Re breakfast, new loaf from the mix and bake bowl: The container from the charoset was just sitting shyly in the fridge underneath actual food.it was concord grape wine with whatever juice and crumbs from the apple, pecan crumbs and Saigon cinnamon. All went in with some water. Also, an Anaheim pepper (mild), diced very fine. As usual, I used basic flour (about 10.5% protein) for the preferment but I haven't gotten more bread flour so used 14% protein pasta flour (which had been opened and needed using) for 3/4. Also a couple large dollops of mixed flour, sourdough discard. It came out of the oven really late, so just threw a light teatowel over it.

It's delightful! The bit of sugar made it brown, as usual. The pepper melted and just added to the depth of flavor without any heat. The dough was stiff but moist. The crumb is nicely bouncy and moist, and open. Pretty perfect. The crust is chewy rather than crunchy, no doubt from the towl while it was still steaming. There's a constant, perfect, perfectly pleasant whiff of cinnamon. Delicate cinnamon. Who knew?

So. A tiny thin sliver of butter enhances. More overwhelms and just tastes like butter. The texture is perfect for soft cheese, but, totally overwhelmed flavor. So cheese on the side. ’S’all good. ;)

Thanks floral we do hope to have a great time. I’m actually travelling the whole time with my son and his partner so not travelling alone, except for the first leg of the trip from Melbourne to UAE. So Yes, a little nervous about that. The others live in Sydney so we will meet in Dubai an hour apart for next flight to Venice.

Annie, as you know doubt know by now, I love food and the eating of it is just as important as the memorable places and people LOL. Thanks for the encouragement to start a thread.

I'm sure you'll be looked after then, Neely. Have a great time.

Visited another (lives locally) son last night and he cooked dinner Italian style for me (Mum.) He made mezze rigatoni with a tuna tomato based sauce. As he hadn’t heard of the Italian rule ’no cheese with seafood’ he piled the cheddar on top which made it even more delicious. Ha!

Thursday: how to stretch six sausages and a tiny piece of lamb for four people.

Kebabs.

Oh, Floral, the kebabs look delicious and so does the asparagus. I just picked the first two spears from my garden yesterday, today it rained all day so maybe more tomorrow.

Neely, I'll be watching for that thread, I'm excited for you!

Here my excitement consists of that first few spears of asparagus, LOL, hopefully the first of many more. We haven't eaten it, it's in the refrigerator waiting for company, I'll check for more tomorrow.

A couple of days ago I high heat roasted an eye of round, served with roasted potatoes and a Caesar salad:

Tonight's supper was some of that beef cooked with onions and topped with Muenster, served on some sub buns. Oven fries and slaw on the side.

Last night we had burgers and a side of beans, I try to cook beans two or three times a week.

Before that it was baked chicken breasts with green peas and baked potatoes:

Bean soup earlier, and yes another taco salad, Elery enjoys them a lot.

Tomorrow we're driving to see a soccer match which starts at 5, so supper will be something either on the way there or on the way home, it's about an hour and a half each way.

Annie

That looks good. We have not grilled this season even with the temps screaming for it. Packing for a road trip, leaving tomorrow morning, i did smoke in our cabinet smoker last weekend...four shelves...top, a pound of salt, #2 cheese....mozzarella, chunks of cheedar, third shelf 4 salmon filets, (straight from frozen), then 4 sausage links. Dad loves the mozz and the salmon. FoodSaver in portions for a mixed roast seafood dinner. (we call it a 'boil-up' in the NorthEast). A big pile of seafood....whatever is off the boat at the time. With all local vegetables from the farms.

I've had our cary-on sized luggage on the guest bed for a few weeks. I like to pick away at it....DH can't pack so i cover that...years past he asks for sox, toothpaste, soaps, yada,...

I'm much better at packing. Traveling by car tomorrow. Road car trips are easier with the behind-the-floor-area- of--the-pasenger-seat....for extra walking shoes, jackets for various spring rain/cool days. Vests, yada-yada.

Venice is magical. I've been a few times. Once for the ArtBienalle. Every other year with the one you are visiting. Good you have some reservations. Hopefully you will have a Venice risotto....

