Thanks for the Crepes

@Kim Shook, I think 475 F was probably way too hot for a cooked naan base for your dish. The hot temps for pizza dough are for oven spring, but cooked naan has already sprung. If it were me set on making this dish work with naan, I'd try it again, reducing the temp to 325 F, which is what my shirred eggs recipe calls for and bake about 15 or so minutes. I don't know if that would save the cheese from overbrowning and the naan from drying out and hardening or not, but it might be worth a try. All of @blue_dolphin's tips to get a better set egg white sound to me like they would be helpful too. I just thought of something too. You have those Club Dutch ovens, and used in the regular oven, you don't have to worry about hot spots on the bottom like I do using them on the stove top. You could try this by dropping an assembled pizza into a preheated covered Dutch oven. That would retain the steam, helping to keep the naan and cheese moist and help to cook the egg from the top and sides like when you cover the skillet for sunny side up. Is the pizza dough that is snapping back on you at room temp? Cold dough is notoriously recalcitrant. Also pressing and stretching the dough with your hands is easier and flattens out the bubbles less than rolling it, if you decide to go with a raw dough base. Is there a reason you're so excited about making this breakfast pizza for your special guests instead of one of the more traditional and fabulous breakfast spreads you have shown us over the years?

I had leftover split pea soup with pork ribs and a lot of veggies, with frozen corn meal pancakes with a lot more veggies baked into one side with butter. For dessert I had a Pepperidge Farm puff pastry apple turnover. I prefer the sour cherry ones, but can no longer find those. I had cooked one from the freezer previously in my small aluminum Club brand Dutch oven and it didn't turn out too well. It was okay and I ate it, but from lying on the hotter floor of the pot/oven on the stove top heat from the bottom, it didn't puff too well, and I had to scrape off a lot of charred pastry. This time, I rolled up some aluminum foil into a couple of inch diameter rolls to hold the frozen turnover off the floor of the pot, and it actually puffed better than it does in the oven, I guess due to the trapped steam under the thick lid. There was still some char on the bottom side of the turnover where it bellied down toward the bottom of the pot, but only in a little section between the foil rolls. I scraped that off, and I had a golden brown very well puffed dessert. The more I experiment with this little heavy aluminum pot, the more impressed I am. By little, I mean 3 qt. I also have a larger one that is a couple gallons, and never used either of them except for wet cooking much until the oven broke this umpteenth time. I just searched and it looks like you can still find the heavy cast aluminum Club pots like I have on ebay, but they have gone to cast iron in their new line. That would be even worse for hot spot on the bottom when used on the stove top.

I had not heard of the Chizza so I wen't to find out. Why, oh why, did I have go and do that?

They probably use smaller chicken patties, like the ones on the McChicken sandwich. There's 15 g protein in that sandwich, while the Buttermilk Crispy Chicken sandwich has 28 g protein, so nearly twice as much chicken in that one. One thing McD's is really good at is making things smaller. They used to have total weight in grams for each item. When they first came out with the McDouble, which is a smaller version of the Double Cheeseburger with one less slice of cheese, they still had the weights on the nutrition site, so you could compare items. It's easier to downsize, I guess, without attracting attention to it with the weights removed from the site. I found the nutrition for the actual Chicken Big Mac on the McDonald's Australia site, and it has 722 calories and 36 g protein, so it is a huge sandwich, bigger than the regular Big Mac which has 520 calories and 26.9g protein. So yeah, apparently there is more "there" there.

Porthos, What is in your chilled canned tropical fruit? I don't believe I've seen this before. And congratulations, that you finally have time to cook again.

And isn't it odd how liuzhou has such an epiphany after giving others a hard time recently for using fried rice as a dumping ground for leftovers? I'm glad you've seen the light and had a great breakfast. Russian sausage? Do you have many Russian imports in China? I don't think I've ever seen a single product over here from Russia.

I had spareribs to use for more split pea soup tonight. I put four of them into the pot with water to cover and cooked them for an hour while I was washing and chopping veggies and washing and soaking the split peas. I used vidalia and white onion, carrot, jalapeno and a bunch, probably a half pound of mini sweet peppers in yellow, red and orange from Bailey Farms in Oxford, NC. I cooked the peas and veggies for another two hours and added a little ground cloves near the end of cooking, along with more salt, pepper, and yes, I'll 'fess up a little MSG. This was very good with the last of the samoon bread heated wrapped in foil in the small Dutch oven, which has come in so very handy since my oven turned into an electrical fire hazard. Many hours later, I'm enjoying the last piece of not perfect baklava I purchased at Baghdad Bakery. You know what? Baklava is sort or like pizza or strawberries, or some say sex, in that the worst versions have to get pretty bad before they're not palatable.

