I think I will try making a vegan spaghetti carbonara from the Boshi Boyz Book. Here is the ingredient list. The sliced mushrooms are marinated in the next few ingredients then roasted and play the guanciale (or bacon) role. The cashews are boiled then roasted, and blended with the next few ingredients to stand in for the creamy raw egg sauce. Not sure the consistency will have the right degree of gluant; maybe try some additional binders?

I may make this in two parallel batches, one exactly per the recipe, and the other with whatever changes come to mind. Trying to speed up the learning process, and family will eventually object to repeating meals.

Difficult to imagine how that will come out. Good luck with it.

Here’s one way with leftover pork. :)

Similar mishmash with leftover chicken, using pearl barley rather than rice.

I don't think I'd have that patience to make the fake carbonara. It's a dish I make if I want something very quick and very tasty. So all that prep would rule it out for me. I'd just make a sauce that was already vegan.

chloe, the chicken and veggies sound (and look) good, plus clean up is only one pan, double bonus!

Dcarch, as always, your plate is lovely and interesting. Elvis Presley might not be so amused, LOL. Are those grapes or multi-colored cherry tomatoes?

John, I think the pasta sounds interesting and I like most things with mushrooms, so I'd try that. Simo is very cute, BTW. Oh, and I'd have purchased the cookbook too, even though I might never have used it.

FOAS, I would like a couple of those cookies, they'd be perfect for breakfast with some coffee.

Floral, your Valentine's Day meal sounds delicious, especially the cake. I also like the idea of "allotment", although here we do have community gardens in town and everyone is responsible for planting and caring for their own little plot. Sometimes participants find that their nicely ripening tomato is picked by a "neighbor" or something similar but it really goes amazingly well.

Neely, I'm glad you are feeling better, good enough to swallow pork chops at least.

PM, the pork looks perfect and your leftover pork dish does too. I have a bit of leftover pork tenderloin to make something with, maybe a stir fry, or something like you have there. And like you, we have terrible weather. Below zero, windy with blowing snow. And, of course, one of the cows just had to have a calf on Sunday, the coldest day so far this year. (sigh) She's a good Mama and put it right into the calf hut but it's below zero tomorrow too and wind chills down into the -teens. Tonight when we went to check on baby all the cows were in the barn, thankfully, it's open to them all the time. I put down some good second cutting hay, hopefully they'll decide to stay in there and eat the good stuff and let the babies stay warm and dry.

So, because it was cold, soup sounded good and I made posole. No pictures, but I also canned some potatoes this afternoon and I did manage to take pictures of those!

Amanda and Dave were here for breakfast on Sunday with Bud, so I made biscuits and gravy. AnnT's biscuits were perfect, as always, made with butter and buttermilk.

I made a frittata with roasted red peppers, black olives and artichokes, and baked some bran muffins.

And, of course, the pork tenderloin, with butternut squash from storage and some leftover baked beans.

I'm still working on pantry/freezer, and I'm using up a lot of things that need to be used, like the potatoes and butternut from storage and the end of a box of bran flakes and, of course, eggs.

Annie

Tasting as I go, a little dispiriting. The “carbonara” sauce does not taste rich and eggy, doesn’t taste of anything really, although the consistency is right.

[Later] It all worked out. Adding stuff gave the sauce a very nice flavor, and the ersatz guanciale was tasty.

The dish plates prettily, more so if you don’t let the pasta clump while cooking so you are peeling apart stuck-together noodles like a novice.

The recipe is thus. Coarse chop 9-10 oz portabella mushrooms (1/4” ”slices” is good), marinate in 1.5 tbsp maple syrup, 3 (not 5) tbsp soy sauce, 1.5 tbsp apple cider vinegar, 1.5 tbsp olive oil, salt, pepper. Spread mushrooms on sheet pan and into a 375 F oven, with several whole unpeeled cloves of garlic, pour rest of marinade over, roast for about 25 minutes. The mushroom pieces should be curling and blackened and just starting to char at the edges.

Boil 4 oz cashews and 3 oz hazelnuts for 15 min. Cashew provides the creamy texture, hazelnut the flavor. You could use a nut other than hazelnut, but cashew alone is too bland. Drained nuts into blender with 1 cup full fat oat milk, 3 tbsp nutritional yeast, 6 oz silken tofu, 1/2 cup plant-based ”Parmesan cheese” (Whole Foods has more vegan cheeses than you can shake a stick at), 1 tsp garlic powder (I think a bit of onion powder would be good too) and blend to a smooth creamy pourable sauce, adding more oat milk as needed. Taste and adjust - more nutritional yeast, more ”cheese”, a little salt, white pepper.