Quick and easy Saturday night. Tagliatelle carbonara and green salad

Last night we snacked while i packed...

Thursday we had...

That looks delicious. How on earth do you manage to prepare so many different things while you're packing?

Finally something for dinner worth writing about. We finally got in to see a butcher shop I'd heard about. Lovely rack of lamb they cut into double cut rib chops for me. I forgot to ask where they were from, but very like the California lamb I grew up eating. Meaty and well grown, trimmed at the bone tips from being been shown as a rack, but not fully Frenched (= “ruined” in my book) Yea! Tasty. Not a hint of over-age funk for all the size. I had fallen asleep after a hectic afternoon, so fridge-foraged for vegetables being too sleep-addled to make a salad. We had fresh in the shell English peas (full grown but sweet, not starchy) and boughten red cabbage ginger ”sauerkraut” which has a texture more like a slaw (crunchy). I usually use that in sandwiches, but it was great with or next to the lamb. And with the peas, a very pretty plate. Please use your imaginations. No photo.

I started packing a month ago. Our bags are always packed. Just needs refreshing. Both cary-ons have been on the guest bed for weeks now. That's the easy part....check basics, shampoo, etc. Big tea drinker....couple dozen fresh tea bags. yada, yada. Enough sox each, ground a few-four days of fresh coffee....a few filters

I also have a small overnight bag in my car behind the pasenger seat 24/7. A change of clothes when needed...re-stock when needed.

Things happen in snow storms when my car is locked in a garage but streets are not cleared...get a boutique hotel room last minute cheap...work pays for it.

Bonus when it is around the corner from the famous Katz'deli.

The difficult packing is food. My hometown is in a food desert. I have 5 dinners planned and brunch snacks. 2 big Misfits boxes will show up at my parents tomorrow. Good produce and snacks. Cheeses. Fruit. Excellent fish monger so lots of crab, shrimp, oysters preparred every way i can think of.

Tonight i'm making a family favorite...

Tuesday. Visitors all gone - back to basics.

Beetroot tarte tatin, asparagus from the allotment

Testing to see if my post comes here. It seems that once again I am unable to start a thread or even continue the one I started about Europe. I’ve been posting about my trip but nothing seems to be appearing.

I cut up some boneless lamb this morning to marinate for kebabs. Will serve with pilaf and Greek salad. This is the marinade I used.

6 T. EACH red wine and red wine vinegar

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Salt and pepper

1/2 tsp. dried oregano or rosemary

1/4 cup finely chopped parsley

3-4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

3 T. olive oil

For anyone interested, this garlic spread from TJ’s is good with grilled lamb or chicken. Be advised it’s very garlic-y with a nice kick of lemon.

Neely, I see your post here!

Nothing new yet in your Europe thread. If it took your posts but didn't post them, they're probably flagged for human review, probably because you're posting from a different place. It might take a few days, or threw the weekend, from my experience.

"probably because you're posting from a different place"

But she can post okay in this thread. And I've often posted from different countries without any problem.

I did a test in the Europe thread and it went in. (Then I deleted.)

Asparagus vichysoisse with cilantro oil

Flank steak marinated and grilled, sauced and topped with chimmichurri.

Neely, We are traveling. (family reunion). One bar cell service. Annoying on and off. Stopped attempting to post a few days ago. Enjoying dead silence. No TV or music. No computers open. Just the shore birds, windows open. Walks on the beach.

Remote NationalSeashore protected. (near my family home). All local seafood all week...blue crabs, oysters, shrimp.

John, the flank with chimichurri looks so good. Two of my favorites!

@chloebud - first grilling of the year!

Butternut sage risotto

We went to a newish sushi place tonight, in downtown Portland. It was a pleasant evening, and there were people strolling and going in and out of restaurants.

Downtown is an odd place nowadays. Most of the offices are vacant, the crowds of office workers are gone, the little lunch spots and dry cleaners and other businesses that catered to the 9-to-5 set are struggling or gone. The city has cleaned up the tents and driven out the campers and dealers. With them gone, people are coming back to downtown to shop, eat, drink, but not so much to work anymore. The ground floors of buildings are lighted and used, the upper floors are dark.

