dtremit

Curious who your favorites are, with a few months' perspective? As of yet I haven't really taken advantage, as I mostly looked at companies in March and April when they were just ramping up and supplies were really limited.

Was just reading through Rawia Bishara's "Levant" and one of her recipes is for a shakshuka with tomatillos — which she mentions she originally developed to use up green tomatoes at the end of the summer. She pairs them with green chiles (hot and poblano) and a zucchini-like arabic squash.

Thanks @liamsaunt! That is all really helpful info, in both posts. It looks like Ceraldi is only open Wednesday and Saturday — so a no go for the birthday, but could be very nice for a special treat for later in the week.

The dog would prefer we put the food in the back with her, of course We'll compromise by letting her lounge on all the pillows.

Ooh. I have never had a beach plum. @gfweb unfortunately we're going to be really short on space heading down -- we are taking our dog, and have to pack all our towels and bed linens. So practically speaking everything we want to wear, use, eat, read, etc is going to have to fit in our back seat.

Thanks for all the suggestions here, I really appreciate it! Thinking through a lot of them -- I think maybe going in a middle eastern direction would be good. It is a favorite of his -- it just didn't cross my mind for a fancy dinner because he's usually talking about things like the $3 sabich sandwich we had the last time we were in Detroit, or the specials at a bakery nearby. I can pack a fairly limited number of seasonings and condiments to pull that off, and use those to weave the courses together per @heidih's idea. A pack of phyllo could become a couple of things. It lets me make good use of the grill, which we don't have at home. We should have eggplant and peppers to char — and I could do a mixed grill on skewers, or possibly a grill roasted lamb roast along the line of @Alex's flank steak idea. And all of it makes good leftovers, which is a great way to justify making an enormous spread only three people will be around to eat 🙂 @CeeCee, I actually have halloumi already, which I almost forgot about! (I have always wanted to try salt dough.) @jmacnaughtan – I will probably do a fish dinner later in the week when I have more time to track down the right stuff. @Margaret Pilgrim -- if I asked him what he wanted he would get all flummoxed and end up saying "anything you make will be perfect." I am incredibly lucky to have someone around who eats and loves nearly everything I cook. The downside is that he claims to love everything equally and I end up reading what's left on his plate like tea leaves to try to discern what's actually his favorite 🤣

We'll be in the northern part of Dennis this time -- so within a reasonable (and scenic) drive of a lot of the Cape. Would *very* much appreciate recommendations on the shopping front; my existing Cape knowledge is very Provincetown-specific. I see Truro has a Monday farmer's market which might be helpful.

It's oddly hard to answer that -- birthdays are usually when we go out and try a new fancy place we haven't been to before, often with a tasting menu or similar. So it's more about the experience than the specific dish. When I think back to the stuff I've made at home that he talks about, it's either elevated comfort food (which tbh is sort of played out after six months of trying to cheer ourselves up cooking at home) or some elaborate recipe for company that requires half the batterie de cuisine (or a dozen oddly specific ingredients) to pull off. I'm overthinking this, I'm sure -- but I really want to be able to do something that feels special (without too much risk of abject failure).

Racking my brains on this one -- we are finally getting out of our apartment for a week and headed to a rental house on Cape Cod for the week of my partner's birthday. Given the pandemic, we aren't going to want to go out to eat a fancy birthday dinner, so I'm planning to cook something. But while I know I will have a kitchen and a gas grill in the rental house, I don't have a lot of confidence it'll be well equipped, and we'll have limited (but non-zero) space in the car for equipment. I will of course bring good knives and make sure I have a couple of good pans to work with. Adding to the challenge: we'll be getting the majority of our groceries curbside from a mass market grocery. We will be picking up our CSA share for the week on our way down, and I'm very open to tracking down local produce -- but I have to pull this off on our second full day in residence, so fewer stops is better. I should add that he hates shellfish, which is very inconvenient on the Cape! He's also not a big fan of steaks or other large, plain hunks of protein (although a dish that involved e.g. grilled beef as a component would be fine). So yeah. The above combination has me mentally stuck. I have a million ideas for easy meals the rest of the week but not this fancy one. I know one of you has to have a brilliant idea to help me get past the block 🙃

@CeeCee – another thought that fits between your ideas might be the Greek skordalia. On the thin side, obviously.

I look very much forward to your report on it! We are looking at moving into a bigger place eventually and I am debating in my head what I want to do for cook surfaces in the kitchen. For years I assumed I would just want an enormous pro-style gas range, but I'm starting to think that having a combination of a smaller gas rangetop and an adjacent induction setup would be the most versatile. But at the same time, I'm not sure we're going to be in our next place forever, and I hesitate to be the guy trying to sell a kitchen with two stoves. Being able to have both a Control Freak and a monster Vollrath for less than the price of a built in induction cooktop — and with nothing permanently installed but an extra 240v outlet — would probably make me a very happy camper.