(DD thinks using packaged vegan cheese is cheating; she would sub more nutritional yeast, some onion powder, and white miso.)

I don’t know if it will ever pass for raw egg yolk carbonara but it will have a nutty and cheesy flavor and the nutritional yeast has a hint of yolkiness.

Make the pasta, not clumsily like I did. I used a little less than 1 lb of linguine. Add a couple handfuls of green peas (or fresh spinach, of other pretty green stuff) to the pasta at the end. Drain pasta, reserving 3-4 cups of pasta water. Mix in sauce, then adjust with reserved water to a soft, flowy consistency. Plate, mix in a good amount of the roasted mushroom, squeeze the roasted garlic out of the skin into the dish, drizzle olive oil and sprinkle green and cheesy things on top.

Just like real carbonara, this sauce tends to set up so you want to serve it right away. You’ll need to add more of the reserved water if the dish sits around.

SWMBO gets very affronted if proposed a carbonara other than the traditional dish made from raw eggs by an elegant Italian lady who was part of some fancy Italian car family - not Ferrari, maybe Maserati? - who we met at the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s. We went to the Concours and the Monterey Historic Races every summer for a decade, so I can’t remember when Mrs. Maserati or whoever showed us how to make carbonara. Anyway that is how SWMBO makes it and she was equal parts hostile and scathing when I announced that vegan carbonara was to be attempted.

She liked the dish. Quite a bit. Honestly, if served this I might not realize right away that it wasn’t ”the real stuff”, and by the time I did, I’d be happily eating.

This vegan cooking is pretty fun. Just entertaining to learn new things.

That said, I have a rack of pork ribs waiting their turn in my tummy.

annie, do you still have that huge surplus of eggs? You must be very popular now!

Your foray into vegan cooking sounds interesting and I’m sure tasty John, but alas not for me.

Your fried rice looks delicious PM and I really like the photo too. Love those biscuits Annie and the barley instead of rice sounds good floral..

Well I made moussaka. It didn’t quite turn out as I intended as the cheesey creamy sauce was still pretty runny although set in some places ( eggs in the sauce/custard ) and I layered in the eggplant instead of just chopping it in with the lamb but it all fell apart as I was serving. It tasted fine but not the “Traditional Greek“ serving of puffy topped, layered moussaka I was intending to serve.

Thank you, lizbeth-gardener , FOAS, Annie, and John for your kind words.

Just for you, I made another Valentine dish. Yes, just for you:

dcarch

White clam sauce on linguine:

Hey where are the cherries?

John, Elery and I are still eating eggs dated in December! My surplus isn't quite as big as it was. I took 6 dozen to the Township Treasurer when I paid my property taxes and 2 dozen to the friend who cuts my hair. The Township Supervisor stopped and picked up 6 dozen today and the B&B has guests all week so they've gotten several dozen.

The B&B paid me $2.50 a dozen clear back when eggs were 49 cents, so I still charge them $2.50. My costs have not gone up, so theirs won't either. I've managed to stay clear of the bird flu so far, and I'm just crossing my fingers that my flock stays healthy. Right now I'm getting between 18 and 24 eggs daily, so not enough to put a sign out by the road, but when the B&B doesn't have guests the eggs tend to stack up.

We also had our second calf born on Sunday, coldest day of the year until yesterday which was even more cold. Wind chills were about -20 so I'm at the calf hut 3 or 4 times a day to make sure bedding is dry and calves are safe and somewhat warm. It got cold enough last night that the Mama Cows wanted to be inside and they took the babies inside the barn, thank goodness. Dinners have been quick and easy. Tonight it's going to be leftover chili from the freezer over baked potatoes.

Annie

Annie, I don't know what precautions you can take for your own exposure to the birds, but maybe worth a bit of research.

$2.50/doz. Boy I wish I lived near you.

What is the temperature in the barn, do you think?

Neely, I would happily eat your moussaka.

Switching gears, roast pork ribs for dinner, just went into Giselle, sides will be decided upon after a little nap.

Normally I pressure cook or sous vide ribs before roasting or grilling, but I didn’t want to make the effort so these pork baby backs were tossed in 50% salt 50% sugar - which is how I do pork belly, which I haven’t made for a decade because of my gallbladder . . . WAIT A MINUTE I NO LONGER HAVE A GALLBLADDER. I can, I will, I must eat ALL the pork belly that I didn’t get to eat for the last ten years. I will become Pork Belly!

