blue_dolphin

I suffer through the florets for the stems, though I rarely serve them separately. If I do, it’s peeled, cut into coins or julienne, macerated with salt, rinsed and stir fried alone or with other veg or pickled. Irene Kuo’s out of print The Key to Chinese Cooking 1977 has a good description.

You guess correctly!

Could go either way. Sometimes there's something I've been wanting to try and I know it's best to get to it in the AM. Or maybe I can hear tasty leftovers to calling me from inside the fridge and feel obliged to answer them 🙃Or, I fart around until I need something quick and easy. Today, I had in mind to make the grilled asparagus, fried bread, poached egg and aged balsamic vinegar from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home to use up some asparagus. Then I saw the croutons were supposed to fry for ~ 20 min and my bread was in the freezer and needed to thaw out first so turned to the figs, which also needed to be used and made a nice accompaniment to my coffee. Thus sustained, I moved on to the croutons slow fried in garlic oil and am now enjoying my previously intended breakfast, even if it's pretty much lunchtime! I'd really like a fig tree but my landscape person said they were too big and between the birds and rats, it's hard to get a good crop so I pay up at the farmers market. They're usually $5 for what I'd call a pint basket, generally more than 6, but depends on the size. They're usually ripe and ready to eat and since I got these guys on Thursday, they were more than ready!

I can't think of a local store that does it any other way....oh wait...maybe Sprouts? But everyone else has the set-up you describe for dairy.

Toasted baguette slices spread with goat cheese, topped with fresh figs and a drizzle of hot honey. Thomcord grapes and rosemary marcona almonds on the side.

Thanks! The mint is from Baltazar Farms in Fillmore, purchased at the local farmers market from Albert Baltazar, seen below with his daughter. They do a good job keeping the herbs looking perky, even in the hot weather!

Some more cooking with the Red Weapons p 104 that I made last week: Give the Gift of Pickled Shrimp p 109 - I know @Shelby made these when the book first came out and liked them. I agree. Love the idea of using some of the oil to sauté the shrimp and will steal that for a pasta dish. The shrimp came out tender and full of flavor. Perfect to set up ahead and have an easy no-cook dish to pull out of the fridge on a hot evening. Feisty Creamycado Dressing p 127 - The photo of this in the book looks orange but mine is decidedly green. I enjoyed it as a dip for tots. I'll use the Red Weapon/avocado combo again, likely just mashed with a fork for a quick guac shortcut. K&W Made Me Do It Skillet Cornbread p 130 - Here, I learned that Red Weapons are a great addition to cornbread but I don't recommend this particular recipe. While the flavor is good and I love the crispy edges you get in a skillet cornbread, this one is very dense and oily. I split the wedges, toasted them and they're not bad along side some beans or greens but I'll try Red Weapons in the Jubilee cornbread instead of making this again!

Here are the 3 mixes I posted about yesterday, now spun and all pretty pastels. At top left is grapefruit & shiso ice cream based on a recipe for grapefruit & basil ice cream from a Diana Henry book. I used red shiso leaves but just steeping in the milk did not infuse the bright color that @cdh asked about. I also put some leaves in grapefruit juice with the same result. I got a tiny bit of color with lemon juice. I think you really need vinegar and/or heat to pull out the color. That said, the herbal flavor does come through. At top right is avocado-grapefruit sherbet from Hello, My Name is Ice Cream and at the bottom is grape and rosemary sherbet from the same book. All good. The two grapefruit recipes used similar amounts of grapefruit and zest but the flavor is more pronounced in the one where the zest was bashed up with the sugar with a mortar & pestle before going in with the dairy so I'll keep that in mind. I need to pick up some more grapefruit as I'd like to try it with the shiso in a sorbet. The Thomcord grapes that I subbed for Concords aren't as punchy but there's still a nice grape flavor and the combo with rosemary is nice.

Ooooh - shiso shrub! I gotta look into that! Per the recipe I'm using as a guide, the grapefruit zest gets pulverized with the sugar before combining with the milk and heating, then the leaves go in to steep for “a couple of hours” then get strained out before using it to make the custard with egg yolks. The grapefruit juice gets stirred in just before freezing. I'm using red shiso leaves from a friend’s garden but I don’t see any color being imparted. Maybe I’ll try infusing some into the grapefruit juice.

I’d say that was just the choice of the article author or her editors to use, “…these foods include…” with a few examples of foods that specifically require dating. I don’t believe the newspaper was attempting to present a comprehensive listing. Lots of items like meats, fish and seafood are all considered potentially hazardous and subject to dating requirements and it would be tedious to list every one.

