blue_dolphin

@Ann_T, beautiful food, beautifully displayed! What's in the pretty little square pitcher/creamer?

Leftover grits & collard greens warmed up and baked with an egg on top

Cool Cucumber Crab Dip for happy hour on the patio I remember when almost every party had some kind of crab dip, often something warm and cheesy that did nothing for the crab. This one is cool as a cucumber and nicely highlights the flavor of the crab. It has cream cheese and a little yogurt, thinned with cucumber juice and flavored with lemon juice, horseradish, hot sauce, scallion and mint. Plus crabmeat and sliced cucumber. It has enough crab that it could easily be stuffed into an avocado or tomato and called crab salad. I went for the old-school potato chips. The recipe calls for 1 lb of crab to serve 6. I made up 1/4 of a recipe and what's pictured in the little dish is ~ 1/4 of what I made.

Today's offering is another of the "pimp my grits" offerings - grits & greens with brown butter-hot sauce vinaigrette. The recipe calls for turnip greens but I used collards. These are cheesy grits with sautéed greens and garlic stirred in, then baked. The serving suggestion is to drizzle the sauce over the top and use pork rinds to scoop everything up like a warm dip or using them as a hearty side dish. I have no pork rinds. I don't think I have ever had a pork rind. I decided on a side of grapefruit and cara cara oranges with olive oil and sea salt based on something I saw in the NYT. I started with a light drizzle of that brown butter hot sauce but went back for more. I like the combination.

I like @kayb's the frittata idea. Going back to my cookbook of the moment , I'm in the process of making Grits & Greens with Hot Sauce. It's kind of a cheesy-grits casserole with greens, served with a brown butter-hot sauce vinaigrette. Vivian recommends topping it with pork rinds and using them to scoop it up like a dip. I have no pork rinds so I'll be skipping that part! The recipe appears in this review of the book.

The recipe I linked to just above, from the Greens restaurant is actually a recipe for black bean chili so it's nice and thick. It gets thinned down with stock, water or tomato juice to make a soup so you can have it as thick as you like. With any recipe, you can always mash or purée some of the beans to thicken the soup.

I have to say that "Gilding the Lily" is the exact phrase that first came to my mind when @liamsaunt started talking about stuffing scallops into sand dabs in order to use up an excess!

Rather than guess at what they like, I would recommend that you solicit input from a few of your fellow residents, hopefully a representation of the groups that you'd like to cater for. If you can get some input, it may encourage actual event participation as well.

That sounds like whine to me

Today, I substituted seared scallops into the recipe for Miso Flounder with Cucumber Noodles and Gingered Collards. Another great combination of flavors and textures. I dug out the spiralizer for the cucumber noodles. They are delightfully fresh and crunchy, marinated in a mix of salt, sugar, scallions, sherry vinegar, chopped mint, lime juice and hot sauce. I see that sesame seeds should have been added at the end but they remain on the counter. Oops. These cucumbers are really good and I would use them as a bed for any sort of grilled seafood or shellfish. The gingered collards seemed a bit chewy to me at first bite but were a good contrast in flavor and texture to the rest of the plate. They are sautéed first with ginger, garlic, red chili flakes and salt and finished off with orange juice and a pinch of brown sugar. The miso butter sauce has a bit of red onion, sake, miso, mirin, honey and hot sauce. And butter! White rice is recommended but after much searching, it appears the only white rice in my cupboard is arborio so I cooked up some brown basmati rice instead.

I look forward to @sartoric's response but in the meantime, have you tried the marvelous tomato chutney from this thread? It's a winner!

When I first found eG, I remember being so impressed at Paula Wolfert's generosity in answering questions and participation in the forums. So impressed in fact, that I decided I wasn't good enough for eG and I lurked for years! There are more recipes in Unforgetable than I expected, 59 of them (here is the list on EYB), and they are woven into the chapters in a way that they tell Paula's story in wonderful way. Really well done. Also mentioned in the EYB article about the book is this blog post from a young woman who assisted with recipe testing for the book. She does a nice job capturing Paula's participation in the process by taking us through the day of a photo shoot for the book.

Yesterday, I broke a longstanding rule and went to Trader Joe's when I was hungry. They seem to be having a bit of a coffee fest and I brought home two new-to-me cookies: Mocha Joe-Joe's and Coffee Toffee Shortbread Cookies. I managed to put them away in the cupboard and eat my planned lunch but I tried one of each with a cup of coffee today. The Coffee Toffee Shortbreads are $2.99 for a box of 12 cookies. 180 calories/3 cookies. The shortbread cookie portion has some crunch from both crushed toffee and ground coffee beans. The bottom is dipped and the top drizzled with chocolate. Very nice. The small box limits the damage one can do. The Mocha Joe-Joe's (product of Canada) are another flavor of the TJ's Oreo knock-off. $2.99 for a box of ~ 22 cookies. 150 calories/2 cookies. There are bits of ground coffee beans in the "creme" filling, they seem less sweet than a standard Oreo and the coffee/mocha flavor does come through. Maybe that's because I was washing it down with a mug of black coffee. I need to conduct another test and take the cookies apart to taste the cookie separately from the filling. That should be done with a glass of cold milk and include a dunk test. I haven't scheduled it yet. I'll report back if I remember. When I got home from TJ's, I found an email advert from them with more coffee items. Good thing I didn't see some of these. I don't have a huge sweet tooth but I have a certain weakness for coffee and mocha flavors. I'm pretty sure the Vietnamese Coffee Caramels and/or the Coffee Cocoa Batons would have come home with me as well.

