Fat Guy

I'd suggest you head over to a Whole Foods or other supermarket that has a large selection of natural foods and wander the snack-food aisles. You'll find that the organic and natural foods industries have been hard at work designing exactly the sort of individually wrapped, highly concentrated energy foods that you need in such a situation. The main reason I'm familiar with these items is that we have a toddler, and this is the stuff we keep on hand for whenever we need to take him out for a few hours: individual portions of tasty, relatively nutritious foods that don't require refrigeration, cooking or anything else. Here are a few of the things we've been getting: - Apple sauce and variants. There are dozens of choices here. The benchmark are the Earth's Best Organic Apple Sauce Cups. They come in a six pack of 4oz cups and are delicious. You can eat them quickly, and they provide a nice energy boost for only 50 calories. There are also all sorts of variants, like Santa Cruz Organic Apple Blackberry. - Cheddar crackers. There are several companies making high-quality cheddar crackers (like Cheeze-Its but better) in boxes of eight one-ounce bags. - Pretzels. Again, there are plenty of good pretzel choices that come in packs of small bags. - Shelf-stable milk. Parmalat makes something called Lil' Milk. These are three-packs of 8-ounce boxes of milk in several permutations (regular, chocolate, various percentages of fat). - Of course, once you have your shelf-stable milk, you're all set to utilize individual cereal packs. There are many, many options here. At the most convenient end of the spectrum, there are the packages that are actual plastic bowls with peel-back lids. You eat right out of them, so all you need is a plastic spoon. For a broader range, you can get whatever cereal you like and pack it in pint-size deli containers, which do nicely as cereal bowls. Depending on how liberal you want to be about refrigeration, you can also go with: - Individual servings of yogurt. Me, I wouldn't hesitate to let yogurt go unrefrigerated for a 24-hour shift. If you don't eat it, throw it out. There's very little expense involved. If you haven't checked out the yogurt products available these days, they're quite good. Total Greek Yogurt, for example, is terrific and comes in individual packs in various levels of fat. - Cheese. Those Mini BabyBel cheeses aren't the greatest cheeses in the world, but they're "100% all natural" and the individual wax wrappers make them pretty stable. - The frozen bread trick. If you make a cheese sandwich, peanut butter sandwich, etc., on frozen bread it will last a good many hours in your locker. You just buy a loaf of good-quality sliced sandwich bread, freeze it, make your sandwich on the frozen bread, wrap first in foil (to maintain the shape) then in a zipper baggie (airtight and an odor barrier). Also, be sure to equip yourself. Your locker should have in it all the various condiments, utensils and other items that you need. If there's a 24-hour rec-room-type area with plastic utensils and napkins, that's great, but if not you should keep all that stuff on hand. Just start accumulating it from various fast-food restaurants: straws, napkins, forks, spoons, knives, salt packets, sweeteners, ketchup, etc.

When I use "savory" as a culinary term I basically mean "not sweet." A single ingredient is usually either/or: sweet or savory. Sugar is sweet, salt is savory. Honey is sweet, wheat is savory. When you get into more complex items that have both sweet and savory flavors (honey-mustard dressing, bacon, carrot cake) then it becomes a question of either a strong center of gravity one way or the other, or the dish is both sweet and savory (I'd say bacon is savory, carrot cake is sweet and honey-mustard dressing is hybrid sweet-savory).

I think those are some of the best. If you want to put together a pretty good platter of soft cheeses in the US you can get some Humboldt Fog, Old Chatham Camembert, and Constant Bliss, and put them out in the morning loosely covered so they sit out a room temperature all day and get really nice. But, if you put that platter side-by-side with a platter of just-smuggled-in French cheeses, well, it's just not going to compare favorably. Our best would have to be considered entry level in the French soft cheese hierarchy. I think with soft cheeses we're at the point we were at with wine in the 1970s: we might occasionally produce a soft cheese that, in a blind tasting, could compete with the good French stuff, but we're not consistently producing a range of products at that quality level. And what that has meant for me as a consumer is that I've wasted a lot of money trying to give our soft cheeses a chance.

