kayb

May I come to your party? I'll be happy to bus tables and wash dishes....

Giving this thread a bump -- How are you planning on cooking your canonical black-eyed peas for New Year's? Mine are with smoked sausage, diced tomatos, green chiles, and paprika. If I feel particularly fancy, I may pour them into a baking dish and top with bread crumbs and grated cheese and bake them.

Crappy cell phone photo, but... Braised chuck roast with carrots, parnips and rutabagas, over garlic mashed potatos. Warmed me up on a cold evening, it did.

A "Wine Trials" book and a big, beautiful, 6 1/2 quart Cuisinart Dutch oven.

Do you have a slow cooker? A small one (four-quart) should handle everything you need, and is usually around 10 bucks at a discount store. It can be your best friend to both save on time and effort, as well as making cheap cuts of meat taste wonderful. You can braise beef or pork in it, make soups, even cook desserts. One of my favorites is white bean and sausage soup -- you could cut the recipe in half, freeze portions, and have three or four good meals out of this one. 1 pound navy beans 1 pound smoked or Italian sausage 4-6 carrots 1 medium onion 3-4 cloves minced garlic 1 28-0z cab diced tomatos dried basil and oregano to taste Soak the beans overnight. Saute the onion, garlic, carrots and sausage. Drain the beans, and put them, the herbs and the sauteed ingredients in the slow cooker; add the tomatos, and enough water to come about 2 inches over the top of the beans. Cook 8 hours on low. This will make 6-8 servings. Lentils and ditalini pasta in a tomato-based sauce is another good one. Cheap, plenty of protein, filling, tasty.

I want those tortillas. Now I want a tortilla press, never mind I have NO room in my kitchen.

Chris, I made your posole last night; as always, it was wonderful! Can't wait to learn all about your French Christmas dinner. Thoroughly enjoyed your first day!

When my former mother-in-law first acquired a microwave oven, she bought in to the propaganda that you could roast meat in it. Tried it with a nice rib roast (I can cook it in 15 minutes when we get back from church!) Think gray leather. The microwave was thereafter relegated to heating stuff up.

Great week of food! Thanks!

The blog's been great! I have never tried the Marcella Hazan sauce; I expect that will change in the next few days! Also fascinated by the gnocchi -- something I've always wanted to make and been intimidated by.

I love my Essential New York Times Cookbook, by Amanda Hesser. Recipes from the newspaper archives, with a bit of history attached.

I'll enjoy Christmas dinner with my best friend from college, who is my children's godmother, while the kids all hie off to their respective father/inlaws events. She's the cook, I sous-chef for her and will probably contribute a dessert, some apps, or whatever else she tells me. I do day-after-Christmas brunch for my throng, which includes one gluten-intolerant eater who will also be about 8 months pregnant at that point. I'm thinking: -- Ouefs en cocotte, made with medium or small eggs, in muffin tins, with a "crust" of corn tortillas and a bottom layer of cheese grits. -- While I'm about it, since the gluten-intolerant one loves grits, a cheese grits casserole with caramelized onion. Maybe even with shrimp on the side. -- Andouille or chorizo tortilla. -- Fruit salad -- just cut-up, fresh fruit, whatever's available and looks good, with sweetened creme fraiche as a dressing on the side. -- Ham "sliders" on dinner rolls. Or I might get ambitious and make mini-Cubanos. -- Roasted asparagus with hollandaise. -- French toast casserole -- cubed bread, custard made of eggs, cream and maple syrup poured over, baked, served with a berry sauce of some kind (Strawberry jam heated and thinned a bit with simple syrup works well, if I don't take time to make something from scratch). -- Cranberry salad, because two of the three girls would rise up in rebellion if I did not have it. -- And I'm thinking about adding Scotch eggs this year, because I made them for the first time last night (with homemade chicken apple sausage), and they were Pretty Good!

