blue_dolphin

Same here. I buy eggs at the local farmers market. Their hens are pastured in an organic citrus orchard and have nice orange yolks. They have been $7/doz for years and years but just last month, they raised the price to $8/doz due to increases in feed prices. So they used to be more than double grocery eggs but are now pretty much on par. Another vendor at the same market, Apricot Lane Farms (of The Biggest Little Farm documentary) had been selling their eggs for $14/doz. Haven't checked lately to see if they've raised their prices.

Yep. Per this LATimes article: $7 a dozen? Why California eggs are so expensive — and increasingly hard to find And from a wholesaler:

Same here. Last year I bought bottles of 16 and 30 and also treated myself to a bottle of the gold label extra vecchio from Modena, which is truly an extravagance but still less than airfare to Italy, which is where I bought my last bottle of that stuff 🙃 That last one is pretty much reserved for strawberries and ice cream! The Trader Joe's Platinum Aged Balsamic of Modena is not bad for everyday use @ $8.99/8.5 oz. It's at least aged in wooden barrels for a few years rather than in a vat with wood chips for a few days like a lot of the supermarket stuff.

Working my way through a giant loaf of maple syrup milk bread from Eric Kim's Korean American. He says one of the best uses is a grilled cheese sandwich. He makes it with mozzarella and suggests spreading the inside of the bread slices with mayo and says it "melds with the cheese so you have a comfortingly bland, gooey, stretchy toasted sandwich." I wasn't wild about the bland part so I went with gochujang mayo for yesterday's breakfast. There are more interesting cheeses than mozzarella for a grilled cheese but the gochujang livened it up and went well with the sweet-ish bread. Today, I made egg nog French toast with some of the Manhattan egg nog I have kicking around in the fridge. With sausage and blackberries With all the maple syrup in that bread, it didn't need any more on top!

I used Rancho Gordo Cassoulet beans.

Thanks for the reminder! I have that book because....well, of course I do! When I bought it, I had good intentions to figure out a scaled-down recipe but apparently lost momentum. I think the closest I got were some cassoulet toasts. This is the perfect time of year to revisit that project. Or maybe just make those toasts again 🙃

You have not gone wrong. I've had that one since it came out. Some recipes are surely dated now but still lots of old LAT food section favorites.

On special this week at a local supermarket

Since I made the milk bread with maple syrup from Eric Kim's Korean American, I used it as he suggests to make kimchi sandwiches. Just bread, crusts trimmed, spread with mayo and a filling of diced kimchi mixed with a pinch of sugar and spoon of sesame oil. I consider kimchi-mayo to be a fabulous sandwich condiment so this kinda seems like a nicely dressed sandwich awaiting its main ingredients. As a follower of Max Halley's secret to delicious sandwiches: hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft, this one is missing a few. I think I'd add an egg, bacon and a pile of potato sticks but I'm sure if you grew up on it, this is pure comfort food just as is.

Eric Kim's Milk Bread with Maple Syrup from his book, Korean American, and also here in the NYT. When comes to bread, I go for rustic, crusty loaves with an open, chewy crumb, not soft, sweet breads with a fine crumb so this is not my jam but after reading Eric's NYT article about it, watching his video and reading a recipe review on the kitchn, I decided to give it a try. I may have overproofed it a bit and should have shielded the top since my oven uses both the upper and lower heating elements on the bake setting and this loaf really rose up. The bread is sweet, but not as bad as I was expecting, given it contains a year's worth of maple syrup - there's a full cup in that one loaf!

Ooops, I did it again! Eric Kim's Creamy Bucatini with Roasted Seaweed. <- even found a link for you this time! Had to try the green bean version. Still works. Threw the beans in with the pasta for the last few min so they finished cooking along with it as the garlic, cream and pasta water made a sauce. They were very good. A couple of years ago, Eric wrote a similar recipe in the NYT for Creamy Asparagus Pasta. In that one, he adds a piece of kombu to both the pasta water and to the sauce as it cooks down around the pasta. I think that's a good idea. He adds onion and rice vinegar, both of which added more sweetness in comparison to his book's simpler recipe and in the NYT he included black pepper but omitted the gochugaru that I think is the perfect finishing touch. Also, this is what the bowl looked like before I mixed the seaweed in. Looks like too much seaweed but it is not.

