who only by moving can balance

I am working my way through cooking (almost) everything from East. I'm at the point where the major limiting factor is seasonality of specific ingredients (and my willingness to buy out-of-season, or lack thereof) -- so herewith recipes organised by Key Ingredient, for reminding myself of closer to the time.

(Why like this? In part because I haven't worked out how to make EYB display to me the set of recipes from a cookbook that I haven't yet made...)

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Currently open in tabs: 12 cookbooks currently available via Oxfam Online, of which: one is a potential Project (Ottolenghi Flavour; I hadn't realised that it was entirely vegetarian or trivially renderable vegetarian); one is another Ottolenghi I have not looked through the contents of yet; one is entitled Mochi et Autres Pâtisseries Japonaises, which I am kind of fascinated by but probably won't be buying; and the remainder are ones that... have not yet been indexed on EatYourBooks, sufficiently interesting to me that I wouldn't mind doing the work but sufficiently uninteresting that I expect they'd then go straight back to a charity shop. (Okay, I say that but there are at least two exceptions.) They are at least mostly under a fiver?

I have made it to the end of page 10 of 60. With any luck a bunch of them will have sold by the time I've managed to finalise an order.

(No, my first indexed book has not yet been approved or indeed fed back upon. Yes, this means I still can't request to be permitted to index any of the ten or so currently in my stack and also, crucially, my possession. Also, there is some standard boilerplate that goes on the end of responses to e-mails: "Any time you have questions or suggestions, please email us - we love to hear from members." The co-founder replying to my e-mails has stopped including it.)

I have been gradually, ah, accumulating parsnips courtesy of the veg box. I... very much needed to Do Things with them.

Therefore today has featured smitten kitchen's honey & harissa farro salad and, also, soup.

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Things I have not made: the Dan Lepard ginger root cake; the Vanilla Black cookbook parsnip and hazelnut and Horlicks cake; the Ottolenghi parsnip and pecan cake with aniseed and orange. Things I did also make: the Waitrose 202...1? calendar self-saucing passion fruit pudding (because there were discount passion fruit and I Know What I Like And It's This), which on this occasion we are eating with discount custard rather than home-made cardamom yoghurt...

One of the things I did this evening while finalising a Sous Chef[1] order was go through East double-checking whether there was anything shelf-stable she calls for that (i) I don't yet own, and (ii) was actually available from this particular source.

The answer to that particular question was no, but in the process -- part of the point of this exercise being to work out whether "cook everything from that book that I haven't yet" might be an entertaining Project for the year[2] -- I wound up diverting to looking up whether pomelo has the same drug interactions as grapefruit. (There's a salad.)

The answer to that question is "yes, probably, and also so do lime and Seville oranges", at least according to Bailey et al. (2013), entitled (...) Grapefruit–medication interactions: Forbidden fruit or avoidable consequences?

WAIT WHAT, I said, WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT???

... and proceeded to experience the Emotional Rollercoaster of reading on to discover that the one reported adverse event was nephrotoxicity, relating to the use of drugs that prevent rejection of organ transplants, following

Marmalade, 1.5 kg eaten during preceding 1 wk

... and the subsequent clarification that not only did this event take place in the context of consuming one and a half kilograms of marmalade, it was, specifically, grapefruit marmalade.

... for some reason I am no longer feeling alarmed about my weekly consumption of, at most, five teaspoons of marmalade.

New toy from previous Sous Chef order: ridiculous cast-iron spice grinder. I am enjoying it a great deal, and also have discovered that it works much better or at least with fewer blisters if you, er, do not fill it entirely to the brim...

[1] If this looks like your idea of a good time, have a referral link for You Both Get £10 Off!

[2] Broadly yes; there are three or four recipes that are incompatible with Alexes, mostly for reasons of caffeine, and another couple with Integral Mayonnaise about which I am Extremely Dubious. But other than those...

1. We have. so many squash. Spaghetti squash is almost certainly going to be turned into the smitten kitchen cookbook tacos (essentially an update of a 2009 recipe). Delicata is probably going to be something involving harissa and pulses. I have also: a buttercup (I think) squash; two tiny decorative squash that are probably quite sweet; a butternut; a Queensland Blue. (And a pattypan and two courgettes, for good measure). Tell me things I should make with at least some of them? More Delicata suggestions also gratefully received.
2. Ginger, grating thereof. why??? is this a "most people have blunt knives and a lack of confidence" thing? as far as I can tell (having tried it recently) it absolutely unambiguously without fail winds you up with a fascinating mess of Ginger Fibre that you then need to chop anyway, at which point you had might as well mince-and-then-crush with a knife to start with? is there something else going on? am I just uniquely bad at Grating Ginger???

