kayb

Groan. So gorgeous. My caprese salad is good, but it can't touch that.

Got my travelogue glasses on and a glass of wine on the table. Looking forward to the trip.

No, but I've had them in a wonderful Brussels sprouts dish in a Memphis restaurant; some sprouts were shredded raw, some were sauteed, and some outer leaves deep fried. I don't know what all they did to it, but it was marvelous.

Be still, my heart! I would have been a regular customer of your bar and grill. Particularly if you had good beer on draft. Unlike @Smithy, I LOVE sweet potato fries. No extra sugar, no sweet dipping sauce (no dipping sauce atall, in point of fact). Just hot and crispy with a dusting of salt.

Pear preserves. Bought three three-pound bags of Bartlett pears from Aldi for $1.99 a bag. Six pints of pear preserves, and a pint of pear syrup, because those were some juicy pears. A moment of silence for the beloved old pineapple pear tree on the home place, which I fear has borne its last pear.

Amazon's "deals" are usually just six or 12 hours for the big discounts.

I have always, if I do say so myself, made excellent potato salad. Recently, I got on a trend of making it and it just...didn't...taste...right. Couldn't figure out why. I all but gave it up. Then it dawned on me one day. I was using either spicy brown mustard or Dijon mustard, not plain old ballpark yellow mustard. Potato salad wants ballpark mustard. The potato salad universe, I am happy to report, is now righted again.

Working my way through the beef in mine in preparating for the new beef coming next month. Found two packages of "fajita strips." Doubt they'll wind up as fajitas, but they've got me thinking some sort of stir-fry this weekend. Maybe spicy Korean beef with veggies and rice? Got a sirloin tip steak in the fridge now I thawed out Sunday and didn't use. Stroganoff tonight, I think. Have mushrooms, too.

Re: the ball cap. I occasionally wear one when I'm out running errands and have not had a good hair day. Sometimes when I'm out running said errands, I decide to eat lunch. Usually a diner, maybe the local Mexican or burger joint. Nothing fancy. You would rather look at my ball cap than my hair after I've been wearing it due to a bad hair day. Trust me on this.

I truly think the only way around this is to know the farmer you're buying from. I buy what are known as "tractor chickens." They live in a wire cage about the size of a good-sided camper trailer, with a wire bottom giving access to grass, bugs and such, and they're moved every two or three days to a different spot on the pasture. Breast is much pinker meat than grocery store chicken. It's all I'll eat. Can't be advertised as "free range." Isn't necessarily organic (depending on the kind of feed used). But it's been raised reasonably humanely, and I'm comfortable "my" farmer doesn't dose his birds with antibiotics and steroids.

If you can get the green shells off before they rot, and boil them, you can use the resulting liquid to dye cloth a medium brown.Thus, "butternut" as a description of Confederate uniform trouser color in the US Civil War.

Well, you've enabled me. I just ordered A Square Meal. I always found it interesting, as a kid, to visit the "pioneer homestead" type places, because the way of life they demonstrated was one I saw on a regular basis. I grew up in the Tennessee River Valley, part of the first generation post-TVA. Prior to TVA, that was one of the most backward places on the face of the planet, and the "old folks" still held to lots of the "old ways." I knew many people (and was related to many of them) who had no electricity and no running water in their homes, and whose way of life, other than having a car or truck, was little different than the previous three or four generations. This ought to be a good read. Looking forward to it. Thanks for the recommendation.

White bean soup with ham. Not photogenic. I was going to have kraut and fried potatoes with it, and decided the bean soup would suffice.

Welcome! You'll find a variety of cooking abilities and styles here, from professionals to enthusiastic amateurs. Jump right in with whatever entertains you! What were your specialties at your bar and grill? I've had great bar food, and pretty awful bar food.

For the first time this year, there's a little nip in the air this morning that caused me to think about hot cereal. I was scrabbling through the pantry for the steel cut oats, which I KNOW are in there but can't find, when I came across the bag of farro. H'mmm. sez I. That ought to work. So I cooked a half-cup of farro, toasting it in olive oil, then boiling it for 20 minutes or so, drained it, added a pat of butter and a bare teaspoon of maple syrup, just enough to give it a faintly sweet taste. Good fall breakfast!

