kayb

I made some recently that was pretty decent; I like a spicy mustard, and this hit the spot. I used half black and half yellow seeds, about 2/3 cup each; I used about 1/2 cup vinegar and then added a 12-oz bottle of Green Flash Double Stout to my quart jar. I let it sit for about 10 days. The seeds swelled to take up almost all the liquid; I was prepared to add more if needed. I blended it in a couple of batches, adding 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1 tsp black pepper to each batch, and left it fairly grainy. Since then, I've taken smaller portions and added things like horseradish, cayenne, honey, and coriander to it to experiment with flavors. If I wanted to flavor it, I'd change the proporitons to 3:1 yellow to black seeds.. I had some bourbon mustard on a burger recently. It was knockout good, and I want to try to make it.

Yesterday, I got ambitious and browned up a pound of sausage, mixed it with six scrambled eggs and four ounces of grated cheese to use to fill eight hand pies from yeast dough I had reposing in the fridge. I had about twice as much filling as I needed, so I used the rest to make a dozen breakfast muffins. I'm fixed for breakfast for a while! Finished product: In progress: Baked. Forgot to brush with milk, so the floury tops aren't too attractive. Muffins:

Shelby, if I adopt you, will you fix me a Mothers Day spread like that one?

David, I'm drooling on the keyboard over that beef cheek pie.

Here's one:

Pork tenderloin, SV 3 hours at 125 F, cooled, then roasted at 425 with a honey chipotle butter glaze. Roasted sweet potato wedges with smoked paprika. First caprese of the season.

Some other favorite uses for beer -- I once had a recipe for a Guinness bran bread, a mildly sweet quick bread that was similar to a bran muffin in taste, and was absolutely to die for when schmeared with Nutella.I like to simmer pork chops in beer and caraway seeds.Must-have addition to a pot of chiliProbably some others, but those come to mind.

Ripe tomatoes were the high point of today's market, where, as you can see, I did considerable damage. A big bundle of leaf lettuce; it'll go with green onions and radishes from last week to make a wilted lettuce salad tonight. Two big tomatoes. I probably should have gotten more. Green beans. Strawberries. More asparagus -- lots of it,as we won't have it for all that much longer. Farm eggs, pork sausage, and a pork tenderloin. Cucumbers, to go in rice vinegar, turmeric, mustard, white pepper and sugar for refrigerator pickles. And two bars of homemade soap, one lemon-lavender and one rosemary-mint. Then I stopped by the roadside produce stand and picked up zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, sweet potatoes and a cantaloupe. The pork tenderloin, the wilted lettuce, a sweet potato cut in wedges and roasted, and a caprese are all on the menu tonight.

The first bacon, tomato and avocado sandwich of the season. There IS bacon on there, I promise. Just not a whole lot. I was much more intent on the tomato and avocado.

ninagluck, that is a lovely dish, and I'll bet it tasted as wonderful as it looks.

My very favorite thing to make with beer is carbonnades a la flamande (and I probably misspelled that), with a ton of good, sweet onions, some well-marbled chuck roast cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes, and a bottle or two of Green Flash Double Stout, which is my beer of choice for this dish. I set about six sliced onions to caramelizing while I salt, pepper and dust about two pounds of beef cubes in flour. They get browned in batches in the stock pot, and removed as they're browned for the next batch. Then the well-caramelized onions are added along with the beer and a cup or two of beef stock, and the whole thing simmers for two or three hours. Then I add a tablespoon of prepared mustard and about a half-tablespoon of brown sugar and cook a bit longer, and finally, stir some cornstarch into a cup of the stock and add it back to the pot for the final velvety texture. It's great over egg noodles, but I also love it over grits (ok, polenta). I've made it with a bunch of different beers, but the Green Flash is my favorite.

Think I will try mine on fish tonight for the first time.

Still on a spring vegetable kick -- yellow crookneck squash and sweet onions, new potatoes simply boiled with butter, a thin pork loin chop, and waffle iron cornbread, an innovation for which I'll be forever grateful to Kim Shook.

