Thanks for the Crepes

It's so good to hear about your rambling adventures again! You've been missed, and I'm glad to hear your mechanical/electrical issues have been resolved. Is the Beach Burger you visited this one? That is an unusual and scrumptious looking bun. On picture 94, the poster comments that they assume it's a Dutch crunch bun. Any observations on this roll? I had never heard of it before. So nice you were able to visit your 96 year old friend/relative, and your cousins put on one lallapalooza of a spread!

Here is a recipe for stuffed avocados that I copied out of a Memphis library book 41 years ago. I note that the recipe is Bolivian, but not the cookbook or author. At sixteen years old, I thought my razor-sharp memory would be eternal. I also misspelled "avacado". 2 oz. peeled cooked shrimp 1 avocado 1/4 banana diced 1 t. lemon juice 2 Tbsp mayonaise 1-1/2 t. milk salt and pepper pinch paprika pinch sugar 3/4 c diced chicken 2 or 3 lettuce leaves shredded Cut avocado in half. Using a melon baller, make two avocado balls. Using a teaspoon, remove the rest of the flesh. Reserve skins and avocado balls. Dice remaining flesh. Combine avocado and banana, sprinkle with lemon juice. Combine mayo, milk, salt and pepper, paprika and sugar. Fold in bananas, chicken and lettuce. Spoon into avocado shells. Top with shrimp and avocado balls. This is a very pretty dish, but I found I liked it better by replacing the banana with tomato, the paprika with cayenne, the chicken with more cooked shrimp and scattering the shredded lettuce around the plate mixed with chopped cilantro instead of mixing it into the filling. I love cilantro, but don't like it mixed in guacamole because it spoils the creamy texture to me. That's probably why care I didn't care for the shredded lettuce in the filling either. Also guacamole must have a little finely diced white onion in this house.

How far is the walk, and will the cocktail supplies/beer also be hauled in on foot? A long hike with heavy loads could be a real problem for kegs, bags of ice, and even liquor bottles and mixers. I am sure you already have, but after some really bad boating and camping experiences at Jordan Lake in North Carolina, where all alcohol is banned in state parks, it would certainly be a top priority for me to check out with the management of the campground what the alcohol policy is. If it is banned it will be confiscated, and if you give the confiscators any back talk at all, they have the power to cite or even arrest you! And yes, as others have said, you know more about your crowds' tastes, and will have to use that as a guideline. It sounds like a very nice tribute and a fun time, if well planned.

How did you like this? It looks lovely, and I love all the components separately, but the orange seems like a strange addition. Was it good or delicious?

Much saner, better practice, IMO, but the hanging is pretty widespread at least at Atlantic beach, Morehead City, NC. It can be a spectacular display as the boats come in with their catches and you are lucky enough to be seated for dinner in one of the portside restaurants to see it and then watch the sunset too while enjoying a fabulous seafood meal.

Yeah, I was watching something, I forget what where there was a quote: "Cassoulet is stew." "No, it's French stew, and it's better!" "No, it's still just stew." I agree, though, cassoulet is awesome.

Thank you @shain! That is an amazing video, and it seems that the specialized equipment explains why I have never seen or heard of this delicacy. Thanks for sharing it with us.

The bounty of the oceans is absolutely amazing and there are so many species that live there under the water. A few we know well, and so many we don't. I can barely wrap my brain around the species that live near underwater volcanoes, eyeless because of the lack of light, and taking energy from the hot water. Some even ideate that the very origin of life began in these underwater volcanoes. I haven't been out to our coast in years, but when I was going out on charter fishing boats, many of the species that came up were familiar, but there were always the outliers. Some so alien-looking, it seemed they could not have originated on this planet! Scientists are still discovering totally new marine species, so I'm not going to beat myself up for not being able to identify a fish. It's still fun to try, though, and I am captivated by a mystery. We have a strange custom here in NC with charter fishing boats, and I would be interested to hear if it is practiced in other areas. When the fishing day is through; and it starts brutally early before dawn, and the lines are all pulled up, the passengers and fishermen go to upper decks and the deckhands hose down the fishy, bloody lower deck on the way back to port. That's not the strange part, but when we near port the catch is pulled from the ice coolers and hung from rails around the ship like this example from the Captain Stacy boat that operates out or Morehead City, NC at Atlantic Beach. Most of what you see here are red and silver snapper. Often the weather is very hot and the ocean wind is whipping, so this is not the best treatment for extremely perishable raw fish. This process of hanging the fish up is started an hour or more before we come to port, because it takes a while if the catch has been good. When the boats come into port with their catch hung up, I reckon it's good advertising for the charter line, entertainment for the tourists and diners in the portside restaurants, but not the best way to handle raw fish. I've never seen any fisherman protest. I guess they like showing off their fishing prowess. Has anyone seen this practice elsewhere?

