Fat Guy

I haven't used one in the kitchen. I'm still a couple of product generations away from being an ebook-reader owner -- I'm waiting for color and such. I did, however, read about 150 pages of a book late into the night on my friend's Sony ebook reader a couple of months ago. There was no eyestrain beyond what you'd have with paper, and if anything the ability to bump up the text size works against eyestrain. I also played with a Kindle and it seemed to be a superior product to the Sony in a lot of ways.

I can only assume a lot of folks posting here have never used an ebook reader like the Kindle. To clarify a few points: - The epaper display on a device like the Kindle is substantially more paper-like than a laptop screen. The experience comes damn close to reading print on paper. At the very least, anybody who spends a few minutes with a Kindle is likely to conclude that with a few more generations of product development the epaper displays will be on par with paper-and-ink or may even look better. - There are also several ways in which even current-generation epaper displays are superior to paper-and-ink. The most apparent one is the ability to adjust text size. You can make any book into a large-type edition with the touch of a button. Anybody who has ever struggled to read the small type in a regular cookbook will surely appreciate this. - You can make annotations "in the margins" with an ebook reader -- this is a basic feature of every ebook device I've seen -- and the ability to do so is quite a bit more sophisticated than what you can accomplish with handwritten notes. You can export your notes, you can highlight and copy whole passages, you can make lists of bookmarked pages and passages, etc. - A $400 ebook reader costs as much as, let's say, 20 books. Sure, it's possible to damage one, but it's also possible to have your entire library of paper books burn down or get destroyed in a flood -- it happens all the time. The difference is that if you have a Kindle you just log in to your Amazon account and associate your account with a replacement Kindle and you get everything back. You don't lose 500 books in one fell swoop like you would in a flood or fire; indeed, you don't lose anything except the physical device. Nor are ebook readers terribly fragile. You can drop one. You can spill stuff on one. They're about as durable as an iPod or whatever. They're breakable but they're not made of glass. In addition, every book you buy in ebook format is substantially cheaper than in print, of course. You pay for the ebook reader with your first couple of dozen book purchases because you keep buying $35 books for $10. If you buy a hundred ebooks you've saved so much money that you can afford to treat the ebook reader as a disposable device. You can lose or destroy four of them and still come out ahead.

(Eater got the story from me so it was fair for them to assume permission. Nobody from Gawker asked permission, though the greater sin was probably the way my post was summarized. Of the major blogs I've dealt with, only Grub Street follows strict print-media protocols and formally asks permission, gives accurate photo credits, etc. Presumably Diner's Journal does too but I've never dealt with Diner's Journal directly.)

I decided to try the Domino's Pizza Tracker tonight. First I tried to order online, but was told: "We're sorry...your store is currently unavailable for taking orders via the Internet at the present time. However, we would be very happy to take your order by phone" So I called my local Domino's and, after listening to a recorded message encouraging me to order online, I spoke to a guy and placed my order. I then ran to the computer to begin the order-tracking process. I entered my phone number and checked the box to promise that I was tracking my own pizza and not the pizza of someone I was spying on. A pretty cool utility then popped up, giving me graphical and textual information on my pizza's status at every stage of production. For example: "Mohamed put your order in the oven at 10:11 PM" and "Our delivery expert, Aboubacar, left the store with your order at 10:17 PM" My pizza arrived shortly thereafter (the store is only 3 or 4 minutes from my apartment by bicycle). I thanked Aboubacar by name, and also asked him to thank Mohamed for baking my pizza. He said, without a hint of irony, "Yes, I will tell him." The pizza (crispy melt with pepperoni) was kind of disgusting, but I enjoyed the overall experience.

If you damage or lose your .mp3 player you don't actually lose any music. You just go back to your computer and sync up with a new .mp3 player. An e-book reader works the same way.

This is all correct. A nearby meat distributor grinds meat to White Manna's specs, or so they say, each morning and makes a delivery around 8am. The meat comes in bulk tied up in large plastic bags set in cardboard cartons. Someone in the back at White Manna portions the ground beef into little meatballs and puts those in hotel pans in the big fridge in the back. Throughout the day, as needed, a new hotel pan of those meatballs gets brought up front and staged in the reach-in fridge next to the griddle.