Ahem. Back to dinner. The ribs were roasted 1/2 hour at 350F, 1/2 hr at 250F, and 1.5 hr at 160F. That temperature step-down wasn’t pre-planned, the sugar was making the ribs blacken too fast at the normal temp. The ribs were firmer than the usual falling-off-bone, but I liked them - however, a little too much salt. DD made a teriyaki sauce with tangerine juice and chili oil.

DD made a recipe from the Bosh! cookbook. This is Hasselbeck Potatoes, a dish that the wizard authors have somehow managed to make vegan! however do they think of these things?!?

Salad with too much radicchio and too little tangerine, in my opinion. More of a looker than a, cooker?, rhymes but doesn’t really make sense.

Dinner was a pre-made salad topped with some chicken salad, but first I grated a small block of smoked jack cheese. Breakfast is in the oven. The brocolini turned a weird color, so I sliced a trio of spring onions and added several sprigs, er, flonds?, of red curly kale, way too much pepper blend because my hand slipped, and a dash of North African heat because my hand didn't slip, and the smoked cheese on top. In a great confluence of space and time, using the six eggs for the custard (and removing the milk which had gone rogue and was trying to become leban) space was made to put the new eggs where they should be, so that which was moved to make room for the chicken could go where the eggs were, and there is now room to put the quiche in the fridge!

Refrigerator Tetris, everyone’s favorite game. We have to clean out and re-organize our fridge every couple of months. DD is cranky because her commercial kitchen ways are to label everything with content and date, but no-one else does, so there are leftover containers holding mysterious things that have been there long enough to evolve consciousness.

Mine is mostly too many jars of things that keep (though I've reduced one starter which was bring fed, not used). Otherwise, it's things like the bundles of greens I got to make soup, but then got a cold and wanted to eat, not make, soup, just when I was without minions.

I like the term ”refrigerator tetris”!

Mushroom risotto. The stock was from a box of Mushroom stock.

We had a chicken curry. Sunday's roast bird made four meals for two people and a pot of stock.

Squid, leeks and peppers on the griddle. Crash potatoes.

Your meal looks delicious floral. 4 meals for 2 people plus stock from a chicken beats me, though I have managed 3 plus stock.

Take away/out rich butter chicken from the freezer with bits and pieces … pickled cucumbers, rice, chutney and yogurt. I made very quickly, a yeast Nan type bread to go with.

Another soup dinner. Or ”snoup” as we say. We needed to use up some aging veg in the fridge.

I made a stock from celery, carrot, onion, garlic, sweet potato, scallion, shallot - whatever was around. Then DD made soup from that stock and much of the same veg - celery, onion, garlic etc, but first cooked on the stovetop - plus a charred pepper, green beans, canned corn, barley, canned tomato and paste, herbs and etc. It was fine in a sort of ”stone soup” way. Flavor a little “thin”. I wanted to add red miso but DD thought the soup would be too salty.

The four chicken meals were the traditional roast, barley 'risotto', omelettes and curry. The chicken was bulked out with lots of vegetables and a carb each time. It was a decent sized bird. 1.8kg.

DH has an aversion to soups. I wish he didn't because it would make my life a lot easier. He is in no way a fussy eater ingredient-wise. He'll eat pretty much anything, but he just doesn't seem to like meals you can't eat with a knife and/or fork. He'll eat soup because he knows which side his bread is buttered, but always looks slightly disappointed when asked to lay soup spoons on the table. Last week I made a smokey cabbage and bean soup. He had mostly the solid parts and called it a stew. I had mostly the liquid and called mine soup. Same thing happens when I make pasta e fagioli.

Everyone’s food looks great to me. And we love soup here. BF especially! All kinds… stuffed pepper, hot broccoli, pea, bean, chicken and rice, etc.

This thread got away from me because I was busy moving snow. I’ve had to run the snowblower more than 35 times this season, so my meals have been whatever I crave that’s fairly quick and easy… and I love salads, so tuna & mac salad with a side salad of tomatoes, red onions, and cucumber, then hamburgers and potato salad, and then a mango and black bean salad. As I was cutting the mango, I remembered learning this technique from David Suchet in his role as Poirot. lol!

Sunday is roast night. Rack of lamb, purple sprouting broccoli, roast root veg, gravy.

Mmmmm. I'm still waiting for an invitation to roast rack of lamb night :-(

There are a couple of ribs left over ...

being slipped into a FedEx mailer I hope

Pre-Sundown Repast: Shrimp Salad.

