weinoo

Too much parsley, maybe. Which definitely got blended in with the soup.

Significant Eater didn't like the color or the texture of the cauliflower soup. I thought they were fine!

I was hoping for a portmanteau, @Anna N !

Two soups with my Instant Pot chicken stock. On the left, creamless cream of cauliflower + roasted cauliflower, with saffron and espelette. Creaminess provided by rice cooked along, and then blended. On the right, a pretty classic chicken soup. I used a small pasta in there; next time, it would have to be egg noodles a la my bubbe.

Breakfast yesterday - a bit of a mashup... I don't know what to call it. Potatoes, a little cheese, eggs. So it's not a tortilla, per se, and it's not a frittata, per se. Torttata? Fritilla? I can see it now...

Not necessarily true. Some roasters offer that their beans are at peak (note, not "freshest") 7 - 10 days out from roasting. Everything involved with espresso making, from roast profile, to beans, to grind, to water, to machinery/equipment, involves experimentation - there is no one size fits all.

Decided, since I was in the area today, to give it a try... This is the fresh shrimp, with bean sprouts, scallion and cilantro. Much better than the joint I was referring to on East Broadway. And $7. Also had curry fish balls on the side, 10 for $3. Not a destination, but worthy if hungry and right nearby.

Nah, not unless they're pretty long. These were trimmed quite well. Might even add to the gelatinous texture!

Half a roasted cauliflower. Done in the Cuisinart Steam Oven, on convection bake. Tumminia busiate pasta integrale, with arugula pesto. Some of that roasted cauliflower. And I had a few prepped artichoke hearts in the fridge, so I roasted them as well.

A little Instant Pot chicken stock production last night. I had a carcass of a Union Market rotisserie chicken (quite good, by the way), walked over to the gross market under the Manhattan bridge, where I procured a pound of chicken feet for $$1.50, and a few legs for another $1.00 (they were like $.79 a pound), and ended up with 3 qts. of fine stock.

You know, having been to the old one, I was excited to try the new one. But, like you, I wondered why all the adulation after my meal.

I'd heard good things, and someone I know compared it to one of the old school places on East Broadway. Looks better than that one, but it's actually like 3x the price.

I kinda like the George Dickel, and Sazerac is still pretty damn good. I have a stash of Pikesville, that I accrued on my drives back and forth to DC, at the state line liquor store right over the Maryland border on I95. Stuff was like $11 a bottle.

Something of interest, maybe? I've been finding that some of the varieties of @rancho_gordo's beans are so fresh, I have to be very careful about how long I cook them. I like to give a soak of an hour or two, in salted warm water, just to give the beans a head start - but when I did that with a pound of a bean (of course, I've forgotten which variety), they cooked so damn fast on the stove top, I ended up using my stick blender to make a soup, instead of using them the way I originally planned. This is not, by any means, a bad thing. Just something to be aware of. I also have moved away from using the Instant Pot for beans; once again, timing is important if you want whole beans, and I'm pretty bad at that!

If only salmon tasted like this stuff.

Not even touched up by me - but I sure ate a lot of that platter! Thank god we also ate a lot of fish.

I'd only serve it with lomo, salchichón, and chorizo; all Iberico of course. Like this, at Gandarias in San Sebastian last month...

Exactly. I have a very similar (maybe the same) pan, believe the one I have is a Mauviel. In addition to its use for vegetables, I often make pasta sauces in it. It's great for that purpose, as it will hold a pound of cooked pasta easily, and allows me the right amount of room to toss the pasta around in the sauce.

Also, Ed Schoenfeld and Joe Ng have opened a Red Farm in London. While it wouldn't be for me, since I tend not to like outposts of original restaurants, it might be right up your alley.

Suggestions from our last trip; looks like we're heading back in April. Anyone who doesn't dine at St. John is missing out. It was (and may still be) groundbreaking. We hit the original, but I'm pretty sure all locations are excellent. The Clove Club - we had a most excellent lunch. If you're at all a wine drinker, I can think of no better place than Noble Rot. Hedone. 40 Maltby. Et al.

I think for latkes there is really no better potato than an Idaho russet.

I was surprised to find that all of the "deli" type containers I have, the ones which came from delis or restaurants for instance, are made in the US, and are both microwave and dishwasher (top shelf) "safe," for whatever that is worth. And yes, @TicTac, if I had kids, I'm sure this would've been much more important to me; why chance anything?

I actually sometimes enjoy using russets for potato salad; I like the creaminess they bring. Depends what type of potato salad I'm looking to make. I'm pretty sure it's how older generations always made potato salad, as it was the one potato one could find. Then I read this piece (which is behind a bit of a wall), tried them, and really liked the way the potato salad came out.

I'm having some sleep (or lack thereof) issues lately, bue to some recent lower back surgery, so I have been watching some very late night TV stuff. Last night, an episode or two of Parts Unknown. Sadly, one can certainly hear, both in the tone of his voice, and in his words, how lonely he was. He also talks about his feelings about being unable to communicate with most everyone.

First of all, Merry Christmas to all. This stuff, about deli containers, got me thinking... I have Tupperware and Rubbermaid containers which are years old. Decades even, in certain cases, I'm sure. And plenty of takeout containers from (mostly) Chinese restaurants, usually given with soup noodles, etc. etc. Always washed in the dishwasher, for all those years. Then a friend was giving my some shit about the quart containers, when he saw that I had used 4 of them for my recent IP stock making, claiming, you know, how bad they are for you, blah blah blah. Interestingly, I did a little research, and of course BPAs and god-knows-what-else are bad for you, and certainly using these types of containers in the microwave is probably not great - though we don't own a microwave, so I don't have to worry about that, though pouring boiling hot soup into them is probably also a not-great idea. Now, the Chinese restaurant containers, and most everything else made out of plastic and used for food, has a little symbol with a number in it, on the bottom, allegedly attesting to how the container is best recycled (or not, as the case may be). There are other symbols and letters on the bottom of containers too; you could spend hours looking at this stuff; the whole idea being that I'd like to at least start storing my food in the safest containers possible; obviously glass and stainless being at the top of that list, but not always practical for kitchen use. So - where am I headed with all this? Oh yeah - I decided I was gonna replace all my old stuff, because a: it's old and b: It's been washed, in the dishwasher, like hundreds of times, and that can't make it any better. So on to Amazon I went, and a buying spree ensued. I also started by looking at how various storage products were rated, on sites like Cook's Illustrated's, et al. And I started with these: Rubbermaid Brilliance Food Storage Container, 14-Piece Set and these: OXO Good Grips Smart Seal Leakproof Glass Food Storage Container, in various sizes. Holy shit, both products are light years beyond the old Tupperware/Rubbermaid stuff. The lids are amazingly tight, that Tritan plastic used in the Rubbermaid Brilliance is amazing, and OXO just generally makes stuff that I like; these glass storage containers totally fall into that category. I threw out almost all of the old stuff (I'll keep a few of the restaurant containers, to give away leftovers for sure); but man, these products are game changers.