Anna N

So long as you know that once you cancel you will no longer have access to any of those books! Just saying.

And so it begins once again. @Kerry Beal is on the road heading to my house to pick me up so we can head north to Manitoulin Island. Hopefully she remembered to put Kira in the van. Things will be very different this time. Change is inevitable. Among the changes iscthat one of our favourite nurses now that she has her children are grown is going back to school to become an anaesthesiology assistant. You might remember her as the owner of a lovely piece of property with horses, dogs, cats, kids and raspberries. But perhaps the biggest change is that the townhouse is to be sold. It is on the market with a closing date of September. Thankfully it will not be shown while we are there! Almost everything in the town house belongs to Kerry except for the furniture and the appliances. One of our challenges will be how to deal with all this accumulated stuff! This will be Kerry‘s 19th summer up there so I leave you to imagine the challenges we will face. But I am determined it will not interfere with our cooking or our enjoyment of the waterfront view or of all the other adventures that we manage to get up to each year. Stay tuned for future installments.

It may look classy, Japanese and expensive but it is none of the above. I picked it up HomeSense for probably about $11. Perhaps manufactured in Japan but even that I question.

Hope you love it as much as I love my stable of roombas!

Tonight’s dinner began with a salad dressed with a Japaneasy dressing at Kerry’s suggestion. It gave me the opportunity to use the small ceramic ginger grater that somehow got lumped in with the small dipping bowls in the photos from Sudbury. It is small but very effective and works as well with garlic as it does with ginger. Dinner was shrimp in garlic butter and olive oil which looked terribly plain until Kerry stepped out onto the balcony, snipped some parsley and showered it over the shrimp.

Oh wow! I can’t say I’m jealous now but there was a time... It is surely the most perfect gift for you! Someone pays attention to who you are and what you do!

Found it! I’m still just as wealthy as I was before I found it. Or just as poor!

So lunch was a cup of coffee, another brown butter cookie and a handful of cherries. I would love to see that brown butter cookie with something other than chocolate chips as an inclusion. Or perhaps no inclusion at all. It’s not that I’m anti-chocolate but that I’m pro brown butter. After rereading that shrimp recipe I linked to above at least three times, I realized it was not the direction I really wanted to go. So I stole bits from that recipe and I will combine them with what is in my head and with some luck we will have something worth eating for dinner. The shrimp shells, garlic and hot pepper infused olive oil seemed like a good idea. I stole that part. Simmering away. Perhaps the shells could’ve gone a little longer but I was concerned about the garlic. Burnt garlic would have destroyed the whole thing. Shrimp have been given a salt massage and are resting in the refrigerator. All the components of a salad are prepped and stored separately. Dinner should be just a matter of throwing together all the prepared ingredients. Just like a meal kit.

Haven’t seen that five dollar book deal perhaps it’s not available on .ca or I’m incapable of finding it.

This is the rice portioned out and wrapped. I portion it into one US cup (250 mL) packets which work out just fine for me. The rice must be wrapped when it is still quite hot and left to cool before being put into a resealable bag and thrown into the freezer. It is a fast meal for me. Two minutes in the microwave to resuscitate the rice and then top it with whatever is handy or can be quickly put together. It is probably not for purists and I never said I was a purist just puritanical.

Why would you need to pasturize it unless you were intending to store it? Having cooked quite a number of pork loins sous vide of various diameters and circumferences I couldn’t imagine leaving one in there for nine hours. And I tend to lean towards the anal in regards to food safety. To each their own. I have no wish to engage in arguments.

Ah so. I suspected you would properly curate that butter, but I did read it that you had sauteed that other stuff in there. I feel much better knowing the truth.

I have bookmarked that cocktail because it does sound delightfully refreshing. I am not sure that ginger beer is absolutely not available on the Island. Sometimes I am surprised at what we find. The popsicles also sound very refreshing. We actually have popsicle molds here which we keep swearing we will try never do. The road to hell and all that.

