blue_dolphin

I’m confused. I've never heard of anyone using a beaker to measure volume. Yes, laboratory beakers usually have rough volume markings on them but they’re not accurate for measuring anything. Of course, the markings on most kitchen measuring cups are pretty rough estimates, too. Just weigh it out.

Sounds like they don’t make ‘em like they used to! 😢

Same here. Mine probably range from 20-30 years old. The big 2 qt one is the youngest, maybe 12-15 years old. I sometimes wash them by hand but they go into the dishwasher regularly, too. They all look just fine.

I just saw this. I didn't buy the original but might bite on this one. Here's a link to their blog post: Introducing Modernist Bread at Home—Your Guide to Exceptional Homemade Bread

I took a flyer and made some major substitutions in the Fig, Blackberry & Tahini Cake from The New Way to Cake by Benjamina Ebuehi. Since we don't get figs at this time of year and I didn't have blackberries (though they are available), I decided to use strawberries as the sweet/softer fruit and kumquats as the tart/tangy one. I made a half recipe, baked in a 6-inch springform pan. I like the cake quite a lot but I found the mascarpone icing quite sweet and I don't think my choice of fruit worked particularly well with the cake. I might try a thinner layer of the mascarpone icing with a drizzle of fig butter and some of those blackberries.

Baked sweet potatoes with coconut curry chickpeas and some lovely Harry's Berries from the local farmers market on the side. I was was looking for a bean or chickpea recipe that used Thai curry paste but wasn't a super saucy curry. Eat Your Books pointed me to this one from the dearly departed Fine Cooking magazine and it fit the bill.

When I make stock, I reduce it 3X and freeze in 1/3 cup sized ice cube trays (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) which I find handy as each cube is equivalent to a cup of stock. I also freeze tomato sauce in the same cubes. 1/3 cup is good for a single serving of pasta or a good-sized pizza. I freeze extra egg white, egg yolk or beaten egg in smaller cubes, generally weighing and aliquoting 1/2 large egg equivalents (30g white, 10g yolk, 25g beaten egg) in smaller ice cube trays (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). Both of the above get transferred to zip-top freezer bags, which I wash and reuse as much as possible. I have 2 sets of those silicone ice cube trays. Red for savory stuff that might contain onion or garlic, blue or pink for everything else. I freeze a lot of stuff in flattened zip-top freezer bags and break off what I need. These can be stored upright and I can usually tell what's what by the color. At the moment, my freezer has lime juice, lemon juice, tamarind chutney, tamarind paste, caramelized onions, red and green Thai curry pastes, tomato and onion masala from Dishoom, Romesco, pesto, puréed chipotles in adobo, sun-dried tomato purée, and a variety of cooked beans stacked up this way.

I confess that I also use yogurt and sour cream well beyond their "best by" dates as long as they look and smell OK. Milk, I always taste as well sniff. Sometimes it's over with before the best by date on the carton and other times, it lasts much longer. Elderly yogurt can get a bit extra tangy so I may not want to chow down a big bowl on its own but it's fine in a recipe. And sour cream is already sour, so....

Me, too. I give it a sniff, make sure there's no mold lurking inside the carton and go ahead with it. Been doing this since I read the comment below towards the end of Stella Park's Why Buttermilk Substitutes Are a Bum Deal article on Serious Eats, I've been using rather ancient buttermilk in baking with no ill effects. If ancient buttermilk isn't your thing, there's also this suggestion from the same article which could set you up for some time if you can manage to get your hands on a container.

@TdeV, I suspect I already answered your question about using bookmarks, but I wanted to add that it's an EYB feature that I use very frequently, particularly for seasonal produce or items with limited availability. As long at that ingredient is already in the ingredient filter list, I don't need to make a separate bookmark for say, kumquats or figs or mussels. I can just pull up all my "I want to make this" recipes and then filter them by "kumquats" etc. Ingredients that are more specialized, like green tomatoes, might warrant their own bookmark if they happened to be of special interest. You can also filter your "I want to cook this" recipes by any of the other filters if you are looking for (or wanting to exclude) preserves, or salads, or desserts or sauces, etc. Quite a handy feature!

