Fat Guy

I wasn't armed with a camera over the weekend but I had a pretty good Thanksgiving-leftovers dish. We were up at some friends' house in Connecticut and they had a TON of leftovers. So we decided to make a Thanksgiving-leftovers casserole. Bottom layer was mashed potatoes. Then a layer of stuffing. Then a layer of shredded turkey mixed with gravy. Then a layer of a different kind of stuffing (cornbread). Topped with a layer of creamed spinach topped with breadcrumbs. Baked under foil for about 40 minutes at 350, then without foil for about 10 more minutes. We had it for breakfast with eggs. It came out great. Their leftovers had a pretty good amount of residual moisture. If they hadn't, I'd have suggested adding a little stock but that wasn't necessary.

I was just reading the piece, by Dave Wondrich, a few minutes ago!

There's a turkey dish in the progression this week: thinly sliced turkey that has been cooked sous vide, in a consomme with a little orzo. As best as I can recall, the current menu is: - Amuses: pork rind, roll with mirin and black-pepper butter, "tater tot" with tomato and lobster - Spanish mackerel, marinated and seared, with toasted buckwheat - Turkey with orzo in consomme - Smoked egg with American caviar and onion soubise etc. - Hand-torn pasta with snail "sausage" (cubes of chopped escargot in a forcemeat of chicken), with crispy chicken skin - Roasted monkfish topped with uni, in a shellfish broth - Frozen shaved foie gras with lychees, riesling gelee and nut brittle - Thinly sliced beef cheek with mushrooms, jalapeno puree, grilled rice and a bunch of other stuff - Mandarin orange sorbet - Fried cheddar cheese balls with pretzel ice cream It's a great meal, but could be improved in places. I think it's time to ditch the pork rind. It's not terribly flavorful and it no longer reflects the idiom of the food. At the beginning, when it seemed that Ko might be pork-centric like the other Momofukus, it sort of made sense to start with a pork rind. I mean, the meal ended with apple pie deep fried in lard. But now the porkiness is all but gone. If a person goes in there and asks for no pork there's very little they have to change about the menu (other than leaving out the pork rind). The Spanish mackerel is very good. It is not as good as the fluke sashimi with buttermilk-poppyseed dressing it replaces. (Which in turn was, I think, not quite as good as the scallops with buttermilk that it replaced.) The monkfish was, to my tastes, slightly overcooked tonight. I like the beef-cheek dish but think it's something I won't miss when it's gone. I'd probably like it as a Ssam Bar dish, but it doesn't really pull its weight as the final course in a savory tasting menu. The deep-fried short rib was really definitive in that regard. I hate to keep harking back to old signatures, but they were some of the best dishes served at Ko. I understand the desire to have turnover on the menu, but those dishes are missed. After dinner we wandered over to Milk Bar and the sweets we had at Milk Bar were more enjoyable to me than the Ko dessert.

My understanding is that there's an optimal rate of heating for kernels. Too fast and the moisture inside the kernel expands and pops before the starch has heated enough to give a good pop. Too slow and enough of the moisture can leak out of the kernels such that there's not enough left to fuel a good pop when the kernels come to temperature.

That has been my experience. I don't have any actual vented lids, though, so I just try to minimize the time the lid is on the pot.

It depends on how much butter you use. Air poppers produce popcorn that either requires the addition of fat as a topping, or winds up tasting like diet food. If you pop with oil, you get delicious popcorn that doesn't require butter. But calorie-wise, you can get away with less butter as a topping than you can get away with oil as a cooking medium, because oil has less flavor (and more calories per ounce).

An interesting twist. What's the rationale behind it?

