Chris Hennes

Scallion Waffles and Sesame Chicken Salad (p. 70) Tonight for dinner I made something actually intended as a dinner food.. These are completely savory waffles with the flavor profile of scallion pancakes, more or less. They are served with a sesame-flavored chicken salad which I thought was OK, but needed something crunchy added, and probably something acidic. Obviously those are easy changes to make on the fly, so I suggest tasting your chicken salad before serving that then modifying it as needed.

Crispy Cornmeal Waffles (p. 44) I used Bob's Red Mill coarse ground cornmeal here, which gives these waffles an excellent texture. They are just barely sweetened with maple syrup (in the batter), and are topped with orange supremes in Gran Marnier. My only criticism is that I'd be inclined to make far more orange topping than the recipe calls for, probably going up to a full orange per waffle. Overall the dish was delicious, however. Note that the batter is quite thin, so you can get just about any interior texture you want based on how full you make your iron.

Blueberry-Yogurt Waffles (p. 52) These were not actually the original plan for dinner tonight, but there were fresh blueberries at the grocery store today, so given this week's theme it seemed appropriate. I've never tried adding blueberries to waffles before: I guess I thought the berries would be too big, and wouldn't cooperate with the iron. This turned out to be a non-issue, and in fact they worked quite well. I found the recipe to be a bit too sweet, so in the future I'd be inclined to cut the sugar in half. Also, none of her sweet waffle recipes have any salt in them, which I think is crazy, so I added a quarter tsp.

I have no idea how I was unaware of the existence of this book. I have several of Greenspan's others, and I love waffles, so I ordered myself a copy. After reading it through, I figured I'd try a bunch of the recipes, so started a separate topic for it here. Please come over and post your experiences!

Banana-Oatmeal Waffles (p. 46) These are a sweet-ish breakfast waffle made with old-fashioned oats, seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg, and including sliced bananas in the batter. They are not a light-and-shattering-style waffle, but are pretty substantial. I found them sweet enough in their own right to eliminate the need for syrup, though that's what Greenspan suggests as their accompaniment. Exterior: Interior:

Waffles: From morning to midnight Dorie Greenspan 0-688-12609-X also in paperback here. Over in the Waffles! topic, @Nancy in Pátzcuaro mentioned the existence of this book, published in 1993 -- I had no idea it existed, so I didn't get a copy until last week. I'm planning on giving a few of the recipes a try this week, and I know a couple others have the book, so I figured it was worth a topic of its own. Who has it, and what have you made from it?

I made the recipe as written here, and don't recall having any problem with the saltiness. Did you make everything else as written?

@shain -- Paper white narcissus? (Surely not garlic chives!)

The ingredient list for mine includes sugar, which made it a bit sweet (not overly so, but definitely noticeable). I'm guessing based on yours that it's not sweet at all, right? I think mine also has star anise in it (based on the taste, the ingredients list is not helpful there).

Honestly I haven't yet met a pickled mustard I didn't like... here's the one I used tonight:

Fuchsia's Emergency Midnight Noodles (p. 288) I make the noodle dishes from this book all the time, but I think this is the first time I've made this one and included the optional egg and pickled mustard. The recipe calls for "Olive Vegetable" as the mustard component -- I don't have that one, but I've got something that at least looks similar. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it actually is! It's got mustard greens as the first ingredient, then soybean oil, then "vegetarian pork." Here's what it looks like in action:

Cat's ears (p. 266) This is a chicken stock soup with chicken, ham, bamboo, dried shiitake, and peas (which I substituted with fresh garbanzos since I had them). The "cat's ears" pasta is made as part of the recipe, and is time consuming but also pretty entertaining if you enjoy making homemade pastas. Unlike most of Dunlop's other recipes which tend to make enough for 2-3, this makes quite a large amount of soup. The recipe says "4-6 as part of a Chinese meal", but I think you could easily serve 8 if you had a few other courses. I served it as a main dish in big bowls and still had enough for 3-4.

"Springtime" noodles (p. 260) Just noodles in chicken broth seasoned with light and dark soy and sesame oil. As usual I replaced the spring onion greens with chives because I have them (for another week or so, judging by the forecast!).

Green soybeans with snow vegetable (p. 180) I used up all the rest of my homemade snow vegetable here, there is almost as much snow vegetable as soybean. It's also got a bit of pork and bamboo shoot, but that's basically it. Ten minutes, tops.

Hangzhou "blanched slice" noodles (p. 262) Snow vegetable (p. 331) Wheat noodles with bamboo shoot, pork, and snow vegetable (homemade, in this case, from the recipe in the book). The broth, which is hiding under the noodles in my photo, is just water and a little light and dark soy sauce. I used less water than she did, so I did not end up with as much broth as in her photo.

@Smokeydoke I use baby bok choy for that dish, and only halve them. I like them just barely cooked, though, so it may just be more to my taste anyway.

Hangzhou late-night noodles (p. 261) Fresh wheat noodles stir-fried with pork, spiced tofu, Sichuan preserved vegetable, oyster mushrooms, and Chinese chives. I can't get the alkaline noodles here, and didn't have time to make them, so I just used plain wheat noodles. I actually liked the texture of this brand better than the last one I used.

Zhoushan fish chowder (p. 148) A quick fish stock is made from the bones of the fish, plus ginger, spring onion, and Shaoxing. Into this you add tomatoes and potatoes, simmer until the tomato is cooked, then add bite-size pieces of fish (I used red snapper).

Dai Jianjun's vegetarian "crabmeat" (p. 125) This is essentially scrambled eggs flavored with ginger, white pepper, and Chinkiang vinegar. I fear I probably over-mixed them while cooking and lost some of the marbled effect she was going for in the recipe, but there's no picture of this one so I don't quite know what it was supposed to look like.

For the Shaoxing "small stir-fry" she gives 绍兴小炒. I think it would be fair to describe this as belonging to the same family as the recipe from her Sichuan book.

Speaking of Chinese chives... Shaoxing "small stir-fry" (p. 99) The recipe is roughly equal amounts of pork, Chinese yellow chives, bamboo shoot, and preserved mustard tuber. My chives are green: my understanding is that if you grow them deprived of light they turn yellow, but I haven't done that, and haven't ever seen yellow chives for sale here either. Can someone who has comment on if it would be worth growing a batch in the dark next year? There are more chives than pork in this particular stir fry, so if the flavor matters anywhere I'd expect it to matter here.

I'm in Oklahoma: dehumidification is not a problem, I just use a fan (right now ambient humidity in my garage is 26%). I considered a smaller humidifier but decided to just stick with what I already owned as a start. If it ends up needing to run often during this cure I'll revisit the data and see if it's necessary to downsize.

I don't follow, @dcarch -- I've never heard of a Peltier humidifier, and I don't need any additional heating or cooling. I found the cooling performance of Peltier devices to be insufficient at this price point compared to a compressor-driven refrigerator, which is how I wound up with this system in the first place. Got a link to a Peltier-based humidification system?

The incubation phase went smoothly, with the average hitting the target temperature of 27°C exactly, and only a little bit over the humidity target of 80%. Everything smells right, so this morning I kicked it into the long-term curing program, with a target temperature of 15°C and 60% RH. Here's the data from the incubation:

Let the games begin... current targets are set to 27°C and 80%RH for the incubation stage, which I will run overnight. Salume suggests only a 12 hour incubation stage, which is much shorter than the recommendation from Chr. Hansen (the bacteria's manufacturer). However, I've had superb results from this book so far so I'm going to go with the book's recommendations, I think. There's no real rush to get the pH all the way down to the target right away, the recipe includes plenty of DQ #2.