On Choy

If you ever find yourself with some mei qing choy, perhaps from your CSA, this is a pretty good recipe.

Toward A Better Latke

If you aren’t totally annoyed by those fucking goddamn popover commercials, this Epicurious recipe for latkes really works well. The issue with latkes is the bath of water that happens in the mixing bowl. This takes care of that by squeezing out the potato hash with a towel. Sounds a little labor intensive but it’s not. Just squeeze out the potatoes as you want to do then add back in whatever spices you want. I put it on a half sheet and dumped the potato juice out of that into the sink. You’re left with a relatively dry batter that crisps up nicely.

A Mushroomball

I had reason to experiment with meatless meatballs and found this mushroomball recipe. Substituted bulgur wheat for the quick oats and added shitake mushrooms. Was not able to let it sit for four hours in the fridge and pretty sure that made a difference — come to think of it, flax seed meal would have probably come in handy. Would try again, actually.

Lamb Loin Chop Sock Puppets

As I was going through this googlerific recipe for lamb loin chops I was thinking that the recipe seemed to cook the things for a really long time. I’ve only made lamb loin chops once or twice, but I know they’re pretty delicate.

And in fact, six minutes in a high-heat skillet and ten minutes in a 400 degree oven doesn’t really get that “medium-rare” temperature I was looking for. It was basically cooked to death.

All of which is well and good — recipes are sometimes solid, sometimes full of typos and wrong information. What gets me is that this is a four-fork triumph. I went through some of the comments and no one was like, “this is way too long to cook this cut of lamb.”

Time was, you could trust commenters with recipes — no, seriously! You’re just kind of like, What are you people thinking? On the other hand, this identically stupid Chowhound recipe does have a voice of reason (“Stratoblaster”) who calls out whoever the fuck posted how to destroy perfectly good lamb loin chops. So maybe Epicurious just really sucks.

This Is Just To Say: Butternut Squash And Blue Cheese

The CSA is deep into winter squash mode and they’re starting to pile up on the counter, so I figured we should make a dent in the backlog. I looked up “butternut squash” in Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus and saw blue cheese and butternut squash as a good combination. Also, it seemed like it could work nicely with the pork chops we were having. Also, I had a hunk of blue cheese left over from the other night when we made a wedge salad, so . . . you see where this is going.

Jen was immediately taken with the combination: “How’d you figure this out?” (I gave credit to the book, obviously).
Definitely worth doing again.