BS: Recipes - what are we eating?

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 12 Aug 19 - 10:45 AM

What am I eating? Not much today; we just returned from a week of restaurant meals on holiday.

It's high summer in southwestern Ontario, so my shopping objective is corn (maize). In its husk, to be eaten off its cob after steaming on the barbecue.

Oh, and tomatoes.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 12 Aug 19 - 10:51 AM

Avocado: not ripe not ripe not ripe not ripe aha you went to the bathroom so I rotted. But when they are good they are very very good.
Made a great chicken soup (no noodles) with mirepoix and thighs and a lot of Berbere spice. Leftovers made a lovely noodle dish (no broth).

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 12 Aug 19 - 10:09 PM

I picked up a jar of garlic Alfredo sauce (Aldi's brand) and will use that with the tandoori bread to make some small personal pizzas. Chicken, basil, Parmesan, fresh sliced tomatoes, etc.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: leeneia
Date: 13 Aug 19 - 01:37 AM

Mrrzy - loved your avocado joke. How true.

My tomatoes have not been ripening. A website says it's because the weather here is too hot. (Never heard of that one!) But I collected several as a test and have put them on the wide windowsill along with an apple to supply ethelyne gas. They said to put them in a brown paper bag, but if I did that, I would forget to check them.

Wish me luck. My own theory is that we are going on a trip in two weeks, so they are waiting for us to go out of town, and then they will turn a beautiful ripe red and be devoured by squirrels.

Maybe tomorrow would be a good day for fried green tomatoes.

Slice green tomatoes about 1/2 inch thick.
Melt butter in a skillet.
Dip tomatoes in corn starch.
Fry tomatoes in hot butter till outside is crisp and inside is soft.
Grate a little pepper on top.

If you have never had them, green tomatoes are tart. They make a nice contrast to mild foods like chicken.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Aug 19 - 11:00 AM

Saw the avocado thing on a friend's fridge, who also had a magnet pad labeled Chopin Liszt. How musical and food-related!

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Aug 19 - 11:27 AM

I took my Chopin Liszt to the supermarket and left Mrs Steve a note saying I'd be Bach in a fugue minuets...

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 14 Aug 19 - 11:05 AM

Steve Shaw: shame, shame.

I am still craving mussels.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Thompson
Date: 14 Aug 19 - 02:08 PM

My understanding is that "green tomatoes" in American recipes usually refers to tomatillo(e)s, a thing I've heard of and even tried to grow, but never tasted.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Thompson
Date: 14 Aug 19 - 02:09 PM

Ooh, avocado soup sounds good!

If you want them exactly ripe, cheat and buy them frozen; Aldi does them, as does Iceland.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Thompson
Date: 14 Aug 19 - 02:14 PM

And mussels: for me it's white wine and butter and lots of garlic and finely-chopped parsley, let them release their liquor and cook for a very few minutes till sweet, then remove the mussels (or pour out the liquor) and reduce the liquor/wine/garlic/parsley and add a slosh of cream. Serve with crusty French bread.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 14 Aug 19 - 05:44 PM

There are recipes for green tomatoes that use just that - green (unripe) tomatoes. I make relish when I have enough green tomatoes in the fall (picked before the first frost). Tomatillos are similar, but they have that husk (calyx) and aren't in the same genus, though they're all Solanaceae family. They're apparently more tart, though when they're quite ripe they're sweeter and similar to the tomato and can be substituted.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: David Carter (UK)
Date: 15 Aug 19 - 03:28 AM

Green tomatoes are used in some south east asian recipes. They go well with chicken.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 15 Aug 19 - 10:33 AM

Fried green tomatoes are too big, I think, to be tomatillos. Here in Virginia, at least. Tomatilloes?

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 16 Aug 19 - 09:23 AM

Grilled pork tenderloin.

Here in Hog Heaven (Stratford in the headquarters of the Ontario Pork Council for a reason), pork tenderloin is often on special at the supermarket. It doesn't taste like much if simply roasted, so it's a good idea to marinate it in something fairly acid, such as fifty-fifty lemon juice and olive oil, and to add lots of garlic and thyme.

I dislike the fiddly task of stripping the fascia (the silvery skin of connective tissue) off the tenderloin, so I cut it into medallions before putting it into the marinade. After about half an hour of immersion at room temperature (longer in the fridge), take out the meat, shake off the excess marinade, and lay the medallions on a cutting board. Cover them with a sheet of waxed paper and flatten them like schnitzel. I prefer the rolling pin method.