I have not found an appreciable difference between the cheap brands -- Goya, Jiffy, the bulk-food section -- and the premium or organic brands like Newman's. If anything, I get the best results from the popcorn from the bulk-food section of my local market, perhaps because it's fresher. Although, I've not really noticed a problem with older kernels. The only really poor-performing popcorn I recall having was some ridiculously expensive stuff from Williams-Sonoma. What I have found are significant differences among pots. I have a particular pot I like to use -- an 8-quart Calphalon stockpot -- because it has a number of properties that I favor. First, because it's thick-walled aluminum it heats evenly. Second, its diameter-to-height ratio is such that if you cover the bottom with a single layer of kernels it pops up to near the top of the pot but never high enough to push off the lid. Third, it has a glass lid. And finally, the thick construction minimizes noise -- I can pop popcorn in this thing while a child is sleeping no problem. Having tried both approaches, I'm forced to disagree with Mr. Amirault's order of operations. I treat popcorn more like bacon than like a stir-fry. In other words, I put the kernels and oil (I prefer corn oil but that's not a hard-and-fast rule) in the pot before turning on the heat. Then I turn the heat to high and let the whole thing come up to temperature. I think, though I haven't done extensive side-by-side testing, that this approach yields fewer unpopped kernels as well as fewer burnt ones. I use as much oil as is needed to moisten all the kernels thoroughly, but not so much that they're swimming in it. It takes several minutes for the first kernel to pop. In that time, I shake -- swirl, actually -- the pot once or twice just to be doubly sure about even heat distribution. I leave the lid off until the first kernel pops, because I think that building up too much steam in the environment of the pot leads to damp popcorn. As soon as the first kernel pops I put the lid on. I give it another swirl and let it go. Once the kernels are popping rapidly, I turn the heat down to medium. When the popping slows to 5 or so seconds between pops I shut off the heat and remove the lid to let the excess steam escape. If I'm using butter -- usually not -- it has already been melted in a ramekin in the microwave. Most of the time I just add salt. When salting or buttering popcorn it's helpful to use a bowl that's much, much larger than the amount of popcorn in it, so you can toss the popcorn and get it really well coated.

Last spring we implemented Amazon's context links program. For the duration of the program, Society members purchased US$104,885 worth of merchandise, which resulted in commissions of $7,138 for the Society. Amazon discontinued the context links program last month and has replaced it with something called "Omakase." Periodically you'll see a banner in rotation at the top of the forums, suggesting food-related books and products from Amazon.com. If you click on one of these links and buy the book or product (or any other books or products in the same session), Amazon pays the eGullet Society a commission of about 5% of your purchase price. It doesn't cost you, the buyer, anything to make this happen. Amazon doesn't increase the price; the eGullet Society just gets a commission. Our food-loving members and readers purchase untold amounts of merchandise from Amazon (the figure above is only what people purchased by following our links, which likely represents a fraction of overall purchases), with many of those purchases inspired by eG Forums discussions. A small portion of that revenue, directed to the eGullet Society, can go a long way towards enabling us to expand our scholarship program and improve our online services. Remember, once you follow one of these links to the Amazon website, everything you buy during that session will generate a commission for the Society. Or you can go directly to Amazon here to have your purchases support the Society. To generate the "Omakase" banner, Amazon's software scans our pages and uses various algorithms to identify words and phrases that are relevant to products available on Amazon. We are only linking to books, housewares and food products (in other words, categories germane to our mission) as opposed to the dozens of other categories of merchandise Amazon sells (computer games, automotive, etc.). In addition, we are asking that members link from their posts to Amazon whenever they discuss food-related books and merchandise that are available on Amazon. You can create a Society-friendly link to any item on Amazon so long as you know its 10-digit ASIN/ISBN number, listed on every Amazon product page. For example, if you look on the Amazon page for the Alain Ducasse pastry book, and you scroll down to "Product Details," it says: The ISBN-10 number is what you want (for books it's the ISBN-10, for non-book products it's the ASIN). You build the link like so: http://www.amazon.com/dp/ISBNorASIN/ref=nosim/?tag=egulletsociety-20 So for the Ducasse pastry book, you put the 2848440163 in where it says "ISBNorASIN" in the above code example, and it looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/2848440163/ref=nosim/?tag=egulletsociety-20 For our members around the world, please note that both the "Omakase" and manually generated links all lead to Amazon US. Our arrangement does not currently provide for commission links to the Amazon UK, Canada and other international portals. We'll let you know if that changes. With relish,

I went yesterday at about 1pm. There was no line. It nonetheless took an excruciatingly long time to get three slices of cake and a cookie. I actually ordered four slices of cake but it was so exhausting to live through the first three slicing efforts that I opted not to go through with the last slice. That aside, the cake was amazing (banana cake), as was the cookie (my friend just pointed at one so I don't know its official name). It is truly impressive that, in what is one of the world's great pastry cities, there is still room for Momofuku to raise the bar. I look forward to trying everything else when I have a whole lot of time on my hands.

I'm pleased to report that my local market, Fairway, now has the bags again instead of just the boxes.

Adour is clearly less formal and less expensive than Essex House. It is a restaurant designed along the Michelin two-star model, as opposed to the three-star model. As far as I know, that's what Ducasse was aiming for. Not an informal restaurant. A less formal one. Happy to discuss it further on the Adour topic.