If one has spent any time with a current-generation e-book reader it shouldn't be terribly hard to imagine how, with a few more generations of product development, we'll have a very attractive book-alternative available to us. Right now, sure, a well-made book is preferable to an Amazon Kindle. Readability is far superior with a real book, and a real book can be in color. But once you get to the point where there are portable color digital displays that produce a page that is visually on par with a first-rate four-color print job on paper, then you have to start looking at the myriad advantages of an e-book reader or equivalent device. For example, the ability to have several thousand cookbooks on that device, all portable, all searchable and sortable in many different ways. Even current-generation e-book readers are in many ways preferable to mass-market "pulp" paperbacks, not to mention unbound manuscripts and bound galleys. I have a friend who's a highly placed editor at one of the top publishing companies. She commutes to and from work by train. Every few days she has her assistant load her Sony e-book reader up with all the latest book proposals, manuscripts, page proofs, new titles from the company, etc. She just takes that device on the train and goes through a dozen of those things a day. And of course, also loaded on the device, there's an unabridged dictionary, an encyclopedia, a style guide, etc. The next generation of these devices will be linked to the internet, so any word you click on can be backed up by thousands of references. When I go out to walk the dog in the morning I see kids going to the various schools in my neighborhood, carrying these huge backpacks full of textbooks, their little skeletons getting deformed under the weight of a 30-pound pack over one shoulder. I think to myself how unnecessary it is to carry 7 textbooks when, for the price of those 7 textbooks, you could just get a Kindle. Of course the other big advantage of electronic book formats is the total lack of space constraints and the minuscule production costs. Most every book you get in hard-copy form has fewer words and fewer photos than would have been the ideal. There's no need to make those compromises with electronic media. You can have a hundred photos illustrating one recipe. You can have video and audio too.

If you want to make pigs in blankets using "as many shortcuts as possible," you buy them premade and frozen, and you just heat them up in a toaster oven. You don't par-cook your hot dogs, cut strips of dough and wrap them by hand. If you want to take "as many shortcuts as possible" when making tempura you buy it premade and frozen, or at least you make your batter from a mix rather than from scratch. If you want to take "as many shortcuts as possible" when making a green salad you use dressing from a jar and "parmesan" cheese from a can. If you want to take "as many shortcuts as possible" when making braised beef you buy it already cooked. You don't boil, then sautee, then roast your potatoes when you could buy frozen potatoes in a bag for a "reliable product" (incidentally, in addition to the "reliable product" excuse, Keller has stated on the record that frozen fries are, for him, a labor- and space-saving device). You don't hand-roll blintzes in homemade crepes with a filling made from three kinds of cheese. You don't even have people over for dinner, and if you do you just order out. I think Richman just chose -- as most every professional chef outside of a Michelin three-star context does -- a couple of shortcuts that he didn't think would have negative impact on the final product. I ate the food and agree with his assessment in the few cases where he used minor shortcuts. There were flaws with the meal: somewhat overcooked tempura, Brussels sprouts overcooked to the point of burning. But the choice of dough and use of mayonnaise did not diminish the meal in the least. And I learned a thing or two by watching him cook.

Are you suggesting that using a tablespoon of mayonnaise in a salad dressing is the same as bringing McDonald's to a potluck? I think it's a lot more like Thomas Keller using frozen French fries at Bouchon: it's a labor-saving shortcut appropriate to a casual venue.

Apparently, it was completely different.

I guess the frankfurters were beef, then? ← Hebrew National.

I'm not sure one tablespoon of mayonnaise makes a dressing "mayo based," nor is mayonnaise much more than eggs and oil -- nothing wrong with that as a component of a salad dressing. The menu, moreover, hardly seemed eclectic to me. Rather, it seemed old-fashioned Jewish-American. If you went to my mother's house for dinner in the 1970s the menu wouldn't have been all that different -- she even did tempura on occasion.

