kayb

I have done something I don't like to do -- gotten a cookbook I really wanted, on my kindle. I find it not friendly for browsing/looking at recipes, and I just prefer to have hard-copy cookbooks. But when a discount book "deal-finder" to which I subscribe offered me French Country Cooking, by Francoise Branget, for $1.99, I couldn't resist. The first few electronic pages have me contemplating ordering the dead-tree edition.

Belatedly, welcome. Guess you eased in while I was occupied elsewhere. Love to hear more about your curing meat...that's a plunge I'm thinking of taking this fall, once I get through canning and freezing and it cools off enough I can hang stuff in the storage building.

There is a watermelon in my outside refrigerator. I believe this may be its fate. I could make an entire meal off that and a few wedges of cheese...and a bottle of wine.

42.

I would poach a couple of chicken thighs, shred them, mix with corn kernels and basil, and use to stuff zucchini I'd then either grill or roast in the oven, depending on my mood and the climate. Sliced tomatoes on the side, as well as maybe some stir-fried green beans.

Well, I got around to at least two-thirds of my Hawaiian meal tonight. We decided we weren't hungry enough for steak, so we had the tuna poke with rice as an entree, along with the Hawaiian potato salad and some cucumber salad I threw together for good measure. The poke was excellent. I chilled the tuna for about 45 minutes in a dressing of soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and a bit of mirin. Tossed it with chopped pineapple just before serving. Forgot the sesame seeds. Rice was plain brown rice cooked in the IP. Sweet potato salad holds promise; I'll try it again tomorrow to see what I think after the flavors have more time to meld. Sweet potato chunks and more pineapple, some chopped bacon and scallions, dressing of mayo, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a dash of Sriracha to liven it up. Off the top, I'll ditch the bacon next time; I love bacon as well as the next guy, but it hit a false note with me on this. Dressing could have been a touch sweeter; recipe called for sweetening to taste with agave and I didn't have any, so I used a teaspoon of white corn syrup. Could have stood another one. Cucumbers had a dressing of gonger, soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar and sesame oil. Standard issue stuff, and we love it. Hawaiian ribeye will marinate another day (I would have been nervous about that, but the recipe says it can marinate up to three days), and I'll grill it tomorrow. We'll have sweet potato fries in the CSO, and maybe more cucumbers. Meanwhile, I have leftover rice for breakfast tomorrow.

My favorite is that I can saute the makings for a soup, stew or braised dish before shifting over to the slow-cook function. Love it for beans. Love it for rice; haven't tried for grits. Also love being able to cook a cut of meat, quickly, as in for carnitas, etc. Retains moisture well in dishes with chicken breasts, which I have a hard time not drying out. I use it at least twice a week. More in cool weather, when I tend more toward soups, stews and braised things. Oh, and it makes GREAT apple butter.

Good to know. Red cabbage very soon. With latkes and some kind of good sausage. Too damn hot to do braised meat (I know I could cook it in the IP, but it's too hot to EAT braised meat). I had never thought of using leftover meat loaf in a casserole; I always go with ML sandwiches with (per Rotuts) a good, runny Brie. This intrigues me. I think it'd work in a shepherd's pie, too. Sounds like a perfectly balanced meal to me. Am finally going to get around to the create-my-meal challenge for this evening, being as I'm actually going to be home.

They did, finally. Took about 36 hours. Turned dark, though. I didn't dip them in any preservative. Cucumbers were kinda fun. I've been munching on them. They're a good snack. That's kind of what I thought. It's a good way to get rid of excess produce I don't want to freeze or can. And I think I may try my hand at jerky. It's obviously not a heavy-duty machine, but should work just fine for my purposes.

@Shelby, I've found if I want to convert a recipe for a 9 x 5 to two 8 x 4s, I can increase ingredients by 1/3 and it works pretty well. Also, I think I knocked off about 10 minutes from the cooking time listed in the recipe for CSO bread, a timing I arrived at by checking with my instant-read thermometer. When it got to 195, I yanked it.

Appropriate timing, as I have a head of red cabbage in the fridge and a hankering for Austrian red cabbage. It freezes well? I'm the only one who likes it, so I'm thinking of making some and freezing small portions. A work of art. Makes me hungry.

