blue_dolphin

I confess that this thread makes me want a freezer. I have a side-by-side fridge with annoyingly narrow little shelves and a space-hog ice maker. Still, that should be plenty for someone who lives alone. More than plenty. And yet, I want more. Specifically, I'm looking for one pre-filled with ham bones, duck confit, smoked chicken legs, pork shoulder roasts and plenty of shrimp and scallops.....

The worst part of finding all that bacon stuff is that yesterday was my bacon-loving brother's birthday. If only I'd seen it a few days earlier! Oh well, there's always next year.....

Over in the Kitchen Gadgets thread, @Anna N shared a gadget that enables one to make hot dog-shaped burgers. I got a greater chuckle from the "Customers .....also bought" items, which led me to a whole line of bacon-related products: Bacon Body Wash Bacon-flavored Toothpaste Bacon dental floss (waxed, though one might think that unnecessary for bacon!) Bacon bandaids (sterile, no less ) Bacon lip balm The products are also helpfully combined into: Deluxe bacon grooming kit Extreme bacon grooming kit and others! Edited to add, I don't think this is new and has probably been cited here before but it did give me a good chuckle so I figured I could share again.

This one about the Tovala? edited to add: their website is still offering preorders with shipping estimated for May 2017.

Yep, they posted a link to this yesterday.

Oh man....I don't even have a waffle iron and I ordered a copy of the book because I couldn't resist the title: Waffles: From Morning to Midnight and the teaser text on Amazon: I figure I'll read it and then give it to my cousin who makes waffles regularly.....that, or I'll end up back on Amazon for a waffle iron...

Earlier this week, I think it was @Anna N who put eggs on some creamed spinach. I thought that might make the last whole grain English muffin a bit more palatable and indeed it did.

I know Wikipedia isn't the source of all info but I found these size-names interesting: From Wikipedia:

I think I beat you to it. Just ordered. It may ease your eyes to know that the Rogan Josh Shepherd's Pie recipe and the other 4 cited in that Food52 list are recipes that did not make it into the book. Not that there mightn't be something equally eye-rolling in there

So last week, I spotted a recipe for a small batch of blood orange marmalade on the LA Times website and thought it would be fun to try so I picked up some blood oranges at the local farmers' market. Before I get into that, I thought I'd mention that Marisa of the Food In Jars blog, is hosting a preserving skills mastery challenge for 2017 featuring a different skill each month. January was marmalade and I thought the fun part was the round-up she's publishing at the end of the month, sharing some of the submissions from participants. Fun to see what people come up with. Here's a link to the marmalade round-up. My fridge is suffering from condiment over-population at the moment but I think I will participate in the challenge anyway as a way to try some new things. February is Salt Preserving. I've still got plenty of preserved lemons in the fridge but I should put up a jar of limes since my tree is absolutely loaded. Back to the blood oranges. The LA Times recipe has you remove the zest with a peeler and slice it into fine shreds, then cut off all the pith and basically supreme the fruits. My oranges were small and I was disturbed by the amount of flesh I was losing in the process of removing all the pith - they were just about golf ball-size once I removed the zest and pith. Christine Ferber has a recipe that uses just the zest and juice but it depends on making a green apple pectin, something I didn't feel like doing. Then I remembered that I had good success with the quick Instant Pot marmalade that sliced the whole fruits with a mandoline so I switched to that method. I'm sure I could have gotten a more refined, sweeter and less bitter result from the first process but I'm happy with this. It's fairly bitter and I decided to play that up by adding a shot of Campari just before it reached the set point. Blood Orange-Campari Marmalade: Edited to add: The Instant Pot recipe I linked to calls for a 2X ratio of sugar to fruit for lemon or lime and suggests less for oranges. I started out with 1X and added a bit more after tasting so the final was 1.33X. Along with the Campari, I also added about 1.5 oz of lime juice and a pinch of salt to balance the dominant sweet-bitter thing. 600 g fruit/zest from 9 small blood oranges 800 g sugar 1.5 oz lime juice 1.5 oz Campari pinch salt

You're right, certainly not a classic British ingredient! But after reading Aleksandra Crapanzano's thoughts about the book in this Food52 article, it's clear that the London restaurants from which she drew the recipes wouldn't all be considered examples of classic British cookery either: A browse through the list of recipes in the book confirms that.

My local library does handle ILL requests but told me that most libraries won't loan a book that's so new (this was just published in October) and they recommended I submit a purchase recommendation instead so I did that. In the meantime, I could break down and buy it. I guilted my brother into giving me an Amazon gift card for Christmas and I haven't used it yet.....

Thank you, @liuzhou for answering and for the banquet guidelines!

@liuzhou, rather than take the dinner thread too far off topic, I thought I'd ask a question about your last post, certainly an extravaganza of holiday meals! I notice that several of the tables (the first and last tablescapes from your post, for example) are so covered with delicious-looking dishes that it leaves little room for diners that might be seated around the table to rest their bowls and chopsticks. I'm accustomed to the juggling of empty platters, etc. as new dishes arrive in a Chinese restaurant but I've never seen a table so laden at the beginning of the meal. How is this managed for the festive home meals you are lucky to be invited to? Does everyone squeeze in to sit around the table and hold their bowls or do people reach in to select a few morsels and retreat to eat elsewhere? I suppose it may vary from one family to another, as holiday gatherings do - I've seen tables assembled from doors and saw horses that snake through the entire house and buffet-style serving with folks settling in wherever. Thanks again for sharing all of this!

Not hosting anything but I just made a triple batch of Vivian Howard's "party magnet" cheese ball. One to bring along to a Super Bowl gathering and a couple for the freezer. These were a big hit over the holidays - I got a lot of requests for the recipe.

Raisins

At least at the time I purchased this bag, Trader Joe's was still selling prunes: However, they apparently put dried plums in them:

I'm not sure which Ina Garten lemon cake @ChocoMom had planned when she made her detour into key limes but Google led me to a recipe for Ina Garten's Lemon Cake. I also used limes, because I have many, many of them and made 5 little loaf cakes, 4 of which are safely in the freezer.

Thank you. That's kind of what I suspected but mallow isn't a commonly used herb in my kitchen so I thought I'd ask. I am intrigued by the kookoo. Do you have a favorite combination of ingredients or is the mallow-zucchini-onion-garlic combination the best? I noticed several of the recipes I found online include barberries and walnuts. I was thinking I might try to use muffin tins for individual servings or give them the sous vide egg bite treatment. Yesterday's breakfast was one of the aforementioned egg bites, reheated. It was already pictured over on the sous vide thread so no need to repeat that. Today was bacon, egg and cheese on a roll:

I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has this book and what you think of it. The full title is The London Cookbook: Recipes from the Restaurants, Cafes, and Hole-in-the-Wall Gems of a Modern City. I've seen mentions of the book on various lists of new cookbooks but it didn't pique my interest until I read the recent post on David Leibovitz's blog that includes a recipe from the book for Apple Calvados Cake with a nice intro by the author. I'm not sure I want to cook from The London Cookbook, but I think I'd love to read it. Sadly, my library doesn't have it. Has anyone else taken a look at it?

Triscuits topped with sharp cheddar and a dab of that blueberry chutney I made last week.

It was $18 to ship the one spoon to me in SoCal. Which explains in part why I don't have one!

Funniest food writing award winner for sure!

Ok, I googled Kookoo and have expanded my vocabulary. Excellent start to the day But what's mellow?

From Melissa Clark in the NYT food section: Why Do Cooks Love the Instant Pot? I Bought One to Find Out There are a handful of recipes, too. Bottom line - she liked it enough to keep it.