The theme was Jewish food: pigs in blankets, braised beef, potatoes, blintzes. Though there were a couple of additions, he was basically cooking the traditional Jewish-American food that his mother cooked. I was a little surprised when I saw the Pillsbury dough but, as I said, I've had pigs in blankets at the Four Seasons where they use a fancy scratch-made professional pastry dough and the Pillsbury product, in the final analysis, worked as well or better. Had there been any flavor-based reason to criticize the choice of Pillsbury dough, you can be sure I'd have done so with relish.

This just in from Alan Richman:

Alan Richman and I are on two different planets when it comes to wine. He's on a very big planet, like Jupiter. I'm on one of those crummy little planets where they debate whether or not it's legitimate even to call it a planet. The last time I saw him in a restaurant it was at this old-guard Upper-East-Side French place called L'Absinthe. I was drinking a $20 half-bottle of Sancerre and he was drinking some vintage of La Turque with like 200 points from Parker. He gave me a glass. Needless to say, he has plenty of good wine at home. Unfortunately for me, though, I wasn't really drinking last night. I'm pretty rigid about not drinking and driving, so all I did was open the bottles and make sure the wines weren't defective. My lack of participation in the drinking also cut short the wine progression: he had selected something like five different bottles for the evening but the group only made it half way into the third bottle. To spare myself the anguish, I didn't really note what the wines were, though when I checked the red I thought it was delightful.