The quality of the uni that Ko is getting is very high. I'm not a lover of monkfish, but this piece of monkfish was quite good and the combination with uni worked brilliantly. The beef-cheek dish is nothing like any other beef-cheek preparation I've had. I think of beef cheeks as brisket-like, braised. This is a very thinly sliced preparation, the meat pink, almost ham-like but beef.

In the approximately three weeks between my last Ko visit and a visit last night, it felt as though there had been a very extensive turnover in the menu. New dishes included hand-torn pasta with snail "ravioli" (actually cubes of escargot bits mixed with some sort of binder), rare seared mackerel standing in for the sashimi with buttermilk, monkfish with uni (I see from noplacelikesanseb's post above that this dish was added earlier this month), and a new-to-me entree: thinly sliced beef cheeks, bearing a similarity to country ham or something in that family. All winners, I thought. The soup course was different, though similar to past soup courses. The new twist was the addition of bay scallops. The amuses included a lobster-and-squash beggar's purse. The sorbet was Mandarin orange, and the fried-cheddar dessert remained the same from last time -- not in my opinion the best dessert I've had at Ko; and not even a particularly strong one. It's odd to me that dessert is a weakness for Ko, especially given how great some of the desserts at Ssam Bar have been and in light of the organization now having a dedicated dessert operation in Milk Bar. After several consecutive visits where I enjoyed the service experience, I felt last night that the restaurant was back to its old grudging self. An anomaly, I hope.

There's a pretty long existing topic on pantry moths, including some information on the solution I had luck with.

New York Magazine implies that I am "the often pushy, aggressively schmoozy alpha Asian-food eater" in ( http://nymag.com/guides/holidays/gifts/2008/5 ), which reminds me of when San Francisco Weekly referred to me as someone "who loves restaurants with an almost embarrassing fervor, and who specializes in demystifying the not very mysterious" ( http://www.sfweekly.com/2005-11-02/restaur...os-and-gimlets/ )

The oven methods are best for containing vaporized grease, which I believe is the main culprit when it comes to lingering odors. However, as between low heat and high, you will find that there's less vaporized grease and splatter with lower, slower cooking.

Nonetheless, I would not call L'Absinthe a fine-dining restaurant, just as I would -- to use a more stark example -- not call Momofuku Ssam Bar a fine-dining restaurant despite it serving outstanding food. L'Absinthe is an upscale bistro, like Benoit et al.

It's not that there's actually likely to be an almond-allergic person in attendance. The school has a policy. The entire building is a "nut-free, seed-free zone." So the question is does Amaretto di Saronno liqueur qualify as a nut-free, seed-free product. I should probably email the company and see if they have an allergy statement. If the amaretto doesn't work out I'm thinking Cherry Heering for the next round of experiments.

Okay, so tonight I got together with some of the other parents for a tasting of my first crack at a punch (working title "Builder's Punch"). The recipe I started with is called Rocky Mountain Punch and I found it in a New York Daily News article by Julie Besonen. The recipe was contributed by Dave Wondrich, from a book by a guy named Jerry Thomas called "How to Mix Drinks," which was published in 1862 and apparently contains 59 punch recipes. The recipe calls for Champagne, Jamaican rum, maraschino liqueur, lemons and superfine sugar. Bearing in mind the restrictions above, I found a kosher sparkling wine that I thought was quite nice and a bit on the sweet side (I figured that would be desirable for the punch, and might even eliminate the need for added sugar): a sparkling muscat from Teal Lake in Australia. Of the Jamaican rums in my cabinet (I was surprised to find three, then again I've been accumulating liquor for about 17 years and drinking very little of it), none had kosher certification on the label nor could I find online references guaranteeing their kashruth, however I did find evidence that all Bacardi unflavored rums are kosher. I chose Ron Bacardi Reserve, which I think is like a Jamaican rum in style. I don't think they still make that bottling, however it may be similar to Bacardi 8. I'll have to taste to be sure, but I used what I had. I likewise couldn't find a guarantee that maraschino was kosher, however I tasted some and found that to my palate it had a lot of common ground with amaretto liqueur. And the website I've been relying on for kosher liquor information said that Amaretto di Saronno was okay. So I used that. I made 1/5 of the recipe: 1 bottle sparkling wine (full = 5 bottles), 6.4 oz rum (full = 1 quart), 3.2 oz (amaretto) liqueur (full = 1 pint), and 1.5 lemons sliced (full = 6 lemons), soaked in the rum and (amaretto) liqueur for 4 hours. The recipe calls for a soccer-ball-sized ice sphere but for this experiment we just used ice cubes. The resulting beverage was quite tasty to me and, more importantly, to the parents who tried it. But I thought it could use some bitters. At the same time, I knew that adding bitters would take it too far away from the minimum sweetness level needed by the general population. So I added 2 ounces of simple syrup and 6 drops of Regan's Orange Bitters to the remaining 1/2 of the recipe. This dramatically improved the cocktail -- really brightened it and gave it added subtlety. Now I have to do a little research to see which bitters are kosher, though, because I don't think Regan's are. In addition, I need to verify that Amaretto di Saronno is nut-free. I believe that, though it has an almond taste, it's actually made with apricot kernel oil just like the cookies. But I have to check.

