blue_dolphin

The beet salad is really something different with that whipped blue cheese dressing. The texture of it surprised me at every bite! It's rich, with a full ounce of blue cheese per serving yet so light due to the whipped cream. It's not something I'll be making every day but it's not that much trouble either. Everything can be done ahead except for whipping the cream, folding it into the dressing and plating. I'll be interested to hear what you guys think when you try it. Today's adventure is the Blueberry-Rosemary Breakfast Pudding. A lot of people in the Food52 cookbook club were posting pictures of this last weekend. Bread puddings are not usually my thing - too much mush, not enough crunch but this looked like it had a good amount of crunch in the top layer so I gave it a try. I barbered the recipe down and made 1/4 the amount, baked in a Pyrex loaf pan. I'd say this makes 2 very generous servings and it gave a good ratio of crispy top to softer bottom layers. I used Rancho Gordo's nice granulated piloncillo for the topping sugar that gets mixed with nutmeg to make that browned crunchy top. This stuff is sweet enough that it could be dessert, maybe with a scoop of ice cream or dollop of whipped cream, but the rosemary and lemon zest (and the use of sourdough bread) save it from being cloying. That's a little less than half on my plate with fresh grapefruit and blueberries Yum!

Another salad. This one is called My Favorite Beet Salad. I wasn't sure about this as I've got my own favorite beet salad but I have to admit this one is pretty dang special. Here, the beets are marinated with orange zest and juice, rosemary, balsamic vinegar and a dab of honey. They sit on an airy pillow of dressing (blue cheese and buttermilk, blended together and then folded into whipped cream) with orange segments and butter roasted pecans. My beet salad has all those same ingredients tossed together with some baby greens or spinach and I like it very much but this is so, so luxurious!

Yes, I'm going to try, anyway. I haven't been formally posting my projects to her site as I've tended to be a little late but I'll work on that. I made Blood Orange-Campari Marmalade for Jan and salted-preserved limes and the egg yolks for Feb. Since this month is jellies and shrubs, I made Rosemary Wine Jelly today (I used rosé wine, so maybe I should call it Rosémary Wine Jelly ) and it gave me an excuse to order Michael Dietsch's book on Shrubs. The Pear-Ginger Shrub sounds really nice, if I can manage to make it before summer!

Various recipes I've see say they can be stored for 1-3 months. I think they are fine as long as they are relatively cool and dry. I haven't run across any reports of freezing them. You'd have to be careful of condensation when thawing so they don't get gummy. Unless gummy is the goal......

Yes, eggy and a little salty. But so does the carbonara itself so I suspect this was not the best test. I think it will be nice on something like asparagus or other things that aren't already eggy. The effort was almost nil. Just used a little salt, sugar and a few egg yolks and I got to do something new so, yes, worth the effort from that perspective. And I'll get to make my plate look cool and chefy from time to time !

Made a bowl of spaghetti carbonara in order to try the preserved egg yolks I reported on over here in the preserving thread.

The Food In Jars Challenge for Feb was salting. I started these salt cured egg yolks last month but just got around to trying one today. I used this recipe from "Bon Appétit". I'm considering trying to smoke a couple per this recipe but haven't decide if I want to bother. In the salt/sugar cure. The pan got wrapped in plastic wrap and went into the fridge. Recipe said 4 days. Reality was a week. Out of the salt. The two eggs on the right are from the grocery, the others are my usual farmers market specimens. Rinsed to remove the excess salt Dried in the oven set to 140F (60C) on the convection dehydrator setting. Served - microplaned over a bowl of spaghetti carbonara Not suggesting that particular dish needs more eggs !