@dcarch and @djyee100, Shelby lives in Kansas and has tenant farmers who grow crops on her land. It is a beautiful field of wheat isn't it? We can't build everything over unless we want to starve. Thank the Gods for the farmers who feed us all, right? My little teeny planting of six scallion bottoms with roots on the deck are shooting up like weeds! Especially since I have to carry all my groceries on foot, it is so very cool to be able to grow food here at home out of stuff that would normally be discarded.

rotuts, lamb fat is not nearly as off-putting as more mature mutton fat, which can make me gag, and it looks like Kim's lamb bacon is very will rendered. I'd certainly try it. I used to keep goats, and the mature ones stink with some kind of musk or something while alive and it permeates the meat. It's mostly the billies that stink this way. The nannies and kids are fine, but Wowee! The males' meat is terrible to me. Perhaps that would be different if they were castrated, but I don't know. I have quit buying ground "lamb" because I used to enjoy it but got ahold of some ground mutton one time sold as lamb. I started cooking it and immediately knew I wasn't going to be able to eat it. I never tasted it, and the dogs enjoyed it, but the memory can make me gag to this day, if I let it run. That is one food I really cannot tolerate. I don't have many of them at all, but my house stank for a couple days. I hate mutton the way you hate celery. Nasty, nasty meat! There is supposed to be a mutton barbecue culture in Ohio and Kentucky. They can have it all.

I just thought of another recipe that would lend itself to institutional service well and uses a lot of produce. You'd have to multiply it, of course. I got it from a library book that I failed to make a note of over thirty years ago. You can believe the instructions/method are paraphrased because I was hand copying recipes. At that time, libraries didn't offer copier service, much less computers and the card catalog was manual. You can tell the recipe is old because I've crossed out a call for 3 T of shortening they wanted you to brown the beef and onions in. An 80/20 ground beef has plenty of fat on its own, but I wouldn't drain it, as the dish has a lot of veggies and is not greasy as I've written it and made it. If you are working with a fattier mix, you may want to drain it, but considering your eaters, probably not. Masbahet El Darweesh from Lebanon 2 T flour 1 lb ground beef 1 c onion, chopped 1/8 t nutmeg 1/8 t ground cloves 1 t salt (I noted that it needs more, closer to 1 T) 1 med eggplant, sliced 3/8" 2 med zucchini sliced 1/4" 3 med tomatoes chopped or sliced (I've done both ways, and sliced is quicker) 2 medium potatoes peeled and sliced 1/4" (I've made with well-scrubbed unpeeled which may work for your circumstances) 1-1/2 c stock or broth (bouillon works) Add flour to raw ground beef in a skillet and mix. This helps thicken your broth and veg juices. Cook onion and beef together. Stir in spices. Layer veggies in your baking pan sprinkling salt as you go. Save a little to finish on top of the final beef/onion layer. I like to keep the potato layers near the bottom so that the juicier veggies baste them, but mix them up. Sprinkle cooked beef and onion mix over top and pour in your broth. Cover with foil or a lid if you have some for your hotel pans and bake at 350 F for about an hour or until veggies (especially the potato) are tender. I've made this many times over the years and it's a very good dish. Crusty bread is ideal, but supermarket white bread, which you said you always have will work fine too. That's all you need for a hearty meal. Depending on your audience, you may want to call it beef and vegetable casserole so as to not alienate those who don't cotton to unfamiliar foods. It really isn't that exotic though, and the light spicing really brings it together.

I remember making pear jam in Home Ec about a million years ago. It was small batch and put into scrupulously clean jars for the fridge, no canning process, but was really, really good. I've never seen commercial pear jelly or jam. Mine lasted no time around the large family I lived with at the time. We had a couple of pear trees when we lived in Arlington, Virginia for a little while. The dang wasps got most of them when we went on a vacation to visit the grandfolks in Louisiana. The pears came lovely ripe just when we were gone. The wasps dig a hole straight through the skin and eat out a hole in them and make a huge and menacing nuisance of themselves if you try to salvage any. I never knew wasps ate fruit before that. I'm sure there must be some purpose for wasps, but I'm hanged it I can see it.

