's Berries from last week's NY Times: Red, Ripe and Renegade: Berries That Break All the Rules

Carrot hummus, roast tomatoes & harissa yogurt from Diana Henry's Simple, on toasted ciabatta I added garlic and salt to the hummus and only a couple of tablespoons of the recipe's specified 1 cup of extra virgin olive oil. The tomatoes roasted with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and harissa are really good.

I hope you will like it and will look forward to your thoughts. When I first skimmed through, it didn't engage me at all. Seemed like recipes for a lot of stuff I throw together without using a recipe at all. What's the point in that? I must have been in some sort of mood. But as I've been cooking from the book, I've found it quite nice to have recipes that come together very easily and still have interesting flavors. There are only a couple of things that I really wouldn't make again and even there, they were OK dishes, just not my thing.

I rarely have watercress and purchased it specifically for a few recipes in this book. I think this one would be very good substituting parsley, cilantro (are you a hater?), arugula or a mix of other herbs, like parsley and basil, cilantro and chive.... I thought the roasted tomatoes in the book (with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of sugar) were almost too intense with the more delicate flavors of the watercress and eggs. It's a great way to punch up the flavor of out of season tomatoes but if I have really good ripe specimens, I will skip the vinegar and sugar. I agree with you on @ChocoMom's chicken latte. It was giving me flashbacks to the SNL bass-o-matic skit

Warm eggs, roast tomatoes & watercress cream from Diana Henry's Simple. Eggs were 6.5 minutes instead of 7 because....runny yolks

I've cooked other TJ's mixes in the IP but not this particular one. I recall a rough guideline to start with some fraction of the label's recommended stovetop cooking time but I can't seem to find it so I am no help!

Linguine all'amalfitana from Diana Henry's Simple. Really quick and flavorful pasta dish from pantry ingredients: olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, walnuts and anchovy. I thought 8 anchovy filets for 2 servings would be overpowering but not at all. A keeper!

Some curious-looking breakfast toasties assembled from leftovers. I sliced a leftover spicy sausage and layered it onto grainy mustard smeared toast, roughly chopped the apples, onions and raisins that had been roasted with the sausage, then added the small bit of hard cider rarebit sauce leftover from last night and under the broiler for a bit.

I recall that the header notes on this one said that the flavor combination was unusual but addictive. I'm glad I tried it but it didn't have enough textural contrast and I have yet to acquire a taste for dates in my eggs. A quick supper tonight - hard cider rarebit from Diana Henry's Simple. Recipe online here. There's a layer of sautéed apples under the cheese sauce. Not my first choice of a rarebit recipe but it went nicely with a glass of the hard cider.

That was my thought as well! Edited to add: That or @Anna N is extremely well prepared and brought her own tiffin to the restaurant!

I only have the Bluetooth version but I have no problem setting the temp with the wheel. How does it incite hatred? This is true. I know I can use the app to set times. I tried it and it works but I've not had reason to actually need this function and am curious if this is important for most users. More often, I've been happy that my food was held at a safe temp for an extra hour or so when something came up and I wasn't able to pull and chill cooked items on schedule. I would be quite peeved if I were required to set start and end points but this is not the case.

I happened to be looking at the Valerie Confections website the other day and noted petit fours priced at $50/box of 12. It's LA.

The book is quite good. If you have an opportunity to check out the book from the library, you might find you like it. If you google the recipe name and Diana Henry, you can find the recipe in the Google books preview. But it's easy enough to just riff off a favorite carbonara recipe - just sauté some sliced onions and the zucchini until it's all golden, add some sliced garlic towards the end of cooking and use that mixture instead of the delicious pig parts that usually belong there

Thanks for sharing that experience, @DianaB! It does seem that much of the meal-box discussion is assembled here so I'll add a comment on another one, Sun Basket. I have no experience with them so this is just a comment. I saw a Sun Basket advert saying that next week, they are featuring 4 meals from recipes in the recent Paula Wolfert bio/cookbook, Unforgettable. I remember commenting upthread that I would consider something like this - where the service would allow one to explore unfamiliar cuisines without needing to hunt down and invest in a lot of ingredients that may not be used often. Of course, that hunt can be part of the fun but I can see the low-risk benefit of trying things out with meal-sized portions before investing in large sizes of condiments and spices. The Wolfert recipes are Salmon chermoula with cucumber salad and preserved lemon-couscous, Spiced lamb patties with cauliflower tabbouleh and tahini dressing, Tunisian chickpea soup with soft-cooked eggs and toasted ciabatta, and Sausage and white bean cassoulet with arugula salad. Turns out I have all the ingredients on hand already so I won't be ordering but I like the concept.

