blue_dolphin

The idea of eating a face is a bit disconcerting but so far, the pictures look more like a shoe or a purse than a living face. Doesn't make it more appetizing, but not so disturbing. I do look forward to learning about its preparation and consumption in future posts.

Salad for lunch: Romaine and red leaf lettuce, pickled butternut squash, dried cranberries, grape tomatoes, goat cheese, spicy pecans. Dressed with a cranberry apple cider vinaigrette I made by subbing some of the cranberry shrub I made the other day for half of the vinegar.

Nice article. Thanks for the link.

There seem to be plenty of them here in SoCal. I got one at Trader Joe's last week and saw both green and orange kabochas at my local farmer's market as well. Edited to add: TeakettleSlim, I'm not ChocoMom but if I get a super hard squash, I put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and that seems to help with cutting it. Now if you've got a monster Hubbard that's bigger than your microwave, the sidewalk may be the best route !

liuzhou - I like seeing your local paper along with that nice breakfast and love your new avatar! Ann_T - The food you prepare and the photographs you make are equally gorgeous to look at. Your homemade, crusty breads in particular make me want to reach through the screen and steal a bite! I used the leftover cilantro lime sweet potatoes from yesterday's lunch and some roasted corn kernels from the freezer to make some little fritters for breakfast. Served with a little peach-jalapeño jam and a scoop of ricotta on the right and a taste of lime-ginger marmalade on the left. Would have been good with some guacamole and sour cream, too, but I didn't have any!

Here it is, as I described in some detail upthread: caramelized winter squash with wheat berries, dried cherry relish and roasted onions. Sorry for the crappy iPad picture. It looked a lot better. So we've got roasted butternut squash, fried in butter - what's not to like? It's sitting on a bed of wheat berries and topped with a dried cherry relish, served with roasted onions and finished with an onion jus. Served with some garlicky kale. Rather a lot of work, particularly the onion jus that required multiple pans and many hours to convert 3 lbs of onions and a stick of butter into 3/4 cup of sauce. But the result was very tasty and I'm glad I tried it.

I made 2 cranberry shrubs recently. I chose this cranberry-lime shrub from Fine Cooking because I love the combination of citrus with cranberry and my lime tree is absolutely loaded with fruit. Alas, the recipe only calls for the zest of one lime so it's not a big help in that department but it is very tasty stuff. It's made with white wine (or champagne) vinegar so the cranberry flavor takes the lead. I haven't tried it in any cocktails (maybe something with tequila and fresh lime juice??) but an ounce and a half in a tall glass of sparkling water and ice made a very refreshing drink that I'd be happy to drink any time of the year. It was very pretty - too bad I slurped it down without taking a picture! I think it would be great with tonic and a squeeze of fresh time, too. The other shrub is a little more similar to the one that David Lebowitz wrote up on his blog recently, using apple cider vinegar and flavoring the shrub with allspice. I followed a recipe for pickled cranberries that included ginger, cinnamon, cloves and black peppercorns along with the allspice and the resulting shrub is full of holiday flavors. I enjoyed this shrub in the cocktail that David had on his blog, sort of a bourbon sour. Because of all the spices and the apple cider vinegar background, I don't think I'd want to drink it in the summer but I bet this shrub would be a great to punch up an apple cider vinaigrette. Cranberry shrub cocktail garnished with pickled cranberries.

I tried the Lime Cilantro Sweet Potatoes that cakewalk mentioned over here in the Thanksgiving thread and served them with a TJ's crab cake and TJ's dill and jalapeño tartar sauce. I used half orange sweet potatoes and half white murasaki sweet potatoes. Should have pulled the orange guys out of the oven earlier as they got a bit overcooked but that recipe is a keeper. Very tasty.

Years ago, TJ's used to carry several different pâtés but this is the only one I've seen lately. Sorry about the truffles!