Yeah, I googled around for a while myself when you asked if anyone could identify them. I can't resist a mystery, but was also unsuccessful on a positive ID. Glad to hear they were tasty.

shain, I had not heard of this before or seen it, so I went to find out more on the internet. It seems Martha Stewart uses shredded phyllo dough in one recipe and here it says the kadaif noodles are flour and water batter poured through a sieve onto a hot metal cooking tray. There's a little more info on wikipedia, and then I went and looked at images for knafeh. I can honestly say that the texture shown on your image of the cut slice looks more inviting to me than any of the other images in the link. Would you be kind enough to tell us more about the ingredients and how you made this lovely-looking dish?

I made a pan of olive oil/rosemary cornbread first because it needed a higher temperature than the frozen stuffed flounder from Quality Foods out of Elizabeth City, NC. I had part of the leftover green bean casserole with this. The leftovers were leftovers, the fish was good, but the cornbread slathered with butter was the star of the show. I put five wedges in the freezer, but two of them will come right back out to go with the pork and pinto beans I pulled out to thaw.

I took a ground beef chuck patty and a bag of French style green beans from the freezer for tonight's dinner. I started off with a quasi Caesar salad and used a boiled egg yolk in the dressing after smashing it up with a fork. I got the idea from Lidia Bastianach while watching her TV show the other day on PBS. Her recipe is here, but it has little semblance to what I ate tonight. I had no Romaine so I used red leaf and I also included some Scarlet Pearl grape tomatoes, which can be relied on for some pretty good tomato flavor in mid winter. I liked the addition of the cooked egg yolk, and will be doing this again. Next I made a small serving of spaghetti with a sauce of butter, garlic, crushed red chili, butter, pasta water and parmesan. I ate this by itself while it was piping hot, as I'm not a fan of cold or lukewarm pasta. Then I put together the infamous and trashy, but delicious Campbell's green bean casserole and put it in the oven, and waited for it to be mostly done and then topping it with Trader Joe's French Fried Onions, returning it to the oven and dropping my burger into a hot skillet to sear off for a few minutes to me served up med rare and very juicy. This was a very satisfying meal and I have quite a bit of leftover green bean casserole. I'll try not to waste it, but I'm finding I'm not a big leftover fan, at least not more than two or three times.

The article doesn't give details about how they are tracking information. I haven't seen one of the Freestyle machines, so I don't know if maybe they have a debit/credit card slot, and could enable tracking you personally. I wouldn't care for that, but if all they are doing is counting the number of each variety purchased so they can align their product line with the more popular ones, I can't see any harm in it.

Don't feel bad @FeChef. I will get shot down and condescended to for my opinion too! Don't get me wrong, I love marbling and fatty meat, but I would have to experience that degree of it expertly prepared by experienced hands before I could draw a conclusion. It seems off-putting to me at this point. I also did not care for the video from chef Magnus Nilsson, although I do admire his technique for equalizing the pan temp to keep the cooking butter and meat where it doesn't burn. If I absolutely must cook a steak inside, (which is a waste of an expensive ingredient, IMO) I always turn it up on its side to sear and crisp the fat cap. It's just de rigueur. M. Nilsson did not do this. The only way I will cook one inside though is when the forecast has been for good weather, and it turns out to rain so hard at cook time that I can't get a charcoal fire started. I love me some fire roasted meat, which I expect, with the well marbled specimen the OP showed would take much of the technique M. Nilsson showed by moving it around on the grill instead of the pan. This is what I do with the fatty rib eyes I adore, but I turn it up on the fat cap with long-handled tongs and let it burn, baby burn! The flames leap up both lateral surfaces of the meat, sizzling away. Watch your fingers! For thicker steaks, it's necessary to move them off the fire to a cooler area of the grill and close the lid so the heat can build up and they can heat through without oversearing the exterior. There is nothing like a fire roasted steak in this girl's opinion. All that said, though, I have seen meat such as the OP depicted thinly sliced and cooked on hot rocks, vicariously on TV and in videos. It does not brown, but the fat melts. It might even be as good as the steep prices it commands, but I have no direct experience with that.