As an aside, if you end up with stone fruit that is hard as a rock, it can make for a lovely riff on a Thai green papaya salad.

This is true for some fruits but not others (I think the technical terms are climacteric vs non-climacteric). Some fruits stop ripening the minute they're picked — pineapples, for instance, will get softer in a way that can be pleasant, but never sweeter. Others will in fact continue to ripen to a limited degree — stone fruits among them. A handful — avocados, for example — actually will never ripen until they're picked or fall off the tree. I think this depends on exactly the stage at which the peach was picked. If they're picked under-ripe, they never get to a ripe state before they go mushy and mealy. When I buy peaches directly from farmers who say they're picked "firm ripe," they do improve in texture and flavor if left out in a paper bag. The key difference seems to be smell -- if they're firm but fragrant when I buy them, they usually ripen nicely. If they smell like nothing, they never get better. (If anyone can tell me a similar trick for pears, I would love to know it. Those are the fruit that disappoint me the most.)

The list prices on the Vollrath website seem to bear no relation to reality. Street price on the MPI4-1800S (wattage equivalent to the Control Freak) is ~$825. The much more interesting Vollrath (to me) is the 3800W 240v model, which retails for about $1550.

FreshDirect keeps saying they're going to expand to Boston eventually, and I wish they'd hurry up 🤣 They have been in DC for a couple of years now.

The revelation for me has been shucking corn backwards. A few years ago someone sent me a recipe for microwaved corn that had you cut through the cob at the base, and pull the corn out of the husk from the stem end while holding the silk tightly at the top. The husk and silk slides off almost completely intact. I've found it works almost as well with raw corn, provided you also make a couple of 2-3" vertical cuts through the husk to provide some wiggle room at the bottom. As for cutting through the cob -- you have to basically cut off the last row of kernels so that the widest part of the corn is exposed. I feel for the base of the ear through the husk, and then slide my knife just above it before cutting through.

One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes "designer" or name brand flatware is also sold under different names. My everyday flatware is Crate and Barrel's "Oona," which they discontinued ages ago. Turns out it's a Cambridge Silversmiths pattern -- they didn't even change the name. I think CS has discontinued it as well at this point, but when I first discovered that, CS were still making it.

Looks like Stella Parks' BraveTart is also $2.99 right now (Kindle) Thank you to Toliver for name dropping BookBub...(my wallet may have a different opinion)

Pretty much any Chinese supermarket in the Boston area will have it *most* of the time. The smaller shops I visit are mostly Korean and Japanese, and I don't remember buying it in any of those. I am pretty sure I have gotten it at the big HMart in the suburbs, but not at the smaller one in Cambridge. There is one local grocery chain (Market Basket) that carries a fairly decent selection of various SE Asian vegetables, and very occasionally I see it there. That said, metro Boston has an unusually large Cambodian immigrant population which probably skews the balance a bit.

The stuff I find looks more like this:

I already own this in print and still consider it a steal for $3!

I'm in the US. Just figured if I just said "in the US" someone would correct me and say "Canada has the same size ranges" 😀

A smaller oven could be an advantage in this regard -- less space to cover with temperature sensors and quicker response when the temp needs to change. (OTOH, probably easier to overshoot.) That said, lots of useful sous vide tasks at 140F and above. You might not get a perfectly rare steak, but steaks are easy to do in a water bath. But short ribs braised in a sauce would be a game changer. Likewise, if it's accurate above 140F it's useful for all manner of egg dishes where bagging or jarring underwater is a huge pain. For vegetables I see two advantages. One, low barrier to entry. If I'm serving carrots as a side dish on a weeknight, I'm not going to drag out a circulator and bag the carrots; I'm just going to roast them. Being able to do SV in the oven makes it an equivalent effort. On top of that, being able to temperature control a vegetable dish that's hard to fit into a bag would be really fantastic -- I can't be the only one who avoids making gratins because I can never get the potatoes done just right.

Folks like you *in the US and Canada* – which is a pretty big caveat. Ranges are a much smaller percentage of the mix in other countries, and even in countries where they *are* popular, the typical size is different. (In particular, the 30" size that's most common in the US is uncommon elsewhere -- much more likely to see a 60cm/24" or 90cm/36" model.) A 30" range with a steam oven in it would need to be built from a clean sheet of paper -- a tall order when it's a product that most people in the US market don't understand. (Look at how long it took to even get convention ovens in standard ranges.) On the other hand, wall oven sizes *are* more or less standardized across markets -- or at least, European sizes can easily be accommodated in US kitchens. So it's frustrating to see companies like Bosch who have steam ovens ready to sell that just don't bother to bring them here. Especially when they sell the non-steam version of the exact same oven here.

I've noticed that the galangal I can buy fresh is way more "mature" and fibrous than the stuff I have bought pre-frozen -- the fresh stuff is sometimes a challenge to slice through at room temp. I'd be a little afraid to try to do it frozen solid, though maybe the freezing helps break up the fibers.