Following @Anna N with another Diana Henry recipe. Pasta all'ortolana from her recent book, Simple. The header notes describe it as a carbonara made with zucchini.

A couple of deviled pickled eggs..... That'll wake up your eyeballs!

No, not several feet - probably barely 12 inches ! I wanted to make sure the yolk stayed intact while the white firmed up a bit so I could have a runny yolk in the end.

I made a half recipe of the lemon & ricotta cake from Diana Henry's Simple. The recipe is available online here. After doing the appropriate geometry calculations, I determined a 6-inch springform pan would be pretty close to half the surface area of an 8-inch pan. I got distracted and feared it was way over-baked due to the browning but after cutting a slice, it's still very soft and moist inside. If I do it again, I may drop the oven temp a bit. I used limes instead of lemons because my lime tree is loaded with fruit. Served with blackberries, candied lime peel and a wee glass of homemade limoncello (also made from limes) Very nice and not too sweet!

It's pretty tasty. The recipe calls for canned black beans to be cooked with onion, red bell pepper, garlic, chicken broth, orange juice, S&P and a final squeeze of lime juice. I had excellent Rancho Gordo Midnight black beans already cooked and ready to go but I think it's a great way to take canned beans up a notch.

For today's lunch, I tried the recipe for spiced avocado with black beans, sour cream and cheese from Diana Henry's Simple. I often make some sort of beans-on-toast for a quick and filling meal but I do not usually include all the accoutrement used here. It was very good, if somewhat messy to eat.

Huevos rotos from Diana Henry's Simple Sliced potatoes and onions are cooked with garlic, smoked paprika and crushed red pepper before the egg is dropped on top. Beyond the occasional potato salad in the summer, I am not much of a potato eater so I had to buy some especially for this. It's not bad but toast is still my preferred device for wrangling a runny yolk !

I had a couple of lonely spicy brats so I made a little 2-sausage sized pan of the Baked sausages with apples, raisins and hard cider from Diana Henry's Simple. I was curious to try this before the weather turns entirely to summer. I'm not a big potato hound so instead of the mash suggested as a side, I put a sausage into a crusty roll slathered with grainy mustard, gave the rest of the ingredients a rough chop, put them and the syrupy pan juices on top of the sausages and washed it down with a glass of cider. I really loved the flavors of the caramelized apples and onions, Calvados-soaked raisins, cider and sausage and will definitely make it again in the fall and winter months. And I'll add extra onions and apples as I think they'll make an excellent condiment to use with other meats or cheeses.

I hadn't cooked orzo in years when I was trying to use more whole grains and but I recently enjoyed the side dish of orzo with lemon and parsley that I made from Diana Henry's Simple. I served it with salmon but it would go well with shrimp, chicken. The recipe is online here. I'll be following this thread for favorites that I should try.

I tried the recipe for pappardelle with cavolo nero, chiles & hazelnuts from Diana Henry's Simple. I substituted tagliatelle. I often make a similar dish with greens, garlic and red pepper flakes so I was intrigued by the addition of orange zest and hazelnuts here. I'm neutral on the nuts but don't care for the orange zest here. Maybe it was the extra oily and flavorful cara cara orange zest that I used? I'm glad I tried it but I have other similar recipes that I like better.

Bottom line - not a lot of crunch factor These are the purple-skin/white flesh Murasaki sweet potatoes. The recipe didn't call for it but I peeled them because a few of them had some dodgy spots and it was easier to cut them out that way. For cooking, I followed the recipe which tossed them with a little olive oil, honey, lime juice, S&P. I cooked them in the CSO @ 350 °F and used steam-bake for the first 20 min and switched to convect-bake for another 20. The brown edges had some nice crunch when I took them out of the oven, but they softened up before I finished the plate. The dish was still enjoyable to eat with the warm potatoes, spicy sauce and cool, creamy yogurt but it's not a route to the perfect crispy sweet potato.