I really, really want to eat this squash dish, Caramelized winter squash with wheat berries, dried cherry relish and roasted onions, and thought posting about it here might prod me into giving it a try. The recipe is from Gary Menes, chef at Le Comptoir in Los Angeles. There is a nice write up on the dish by Russ Parsons and a video on the LA Times website. There are rather a lot of steps but all pretty straightforward. The wheat berries are cooked ahead with a bit of celery, onion, carrot, garlic, thyme, white wine and (of course) plenty of butter. A dried cherry relish is cooked up from cherries, orange juice and zest, red onion, pistachios (sub squash or pumpkin seeds), parsley, chives and red wine vinegar An onion jus is prepared ahead by caramelizing red onions in butter then cooking them in water to extract the flavor, reducing the strained liquid and seasoning it with sherry vinegar The squash is cooked twice, first roasted, halved but skin-on, in the oven and just before service, it is sliced and sautéed with butter, olive oil and thyme. Whole onions are roasted in the oven in foil with a bit of butter and thyme and then thin wedges are sautéed along with the squash. There are a couple of differences between the video and the written recipe. In the video, Menes, dots the halved squash with butter, thyme, S&P and brown sugar, wraps it first in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil and places it on a baking sheet cut side up. The written recipe has you place the squash cut side down and wraps the whole thing, baking sheet and all in foil. And for the onion jus, the video uses a pressure cooker to cook the caramelized onions in water for 30 min while the written recipe does that step on the stove top for an hour. I'd think the PC might be more effective. I was thinking I might try to shortcut things by using some of my pickled cranberries instead of the cherry relish and finishing with a little artisanal balsamic vinegar but it's really such a lovely recipe, the way it uses thyme to flavor each of the components that I think it deserves to be made as is. The question is.....will I do it!

Seasonal breakfast bruschetta. Cubes of roasted butternut squash and some (not very) blue cheese warmed together on toasted ciabatta. A few pickled cranberries alongside. Later in the day, I would have rubbed the bread with some garlic and had a glass of wine with this but coffee was fine, too.

Based on this answer from the Periscope help page, one would think that the live feeds would be viewable. "...You can also watch videos on the web and with other mobile browsers. If a broadcaster tweets out a live broadcast link, click on it and you'll be able to watch on your browser. Periscope on Web doesn't have chatting or heart capabilities at this time...." That said, my experience was the same as yours, huiray, with Safari and Firefox - audio only, no video on the live feed but it worked fine on the completed video. I was able to watch the live feed my iPad with the Periscope app. It was fun to watch, but I was getting worried for gfron1 during the busy parts and wished I could reach in and offer some help!

My spell checker would certainly agree with you. I had to go back and edit my post to get it right....or wrong....or whatever...to use oven as a verb !

Thanks for the Crepes, a while back, I also tried those so-called Heavenly, sounds-like San Marzano tomatoes and found them bland and sort of mealy in texture. They were indeed a disappointment. I'll be interested in hearing how you do with dissection of the TJ's Cheese Spiral. The outermost rings are fairly loose and should come apart easily. The inner ones seemed a bit more stuck together, but perhaps by the time you get down to that point, it will be small enough to just cook the remainder. From yesterday's trip....first off, no turkey dinner potato chips at the TJ's I went to. Sold out and no more on the way, according to the staff. They did have these Sriracha Lattice Cut Kettle Cooked Potato Chips but I did not bite. Maybe next time. I tried this blue cheese from Germany: The TJ's label calls it "Grand Blue" but it seems very similar to this Grand Noir from the Cambazola people. It's covered in black wax and I can read "Grand Noir" printed on the wax on the piece I bought. It's firmer than the regular, Brie-style Cambazola that I'm more familiar with. The blue-cheese flavor is a bit stronger but it's still on the mild/creamy side of the blue-veined cheese spectrum. It was $12.99/lb. I had a bit with some of the pickled cranberries and butternut squash that I made last weekend and a hunk of crusty bread and called it lunch. Possibly from the same folks in Greece as the Cheese Spiral, I got these sundried tomato/cheese phyllo triangles. They are a bit bigger than the spinach or mushroom phyllo triangles that I get at TJ's. That means more of the rich filling and means that I probably wouldn't want to eat too many at a time but it's easy to remove one or two from the packaging and heat them up, as I did today. I liked them, but they are rich. Maybe rich enough to turn a salad into a meal. One was really enough but I ate 2. Also, I have learned a new vocabulary word from some recently purchased frozen items: Ovenable Here it is again: Cracks me up! Since I removed and ovened my 2 triangles on a baking sheet, I did not oven the tray itself so I can't verify the claim.