Most grocery store tomatoes are abominable; picked green in the Rio Grande Valley or similar clime, shipped north, forced-ripened with carbon dioxide, and utterly pale, insipid, and tasteless. I have had decent luck getting Camparis and Romas over the winter, and when I'm really jonesing for fresh tomato taste, I get cherry or grape tomatoes. In our part of the world -- latitude roughly the same as Oklahoma City and Nashville, TN -- I can generally start finding acceptable tomatoes in mid-April at produce markets. They allege to be vine-ripened, usually in Georgia or Florida. They're a little late this year because of a late spring. We also have "hoop house" tomatoes -- started early under clear plastic stretched over Quonset-hut-style frames, plastic removed when weather warms up -- that are generally ready by the first of May, and again late this year due to the later spring. I do find decent tomatoes almost year-round at some of the higher-end restaurants. I guess they're greenhouse grown. Edited to add: I canned several bushels of tomatoes in different preparations last summer. I have been astounded at the difference in taste between them and canned tomatoes from the grocery, even San Marzanos. Sauces made with my canned tomatoes taste like they were made with fresh tomatoes. I'm just about out of everything now, so I'm anxious for tomatoes to come in fast and furious so I can can a lot more this year.

In honor of scoring the first zucchini of the season, along with an alleged vine-ripened-in-Florida tomato, we had zucchini fritters, creamed corn and sliced tomato for dinner. The corn was some I had frozen last year. The tomatoes were good, if not spectacular; flavor was vine-ripened but the texture was mealy, I expect from refrigeration on the trip up here. Still better than grocery store tomatoes, by a long shot. I'll have the rest of that one today on a BLT. The fritters weren't....quite....right. I think it was the off-brand saltines I used for crumbs. Must go back to using Nabisco.

If I didn't use mine for anything but steaks, it'd be worthwhile. But I love a pork loin roast done in one. Going to try some short ribs this weekend.

Meant to express that the weight prior to cooking was 8 ounces. Didn't do a very good job of expressing that. Sorry.

No, Huiray, I lived in Hot Springs before I moved to Jonesboro. Wish the farmers DID commute. We have several who come 50-60 miles, mostly because we're the largest city in about that range to the east, west or north (we're also about an hour from Memphis, southeast of us). I generally make a visit to an Asian market once a month or so when I have occasion to be in Memphis (haven't done that since I started thinking about quail eggs, but I will soon!). The Jonesboro market is actually operated by Arkansas State University, which has a sizeable ag program, but the growers all seem to be unrelated to the university. Oh, and I stopped by the side-of-the-road vendor today. Yellow squash and zucchini from Louisiana. New potatoes from -- I forget where. Alleged vine-ripened tomatoes from Florida. I demurred at the tomatoes, and let him talk me into a single one, just to see if they're decent. We shall see, in a blt tomorrow.

Road trip with daughter yesterday to Little Rock to take grandson to Children's Hospital for a second opinion on a problematic ear condition; good report, and we stopped for dinner and later dessert on on the two-hour drive back home. First, a burger and fries at Big Orange, a local chain of very excellent burger places. You can get everything from truffle and wagyu burgers to turkey burgers with miso and ginger, and a multitude of other offerings. We split a bacon/avocado burger, with the bacon from a local packing company, Petit Jean Meats (excellent cured meats; info here). The beef is from a local grower, and the pre-cooked patty is an eight-ouncer. It came with a good half-inch of chunky avocado puree spread over one side of the bun, and lettuce and tomato on the other. Bun from a local bakery. Plenty to split. I had sweet potato fries, and she had regular. Grandson had a grilled cheese and appeared to like it just fine. Got half-way home and stopped at a little dairy bar type place that's noted in Northeast Arkansas for good food (love their smoked chicken sandwich!) and, this time of year, their strawberry shortcake. Really more of a sundae, as it has soft-serve on the bottom, topped with macerated strawberries, surrounded by rectangular shortbread wafers dusted in sugar before they're baked, and topped with whipped cream and chopped pecans. Astoundingly good. I asked them once how many they served a day during the season -- the answer? About 200 or 300. In a town whose population is about 1,800, but people come from MILES away to eat there during strawberry season. Later in the year, they'll shift to a peach shortcake which is the same model, and just as good. Made a long day and drive worth it.

I miss the Hmong farmers at my Farmers' Market here in Jonesboro. We had two families of Hmong farmers in Hot Springs, and I could always count on them for peas, both snow and sugar snap, long beans, daikon, Japanese eggplant, and assorted vegetables the others just didn't grow. On the other hand, I could rarely get asparagus there. Here in Jonesboro -- also a college town, but very much a "country music" town as opposed to an "indie/jazz/blues" kind of town like Hot Springs, we generally get "country" vegetables. Plus asparagus. And I'm glad to have them. But I'd surely love to have green peas and some of the other veggies. Meat prices at the market, I think, are quite reasonable. I pay $1.50 per pound on the hoof for my quarter steer, which works out to between $5.50 and $6 per pound for my finished beef. So I'm paying the same for hamburger as for porterhouse, and everything in between. I'll take that. If I buy it by the package at the market, it goes from $5 for hamburger to upwards of $12 for steak. Pork also starts about $5 for sausage, $4 for ground pork, $7.50 or so for chops. We have a roadside vendor who sets up all summer, and sells produce that's not local, but that he buys wholesale from farmers in a several-state area. I find that I get better produce that's not in season yet here, which he brings from states south of us, than I can get from the grocery. He has tomatoes from Georgia right now which are acceptable, barely, as well as peas and green beans which are several steps above supermarket quality. I believe I shall stop by and see him today.