It is oddly pleasant, even if it also feels and is unsustainable. Eventually the class B and C downtown office buildings, many of them lovely pre-war buildings with ornate detail and classic design, will go into foreclosure and be sold for twenty cents on the dollar, to new owners who will find new uses for them as . . . maybe residential conversions, maybe very inexpensive offices, maybe live-work lofts or creative spaces. Hopefully not as demolished vacant lots.

Anyway, this sushi bar is an all-you-can eat omasake place for $100/head. The review said the fish was good. It was. Really good, some was the best I’ve had in ages.

This is steelhead, Hokkaido scallop, squid, and mackerel. The scallop was excellent and I now want to go to Hokkaido.

This is a deep fried shrimp head with the raw body.

This is an egg custard with roe and uni. I’m going to make this.

This is lean ahi, toro, uni, and waygu. The uni was the best I’ve had in many years. The toro was like mousse.

After the omakase part, which you’ve just seen (less a few plates I forgot to photograph), you are invited to order as much as you want of anything. We had big plans, but after eating for an hour and a half, you just get full from the sheer time at the table. So we could only manage some more ahi, toro, saba, and waygu, plus an order of karage and a mochi dessert.

Spring is happy time. One of the very early harvests from the garden is hostas. Tender, delicious shoots, with shrimps.

dcarch

I am so behind

‘blue crabs, oysters, shrimp’ sounds like wonderful seafood Sleeve. Safe travels.

Great food as usual Annie

Floral ‘butternut and sage risotto sounds like you’re here in Italy too. It seems to me the Italians like to use sage quite a lot. A meal I had was sea bass with sage potatoes and there were huge bunches of sage for sale at the local fruit and veg market. Also let’s not forget veal saltimbocca and sage.

The sea base was first presented as whole cooked fish sizzling on a platter and then filleted to serve like this with no bones.

John your asparagus vichyssoise with cilantro oil sounds amazing and that sushi place, well just so good.

Your marinated lamb kebabs sound very good chloebud.

I’m afraid our climate is no good for growing hostas dcarch

I have tried to start a thread again but no luck. If anyone has some time perhaps you could start a thread for me, perhaps Neely’s Food in Europe or something like that. I would be so grateful as I have quite a few food and travel stories I would like to share.

Done, Neely. Your thread is posted. So sorry about your forum That fish sounds great, and I can't even eat fish!

ETA: They took it away!

I've made another attempt with a more cryptic title.

I was thinking ploughman's lunch, but couldn’t face the hot carrot pickles this early. so, short of that, it was an interesting new peppercorn cheese, and the new loaf is breakfast radishes and same size and shape carrots, coin sliced. Nearly forgot the seasoning, but it seems to have distributed evenly (salt and citrus alium pepper). It had good legs in the baking bowl. Great crumb. The radishes melted more than the carrots, thus the voids, but there are pink spots, plus a few soft pinky pieces. Mostly, it’s just nice bread, with spots.

ARG!! Neely, they really, really, really don't want you to post. I didn't even mention you in the World Food Explorers thread but poof! It's gone. I don't know why, but I did try. I had thought it was an overactive AI, but it seems to be more than that. I don't know why....

ETA: There's something wrong. The threads aren't reordering in the index as they're added to. I did a test post and it did post. Sat at the top for a few minutes, then disappeared. So, unless I'm flagged for trying to make a thread for you, it's not you!

Burro è salvia is one of my favourite ways with pasta. Very simple. Worth a try if you see it, Neely. I use quite a bit of sage, which I grow, especially with anything porky.

Friday night: chicken, spinach and potato curry.

Donkey? Floral, would you please explain what's in it?

Dinner in bags: A smallish store-type bag appeared at my door. Inside was a paper shopping bag. Inside that was a giant plain plastic bag. Inside that was a whole lobster, red from the pot, I want to say "swimming" but it wasn't alive, in butter, large chunks of garlic and some red spices I would call "cajun sesasoning". No cracker. I have two seafood crackers and a nut cracker. I could draw pictures. But I don't think I've seen them for years and they're not where one might find such things. The lobster, which was personal sized--not mini, but not one of those giants they parade around restaurants on show--and it was all for me (I didn't pay much attention to the rest, though there was for sure fried shrimp. as in shells removed) but it wasn't cracked open the way it's served in a fancy restaurant. It was whole, and hard.