Being a "food critic" usually means the assembled guests perceive you as the second-most interesting person at a dinner party, after the woman who used to be a stripper. It also elicits a corresponding amount of unwanted attention and triggers a number of predictable and, with repetition over a period of years, annoying comments (in addition to "You're a food critic? Really? I've never heard of you."). "You're a food critic? What's your favorite restaurant?" is typically followed by disappointment bordering on argumentativeness when you name well-known restaurants universally thought to be excellent. People are hoping that, despite New York City's off-the-charts saturation of food media, some secret restaurant nobody has heard of is going to be the best restaurant in New York, and they think less of you for not having that inside scoop. "Do you know Frank Bruni?" No, I don't. "Oh." And then there are the fingernails-on-the-chalkboard words spoken by so many hosts: "I hope you're going to give this dinner a good review!" It's unfortunate that, even though I'm just about the least picky dinner guest in the world, and even though I'm a food critic nobody has ever heard of who doesn't know Frank Bruni, my presence causes the host that sort of minor discomfort. I have various ways of reassuring people, depending on when they introduce the subject and how worried they really seem to be. But come on, folks, do you really think I'm going to go home after a dinner party and write a review? Of all the ungrateful, uncouth, uncultured things I could do, that would surely be the lowest. I could scarcely think of a situation where it would be socially acceptable to return somebody's hospitality by writing a critical review. Until now. A few weeks back I crossed paths with Alan Richman at a James Beard House event. Richman and I don't know each other all that well -- we've had a couple of dinners together and exchanged the occasional email -- but I'm quite fond of him not least because when I stand next to him I don't seem particularly grouchy or cranky by comparison. It's similar to the appreciation I feel when I go to Applebee's and no longer feel fat. Richman was complaining -- no surprise there -- that nobody comes up from the city to visit him in Westchester, where he lives. So I said I'd come visit him. Initially he said he'd take me out for lunch, then somehow the invitation evolved into him cooking dinner at his house for me and a couple of other guests. I said fine, but I'm going to write about it. As the date approached, Richman displayed increasing regret in his emails. However, unlike the pity I feel when a normal host says "I hope you're going to give this dinner a good review," I positively reveled in Richman's discomfort. I even decided to bring my camera. What follows is my review of dinner at Alan Richman's House. By the time you get any actual food at Alan Richman's House, you've already been through three ordeals. First, there's getting there. Access to Alan Richman's House is via a dirt road in the back country of Mamaroneck, New York. The road is so narrow and foreboding that I drove past it twice before coming to terms with the need to drive down it. Barely wide enough to accommodate my car and maintained by people who were fired from the Cross Bronx Expressway construction project for being too careless, the path proceeds under looming trees and terminates in a clearing. Second, there are issues with the greeting. When we arrived at Alan Richman's House, our host (Alan Richman) appeared in the doorway wearing a plaid bathrobe and flanked by two Welsh Corgis sounding the alert. It took about 45 minutes for Richman to hit his stride, a process that included showering, opening a bottle of wine, and preparing pigs in blankets. Third and finally, never have I dined at an establishment that so aggressively undersold itself (with one exception that we'll get to later). Most chefs try to prepare you for a culinary experience by building your anticipation. Not so Richman. For example, he repeatedly claimed "I know nothing about cooking!" in the manner of a German philosopher announcing "I know nothing of philosophy!" Having lowered our expectations to Ron Paul-campaign levels, Richman proceeded to impress. We started out with three appetizer courses served in the kitchen. He began by making traditional pigs in blankets. As he made them, still wearing his plaid bathrobe and with his Welsh Corgis at his feet, he explained his two tactics for improving pigs in blankets: first, use very little dough cut into narrow strips (Richman prefers Pillsbury, from the refrigerator section of the supermarket); second, briefly poach and then drain the frankfurters before wrapping them in the dough (his position is that this removes the "package taste" from the meat). I can't say I've ever had better pigs in blankets. I've even had pigs in blankets at cocktail receptions at the Four Seasons restaurant, where they make them with fancy dough produced by a professional pastry kitchen, and they're no better than Richman's. Next we had a tempura course, which was one of the more impressive Richman accomplishments of the evening. Having just returned from Japan, where he was working on a story for GQ, Richman has upped his tempura game to quite a high level. The first batch of tempura, introduced as "a little undercooked" was cooked exactly right -- beautifully crispy and crunchy but short of browning -- and was as good as most any restaurant tempura I've had and better than most. A subsequent batch, which Richman felt was not undercooked, was to my mind a bit overdone by tempura standards -- it strayed more into American-style fried-zucchini territory. Throughout, Richman was apologetic that he hadn't been able to procure a Japanese yam, but apparently Mamaroneck is not the garden spot of New York. He quipped, "Mamaroneck is an old Indian word for 'no vegetables grow here.'" We then had a shockingly good salad, basically a variant of Caesar salad, with a dressing made from red-wine vinegar, mayonnaise and vegetable oil, topped with quite a bit of Parmigiano Reggiano. Advertised as "over-dressed," it was dressed just right. I had seconds, then finished someone else's. Richman has promised the exact salad-dressing formula, which I'll provide later. The salads were served at the little table at the end of the kitchen, where I set my plate among a pile of magazines, a Zagat survey and Alan Richman's wallet. We then repaired to the elegant dining-room at Alan Richman's House for the main course, which involved three components. The centerpiece was braised beef, cooked in equal parts red wine and tomato puree. Richman prepared two different cuts: chuck and top sirloin, and served each of us some of both. Advertised as "undersalted," it was seasoned just right. In addition he prepared two vegetable garnishes: potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Richman cooks potatoes with the rigor of a Shanghainese chef, in a three-step process that yields a tender, crispy, well-seasoned final product. He begins by boiling the potatoes for a few minutes, then sautees them and finally roasts them in the oven. Richman got his Brussels sprouts recipe from Marc Vetri of Philadelphia (Richman hails from Philadelphia). It basically involves sauteeing the heck out of them. That last photo shows the dish at the exact moment of readiness. Unfortunately, due to the chef's inattention -- prompted no doubt by the presence of two pretty girls -- the Brussels sprouts were forgotten on the heat and the finished batch tended towards burnt. Still, if you picked out the good ones, they were delicious. Here's a finished plate of beef, potatoes and Brussels sprouts as served at Alan Richman's House: There was one more course to come, and this course had not been undersold. Several times over the course of the past few weeks, Richman had claimed that he makes great blintzes. Indeed, the whole evening was positioned as buildup to the blintzes: "We're going to have a bunch of things to eat and then we'll have the blintzes." Needless to say, by the time the blintz course was upon us, the anticipation was nearly unbearable. Richman had made the crepe wrappers in advance and stuffed them with a mixture of farmer's cheese, pot cheese and cream cheese. Just prior to service he browned the blintzes in butter. The tension was glorious: a few drops of perspiration beaded up on Richman's forehead as he worried out loud that his blintzes might not live up to the hype. One of them opened when he turned it over, causing a human-canine panic in the kitchen. Richman seemed to care deeply what we thought of his blintzes. I thought to myself, "If these blintzes suck, even I'm going to feel bad." But I affirmed my commitment to write about it even if the blintzes were lousy. I was both pleased and disappointed that the blintzes were so great. You'll never get blintzes this good in a restaurant because they're too fragile for commercial food-service. The paper-thin wrappers and fluffy cheese filling give the Richman blintzes the elegance of an haute-cuisine dish while still maintaining the rustic shtetl underpinnings that make blintzes so satisfying. A triumph. After dinner we had a tour of Alan Richman's House. He lives alone with his dogs Sophie and Rudy -- he's recently divorced from Food & Wine magazine columnist Lettie Teague and has no children -- in a rambling three-story 1870s house that could accommodate three families with kids. He works in an office on the top floor, sleeps in a bedroom on the middle floor, and cooks in the kitchen on the ground floor. The rest of the house doesn't appear to get much use, so if you're looking to rent a few rooms you may want to contact the man. Of course the best thing about dinner at Alan Richman's House is that you get to listen to Alan Richman talk for several hours. Richman is a wonderfully cranky, grouchy complainer in the tradition of the great American cranky, grouchy complainers from W.C. Fields to Lenny Bruce. He never lets up. He has no secrets and his forthrightness is disarming, charming and exhausting. You don't want to be on the wrong end of Richman's pen, but in person he radiates warmth and it becomes clear that the Groucho Marx act is the protective layer around a soft, almost vulnerable core. I plan to recover from dinner by 2009 and hope to be invited back.

