dtremit

FINALLY placed an order with these folks this week. Not for lack of trying — they open their ordering window at 6am on Friday, and by the time I wake up, there has almost never been enough left that I want to fulfill a minimum order. It seems like they're going to three days a week, so there was enough this week for me to get a good selection. This was the haul — nicest surprise was that the "Green chili" turned out to be Thai chiles. I don't think I've ever seen Imperfect offer anything hotter than a jalapeño. A few things had some cosmetic issues but nothing was bruised or inedible. And it was all $25.50 delivered. Really hoping the better availability this week wasn't a fluke. Edited to add: their packaging is also really minimal, since they deliver by local truck or van. Aside from the bags / clamshell, everything was just in two brown paper grocery bags.

You can also do a hold of up to 3 months, and can renew that multiple times. I just realized that we have been doing that since early *last* summer, so I know there's no time limit 🤣 @kayb It was exactly your issue that caused us to stop getting Misfits in the first place. Our summer CSA is all vegetable, and Imperfect let us do a fruit-only box, whereas Misfits would not.

Good one from BookBub today: Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean (eGullet-friendly Amazon link) $1.99 in the US store This is the first cookbook from Ana Sortun, the chef at Oleana in Cambridge, MA; one of my favorite restaurants and the cookbook really brings the same flavors home.

I'll try to post pictures of the box the next two weeks to fill in the gap! Though the pictures won't look nearly as nice, as it'll be the last week in our old kitchen and the first week in the early '90s grandma special in our new house. You might find some carrot inspiration in this thread I started when we started the Clover root vegetable share last fall: Sadly that share ended up being about 40% carrot. We have eaten a lot of carrot sticks lately.

Imperfect delivery this week was pretty uneventful, but we randomly got a free bag of Lundberg basmati thrown in. Not sure why but I'm not complaining. I impulse bought a bag of something called "RightRice" without doing my research. I read enough of the description to hear "ancient grains" and "cajun spice" and thought hmm, it'll be like a seasoned quinoa and sorghum blend, nice for a quick dinner. Nope — the "rice" is various legume flours pressed into unsettlingly perfect little rice grain shapes. You cook it by mixing it with boiling water and letting it sit for 12 minutes; that'd probably be fine if it were unseasoned, but the flavored version ends up just tasting of uncooked, dusty spices. Blech. Avoid. Even my partner, who is normally the most charitable person on the planet when it comes to anything I put on the table, was inclined to throw it out. Agreed — these definitely push us to eat a bit better. I stumbled across an online review of both services recently, done by a person who compared them to her normal shopping in person. She said that in terms of savings, the services were cheaper for organic produce compared to her local stores, but conventional prices were similar. But, when she looked at her total grocery bills, she was spending way less on processed foods even if the produce price was a wash.

We did — looks like just after 9am. Might want to give them a heads up. We do a "market style" CSA elsewhere in the summer as I really like being able to pick what we want in a given week — but I have really liked having an option in the off season as well.

I have heard of people pre-shaping flour tortillas with a press — just using it to transform the ball into a disc that is then rolled to an appropriate thinness. There are also heated presses for making flour tortillas — my understanding is you don't cook the tortilla on them, the heat is just enough to soften and set the dough. But I think these are more typically restaurant apparatuses.

That looks delicious! Do you mind me asking the cook time for the Royal Coronas? And were they soaked or unsoaked? I have been a little afraid to try to cook those under pressure.

We've started getting this share this week as well -- thanks again for the heads up on the sale last fall. (We got a daikon instead of the macomber turnip, and blackberry jam.) I suspect we will try Siena's winter box next winter — the Winter Moon Roots box through Clover was a little too repetitive for us.

That would be Super 88 (or at least, it used to be called that?) — the market itself has gone through a couple of owners and seems to have come out a bit worse for wear. The food court in front is still excellent, though — though the vendors have changed a bit over time. There is a good place doing sichuan dry pot (though I like the one in Central Square better). Weirdly my favorite lamb samosas in all of Boston are from the Indian stall at that food court. I think (hope!) they are still there.

I can't speak to the other one, but the building that housed "G-Mart" and the Hei La Moon dim sum restaurant is being razed and redeveloped with some monstrosity. The same people operate "C-Mart" (across I-90) so I think they just decided to shutter the "G-Mart" location. These days I prefer to go to Quincy when I have time — you have Kam Man, the one across the street (New York Market, maybe?) and our very first Ranch 99 make for a very efficient trip. (Of course the last time I was there was February 2020.) The 99 Supermarket in Malden is not as good as Kam Man, but it's pretty good, and much more convenient to us. (And about to become even moreso when we move next month.)

I have never ordered from this site but I have found it to be a really good reference for what's available in a good Chinese grocery in at least the northeastern US. In particular, you can switch the language on any page between Chinese and English, so you can switch to Chinese to search and then switch to English for the product info. (The site has the same address as a large Chinese grocery in the Boston suburbs, and the stock usually matches what's in that store, so I suspect they are just fulfilling orders from there. I have heard very mixed things about their mail order service.)