Lovely dinner that I want right now! I would say not. @Anna N has been very merciful about the parameters, which makes it much more fun and approachable IMO. It's easier to herd us cats that way, I reckon. I wasn't going to post my freezer clearing adventures, because my first attempt was a failure, but after a few drinks ... That's life, and a wise older Southern gentleman once told me, "If you ain't makin' mistakes, it means you ain't doin' nothin'". I took out a half pound of Jimmy Dean hot sausage last night to thaw in the fridge. There was a "local dish" recipe on my WRAL TV news station website the other day for sausage ball mini muffins. Not having a mini one in my repertoire of two regular and one jumbo muffin tin (great for popovers), I decided to make standard sausage balls. I've never made them, but have enjoyed them at many an office or church potluck or party. I'd never even heard of them until I moved back down here as an adult. So I looked at these recipes from here, and here, and even here. I sort of combined them, using the jalapenos from the Jimmy Dean one, and the milk from the Betty Crocker/Bisquick site. I also added freeze dried chives and parsley, crushed red pepper, chili powder, black pepper and decided to cut the ratio of cheese in half and use AP flour with added baking powder and salt, because this is a really high fat morsel, and Bisquick has added fat (and trans fats). I also halved the recipe because I only had a half pound of sausage to work with. I prepped all the ingredients and started by fork shredding the sausage (which looked and smelled perfectly fine raw) in a stainless mixing bowl on top of the preheating oven to get the chill off. Then I blended in the herbs and spices, chopped jalapenos and the flour, salt and baking powder. Finally, in went a cup of shredded cheddar and that got mixed up so the still loose flour could sort of coat it like when I do Red Lobster knock-off Cheddar Bay biscuits. Then the milk, and mixed up just until it came together into a cohesive, but not sticky mass that formed easily into the one inch balls called for. I didn't have a scoop, but my largest size melon baller, that I thought would be to small, worked extremely well in my right hand with my left, dirty hand, helping to form the balls. Everything went quite smoothly, and I got 34 pretty uniform and near perfect little morsels for my efforts. I had decided to cook ten of them for dinner, and freeze the rest until tomorrow to bake and take to the nursing home, going on the advice of one of the tips in the recipes. Wow! was it a good thing I took one for the team, and did a test run! The meat was not to the old freezer meat gag stage, but it was definitely too old to be served to company. This is such a calorie laden dish that it needs to be absolutely optimum, and when it is, it is worth it. I was hungry and ate about three before deciding that the cooked ones would be thrown to the coons, and the carefully wrapped ones in the freezer would be cooked up later for the coons as well. I was still hungry and cooked up some Sea Pak frozen breaded clam strips and cole slaw with apple for my dinner. I also had "homemade" tartar sauce, but I just chopped olives, onion, capers, store bought dill gherkin and parsley and added it to Duke's mayo. It was good though. When I was finished eating, I cleaned up and made brownies to take to the nursing home tomorrow. The sausage balls would have been better, but such was not to be. In the never again department: I will not put sausage into the freezer without a date!

Yay! Thank you so much @sartoric for sharing your amazing trip to far India with us. I will never be able to go, so it means so much to me to share your experiences and learn more about the food and culture. I have a question about the flower market. I was expecting bouquet sprays, but your photos seem to show garlands of maybe marigolds. What is the cultural significance of that? Are they like Hawaiian leis? I haven't heard of this before. Okay, two questions. Why the single use on the terra cotta containers. It seems a bit wasteful in a culture that is not known for that.