Do you like chili, tacos, nachos, enchiladas, bolognese sauce, lasagne, stuffed shells, moussaka, pastitsio, beef stroganoff, meatloaf or balls, stuffed peppers, cottage pie, or my favorite: a good old plain ground chuck "steak"?

Warning to @liuzhou: horrible non-food discussion ahead. Really? One of my favorite vegetable sides is onion sauteed in butter until nice and soft and just beginning to brown, then add fresh corn cut off the cob. It you have red bell pepper, or want to add some jalapeno, add it with the corn. It's really good. You can make this with frozen corn during winter, but fresh corn is best. Is your Berkshire chop 10" thick, Jo, or 10" wide? I bet it will be good! I'm not afraid of salt either. It would be a sad world without salt to me. Primitive peoples used to use it as currency, and in Stephen King's "Under the Dome", where a small Maine town became isolated from the world it became currency again. We under appreciate it, I think, because it's cheap and abundant. After having a huge lunch at the vegetarian Indian buffet at Udipi Cafe in Cary, I walked around the corner and picked up a couple of samoon bread loafs and a couple pieces of pistachio baklava at Baghdad Bakery. One of the samoons became dinner stuffed with Danish ham and Muenster, wrapped in foil and heated in the small Dutch oven. The baklava was okay, and I tasted butter, but it wasn't the freshest, and there was no honey, just sugar syrup, and no rose water. I probably won't get baklava there again, but I'll be back for the samoon loaves that are baked up fresh every day. I'm spoiled on baklava from what my Greek FIL used to make and taught me to make. It sure would be nice to buy some good stuff somewhere, though, because it is a PITA to make properly and deserves the high prices if it is, in fact, properly done and reasonably fresh. I did like that Baghdad's version was not too overly sweet, but the pistachios were all in one layer and had some chunks that were almost the size of a quarter nut, so an overall baklava fail for me.

I'm not a chef, but I've traveled for a week on a tow boat as a passenger and eaten the food. My husband and I were stewarding a yacht for a dentist friend who wanted to move his boat from Biloxi, MS up the river to a berth at my FIL's marina in Memphis, TN. It was cheaper to pay for a tow, hitching a ride with the tow boat which travels 24/7 than it was to pay for fuel and motor the boat upriver under it's own power. My first husband was a merchant marine with a tankerman's license. That allows one to on- and offload hazardous cargoes like crude and refined petroleum. He worked 30 days on and 30 days off, with 6 hours on and 6 hours off, 7 days a week for his 30 days on duty. Then he would come home for 30 days. It worked the same for the cook, only their duty was to prepare three meals a day, 7 days a week, and then be off for the evening. The best part, is at least with this company, is that the cook did not have to do any clean up at all, just the cooking. My husband's status as a tankerman classified him above a deckhand, but apparently not far enough above them to spare him from joining them in the clean up duties. He said the food was good, but complained bitterly about one of the cooks who did not wash her hands and would smear (cross contaminate) food all over the kitchen, including the drawer and cabinet pulls. This created a lot of extra work for her clean up crew, and she was understandably, very unpopular. From the perspective of the cook, though, it seems that they can get away with quite a bit as long as the food is good. As cook, you'd be feeding 12-25 crew, depending on the size of the boat and its cargo of barges you are assigned to for that trip. While we lived in Memphis, living near a port wasn't necessary. The company flew crew to pick up points from all across the country, and in fact, my husband had to fly to meet his assigned boat more often than not. My husband's experience was that he was assigned to different boats as needed, and the crew varied too, so you might be working with different people all the time. He stuck with it for a couple years while we were together and eventually would wind up on repeat boats, which usually stuck with the same captains and got to know many of the crew members. The cook usually had his/her own stateroom, but accommodations can vary widely. Once my husband was assigned to a smaller boat and complained of having to share a "hot sheet" with the crew member who relieved him on his 6 hour off shifts. Eww. Also this stateroom was near the engine compartment, so it was noisy, vibrated, and it was difficult to sleep. That was the only time it happened, I'm just saying don't expect the Waldorf, but it is usually not that bad. Our stateroom as passengers was quite pleasant. The money is very good, but you have to be away from your family. I was working, but making much less than I could have as a cook on one of these tow boats. I thought it would be ideal for us for me to hire on as cook on the same boats as him, so we could be together. It turns out that the policy (late 70's/early 80's) is that they don't hire young, pretty women because it distracts the crew. I'm sure I could pass that requirement now, but even if I could have then, further policy is that spouse's do not serve on the same boat. There are, of course, exceptions made for captains who wish to have their wives on board. The captains are Gods on the water, so you had better make a point of getting along with yours. The food was a lot of meat, potatoes, vegetables, breads, desserts. Your eaters are mostly hard-working young men with huge appetites. Some of the captains got extremely obese back then, I don't know about now. Food is given very high priority, and is one of the few perks of working on the tow boats. Food budgets are ample, and the cook is responsible for menus and ordering supplies from the marine supply stores along the Mississippi. These stores send out supply boats with your order and fuel barges, and the tow boats are refueled and supplies are laded as they continue to travel upriver or down. At least the company my husband worked for realized the value of good food to crew morale and retention, and the cook is a valued position on these boats.

