JAZ

I just saw this from the new editor and CEO: https://www.saveur.com/culture/print-is-back/. From the announcement: "Today, I’m so delighted to announce the pre-sale of our first new issue, which will drop in March of 2024—just in time for SAVEUR’s 30th anniversary. . . . This doesn’t mean we’re diving right back into printing monthlies. In starting from scratch, we had the opportunity to reconsider the old print model and land on one that will allow our publication to be the best possible version of itself, in 2024 and beyond."

I don't think anyone has mentioned TJ's grilled olives. My sister told me about them (we are both big olive fans) so I picked up a jar on my last visit. They're great -- very unusual, with an actual grilled flavor. Rather than a brine, they're packed in an oil-based liquid. I'd never heard of this variety of olive before, but in my opinion, they're a winner. This photo makes them look huge -- they are large, but the plate is a very small tapas plate.

I just saw this on Twitter. I thought it was a joke, but apparently it's real. There's a hilarious review of it there -- my favorite comment is about the green bean flavor: ". . .it is unforgivable. If you left a cup of green tea on the porch in bad weather for a week, during which time it attained sentience and promptly began plotting your demise, and you hate green tea, that’s what this tastes like. . . . Raw, unholy green in flavor as well as color, with a single, 1-note foghorn taste, like mowing the lawn with your mouth open."

Sorry I'm late to the conversation, but I developed a potato salad recipe with eggs and potatoes cooked at the same time for my book Instant Pot Obsession. (I can post it if anyone is interested.) Like@OlyveOyl, I cooked them for 4 minutes. In my case, I used smallish red potatoes quartered. To make the salad, I crushed the potatoes into smaller pieces.

In addition to the spinach and feta, we tried the steak and stout, chicken and bacon, and the chicken tikka masala. The steak and stout tasted great. The steak was cut into fairly big chunks so if you were truly trying to eat it out of hand, it would have been a mess. Since we were using forks and knives, it was fine. The chicken and bacon was a hit with both of us. We didn't make it to the chicken tikka masala for dinner (too full), so I had it for lunch the next day. The filling was excellent, but you're right, it was a little odd inside a crust. Although to be fair, since it was reheated, it probably wasn't at its best. The crust was pretty good. The pies are made with puff on the top and short crust on the bottom. The bottom crust was a bit thick and would have been better, I think, if we'd taken the pies out of their foil pie tins halfway through cooking so they could have gotten more crisp and browned.

For my birthday, my sister sent us a selection of savory hand pies from a place near us in Atlanta. This was the selection (not sure why the chicken and mushroom pie didn't get a fancy label): We chose four to bake a few nights ago for dinner. They recommend basting with an egg wash, so we did that. We only ended up sharing three that night, with one left over for lunch. I liked them all; Dave was not a big fan of the spinach and feta.

I love the combination of aged cheddar (or aged gouda) with roasted red peppers, so I can see that working quite well.

I was intrigued with the idea of fried saltines so I tried them, but topped mine with pimento cheese instead. Definite keeper.

We stayed in our place during our renovation, but a couple of things made this tolerable for us. First, we didn't change the location of any appliances or the sink, so there was minimal plumbing work. We had some electrical work done, but it was pretty minor and we were able to get that done ahead of time. The actual renovation involved a new floor, new cabinets and counters, and new appliances. Once the floor and cabinet bases went in, we set up a few pieces of plywood on a couple of the cabinet bases and cooked for a couple of weeks with an induction burner, Breville countertop oven, an Instant Pot, and a microwave (we moved the old fridge out into the hallway so we could still use it until the new one arrived). The main problem was the lack of a sink and dishwasher; we used a lot of disposable plates and utensils since we were doing dishes in the bathroom sink. As I recall, that stage lasted for about 2 weeks, so it wasn't terrible. Second, we didn't run into any big snags with anything major -- our appliances arrived and were installed on time, the countertops fit, etc. We had a lot of finishing work that didn't get done for months, but we could live with that.

The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product Interesting explanation from Atlantic magazine -- nothing that hasn't been said already, but a good recap: "A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. . . . From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem."

A couple of cocktails in our usual evening rotation include orange twists (or, in non-cocktail terms, strips of the zest from oranges). Thus we regularly find ourselves with denuded oranges, which we sometimes struggle to use up. We use the supremed segments in a couple of salads and in a dish of roasted fennel and onions with Italian sausages, but we're always looking for new recipes that call for segments or lots of juice, or both. Anything interesting out there? Note that while we can usually eke out a little grated zest, recipes that are heavily dependent on zest are out.

In my experience, pretty much any canned diced tomatoes contain some pieces with skin. Some more than others, but I don't think it's unique to fire roasted tomatoes.

That is the thing with pressure cooking eggs, I've found. If you find a time and method that works, then do exactly that, with no changes, and you'll be fine. Change one thing -- amount of water, number of eggs, height of the rack, whatever -- and that's what seems to cause problems.

I agree. Even though I included hard cooked eggs in most of my Instant Pot books (and tested them successfully each time), I never use a pressure cooker for eggs unless I'm testing a recipe for a book. Regular steaming is just as fast and much more reliable.

@TdeV, the bags reseal quite well, and we try to squeeze as much air out as possible, plus the drawer where they live is dark and pretty cool, so I think that helps. But we don't buy bags of everything -- just the spices we use a lot. Also, you can't see this, but many of the bags contain whole spices -- cumin, caraway seeds, fennel seeds, and peppercorns. So overall, we've found that they keep pretty well. Finally, Penzey's seems to pack very fresh spices. I don't think I'd want the typical jar from the supermarket to sit around as long.