Yes, it's done with the "Bookmarks" feature. You can assign bookmarks to a recipe to to a book. Here are links to some EYB help articles on bookmarks. I believe there's a default recipe bookmark called "I want to cook this," if not, you can make one or any others you want. Just now, I have a window open with recipes containing mussels that I have marked "I want to cook this" so I'll put in a screen cap from that: If you assign a recipe an "I want to cook this" bookmark, it gets a red chef hat icon to the left of its name. If you assign a recipe a "I've cooked this" bookmark, it gets a green chef hat icon. I opened the screen above this morning to look for a recipe to make with my remaining mussels and also to mark that top recipe as one I've cooked. For books, I have a bookmark for ebooks, so I can search them easily when I'm cooking away from home. I also have bookmarks for the various cookbook clubs that I participate in. For recipes, I mostly stick to the "I want to cook this" and "I've cooked this" bookmarks. Hope that helps!

I made these mussels and rice noodles in green curry broth for lunch yesterday. I still had more mussels in the fridge and this was so good and easy that I made it again for breakfast. A delicious and warming bowl for a cool, cloudy morning. Still enough mussels for one more dish... hopefully I'll branch out and make something different but I really wouldn't mind having this again!

I got mussels in this week's fish share so I put them into this recipe for mussels and rice noodles in green curry broth from Kenji's The Wok Very quick and easy. I just may have to do this again,

Well, I won't have it for months, but I caved on yet another Ottolenghi and pre-ordered his upcoming release, Comfort, co-authored with Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller and Tara Wigley. I ordered from Blackwell's so I'll get the graphic UK cover instead of the North American photo version.

Pickled Fennel Niçoise Salad made with Fennel Quickles, both recipes from Tenderheart. I had everything needed for this except for green beans so I subbed sugar snaps. I also skipped peeling the spuds, as the recipe requests, and tossed them with some of the dressing while they were still warm so they could soak up a little flavor in advance. I pulled out a tin of fancy tuna belly, thinking I'd want to add it to the salad - I didn't see how pickled fennel was going to take its place but I never felt the need and thought it was a great meal as is. The Fennel Quickles are very good. I really like the combo of fennel and the rice vinegar brine. @Smithy's recent comments about pickling spinach stems gave me the idea to add some thinly sliced stalks to the shaved bulb and I would do that again.

What info are you looking for? The only ones I can make are River Cottage Veg, the pink one in the middle, to the right of that is Diana Henry's Salt, Sugar, Smoke, and to the right of that is Paul Hollywood's How to Bake. To the left of Veg, I believe is Nigella Lawson's How to Eat.

Reheated yesterday's creamy harissa mushrooms and spooned them over polenta with garlicky greens and the pinkest pickled onions

If you want to soak, and you want a firmer bean, I'd pick a time below the spreadsheet guidance of 10-14 min for soaked garbanzos and finish using the sauté function to simmer, if necessary, after a 10 min natural pressure release. I'd probably go with 8 min if you want them really firm. If you're soaking at room temp and you don't have hard water, I don't think there's going to be a big difference between a 6, 8 or 10 hr soak. If you want to try unsoaked, the spreadsheet guidance is 32-35 min. I'd go with 30 min and expect to finish with a good simmer using the sauté function after a 10 min natural pressure release.

Marinated celery with couscous and pickled golden raisins from Tenderheart. Recipe available online at this link. I subbed sliced, dried apricots for the golden raisins and bulked it up to be a meal by adding some chickpeas and arugula.

Creamy Harissa Mushrooms with a side of sugar snaps This recipe, which couldn't be easier, came in an e-mail from the Zwïta peeps, makers of harissa. Cook the mushrooms, add harissa to the pan, stir about, add the cream, simmer a bit and spoon over toast. They recommend drizzling some balsamic glaze over the top. I tried a little balsamic vinegar and the acid is welcome but I don't think I'd care for the sweetness of a glaze. Maybe a pickly garnish of some sort? Edited to add that I will put my little brain to work on that because the stuff is really good. You could spoon it into a baked potato, on polenta, over chicken, as a pasta sauce, etc. for a quick meal.

Sticky gochujang Brussels sprouts with rice and yogurt from Tenderheart, sesame sweet potatoes from Veg-Table with a fried egg and tangelo wedges. I used some of the gochujang marinade from the sprouts to drizzle on the egg. I really liked the sprouts. The sweet potatoes get drizzled with sesame oil before roasting but it didn't add a ton of flavor. They look pretty though and were good when I added more of that gochujang marinade!

I have pickled kale stems per a recipe in Deep Run Roots and loved them, Swiss chard stems per a David Lebovitz recipe that were a little disappointing in that the “rainbow” colors all merged into a pale, muddy pink, though they tasted fine. Edited to add that I have a notion that I made some kind of pickled stems from a Bryant Terry recipe but I can’t find any proof of that!