So I carried what I could find into the dining room: A funnel style nut cracker, a metal meat mallet and bar sized cutting board, and my kitchen shears that have a toothed curved part for cracking nuts. Th mallet was least useful. It softened up some parts enough to use the scissors on, but not much. The funnel cracker was the only thing that worked on the thumbs. The cracker part of the shears was only sized to fit the knuckles but it did that really well. the part that meets between the cracker part and below pierced the claws enough to be able to break and cut the claws open enough to get the meat. The carapace took brute force, but the meat was mostly pulled away and it was just about getting it out. The most useful part was a little pickle fork! Not the stab out of the jar kind, but from my mother's old kitchen stainless which is meant to go on the relish plate, or for stabbing sliced meats off the serving platter. Both the fork and the tail as a pusher, did a lot for the cause.

Never fear. The company held up the conversation while I worked--and I mean worked--my way through the whole of that bug! Deep into it the spice made my nose run and sneeze, but it was delicious! The spice didn't overwhelm the lobster flavor at all. The garlic in the lobster bag was the only vegetable to be seen. It was crunchy and good, not burny, but I don't think I ate enough of it to count. I'd put together a green salad for a midnight snack, but I'm still full. Tomorrow is another day.

Very jealous of the lobster.

Neely is in Italy, not Spain, Pillog! Burro è salvia is incredibly simple to make. No donkeys required. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/29/recipe-for-pasta-with-butter-to-save-and-salve-pasta-al-burro-e-salvia-by-letitia-clark

Okay, so pasta with butter and sage, not pork? It looks appealing, even if I can't figure out what it is.

No. No pork. Perhaps I wasn't clear. I was just saying that sage goes well with pork dishes. Not that pork was involved in pasta with sage and butter. There's no figuring out really. That's the recipe. Pasta, butter, sage and some parmesan if wanted. All triggered by Neely's remarking on the amount of sage she's seeing in Italy.

Thanks! I'm not usually so dense. I totally missed the caption with the picture, in all those times looking at your post. The dish truly looks like chicken legs and spinach! I was trying to reconcile the pasta dish with the picture. My only excuse, a flimsy one, is that I was overworked and underslept all week. Thank-you for your patience, Floral! I also didn't know ”burro” was butter in Italian (it's ”manteca” in Spanish). One would think it would have floated by me on restaurant menus and recipes, but if so, I missed it! We eat burros, as in donkeys, all the time here (in the way that ”dogs” or ”hotdogs” are sausages). Burros are full sized versions of burritos, which you probably know are sizable wheat tortillas loaded with a pile of goodies and wrapped like an egg roll.

On restaurant menus, they call often the big ones “burrito” too, or ”burrito grande” to get the idea across to the general populace, and it's common all around to just say ”burritos”, I'd guess, in fact, that ”burrito” was the original form. They used to be like pasties or saussge rolls, walking foods that were meant to warm the hands and stomachs of workmen. When my mother was young, the schoolbus stop was at the main rancho. The kids, like the workers, would go into the kitchen, where the tortillas were in a warmer on the range, and big pots of beans and chili were keeping warm on the back burners, balance a tortilla on their palm, ladle on a pile of beans, etc., and fold them up into burritos, then go wait in the bean fog (like golf course fog) for the bus and eat them to keep warm.

Burros are made with giant tortillas, and sometimes two, overlapping, served on a plate, and usually ”wet”, with sauce and toppings. There's an in between, very common size that's made in a large but normal sized tortilla, kind of two hand size, which might be eaten wet or dry, often lifted like a sandwich, but not a walk down the street size, which is usually called a burrito, but sometimes a burro.

Which has nothing to do with any of your post, which is why I was asking if your word mean donkey.

