kayb

Hungry, were you?

Take a plastic container that's deeper than your sage sprigs are tall. Put about an inch of cornmeal in the bottom. Hold the sage upside down and gently pour cornmeal to surround and cover it. Cover it with a cloth and rubber-band the cloth on, and set it in the fridge. Check your sage after a couple of weeks. Mama used to do this with flowers, with a mixture of cornmeal and borax. I've tried it with herbs (obviously without the borax). It works reasonably well. The other option, of course, is to dehydrate on low heat. We haven't had a killing frost yet, so my sage plant is still thriving.

Add about four ounces of goat cheese to your ricotta. Amazing difference in the taste/texture, at least to me. H'mm. I have bolognese in the freezer. I think lasagna just went on the menu for one night next week.

OK. That's more like it. That I could actually eat.

I followed one of the recipe links. Sweetened condensed milk? Seriously? I'll pass. Tried making goetta once. Damndest mess I ever made. Wound up tossing it. Will stick to sausage.

You win!

Yeah, the sandwich one is weird. It also calls for a pound of fillings to make two sandwiches, which begs the question, for whom, the Jolly Green Giant? The Currence book, now, I had to get that. He's helped really set the pace for dining in the MidSouth. I'm gonna have to get to Oxford for breakfast at his place one of these days.

I lust after these onion rings.

Long side. If you wanted fewer rolls, but wanted them bigger, you could start from the short side. I roll my dough on a kitchen towel (the flour sack variety). I use the towel to help roll the long side all at once. Helps to have a little dish of water or egg white nearby to help seal the seam.

5 minutes at 350 in the CSO. Perfection. Before I bake, I pour a sauce of 1/2 stick melted butter, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce, and 1 1/2 tbsp. Dijon mustard.

Ham and cheese rolls, which were the inspiration for me getting the ham in the first place. Ground ham over yeast dough, to be followed by cheese. Rolled up, sliced, set to rise before topping and baking This morning's breakfast.

Love the plates and serving dishes in that last photo!

From someone who lives where the nearest GOOD Asian market is an hour and a half away: Shaoxing vinegar and wine A variety of curry pastes A variety of kimchee Good Chinese mustard Gochujang Galangal From other regions: Aleppo pepper Pimenton de la vera Seriously hot horseradish A good variety of barbecue seasoning rubs (a lot of restaurants have proprietary brands they sell, and would probably be pleased to have you market) Ditto barbecue sauces Ditto proprietary steak sauces, meat marinades Specialty small-batch hot sauces

What he said. I haven't tried freezing in plastic bags and SV'ing, but I freeze in foil trays, over rice, and pop the whole frozen tray in the CSO when I come in the door. Then I can go about changing clothes, doing whatever else needs to be done, having a drink, etc. About 45 minutes at 350 from frozen for a 4 x 6 x 2 inch tray, frozen solid. You could cut that time if you moved them from freezer to fridge the night before.

That's a gorgeous stove.

It's a good thing I haven't found them at that price. The beef guy delivered my quarter-steer this week, along with my turkey and two whole chickens, so my freezers are PACKED. To the point I could not find the frozen pound bag of coffee beans I KNOW I have (luckily, I have Keurig pods for emergencies, which this constituted). And I'd be required to buy at least four of those tenderloins at that price, for the freezer.

The IP and I made 14 4-oz portions of highly concentrated ham stock. Pressure cooked yesterday's ham bone for two hours last night, then left it on slow cook overnight. Fished the bone out and picked off the meat today, while running the stock through three saute cycles with the lid off to reduce it. It's currently in the freezer in the silicone baby food freezer containers; in a day or two, or when I think of it, I'll pop them out and transfer them to a gallon freezer bag. A couple of them ought to flavor up a pot of bean or split-pea soup quite handily.

Looks remarkably like my breakfast (it's still breakfast if it's the first thing you've eaten, right? Even if it's after noon?) Hot ham and Brie on a leftover yeast roll, with honey mustard. Except you take MUCH better photos than I. So, everyone, imagine a version of @robirdstx's breakfast in the space below.

Think I failed to ever post the results of the peanut salad. My verdict: not nearly enough brine, resulting in a relatively bland dish. I added several tablespoons of red wine vinegar and a teaspoon or two of sugar, and that improved the taste markedly. It's interesting. Don't know that I'd take the trouble to make it again. The pickled mustard seeds seemed very faint in the flavor profile. The onion and carrot sub worked nicely.

Had to make an unexpected trip to Little Rock this week, which included a shrieking preschooler having to be physically restrained while his ears were suctioned. After that, I felt like I deserved a treat, so we went to Big Orange, a local chain, for lunch. Maytag blue cheese burger, with caramelized onions and pepper jelly. Went a long way toward assuaging the trauma of the morning. Big Orange is part of a Little Rock restaurant group that includes a couple of those, a couple of pizza/pasta places (Zsa Zsa's) and a couple of Mexican places (Local Lime). Very, very good fast casual dining. They source all their ingredients locally, buns from a local bakery, grass-fed beef from area farms, etc. There were tomatoes, good tomatoes, on the burger, but they made it too hard to handle, so I took them off and ate them separately. The sweet potato fries came with chipotle ketchup, which was GOOD.

I'm with TftC on the crunchy tacos, eaten immediately, with a packet of mild sauce. About three at a time, about every six months.

Oh, my, @scubadoo97. A true work of love. That tenderloin! Mine wasn't nearly as attractive, but good. I had been craving ham, so I picked up an Appleton Farms spiral sliced ham at Aldi because I'd heard good things about them. Did my standard glaze, which consists of coating the ham with ballpark mustard and then packing brown sugar on top of that. Had it with potato salad, beans and rolls.

I'm curious. How many "stuffing," which I interpret as white bread based, vs cornbread-based "dressing" do we have here? And am I correct in believing cornbread dressing is mostly a southern thing? My dressing is all cornbread. My mother made it with probably 3/4 cornbread, and the "heels" from loaves of supermarket white bread to lighten it a bit. Sage is a common ingredient, along with onion and, for some folks, celery (I don't like celery, so none in mine). Some have chopped, boiled eggs. Some put chopped boiled eggs in the giblet gravy. This year I'm getting my dressing from a local restaurant that makes great chicken and dressing. Mine is tremendously inconsistent; some years it's great, other years inedible. Decided I'd play it safe. Leftover dressing, crumbled and moistened with chicken or turkey broth and spread into a casserole dish, with depressions for eggs to be cracked into it and then baked, makes a fine after-Thanksgiving breakfast. You can shop for a while on that.

Yum. The crust looks luscious. Love the tiny cow. Steer. Bull. Whatever.

Oh, my. I daresay I know what dinner involves...