Burning Seaweed Productions

My homemade cranberry sauce turned out fine, but I think I like the canned kind better because you just can cut off a slice and eat it.

Squash is abundant now so I tried roasting several kinds. They were all pretty good, except maybe the white pumpkin which was bland.

Shown here: some kind of white pumpkin, delicata squash, acorn squash, carnival squash, and honeynut squash.

Recipe by Leah Colins at Serious Eats.

Despite its shameful clickbait title (“The Hearty 5-Ingredient Dinner Salad I Make Every Week”), which I choose to blame on Serious Eats’ recent acquisition by media conglomerate People Inc. (or whatever they’re calling themselves this year) rather than on its contributors, this is a pretty good recipe.

I found that steaming, then sauteing the broccoli caused a lot of small broccoli bits to fall off and burn. I wonder if sauteing the broccoli first would avoid this issue. Roasting both the broccoli and the chickpeas would probably also be acceptable and reduce the hands-on prep time.

Recipe by The Woks of Life.

Here’s a salad I thought was worth sharing. The base is radicchio, with its bitterness offset by a dressing of tahini, lime juice, olive brine, and chili paste (very inspired by Anna Ladd’s “tahini and pungent liquid” formula). For toppings I used onions, cheddar, pepitas, chickpeas, sliced cornichons/gherkins, and a piece of salmon that I broiled with mustard.

I made some yogurt using Daniel Gritzer’s recipe at Serious Eats. It worked very well, in the sense that three days after I started, I had homemade yogurt that tasted about the same as the yogurt I started with.

I inoculated half a quart of milk with some Fage and incubated it in a cheap styrofoam cooler with a heating pad inside, which was able to maintain a temperature slightly over 100 °F for the few hours it took the yogurt to set. I strained the yogurt down by about half using cheesecloth, but a large coffee filter probably would have been easier.

The process was interesting but not really practical at such a small scale. It might be fun to try out some of the starter cultures that are available online.

I found some frozen sliced beef liver and decided to give it a try. First I tried thawing the slices and frying them, but they were too delicate and floppy to handle easily, and the liver wound up overcooked and gross. I threw it in the food processor with fried onions and a boiled egg to make chopped liver, which was actually quite tasty.

Recipe by Just One Cookbook.

Recipe by Elise Bauer at Simple Recipes.

A curry with locally grown oyster mushrooms, homemade paneer, and chickpeas. The paneer added a needed creaminess that balanced out the spice of the curry sauce.