Anna N

Sounds an awful lot like the icebox cakes made over on this continent.

Good morning. A beautiful morning in Little Current. Looks like a rainy weekend coming up, though. Not really an egg McMuffin as I opted to put the cheese on the broccoli.

I have to say for my part that they required far less attention than sausages usually do. Certainly would be my choice of preparation going forward.

65°C for give or take two hours.

A divided CSO baking tray. Some times I forget to engage all thrusters. Today was one of those days. I wanted some char on the peppers so turned them over so the filling was down. DUH! So I did my best to scrape up all that lovely cheese and spoon it back into the peppers. SInce Kerry knows about cheddar Smokies I will let her comment on what she thought of them being sous vided. I suspect she would have preferred finished the Little Green Egg.

So the broccoli…. I have long wanted to attempt this. A broccoli purée reheated in the sous vide. Not at all sure how successful my first attempt will be. My suspicion is that the broccoli should have been cooked just a little longer before I attempted to purée it. But with the help of a little friend (35% cream) we seem to have a reasonably smooth purée. The menu is not one likely to show up at your favorite high-class restaurant in the near future. Cheddar Smokies, broccoli purée and goat cheese stuffed mini peppers. But I suspect after a cocktail (or perhaps two) both Kerry and I will find it amusing. And if not we can always go for another cocktail. Life is good.

Before you know it you will be wondering why you waited so long. Depending of course on your cooking habits.

Going to try sausages tonight.

The chicken stock was reduced to 3 cups from, I'm guessing, about 5. I did not sold it nor did I use anything more than a tiny bit of onion in there so it's pure chicken flavour. No worries about reducing it and getting it too salty. As for the ham stock I did reduce it somewhat and do not find it either obnoxiously smoky nor obnoxiously salty. I am not sure where we might use it. It is so gelatinous that I think it would make a good addition even to the chicken stock for that lovely mouth feel one gets from stock that is heavy in gelatin. I will throw it in the freezer and see if we use it before we leave. At the very least I made some room in the refrigerator. And it is always good to perform a cleanse once in a while. No, not your body, it does a fine job most of the time – – your refrigerator. I discovered these mini peppers which we had bought and I thought they would add a little je ne sais quoi to our dinner plates this evening. In various places on the web various implements were suggested as appropriate for stuffing cheese etc. inside these tiny peppers. In the end though I used those exquisite instruments I was born with, my hands. Looking at various recipes I determined that the ratio of stuffing to peppers was about 1 to 3 by weight. That was about the only thing I felt I wanted a bit of help with. Then I mixed up some goat cheese, half a clove of minced garlic, pepper, oregano and basil from our herb garden and some shredded mozzarella. Come dinner time I will brush a little oil on their backsides (oh do stop snickering) pop them into the CSO to get a bit of char and see how they turn out. They'll be like poppers without the pop! Then I researched Archimedes principle of displacement. I almost never use Ziploc bags to sous vide but could only imagine the catastrophe about to overwhelm me if I attempted to vacuum seal sausages. So dinner is almost in the bag as it were. But, but what about the broccoli you ask. Hmmm. Must continue to cogitate on that one.

That more or less describes how I work these days. Edited because such a simple sentence didn't need re-iterating.

What Shelby said.

Another fan of Amazon here if only they would get rid of those re-sellers, many of whom have ridiculous prices and even more ridiculous shipping costs! Dealing with Amazon directly is a joy.

So I sprang for the 10 day free trial but I'm finding the interface less than user-friendly or perhaps it's just me. Once again we singletons seem doomed to repeat meals. I am aware that cooking/shopping for one can be challenging but if you are going to be paying for menus and recipes then I aver that it's not unreasonable to expect the algorithm to deal with singletons who don't want to repeat meals. If I request five lunch menus I get two menus to be repeated and a single menu. I have yet to figure out how to save any menu/recipe/list although there must surely be a way. I was hoping to be blown away by the service but so far I have to say I am underwhelmed.