$5 special shrimp cocktail in a special container with a gripper ring for the (sealed) sauce. I hate cocktail sauce on shrimp, but I put a little in the dressing with mayonnaise and dijon, on cut up shrimp, hard boiled egg, sugar snap peas, orange bell pepper, scallion, fresh mint, dry coleslaw (i.e., did not rescue its dressing from the bottom of its container, and fine black pepper. Don't worry. It tastes mostly of shrimp (which wasn't very strong to begin with). Served on squishy rolls.

Shrimp and mint seem like an interesting, and awfully upper-crust, flavor combination!

The trick to mint in salads is control. I think it was 6-8 full sized leaves, torn small. You get a punch of freshness and a frisson of sharpness, but it's not enough to evoke toothpaste. ;)

DD made dinner for S___’s birthday. S____, the kid of a friend, is going to college here so we are like his local family. DD made Italian sausage on polenta with rainbow chard and a simple arugula and Parmesan salad.

My job was to do dishes as they were dirtied, and a little sous’ing.

After I made Valentine's Day Dinner, a comment was made, "Why can't Valentine's Day be everyday?"

So I had to made another one. Sous vide/grilled porterhouse. Kind of surf & turf.

dcarch

Very pretty!

I need to use mint more often!

Agreed. Mint is everywhere in my yard (it is a weed), both the icky soapy lemon mint and the nice tasty dark mint. Other than mojitos, we don't make much use of it. I should at least make mint gelato. But mint in cooking would be fun to play with. Hmm, I bet mint would go with fish.

Back before the allergies got worse (or the canned tuna got worse), I put chiffonade of mint in the tuna salad, especially for ladies' potluck meetings (Jewish ones always have tuna salad). Similar kind of thing to the shrimp salad (though not overtly traif), with categories of color and flavor to be observed. People loved the mint. Obviously, a different kind of thing than a poached filet of some delicate flaky white fleshed skin on (i.e., fish as cooked on TV), but white albacore is fish, and was good with mint. Again, the trick is not to have enough to evoke toothpaste or Yorks.

Mint is a classic combo with new potatoes here. As is mint sauce or jelly with lamb. (Mint jelly is the jar in my rack of lamb picture.) I also make raita, uptsatsiki or plain yoghurt and mint to go with curried and barbecued meats.

Tonight we had pasta with purple sprouting, blue cheese (I used Clawston), nuts, crème fraiche and lemon. Tasty, but would have been better with proper pasta and not wholemeal.

Like John, we have a lot of mint growing…definitely like a weed!😳 This marinade has been one of my favorites for grilled lamb for years. Easy to adjust the amounts for less lamb. I tend to use about 1/3 cup mint for the full recipe.

1 cup dry red wine, 3/4 cup soy sauce, 4 large cloves garlic, chopped, 1/2 cup chopped fresh mint, 2 T. fresh rosemary (or 2 tsp. dried), 1 T. coarsely ground black pepper, 1 butterflied leg of lamb (about 4 to 5 pounds)

DD and DS made shepherd’s pie and shepherd’s cupcake.

(DD is keeping track of dishes that she might use in her eventual cafe-bookstore. She is not yet at the point of calculating food cost for dishes, but is thinking of food that is easy to prep, cook, and serve in reasonable quantity. Shepherd’s pie, all its components being fully cooked before assembly and heating/browning, seems practical.)

Fresh rosemary, thyme, fennel, kale, peas, carrots, and the rest of a standard S.P. recipe.

I think a vege/vegan S.P. using mushrooms would be interesting, and may try that sometime.

I suggested a hachis parmentier, but DD does not like those very much. Mashed potatoes too mealey, meat quantities too meager. Not a good dish to order in a French cafe, she says.

The cupcakes had the potatoes piped on top. The topper is supposed to be a roast cherry tomato, but we hadn’t any so an olive stood in. The cafe version will probably be prepped several dozen at a time, in ramekins, and frozen until the day of.

There were also savory scones, but they are as yet more xprmntl. A future version will use red miso butter.

We discussed the potential of a red miso gelato. I think Ice Cream Boy will emerge this weekend.

Is that 'Shepherds Pie' in a pastry case? If so it's not SP as it's known here. We make it only with the meat (lamb) filling and mashed potato topping. Cottage Pie is pretty much the same but made with beef.

The SP “cupcakes” have pastry shells - so they can be served without coming apart - but ramekins would make that unnecessary.