There are a couple of scallop recipes in the "Simply Vanilla" book. One is "pan-seared scallops with coconut rice and candied red pepper and cilantro salad." The basic idea is that there's a vanilla-based sauce that goes over the seared scallops at the end. The sauce is butter, vanilla, chopped ginger and salt. The scallops are seared in grapeseed oil and basted with butter, fresh thyme and lime juice. The other recipe is "shellfish trio in a vanilla-mint-citrus broth."

Lori, in the recipe for vanilla-herb-infused oil in the "Simply Vanilla" book, they recommend heating the oil in a skillet, scraping the beans in, and then pulling it from the heat before the vanilla burns. I imagine this releases a lot of the flavors (it's why I was thinking, in my egg experiment, that I should have added the vanilla to the butter not the eggs). So you might want to do that with the oil for your vinaigrette. That's my guess, at least.

Vanilla scrambled eggs Today I decided to get a savory vanilla baseline by adding some vanilla to scrambled eggs. I split one Tahitian vanilla bean and scraped the seeds into a small mixing bowl, and also put in some fleur de sel and fresh ground pepper. While the butter was melting . . . . . . I wondered whether I should have, instead of combining the vanilla with the eggs, added it to the butter in order to expose it to the heat a little longer -- would this somehow "activate" it? I don't know. I was pleasantly surprised by the result. I mentioned above that I have (and I assume most of you have this too) a psychological predisposition to associate vanilla with sweet foods. I don't think my brain has really got a system yet for processing the flavor of vanilla when it's divorced from sweetness. Indeed, it's not really a flavor in the sense of something like cinnamon or nutmeg. It definitely made the eggs taste special and interesting, but in an unexpected way: it was like a flavor enhancer with interesting secondary floral aromas. I went back to the "Simply Vanilla" book and noticed that the authors say the following in the notes on the savory entree recipes: "While you might not taste the vanilla in the dishes, vanilla enhances the natural flavors of just about any dish." My experience did indeed square with that claim. Looking forward to more experimentation. P.S. after scraping the pod I added the remains to one of my already-brewing vanilla-extract jars.

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That really does look good. The "Simply Vanilla" book has a couple of pasta recipes as well, though the Adria recipe is so elegant in its simplicity -- it's so simple it definitely would have qualified for inclusion in a book called "Simply Vanilla"! I'm really going to need to do a bunch of savory cooking with vanilla in order to gain some perspective, because I'm just not yet psychologically able to break away from my identification of vanilla as a harbinger of sweetness. I'll have to take a few basic, simple foods and scrape some vanilla in just to see how it works: scrambled eggs, rice, pasta, vinaigrette, sauteed mushrooms.

Okay, I can't argue with that. I think we also have some good ricotta, farmer's cheese, etc. I've been sloppy about my definition of soft cheese. I'll have to consider it further.

I think the pasteurization issue is relevant, and unfortunate, but probably also overstated. It's not like the 90-day-aged soft cheeses in the US are all that good either. Jonathan White at Bobolink has told me many times that the pasteurization issue is "a pig in a poke," and by that he means it's not nearly the issue people make it out to be. It's possible to age most soft cheeses 61 days in order to bring them within code -- it's just that most people don't bother to do it (Jonathan does). I think there are major issues of the quality of milk, the expertise of the cheesemaker and, above all, the overwhelming American consumer preference for bland cheeses and general ignorance about how great cheeses are supposed to taste. I'm not sure what criteria everybody would accept to define the direness of a situation, but I don't think pointing to a handful of examples of very good soft cheeses does the trick -- especially since at their best those examples still trail far behind the best European stuff. I've tried probably 9/10 of the soft cheeses that win the awards and get the accolades, and the Bobolink cheeses are the only ones I'd seriously try to sneak on to the cheese cart at a Michelin three-star restaurant in France. All the other really excellent soft cheeses I've had in the US have been from Spain. You can get decent unpasteurized Epoisses from Berthaut and okay Reblochon, both of which have been aged 60 days to meet US guidelines, but those aren't superlative cheeses. They're cheeses that tide you over until you can go have the really good stuff in Europe. I've not enjoyed young American goat cheeses nearly as much as European ones, though I do think on the whole we do better with goat than with any other category. I do think, though, that viewed uncharitably, in the cold light of reason, with no allowances for effort or romance or home-team loyalty, the state of American soft cheeses is pretty bad.