Thanks for that link. I enjoyed the article and it sent me down the rabbit hole of the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection website looking for some of the white grapefruit varieties I see at my local farmers markets. I love reading about all these varieties. A pity how many citrus varieties exist and how few are grown much commercially here in the US. A pity.

A little sandwich of leftover pork tenderloin, brussels sprout leaves (due to a dearth of leafy greens in my fridge, it was that or parsley ) and apple preserves mixed with grainy mustard and sherry vinegar on a toasted Parmesan-rosemary roll

Thank you for sharing that, @chromedome!

My copy arrived today. I want to flip through and see what catches my eye but I am resisting as I can tell this is a book to savor.

Did you read this, from Serious Eats? Edited to add that if you procure crabs from recreational fishermen on the West Coast, make sure they didn't come from a fishery closed due to the biotoxin domoic acid as it tends to be concentrated in the internal organs.

More leftovers here: Grits topped with bacon-roasted rutabaga and a non-leftover poached egg. The bacon cubes that were so deliciously crisp and crunchy the other night sadly lost that quality in the storage/reheating process. Too bad for me. The grits were still delicious.

I'm pretty sure I should not be eating this "artery cement" but some things, ya just gotta try. Like this Baked Pimento Cheese and Sausage. I made about 1/8 the recipe, perfect for one of my littlest cast iron skillets. It's very good but I'm still pretty sure I should not be eating it Edited to add that this is cooked sausage mixed with pimento cheese, pressed into a pan, topped with panko and baked. Vivian says serve with saltines, Ritz or toast. I always like toast

Like @Smithy said, I don't see fresh pomegranates in stores around here, except for the fall/winter season when they are harvested here. But I do see the packaged arils available for a much longer period. Not sure if it's all year but I bought some last week and haven't seen a fresh pomegranate around in months. I guess they all went to @cakewalk's area.

Last week, I tried the Wild-Caught Frozen Crab Meat. It's $7.99 for 8 oz. Ingredients: crab. Nothing else. Inside the box are two 4 oz packets. Instructions say to thaw in the fridge for several hours or quick thaw in cool water. The way they are packaged in little flat packets helps them to thaw quickly. As a mostly single eater, I liked that I could easily use one packet at a time. I found the flavor and texture to be quite good. Much better than any canned crab product I've had and it doesn't have the faintly pickled or preserved taste that I often get with refrigerated crab. The flavor is very mild, not as crabby as fresh picked, just out of the shell meat but I didn't pick up any off- or fishy odors or taste. It tastes like crab, just not quite CRAB! I forgot to take a photo of the thawed packet contents but here is one after I'd mixed it up with the dressing for a recipe I was following. Not all that appetizing looking but it gives you an idea of the size of the pieces. The finished dish looked more appealing

Today, I made the Sage Honey-Glazed Pork Tenderloin with Bacon-Roasted Rutabagas. Served with Foolproof Grits (also from Deep Run Roots) and some charred Brussels Sprouts because I thought something green was in order. I did the pork sous vide with a quick sear as there's nothing special about how it's cooked in the book. The sage honey sauce is just added at serving. It's nice: sage, honey, cider vinegar, smashed garlic cloves, mustard seeds and chili flakes get simmered and reduced into a nice glaze. I inadvertently over-reduced it so I added the bag juices to thin it out and add a little more flavor. The bacon-roasted rutabagas are pretty amazing and perfect with the pork. The recipe calls for slab bacon, which I could not find so I cut some thick sliced bacon into cubes. They fanned out a bit but didn't come apart. If anyone asks, I'm calling them Hasselback bacon croutons .

Welcome to eG, @mikkidonaldson! Can you say a little more about the "simple but elegant" part of your request for breakfast menus? On the simple side, is this something that needs to be prepared and eaten very quickly? You mention that you don't know how to cook well - are you interested in learning new skills or should suggestions stick only to the most basic things? Do you have time for a little prep either in the AM or the night before? By "elegant," I think I can assume that we're not eating this in the car but I'm not sure what else that means.

I used to drive past a big Driscoll's packing and shipping building on my way to work. The big sign outside had their former name, "Driscoll's Strawberry Associates, Inc." For some reason, that name tickled my funny bone and I always imagined a group of big "strawberry associates" sitting around a conference table in the board room, making important business decisions. Alas, they shortened the name to Driscoll's last year and I don't drive that way anymore but this thread reminded me and gave me another laugh!