blue_dolphin

It was a first for me, too. Seems like most deliveries I get are way late. Then they say that I need to pay them an extra $45 for some little plumbing connection that I could get for 75 cents but it's so late that all the stores are closed so I have no choice but to pay up. Then the new dishwasher leaks all over the floor anyway!

Good news - the fridge has arrived, is plugged in and is humming along with a Spot in the fridge and one in the freezer. Last night, they sent me a delivery window of 8AM - Noon. A little after 7, I heard a truck pull up out in front. Thought it was probably my neighbors construction delivery so I paid no attention. I was bustling about, emptying the closet, mopping the dusty floor in there, moving furniture so there was a clear path, etc. when the doorbell rang. That was indeed my fridge truck, an hour early - good thing I'd changed out of my PJs and brushed my teeth!

Excellent idea. Not that it would have helped me here as the freezer temps have remained within an acceptable range (based on the min-max display on the little Thermoworks Spot that lives in there) though a fridge alarm might have helpfully woken me up in the middle of the night and provided me a bit more time for online fridge shopping!

Yes, I've certainly been thinking of your ordeal. Thankfully, I didn't have to resort to bribery....yet! And, I'm very, very lucky that I can afford to replace it and was able to find one I could get delivered on short notice!

Well, I failed to heed my own advice and my fridge is giving up the ghost. It was hovering around 40°F yesterday. Freezer was at -1°F, a few degrees above normal. I thought I might not have closed the fridge door properly and hoped that a nice long overnight with no opening it would give it time to recover. Alas, it was 50°F this morning and the freezer up to 1°F. Went to Lowes and bought a small, but full-sized one that will be delivered tomorrow. It will fit into what used to be a laundry closet, right around the corner from the kitchen and could eventually become a garage fridge. A previous owner built the kitchen cabinets very closely around the now dying fridge. It's a side-by-side with panels that match the cabinets and I'm going to need a bit of time to figure out what to replace it with. My preference is no ice maker and that ruled out anything available quickly. While I was at Lowes, I bought a cooler and stopped for ice on the way home. I put enough dry ice into the freezer to keep everything in frozen. Now I need to start the fridge clean out, toss anything perishable and use the cooler for stuff like fruit, veg, cheese, mustard, pickles, jams, etc. that I'd still eat. Shouldn't be anything stinky yet but I'm not really looking forward to it! And even if it doesn't stink now, it surely will by the time the trash gets picked up on Friday!

What a nice find! If you should find yourself with more, I can recommend the recipe for Sand Dabs with Shallots, Sea Beans and Sherry Vinegar from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I haven't had the pleasure of foraging it myself but Murray Family Farms was offering it regularly at their farmers market stand. They said it grows on their property near Bakersfield. Go figure! I tried that Zuni fish recipe (posted here) and an easy, briny anchovy and samphire pasta recipe from Ottolenghi's Simple (posted here) which was also very good. I need to get some more to play around with!

Oh, one more possible addition for you. Their uncured, raw Spanish-style ground chorizo is a great pre-seasoned ground pork that you might enjoy playing with. $4.48/lb so certainly a premium over what you'd pay for ground pork but reasonable in the sausage realm and very tasty stuff. I like to make it into little patties for breakfast sandwiches. Would probably be great mixed into burger meat. This isn't Mexican chorizo, lots of smoked paprika, etc, like in Spanish chorizo.

Not sure where you are but here in SoCal, grouper isn't common so I always order a grilled grouper sandwich if I'm in Florida. Happily, WildFork offers excellent grouper that's nicely packaged in individual pieces.

That looks amazing but I am shocked, so shocked to see you post a breakfast without chorizo.....perhaps I can't make it out....or maybe it's on the side? 🙃

In a nood mood this morning so Eric Kim's gochujang buttered noodles Sugar snap peas not part of the recipe but I like them.

I donated to a church fair for their penny pitch booth!

A while back, I received this large wine glass which is also large enough to hold an entire 750 ml bottle of wine. Pretty sure it was taller than 9 1/2 inches!

You weren’t kidding about the length of their menu - wow! I was curious about: so I looked it up on their website to see if it explained. I learned that momo are dumplings and these must be breaded or battered and fried but what was inside? Duh. I was over thinking. These must be chicken filled momo that are fried rather than steamed, not chicken-fried momo 🤣🤣🤣

We need a photo of this one!

Two fish lunches. This week's fish share was black cod so I followed a recipe from Kenji for miso-marinated broiled black cod: with scallions, steamed rice, cucumbers and pickled ginger. Last week, I got fresh halibut and subbed it into a recipe from NOPI for Lemon Sole with burnt butter, nori and fried capers: with brown rice and sugar snap peas. Kind of a murky looking sauce but it tasted good!

I perused this thread recently and noted a few recommendations for the Chicken Braised with Figs, Honey and Vinegar on p 350. Figs in season and a pack of leg quarters at $0.99/lb sealed the deal. This is an excellent chicken recipe. These leg quarters were huge so the braise was a great way to cook them. Header notes talk about identifying perfect figs, but I think the brief sauté they get in the reduced braising liquid, brightened with honey and vinegar will make even a so-so fig taste pretty great. Header notes say the restaurant serves this with a salad of raw fennel ribbons and arugula with wedges of fried pizza dough to sop up the sauce. My mind went to polenta but I did add a pile of arugula. Edited to add that the recipe calls for a single onion, cut into 8 wedges to go into the braising pan for 4 servings. The braised onion is quite delicious, so if you like onion, I’d increase that.

