blue_dolphin

I haven't eaten Saltines in ages but reading through this thread brings back some sweet memories of childhood snacks and lunches that featured buttered Saltines or little Saltine PB&J sandwiches. My mom remained a Saltine devotee until the end, switching to the unsalted tops in later years due to blood pressure concerns. They were always on my "Mom Food" shopping list when she came to visit, along with the specific type of American cheese slices she liked to fold into Saltine-sized squares and sandwich between 2 of those crackers. She made them for me when I was tiny and I made them for her near the end when almost nothing else appealed to her. A full circle of Saltines!

I’m not a sheet pan meal fan. I don’t doubt that it can work but it’s so dependent on aligning the ripeness/moisture level, cut size and distribution of ingredients on the pan. If I try, I always pile the ingredients separately so I can easily remove anything getting cooked too quickly and that kind of defeats the whole idea of cooking things together. Haha! That made me laugh, too. I love artichokes but not prepping them.

This recipe for a cranberry vanilla breakfast buckle got a lot of positive reviews when this book was covered by the baking cookbook group. Maybe I’ll start there!

Thanks for bringing this up again. And thanks to @Alex for sharing in the first place. I see the sessions are available to view on YouTube so I can catch up with them that way.

Not sure how you feel about Melissa Clark or if you've seen her new book, Dinner in One (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)? This was last month's cookbook club book. I'd pre-ordered the book but it didn't click with me and I only cooked a few recipes but there were others in the group who were delighted with it for ease in getting meals on the table with minimal fuss, though most allowed that they'd needed to tweak the recipes to add flavor. In her interview on the Salt & Spine podcast, Melissa described carefully combing through each recipe to make sure every nonessential ingredient, bowl, pan, step and transfer had been eliminated. Seemed to me that process kind of sucked the life out of the recipes. Maybe it was because this book followed Falastin in our lineup. That one has all sorts of little flourishes that make the recipes special. On the other hand, Ali Slagle's I Dream of Dinner is even more minimal than Dinner in One and I love that one. I decided the Melissa Clark books, Dinner, Dinner in an Instant and Comfort in an Instant give me a good sampling of her simple recipes and I've also got her Dinner in French and In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite so I'm going to let this one go. On a completely different tangent, I'm reading and enjoying another 2022 release: Jeremy Lee's Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many. That's an Amazon UK link as it offers a "Look Inside" sample. I ordered my copy from Blackwells after reading this interview with Mr. Lee that Russ Parsons wrote: Jeremy Lee: ‘I want to encourage people to go into the kitchen and in half an hour make something absolutely delicious’. Edited to add - Here's a little quote from the introduction of the book that I liked: I don't see a pub date yet for a US or Canadian edition and I'm not sure how it would fly with the US cookbook buyers who want brilliantly colored and styled photos of each dish. This book is largely illustrated with pen and ink drawings, which I find charming. Actual photographs are few and far between and most look like completely unstyled snapshots taken of a pot or plate on a drizzly day. Each chapter begins with an essay (which may be long or short), followed by a recipe or six. This makes for great reading as you can easily sit down and treat yourself to a chapter and get a bit of writing and a bit of cooking. The chapters are organized alphabetically, which means more or less randomly: Chard is followed by Chocolate and then Equipment. Aside from the chapter title page drawing, the only illustration in the Equipment chapter is a photo of crock full of wooden spoons. Speaking of spoons, metric measurements are standard here, aside from "soup spoons" which he uses quite a lot. I haven't cooked anything from the book yet. The griddled chicken livers, bacon and sage (half a strip of bacon topped with a sage leaf and piece of chicken liver, skewered and grilled, then brushed with olive oil & red wine vinegar) are first on my list. I've got another pile of 2022 releases that I've barely looked at so I am banned from purchasing any more until I make some major progress. If anyone wants to hear about any of these, let me know and it will give me a place to start. And yes, I know I have a problem 🙃

We actually have a whole Saltine topic over here - Saltines: Hopelessly Square - with some good comments.

In my vacation rental experience, one reason the knives are crap is at least partly due to the lack of a decent cutting surface. I’ve seen glass, ceramic, hard plastic and nary a knife-friendly cutting board in some otherwise well-equipped kitchens. All the sharpening in the world won’t last long under those conditions.

I’m surprised at that. Kitchen knives in checked baggage should not be a problem. Sheath or pack in a knife roll labeled “sharp kitchen knives” so they won’t harm anyone searching the luggage. Knives in a carry-on? No.

Maybe that roughness is just what's needed to stand up to all that cream and sugar at cold temps!

I've always thought of saltines as bomb shelter provisions. I'm pretty sure they were stacked up when we had to practice evacuating into a nearby shelter when I was a school kid.

I’m definitely interested! From the book title, it sounds like it would make a manageable amount.

I could go for that!

When you say you remove the ventricles, does that mean you are only eating the small upper chambers (atria) and discard the muscular lower part (ventricles) or does ventricle have another meaning here? Edited to add that these look like ventricles to me.

I agree and the second recipe I linked to above (on Leites Culinaria) is from that book. When it comes to go-withs, one could poll every chili lover on eGullet or anywhere else and come up with tons of options and little perfect concordance so I'd say the OP should go with what she or her audience likes and can get easily.

Yes! Taught to us by our guide on a hiking (tramping?) trip down under many years ago. Milo was the hot beverage and was tasty, warming and fun at the end of a wet, chilly day. Probably not so much at home at my age 🙃

Nice catch, @FauxPas! I didn't even try to read sideways! Target offered Tim Tams for a while but I haven't seen them there in a long time. One thing. Doing an "Aussie-style chocolate crème sandwich cookie slam" doesn't quite have the same ring as a Tim Tam Slam 🤣

Here are links to two good, authentic recipes: https://www.seriouseats.com/real-texas-chili-con-carne https://leitesculinaria.com/101686/recipes-chili-con-carne.html Both offer suggestions of what to serve with. Neither use minced beef.