I fired up the charcoal grill for dinner tonight to kick off summer. A nice, thick rib eye steak starred with a supporting cast of vidalia onion, zucchini planks, a huge and very hot jalapeno pepper, fresh corn and a peach. Everything was done on the grill. I carefully peeled back the husks and removed the silk, washed the corn well and slathered it with soft butter, sprinkled with salt, then replaced the husks, trying to return them to their original positions. An aluminum foil tie at the end where the silks emerged kept the husks in place pretty well during the grilling. I stole a trick from @chefmdwhere she was grilling thick onion slices and had them skewered through the middle of the slices horizontally and this kept me from having to chase the separated rings around the grill. I will use this trick again, but oil my onion slices after skewering. It was a challenge to run the skewers through the slippery slices without skewering myself. I lost one of the peach halves down under the food and fire grates and had to give up trying to fish it out for fear I would upset the rest of the food. The very first batch of peaches I bought this year are very good. I ate one out of hand that was very juicy, tasty and ripe last night. The one grilled half I had tonight was good too. A tall glass of fresh-squeezed, icy lemonade topped off the meal. This was a very good way to usher in another summer.

There are some PBS videos of "American Masters" chefs available for free streaming here. I have no way to test if they will work across the border in Canada, but it couldn't hurt to try if you're interested.

I love root beer, especially the old-timey kind that seems as elusive as the yeti now. My Chinkiang vinegar tastes nothing like root beer to me. Anyone else think this vinegar tastes even remotely of root beer? I made the second iteration of scallion pancake for dinner tonight, but I think this is a one off dish for me. I'm glad I made it and tasted it for the first time, though. It is just too oily for me, even after being blotted with paper. The oil gets between the layers and kind of stays there. Perhaps I just tried to eat too large portions, and I couldn't finish it tonight. I don't think I need to make this again, though. Although, perhaps if I used a more regular technique with less layers and rolling instead of Kenji's, I might like it better?

Bird's nest fungus? Stunning report @liuzhou!

Perhaps @Kerala, @Vijayor some other member from India would care to weigh in on this topic? I am trying to learn more about Indian cuisine as well.

I can't read the brand because it's in Chinese. Muddy is probably not a good description. I probably just don't care for this particular style of vinegar, but I don't think mine is off or bad. Given it's one of the few foods I don't care for, I consider myself lucky to be able to enjoy the thousands of foods that I do love.