I was just talking about the trappings, not the food. The food is as good as can be, but the trappings make the place not a fine-dining restaurant. It's in the next circle out from that.

I've had some truly fantastic food at L'Absinthe. Jean-Michel Bergougnoux is one of these guys whose name gets zero play, yet he's as talented as the best French chefs in town. Bergougnoux holds the prestigious title of Maître Cuisinier de France and worked in many of New York’s best old-line French kitchens (Le Régence, Lutèce, Le Cygne) before opening L’Absinthe. Last year I was invited in for (free) dinner by the chef and had two of the better dishes I tried all year: free-range poached chicken in black truffle broth with baby vegetables, and the venison-and-foie gras stew, covered in a pastry crust -- a deeply satisfying plate of food. Bergougnoux has a firm command of the classics and dishes in the classical style, but he is also conversant with contemporary trends and switches effortlessly between old and new. So at the same meal where I had that venison-and-foie thing, I had a bass carpaccio appetizer that would have felt right at home in a contemporary French/New-American place. Ditto for this lobster arrangement. Also on the classic front, wonderful saucisson: Desserts and service are not the restaurant's strengths, in my experience. It's about the savory food. Last time I looked at L'Absinthe I thought it was a tad pricey. I think I'm retreating from that opinion. I'm not sure if the menu has been priced downward a little or if L'Absinthe has held the line while others have raised their prices, but looking at the website today it all seems pretty reasonable compared to other restaurants in the semi-fine-dining bistro category.

I believe that's the point of the Internet Archive. It's a pretty amazing project and they have been working on improving the search engine. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like it from Google as well, at some point.

If you're going to wage a successful campaign against rodents you need to fight on three fronts: exclusion, traps and poison. If you ignore one of those, your strategy is incomplete. In particular, if you don't deal with the exclusion issue up front then new mice may just come replace any that you poison or catch -- so your efforts can wind up being a waste of time. So, find those entry points -- the cracks near the floorboards, the gaps around pipes and cables, etc. -- and stuff them with steel wool and fill with expanding foam sealant. Also deny the rodents any nourishment or attractive aromas: make sure all edibles are in good containers, etc. We have taken to storing a lot of things in the fridge simply because the fridge is essentially rodent proof. Clear out all the stuff under the sink and in other places where bottles, rags, etc., accumulate. Once you've dealt with the exclusion part of the strategy, you're ready to deal with the rodents that have already taken up residence. Traps and poison are both effective tools but you have to know where to put them. Mice like to travel along walls, so traps and poison placed in that path are the most likely to be encountered. If you're actually getting bait stolen then that's good -- you're choosing the right places. Because you have a pet you'll want to put your poison in bait stations. These are black plastic triangular boxes that mice crawl in to to get at the bait but have openings too small for pets to get at. Again, along the walls is best. You can open them up to see if the mice are eating the poison, and adjust your positioning accordingly. Trap-wise, I've had good luck with glue traps and small pieces of Snickers bars as bait (a trick I learned from the best exterminator I ever met). Snap traps are also good. If they're stealing the bait off your snap traps you just need to refine your technique or get better traps and stickier bait. Again, if you have a pet you have to be careful with placement of traps. Behind furniture where the pet can't fit, at the backs of floor cabinets -- locations like that are what you have to rely on. If you didn't have a pet I'd also advise the use of tracking powder, which is highly effective.

It will probably live forever in the Internet Archive aka Wayback Machine, and perhaps future sites like it. Right now you can go there to look at archived versions of HollyEats.com dating back to August of 2000: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hollyeats.com