Are you talking about savory potato cakes which have cheese, as opposed to sweet cheesecakes which have potato? I've often made potato cakes using leftover cooked potatoes, usually stewed or baked, leaving lumps of potato in the batter. They involve mashing some of the potato and/or using the stewing liquid and adding flour, egg and milk to make a stiff batter, then frying as fritters. I see no reason you couldn't add cheese to this; you'd just have to be extra careful to avoid sticking as they cooked. I have no experience with adding potato to a sweet cheesecake. I have had savory cheesecake (notably the crawfish cheesecake at the Palace Cafe in New Orleans) which could, I guess, utilize potato in the batter.

It was a dinner marred by a couple of mishaps, but it turned out OK. First, I'd been smoking a bacon-barbecue meat loaf, and when I went out to take the meat loaf off and put the steaks on, I found the gas bottle had run out and had to change plans and cook the steaks and asparagus inside. Then, my hollandaise -- it went together perfectly, and I covered the soup mug in which I'd made it with foil and set it on the back of the stove to stay warm. I sat it too close to where the oven vents heat through one of the units, though, and it curdled a bit on me. Didn't hurt the taste. It's very bright yellow because I used farm eggs. And as I was the only one in the house who likes hollandaise, I put it on my Hasselback potato, as well. Because I could. This was the purple asparagus from my farmers market trip yesterday morning. Very good -- less of a bitter taste than the regular green variety. I'll buy it again. I like the fat spears, too.

If there is already a similar topic, please forgive me, but I didn't see one. As April ends and May arrives, Farmers' Markets, at least here in the MidSouth, are either opening for the year or switching from winter to summer schedules. I went to my local market's first session today. Here was the haul: Green tomatoes, two kinds of asparagus, radishes, green onions, strawberries, two pounds of pork breakfast sausage, and a bag of kettle corn. I passed up leaf lettuce and cucumbers. The Amish farmers who had the green tomatoes (fried green tomatoes tomorrow, everyone!) raises them in a greenhouse and expects to have ripe ones next weekend or the next. I'm anxious. There were lots of garden plants -- peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, melons. I'm a little disappointed there are no early peas; I may have to make a trip to the Memphis market, an hour or so drive, to get a broader variety of produce. Gardens are all late around here because we had a late spring. Two months from now -- around the 4th of July -- will be prime garden season, and the market will be overflowing. My local market offers locally raised beef and pork (we're not much of a lamb region, in general), lots of fresh eggs, a ton of baked goods, lots of crafts. There's a new food truck this year, whose menu I didn't peruse, but I don't see how it can top last year's truck that had the sausage, egg and cheese biscuit, which was a thing of beauty. Later on, we'll have lots of sweet corn, lots of green beans and purple-hulled and crowder peas, lots of tomatoes. We'll have blueberries and blackberries and peaches and melons. My grocery store bill will drop to nearly nothing, and we will eat well at my house! What are other places seeing at their markets this time of year? What are the big hits? What harvest can you just not wait for?

My gardening is limited to a dozen or so pots of herbs. My sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary and mint overwintered pretty well. I've planted basil, tarragon, chives, parsley and cilantro. Thinking about adding marjoram and lavender -- have never cooked with either, What are some uses for them? I've mostly had lavender in pastries and such. Not sure about marjoram. This fall, I plan to do the prep work for a "straw bale garden." Allegedly one uses bales of straw, which can be framed around loosely and used for a couple of years. Over the winter you add compost, and in the spring, break up the decomposing straw a bit and add potting medium. It's allegedly a good way to grow tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, squash. Think I will give it a try. I'm fortunate to have a lawn that gets a good deal of sun.

I have in my pantry at present: Olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil, and a crock of saved bacon grease, as well as some flavored oils, some walnut oil, and some tangerine oil which makes outstanding citrus viniagrette. Oh, and there's coconut oil in the bathroom; I've never cooked with it, but it makes an outstanding moisturizer. I use the first four with some regularity, the latter ones for specialty purposes.