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What are powerhouse eggs? Do they appear in the photo? Yesterday. Black bean & pepper jack quesadilla, cabbage salad dressed with mojo de ajo, a citrus-y roasted garlic sauce from Grist. Today, black bean pot licker w/roasted sweet potato, also from Grist

I tweaked the recipe for Hominy w/Black Beans, Summer Squash, Basil + Mojo de Ajo from Grist to make it better reflect the season (and the contents of my fridge), delicata squash for the summer squash and used oregano instead of basil as the fresh herb. The mojo de ajo is made with garlic, slow-roasted along with fresh oregano in olive oil, then mixed with lime and orange zest and juice. Tasty stuff.

Getting home from work in less than 15 min is truly the most remarkable aspect of this post but the dish also looks amazingly delicious. Are the dark shapes prunes? Kalamata olives? Something else?

@Midlife & @Katie Meadow, which TJ's flour tortillas are you buying? My TJ's has a few different packages. I get these, which reheat nicely in a cast iron skillet, no oil.

Repeat lentils. This time with a fried duck egg.

Paprika-Honey Ribs w/Hominy + Lemon Parsley Mojo from Grist

Caramelized Lentils du Puy from Taste & Technique with a boiled egg There's a fair bit of faffing about in the lentil recipe, as there is with most recipes in the book, but they do taste good.

That's a good point. I actually have a low simmer burner on my gas cooktop that will maintain a very low flame and should just use that.

Nice to see you still cooking from this book! A little while back when a topic popped up here about Farokh Talati's recent cookbook, Parsi: From Persia to Bombay: Recipes & Tales from the Ancient Culture , I pulled out My Bombay Kitchen, thinking I should really cook from it instead of buying another new book. I spent some time looking through it and also searched here on eG to read through the very many meals that you (and some others) cooked from this book and posted about here. It's a great book, I very much enjoy her writing and really should get cooking from it!

This speaks to the power of expectations and how nice it is when something exceeds them. I'd recommend focusing on the meal having exceeded expectations and forget that he chose to remind you that he really had none to begin with 🙃

For some reason, I don't think the guy with the cigarette in his photo is looking for cooking jobs these days!

Hominy w/peperonata + arugula from Grist made with escarole instead of arugula. The first time I made this, I used Vivian's Red Weapons instead of peperonata and I thought it was fabulous. Today, I made a small batch of the peperonata from the book. The peppers are lovely and sweet but the recipe is very simple and mild so the overall dish lacks the acid I think it needs. I ended up drizzling a few spoons of Red Weapons over the top and that did the trick. I'm still a fan of using hominy in a salad like this but it needs to be dressed with some thing punchy.

Hominy with Seared Chicken Thighs, Radish Salad + Smoked Yogurt from Grist with sautéed baby kale with garlic, lemon confit and red chile. I cooked up some of the Rancho Gordo hominy we got in our recent bean club box and decided to try some non-pozole recipes. In this one, the chicken is first browned on the skin side, then roasted atop the cooked hominy so it's seasoned by the drippings much like other recipes that roast chicken on potatoes or rice, etc. Very quick and tasty.

Yes, I had gotten quite good about doing that before purchasing but when things were initially shut down at the beginning of the pandemic and I felt like I deserved to treat myself, I got completely out of the habit.

Thanks! Some of these sound very good. I have Pulp, Abra Beren's fruit-centric book on pre-order. She uses fruit in some interesting ways in both Ruffage and Grist so I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with this one. Evan Kleiman had a nice interview segment on recently with Homa Dashtaki, author of Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life. It was not previously on my radar screen but the interview piqued my interest and I'd really like to get a look at the book. Here's a link to the interview. I bought the UK edition of Nigel Slater's A Cook's Book when it came out, year before last, and have very much enjoyed reading it but, sadly, haven't cooked anything from it. I should really do something about that before I buy more books! I'm curious to see what Alison Roman does with a dessert book. I have her other 2 books and she's very good at writing recipes that work. Ditto Andrea Nguyen when it comes to recipe writing. I love her books. Heck, I'd like to check out almost all of them!

In the header notes for the Cracked Green Olive and Armagnac Prune Relish in Taste & Technique, Naomi Pomeroy says the relish was inspired by the chicken Marbella in the Silver Palate Cookbook so I tossed the relish with some chicken and loaded it onto a toasted baguette:

Butter is my microwave nemesis. I know this well. I use a cover. I choose a low setting. I stop and mix often. And yet....BOOM!...it's everywhere!

Welcome, @GastriqueGangster! Have you read Alon Shaya's book, Shaya? It's part cookbook, part memoir. He also found direction and purpose through cooking, in his case, beginning in a Home Ec class in his freshman year of high school and went on to win those James Beard awards. Check it out if you haven't already. I think it took him more than 5 years to get there but I'm sure you can shave some time off that!

The given range in the recipe is 35 - 45 min. I took it out at 35. Probably could have gone a couple more minutes. That square pan I got is very shiny and takes a little longer to bake compared to the round one I have that's dark. I used frozen cherries but thawed and drained them before putting them on the cake. Honestly, they'd been in the freezer for a while and were more suitable for smoothies but they tasted fine so I went ahead with them. Looking forward to making this again when cherry season starts!

Half batch of the Cherry Coconut Almond Cake from Snacking Cakes baked in a 6-inch pan This cake uses coconut oil instead of butter so I was a bit wary of it being heavy but it's nice and light.

I didn't mention my waffle maker here earlier because it only makes one at a time and that's not what was requested but I'm going to call it out anyway because it may be a good option for others. I recommend it particularly for someone who wants to try making waffles without making a big financial or space investment. It's the little Cuisinart Classic Waffle Maker (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). The price kind of jumps around. I paid $21 about 5 years ago, it's now closer to $30, which is still less than most others. It takes ~ 5 min to heat up and each waffle takes 1-2 min to cook so even though it only makes one at a time it can still crank out a batch fairly quickly. The waffles are round, in the thinner, classic style rather than Belgian and it doesn't have extra plates or anything like that. It's a little thing and stored on its side, takes up about the same space as a cookbook. It feels really cheap. The slider moves like it's not attached to anything, though it does actually work. I've used it a fair bit and if it dies, I'd be inclined to just get another one rather than moving up to something that costs between 3 and 10X the price.

Turned last night's appetizer of Baked Brie with Armagnac Prunes, Mushrooms and Thyme into a grilled cheese sandwich

Found 2 episodes of this season of the French version on YouTube:

Baked Camembert with Armagnac Prunes, Mushrooms and Thyme from Taste & Technique I was curious about this combination of savory mushrooms sautéed with shallots and the sweet prunes but it turns out to work quite well. Trader Joe's had some little 5 oz rounds of goat cheese Brie from Laura Chenel in Sonoma so I subbed that in for the Camembert. Leftovers are shortly to be turned into a grilled cheese sandwich.

I have a nice stash of wire bale/swing top wine bottles that I also use for eggnog so if the concern is only for bottling, then I'm good. I was afraid the warning also pertained to the 30-40 day period before the fruit is strained out but maybe not.