I just added some of those to my list as daepa 대파 to use in Korean recipes.

Do report back if you make it. Sounds interesting but very different from this one which Eric describes in the header notes as having the briny seaside flavors of a classic shrimp Alfredo. Instead of shrimp and cheese, the seaweed provides the umami hit but it’s very much in that creamy garlicky pasta family. There’s a nice amount of garlic and a bit of warmth from a dusting of gochugaru, which he says is optional but is actually quite important. I had green beans at the ready and might add them next time but I’m glad I tried it as is.

Creamy bucatini with roasted seaweed from Eric Kim's Korean American I resisted the urge to add a bunch of vegetables and just enjoyed the easy, comfort food aspect of this simple pasta dish. Not bad at all, nor should it be bad, given the amount of heavy cream involved!

Interesting. The name cracks me up! I’d try it. Can’t buy the real stuff here in California anyway.

Can we see a cross-sectional view? They do look rather like shallots. I didn't realize there were so many types - see photos of 13 varieties here.

They look great! Had to go search my books on EYB and came up with 43 falafel recipes!

Yes, they are very messy trees, dropping leaves, branches and berries all over the place! As you said, I just dry them at room temp for a few days and crush them as needed. I tried them after reading this Garden Betty blog post. I'm not tremendously enamored of the flavor but I haven’t experienced any ill effects at all.

I see the Massa Organics brown rice is finally back in stock!

In my peppercorn collection, there are a couple kinds of black peppercorns. My main Unicorn magnum grinder is currently filled with Aranya pepper from India. An auxiliary grinder is filled with Vietnamese black pepper. Both of these have fruity notes but the former leans more to warm dried fruits and the latter towards bright citrus. Another auxillary grinder, chosen for its very fine grind, houses white peppercorns and I use them occasionally. I have both red and green Sichuan peppercorns, though I usually bash them as needed with a mortar and pestle rather than in a grinder. At the end of my driveway, I have a California pepper tree (Schinus molle, aka Peruvian pepper tree, not to be confused with the Brazilian pepper tree (Schinus terebinthifolia or Schinus terebinthifolius, which I also have popping up in weed-like fashion) that @heidih mentioned above. My tree offers me all the pink peppercorns I could ever want. I keep some in a small grinder along with black and white peppercorns that makes for a nice mixed finishing pepper but if a recipe specifically calls for pink peppercorns, then I try to plan ahead, get some from the tree and let them dry a bit.

Yes, that's the same one I mentioned upthread. I am lucky to be able to get it easily. I went to a holiday friend's gathering the other day where we usually exchange small gifts. I gave everyone butter 🤣

The first link that @Anna N posted says: So perhaps they are a descendant of the Brittany Roscoff that I mentioned. Of course, I suppose the Spanish Armada could have made a port stop in Brittany and planted them centuries ago! The Roscoffs have an interesting history with French Breton farmers or farm workers (onion Johnnys) selling those pink onions in England and Wales.

I remember the first time I tasted pesto. I brought a huge amount of basil home from the Santa Monica Farmer's market and followed the recipe in Mollie Kaizen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I remember breaking off pieces of ciabatta to wipe out the blender and being amazed at the intense flavor. The first batch of pesto each summer brings me back to that little apartment kitchen!

I wonder if they were similar to Roscoff onions from Brittany. I believe that name is appellation controlled but I'm sure similar onions are grown elsewhere. Yesterday, I bought some Bordier butter flavored with Roscoff onion, one of Bordier's seasonal winter flavors.

Thanks for taking time to pull together an amusing and entertaining review, @Anna N. Even though it seems rather ill-suited to your preferences, you kept your sense of humor and gave us a good sense of the book!