blue_dolphin

Use google or the like to search for vegan puff pastry recipes to find options that don't use butter. I don't think they are likely to be big cost savers but they'd certainly be an option if you need to avoid butter. You can also find vegan phyllo dough recipes. I've only used purchased phyllo but I've made all sorts of sweet and savory turnovers and I'm sure you could do the same if you settle on a recipe and technique to make your own.

@Chris Hennes, the photos you post of the dishes you prepare are always beautiful but some in this thread are really stunning. In particular, the photos of the Chickpea saute with Greek yogurt and the Pasta and fried zucchini salad are ever so much more appealing to me than the photos of those same dishes in the book! Beautiful job, you've really inspired me to cook from this book - it's now made the journey from the bookshelf to sit next to me so I can look up the recipes as soon as you post them. Thank you for the inspiration!

I don't know the secret, but @Ann_T certainly does! Check out the picture in this post. Just glorious!

From this article on WIRED: The app is essential for manually entering temperature controls for your own freestyle meals, as there’s no temperature dial on the oven itself. (emphasis mine) If that's true, it would be deal breaker for me. I don't want to be accessing a remote phone app every time I need to change the temp.

@Anna N, I'm glad to hear the green pancakes reheat well. I will have to give them a try. This was second breakfast today: Last week, I tasted a "Figs on Fire" pizza at a local spot. It used Jenkins Jellies Fiery Figs pepper jelly, goat cheese and roasted almonds on a thin, crispy-chewy crust, topped with arugula and olive oil. Lacking most of those ingredients and the wood-fired pizza oven, I substituted toasted ciabatta, homemade ricotta, a 1:1 mix of TJ's fig butter and sweet & spicy chili jam and a sprinkle of toasted, slivered almonds. Not as good as the pizza, perhaps, but not bad at all.

There is an older cider thread that may have some info: Cider

Indeed!

Interesting choice of a planting date, given the way it moves around the calendar. This the the guidance I grew up with in northern NY. Fair enough to gamble on setting things out earlier in May but pre-global warming, Memorial Day was always the best guess for setting out tender plants.

Yay! I'm glad my sleuthing took me to the right place! I'm very much looking forward to spending some time in your area, virtually that is! When I did that image search, I was really trying to identify the type of fish and thought I might find something similar to help me track them down. I thought I remembered that previously posted eG images weren't used in the teasers so I was surprised when my search sent me right back here to your thread! Then of course, I distractedly posted while cooking a frittata and revealed your name immediately after @Smithy asked for time to post more photos. For that, I sincerely apologize. But I am most delighted that I was right!

I have not supported the Tovala Kickstarter campaign. If I didn't already have the Cuisi steam oven, I think I'd take a chance. The slightly larger capacity, if it can really accommodate a 1/4 sheet pan would be great, thought that's probably more for the convenience of using existing cookware than actually cooking more food. And it does look nice and sleek. A 30 day warranty would certainly give me pause. On one hand, I much prefer the tactic of using a mobile device app to control an appliance over building a complex user interface into the appliance itself. On the other hand, I'm not sure that this particular appliance is one that benefits from that sort of remote access. I'm concerned that the limited manual buttons will require excessive use of the remote user interface. If I check and decide that something needs 5 more minutes on convection or broil after the steam-bake time that I've entered, do I really need to get the phone and use my greasy, cooking fingers to add that setting to the little oven that's sitting right in front of me? My first thought was that it would be nice to program in cook cycle that would steam-bake for x minutes and then switch to broil for y minutes but the reality is that I'd prefer to check the food after the first phase and decide what additional cooking was most appropriate. I thought it was interesting that several photos and videos on the Tovala Kickstarter page show the Cuisi steam oven being used in their "test kitchen" and apparently in their prototype development. I'm really curious to see what they do with this. If you want to start your own, @rotuts-kickstarter to fund your continued participation in the Tavola scheme, I would contribute, knowing that you have a solid record in testing and reporting your carefully documented (lab notebook) results!

There are 2 SA stores out here in Ventura Co: Thousand Oaks (where I got these) and Oxnard. That store doesn't have the best selection or prices, but it's just across the parking lot from Smart & Final so I stop by for a quick look-see if I'm in the area.

Yes, the kind of glasses that make me feel like I'm at Downton Abbey!

Not exactly a big score, but I bought these 3 pretty little glasses at the Salvation Army store today for 75 cents. The one in the back is holding 1.5 oz of an unspecified beverage. Two of them will be an add on to a gift of homemade lime-cello or strawberry infused tequila. The third one has a little chip in the lip so I'll keep it to enjoy some little treats.

Yes, congratulations, @chappie! I'm so glad that you let us know how things came out. I'm not very familiar with cook-offs so if you have a moment sometime, I'd be interested to hear more about how your chowder cook-off works. How much do chowder do you have to make? How long is the "service" period. What sort of facilities (if any) are available for last-minute cooking? My only cook-off experience is limited to an annual chili cook-off at work where each entry (usually a group, working together.....in some cases, just barely ) had to make at least 12 gallons of chili but I've seen other events where people seem to bring crock-pot sized containers so I have no idea what is the norm for cook-off events.

Oh, I'm so sorry that I didn't see your post, Smithy, until I hit "submit". I must have been going back to the original thread to make the link.

Cook's Illustrated Pasta Frittata with Sausage (you can also find the recipe here) @Xilimmns posted this over on the dinner thread and I thought it looked so good that I stopped by Sprouts on my AM walk to pick up the sausage so I could make it.

deleted

Those are beautiful! I would display the white one on the far right in the third row as a piece of abstract art!

Well, a search did identify another place on eGullet where that fish photo appears, but using a search engine instead of my brain to solve a puzzle seems like cheating, doesn't it?

Sounds promising that there's interest in this aspect of food and cooking from a number of publishers. Last week, I read a piece in the LA Times about Bauder and was hoping that you'll get some nice coverage like that to get the word out when your book is ready.

I agree, they do look like smaller, flatter fish than cod but it's hard to get a sense of scale without anything else in the picture.

LindaK of the great Salt Cod Diary thread?

Thanks for that link - I really liked Marjorie! I'm so glad to hear that she will be cooking with Amar in the finale, even if it's as his sous chef instead of being in the running herself. And with respect to part 1 of the finale, the choice of Amar as the winner HAD to be about the food since he did ZERO in the way of presentation or magic tricks! So even though my girl Marjorie was out, I figured the decision was probably fair.

I haven't tried it with gin, but @thirtyoneknots recommended the Culross with a Flor de Cana, Cocchi Americano and lemon back in this post and I found it quite tasty.

Ditto what TFTC said. I thought it was entirely fair to ask for confirmation about an ingredient called for in the US version of a cookbook written by a chef who grew up in Jerusalem, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and owns restaurants in the UK that feature flavors of the Middle East and beyond. Especially since that word can be used correctly in the US to refer to more than one food. What did I learn? I had no idea that the US banned farming of currants in 1911 due to concern about the role of blackcurrant plants in spreading white pine disease and the impact of that disease on the logging industry. Apparently, blackcurrants were popular in the US prior to that time. The ban is still in place in several states but has been overturned in others and currant growing is returning in some areas. The owner of this operation was responsible for overturning the ban in New York State is growing them there. I am curious to try some and see what they are like.