Beautiful dinner! It's been a long time since I made hollandaise, and the next time I get my hands on some good asparagus, this is happening. Did you use powdered tarragon for your bearnaise? I usually see it with flecks of green. I so appreciate all the beautiful food photos on this site. I don't own a camera or money to buy luxuries like that, but even if I did, letting a beautiful plate of food get cold while futzing with anything but digging in is anathema to me. I suspect that is what makes me prone to even forget garnishes that have been carefully prepared are sitting ready on the counter many times.

? I don't understand what you mean by this? I don't believe no one who prepares food for customers Just Don't Care what goes on in the kitchen, and somehow, I don't believe you really do either. Duh? Just thought about it, and you must mean the customers don't give a flip about what goes on in the kitchen. Still, it's not ALL customers. The few bad apples should not be allowed to taint the whole barrel, though. Many restaurant customers care and respect the effort to bring off a top notch restaurant experience. I for one, am always amazed and delighted when I can enjoy food as good as I can cook at home or even better, especially since I can't afford a premium price point. It can be magical, even with a simple and perfectly prepared meal, and is one of the highlights of my life! I do care about and respect the staff, and I am certain I'm not on my own here. Don't let the squeaky wheels distract you. They are very good at being bastards, though. I used to dine out for lunch with a coworker who took all the staff's time from the table. The rest of the diners got very minimal service because of this demanding rhymes with witch. All of us, as customers, had a sort of simmering hate for her too.

Restaurant culture cA ... aan be rough at times around here. There was for many years, a restaurant in downtown Cary, Melba's Kitchen, that served lunch and breakfast only and closed promptly at 2 PM/1400 hours. It was the only place that served fried shrimp in driving distance/time for my lunch hour. It was run by Melba herself and a small crew that had been with her for many years. Melba's closed a few years ago, probably because Melba aged out and retired. The food was not fancy fare, but prepared with care, served hot and was always tasty and affordable with an emphasis on Southern American cuisine. The type of place where all the waitresses call everyone "Hon". This bothered me when I first moved back to the South, but it is not at all meant as condescension, but as camaraderie. I found out about the place soon after I moved here when I was bemoaning the fact just before my lunch hour one day that there was no place that had fried shrimp where I could get to and back to work in an hour. This great old gal I used to work with, whose dad was foreman of Kildaire Farm, " Kildaire Farm was started in the 1920s as a 1,000 acre dairy farm. By 1972 when it was sold for development, it had 10,000 laying hens and 550 head of cattle" and she always took great care of me at work, called Melba's Kitchen where she knew everybody, and asked if they still had fried shrimp. They did, and so I went to get some and got there about 1:30 PM/1330 hours and ordered my fried shrimp plate, plus take out orders for the other two women I worked with. My fried to order shrimp came out piping hot with great veggie sides and a warm yeast roll with real butter about 20 minutes later. At 1:57/1357 hours, 7 minutes and only a few bites into my meal, my waitress came back out with the two styrofoam-boxed take out orders and an empty styrofoam box. For about 10 minutes while I waited for my shrimp order and was eating, people were cleaning tables and placing chairs upside down on the tables. I noticed I was the only diner in there. My waitress patted me on the shoulder when she delivered the boxes and said, ""Pack up your dinner and go eat with your friends, dahlin'. We're fixin' ta close." So though Southerners are known for their hospitality, closin' time is a priority too. I went back many times over the years, but never after 1:00 PM/1300 hours. Closing times are pretty strict around here in general, and entitled snowflakes can be shocked if they aren't used to it. There are a lot of rants about this aspect on Yelp on local restaurants from folks coming in from out of town, and they almost always get relegated to the "not recommended" reviews. I don't blame them, because I am so aware that is impossible to put forth your best effort exhaustlessly. I don't know how doctors and nurses do it working so many hours, but they are dealing with life and death or severe, long-lasting disability if they don't rise to their challenges. No one dies or get crippled or disabled because you can't get your order filled past closin' time, so get over it spoiled people. Lucky France! Unfortunately, we are not quite as civilized on this side of the pond. Here is a Google link where you can see multiple other links to the incident, in case you can't believe it, like I didn't want to. It's one of the most disgusting examples. Eeeew! These happen more often than anyone would like to think about. And every body fluid you can imagine has been in the news here in relation to food tainting. Some jack-assing teenagers have even posted videos on social media of them contaminating restaurant food and been in the news and the wrong side of the law for it. Cops seems to be prominent targets, but that could be because those cases are the most prosecuted. As for me, I wouldn't piss off the kitchen or waitstaff for big money on a bet.