Certainly, it's very simple to do: I used a standard cream and bittersweet chocolate truffle recipe, but added a pinch of organically grown tobacco shreds to the cream before heating it over an extremely low flame in a very heavy pot (it took about half an hour for bubbles to start appearing around the edges of the pot). Once I took the pot off the heat, I let the tobacco steep for about 2 minutes longer in the hot cream, then strained the cream to remove the tobacco shreds, and proceeded as usual for truffles. The tobacco was noticeable, but very subtle; I feel that it enahanced a note which is present in some chocolates. The effect was very elegant and smooth, not at all harsh. My research on tobaccos's toxicity, in case you're interested: I found this monograph: Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 9: Chemistry and Toxicology. Nicotine was my primary concern, owing to its immediate toxicity (as opposed to the cumulative/long-term effects of other compounds), but nicotine appears to comprise between 0.6 and 2.9% of the dry weight of tobacco (p. 7 of the monograph), which means that an entire 40g (1.4 oz) packet of the brand of tobacco I used would contain between 0.24g and 1.16g nicotine, well below the median lethal dose, even for children (that would be 10g; no children ate these, but it seemed a good idea to use as stringent a standard as possible: (IPCS: Nicotine). I'm not certain how much the pinch weighed--my scale doesn't measure under a gram/fractions of grams--but it was certainly under a gram, meaning that, on the outside, there were 0.03g of nicotine present in the entire batch of truffles. Fascinating! What kind of tobacco did you use? I would guess a pipe tobacco?

Mjx -- I'm intrigued by tobacco truffles. Can you elaborate on that one? I'll do pralines, fudge, chocolate covered cherries, spiced and candied pecans. And then I'll do savories -- cheddar cheese shortbreads (they do better than biscuits in gift tins) and crocks of bacon jam; blue cheese savories with fig jam (think savory thumbprint cookies). Maybe spiced and toasted chickpeas.

One word. Posole. Chris Amirault's mother-in-law's recipe, from the eGullet posole cookoff thread. If there's any posole out there any better, I don't want to know about it.

I can handle the oriental chicken salad. And a baked potato. The chili is horrible, and the burgers leave much to be desired. Of course, the only fast-food burgers I can tolerate are In n Out, on the rare occasions I'm out West; Back Yard Burgers (not nearly as good as they once were), and about once a year when I HAVE to have them, Krystal (the Mid-South equivalent of White Castle). Best burger I ever had in my life was one at the Dairy Freeze in Hiawasse, AR. I will brag and note that I enjoyed it at a table with not-yet-then-President Bill Clinton in 1989, and he thought his (all the way; mine was hold the onions) was excellent, too. It's on my list to go back there someday and see if (a) it's still there and (b) the burgers are as good as they once were.

Weighing in on Howard's side here....he'll eat more Brussels sprouts (it's no accident their acronym is BS) than I will. Only way I've ever had 'em that I could deal with 'em was raw, shredded, in a cole-slaw type preparation. Add my admiration to the smoked brisket adventure. I tried it once. The deli does a better job than I can. Won't go there again.

No photos...but I had dinner at my favorite Hot Springs restaurant tonight -- Central Park Fusion -- a 6-oz filet topped with Boursin butter, atop a bed of truffle-oil flavored polenta with roasted corn and a side of wilted greens (which I did not eat, because, well, greens, and I'm squicky about that). Pretty marvelous. I'm so grateful to have a restaurant of that quality within a 20-minute drive (and that far only because I live way out on the lake...)

Three new ones recently: Amanda Hesser's Essential New York Times Cookbook; Ruth Reichl's Gourmet Today; and Kathy Sparks' Sparks in the Kitchen.

I have to laugh at that one! Sounds like something I'd do! Enjoying the blog; particularly interested in the GF stuff, as one of my daughters is gluten-intolerant.

dcarch, I think perhaps that quail is my favorite of all your stunning plates you've presented. Gorgeous!

I don't know, but I want a slice of that.

Clam chowder and a salad, the daily lunch special today at Culinary District, the Surfas store here in Hot Springs. No photos; didn't have a camera with me. Damn fine!

Oh, and Jack Daniels is not a bourbon; it is a sour mash whiskey. Very different animal. Makers Mark is a good all-purpose bourbon, as is Knob Creek. You need a good Scotch (well, maybe not until winter; it's a cold-weather drink, in my book), plenty of vodka (my bar workhourse) and dark and light rum. And I always try to keep a couple of good bottles of port.

Our receptionist is Australian, so in addition to the delight of calling the front desk because we love to hear her talk, we learn about all kinds of cool Aussie things...like Vegemite. Her mother sent her a care package that had a couple of jars, and she had to bring one so all of us could sample. She was in heaven with that taste of home. I didn't think it was at all bad, myself -- but yes, I see how it would HAVE to be used with a light hand! Enjoying your blog! Anxious to hear about the 'roo!