It's been quite some time since I shared my cookbook acquisitions here. Guess I've been lazy but there's also the fact that for many years, I've viewed every cookbook post to be the beginning of a conversation with @Anna N and it makes me sad to know those convos are no more. There are some books on this list that I haven't cooked from yet and that certainly wouldn't have happened when Anna was around as I always tried to cook at least a few recipes before mentioning a new book. I'll try to come back and update this when I get around to more cooking. Onward...to the new-ish arrivals shelf... Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes, and Stories (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Nigella Lawson - I think this one would have been right up Anna's alley as I know she mentioned cooking from Nigella's recipes multiple times. It came out in 2021, but I haven't seen many specific mentions of it here on eG. It was the December book in my cookbook group and I didn't cook as much from it as I wanted but really enjoyed the experience and would very much recommend it to anyone who enjoys Nigella's writing. There are a ton of what I'll call "stealth recipes" that are tucked into essays that begin chapters or header notes or even buried right in another recipe. Eat Your Books is your friend in ferreting out these little gems. Veg-table: Recipes, Techniques, and Plant Science for Big-Flavored, Vegetable-Focused Meals (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Nik Sharma - this is Nik's latest book and came out towards the end of last year. It's not a vegetarian cookbook, plenty of meat, fish and chicken here but it's organized by vegetable "families" so it's kind of the focus. It's this month's book in my cookbook group and I haven't cooked a ton from it yet but I've liked what I've made and have a lot of recipes marked to try. He uses a lot of interesting flavor combinations and a fair number of unusual ingredients. On the downside, he's formatted the recipes without a separate ingredient list and has instead incorporated them into the recipe text, as they are used in the recipe, using a bold font so they stand out. You can see what this looks like in the Amazon sample. He claims that this is the style used in the Joy of Cooking and some other classics. Those books do list ingredients as they are called for but they stand proud of the instructional text, instead of being incorporated in it as this book does. My gripe with the format is that I usually scale recipes and like to write the amounts I actually use next to the ingredients and that's entirely impossible with this style. Some people absolutely refused to even try cooking from the book. For me, it's not a tragedy, just an annoyance. Photos are Nik's signature dark, sometimes moody style. Sometimes takes a little sorting to identify which photo goes with which recipe. Snacking Bakes: Simple Recipes for Cookies, Bars, Brownies, Cakes, and More (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Yossy Arefi - bought this one because I really enjoyed her previous book, Snacking Cakes, full of easy, one-bowl, modestly-sized cakes. Haven't touched it yet but am looking forward to it. Zingerman's Bakehouse Celebrate Every Day: A Year's Worth of Favorite Recipes for Festive Occasions, Big and Small (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Amy Emberling, Lindsay-Jean Hard, Lee Vedder and Corynn Coscia - I believe this was the November book for the Food52 Baking group, although it's not strictly a baking book as there are plenty of soups and plenty of savory baking, too. It's organized by season with a few recipes for a range of well-known and more unusual holidays, like the Moroccan Harira Soup, Za'atar Flatbreads and Nutty Butterball Cookies that I made and enjoyed on World Kindness Day. I think this one would make a fun gift book as it kind of puts you in the mood to celebrate Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Diana Henry - This book was originally published almost 20 years so this is kind of an anniversary re-issue but contains a bunch of new recipes as well. I know I called this out in the Kindle bargain topic but it's still only $1.99 for the Kindle edition of the new book. Diana's one of my favorite cookbook authors so I'm very much looking forward to diving into the book as it will be the March selection for my group. Honestly, I'll probably be dipping into it sooner as it's really a book made for cold weather cooking. I'd highly recommend this to anyone looking for some warming winter recipes. Sadly, Diana got Covid around the same time I did after Christmas and has been in the hospital with that and pneumonia and was still in ICU a couple of days ago, although her Instagram post sounded like she was getting better. Hope she'll be back to herself soon. 50 Great Curries of India (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Camellia Panjabi - this was totally an eG-enabled purchase. There's a topic about it in the Cooking forum and it pops up in discussion often. Looking forward to diving in! Latinísimo: Home Recipes from the Twenty-One Countries of Latin America: A Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Sandra Gutierrez - I ordered this one after listening to a few author interviews and reading articles, like this excellent one in the Washington Post: A life’s work: Celebrating the glories of Latin American home cooking (that should be a gift link.) It's described as being about home cooking in 21 different Latin American countries. The recipes are organized by ingredient, which makes for a nice way to compare and contrast recipes from different areas. My gripe with the book is in the formatting, where there's a ton of white space on most pages but the font is quite small. I'm nearsighted and usually have no problem with small print but this is right on the edge of being annoying - I love to settle in and read a cookbook and this one just isn't a relaxing experience. So I'm going to recommend the book but advise purchasing it in an ebook format to avoid being annoyed. Bold Beans: recipes to get your pulse racing (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Amelia Christie-Miller - I think I've mentioned this one in a bean topic and maybe a Kindle bargain topic. The authors own a UK company that sells fancy-ish jarred beans and these recipes make use of their products, although they also provide instructions for cooking your own dried beans. I found the flavor combinations to be interesting and lots of the recipes are super quick and easy to toss together. A good addition for any beaniac's cookbook collection. Grilled Cheese: 50 Recipes to Make You Melt (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by @marlena spieler - after we learned of Marlena's passing earlier this year, I spent some time reading her contributions here and found several mentions of this book. It's chock full of sandwiches made with interesting cheeses, all sorts of breads and delicious-sounding accompaniments. I'm pretty sure it's out of print, but I picked up a used copy and I believe there's an e-book version as well. Veg Forward: Super-Delicious Recipes that Put Produce at the Center of Your Plate (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) by Susan Spungen - Like Nik Sharma's Veg-Table, this one is touted as having a vegetable focus but not strictly vegetarian though this one comes closer to veg, including small amounts of meat or fish more or less as seasonings rather than the center of the plate. Like Nik, Susan did her own photography for the book although the layout is less artsy: Recipe on one page and photograph of the finished dish on the facing page. This one is organized by season rather than veg family. I confess that I put it away on the shelf when I got it, planning to compare with Veg-Table when it came in and promptly forgot about it. I'll have to pull it out and line up some comparisons in the next month or so. I'll try to update these as I cook more from the books and add new books more frequently to avoid a big dump like this.