@Anna N , very tempting snickerdoodles. I can almost smell them. @MelissaH, I also keep a batch of cinnamon sugar in a shaker jar with a screw top (a recycled McCormick's glass spice jar) for cinnamon toast on a whim or whatever. It keeps really well. I mix by eye too and like mine pretty dark. I like the idea of freezing the dough to bake up a few fresh and hot ones at a time so much I will probably steal copy it.

I think where you stand on the obesity/taxation or regulation of sugar consumption issues is irrelevant. This is very disturbing news and a horrifying threat against free expression. I think based on the current research (which changes day to day), we can all agree that eating too much refined sugar is a bad thing, but without action, who will become the next targets of such unethical and shocking tactics? Will I? Will you? *shiver*

The price is good these days for beef rib eye steak, and the portion is generous for two. Probably, the steak is a normal cut and just crammed into a heart shaped pink container. Raw meat is quite malleable and boneless rib eye is good. It might pulled off with a T-bone too, with more gaps in the tray. You would have to make sure you showed it off in the container before cooking for the heart presentation, though. As a person who has experienced much consternation at what to give a male for Valentines, I think this is the perfect, brilliant thing. I can't think of a man I know who wouldn't be thrilled with it, but I'm sure there are many vegetarians and beef haters among the male species as well. I would be thrilled with it as a woman too, much more so than candy. In keeping with my matchless luck, though, this product has come out at a time where Valentines will be pretty much a nonevent for me for the first time I can remember.

I had my thawed pork chop with a baked sweet potato and lima beans. I know exactly how I came to have an obscene amount of food for one person in the two over-the-fridge jam packed freezers. The closest place I can buy any food at all is a vegetarian Indian grocer. It's a half mile walk one way, and they sell no meat of any kind. A mile and a half away, is an Asian grocer, that carries some limited meat. Everything I walk after must be carried back the same distance in a backpack. When I get a rare ride to an actual supermarket, I can't suppress an understandable inclination to buy everything I can cram into both freezers while I don't have to pack it back on foot. Then it comes back out one beef patty or chop at a time. I need to speed up my adjustment to my new circumstances, but it sure is hard.

I used a ground beef chuck patty from the freezer for dinner and served it with a baked potato with butter and sour cream. I also made some broccoli from fresh and melted cheddar cheese over it. Please remember all these alliterations, because I think I won't have any at all tomorrow. I've got a center cut pork chop thawing for tomorrow.

I understand where you are coming from, having worked as a server years ago, but never back of house. Our chain restaurants here in the US are typically open 7 days a week, but it is a different story with mom and pops. Much of the best food can be found in these independently owned establishments and they run them just as they please. They have no stockholders to please, and it shows in their passion and commitment to quality food and service. It also shows in their limited hours. We are in what is called the "Bible Belt" of the South, so it's not uncommon at all to find independents restaurants closed on Sundays, although that is a profitable day here. Some proprietors choose to only serve breakfast and lunch and kick you out promptly and unceremoniously at 2:00 PM if that is their chosen closing time. Some, including a favorite Southern Indian vegetarian restaurant, close on Mondays. Mondays are usually less profitable for the hospitality industry here as well, and some establishments choose to go in the opposite direction by offering discount specials on Monday to attract what business they can get. My biggest pet peeve about my particular area, is that they tend to roll up the sidewalks for dining around 9 or 10 PM for most dining establishments. We are a city of 150,000 souls, who mostly apparently tend to be nested at home by then. We are also contiguous to Raleigh, which has a population of over 431,000, so we are hardly in the wilderness. We have Waffle House and some bar and grills that serve food until 2 AM and in the case of Waffle House, 24 hours, but mostly, if you want to dine out late, you are out of luck. Some of the smaller places are eccentric with their hours. If business is slow, and they feel like going home, they ignore their own posted hours and close up early. It's frustrating to the patron, but I know I can find the best offerings in the smaller restaurants run by people instead of stockholders and bean counters, so that is what I continue to seek out.