I've been remiss in responding, partially in hopes that my library would get the book and I could actually get a look at it! Food52 Simply Genius is the cookbook of the month in the Food52 cookbook club and while I usually get the books, I wasn't sure about this one because it contains so many recipes from other cookbooks I own or online sources I can access. I asked my library to buy it and I'm sure they will but it's not here yet. Thus far, I've been cooking recipes I could access via the EYB digital preview, Amazon's "Look Inside" feature or online on the Food52 site or the original sources. There are some I'm curious to try that I haven't been able to find so it's not a complete rehash of readily available material. While I'm not sure it's a worthwhile book for me, it does gather some simple cooking "tricks" from a range of sources and presents them in a consistent and approachable way that I think less experienced cooks would appreciate. For example, Aki and Alex from Ideas in Food tend to share things that are just that, ideas, rather than recipes. The Caramelized Cream Seared Smashed Potatoes from their site isn't really something I think beginner cooks would feel comfortable tackling - no quantities, no pan sizes, timing, etc. I haven't seen this recipe in the book but I'm pretty sure Kristin or her team have fleshed it out into a proper recipe. Are all the recipes "Simply Genius"? Well, I thought that cocoa almond oatmeal was "Simply Awful" 🙄 On the other hand, that 5-minute tomato sauce from Heidi Swanson that I made yesterday is pretty great. I often keep a jar of Rao's Arrabiatta sauce on hand for emergency hangry situations. This recipe is a perfect sub and ready in the time it took the pasta to boil. That one is a keeper. Others are in-between. Like the sheet-pan roasted mushrooms and greens where you roast the mushrooms in the oven, then wilt the greens by tossing them right on the sheet pan and popping them back in the oven, taking them out for a stir a few times 'til they're done. Kind of efficient. Kind of a nuisance to keep opening and closing the oven. I'll keep it in mind but am not overly enamored with it. If you've viewed the Amazon "Look Inside" preview of the book, you will likely have noticed the use of rather small fonts, particularly in side notes or recipe variations, and sometimes on colored backgrounds. It's not the worst I've seen but I've had to take a screen cap and blow it up to read clearly, something I don't normally have to do. That leads me to believe that there might be readability issues with the print edition and of course, that can't easily be zoomed. This was confirmed by at least one of the cookbook group who said she was returning the book because she couldn't read it. I think they've sacrificed readability for the attractive open spaces in the book design. There - my 2 cents, from someone who hasn't actually seen the book 🤣

I was true to my word yesterday and only ate two bites of that cinnamon roll. Warmed it up in the CSO and am enjoying it for breakfast today. They posted this photo of the platter that they tempted me with yesterday on their Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl9XZVXPPDH/ I think they poured all that extra caramel sauce on after I got mine!

Had a craving for pasta with spicy Italian sausage so I tried Heidi Swanson's 5-minute tomato sauce from Food52 Simply Genius. This is a bright, somewhat acidic sauce, not a sweet, mellow one but perfect with the spicy sausage.

I thought the texture was a bit different but not at all unpleasant. The curds were soft and moist and the part that's still liquid when you take it off the heat kind of gels up so it's not too liquid-y. I think I tried this when she first shared the recipe on her blog but can find no evidence of it but I don't recall being wowed. I probably used cornstarch, which Mandy has since removed from the starch options. I used potato starch this time. It's an extra step but seems to provide a little insurance, preventing them from getting too hard when overcooked or liquid-y when undercooked. I'll try to remember to play around with it next time I'm in a scrambling mood. Exactly! I know I cooked it thicker than some people like their oatmeal but there was never a point in the process that it looked appealing! Unbaked cookie dough is a very charitable assessment compared to how I would describe the earlier stages 🤣 This morning, I went to check out a new bakery in the area. They're not officially open yet but are working out the kinks so I was able to get some bread but had to Venmo the owner as their payment systems aren't up yet. Nice looking bread: Since I hadn't had breakfast yet, I let them talk me into taking one of their cinnamon rolls home. Here it is after a couple of bites: I told myself I'll only eat a little and save the rest for tomorrow. We'll see how that goes!

Breakfast was some of that Fromage Pavé on toast, topped with TJ's Ginger Spread, kinda like a ginger marmalade, lots of little chunks of ginger. Not the sharpest ginger bite but still very nice with cheese. The label suggests using it to glaze salmon, ham or roasts. Edited to add it was $3.99/12 oz jar

Cocoa almond oatmeal from Food52 Simple Genius. A bowl of brown oatmeal doesn't really appeal to me so I planned to skip this recipe but a chilly morning put me in the mood for either hot cocoa or oatmeal. Why not? Part of the "genius" of this recipe is the use of a small non-stick skillet to cook the oatmeal - it supposedly cooks more quickly and cleans up more easily than a saucepan. Well, you really need to stir well to mix in the cocoa and it was too easy to slosh over the sides so not that "genius" to me. There's no sugar, which appealed to me as I don't like sweet oatmeal, but the resulting flavor was that of unsweetened cocoa. I added the requisite swirl of almond butter but it still looks like a bowl of poop so not terribly appetizing. I tried adding some diced, crystalized ginger and that was a nice touch but not enough to make me want to try it again.

Made some cookies earlier and figured the oven only needed a little more juice to get up to pizza temp so I had this for a late lunch Topped with leftover oven roasted mushrooms and baby kale from yesterday's breakfast.

Made Eric Kim's Gochujang Caramel Cookies from NYT Cooking Cookie Week. They're quite good. Sue Li's Orange, Pistachio and Chocolate Shortbread cookies are next.