Ouch, @scubadoo97! So sorry. I've been pretty good about not touching the mandoline without my cut-resistant glove since a certain incident with my right thumb. You have given me a fresh reminder. Dinner was all leftovers. Cucumber, tomato, onion salad with feta, fluorescent beet tzatziki (I turned down the lights to eat ) and a little lamb slider with tahini-lemon dressed greens on a piece of TJ's naan. I froze 6 of those mini lamb burgers last night and wanted to see how long it would take to cook them from frozen. 16 min @425F, steam-bake in the CSO does the trick. Now I know.

A salad from Deep Run Roots. Blueberries and Cucumbers with Pistachios and Yogurt

Guidelines for cutting sandwiches in half? I think not. In general, when cutting through materials with varying density/texture/hardness, a cleaner, more even slice will result if the knife (or the material) is angled slightly so the entire cutting surface doesn't contact the change point at the same time. Use of a serrated blade and sawing motion pretty much takes care of that. Besides, there is generally no need to make reproducibly thin, consecutive slices of a sandwich so I think you should feel free to wield your knife in whatever safe manner that produces the results you fancy.

Winners listed here on Eater and here on a pdf download from the IACP site. Deep Run Roots won in the General category, Chefs & Restaurants, the Julia Child First Book award and Cookbook of the Year. It was also nominated in the American category, won by Ronni Lundy's book, Victuals.

Beautiful! I spied this thread earlier but waited to look until I had a cup of coffee at hand as I knew there would be gorgeous photos to savor. Thank you for sharing!

I like the IP for cooking winter squash for soup, etc. but for spaghetti squash, I use the microwave, as @andiesenji describes in this post. I use a big screwdriver to stab it !

Deep Run Roots won three of the four IACP awards it was a finalist for: General, Chefs & Restaurants, and Julia Child First Book. In addition, it was named Cookbook of the Year. From watching "A Chef's Life" on TV, it was clear that Vivian poured her heart and soul into that book so I'm glad her efforts are being acknowledged in this way.

I wanted to make the Grilled Lamb Kebabs with Beet Tzatziki (p. 517) but all the lamb leg I could find was in larger packages than I wanted so I bought a pound of ground lamb and made little meat balls, using the same seasonings (lemon zest, oregano, rosemary) that Vivian puts in the lamb marinade plus some Aleppo pepper, garlic, panko, milk and egg. They got baked in the oven. I also prepared the Everyday Cucumbers (p. 246) to go along with. The beet tzatziki is rather violently colored and I wish I had some nice fluffy pita bread to go with this but everything was good.

Today's lunch was the Lentil Apple Soup with Bacon Per the recipe, this was to be served with a dollop of buttermilk. The contents of my carton was unpleasantly curdled. I tried a spoonful of yogurt instead and it added a nice tang. Not sure how the apple texture will stand up to a freeze-thaw cycle, but I'll see.

I set out to make the Hot Apple Jelly Thumbprints, a savory cookie that uses a cheese straw-type dough and fills the depressions with a hot apple jelly. Vivian describes the origin of the recipe as coming from an occasion when she was charged with developing a creative, portable, Tabasco-containing snack. For my test batch, using sharp cheddar cheese, I tried the hot apple jelly, made per the recipe, as well as some filled with Jalapeño-Peach Glaze and Blueberry Chutney which are also in the book. All of them were very tasty with a glass of wine. I gobbled up the hot apple jelly ones first so I give you Jalapeño-Peach Thumbprints:

I reported over here in the preserving thread about my fail in attempting the recipe for Apple Chips, a sort of apple preserve. The book photo shows beautiful transparent apple slices in a pretty amber glaze. I got a mix of transparent and opaque apple slices in a dark brown syrup. Food52 started a cookbook club last month and Deep Run Roots is this month's book. It's that activity that got me re-reading the apple chapter, among others. I must say I am appreciating the nudge to delve into some of the chapters I hadn't paid much attention to thus far. And the Apple Chips? Ah well. I tried something new and made my house smell very apple-y!