Oh, I thought the first picture showed a pastry case. Perhaps I'm just seeing crispy potato edges. Mini pies in ramekins would be cute.

John, that looks really good! Inhaven’t made Shepherd’s Pie in a long time. My mom made it often and I loved it.

So, for over a month there SWBMO was in TX and DD was in Marseille, so it was just me and DS and we were eating quite indifferently. Now everyone is back and we are cooking a lot and, well, Round is the new look. I really need to be showing you all some "spa food" cooking, not S.P.

Tonight, sweet potato and spinach dhal.

I’ve done shepherd’s pie in double ramekins, about 4” diameter and standard height. It makes a full meal portion.

Floral, that's pretty. I'm not a big lentil fan, but that could tempt me.

Well, it certainly did not take much time to get way behind!

John, my old barn is kind of like a walk out basement, there is earth on two sides, an old fieldstone foundation and the south side has a large sliding door which I leave open so the cattle can go in and out as they choose. There is no heat and the water tank would freeze without an electric tank heater, so it's warmer than outside and out of the wind, but when it's below zero outside it's about 10F inside the barn. Add some big cows and body heat will raise it another 10 or 15 degrees, so maybe up to 25F. It's dry, though, and out of the wind. so a much better place for the little guys who don't have the sheer body mass to stay as warm as their mothers. My littlest one is 9 days old now and seems to have survived the worst of the weather without ill effects. One more is still to be born, so it'll probably be Friday night because Saturday is supposed to be a high of 22F and a low of 11F. Sunday will be similar then Monday back up into the mid-30s. I've been checking the barn and calf "crib" multiple times daily, making sure there is dry straw, that no new babies are left out in the weather, no water tanks are freezing, and everyone is OK. I have so much winter gear that it takes longer to get everything on than it does to do the farm "check", LOL. Thankfully, it was up above 40F today, and Elery says anyone who says they like winter does not have livestock!

Meals have een quick, this was a baked potato covered with chili from the freezer and a side of coleslaw:

After that we had roasted radishes/romanesco/carrots and some maple glazed salmon:

A kind of "burrito bowl" with beef barbacoa, also from the freezer, some riced cauliflower and rattlesnake beans from last year's garden. The cauliflower was left off my plate, I just cannot make myself eat the stuff.

Hamburgers with our grassfed beef and some freezer dill pickles that I found when I was cleaning the freezer:

Finally, baked chicken breast from chickens we raised last year, mashed potatoes made with some of those canned potatoes and some salad that was supposed to be an Olive Garden copycat. I ate the salad but I wouldn't make it again, it was unremarkable.

Tonight we had a high heat roasted and nicely rare top round, which was unfortunately very tough, accompanied by baked sweet potatoes and a package of "kung pao broccoli" from Aldi which had been languishing in the freezer. Elery liked it but it was a bit too spicy for me. Good thing chickens don't have heat receptors in their mouths because mine ended up in the chicken bucket, LOL, and I forgot pictures.

And that's what's for supper here, although I'd sure like to have some surf and turf or shepherd's pie or shrimp. Tomorrow we are going to have "supper" at the neighbors' home, as one of the ladies is having a birthday and she just wanted a whole meal of "snacky finger food". I gave her a big bag of chicken wings from last year's chickens and she's going to make those as well as some little smoky sausages wrapped in crescent roll dough because she likes those. She does not care for sweets so in lieu of a cake I made Fire Crackers, some cheese crackers, a batch of whipped feta dip and I'll take a jar of my homemade salsa and good tortilla chips.

Annie

Pre-Sundown solitary repast (meeting tonight):

Organic deli sliced turkey (the kind that tastes like turkey, with Dijon and mayonnaise, sugar snap peas held together by refried black beans (some whole) and arugula, on high fiber squishy seeded ”bread”.

DD made this shallot-cheddar-apple savory galette. The crust is wheat flour and came out too small. Even though it is savory, I would have lightly sugared the apple slices, or soaked them in mirin, but DD thinks I use too much sugar in my cooking.

SWMBO hates apple pies and galette and tartes, basically anything sweet with apples. She grew up in Yakima WA, so she spent her childhood trying to avoid drowning in apple desserts. I’m surprised she didn’t develop an allergy. But she will eat apples in a savory dish, be it galette or salad or ?

It is plated with a shepherd’s pie cupcake, now with gravy “frosting”.

annie, if you hung a weighted tarp or blanket or rubber flap over the door, to keep the wind out, would the cows still be able to go through?