blue_dolphin

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.

Ergonomics are no joke for any time-consuming tasks. If you have the opportunity to fit out the workspace, you should take @Margaret Pilgrim's advice and take the time to sort out what works for you and your wife for the tasks you do. I'm 5' 3" and am mostly OK with standard 36" counters, although I like a table height for kneading and make sure to put on clogs if I'm doing a lot of chopping on a board that adds an extra inch. That makes me think you could easily go up by 4 or 5 inches for most counters, though arm and leg length both weigh into that ergo equation.

That is making me so hungry! Have you tried the recipe for Grandma Alice's Chipotle Chorizo from Josef Centeno’s book Amá? It’s excellent. I need to make another batch soon.

Thanks! They are olives. Big Castelvetranos.

Yes. I think Mexican chorizo could work, you just want some thing that's going to release some flavorful fat to help roast the potatoes. That said, with the olives and sherry, it's definitely a Spanish style dish, the bread crumb crust is seasoned with lemon zest, garlic, parsley and smoked paprika. It calls for "cooking chorizo," like this, softer and moister than the most common cured Spanish style chorizo that I see in local stores. I thought I had some in the freezer but it failed to reveal itself during my search so I used firm cured Spanish chorizo but cut the slices on the thick side.

A late (10 AM) breakfast and I suppose an odd choice except that I've been wanting to try this but am not in the mood once it gets hot so breakfast it was! Halibut with chorizo, tomatoes, olives & sherry from From the Oven to the Table by Diana Henry. I don't suppose anyone else wants this for breakfast, but if you're looking for a fish dish that comes together very easily, it's a good one. Put the veg in the oven to start cooking while you make the fresh bread crumb topping for the fish, toss in some olives, cook everything together for a bit and it's done!

Almost the same ingredients as yesterday's lunch, rearranged into grilled halibut tacos with the habanero crema used to dress a cabbage slaw. Made the tortillas with Masienda white corn masa harina.

I didn't know they had merged so I'd be interested in more info on that as well. Back In May, both announced that they had "linked up" so subscribers to both services could easily use EYB to search both the books they've entered into EYB and all the books that CKBK has licensed. EYB had added links direct to the CKBK recipes for the 400 books they had already indexed and were in the process of indexing the rest. Here's the announcement from EYB and from CKBK. At the time, CKBK was offering EYB members 25% off on the first year of a CKBK membership and EYB was offering CKBK members an extra month free trial. From what @ElsieD said, it sounds like there was a more recent merger. Probably the best $50 I've spent!

I also started doing this due to a wonky igniter. That one seems to have cured itself but that little lighter has been quite handy during power outages. Like day before yesterday when it went off unexpectedly for a few hours. I'm keeping it in the utensil bin!

Puerto Escondito-Style Halibut Ceviche Tostadas from Asada Great dish. I made the tortillas with Masienda red corn masa harina and, per the book, fried them in duck fat and peanut oil. Crispy/crunchy and very flavorful! The charred habanero crema is excellent and livens this up compared with a standard ceviche.

Corn tortillas, scrambled eggs, Salsa Almendrada (roasted almonds, cascabel & de arbol chiles, garlic, olive oil, vinegar), Pickled Red Onions (the recipe includes orange juice and is very good), Frijoles Negros de la Olla con Nopalitos, topped with a little queso fresco. All from recipes in Asada except the queso fresco recipe is from Nopalito and there is no recipe for the eggs.

I bought something similar a while back. It is kinda nice to have that big clear ice. Mine is about the same height but shorter so it makes only 6 cubes at a time vs your 10. Mine has two trays so you can make either round or square ice. It's about the same size as my popsicle mold so I'm accustomed to tetris-ing things around that. My most recent acquisition, a Doña Rosa tortilla press in sassy pink: It's steel and quite heavy. I'm working on the tortillas

Had this today. Tomato, mayo, Quirky Furki on sourdough toasted just long enough to thaw and warm up a bit. I liked it.

I'm not convinced that would prevent you from feeling the heat entirely, but it might minimize the scenario where you open your mouth and gasp for air, directing a shower of particles of hot stuff directly at the back of your throat, near the the upper reaches of your airway where it triggers uncontrollable coughing.

On passenger aircraft, in the US, you are limited to 5.5 lbs of dry ice. That's a reasonable amount, but not a ton. The container needs to be labeled with the amount (you can print out the labels online) and has to be vented. The only issue is that getting it on the plane is always at the discretion of the pilot and sometimes someone had some kind of bad experience and decides they're going with a stricter limit and will have dry ice packages removed. I'd think they'd remove larger shipments that contain a lot of dry ice before going through little passenger coolers but still might not be worth the potential hassle if everything's thoroughly frozen.

I grew up in northern NY on Hellman's. I haven't seen Duke's on any store shelves but ordered some for a side-by-side with Best Food's. I liked Dukes but didn't think it was worth the bother of ordering. I recently switched from Best Food's to Aldi's store brand. Maybe time for another side-by-side with Duke's? Ditto. Kewpie? Yes, it has a specific flavor but I didn't get that from Duke's either. Though Eric's taste buds may be dulled from all the sugar he puts in everything!