Whatcha Cooking today?

[Sue_CT]

Pecan crusted chicken breast with a large salad of mixed greens and diced apple. Small amount of blue cheese dressing for the salad. Watermelon for dessert.

[pepperhead212]

These are the only peppers I pickle - some escabeche, with the jalapeños. I also added some datil, and some Thai peppers, slit opened, to heat it up some, as the jalapeños were mild this year. I'll find out eventually, how much of that heat transfers. Funny thing about the heat transfer - years ago, when I first made this, I realized that the carrots would end up hotter than the peppers, after sitting about a month - sort of like a heat magnet.
A little over a pound of peppers, and 12 oz each of onions and carrots, ready to salt them, before cooking. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

Vegetables added to the onions, after cooking those with the blended seasonings. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

4 pints of escabeche, after a 15 minute water bath. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

[worth1]

I wanted to play with my mandolin some more so I'm making a slightly different stove top version of scalloped potatoes.
This time russets with meatballs and frozen English peas.
All in a skillet with Dutch oven cover.
Probably grate up some sort of cheese for on top.

[karstopography]

Cut the bejebus out of my left thumb. Slicing up fresh parsley of all things. The event resulted in a semi knock down drag out with my wife. I was a tyrant for sure and she evidently doesn’t appreciate tyrannical behavior, who would have thunk it?

The show must go on. Pasta with mushrooms, garlic and prosciutto was the show. Dinner was okay, not our best.

[bower]

@pepperhead212 heat transfer in pickles is the reason that banana peppers are worth growing, in a pepper challenged environment. They produce a lot and in the pickle, lo behold, they have taken on your good hot pepper flavor in the mix.

Here it is use it or lose it tomato processing time. Several batches of roasted sauce got whizzed up today, some frozen and some used for pizza. Always a favorite but it's a long haul for me to chop all the toppings and finally get em in. I made a cheeseless pizza for my DIL who is now sadly allergic to cheese in any form. And a cheesy one topped with parmesan as normally.

Just eating a slice and it sure is good. Got some 'Red Shepherd' peppers from the grocery, I guess they are a 'corno di toro' type, very large, medium wall, absolutely tasty and sweet. I bought the basket and will freeze for later use, as I did last year. They are way past bell peppers for sweetness and taste.

Also doing an experimental thing, inspired but no recipe, a really delicious tomato-potato pastry which I had at a Kurdish friend's house long ago. Really no clue how to do it but eventually settled on a compromise between my usual pastry and my usual dough, with more oil than dough but less than pastry. About 2/3 of the dough rolled out to a rectangle to fit my pan. Boiled and mashed potatoes with EVOO garlic parsley and a bit of leftover tomato sauce. This got spread in a thin layer on top of the dough. Then departing from my memory of the delicious thing, I made a layer of fresh tomatoes and bits of Shepherd pepper, covered with a thinner rectangle of dough, daubed with paprika on top and baked out. Not tasted, just came out. Hopefully not a complete bust - well how could you go wrong with tomatoes, potatoes and dough?

[Sue_CT]

karstopography, sorry to hear about your thumb. Mine kept bleeding for 2 days if I used the finger or took off the pressure bandage. But today it looks good and I won't loose the flap of skin I don't think. Looks like healthy tissue and like it will heal well in place. I hope you are on your way to healing soon, too.

After all that, that sounds like a very tasty dinner you ended up with! Hope it was good enough to apease your wife a bit, lol.

[karstopography]

karstopography, sorry to hear about your thumb. Mine kept bleeding for 2 days if I used the finger or took off the pressure bandage. But today it looks good and I won't loose the flap of skin I don't think. Looks like healthy tissue and like it will heal well in place. I hope you are on your way to healing soon, too.

After all that, that sounds like a very tasty dinner you ended up with! Hope it was good enough to apease your wife a bit, lol.

All is well. Wife wanted me to go to emergency room or at least get our daughter over to stitch up the cut. I kept constant pressure on the cut while I cooked and barked orders to my wife to stir this and add that.

I can be intense at times in the kitchen. Not everyone appreciates intensity.

Thumb has a big pad of gauze tapped over the cut. The gauze has dried blood showing, but the bleeding has stopped. No way am I going to any place that will charge my hundreds of dollars or more in real money to stitch up a stupid, careless cut.