I tried the recipe for "Apple Chips" from Vivian Howard's Deep Run Roots cookbook. This is not a recipe for dried apples (that one is on the preceding page) but a sort of sugar-cured apple preserve that Vivian says gets its name because the apple slices stay crisp through the macerating and cooking process. She also said this was her favorite of the fruit preserve recipes in the book. She describes mixing them with a little Dijon mustard and sherry vinegar and putting them on pork chops, hams and roast chicken, or adding an acid like lemon juice, salt and olive oil to make a fruity salad dressing. Sounds good, no? Sadly, this was my first fail from this book. Not sure exactly where I went wrong but even after cooking for WAY longer that suggested, many of my apple slices remained opaque and never cleared up like the picture in the book. I did cut the recipe in half, using 2.5 lbs of apples and sugar instead of the 5 lbs in the recipe so maybe it's some sort of volume issue. Here are the apple slices and a sliced lemon tossed with the sugar, cloves and star anise. This after about 5-10 minutes and the apples have already started giving up their liquid. Here's what they looked like after sitting overnight. There's much more liquid although there's also a bunch of undissolved sugar in the bottom of the bowl. Everything went into a pot and simmered. Per the recipe, the apple slices should have started clearing after around 45 min and should have all cleared by the 60 min point. Mine were all still solidly opaque but I didn't worry as every preserve recipe I've made needs longer cooking times than specified. But here is after 4 hours of cooking. The syrup has darkened much more than the book photo and some of the apple slices have cleared but many are still quite opaque. My lemon slices are pretty much dissolved, while the lemons in the book photo appear intact. I used 2 types of apple, so perhaps one has very different properties from the other. I dunno. Both fell into the "crisp eating apple" category, from my perspective. I tasted an apple slice and I wouldn't call them "crisp" but they certainly have more texture than you would expect from an apple cooked so long. They were tooth-achingly sweet. I think I'll keep a jar and try Vivian's suggestions. The reason I looked at this recipe in the first place was because I wanted to try the Hot Apple Jelly Thumbprints which use a cheese-straw dough baked up like thumbprint cookies with the hot apple jelly filling. She makes the hot apple jelly from the skins and peels of the apples used for the Apple Chips. I rather liked the economy of that idea and the Hot Apple Jelly came out just fine so I can proceed with the thumbprints. I think they will be nice with a glass of wine and I plan to proceed with that as well

From the oracle: So it seems that one could prepare a spatchcocked spatchcock

I was cutting up apples for another purpose when I decided I needed breakfast so: apple slices and sharp cheddar I was cutting up apples for another purpose when I decided I needed breakfast

Brussels Sprouts, Apples and Pomegranate Salad with Blue Cheese Honey Vinaigrette I put a little more blue cheese on a slice of toasted ciabatta to go along with.

Leftover garlicky beet greens from last night, topped with a ladleful of leftover white bean soup and a poached egg: It would have been really good with a little of that leftover pork belly chopped up in there with the beans and greens but being Ash Wednesday, I shall abstain. Perhaps tomorrow.....

Cumin-Crusted Pork Belly with Sweet and Sour Beet Bottoms and Tops: Great combination of flavors here with the cumin-cardamon-mustard seasoning on the pork, garlicky, slightly bitter and astringent greens and sweet/sour orange-glazed beet roots. At first bite, I thought the beet roots were awfully sweet but they grew on me over the course of the meal. Still, when I make it again (and I will) I'll probably use 1/3 to 1/2 of the amount of honey specified, depending on the sweetness of the oranges. Today, I used some very sweet cara cara oranges.

I'm sure this is very shallow of me, but something that delighted me in the photos that accompanied the Piglet review of Diana Henry's Simple is what appears to be a lovely, old fashioned, sewn-in satin ribbon bookmark. I swoon for sewn-in ribbon bookmarkers and it makes me want to choose the hardcover version over the Kindle for this one. I know that Kindle books allow the reader to place all sorts of useful bookmarks and notes but they lack the feel of that smooth, satiny ribbon .