Then grill the medallions (now more like ovals) either on the barbecue or under the broiler. They cook fast, so don't leave them unattended for a minute. Very good with rosé and a heap of grilled or stir-fried veg.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Aug 19 - 09:55 AM

Though my recipe calls for a less lean meet, I have an eggplant, tomato, and pork casserole that is a favorite cold weather dish and I use tenderloin because it's relatively inexpensive and very easy to cut up for the dish. I start making it in the fall when the eggplants are still producing and the weather has cooled. I serve it with mashed potatoes. This is a recipe I scanned for someone ages ago and I have it in my Flickr account. I landed on this recipe when I was trying to find a way to use as many things from my garden as possible and I had lots of tomatoes and eggplants. It comes from Tess Mallos' The Complete Middle East Cookbook, a book I have given to all of my family members. My mother liked it and years ago gave copies to her sisters (one who is married to a Turkish immigrant who loved these recipes).

The funny thing about this book is that the newer editions are expensive paperback, but I go to Bookfinder.com and I search for the book using "The" in the title (my librarian friends scratch their heads on this one - it should drop out and not affect the search, but that isn't how this works) and I choose "used or out of print" then look for the hardcover editions. I can usually get them for under $10; I just ordered another one for under $5. I keep extra copies to use as gifts. I had a copy at the library where I worked and we had lots of international student employees. Sometimes that book was used as the ice breaker, other times it was used to compare recipes, because Mallos has it broken down by country so the same general recipe appears in different forms several times in the book. I gave that office copy to a co-worker when I retired because though it sometimes was a distraction, the bonding that people do over food is one of the fastest methods I can think of.

BTW: When I have extra eggplants I peel and cut them up and cook and then freeze them, so I always plan for a few for that casserole by cutting them in quarters length-wise, browning all sides, and freezing. Then they're ready for the casserole even out of eggplant season.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 16 Aug 19 - 01:12 PM

When you said Use the book as an icebreaker I thought of As an icepick. The visual did not work.

I am still on a mussel hunt. But I am afraid to cook them myself. So I might go back to the place that tried to sneak in Pernod. Ugh. But I think if they skip just the Pernod it might be quite good...

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 18 Aug 19 - 06:58 AM

Wasn’t feeling hungry the other day so I just had a few of the cooked potatoes on a plate with some butter. I don’t know what they were except not Charlotte, planted late here and as our one sample for the year and in a spot we later had doubts about… They were wonderful – firm flesh and great sweet and nutty flavour. Not a great crop (not that we try for much) but say 2/3 a carrier bag left and I look forward to eating more of these “new potatoes”.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 19 Aug 19 - 09:27 AM

We had a feed of corn (on the cob, maize to you Brits) last night, a variety new to me called Trinity Bicolor. Sweet as all corn seems to be these days, and only a bare whisper of true corn taste. The strongly flavoured yellow corn varieties of my youth seem to have vanished, probably because they ripened later and produced fewer cobs per stalk. Sigh.

Unwilling to set loose a storm of husks and cornsilk in the kitchen, I tried baking the cobs in their husks in the oven. It worked, and now I doubt that I will ever boil corn again.

Trim the hanging bits of corn husk off each cob, and the top of the silk tassel. Fill the sink or a bucket with water and soak the corn for about 15 minutes. Heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and lay the cobs on the rack in the middle of the oven. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Using tongs, lift out the cobs and lay them on a heat-proof surface to cool for a few minutes. When you can handle the corn without pain, peel off the husk (it will come off easily, taking the silk with it) and get busy eating.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 Aug 19 - 10:50 PM

I made cranapple juice last week after steam-juicing cranberries from my freezer. I wanted to use the pulp so I found a cranberry bar online that uses a boxed yellow cake mix for the flour portion of the recipe. Lots of sugar and butter in it - these are rich so cut them small, but they sure are good! I tried making something one time before and it was way too complicated. This was easy, and the house smelled marvelous by the time they came out of the oven. Allrecipes cranberry bars.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 19 Aug 19 - 11:51 PM

back to the corn... I think the only sweet corn we have at home these days comes from a Birds Eye frozen packet where it is mixed with peas – to me it’s not a bad standby to have in the freezer.. Years ago, I remember cans of a “Jolly Green Giant” brand.