[Sue_CT]

You might get your daughter over to look at it. The edges of the cut need to be "approximated" and kept in place with the bandage for it to heal as well as possible. Depending on the type of cut, that can be easily done or require a bit more finesse. A straight slit is the easiest to do that with. In my case it was a round slice that was only left attached in one small area and it was about 1/8" deep. If it didn't heal correctly I would have been left with a small chunk out of my finger. To keep the bandage dry, I cut the thumb off a rubber glove and put it over the bandage and taped it around the bottom to keep it dry while loading and unloading the diashwasher, washing my hands, etc.If the bandage keeps getting wet it needs to keep being changed and that can lead to fresh bleeding, otherwise infection can set in if the dressing isn't kept clean and dry. I also needed a tetnus shot. Last tetnus I had was because I got cut cutting mushrooms. Anything that might be contaminated with soil or manure can contain tetnus bacteria.

[worth1]

I've got a notch in my fingernail that's slowly working it's way to the end.
Close call.

[worth1]

The scallop potatoes turned out pretty good.
I added nutmeg and ground allspice to the mix so it was sort of like swedish meatballs.
Russets aren't the best choice and from now on will use white or Yukon Gold potatoes.
Something waxy.

Later today I'll be hopefully eating a porterhouse steak and lobster tail.
We'll see.

[karstopography]

IMG_2422.jpeg

The cut as of this morning. Had it gauzed up overnight and it was the devil to get that gauze off being it had stuck to my thumb. I used 3% H2O2 to slowly dissolve the dried blood “glue” that held the gauze to the skin. I did want to risk opening up the cut by ripping off the gauze. Doesn’t hurt and the bleeding has stopped. I applied a topical antibiotic to the cut after a thorough irrigation with peroxide. Now it is taped up again in a bandage plus the gauze wrap. Sometime in the not too distant past I had a tetanus booster.

I’m hard on left thumbs. Once upon a time cut the extreme tip of that thumb clean off with a machete. The tip got put on ice, my dad’s scotch on the rocks, and then the drink, thumb tip and myself got trundled off to the ER. Doctor on duty sewed the tip back on. Dad used to kid me they got the thumb tip confused with the goose and tell me that every winter and spring I’d get the urge to migrate or that I would grow feathers from my thumb. I was using the machete to cut off the feet and lower legs of some wild specklebelly geese we shot and kind of missed my target. The machete was a wonderful tool for this as one well aimed strike would do the trick. Specklebellies were prime geese for table fare and they always got picked clean of feathers, gutted, cleaned up, wings and lower legs removed, via the machete, and then roasted whole. Another time I stuck a heavy duty saltwater treble hook past the barb into that thumb, only with a thrashing 4# redfish still attached. Food securing and food prep is evidently hazardous duty for my left thumb.

[Sue_CT]

Yours looks similar to mine except for location and how much skin was left attached. The edges are well approximated and the tissue looks healthy. It should heal up fine. Good job on the bandaging.

[worth1]

Good lord I get squeamish at such things.

[worth1]

Somebody made a mistake in the meat section.
No way was this cut from USDA select.
The rest didn't have any marbling and it was at least if not better than the prime.
I also got a couple of north Atlantic lobster tails and some asparagus.

IMG_20230921_113435257.jpg

[karstopography]

Somebody made a mistake in the meat section.
No way was this cut from USDA select.
The rest didn't have any marbling and it was at least if not better than the prime.
I also got a couple of north Atlantic lobster tails and some asparagus.
IMG_20230921_113435257.jpg

Nice find! I agree, that NY strip looks like prime beef and that’s a good sized filet for a T-bone.

A true select grade NY strip has hardly any marbling.

[Wildcat82]

Somebody made a mistake in the meat section.
No way was this cut from USDA select.
The rest didn't have any marbling and it was at least if not better than the prime.
I also got a couple of north Atlantic lobster tails and some asparagus.
IMG_20230921_113435257.jpg

Just looked at the bottom of the home page and see it's your birthday. Make sure you treat yourself today birthday boy.

It's amazing how guys like us just get better looking the older we get!

[worth1]

The tenderloin is 2 inches at it's widest point making it offialy a porterhouse by 3/4 of an inch.
Got a half pound of unsalted butter heating up in the cast iron loaf pan to make a somewhat ghee with herbs spices and garlic but not burned.
That's what the lobster will be cooked in.

[worth1]

Okay now the whole neighborhood smells like garlic.
It's in the butter just a little over hot and infusing it with garlic taste.
The other ingredients in the butter are hot smoked Spanish paprika and herbs de provence.
This is what the lobster is going in to more or less poach.
I'm preparing them in the fashion of saddleback.

IMG_20230921_144604596.jpg

[worth1]

I've got zucchini and yellow squash baloney sliced with ruffles in the oven with a half stick of salted butter shrimp bullion powder black pepper and freshly grated nutmeg in the oven on 200F covered with cling wrap in a bowl.
At that temperature it's going to take awhile.

[worth1]

Steak was cooked to perfection.

IMG_20230921_184958411_HDR.jpg