I find I am much more challenged now than I used to be in terms of getting a meal on the table. One of the main things I do is grate cheese. Often by the time I am ready to add some cheese to whatever I'm making I have run out of the energy needed and being able to reach into my refrigerator for a container of cheese already grated can make the difference between a good meal and a really good meal. At home I keep grated cheddar, gruyere and Parmesan on hand (all grated by me!).

While I applaud the old ways I am not sure they will be sustainable for very long. And my reasoning is this: how long do we think that basic foodstuffs as we know them will continue to be regularly available in their unprocesssed forms. Offal which requires more knowledge and a lot more time to properly prepare is almost nonexistent now in regular grocery stores. Sometimes I can go into a grocery store and find only sliced mushrooms! More and more my grocery store produce department is filled with pre-chopped, presliced, pre-cleaned fruits and vegetables. I don't think it will happen overnight by any means but I do see a time when finding uncut squash, pineapple, etc., will prove quite challenging. And I suspect it will become harder and harder to convince a child or teenager that they need to learn knife skills when someone else has done the work for them. I'm just saying……

Yes. Let's not go there again. There is one of each in this place so no arguments.

Good morning. As you see the rain has returned! Under such a louring sky I knew my breakfast plate would have to sing with colour. (Now I hear thunder). That is Max Burt's bacon you see. There might be a couple of supermarket slices left in the refrigerator but I couldn't locate them and let's be honest I didn't try that hard! Nothing too exciting is going to happen today. Kerry is back in Wiki and my plans center around reducing some chicken stock and perhaps the ham stock. I say maybe the ham stock because it was strictly an experiment and perhaps not worth the effort. Both are taking up too much room in the refrigerator so must be dealt with one way or another. Dinner plans revolve around Sous viding some sausage which I have never done before. A recent discussion on this board inspired that idea. Broccoli will show up somewhere and perhaps some baby sweet potatoes.

Neither one of us felt our dinner worthy of being posted. Kerry had re-heated chicken thighs from last night and I made a chicken salad using the chicken from the stock I made. I added red onion, raisins, lots of salt-and-pepper and some Hellmann's.

Lunch for me was OTS style (over the sink). Odds and sods I found in the refrigerator that were still perfectly edible but needed to be used up. Made chicken stock in the instant pot which is now in the refrigerator. Tomorrow I will remove the fat and cook the stock down somewhat. Surprisingly the meat still had a bit of flavor so I might make the chicken salad with it later. Then I thought I had nothing to lose if I threw in the bone, bits of meat and skin from the ham hock and made a smoky, porky stock. Too bad it is no longer soup weather here.

Love his recipes, love his philosophy but no particular wish to meet him. Jacques because he can still make my knees buckle and Marcus because his story is so fascinating.

Good morning. I do not seem to have suffered too many ill effects from last evening's powerful cocktail! Toast with caramelized apple cheddar and some Moody Blue. Kerry has gone off to Wiki for the day once again. I am leaning towards a lazy day of doing little more than reading. I have just opened my copy of Marcus Samuelson's Marcus Off Duty. I am not one to idolize chefs by any means but there are two I would like to meet. Marcus would be one and Jacques Pepin the other. However there is chicken left over, including drumsticks, that would make a nice chicken stock in the Instant Pot so I may rustle up enough energy to get that going. And I think it is time to make a serious inroad into seeing what is in the refrigerator that needs using up or tossing out. The weather has turned around and it appears it's going to be a beautiful day with temperatures in the low 20s.

Thank you. Were I looking for a way, any way, to make creamy polenta your suggestion would be helpful.

Coriaceousness is so over rated...unless of course your name is Imelda Marcos.

Yep. But the whole point is getting creamy polenta from the bowl in bowl method in the Instant Pot!

Many thanks, Kenneth. It was like a mini vacation for me.