Didn't manage to talk myself into getting a Traveler's Notebook set-up from the Galen seconds sale before the colour & size I was interested in had sold out. Did pine about this somewhat.

... jumped on being second in line when a Moterm in deep teal came up on the FountainPensUK buy/sell/trade group over on Facebook last week. And it arrived today!

So far I have fondled it happily and peered at its workings and contemplated the notebooks it came with (blank/lined/grid); blank can be for poetry (maybe), grid is extremely multi-purpose I just need to decide on a purpose (given that I've got lots of potentials), and I am not thrilled about lined because I mostly eschew lined paper but idk I'll come up with something. (These days I am dot-grid all the way.)

So obviously I happily added the new notebook to the list of notebooks I've bought in the notebook where I track that (this notebook is discbound, and also includes keeping a vague record of how fast I go through the ludicrously expensive conditioner, how many pens exactly it is that I own, Irish irregular verb tables, and Notes On Computer Games). Which all starts to feel a bit recursive, so then I went and bought some cookbooks.

(This is an unhelpful summary. In fact I blithely quoted Molesworth at somebody, realised I didn't know if they recognised a Molesworth and clarified that it was Molesworth, they were one of today's lucky 10,000, and now I've got two copies of the compendium en route to me for really not much money, one for them and one for lending. In the process of noodling around eBay for cheap books I somehow wound up putting in a second order with a different vendor for a different 20% off offer, and now en route to me are Short and Sweet so I can add the recipe in there I definitely care about to the EYB account; the unrevised The Perfect Scoop, because the library doesn't have it and I'd forgotten a revised and updated version exists; and Leiths How to cook... Desserts, which was the only one of that set of four I still didn't have. Booksss.)

I looked at it dubiously while we were making it. I peered and prodded and went This Zabaglione Is Too Runny, It's Not Going To Work, Oh No, What Have We Done Wrong.

I almost managed to persuade myself it'd be fine once it had had 24h in the fridge?

But no. No it oozes everywhere gracelessly. It is still tasty and we're still going to eat all of it (and then we might have to make another one Just To Make Sure We Still Can...) but it is very very definitely: tiramisoup.

Two bags thereof, which I'm now experiencing mild trepidation about because apparently last time around I had the equivalent of one (1) bag and... ended up with 14 jars of jam.

Happily I did (thanks be to Dreamwidth search) make a note of which recipe I followed; alas I did Not make a note of how much of the various spices I included, so will get to make that up again (and take more notes this time, at least).

Alas I have been disorganised such that we don't actually have enough sugar in the house for jam to Progress until such time as Shopping has Occurred, but on the other hand there is Enough Else going on this week that leaving them to sit and think about what they've done for a little longer won't do them any significant harm.

(Providing a jar of the last batch of jam in gratitude for the More Fruit didn't hurt, esp. not given that I apparently managed a better job of getting it to set than the fruit tree's custodian usually achieves...)

The reason I'm finding myself indifferent to so many non-butternut winter squash is that they're too far over to the "melon" end of the (socially constructed, by me) cucumber-melon spectrum.

Which isn't really a reason in itself so much as it is a pattern, but I have long described my perspective on melons as "like if cucumbers had bad qualities and then you turned them up to 11".

(This realisation brought to you courtesy of "making pumpkin soup for lunch and questioning my life choices".)

(Which Deb calls "crisps", which are, obviously, a different thing.)

This recipe was originally posted waaay back in 2007, before I started reading smitten kitchen, and I actually first came across it when I was investigating fennel seed ice cream, which was in turn because I was looking for things to do with fennel. Deb updated it substantially in 2020, and almost all of it is now provided in sensible units, but as usual we prefer things with rather less sugar and more importantly I have to look up what 2/3 of a cup of whole almonds corresponds to in terms of weight every single time. Which turns out to be often enough for me to type this up for my own reference.

(This latest batch was half pear and half rhubarb for the filling, but alas I am once again underwhelmed by rhubarb even though it does go very well with the fennel ice cream.)

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