As for it on the cob, it never was common here but we did have a few seasons of growing about 6 plants. From that, I do believe it’s a veg best cooked very soon after harvest (something that wouldn’t be achievable with supermarket produce) so it was worthwhile for a few treats. A problem now though is none of us have the teeth that would enable munching into the cob as I’d like to.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: BobL
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 03:59 AM

"best cooked very soon after harvest"

Which gives me an excuse to repeat an old tale about some folks discussing the best way of ensuring their (home-grown) corn was at its freshest when cooked.

The first said "I get the water on the boil, go and pick the corn and run - not walk - with it back to the kitchen, and put it straight in."
The second said "I set up a camping stove next to the corn patch, get some water boiling, and can cook the corn the instant it's picked."
The third said "I set up a camping stove right in the corn patch. When the water boils, I bend the plants over so that the cobs dangle in it. That way, they're cooked even before they're picked!"

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 09:51 AM

BobL, my family practised your first method (run-not-walk-back-to-the-kitchen) of corn preparation when I was young and, since we grew a tender white variety called Country Gentleman (now long disappeared), that was just about right. (My mother would probably have started a grass fire if she had ever been given custody of a camp stove.)

The corn we eat these days comes from local farmers who bring it to market in great heaps in the back of pick-up trucks. It is picked just after dawn, cooked within the day, and eaten before dark. Not optimum by the standards of true corn purists, but okay for our aging olfactory senses.

I never buy corn on the cob at the supermarket. That's just sad, and totally unnecessary in southwestern Ontario, where corn has grown since time immemorial. I see it there, all wrapped in plastic, and wonder if the people who buy it come from Mars or Antarctica, or perhaps had their tastebuds (and common sense) shot off in the war.

Jon Freeman's remark about teeth is very pertinent, however. I thank every higher power there is that I still have a full set of natural-grown, original-to-me choppers, inelegant as they may be, for at the age of 65 I can still gnaw a bone or a corn cob to good effect. Mind you, I have to set aside enough time later for a close encounter with the dental floss, but there you go.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: gillymor
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 10:17 AM

When I lived near the shore in Delaware during summers we'd catch a bunch of blue crabs and then run out to a u-pick farm and gather up some Silver Queen corn and within a couple of hours they'd both be on the boil (not in the same pot) and I can't imagine corn that tasted any better.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 11:17 AM

There was a Nero Wolfe novella in Trio For Blunt Instruments that was made into the TV episode Murder Is Corny. He has specific requirements that the corn be picked and delivered very quickly (and then other information about how to cook it.)

My Facebook page is messed up so I asked the question about the source of this story in the Wolfe Pack page then had to go there via my pitbull's account to read their answer since my original post disappeared. (This is getting really old!)

As a kid in Seattle one of my favorite meals every summer was when Mom would get the fresh corn (she grew up on a farm so I imagine had a good idea of what fresh corn was all about) and boil it and keep bringing it to the table. We got one dinner each summer of just corn on the cob, as much as we wanted to butter and salt and gobble down. With six of us I imagine that must have amounted to a case of corn. :)

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: leeneia
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 12:28 PM

I find that corn on the cob from local supermarkets is quite good. We shuck it, pull off the silk, put it on a plate with 2T of water and microwave it on high for 5 minutes. You have to let it cool off before you can eat it.

Nero Wolfe's instructions (IIRC) were to bake the corn unhusked, in the hottest possible oven for 45 minutes. I would never do it; it's unthinkable to run a hot oven on a hot summer day.

Cook's Illustrated magazine just had a recipe for country ribs, Spanish style, and we are going to try them today with corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes. "Spanish style" calls for lots of spices from my spice collection.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 06:02 PM

Supermarkets here sell corn on the cob that goes by the name "supersweet." It can be very nice, though it's been known to be a bit chewy. Ten or fifteen minutes on the barbecue, not too roaring, renders it delicious. No need to wrap it in foil or anything. Just keep it turning.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 20 Aug 19 - 09:59 PM

Them mussels were YUMMY without the Pernod!

And yet still I crave. Vitamin deficiency or something?

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 11:08 AM

I froze this year's wild grape juice because so far I haven't gotten around to making jelly. And while I was in there I evicted a gallon freezer bag of mystery meat, probably cooked turkey. I had some turkey legs and thighs from 2016 that were sealed in the Food Saver vacuum bags and they're a different story&mash;stuff saved that way really does last a long time. I think tonight I'll try making some soup with the thighs; if it isn't any good tomorrow is trash day (though I expect it to be just fine).

This is a "Frugal" month, where I'm trying to spend as little as possible beyond the usual bills and gas and occasionally picking up fresh fruit and vegetables. I'm coming up with some interesting meals with frozen items. I'd forgotten I had a couple of pounds of Jimmy Dean sausage in the freezer so I had a few ounces of that alongside my bowl of oatmeal this morning. All of this cooking is better-aligned with cool-weather, but still delicious.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 12:53 PM

I found an aubergine “in hiding” today. The other fruit that have formed are much smaller but this one somehow got to about 10 inches unnoticed. I chopped it up together with a courgette and a tub of mushrooms and cooked it it some (in the recycling bin now and I can’t remember what it was) “cook in” sauce. Parents seem to be tucking away happily as I type.

One thing I’m sometimes in two minds about with this sort of hash up is whether to do rice or some pasta with it. I’m none too sure that some of my “cooking” would go down to well with some here but I’m curious anyway. Rice would usually be preferred here but I think either could be used and wonder about others.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: keberoxu
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 03:08 PM

One more reminiscence about sweet corn on the cob.

How my mom found out about
corn on the cob
and pressure cookers, I do not know,
but the two went together, in her kitchen,
as strictly as white with rice.

We gobbled it down as though we had all changed into hogs.
(provided sufficient margarine/butter and salt, that is)

The pressure cooker, I reckon,
would shorten considerably the cooking time.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 03:12 PM

Margarine will considerably shorten your life. It has not been allowed in our house for 25 years. Butter is the word you're looking for.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 03:19 PM

My wife left me 20 years ago, not had margerine in the house since.

Horrible stuff.

Dave H

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 03:59 PM

I would think pressure cooking would overdo the corn. One point I took from Nero Wolfe was that "American housewives murder corn on the cob" or something along those lines, by boiling it for 10 minutes or more. I took note and usually only have it in the water long enough to get hot, probably 5 minutes.

My dogs love corn on the cob and my Labrador retriever is particularly adept at eating it off the ear row by row, human-style. The other dog it's a bit of a wrestling match to keep her from taking the entire cob to consume. Yes, it is possible to have leftover corn, and this is how I dispatch it. You should see those two gobble it down if there is butter on it. (Agreed about margarine, I haven't used it for years. I adopted friend's policy, who once pointed out that she didn't use much to spread, etc., so she might as well use butter. I also cook with it and have stopped using shortening. I use butter or oil instead.)

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 06:59 PM

Mrs Steve and I have this tradition of not cooking on Wednesday nights. The core of the menu is always cheese with Bath Olivers. We have a repertoire of accompaniments/starters. It could be avocado with prawns and Delia Smith's seafood sauce, or my version of mackerel pate* with toasted Crosta Mollusca Puglian bread (two quid from Waitrose, does us twice, freeze half of it), or just assorted nibbles.

Tonight it was assorted nibbles. We had a pot of Greek olives with feta and sun-dried tomatoes (M&S), a small pot of habas fritas, a small pot of almonds, half a jar of caperberries, some Sungold tomatoes from my greenhouse and some baby cucumbers, sliced longways, also from my greenhouse. The cheeses were a hunk of Montagnolo (a soft blue triple-creme cheese from Germany) and a hunk of Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire. My God, we ate well. We washed it down with a bottle of Puglian Primitivo (oddly, the label said Zinfandel, genetically identical). Sweet dreams, dearest...

*The mackerel pate is disgustingly delicious and disgustingly easy. Make it the day before for best flavour. If you have a hand blender it takes about four minutes not counting the washing up. If you haven't got a hand blender, there's something seriously wrong with you...

You need two cans of mackerel in olive oil, which you should drain and discard the oil, one heaped teaspoon of hot mustard (Colmans English innit, not that grainy stuff), one tablespoon of full-fat creme fraiche, a grinding of black pepper (no salt, please), a dash of Tabasco and the juice of a good half of lemon. Do not use that abomination which is bottled lemon juice. Get yourself a fresh unwaxed lemon. You won't regret it.

Put the whole lot into a jug and blitz it to almost death with your hand blender. You will have to shove it down the side of the jug a couple of times. It's very quick. Scoop into a nice ornamental pot (I have a lovely collection that I bought in Andalucía). Just before you serve it up to your beloved, coarsely grate some lemon zest on top. You need some really good hot toast and butter to go with it. The Puglian toast is magnificent if you can get it.

As with many things, I can't tell you how much better this is if you make it the day before and stick it in the fridge...

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 08:18 PM

That sounds like a wonderful Wednesday tradition!

I'm still clearing the freezer so I had the last two small pieces of cod, breaded and pan fried with homemade tartar sauce and I'll nibble something more later. I also defrosted half a multi-grain baguette that I toasted for a crostini later in the week. I made some carrot salad yesterday (ground carrots, raisins, mayonnaise) and I baked some sweet potatoes, so it could be something like that. It has been up to or over 100^o for the last three weeks and I just don't feel like sitting down to one meal all at once.

A single malt Scotch (better for me to drink after a meal) finishes the evening.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 21 Aug 19 - 11:36 PM

Hee hee that was supposed to be mdash but mash was way more culinary!

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 09:39 AM

I stopped buying margarine when I finally managed to persuade Himself that butter would not take him to an early grave with heart disease. I haven't eaten the stuff myself since I was a child, and my parents bought it because it was cheap.

I must confess that it took me way to long to learn that, with respect to food, "both good and cheap" typically applies only to what's in season where you live, if you're lucky.

Yesterday I went out to Canadian Tire and bought myself a Food Saver vacuum-sealer. This is a gadget that vacuum-packs food for storage in heat-sealed plastic bags. As soon as I brought it home, I set it up in the kitchen and promptly packed up two trays of chicken legs bought on special the day before. This task normally takes a great deal of fiddling around with clingfilm, zipper bags and masking tape, with mediocre results. With the Food Saver, time on task was cut by at least half, with much less accompanying mess. The resulting packages look just like the vacuum-sealed items in the butcher's freezer, and I expect them to be as resistant to damage. Himself tells me that vacuum-sealers are very popular with "preppers" -- the people who think they can survive the Zombie Apocalypse if they only pack away enough freeze-dried soup mix in their basements. I hope the Food Saver is the only thing we have in common ...

All this was brought on by the discovery of a package of chicken parts damaged by freezer burn. I remember that package, an awkward thing of corners and odd angles, and it was a damnable nuisance to wrap. I hope that's my last freezer-burned item. It would also be nice to reduce our holdings of baggies and clingfilm, which I loathe because it can't be recycled and it always twists into useless clumps.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 06:28 PM

I wish to report a culinary failure. I bought a beautiful big cauliflower yesterday for a quid. The weather later on today was unexpectedly benign, so we thought we'd have a barbecue. I found a recipe for barbecued cauliflower steaks. You cut the whole cauliflower into thick vertical slices, baste them with garlicky olive oil and barbecue them gently (I used one of those perforated aluminium trays) for six or seven minutes each side.

Well what a waste of a good cauliflower. Dry, acrid, ruined. And it took twice as long as the recipe said. Binned it. Never again.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Charmion
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 07:19 PM

Thanks for the report, Steve. I thought it looked too good to be true.

Marcella’s cauliflower — the one where you boil the entire head whole, then smush it up with olive oil, Parmesan, salt and pepper — was such a revelation to me that I’ll never eat it any other way again.

Oh, except for that Madhur Jeffrey recipe where you break a whole cauliflower into florets and cook it in a wok with turmeric and nigella (no kidding!) seed. I could eat the whole thing myself, cooked like that.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 08:34 PM

Well as you can imagine, Charmion, I possess Marcella's "bible," and as soon as I saw your post I looked up that cauliflower recipe. It will be next on my cauliflower hit-list and I shall report back. I must have posted our favourite Yotam Ottolenghi cauliflower recipe before, the one with chorizo, sliced olives, pumpkin seeds and paprika. I really must get to bed now but I'll post it tomorrow if I haven't already.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 10:42 PM

Um, cooking things twice as long as the recipe says usually does result in dry/acrid/burned, in my experience. I have had great experiences with grilled cauliflower steaks, oh do try again. Maybe thinner slices? I'd hate for you to miss out...

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Aug 19 - 10:43 PM

I've been tempted to put some links at the top of the thread to various recipes posted here, but there are so many that are casual yet actionable descriptions I wouldn't know where to start.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: leeneia
Date: 23 Aug 19 - 11:03 AM

We have made the cauliflower steaks with olive oil both fried in a skillet and baked in the oven. Both are good.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 24 Aug 19 - 04:36 AM

We did a very simple barbecue this evening. Very basic, very delicious. The main player was mackerel fillets, three each, quite large. I had to spend half an hour pin-boning the buggers, but it was worth it. I made a baste of lemon juice (fresh lemons or forget it), a squidge of garlic, a sprig of thyme, a dash of Tabasco and, not least, extra virgin oil. We had salad potatoes, cut in half, coated in extra virgin olive oil and seasoned, baked on a tray in a hot oven for half an hour, and cherry tomatoes skewered and done for five minutes on the grill. It was a beautiful evening too. Lit the fire pit and dotted a few citronella tea lights to ward off the mozzies. Bliss.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 24 Aug 19 - 04:44 AM

That was yesterday evening. I started the message last night and finished it this morning. Don't ask... :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 26 Aug 19 - 06:43 PM

I've been over to my local one-off gourmet surplus grocery that sells deeply discounted foods, many that came from the grocery store supplier because they weren't sold to the stores, others that are extra after big events (there's a high-end store that does cheese and fish and fruit and chile and other events during the year; the extra ends up here.) I'm concluding a frugal month and the purchases were mostly to restore dwindling supplies of fresh vegetables. I'll be eating a lot of asparagus because I couldn't resist buying two bunches for ten cents each. Green and yellow bell peppers and poblano peppers will be sliced and frozen.

Yesterday I brought home a rotisserie chicken and I'll be using it this week in various dishes - with these fresh peppers the first thing I'll do is pull a breast apart and mix the shreds in with sauteed sliced onions and poblanos for fajitas. I have frozen corn tortillas that will go with those. I top it with some of my thawed homemade guacamole, lebne (works like sour cream) and a few dashes of Tapatio hot sauce.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 26 Aug 19 - 07:20 PM

Last night we had a food emergency. I was going to barbecue some rather magnificent cod loins, skin on, but I'd misjudged the amount of time needed for it to thaw. Normally, that wouldn't matter, but I found that pinboning half-frozen cod is impossible without wrecking the fish. I therefore abandoned the fish, returning it to the freezer (discuss...), and we had cheese instead. But what cheese. Aside from the small lump of Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire that we had lying around, we tried a French one that we'd never tried before, namely blue d'Affinois. What a magnificent cheese. With those two to hand, we were in cheese heaven. The d'Affinois is a soft blue, double-cream cheese. You don't need much as it's very rich, but, begod, it's a beauty....

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 27 Aug 19 - 05:03 PM

Tonight we had line-caught pollack from Bude Bay. Our fishmonger prepared it beautifully for us, fresh as a daisy it was. I made some oven chips from "Jazzy" potatoes (cut into wedges, parboil for eight minutes in salted water, drain well, coat with groundnut oil and bake for 20 minutes in a very hot oven). Meanwhile I made some mushy peas from the frozen Morrison's article, 20 minutes' boiling in sparse water. I basted the skin-on fish fillets in olive oil, lemon juice, fresh thyme and a whiff of garlic, plus seasoning, then baked them open for about nine minutes in the hot oven (turned it down a tad first) on the chip tray (I put the chips on another tray first). Nirvana.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 27 Aug 19 - 07:29 PM

"Groundnut" - would that be peanut on this side of the pond?

I found some pollack buried in the back of the freezer. It won't be as wonderful as yours, but it makes a great breaded and fried fish to go with pan-fried potatoes (cut into chunks and sauteed in olive oil and seasonings), a homemade form of fish and chips.

Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 27 Aug 19 - 07:46 PM

Yep, peanut equals groundnut.

The hardest bit of cooking skin-on fish in the oven is the timing. Tonight, my pollack fillets, which were quite thick, took about nine minutes in a 200C oven. They tell you to test whether the fish is opaque all through and going flaky. That is not easy! Much better slightly underdone, rather than dry and tough because you've lost your nerve. I nearly always get it right these days.