The picture was the curried chicken legs with spinach which I had for dinner. Nothing to do with the completely different dish involving sage which I was recommending to Neely.

Yeah. That's what I just figured out this morning, after a good, garlic-scented sleep. I literally didn't see the “Friday night: chicken, spinach and potato curry.” before, in many looks at your post. Apologies, again. And further thanks for your forbearance.

😂

OK, now this is Saturday night. Scallops followed by baked salmon and vegetables.

I love crab but I've never had soft shells. Are they always deep fried in batter? When are they in season?

lovely seafood, both fin and shell.

Soft shell crab are typically fried, not necessarily with batter. Can be simply dry rubbed then pan fried in butter. I’ve never tried boiling or steaming them.

EasterShore blue crabs are almost always battered and fried or cast iron pan shallow fried. Even in NYC Jpanese restuarants. I find they need that high heat to crisp the shells or they are way too chewy. (i don't mind the chew)

Similar to shrimp heads. My grandmother would gather all the shrimp heads and tails during a boil-up, batter and fry for pop. My brother and i loved them as well.

The season started now through the Fall. Depends on the water temps and where you are up and down the coast.

They freeze well. We will pick up a dozen one they way out of town tomorrow.

Usually the older generations that don't understand the advances in flash freezing. I've read it takes about 3 minutes for most proteins, especially seafood, to freeze solid. Something like 40 below but don't remember the details.

An interesting documentary on YTube showing the process. They put the crabs in shallow holding tanks and watch them all day to catch them within minutes of shedding their hard shells.

Not clear in the pic, but they are served on toasted boule, open faced. DH and brother had theirs full on sandwiches. Top and bottom toast.

A couple days ago i made Oyster Po' Boys. More common on the EasternShore, DelMarVa, are oyster fritters on burger buns. Po'Boys more common south, especially New Orleans

Creole remoulade at the table. The red stuff is chopped Kimchi on the oysters. Missing is a good thinly sliced crunchy lettuce but made due with what i had.

A couple brunch sandwiches...

Fiddlehead fern come around now, but only for a few days, then you will have to wait till next year.

Made fiddlehead and drum sticks on asparagus from the garden.

dcarch

Musical!

Does anybody know whom to tell that the forum is broken?

Exhausting day. No oomph to cook. Cental American grilled shrimp and vegetables take out. Really good and effortless to eat.

I tried posting this on my Europe thread but it’s gone crazy again. So hope you don’t mind I’ve posted here in WFD.

John you asked where we were in Venice. We stayed just around the corner ( or 3 plus a bridge ) from the San Angelo vaporetto stop. We thought it was the perfect location… walking distance to St Marks square and as you know the vaporetto ( water bus ) will take you everywhere.
I loved Venice it was so beautiful but exhausting for me. Really as floral said it is a walking and water city.
We went a lot of places including the Gardens of the Biennale Architecture 2025. We went for the opening of the Australian Pavilion which was great with an indigenous dancer and the exhibit was a rammed earth wall our theme was HOME. Went into your (USA) exhibition pavilion and thought it was very good. Fantastic use of wood and your theme was PORCH. Visited many countries exhibitions. Tried to get into the Russia one as we were curious to have a look
but the man at the door said “Madam we are close ed” . There were people inside but they weren’t letting other nationals in, unlike all the other countries.
Below Exterior Australian Pavilion

Below. Interior Australian Pavilion

Below
The exterior of the USA Pavilion

Below
The interior of the USA Pavilion

The English Pavilion was very well done

Below
Exterior Gran Bretagna

Below Interior English exhibit

Went to the 1700C Cafe Florian on St Marks Square for breakfast. We had salmon and spinach quiche and it came served on a silver tray.
Below Breakfast at Cafe Florian
Exterior

Below Interior

Below
Salmon Quiche and Cappaccino

Lunch the first day in Venice was squid ink spaghetti with a mixed seafood ragu. Below

Hope my WiFi issues improve at next place. The Houzz IT don’t seem to like me changing countries do they ?

Nice first leg of your trip. Post more pics when better internet!

@john. I want to make that as well. A savory custard. Came up in my NYTimes feed just after you posted...