Yes, freezing is almost always a safe alternative. No risk there.

Yeah, it's not something I'd buy for making burgers or any sort of volume use but when I'm making Marcella's chicken liver sauce for pasta that only calls for 1/4 lb ground beef for 4-6 servings and I'm scaling that down, it's pretty handy!

I bought a bunch of those at Daiso a while back. I think they were about a dollar each in the store. $1.75 online. Packaged them up in a little bag with a nutmeg and tied it on to a bottle of homemade eggnog that I give for holiday gifts. Should go back and pick up one for myself! It's really handy. I like that you can "name" your timers when you tell Alexa to set them. When I'm juggling a bunch of tasks, it's nice to be told, "Your laundry timer is done," or your cookie timer or farro timer or whatever. I'm so used to it that when a temp alarm I'd set when making ricotta started beeping, I immediately called out, "Alexa, stop alarm," forgetting it was a completely unconnected Thermoworks device!

I've mentioned this before but I also have a local Wild Fork store. I've been doing a local fish share so haven't used them much lately but I really like that the fish portions are individually vac-packed. I also like their ground beef that comes in a bag of individually frozen bits so you can just shake out a small amount. Wish they offered ground pork in the same format.

For cookbooks, I generally use the Kindle app on my iPad and photos usually display very nicely. I assume there's a Kindle app for other tablets. I have a small Kindle device (Paperwhite) that has a small, monochrome display that I use for reading other books and it’s not so great for photos. It’s like reading a small paperback. I've also noticed there are things about the way individual books are formatted that makes them more or less pleasing to navigate and use. Some of that is the dependent on the e-reader software but some is on the publisher and how they’ve formatted tables of contents, etc.

Like @lindag, I prefer a paper book but I've also made good use of ebooks. If you want to try them out, my recommendation is to start with your public library. It takes a little while to develop familiarity with the specific e-book reader navigation you use while cooking - setting bookmarks, jumping back or forward within a book or between books, adding notes or comments - so take a little time to do that with the format you choose. My library lets me download ebooks in the Kindle format and most of the e-cookbooks I've purchased are from Amazon so I'm most familiar with that but I've also used Overdrive (Libby) to access ePub format books. Price-wise, I've noticed that Apple iBook prices seem to track pretty close to Amazon wrt to sales, etc. Most of the Kindle cookbooks I've purchased from Amazon have been sale-priced, in the $1.99 - $4.99 range, though I've paid more for specific non-bargain books that I wanted to have in ebook format. You could also take a look at ckbk, a subscription service that offers digital access to 700 + cookbooks. At first, this rubbed me the wrong way as it seemed like they were just scraping the recipes and making them searchable while what usually draws me into a book is the writing, whether it's stories, background, header notes, etc. but a closer look suggests that they do capture all the content of the books. To me, the reading experience isn't as seamless as a paper book or Kindle, but the content is there and they do offer a lot of out-of-print books. I looked at Irene Kuo's The Key to Chinese Cooking and the lovely drawings that I found so helpful in learning to cook are indeed available. Downsides are that you're limited to the books they have available and a LOT of popular books aren't. At the moment, I personally own 513 cookbooks, 125 are Kindle ebooks. Only 17 of my 513 cookbooks are among the 745 books on ckbk. Not sure if that's good because there's not a lot of duplication or bad because they offer a lot of books I'm not interested in. I think the cost of a one month trial is around 5 bucks so you could check it out if you were curious. I did this recently, thinking it might help me preview books that I'm considering purchasing. So far, I'm ambivalent as to its value.

Just because I like to compare prices: @rotuts Total Wine my Total Wine Hi-Time 1910 $ 62.99 $ 58.99 $ 49.00 1920 $ 54.99 $ 52.99 $ 49.99 Sorry for the poor formatting. Should have made a table.

The list of chiles in parentheses plus 1 t salt become the Amá spice mix and 2T of that goes into the chorizo, along with all the other ingredients listed. Sorry it was unclear. I'm sure it's not necessary to use all those chiles but I have to say that I enjoy the complexity and I use that mix wherever red chili flakes are called for.

That TJ's soy chorizo is really salty. I've made my own veg version with tofu and mushrooms and the seasonings called for in the Amá chorizo recipe. it's not bad, though I prefer the real porky thing. I'm going to give the ingredients for the Amá version that's my go-to. As @Tropicalsenior says, it is a LOT of spices compared with most other sausages I've made. 1.5 lbs ground pork belly or ground pork shoulder Toast the following: 1 T cumin seed 1 t coriander seed 3 whole cloves and grind them together with 2 dried bay leaves 1 T chipotle chile powder 2 T Amá spice mix (basically a mix of all your chiles, toasted and ground with a little salt. The recipe calls for 8 arbol, 5 guajillo, 5 New Mexico, 5 chipotles, 4 chiles negro, 4 mulato, 4 pasilla de Oaxaca , 4 cascabel and 1 t salt) 2 T sweet paprika 1 t sea salt 1 t black pepper 1/2 t oregano Indio 1/2 t dried thyme 1/4 t ground cinnamon 1 large garlic clove, grated 3 T apple cider vinegar You basically just mix all the spices together and work them into the pork along with the garlic and vinegar, ideally let the mix sit O/N in the fridge to meld the flavors, and then cook it up 'til crispy and fat is rendered. Use right away, fridge for a few days or freezer for longer term.