Melissa Clark has a book out called Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals: A Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). You can see the recipes in the Amazon sample but basically, it's divided into chapters on: Sheet Pans Skillets One-Pot Pastas & Noodles Dutch Ovens Casseroles Soup Pots Instant Pots and Multicookers One-Bowl Cakes Go-Withs & Basics If the recipes sound appealing and you'd like to have the book, just PM me with your address and I'll mail it to you. It's in my pile to donate. Why am I getting rid of it, you ask? Well, here's what I wrote after the Food52 online cookbook group cooked from it back in Nov 2022: "I'm not quite sure why I didn't click with this book. I like Melissa's books and pre-ordered this one way before it was selected for the group. I only made 4 or 5 recipes, didn't particularly care for any of them and had a hard time generating enthusiasm to try more. I was listening to Melissa talking about this book on the Salt + Spine podcast and she described how she carefully combed through each recipe to remove extra ingredients, steps, dishes, movements, etc to make cooking them as efficient as possible. This strategy has great value for getting weeknight meals on the table ASAP but my impression is that some of the flair, charm, flavor and fun of cooking got stripped out, too. I'll still turn to Melissa for reliable, easy and efficient recipes but it will be to her other books as I'll be donating this one." Here's a link to that Salt + Spine podcast that I mentioned. I should say that quite a lot of group members really liked the book a lot. Even those who didn't love the book, like me, thought the recipes they made were OK, just not particularly interesting so it might be worth your looking through it to see if there are any tricks to be learned. I'll add that I really like her Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot® : A Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) and Comfort in an Instant: 75 Comfort Food Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and InstantPot®: A Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)

Obviously late to the party but I may have missed reporting that I've been happy with the sharpening that I've had done at Knife Aid. I have an Edge Pro but sometimes I'm just lazy. I agree with @weinoo that they may have taken a little more metal off than I might have with the Edge Pro but, on the upside, they've given extra life to some serrated and bread knives that I can't sharpen myself. They won't last forever, but I've gotten at least a couple of more years out of some favorites. I used their mail-in service earlier in the pandemic and found the turn-around very acceptable. Since then, I've taken my knives in to their shop and have been able to speak with an apparently knowledgable staff person. Since they're local, I can usually pick up the same day or the next day, depending on when I get there. I believe they are doing well and currently have a contract to do knife sharpening for Williams Sonoma, Macy's and Crate & Barrel. A reasonable option to consider if you are local or don't have a similar service in your area.