Doubt you could even tempt me with this. Seems like a shameful waste of lovely butter. But then what do I know?

No. I might do that if I was using it as a marinade but it will be used to deglaze the pan after the browning happens.

Ah ah. I may have found the answer to my cocktail dilemma. In the Chambord topic there is a suggestion that Chambord could, in a pinch, stand in for cassis. There is a cocktail recipe that Kerry sent to me before we came up here suggesting that we give it a try. It is for a Bourbon Decay. When we went to make it a few nights ago we discovered that we had no cassis. I will run that by the boss and see if it flies. Here.

So today I am going to take the final beef shank from the freezer and allow it to defrost in the refrigerator. Tomorrow or perhaps the day after I will give it the treatment it deserves – – a true, well almost true, braise. It will go into the Instant Pot along with some aromatics and some wine and we will enjoy it a la osso buco. Before Kerry left on her adventure we discussed dinner this evening. Shrimp tempura needs to be saved for a day when Kira is being well cared for by a sitter! Tempura waits for no woman. But like me, Kerry is finding those shrimp in the freezer are weighing heavily on her appetite. So tonight it will be shrimp Spanish style mostly following this. I also need to get some Japanese rice cooked, packed into portions and frozen. I did not bring my rice cooker along so the Instant Pot will have to be the stand-in. But ever since I learned that every grain of rice cradles seven gods (click), rinsing and cooking rice has become fraught with danger. The very thought of washing 7, 14 or perhaps 28 gods down the drain ... But I have rolled my strength and all into one ball and will face the dangers ( apologies to Andrew Marvell). I have also been tasked with finding a cocktail which will empty yet another bottle of spirits. My choices seem to be Chambord, Rittenhouse Rye and an amaro whose name I have forgotten. Please Lord they do not all have to be in the same drink.

I saved all kinds of money on Prime Day. The flakiness of the website combined with an inability to figure out what is what because of the search function I didn’t buy a thing.

I have an induction range so finding a magnetic pot is never an issue in my house.

That would almost certainly work for me to keep the kitchen cool. After the stiff gin and tonic and the cold watermelon I would have no further interest in anything but a nap.

Good morning. A bit of a late start today it’s beautiful out there with lots of sunshine and very tolerable temperatures. Kerry has gone off to finish up things at the hospital and then she will be heading out to Gore Bay again for lunch and a visit with Lisabeth of Ultimately Chocolate. I have chosen to stay home for many reasons but especially because I know Lisabeth has news she wants to share with Kerry about her chocolate business. I have only a very peripheral interest in chocolate these days so I’m sure I’ll be happier here reading about Japanese cooking and culture. Of course I will likely miss out on a great lunch either at a restaurant or made by Lisabeth who is no slouch in the kitchen. Breakfast is good but missing any sort of bread to soak up that yolk! Thought I might’ve had a pan-fried hotdog bun but when I reached for one I saw they had already become part of a science experiment. They just don’t make things the way they used to.

For me it’s the Joule! Size, sleekness, ability to be used in so many smaller vessels. Slips into a drawer easily. When in use kitchen looks more like a kitchen than a science lab. Aesthetics! But the Anova was my work horse for a long time and I would not dismiss it. I still own two.

Most of them go into the dishwasher. But really it’s just as easy as taking a soapy cloth as you would to a dinner knife, rinsing it and drying it. One of mine has a wooden handle so it requires a little more care and attention. The wires do break eventually so it’s wise to have a spare wire on hand.

Really, truly I do not want to drag this off-topic but I have to say that you + slow cookers simply does not compute in my very limited universe. What do you cook in them? I am now going to make a 2nd cup of coffee to make sure I read your post correctly.

Vodka and Kahlúa. Proportions vary. Think I got this one wrong. I used 2:1 vodka to Kahlúa. Doesn’t taste quite right. Didn’t stop me from drinking it though.