I made scallion pancakes for the first time after watching an Episode of "America's Test Kitchen" on PBS where they were making them. Apparently, they are stingy with their online recipes even for televised episodes, so I proceeded with this recipe from Kenji on Serious Eats. I halved the recipe, changed up the dipping sauce a little bit to suit my taste, and added a little salt to the dough. After all was said and done, I'll be adding a full dose of salt to the dough from now on. I actually own a 350 ml bottle of Chinkiang vinegar. There is probably a half cup gone from the bottle where I've used it in various things. I cannot make myself like it. It tastes muddy, and makes everything I put it in taste muddy. I haven't thrown it out yet, but every time I come across a recipe that calls for this black vinegar, I go to the pantry, open the bottle, smell it, close the bottle, and just cant bring myself to use it. It's marked with the proper Chinese characters, both on the label and embossed in the glass of the bottle. I wanted to like it. I still want to like it. I can't. I will probably keep smelling it though. I added white vinegar to the dipping sauce. I know it's probably a boring choice for most eGer's, but I like its bright flavor. I also added crushed red pepper and would have added more crushed pepper to the dough, had I seen this first. I have half of the dough from the half recipe in the fridge and will be sprinkling crushed pepper with the scallion tomorrow when I make up the rest of the dough and sprinkling some salt over them before rolling. Tomorrow, I think I'll follow kenji until I've rolled up the scallions into the dough, and then divide the roll in half and make two smaller pancakes as Martin did. It was kind of scary flipping an 8-incher in boiling oil and took two spatulas to execute. The pancake was good, and it's the first time I've eaten one, which needed to be corrected. I can think of other ways I'll do it differently starting with adding salt to the dough, making them smaller and rolling out a little thicker. Still a good first effort, I'd say. This was accompanied by homemade egg drop soup following "The Joy of Cooking's: recipe. I've made this before, and it was excellent as usual. I also has some leftover fried chicken wings from the Chinese American joint Lucky 7. I can't beat their wings, but on my maiden voyage with the egg drop soup, it came out better than theirs, so I make that instead of buy it anymore. Joy has you simmer slices of ginger and smashed, peeled cloves of garlic in the chicken broth for 15 minutes before proceeding with the soup. It makes all the difference. I also planted the three scallion bottoms with roots out on the deck in planters. The wind blew the planter my last crop was in clean off the deck over the winter and I didn't notice it until it was too late to salvage the scallions. They will usually winter over. I'll plant more tomorrow when I use the rest of the dough up.

Hmm... No ads, but I had to unmute the sound. I do run Ad Block software. Awesome video @Okanagancook! Well-cooked beef is my favorite protein. I love a lot of others, like lobster, shrimp, trout, nice lamb ... , but you just can't beat skirt steak, rib eye or even a good cut from the chuck in my book. It is just me, or does anyone else think that the cuts from the round would be much better without "cleaning"? They had what looked like a nice cap of fat. Perhaps it also has silverskin or something that necessitates taking off the fat, but it looked like ruining it to me. Was that an unusually fatty beef side of is that pretty normal?

On a long trek to the grocery store, which included a trip to the landlord's office in Raleigh so they could increase the rent on my dysfunctional home, I ate at Lucky 7 Chinese. I usually get the fried chicken wings. They are very lightly battered with the crispiest, tastiest coating around these parts. They par fry them and freeze, then finish frying from frozen to order and they come out screaming hot. Four whole wings plus a huge order of cooked to order similarly hot fries are $5.99. The wings are marinated before coating in batter in what I'm guessing is salt and turmeric. Delicious and a much better deal than any of the buffalo wing places around here. I also had a pork egg roll. It was okay, but I've had and made better. Can't beat the wings though and the fries are frozen too, but hot out of the fryer goes a very long way with me. I had leftover wings, which remain crispy. They are slated for dinner tomorrow night, and I'm going to try making scallion pancakes for the first time in my life. Come to think of it, I've never eaten scallion pancakes before, so it's time that is corrected. I watched an episode of America's Test Kitchen yesterday, and they were making them, but I couldn't find their recipe. Kenji to the rescue! I was also relieved to find out while at the grocery store today that they carry sesame oil. The Korean owned Pan-Asian grocer I used to have access to went out of business. There is a sign on their door from the Sheriff's office about non-payment of rent. I was panicking! I don't use much sesame oil, but I sure would hate to lose access to it altogether, and the other area Asian grocers are out of my current ability to walk to. So that was a bright spot in a bad day, finding sesame oil and some other Asian ingredients at the mainstream grocer. Yah!

Chicken cacciatore is one of the dishes I really love as leftovers. I am careful not to overcook, more for the veggies' sake, especially the green peppers, which make an appearance in my favorite recipe than the chicken. I love this dish, and am usually pretty indifferent to leftovers and feel put upon when I have to eat them to avoid waste. Not with this dish. I always cook up pasta fresh to serve with the leftovers. I mean it's dried pasta, but it is cooked up freshly. I need to make this again, stat.

On the box mix brownies (Duncan Hines) it says to use 2 whole eggs for cake like brownies and only 1 egg for fudgy brownies. I prefer lighter brownies, and use the two eggs normally. I have at times used just one egg, and it does result in denser, chewier brownies. @Lisa Shock's advice on reducing the egg, I think, is good, as usual. It is played out in my own experience on the advice of the mega corporation that is using the name of the late, great Duncan Hines. I would also up the butter to 8 T (1/2 c). Brownies are not meant to be low cal. This will help with the dryness.