That's a fairly high bar. That said, my partner refers to Panera as "yuppie Subway" and I have to admit the shoe kind of fits. The power move with their boxed lunches (which we used to get all the time in the office) is just to scavenge the giant cookies.

If it were the whole loaf, yes — but like @Smithy I was only having trouble with the bottom of the loaf. Hard to get steam in between the loaf and the pan/stone/steel it's sitting on. And if I pulled it before the bottom crust got too thick, the rest of the loaf was underbaked. In my case, reducing the amount of time the loaf spent sitting directly on something super hot seemed to help a great deal.

My issue wasn't crust thickness so much as overbrowning — but when I was baking more on my steel, I often would take the loaves off the stone and move them to a rack for maybe the last ten minutes of cooking. Lately I have been baking more in my Lodge combo cooker; with that I preheat the deeper half and use it as a "lid" over the bread. The other half (under the bread) I leave unheated.

It's worth noting that choice of any kind is fairly new to Misfits — when I first used them back in April, the only thing you could pick was the size of the box.

Honestly, having had both pastramis at the source, I actually like Zingerman's better. But I am an Ann Arbor native, so I might be slightly biased 🤣

@weinoo I mean, it can be if you order from someplace who doesn't have free shipping. Case in point: to get free shipping from Katz's, you have to order three pounds of their lean pastrami @ $37/lb. So three pounds shipped is $111. Zingermans will charge you $20 to ship it, but their lean pastrami is "only" $25/lb. So three pounds shipped is $95. Not sure how much you'd pay if you walked into Katz's and ordered a pound of pastrami to go but I bet it'd be less than $37.

Steam vs non-steam aside, I have frequently seen advice elsewhere to reduce temperatures by 25°F when using convection on a recipe designed for a non-convection oven. I would also probably tent a roast that big with foil in the CSO, as things get really intensely browned if they're close to the top heating elements.

Imperfect seems to have recovered from whatever blip they ran into last week. Normally we do delivery every two weeks, but after we were missing so many items I put in a small order on our "off week." I asked them for a credit equal to a shipping fee since I wasn't going to need enough to make the minimum, which they agreed to. Thankfully everything was delivered exactly as promised; they ran out of one item but told me a few days ago that it wasn't coming. (We did lose one egg to shipping discombobulation.) We tried the La Boulangerie croissant bread as a splurge last week and clearly I need to find a similar recipe. We really liked it and I am not going to regularly pay $8 for it!

@jimb0 I've had great luck with them as well — we have a few of their cake pans and have really liked them. I think they also make all the pans sold by King Arthur Flour (at about double the normal list price). @weinoo if Teamfar made a 12x16x2 I would probably consider it. But without a fully rolled rim I don't think they have the strength in the short sidewalls to keep them square. I probably will get a few more of their small pans, though, as they do great in the dishwasher.

@chromedome Also helps that in the rare cases when it does go off, it seems to go off in a fairly obvious way.

@weinoo I think the square pan is the ticket. This one looks like it could work really well. The USA Pan looked great but I think the listed dimension is interior -- their website suggests an exterior dimension of 17.75" which is too big. The TeamFar 12x16 pans are tempting but the reviews all seem to talk about warping. I have noticed that with my smaller sheet pan for the CSO and while it doesn't matter for that size, I think it would be a problem for the bigger ones. @Paul Bacino that is a very nice looking pan indeed — I may need to start making pizza al taglio!

@JoNorvelleWalker The Anova won't fit a half sheet pan either! 🤣 I'm sure I'll end up with one eventually, but I have trouble justifying replacing the CSO so quickly. And trust me, with a new house, any checks recently and soon-to-be received are long gone. I joked the other day that I should just reconfigure my direct deposit to go to Home Depot. @gfweb Tried that, no luck. They are the kind that have a curve in them to stop the rack pulling all the way out, so the pan won't go in all the way. @weinoo For a lot of things a quarter sheet is fine (and I have plenty of them) but the 9" dimension is too small for some stuff. Won't fit under a pie plate or a springform, e.g. OOC, why do you dislike the shiny finish on the Teamfars? I have a few of their small pans for the CSO and it's never struck me as making much difference.

I have found myself in a conundrum — we are moving to a new house this month, in which I will eventually be able to renovate the kitchen. Alas, that renovation is likely a couple of years away, so the current kitchen will need to do for the moment. I'm glad to be moving from a range to a cooktop and wall oven, but the oven in question is an older, 27" electric — and when I peeked inside it the other day, I realized that it is particularly narrow inside. Sure enough, I checked today, and my standard 18 inch wide half sheet pans do not fit. It's *very* close, though — my rimless cookie sheets, which are less than half an inch narrower, fit just fine. The sheet pan just happens to hit the rails for the oven racks. While I am tempted to buy a new oven in a fit of feigned rage, I suspect it is probably more effective to replace the pans. I'm looking at some Teamfar stainless ones on Amazon that are 16x12, but I'm curious if anyone happens to have a ~17x12 rimmed pan they love — or perhaps even a deeper one to regain some real estate. (I'd be curious if something like this Sicilian pizza pan might fit, but I think that's probably pushing it on the depth. The oven claims to be a convection oven, so probably good to leave some room for circulation...)