Tong po pork is supposed to be pork belly. If I ordered tong po pork in a restaurant and was given a big piece of pork shoulder I'd assume either the wrong order was delivered to my table or there was a problem with the English translation of the menu. Per Eddie Schoenfeld, quoted in the New York Times: In "A Taste of China: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking," author Ken Hom writes: In "Hunger," Terry Durack refers to: The recipe in "Cooking with Annie" also clearly states pork belly.

Just for clarity: tong po/dong po/whatever pork is a different dish. It's chunks of pork arranged like a flower and served with those little buns. What we're talking about is the dish described on the New Green Bo menu as "Pork Shoulder In Brown Sauce," which is a single hunk of pork shoulder. It's not sauced quite the same as the bo ssam: the Chinese-restaurant version comes in a wide shallow glass bowl in a pool of sauce. But if employed sparingly the flavor of the sauce winds up not being all that far off from the bo ssam marinade/mop.

I was at a cocktail party the other night. Not at somebody's house; at a high-end food-service operation. I was having a chat with someone I'd characterize as a "food celebrity" and a server came around with a tray of hors d'oeuvres. Several of this item were laid out on one side of the tray, and on the other side of the tray was a bowl of dipping sauce. I took one, dipped it, ate it. This celebrity took one, dipped it, bit off half of it, then dipped it again. I didn't worry that it was going to lead to a public health crisis, but I was pretty surprised at the inconsiderateness of the maneuver. I was also surprised, pleasantly this time, that as soon as the server was out of the celebrity's sight line he took the whole tray of hors d'oeuvres back into the kitchen and replaced the dipping sauce with a new bowl.

