Moro blood oranges, kaffir limes, cocktail grapefruits… At this stage, the best plan is to simply make one big fruit salad and be done.

This turned out really well. Soaked in water until it ballooned to about 10 times its dried size, then sauteed with pork in a nice sauce that was on the package of hijiki: dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and sugar.

I’ve made meatballs of all kinds, hundreds of dumplings, meatballs that used to be dumplings, as well as headcheese, but somehow I had never thought to make meatloaf, which is a less fussy relative of all of these.

And I love meatloaf — especially in a sandwich (and especially the one at Greene Grape Provisions in Fort Greene) — so it seemed necessary to address this gap in my repertoire.

With some instruction over the phone from Alex’s mom, and ignoring the recipes I found on the internet, I turned out this first iteration using only ground pork, caramelized onions and garlic, oatmeal, chives and dill, and then, as usual, not being able to leave well enough alone, I added a few anchovies and dry mustard.

I also wanted this to have a fairly tight loaf shape, and Alex reported that Alton Brown makes his without a loaf pan, which sounded like a good idea to me, so I mixed vigorously, employing what I’ve been told is a Cantonese dumpling-making method, forming my hand into a claw and whipping the mixture around until it became fairly paste-like and uniform. It was easy to shape into a loaf and in baking, very little moisture seeped out. The resulting meatloaf had a very dense crumb and was easy to slice. Also: no unmolding necessary!

Unorthodox in so many ways, but definitely worth repeating. We liked this.

So did Pinky.

For the sandwich, Alex recommends slathering Marty’s potato bread (toasted of course) with mayonnaise and placing raw green pepper strips between the bread and meatloaf. Trust me, he knows what he’s talking about.

Other days, we have stuff on toast.

I might just prefer sliced hard-boiled eggs paved on mayonnaise over egg salad. Sometimes the parts are greater than the sum.

And I don’t know if it’s because the tomatoes were not as good this year, but I might even prefer the hard-boiled egg sandwich to the tomato sandwich.

Colder days are nearly upon us.

Pear, Gorgonzola, and Mesclun Salad

We’ll start at the end. Tonight I made the final dish. Pear, Gorgonzola, and Mesclun Salad. This salad is to the 90s what the Caesar was to the 20s. Who knows how many times I’ve eaten this (plus or minus the toasted walnuts). But it definitely stands the test of time.

Pumpkin Panna Cotta

This looked like a simple and awesome recipe for, say, Thanksgiving. Given that I had to make a second turkey for this project (see below), it made sense to have this as a dessert. Unfortunately, this dish was a dud. The flavor was great, but the texture was terrible — oddly sandy and greasy at the same time. I blame the gelatin. Also, some of the dairy sank to the bottom of the dish as it cooled, so there was a creamy white layer below the pumpkin puree. Really strange. I have reread the recipe and I don’t know what I could have done differently: as far as I can tell, I followed the directions exactly. I pureed the hell out of it, too. Anyway, I think this dish would have turned out way better as a stirred custard: I’d try substituting 3 or 4 eggs for the gelatin, and following pretty much the same steps.

45 Minute Roast Turkey

I don’t eat much turkey. It just doesn’t occur to me to go grab a 12 pound bird at the store and throw it in the oven for dinner. Plus, it puts me right to sleep. Having said that, if I did need a quick turkey dinner, this would be my method of choice. It is the turkey equivalent of Chicken Under a Brick from part 1. And it works! Our turkey took a bit longer than 45 minutes, but it was done in under an hour and a half. And in a way, it felt like magic: aren’t turkeys supposed to take hours and hours? Nope.

Corn Salad with Soy and Tomato

This was my favorite of the batch. What a great combination of flavors. Like the Watermelon and Tomato salad in part 4, this salad is unconventional, super chunky, and it starts turning into soup immediately. Not that that’s a problem—I really enjoyed slurping up the leftovers the next morning.

There is one more dish: South Indian Eggplant Curry. I don’t have a picture of it. Of all 25 recipes, this is the only one I’d actually made before, when it originally appeared in the Minimalist in 2008. It’s the only microwave Minimalist dish I know of, and it’s good but not something I’d make twice.

With the completion of this project, I do feel like a small burden has been lifted. A low-grade burden that grew as I did more of these recipes and neared the end. A voice saying, “Finish the damn thing already!” So I finally did. This was a great project, but I’m glad to be done with it.

What should I cook next?

Yes. At home.

Ever since I saw the recipe for English muffins a couple of years ago in that old reliable, The Breakfast Book, the idea of making them has been pinging around in my brain. And then, when we decided to have some friends over for brunch at the new place, I figured, What the hell?

And then, because I like to pile as many challenges into one project as possible, I thought I might try to make Eggs Benedict from scratch — everything except the bacon, because I didn’t think of this project far enough in advance. Alex thought this was a terrible idea, as there are many, many points of failure in this dish, and that’s the reason why one dines on Eggs Benedict in restaurants. He had a point, seeing as how I’d also never yet been successful in poaching eggs, nor had I ever made Hollandaise before. But sometimes the urge to take on a project outshouts all the reason in my head — and Alex’s.

