What's za'at?

Purple cauliflower retained it's colors after roasting. With za'atar spices. I just like saying za'atar! Za'atar! The spice-lings were not all that amused when last I visited the Spice House. Za'atar!

Holy crap delicious. It was about time I made something Spanish after watching hours upon hours of Spanish cooking shows. Migas, a Spanish peasant dish composed of fried breadcrumbs and "whatever" ingredients you may have present. I made mine with apples and hen of the woods mushrooms. Holy crap delicious. I doubled the recipe that served 4. And then I ate the entire batch by myself in one sitting. 8 servings my ass! I would wager that Spanish peasants didn't eat like waifish coked up supermodels.

Dinosaur kale with almonds and cauliflower hearts. I didn't want to open a new bottle of white wine, so we'll use red. Now we're color coordinated with the roasted purple cauliflower.

Calamari fritto. Delicious! I bought the squid off the back of a truck at the farmer's market. They gave me extra tentacle bits because we agree'd those were the best parts. (And I was doing my best flirty flirty with everyone that day.)

Still hungry late at night, so for dinner #3, I fried up some of the frozen Thanksgiving celery root ravioli.

Leftovers be over

Leftover sweet potato puree transforms into the filling for tortellini. Individually quick frozen for future consumption. I learned IQF from watching Top Chef. In our recessionary times, I shall endeavor not to throw away food.

And celery root puree similarly makes its way into pierogi. Pizza red sauce get combined with meatballs for a home made version of Chef Boyardee. And I also learned from television that Chef Boyardee was an actual person. Ettore (Hector) Boiardi (Boyardee) dumbed down his Italian name so the dumb ass Americans can pronounce his name phonetically.

Hot layers of hell

The final chocolate layers are applied to the 7 layer cookies. The shape and form of the cookie slab reminds me of slab bacon. Mayhaps I will attempt a red, white, and pink version that is maple and smoke flavored. With white chocolate.

Sliced into pieces for holiday visitor parting gifts. These are tasty. Almond flavored layers with apricot filling, sandwiched between dark chocolate. These would be even better if the recipe made any sense to humans. Seriously, that recipe writer needs to die a painful death and rot in hell without bacon.

Leftover meat cake potato frosting get recycled into thrice baked potatoes. It's once more delicious-er than twice baked potatoes.

Mini Me(eat)

I love meat cake so much that we will make a cute Mini Meat Cake tonight.

With turkey deli meat rose. The sprinkles are red Hawaiian sea salt. Isn't baby meat cake just darling?

Today's adorable meat cake is made with a triumvirate of P's. Pork, pistachios, and pimentón. (And a ton of leftover ingredients.) I've been watching a lot of Spanish cooking shows lately.

Tart tart

The last of the king trumpet mushrooms, smeared with a basil pesto. I'm feeling the effects of pizza fatigue.

And one more roasted vegetable pizza. This is getting predictable now. But I must say, the pizza doughs lately have been very well behaved and great to work with.

This cranberry polenta tart was filled with a custard of leftover Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Nothing really wrong with this cranberry tart, I'm sure lots of people would love it. But for me, meh. So as of today, I officially declare my dislike of cranberries. Bah! Cranberries. But ridged cranberry tube from a can is still on the good list.

Happy tree friends

My Baby Trees of the National Parks are doing well enough to move into larger pots. We did lose the coast redwood sapling over the hot dry summer. We will have a moment of silence, mourn, and then send the dried out redwood carcass into the wood chipper.

Super deformed lemon. The limoncello tree is so silly sometimes. It's been super happy this year. So glad I didn't send it through the wood chipper years ago.

And once again, I call upon the services of pizza to help deal with meat cake party leftovers. The salame was once part of the antipasto plate and the cheeses from meat cake.

Leftover mushrooms from mushroom cake.

And leftover roasted vegetables from veggie cake and beef cake. Still, not much of a noticeable dent in the refrigerator. I might be eating leftovers for the rest of the month. Aie-ya!

Meat block(er)

Every once in a while, the refrigerator is so tightly packed with food and leftovers that it is impossible to see the items at the back. When that happens, we concoct strange combinations with whatever is easiest to grab from the front. We need to eat a path to access the things towards the rear. It's like playing a refrigerator version of Tetris. Today, sausage and chrysanthemum greens (tung ho) were most accessible in the refrigerator.

Candied bacon. Because I just can't stop.

Meat cake party leftovers get turned into garlic bread and bacon wrapped dates stuffed with gorgonzola. I would be a truly happy man if all my dates come wrapped in bacon...

That's a wrap

The very last of the Thanksgiving turkey holidays get used up. Rather than the usual turkey sammiches at this time of the year, we go Southeast Asian with rice paper. If the pilgrims had GM's corporate jets, they would have made these too.

Fire in the hole

Now THIS is an individual sized turkey pot pie.

Brussel sprouts are mind numbingly labor intensive to clean and prep. But delicious. I could use a sous chef and a prep cook to make my life easier. And my own bacon pig.

What do they say about ashes to ashes? Preston went all Dalmation on me and tried to save my life from the self cleaning oven. The oven was filthy. Filthy!

Pie pigs

In some strange Twilight-Zoney twist that is my life, I'm having turkey leftovers on the morning of Thanksgiving. Nothing like turkey to build up an appetite for more turkey.

Individual turkey pot pies. Though, I'm not sure I can call them individual pot pies if I eat more than one at a time.

And for Ben's tonight, I will be testing the newest refinement to my apple fennel salad with grapefruit. I matched my tie to the grapefruit.

And the best iteration of key lime pie so far. This time with coconut flavored whipped cream. The coconut whipped cream is a keeper, but the crust needs some more tweaking. I will be needing volunteers to be guinea pigs for the next key lime pie.

PTSD

Christmas decorations have been up in the stores since before Halloween. I'm way behind this year. And with early Thanksgiving this year, I have all my holidays screwed up.

In the post-early turkey day aftermath (Does that even make sense?) we start a week of processing turkey leftovers. Because of this year's early gobble gobble festivities, I might actually be eating leftover turkey on Thanksgiving day.

Turkey mushroom stock is what you get when you juice a Thanksgiving turkey. I let down my ancestors by not throwing in a handful of MSG.