dtremit

Imperfect Friday here — and I would just like to advise @JoNorvelleWalker not to look for limes this week. I have them all, at least by weight: Hard to illustrate quite how big these are but hopefully the standard size can will help. The large one at center left is almost half a pound! Definitely larger than some oranges we have had recently. Sadly it seems to have been an off week for Imperfect — about 1/3 of my order was missing. I suspect it was packed in two boxes and one was left on the truck. On top of that, the eggplant was pretty badly bruised, though I think I can salvage it if I work quick, and the watercress was a bit flattened. I've asked them for a shipping credit in addition to the refund so I can place an "in between" order next week; we'll see what they say.

What is this magical place you live in where things come up to your apartment on their own? 🤣 (I gave up years ago on expecting food delivery people to walk past the front door, let alone package carriers. And we even have an elevator.)

I think if you push back Misfits will offer a partial refund. I did, and they gave me one, on my last order (though I think my issue was with an add-on item).

Indeed, without the ice pack, it could have done both — thawed before it left the warehouse, and then refrozen on the truck. Or vice versa — we live in a large building, and they deliver the boxes indoors; sometimes that means they're sitting in a room temperature space for a few hours before people are home to take them up to their fridges.

The pink color in the root makes me think those are watermelon radishes. They get pretty big sometimes. I never get past putting them in salads and making pickles, but I understand they can be cooked as well. Those are some lovely looking tomatoes for February!

You may want to set an alarm for just before your shopping window closes and check again — a lot of stuff that's sold out at the beginning seems to end up available again later as people take it out of their default carts.

I suppose one could buy these to eat, rather than just stealing them from the package when you're making a recipe that calls for them.

Potatoes are returning, apparently.

Whatever it is, it's quite tasty. Nuttier than regular barley, I think. We have really enjoyed it as a substitute for rice.

Right, sorry. To be clearer — I've never seen "baby broccoli" used to describe anything but broccolini.

Are they different? I've always seen those names used interchangeably.

For longer-cooked applications I wonder if it would benefit from a Chinese-style quick blanch and drain?

Maybe it's regional or weather dependent, but our last few orders have just had the ice pack in a heavy paper bag, instead of the foil bubble wrap. The switch happened after a neighbor started collecting them for a local homeless shelter, of course.

I almost made a comment about them raiding ShopRite in the dark of night but I didn't want to be the one to bring it up 🤣

Today's Imperfect box. Actually managed to remember to photograph it today. Overall a pretty good haul; normally we have more "extras" besides produce, but I am trying to draw down those supplies in the fridge and freezer a bit and thus blew most of the free shipping minimum on produce. This will be most of our grocery shopping for this week and next, I think; we are pretty well stocked on everything else. Only sad item this week was a couple of the green onions. Also hoping the kiwis didn't get banged up too badly; they kind of fell to the bottom of the box. The pears and limes have a fair number of cosmetic defects, but I think are unaffected in terms of quality. Just ugly exemplars.

For the unknown peppers and roots — I think the smaller peppers are serranos, and the other mystery veg looks like golden beets. The latter look just fine to me — the skins on those are pretty rough sometimes but they're usually perfect underneath! I know it's not particularly creative, but I love to riff on mashed potatoes by mixing 50/50 with celery root. They're also nice in a gratin.

Quality decline aside, I am really hopeful that FreshDirect will expand to Boston at some point soon. They've been saying for a decade that they want to operate from Boston to DC, and they staked out the DC end of that in 2017. We could use the competition here.

Their dough is designed to keep up to two weeks in the fridge.

There are pans that are half as big by volume but usually those make tiny loaves in the normal shape, which probably isn't useful. I might try using a 4" deep 1/6 hotel pan — it'd be slightly larger than half a normal loaf pan, but in the right squareish shape. That said, is there a reason you don't just cut the baked loaf in half and freeze that? IME baked bread freezes better than unbaked dough.

Maybe if we all had electrical outlets inside our ovens 🤣 I think you're overlooking the phase change aspect of heat pipes. They're not just conductors — you are boiling a liquid at one end and then condensing its vapor at the other end. That ends up resulting in an effective thermal conductivity of several hundred times that of solid copper. The minimum temperature is a factor of the pressure inside, of course, but it's unlikely that one designed for cooking would function "backwards" as you describe — the temperature of the meat once removed from the oven wouldn't be sufficient to boil the water inside the heat pipe.

@Richard Kilgore and @Shelby what all of you think of the Duo Evo Plus outside of the SV ability — this is the first time I'm really tempted to update my vintage 2015 Duo. The stovetop-friendly pot is really an appealing feature. As for sous vide, I doubt it would displace my Anova for long cooks — but the ability to SV in liquids other than pure water is really interesting to me. I could see it being really lovely for doing various types of confit in oil, or for poaching things in broth.

BookBub alerted me today that Jacques Pepin's Fast Food My Way (eGullet-friendly Amazon link) is on sale for $1.99 again today.

@rotuts, this one I couldn't pass up. Thanks for posting!

I think the "box sizes" really only describe the default selection — an approximation of how much they put in your cart before you shop. I think I usually swap out at least half of what's pre-populated. As for individual items, I probably haven't ever checked weights because they're not in the email confirmation — which is what I usually use to check if I've gotten everything. The weights are only on the web purchase history. Everything from this week looks fine, but most of what we ordered was by count, rather than by weight — or prepackaged. (The 3lb bag of Bartlett pears for $4 was a nice find — they're really tasty.)

You know, I never have thought to check the weight on anything I've gotten from Imperfect. Probably should start doing that...