Fat Guy

Tonight I had dinner at Adour, the Alain Ducasse restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel, where they offer a vegetarian tasting menu. If you want to see vegetarian cooking at its apex, this is the place to check that out. This is a cell-phone snapshot of one of our dishes: It's eggplant stuffed with locally made ricotta, topped with a stylized bayaldi made with peppers, and sauced with something along the lines of a sauce grenoblois. It was amazing. I should disclose a couple of things that chef Didier Elena did, though. First, he wouldn't let us pay. Second, he was able to live with my no-meat request but really wanted us to try some fish items -- so I broke the diet again and am going to have to reboot. Another fantastic vegetarian dish we tried, and I apologize for the lousy cell-phone photos: That's the "white vegetable carpaccio," with summer truffles and black-truffle sauce. Of course desserts tend to be vegetarian... I'll give a more complete report on this meal on the relevant NY forum topic, maybe tomorrow. I'm stuffed and need to go to sleep.

If I can get myself there, I will help with anything that needs to be done. I'm working on it.

Brilliant. If I ever get into this predicament again I'll do that.

It claims not to.

Almost an hour so far...

That makes sense.

The blender strategy worked, and I sort of backed into a method close to Andie's. My one issue with the method is the percentage product loss because it's so hard to get it all out of the blender pitcher.

Trying it now.

Has anybody actually tried the blender/mixer solution in this scenario? I don't mind giving it a go if it is likely to work, but if all it's going to do is whirl around a mass of nut solids in a pool of liquid I'm not eager to go down that path.

There are a lot of advantages to natural peanut butter -- it tastes better, it's better for you, etc. -- but the big disadvantage is that it separates. In most cases, this just means that when you open a jar that has been on the shelf or in the cabinet you have to stir the contents a bit to re-incorporate the oil. This generally works, with a little effort, at room temperature. Trouble is, I've just encountered a jar of peanut butter (Yum brand) that has separated so much I can't stir it back together. A tremendous amount of oil/liquid is sitting on top, and the peanut-solids part is so hard it can't be stirred. I've already tried the most obvious approaches: 90 seconds in the microwave, and warming the container in warm water. I transferred the entire contents to a bowl for better access but I can't make a go of it. Before I write off this jar of peanut butter, anybody have a clever solution?

Today was another unremarkable eating day: yogurt, fruit, various snack crisps, bread, cheese, and assorted sweet items (a brownie, a blondie, a cookie, some candy). Tomorrow night I have a special meal planned, though. Stay tuned.

Today's CSA haul: cucumbers summer squash lettuce dino kale onions oregano green cabbage beets

My son insisted on chicken, however most noodle dishes at the restaurant are listed on the menu with a choice of proteins, so for example with pad see ew for $9 you can have it with chicken, tofu, vegetarian mock duck, mock salmon, or mixed vegetables; for $10 shrimp or beef, and for $13 mixed seafood or actual duck.

The tofu pictured in the salad photos is not for me. My son and wife like it in theirs, but I make mine without. I'm just not that into tofu. I suppose were I going vegan I'd look more carefully into soy protein permutations, but since I have milk, cheese and eggs available to me I haven't had much incentive to go down that path.

Thai food tonight at our favorite place: Sookk on Broadway between 102nd and 103rd Streets. I had spicy Yaowarat noodles with mixed vegetables. I was a little envious of my son's pad see ew with chicken, but my dish was excellent.

Not really, though I do use yogurt in frozen desserts -- none of which I've made this week, for no good reason.

For breakfast today I had a bowl of cherries. The cherries this year have not been fabulous, as some have noted on the US Summer Fruit 2011 topic. For lunch I had toasted gruyere cheese on whole-wheat sourdough. Still thinking about dinner. This is shaping up to be one of the two hottest days of the year so far, so I'm feeling pretty sluggish and uninspired.

What do you call this thing? It keeps the bag of English muffins or whatever closed. I think it's pretty great. Can anybody think of a product that comes in both cans and aseptic packaging -- exact same product -- that I can compare side-by-side? Tuna is the one I'm thinking of so far.

I did not eat well today. Up until dinnertime all I did was snack incessantly -- I didn't have an actual breakfast or lunch. I had: A Nestle Crunch ice cream bar Cherries Chobani pomegranate yogurt Stacy's pita chips Kalamata olives A chocolate-chip cookie An oatmeal cookie Costco/Kirkland chocolate-covered almonds Assorted gummi candies Cheddar cheese Snyder's pretzel snaps I did eventually have dinner. I made salads for the family (a vegetable plate for our son), and ate some of those lentils from the other day, cold. They were quite good cold.

At the moment I have no cookbooks. They're all still in storage in the Bronx, pending construction of bookshelves in our new apartment -- a job that could take many more months. So unless someone describes a recipe here or it can be linked to, I can't access it. I'm pretty sure that book is or was in my collection -- when I packed I was surprised how many vegetarian books I had -- but I'm not entirely sure what I kept, as I got rid of a couple of hundred cookbooks before we moved. I shouldn't say I have no cookbooks. I have one volume of Modernist Cuisine with me (volume 2), as well as a Spanish-language dessert book that one of my students wrote and gave me a copy of.

Thermolon is the big one. I ignore most of these supposed innovations, but when Demeyere embraced Thermolon I did a double take. The Demeyere people seem serious to me.

That assumes you use enough oil to make the food not stick. The difference is that in a nonstick pan you can cook with substantially less fat.

I think you've hit the nail on the head: fresher, less-cooked, and I'd add less processed. This is what I notice about aseptic anything versus the rough canned equivalent, be it tomatoes, tuna or anything I can think of. I agree if you're going to cook it a long time or otherwise manipulate it then you lose that advantage. I also wish some of the super-premium DOP-type packers would offer stuff in aseptic packaging, since Pomi tomatoes are clearly not the world's best (nonetheless I think they taste fresher than the world's best, and you have to add a lot of salt to make a fair comparison). I don't think there would be any contest if a top-quality San Marzano tomato product in a can and an aseptic box got tasted side-by-side.

The "Stoopid food packaging" topic has resonated a lot around these parts. But I was thinking, isn't it also the case that there is a lot of really great food packaging out there? Perhaps we can come up with some examples. For example, can we hear it for aseptic boxes? I don't actually understand the technology, but stuff in them generally tastes much better than stuff in cans.

For many years I think all nonstick pan coatings were the same. They were variants of Teflon, and any vocabulary differences were marketing speak. Now it seems there are some actual new nonstick coatings on the market. Has anybody had experience with these? Even better, can we get a tutorial on how they work?