hummingbird kiss, that last post brought tears to my eyes! Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, too! Last night, I received my Thanksgiving assignment - pies! Not my forte but at least I don't need to worry about keeping things hot when sit-down time is delayed by hours! Old: Pumpkin-pecan layered pie modified from this recipe in Southern Living. A layer of pecan pie type filling on the bottom and a creamy pumpkin layer on top. New: Apple Cranberry Crumble Pie My lime tree is loaded so I may make some sort of lime dessert as well. Or maybe just a bottle of my lime-cello - my favorite dessert after a heavy meal, a little glass of something tasty to sip!

Emergency duck legs - I love it! I have flashlights, hand cranked radios, bottled water, peanut butter, canned soup and granola bars but I am clearly missing a key item in my emergency supply cabinet ! Host's note: this topic is has been split to allow our servers to work efficiently; the next segment may be found here.

Wow, BKEats! That was a whole Egullet foodblog in 4 posts! Very fun to read. Now I need to go eat!

I like the idea of the liquid smoke (gfweb) and chipotle (gulfporter) additions!

I've been making the recipe for Nikki's sweet potatoes from 101 cookbooks for years now. Dead easy and always a hit. Not too sweet, just a tablespoon of maple syrup. Coconut milk makes them creamy and they are topped with unsweetened coconut and macadamia nuts. I've sometimes used other nuts instead.

Ditto. I'd love to see comments utilized for the recipes. For me, numerical ratings would not add value but I'd have no problem just ignoring them if they were of value for others.

I roasted up some little cubes of butternut squash this AM and added them to my hot cereal along with raisins, nuts and maple syrup. Very tasty. Picture over in the breakfast thread in case you want to see a bowl of oatmeal with squash !

Chilly morning here. This hit the spot and warmed me up nicely: Hot multigrain cereal, cooked with cinnamon and nutmeg. Served with roasted butternut squash, raisins and walnuts. Sweetened with just a bit of maple syrup. Cup of joe alongside.

Yes, that cranberry color is so festive, isn't it? I was a little disappointed that some of the cranberries sort of exploded (as they do) in the brine rather than all remaining intact. For some reason, I thought maybe the acid from the vinegar might help keep them all whole but that was not entirely the case. As a condiment, it's probably not a big deal, and there are certainly whole berries in there but I think I'll try to be more gentle with the heat and stirring with the next batch.

Yesterday, I made some butternut squash pickles (posted over here in the winter squash cook-off thread) and also tried some pickled cranberries, both small pilot batches to see if they'd make good holiday gift add-ins. I used this recipe for the cranberries but doubled the ginger and grated it instead of slicing so the ginger flavor is quite punchy at the moment. I suppose that may mellow over a bit of curing time. I only used 2 bags of cranberries instead of 3 so I ended up with a good amount of leftover brine or as I'm calling it, cranberry-ginger shrub. I already tried it in the cranberry shrub cocktail recipe that David Leibovitz posted the other day and it was quite tasty indeed. And the cranberries themselves are very nice with some sharp cheddar and crusty bread.

Cooked up a few crustless mini-quiches in the cuisi steam oven: And had one for breakfast, along with some cuisi-toast and grape tomatoes: