I’m also mostly vegetarian, but every now and again I like to cook up an almighty stack of big, fat, American style buttermilk pancakes with a boatful of maple syrup and streaky bacon that’s been fried until you could stab someone with it. It’s kind of my specialty and probably the only reason I still have any friends.
I’ve toyed with the idea of opening a little pancake place, as there’s very little of that sort of thing around here, but two kids will be keeping me busy enough for the time being.
No judgement here. I’ve had my own brushings with extravagance.
I recently lacto-fermented a kilo of ceps as per Rene Redzepi’s fermentation book (which is a great read, if mostly fairly impractical for the home cook).
Was in the middle of a heatwave in London, which meant these things fizzed like mad and ended up EXTREMELY funky.
Wasn’t really sure what to do with the end product. He recommended soaking them in maple syrup, drying them out and coating them in dark chocolate, which I did. And they were nice in an interesting small mouthful at the end of a 22 course meal at Noma way. You wouldn’t want more than one in a sitting though…
I’m supposed to be studying, but now you’ve got me thinking about seafood…
I grew up in Glasgow, and my parents are still up there, and one thing the West coast of Scotland does well is seafood. My Dad knows all the places to get the best fish.
Langoustines are my absolute favourite. When they are super fresh, just boiled with and served with proper mayonnaise is the business
Youre speaking my language…regarding the shellfish and mayonaise, and also as Scotland is where my ancestors hail from! My mothers paternal side goes back to the McCrackens and the Grahams.
Rough folk, from what ive heard.
My Mom, in these later years, likes to do a Christmas eve dinner of cracked crab, fresh bread, and a bowl of mayonainse. a green salad. but not much else, maybe some lemon wedges or butter.
bottles of cool white wine to go along.
My wife is doing for a pancakes filling a mix of fried champions with a bit of fried onions, egg and cheese too. But in a polish way. Lots of homemade polish food in this household…
My wife and I are celebrating OctCOVIDfest by making pretzels, red cabbage, roast pork with mushroom gravy, and Black Forest cake at home! We typically meet up with some good friends that live out of town, but can’t do that this year, but this will be a good alternative.
Nothing fancy tonight but we’re doing cedar planked line caught salmon on the grill, romanesco and risotto topped with microgreens. I’ll take a pic and update in a few hours when I’m cooking.
Perhaps my favorite food of all time.
I did a tour of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia in 2004 and after eating it once, it became an every other day kind of thing for those three weeks.
Then when I was brought back to Croatia a year later, it was all I wanted.
There’s a small Croatian restaurant an hour south of where I live. Unfortunately they’ve transitioned to mostly steaks and seafood. There food is fantastic but sadly no Ćevapi on the menu.
Čevaps are more common in Bosnia and Serbia and even though they are popular in Croatia as well you won’t find them as much. At least not in Dalmatia where seafood is obviously more popular as it’s the coastal region of Croatia and that’s where my family is from.
But weirdly the best Burger I ever had was in Zagreb, meat from a local butcher and basically the same thing as Čevaps just formed into a patty with a black bun and selfmade fries. Fingerlicking good!
We’ve grown some of our own food for about a decade. We typically have 10-25 edibles going at any time of the year including chickens. This year we decided to raise some ducks since we were home due to covid. I’m happy to say they just started to lay. I’ve read that duck eggs are a secret weapon for bakers and confectioners. Does anyone have experience with this? I can say that they are delicious for breakfast but we’ve not done anything else with them yet.
I’ve been trying a few new things. We used to love going to middle-eastern restaurants and getting appetizer platters, so we’ve been trying to do that at home with homemade hummus, and baba ghanoush which we’ve done before, but I’ve also made kefta kababs from scratch which have been really tasty.
As a treat, I’ll sometimes make homemade smash burgers, double patty with fried onions. Also made some curries, some really great tomatillo salsa, chermula, and a few others.
Only thing I really want to do that I haven’t done is homemade gin. I’ve done it before, but have had so much else going on I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’d love to make some beer too but not before the dishwasher is installed.
) to get out of the States… business opportunity!