We got a pound of sliced Iberico and a pound of manchego for Christmas, and one thing we made was croquettes, based on this recipe: Martha Stewart croquettes. Probably wouldn't have made them if we only had a bit of it, but the croquettes were excellent. We served them with a dipping sauce made with piquillo peppers and smoked paprika.

Way back when this topic was first started, we were redoing our kitchen. Before that, we had a cabinet next to the stove dedicated to spices, with a 2-tier turntable on the upper shelf, and a stepped rack on the lower. In addition, we had a shallow rack on the inside of the door to hold 4 or 5 jars of spices that we used the most. It was not ideal. When we remodeled, we bought the pull-out shelves mentioned by @kaybback then (that might even be where we first saw them). (Here's a link: https://www.verticalspice.com/products.php?product=222x2x11-Spice-Rack-Drawer-%2d-Cream). As she said, they are expensive (although they seem to have gone up in price -- we paid a bit less). We bought one and liked it so much we bought another for the other shelf. This is what they look like in our kitchen: The company makes a single pull-out shelf and it would have fit next to the larger ones, but we decided that the extra spaces was better served holding odd-shaped, larger containers. While the shelves were pretty expensive, they were one of the best investments we made in the new kitchen. You can't tell from the photos, but the black bands that hold the jars in place are elasticized, so it's really easy to remove and replace the jars (even on the top shelves). Each set of three shelves holds 30 jars --more if they're small and you stack them. Our problem was that we buy most of our spices in bulk bags and transfer to the jars as needed. We were keeping the back-up bags in drawers in the living room bookcases, which serve as our back-up pantry. When it was just a few, it was pretty easy to keep track, but lately, it has gotten out of hand. So we bought a couple of baskets to hold the bags, and now they're much more manageable. They're in alphabetical order now, although I can't guarantee they will stay that way. We still have a few strays in the drawer above -- mostly small bags and jars that were free samples from Penzey's, where we buy a lot of our spices. The last thing I did to make it all more manageable was to create a spread sheet of the jars and bags so we know what we have. Oh, and the only spices that aren't in the cabinet are salt and pepper (black and white). We keep them on the counter on the other side of the stove. So far it's worked quite well, and I think the new baskets and spreadsheet will help solve the minor problems we had.

I used to run the "Cooking for Two" site for About.com back when About.com was a thing, and also wrote a couple of books on cooking for two. What I told my readers was that in most cases, 2 oz. per person (so 4 oz. total for two) was a modest portion, 3 oz. per person was a generous serving, and 4 oz. is large. But that also depends on the sauce and what else is in the dish. If we're doing something like carbonara, we do 6 oz. for the two of us, unless we're adding a deep fried poached egg, in which case we lower it to 4 or 5 oz. With a really rich sauce like mac and cheese or alfredo, 2 or 2.5 oz per person is usually enough. But with a light sauce and a few shrimp and vegetables, we generally go with 6 oz. total for the two of us, and sometimes that also results in a lunch for one of us the next day. I have found that many if not most commercial recipes call for 4 oz. of pasta per person, which in my experience is just way too much. (All of this, of course, assumes that you're weighing your pasta.)

Those look great! We often make just a few biscuits, using a dead simple recipe/technique we discovered on Serious Eats. You just mix together equal parts self rising flour (we use White Lily) and heavy cream, so it's a breeze to scale however you want. For us, 4 or 5 ounces each of flour and cream yield enough biscuits for dinner, plus a couple left over. Here's the article: 2-Ingredient biscuits

It seems like this would work with dessert empanadas as well, depending on the filling.

When I ran About.com's Cooking for Two site, I came up with quite a few small batch desserts, but unfortunately, most of them got lost when Dot Dash bought About and changed it to the Spruce Eats. I have a few in my files that I can rewrite for Recipe Gullet (Dot Dash owns everything I posted there), but here are a couple links to what's left: Peach crisp for two (ignore the photo -- they switched mine for a stock photo, which looks nothing like the actual dish) Small batch lemon curd Small batch pie crust (this makes either a single or double crust for a 6-inch pie pan) I had recipes that used the lemon curd and pie crust, but they've been deleted -- oh well! I also had a handful of dessert recipes in my Instant Pot for Two cookbook, a couple of which are posted on the Instant Pot site. Here are links to those: Mini chocolate marble cheesecakes Lemon mousse The lemon mousse uses curd made in the Instant Pot, but if you don't have one, you can follow the directions for the lemon curd above and use it to make the mousse; both recipes make the same volume of curd.

Harold McGee wrote about off flavors and odors in white peppercorns quite a while ago. From the article: "It turns out that the off-flavors develop during the fermentation. Pepper is grown and white pepper produced in the tropics, and thanks to the heat and the stagnant fermentation water, microbes flourish that break down peppercorn flesh to variations on the molecule indole and other compounds that smell rotten, fecal, cheesy, and chemical. The chemists showed that if the peppercorns are kept in constantly flowing water for just a few days, the fleshy layer can be removed with little or no development of off-flavors." Harold McGee: Strange flavors in white pepper

My aunt (from Butte) always made this for family functions, but I thought it was her own invention. I never tried it because back then I didn't like sweet potatoes.

My mother used it all the time (she was also from Montana) -- I remember her using it most often on turkey sandwiches and fish, but I'm sure she used it in other applications as well. I don't use it often, but I do like a bit in chicken salad, along with mayonnaise. I don't have a recipe written down, but I would say I use a couple teaspoons of Durkee to 1/4 cup of mayonnaise.

One of the easiest and best dishes in my sheet pan book was Italian sausages with grapes and shallots, similar to your recipe but flavored a bit differently. Sausages are a good choice for sheet pans.