Chris Hennes

Hey, they worked! After proofing they were solid enough for filling: I used peaches that I pureed and then cooked down to a fairly stiff and dry consistency (reserving a few solid chunks to add on top), and I made a sorghum-sweetened cream cheese for the other side: Both fillings were excellent: not too sweet, but sweet enough. I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipe for the danish pastry itself. It includes a little bit of cardamom, which I was worried would be overpowering, but it turned out great. Thank you all for your help recreating this bit of childhood nostalgia.

I ended up going with the technique in the video @Kerry Beal posted -- I cut strips 2.5cm x 50cm, twisted them up tightly so they looked like a rope, then formed the figure like in the images on that site (I think...). Here's what I ended up with: They are proofing now, and I am taking @gilbertlevine's advice and not filling them until after that step. I have also hedged my bets, I only made half of them so far. I am going to bake these off and see how they turned out, and if necessary do the second half of the batch differently, using @Alleguede's strategy.

Nice, thanks @Kerry Beal. I guess you must sort of press the spirals together before adding the filling. I sense a mess in the making! I will try to remember to take pictures .

Growing up we had a bakery down the street that made my favorite pastry: a figure-eight shaped danish with apricot preserves in one "pocket" of the eight and cream cheese in the other. I want to make them, but I don't know how the eight is formed in such a way that the filling doesn't just come out the bottom. Does anyone know the technique? This bakery has an image of basically what I'm looking for.

On the plus side, these jalapenos are fiery! I'm glad that at least if they are going to send me a ton of them, they have some heat.

chileplants.com says they have 500 varieties this year (I was good and only ordered 12).

Medium.

It's pouring jalapenos here this week, including a couple that are nearly as large as carrots:

We are going to go hide from civilization this weekend, those are snack food for the trail.

Kiwi. No idea why they were in a clamshell this week. And they were big ones, as kiwi go.

They are quite small lemons: I’d say the limes are normal lime size (very precise, I know!)

Here's today's order: The spinach bunch is large, the avocados small (they always are), and the citrus has some cosmetic blemishes. I think the rest is overstock. It's the first time I've ended up with an entire bag of apples, they usually show up one or two at a time. (And the giant brussels sprouts must be a common thing, I've got a batch that looks like that in my fridge from last week).

For those of you whose public libraries offer the Kanopy digital video service, they have recently added this film to their catalog: I just watched it this evening and really enjoyed it.

I don't think they have a second box size. Has anyone ever gotten anything from them in a different sized box? My orders always come in perfectly identical boxes, I've never seen any other sizes. And if that's the case then your weird packaging is more understandable. When they hit the weight limit of one box, they switched to the next and finished the order. The packer didn't have to think about it at all. Sure, it might have looked nicer to split the order more evenly between the boxes, but it's not like that would have actually reduced the packaging or made any meaningful difference.

Thanks, that's good to know. That's a lot less packaging than they used here in Oklahoma during the autumn the one time I tried ordering perishables. I might give it another go now that it's "cold" here.

I haven't had a problem with potatoes (or sweet potatoes) -- the occasional bad lemon or lime, and the hit rate on berries is not great, but that's true in-store as well.

During winter in NY, do they still pack meat/dairy/etc. in a separate insulated compartment, or is it tossed in the box with everything else? I basically only buy stuff from Imperfect that doesn't require the additional packaging, but I had wondered if in colder areas they skipped the extra packaging when it didn't really do anything. Or are they doing the opposite, and trying to protect greens and the like from freezing?

It's hard to do it completely fairly: for example, the avocados are very small, and Whole Foods only has organic produce for some of these options so the price can be expected to be a bit higher. So I tried to be fair, and just get one less of the organic items, and I got one "large" avocado instead of two small ones, but my Whole Foods cart is $29 for about the same stuff. I don't know how much shipping would be, in real life I'd spend the extra $6 to get the free delivery. Totally comparable, and while it's not a great cost savings, that's not really the point (for me). I do really appreciate the absolutely bare minimum packaging that Imperfect gives you. Except for the blackberries (which are in clamshells) none of that produce was in any separate packaging, it was all just chucked in the box. To be honest, that's better than I do when I go to the store!

“Medium regular” $22 for the food, $5 delivery. I never hit the free delivery price. It’s shopping, you pick the items. The item size and condition varies, but they sent me what I ordered.

Here's today's Imperfect delivery: The carrots are ginormous, as are the brussels sprouts. The bok choy actually looks quite nice, though: last time we got bok choy it was too small to use on its own as a side, I had to mix it into something else. This time I got four big ones, it's probably two sides, or one main. The weather here is perfect for this sort of service right now: it say on my front porch all afternoon, but it was in the 40s, so basically perfect for storing the greens.

Landbrot with Pressure-Caramelize Cherries and Almonds (KM p. 223) I've posted about the Landbrot before: it's a very high-hydration "Farmer's Bread"-style loaf with a very large quantity of white flour levain, plus a relatively small amount of whole wheat flour and medium rye flour. In this ingredient variation you make 800g of that dough, then add 180g of pressure-caramelized dried cherries and almonds. The inclusion is delicious: in fact, my only objection is that I would have like more almonds. Like, a lot more. Next time I'll probably make something like 4x the quantity of almonds the recipe calls for, they have a great flavor and texture.

Next Day Grits (p. 175) This recipe comes from Dr. Fred Opie, Professor of History and Foodways at Babson College. It calls for "leftover grits"... this is not a thing in my life. So I arranged to have some leftover grits. Which is to say, at lunchtime I made some grits and tossed them in the fridge. Voila! Leftover grits. To make the dish, the first step is that the grits are then rinsed to separate the grains. It says to avoid pressing on the grits, but those grains were not going to separate themselves (did I mention my "leftover grits" had butter in them?). So I sort of gently prodded them apart with my fingers. Then you make a sort of soup/porridge thing with chicken stock, coconut milk, and those grits. It's flavored with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and vinegar, and finished by adding some leftover dark chicken meat (this time I really did have leftovers, but only because I knew I wanted to make this dish!), mustard greens, a poached egg, and a little cheddar cheese. Overall the dish was OK, but it lacked the finesse of many of the other recipes in the book. It needed one more flavor and/or texture pop. Liberally doused in Frank's hot sauce, however, it was definitely edible . (NB: those are the Geechie Boy blue corn grits, which is why the color is a little odd.)

I don't think it adds that much flavor to the chicken, and it makes the skin adhere even less (well, not at all!). If you want your chicken to taste like something other than chicken, you need to give the flavor time to penetrate. An hour in the oven isn't going to do the trick, you should have just made a sauce. Then again, I might just be judging the book against itself: the last two fried chicken dishes were spectacular, and this one was just so... pedestrian.

Sunday Roast Chicken with Chickpeas and Couscous (p. 188) The chicken is roasted with plentiful herbs and Berbere spice brown butter under the skin. The couscous has olives, red onion, chickpeas, tomatoes, red wine, cumin, turmeric, and is finished with lemon juice, lemon zest, and sauteed chicken livers. The "herbs crammed under the skin" technique is not my favorite way of roasting chicken, but it turned out reasonably well. Overall the dish was good, but a little "homey" compared to the rest of the book.

Today's box was pretty good: one bad lemon and some sketchy berries, but otherwise usable. I really like the minimal packaging they use: And the haul: What would a week be without some somewhat-the-worse-for-wear carrots?