NoNiceTime, where are you getting the ingredients information from? Adobo? Worcestershire? Egg? I was under the impression, and the ingredients list on a box of frozen White Castles seems to support this, that the patties only contain beef, onions, salt and pepper. For me the problem with White Castle is that, while I admire the place from a nostalgia standpoint, the end product just doesn't taste good. At pretty much every step along the way to producing a slider, White Castle makes the wrong choice -- an inferior ingredient, a questionable process -- and the end result is an inferior product. The onions they use are disgusting; they use frozen, compressed, low-quality beef patties; the take the highly questionable step of placing the buns on top of the patties when the patties are still raw, they use awful bread and awful cheese. No wonder the things are so hard on the stomach and so disappointing to eat. Your burgers look infinitely better. There's a place in New Jersey called White Manna. It dates back to the 1930s and serves sliders that, at first glance, seem similar to White Castles. Except they're great. If you took every step in the White Castle process and reimagined it in the service of good flavor, you'd get a White Manna slider. It so happens there's a available as well. The differences are apparent: White Manna starts with ground beef at refrigerator temperature, not frozen, and uses sliced onions not chemical-bath diced prepack onions. The burger patties and onions cook alone together for a bit, then the cheese gets added, then the bun is put on top to steam at the end. The buns they use are the excellent Martin's Potato Rolls out of Pennsylvania. The burgers are served with good-quality pickle slices on the side. Now that's something worth imitating!

My current take is the same only because I haven't had enough frozen pizza since 2003 to have a different take!

If you want to see how Domino's pizza could be improved you need only look at Pizza Hut. I'm not really coming at this from an NY perspective, comparing Domino's to good New York pizzerias. I'm no pizza snob. If I'm on the road I'll eat at chain pizza restaurants. I like the pizza at the Costco snack bar just fine. But I'll always choose Pizza Hut over Domino's because Domino's is just not pleasant for me to eat -- waxy cheese, poor-quality sauce, dough full of off flavors (though the thin-crust dough is not as bad as the others, with the deep dish being the worst), unfortunate and stingy toppings -- whereas at least Pizza Hut makes an acceptable product. I actually think there are several brands of store-bought frozen pizza that are better than what Domino's brings to your door.

I actually think the bo ssam is not a particularly great demonstration of Ssam Bar's culinary acumen. Aside from being horrifically overpriced, it's not truly exceptional. You can get pork shoulder at New Green Bo that's nearly as good and costs $12.95 (though you'd have to order two or three to get the bo ssam volume). No it's not from some fancy artisanal hog but when you cook a pork shoulder for a thousand hours you don't get the kind of differentiation you get with a pork chop, a country ham, bacon, ribs -- basically all the other pork stuff at Ssam Bar. I don't think a North Carolina pork eater would be particularly impressed by the bo ssam, which has as its primary virtue the fact that it's cooked to the point of falling apart. At least, having eaten a lot of pork in North Carolina, I wasn't impressed by it. I would much rather eat the rest of the dishes on the Ssam Bar menu, especially given that you can get ten of them for the price of a bo ssam.

Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe are typically number 1 and 2 (it switches back and forth) on the Zagat most-popular list, so the demand for prime tables in the 7:30-9:30 range (I assume that's what is meant by acceptable terms?) tends to exceed the supply. That being said, Gramercy Tavern is easier for non-regulars to book than a lot of less popular restaurants that are more aggressive about favoring VIPs. At least at Gramercy Tavern, if you call the morning they start accepting reservations for a given date, you can actually get a desirable table. Even now if you go on OpenTable you can find a couple of 7:30 spots for 2 or 4 towards the end of the month (as of when I'm writing this). They don't hold 100% of the good tables back the way a lot of restaurants do. Gramercy Tavern is also a fairly large restaurant, so things open up with greater frequency than at smaller places, and the reservationists are very good about calling back if you put in a request that they can't fulfill right away and something opens up later. I just had friends in from North Carolina and, about a week in advance, they tried to book at Gramercy Tavern for this past Monday night. They couldn't get anything, but the restaurant called on my friend's cell phone Monday around lunchtime with an offer of a table. I didn't even hear about the adventure until after it was over, otherwise I'd have advised more persistence aka obsession. But they got the whole thing accomplished with just that initial phone call.

Total guess, there were maybe about 80 people at the event. The "Gallery" (the nomenclature for the three spaces is the Study, the Kitchen and the Gallery) is 1700 square feet, so you could probably do a few more people than that, but I bet they're primarily focusing on 70-80 for the seated dinners. Needless to say, with 1700 square feet of open, loft-like space, you could do a cocktail party for 150 no problem. I can find out the exact numbers at some point.