Turns out English muffins are pretty easy to make. You make a pretty straightforward yeasted bread dough and after rising, cutting, rising again, you cook them on a griddle (or if you, like me, have trouble controlling the surface temperature of your griddle, you resort to a skillet). Cunningham wants you to cook them in ring molds, but I only had one mold and zero patience, so I just cooked them as they were, and they turned out fine. Don’t they look fine?

I ended up following Cunningham’s instructions (from, yes, The Breakfast Book again) for blender Hollandaise, which came together perfectly. (Later that week I failed repeatedly in attempts to put that same blender to use in making mayonnaise and had to fix two quarts of mayonnaise by hand. I’m still feeling it in my right arm.)

For the most treacherous task, poaching the eggs, Cunningham provided a method that I’d never heard of: boil the eggs in the shell for 30 seconds, and then poach as usual in shallow, simmering water with some cider vinegar added. And miraculously, it worked!

The one thing that didn’t turn out so great was the potato pancakes. I didn’t have any time to pay attention to them, and they ended up mostly perfunctory and slightly burnt.

I’m pretty convinced that the Benedict only came together with beginner’s luck, and that I’ll never be able to recreate it again, but whatever, I’ll take it. And I have photographic evidence that it happened.

I’ll still sweat it out over the stove to make the panade from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. In fact, through the heat wave in July, I made panade three times — it’s that good. Luisa, from whom I had first learned about this dish, responded when I tweeted about it: “It is obsession-worthy. (But isn’t it a million degrees where you are? Are you still making it in the crazy summer heat?)” Yes. I can’t stop.

Panade requires you to sweat onions and garlic for 20 minutes, heat up stock, and also sauté greens, if that’s the version you’re making. All these components are layered together with bits of hearty peasant bread, along with a generous amount of cheese, baked for an hour and a half until everything has melded together into a silken, savory bread pudding-cum-soup. And then of course it must be browned on top for total, unstinting deliciousness.

This is the tomato version, which we found inferior to the chard — the latter had much more sophisticated flavors — but no one will complain if you make it. (And had we not known about the magical chard one, we would have gone on happily making and eating the tomato.) The first time I made the panade, I happened to have only beet tops on hand, and they filled the chard role nicely. For the tomato, Rodgers suggests cutting the bread into slices instead of the cubes for the other version, but I think somehow that emphasizes a consonance with baked pasta or even pizza, which we think is not preferable. The cubes also end up looking more attractive in the finished dish.

I’ve since found other versions of the panade in Tartine Bread and Simple French Food, the first with butternut squash and kale, the second with just onions. I don’t know if I can yet bear to deviate from the chard/beet top panade, but perhaps I’ll be ready to experiment by November.

I call this my Mailman Dish, good in all weather conditions.

P.S. Luisa’s post has the recipe.

P.P.S. I’ve decided not to let my wonky analog photographic devices (all of which are low- or non-functioning at the moment) determine how often or whether I post here, so it’s gonna be ugly digital pictures for the time being. But hey! At least I’m here.

Braised Turkey was lovely and yields enough turkey for an army. The mushrooms and italian sausage lend great flavor to this, too. The turkey breasts came out beautifully thanks to the short cooking time, but the thighs had dried out by the end, like the braised duck legs in Carl and Mark part 2. That was frustrating. I still feel like I don’t understand how to slow-braise dark, tough meat so that it falls off the bone, rather than being dry and chewy. I think it needs to stay wetter (maybe be basted?) and probably cook for less time (the above turkey thigh cooked for 2.5 hours).

Spaghetti With Fried Eggs. The yolks and olive oil make this work; what a nice combo. I love the chewy texture of the spaghetti with the silkiness of the sauce. The other pantry sauces in this Minimalist are worth checking out, too.

Fried Chicken With Ketchup was rather Happy Mealish, but in the best way. It hits all of the primal flavor buttons: sweet, tangy, salty, fatty, a little spicy, and lots of umami. The sauce is really ketchup, caramelized a little, with sauteed garlic and oil. We made sushi rice to go with it, but ended up eating the chicken right out of the pan before the rice was finished. Then we ate the leftovers cold right out of the fridge.

Watermelon and Tomato Salad is a keeper. I made it twice, and the first time my guest asked for the recipe on the spot. The second time didn’t work out so well because the tomatoes were not great, the sherry vinegar was weak (5% acidity — not 7-8% as it should be), and I put too much watermelon juice into the dressing. Also, the watermelon in this dish starts to weep immediately, so I think the key is to handle it gently and serve it right away. As with any salad, I suppose.

Red Pepper Puree is in the fridge right now. How can you go wrong with red peppers and olive oil? That was a rhetorical question. You can’t. It’s great, and I have a lot of plans for it: on sandwiches, in salads, on grilled veggies, on pasta, etc. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble gobbling this stuff up over the coming days.