Food Thread: Croissants... It's A Bun! It's A Hairstyle!

I have no idea what that is, but it sure looks tasty. I like croissants, I like fried eggs, and everything else is probably manageable, especially since I have a strong suspicion that whatever is hiding underneath the egg has been fried.

Is it too much to ask that it is a fried soft-shell crab? That would work!

I watched some food show recently and they featured some monstrous sandwich built inside a croissant, and my first thought was a fond memory of my mother buying ham-and-cheese-stuffed croissants from Stew Leonard's in Connecticut. This was before his tax fraud conviction, and well before his family expanded the store into a small chain. I have no idea whether they still make them, but coming home to find on or two of those delicious and greasy snacks was wonderful.

Brioche buns for burgers work well, so why not a croissant? It's the same idea; a rich buttery dough. Obviously the croissant is laminated, but it still works, so I am going to examine the possibilities. That ham and cheese from my youth sounds like a good place to start!

I had this last month at a very good restaurant in Santa Ynez, and rumor has it that the owners are...gasp....conservative-leaning folks. Regardless, they know how to run a restaurant.

• 4 ounces Reposado Tequila*
  
• 2 ounces fresh lime juice
  
• 1 ounce Agave Syrup**
  
• 1 handful of cilantro, stems and all (rinsed and dried)
  
• A sprinkle of cool-colored salt (That black stuff looks great!)

  Put everything except the salt in a shaker with lots of ice. Don't use crushed ice because you need the ice to do some work breaking up the cilantro.

  Shake the hell out of it so you extract as much cilantro flavor as you can. Do it fast and hard, because you don't want to dilute the drink!

  Wet the outside of a lowball glass and roll it in the salt so you have a nice coating on the upper part of the glass.

  Strain and serve with a cilantro garnish and few cubes of ice, or one large cube if you have one.

  *The restaurant uses both Reposado and Blanco, but that makes no sense to me.
  **This makes a fairly sweet drink, so adjust according to your preferences.
  

  ******
  SACK O' SAUCE IN A CAN O' MEAT
  ******
  My first attempt at pickled cauliflower was...meh. I used the recipe for the carrot brine, and I also parboiled the cauliflower, which in retrospect was wrong. I just added a bit of red pepper flake to the jar, in hopes that I will be able to jazz them up a bit. Otherwise I will just send them to Bluebell, because she loves cauliflower and is a Red Sox fan (17 games behind the New York Yankees) so she also has no taste.

  Maybe green beans next?
  

  ******
  Pumpkin Spice Spam Exists, and Here's Our Honest Review

  It looks like normal Spam (which really isn't that bad!), but soon after taking it out of the can we caught a whiff of that familiar pumpkin spice scent, which only intensified as it fried up on our stovetop. The combined scent of heavily processed ham and sweet pumpkin spice was a bit off-putting, but how did it taste?

  [Hat Tip: Curmudgeon]
  

  ******
  Sunday at the "D'oh" house. Local crabs, and apparently they were quite feisty.
  
  

  Found a new shellfish shop near us, owned by a delightful husband and wife. Their boats are parked in front of the store, and the male crabs are from local waters. We bought more than we could eat (the price was incredibly low), and my husband cleaned the leftovers. I layered newspaper in a bin in the fridge, and placed more newspaper on top of the crabs. I also covered the breakfast room table with plastic and more newspaper for easy cleanup.

  
  

  Looks like fun, but there is only one beer, which makes me deeply suspicious.

  Seriously, it looks marvelous, although I think there is a gene that imparts crab-picking skills, and I don't have it! I prefer my blue crab made into cakes, but please, don't load them up with too much Old Bay and bread crumbs and minced peppers and all of the crap that restaurants use to extend that very expensive crab meat.

  Mark Bittman is a toad, but he does have a fine crab cake recipe.
  

  ******
  Ah...let's import food from Mexico!
  Fresh basil consumption likely responsible for 205 Cyclospora infections in 11 states
  Care to guess how it got on the basil? Go ahead, it's not a tough question.

  Lost in all of the hysteria about racism and open borders is the reality that importing third-world workers also imports their third-world sanitary habits.
  

  ******
  Food and cooking tips, triple-cream cheeses, young wild pigs, crisp bacon (although I am moving toward less crisp), thick and fluffy pita, and good tomatoes that aren't square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit. And yes, shaking a Manhattan is blasphemy...it's in the Bible!
  It's A Hairstyle!&bodytext= I have no idea what that is, but it sure looks tasty. I like croissants, I like fried eggs, and everything else is probably manageable, especially since I have a strong suspicion that whatever is hiding underneath the egg...&topic=world_news"> posted by CBD at 04:15 PM
  
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