I have taken to making my stock in the Instant Pot (180 minutes high pressure). I pull the solids, strain it, put it back in the washed pot, and run it through two saute cycles (20 minutes each? 30? I forget), which reduces it by half. Freeze it in one-cup portions in freezer bags, laid flat and all the possible air expressed. Works well for me. I'm about to accumulate enough jars I could can it (my stepmother loaded me up last time I was home), but my canning shelves are about full with veggies, pickles, jams and jellies.

He's a bit extreme in his food views, not to mention significantly more authoritarian than I'd like. But his "How To Cook Everything" unlocked the secret to good fried rice for me, as well as a fail-safe pizza dough, and for that I will always be eternally grateful.

An uncommonly long and warm fall here means some folks' tomatoes are still producing well, albeit smaller tomatoes than in midsummer. I bought some at the farmers' market and got gifted a big bunch by my neighbor, so I made tomato soup. Today, I'm going to try to get the pears started; they need to be peeled and cut up, and then they sit in sugar overnight for cooking and canning tomorrrow. And I've found a source for Arkansas Black apples who promises they'll be in near the end of the month, so it'll be apple butter time. And then, perhaps, I'll be through canning for the year.

Absolutely beautiful. The food AND the view. I was planning to be back in Boston this fall and was going to make a trip out on the Cape, but life intervened and it's not going to happen. Sigh. Maybe next year.

Growing up, I had to fight for every turkey I ever got. My father claimed the Army fed him turkey every day on the troop ship headed to and from Korea, and he didn't care if he EVER saw another turkey. So I'd wind up winning and getting turkey about every other year for Thanksgiving (it was almost always ham for Christmas). Now, I cook a turkey every Thanksgiving. Last year, my farmer who supplies all my meat saved me a turkey to slaughter just before the holiday. Since he was a fresh bird, I didn't get to specify how large I wanted him; he would be however big he got. He was 24 pounds. There were five adults and one kid. I saved one whole side of the breast, vacuum packed it, and then took it out and sliced it along with the ham for Christmas. And I had turkey broth and shredded leftover turkey frozen for-freakin'-ever. Best turkey I ever cooked, though. Got another one coming this year. And if he's 24 pounds, well, he just is, and we'll have turkey aplenty to do us for a while. My traditional Thanksgiving meal always includes sweet potato casserole, cranberry salad (with apples and oranges and pecans, family recipe we've had every Thanksgiving and Christmas long as I can remember, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, generally homemade mac and cheese for the sons-in-law, who love it, and a green thing of some description (roasted broccoli, green beans or Brussels sprouts). I always make a couple of desserts, including the obligatory pumpkin pie (for which I do not care, but the eldest child does), but we rarely get into them until the next day. Leftover cornbread dressing , mixed with some giblet gravy and spread in a ramekin with a "nest" hollowed out in the middle, makes an ideal vessel for a baked egg the next morning, btw.

I saved that recipe for mincemeat and pork cake, and always planned to try it. Never did. Now I've saved it again, and perhaps this time, will get to it. Thanks.

I really, really want to work in your office.

Have never had/cooked pheasant. I've heard it tends to be dry. Does it? If so, what do you do to it to offset that?

I bake a Bundt cake about once a year. Might as well just use the oven.

If it would ever get cold, I'd make posole. I still have, and use regularly, @Chris Amirault's mother-in-law's recipe, for which I have been grateful for several years now. Only posole I've ever made. See no need to try to improve on Sweet-Baby-Jesus-that's-good! For some reason, I have a tendency to hit some weird filter on my phone that gives me this sort of greenish sepia tone photo. Sunday lunch was sirloin tips in onion gravy (with rosemary and marjoram) over mashed potatoes, with a side of purple-hulled peas topped with tomato relish. Definitely better than the photo looks. I have taken to adding a sizeable spoonful of my homemade Greek yogurt into mashed potatoes. Does good things for them. Butter, and a small splash of heavy cream. Yum.