As others have said, citrus zest works well. The blades make it undetectable post-spin except in that thin layer on the bottom & sides that they don’t reach. If that’s an issue, use a spatula to scrape the sides & bottom, level the mix and run a respin. A while back, I made a lemon ice cream with a lemon curd swirl and really liked the contrast of creamy ice cream and tangy curd. Will be curious to hear how it works with sorbet! This AM, I mixed up two more sherbets from Hello, My Name is Ice Cream: Avocado-Grapefruit and Grape and Rosemary. That second one is supposed to be made with Concord grapes which don’t grow locally but I got some nice Thomcords (Concord-Thompson seedless hybrid) at the farmers market yesterday and figured I’d give them a try. Won’t be as flavorful, but we’ll see. I'm also trying a grapefruit & shiso ice cream based on a recipe for grapefruit & basil ice cream from a Diana Henry book.

This was also shared last year by @Kim Shook over here in the vintage cooking booklets and pamphlets topic. Best for about 5 min? Hard to imagine dispatching that volume in 5 min…and if it’s for a crowd….where are they all going to go 🤣

Thanks and nice to “see” you! Looks like K&L carries it but is out of stock so I requested an email if they get it in again.

This is zero help with rescuing your current batch and may not be the direction you want to go in but I remember someone on one of the Creami groups recommending the coffee creamers from NutPods as a base. They have sweetened and unsweetened, flavored and unflavored versions and are sold in groceries around here. Most of their line is an almond/coconut base but they also have an oat milk line. Their ingredient list is less scary than a lot of nondairy stuff.

Hmmm. I'm wondering if a very warm room temp could be the issue. As @heidih said, the mix in that bowl looks very loose and I'm wondering if it was warm enough to split or break.

Tuna salad on a brioche bun...handy leftovers in the fridge are always the path of least resistance!

Sounds like Cheerios are the main cause*. If there are any left, I recommend disposing of them ASAP * aside, perhaps, from a certain lack of spatial awareness

Maybe this?

I generally pay $1.25/ bunch of organically grown scallions at the farmers market. $1.29/bunch at Trader Joe’s. This is also the regular price for organic scallions at Whole Foods but they are $0.89/bunch this week 3 bunches/$1.00 at Vallarta Supermarket (mostly Mexican chain) 5 bunches/$0.99 at Valley Marketplace (small, pan-ethnic chain), on special

Peach jalapeño frozen yogurt from Dana Cree's Hello, My Name is Ice Cream Peach & jalapeño is one of my favorite flavor combinations but I've never tried it in dairy base. I'd up the amount of peach purée here but otherwise it's really good. Pleasantly spicy.

Interesting. Are they makrut limes? The label picture looks more smooth but I can’t make out what’s inside the jar. What's in the brine? Are the limes intact or cut in some way? I’m wondering how similar they are to the salt preserved citrus common in Middle Eastern cooking. Looking forward to seeing how you use them!

My breakfast today from This Will Make It Taste Good: Red Weapons Greens on Mozzarella Toast p p 125 This a pan-fried slice of bread, topped with mozzarella and broiled then layered with a pile of greens cooked with Red Weapons on top. The take home here is cooking greens with Red Weapons which is a great shortcut to flavorful greens of any sort. IMO, Vivian over complicates it by calling for chopped Red Weapons and pickling liquid as separate ingredients but one could easily just scoop a ladle of Red Weapons into the pan, going easy on the oil and skipping the butter that's in the recipe. You'll get a nice, tasty mess o'greens. I used baby kale but any cooking greens would do. Kinda wish I'd mashed beans on the toast instead of melting the cheese but I can do that next time.

Salt water taffy always makes me laugh. In my lab group at UCLA, for a time, there was a bit of a competition to see the most unlikely locations from which one could bring back salt water taffy. Once I started looking, I began to see it almost everywhere in the US, certainly far from any natural sources of salt water. Not sure if it's still the case as I haven't been anywhere lately but it used to be in almost every airport - handy for the procrastinators among us 🙃

I know you didn't ask me, but as far as I know, they offer the original, small chunk and a smooth version of Branston pickle. I've seen reports that say the small chunk tastes sweeter than the original but I've only had the original so I can't say. The smooth might be good for smearing on a sandwich, but doesn't really interest me. As to sweetness, yes, it's sweet but I wouldn't define it as a sweet pickle without other modifiers. I'm not sure what you would call a sweet pickle. Sweetness is surely there, like in many chutneys but the level of savory and spice is above what you'd find in the average sweet pickle relish in the US, which tends to be mostly sweet with a little sour.

What’s the Hiberno connection?