My very favorite summer dessert is blackberry cobbler. Now, I am a cobbler purist. I do not like the ones with the cakey-like topping, although I'll accept that on a peach cobbler (but not a berry one). No, I want dumplings. Thin, non-risen dumplings. I make up a pastry recipe for a two-crust pie. Roll it out, cut out a big enough piece for the top. Cut the rest up into short, thin dumplings. Stew the fruit just lightly with sugar. (Dumplings are not sweet at all, but will soak up sweetness from the fruit juices.) Put it in a deep dish pie plate. Distribute the dumplings around in the dish. Top with the top crust, pierce in two or three places, brush with melted butter and sprinkle with a little granulated sugar. Bake at 350F for 30 minutes or so, until the top crust is golden. Eat within 30 minutes. With vanilla ice cream. Repeat until dish is empty.

Well, I stopped by Aldi yesterday to pick up half and half, cream, and a pineapple, and they had the dehydrators (we're always a little slow here in Arkansas...). So I got one. About to try dehydrating cherries, because I bought some at the grocery a week ago, haven't touched them, and need to do something with them....

It's mild, with a rich, buttery note.

My newly-opened Kroger -- one of the big upscale models -- has a great (for small-town South) cheese section. I've been getting fresh buffalo mozzarella, and Rogue River blue, St. Andre, and more kinds of cheddar and gouda and Swiss than you can shake a stick at.

I got up hungry this morning (because I didn't have time to eat dinner last night amid canning tomatoes), so I cooked bacon (needed some chopped up bacon to keep in the fridge anyway), and eggs. Added a slab of Anadama bread toasted in the CSO, topped with some fresh ricotta and apple butter. I'm ready for the day.I

This is the recipe from the book. I followed it to the letter (scaling it down by half). It was awful. Much more bland than the restaurant version. I'm going to roast the eggplant next time, use a tangier cheese, and up the seasoning. The texture was pretty much on point.

It's this one. I am trying to duplicate the Boars Head brand horseradish pickle that I love so much, and this recipe looks like it ought to be about right. Instead of strips of horseradish root, I'm using a tablespoon of prepared horseradish per jar.

Well....correction. Pickles will be tomorrow. I had tomatoes that were going to be too far past their prime if I didn't do something with them, so they took precedence. I'd bought a box of "seconds" at the market Saturday, and had close to a half-gallon of Romas and cherry and grape tomatoes I'd picked here. The toll so far: 11 pints of tomatoes (I still have quarts left from last year, and sometimes, a pint is all I need), three quarts and a pint of tomato juice. Still on the stove simmering is tomato sauce; I estimate there'll be 12 half-pints of that.

Thanks!

I'm pickling today as well. Sweet-spicy horseradish pickle chips. Cucumbers soaking in ice water now. Must make a quick run to store and get more horseradish. I do not run out of horseradish at this house.

@Shelby-- next time, try coating that scored surface of the eggplant with a mixture of honey and miso. Read that in a blog somewhere and it remains one of my favorite methods. I am still attempting to recreate one of my favorite restaurant dishes, an eggplant casserole that features onion, cheese and cracker crumbs, from a local meat-and-three institution. The recipe is in their cookbook, which I have. The cookbook lies.

I love shrimp, and I agree, for the most part, with your construction of cocktail sauce. I'd add a drizzle of lemon juice and a shake or two of Louisiana hot sauce. Your meal looks gorgeous. I'll eat fresh when I'm on the coast and can get 'em, but many shrimp are flash-frozen on the boats within minutes of being caught, and are very difficult to tell from fresh. I refuse to deprive myself of a food I truly love just because of circumstances of geography. Surely is. To me, smothered represents a gravy, as Ashen notes -- a flour- or roux-thickened sauce. Grew up on smothered round steak. But I must quarrel with you, as a Southerner who loves her grits -- it's CHEESE grits -- never CHEESY. As Mitt Romney found out during the most recent Presidential campaign.

Well, it's not going to happen early this week; I've just learned I have meetings each of the coming three evenings, so that does for cooking. Will go ahead and start the steak marinating today and plan to have it Thursday. Meanwhile, I'm going to choose Lisa Shock to share her ingredients, and perhaps whoever else is in the pipeline can cook and report back before I can.

That is a thing of beauty. What was the temp? Re: SPFs -- if you have Schwan's delivery frozen stuff in your 'hood, they do a good SPF.