The other day I was starting to question my decision to rely on Tahitian vanilla for my own in-home experiment. I bought them without a lot of consideration, and now I wish I'd purchased half Tahitian and half Madagascar. As luck would have it, one of our members, dmbolus (chef Matt Bolus), is the author of the book "Simply Vanilla" (I've started a topic on the savory cooking aspects of the book here) and his co-author is the owner of the Arizona Vanilla Company. A book and a bunch of Madascar beans just arrived, so I'm going to get those infusing (the beans, not the book) for comparison, probably in vodka.

Some interesting foundation items in the book are a vanilla-herb oil (vegetable oil infused with vanilla, garlic, rosemary, thyme and sage) and several variants of vanilla-infused vinegar (such as vanilla, lemongrass, cilantro and salt in rice-wine vinegar).

I just received a copy of the book "Simply Vanilla: Recipes for Everyday Use," by Patty Elsberry and Matt Bolus. Patty Elsberry is the owner of the Arizona Vanilla Company and Matt Bolus is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef currently working at the Sanctuary Hotel on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. He also happens to be eGullet Society member "dmbolus," who has been posting recently on the "make-your-own vanilla extract experiment" topic, which is how he and I connected. I've been enjoying the book so far, particularly the introductory material that covers everything from the mythology of vanilla to basic instructions on how to make your own extract. And of course it's nice that we have access to chef Matt -- I'm sure he'd be happy to chime in and address any and all vanilla-related inquiries. The most interesting aspect of the book to me, however, is the section of savory recipes that utilize vanilla. While I've long been aware of the lobster-with-vanilla combination pioneered (I think) by Alain Senderens at Lucas Carton, I've never given really serious consideration to vanilla as a versatile savory ingredient. "Simply Vanilla," however, has all sorts of interesting recipes, and as with most books of recipes I think more in terms of idea-generation than actually following the specific recipes. For example, there are recipes for a spinach-and-mushroom pizza seasoned with a vanilla-and-herb infused oil and for "vanilla seared tilapia with shiitake infused basmati rice and sauteed Thai vegetables." This gets me thinking that the vanilla-mushroom combination is something I'd like to explore. The book isn't from a major publisher, so I doubt you'll find it in a bookstore, but it is available from Amazon. <iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=fatguycom-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1601940009&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr&nou=1" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Bobolink was what I had in mind when I said "Yes, there are a couple of exceptions, but very few." (For an account of our visit to Bobolink, click here). So yes, when I happen to fall into one of Bobolink's softer cheeses, I eat it and enjoy it. I haven't had particularly good luck achieving a stable supply of Bobolink products, though. You really need to catch them at a greenmarket, and even then the supply is unpredictable. And once in awhile I'll taste a really good soft cheese from the Picholine cheese cart, for something like $8 for an insignificantly sized two-bite piece. But that's about it.

After years of fighting against the system, awhile back I decided to adapt to it. In the US, there is a dearth of good-quality soft cheese. It's difficult to import the best examples, and it's hard to make here -- in both cases primarily on account of regulations against use of unpasteurized milk in cheeses aged less than 60 days, but also because such cheeses are difficult to transport (in the case of the imports) and because there doesn't seem to be a lot of American expertise in the soft cheese department. Yes, there are a couple of exceptions, but very few. Yet, it's quite easy to get great hard cheeses in the US. The best ones in the world, such as from Neal's Yard Dairy, can be imported with no trouble. Even though they're made from unpasteurized milk, it's okay because they're aged for so many months so they're within regulations. And they travel well. In terms of domestically produced cheeses, there are many producers of excellent domestic hard cheeses in various styles. Even people who don't live in major cities with extensive gourmet markets can order hard cheeses by mail and rest assured they'll arrive in edible condition. It's a virtual guarantee that if you're in the US and you're presented with a cheese plate of high-end cheeses, the best cheeses will the the hard ones and the worst will be the soft ones. In France, needless to say, it's exactly the opposite. Well, I'm through trying to recreate the French cheese-plate experience here in the US. These days, I'm focusing on what's good here, and I'm much happier. This morning, for example, I bought two cheeses: Fiscalini San Joaquin Gold, a cheddar-like cheese from California; and Butlers Goosnargh Gold, an incredible double Gloucester from the UK. Both were so delicious -- there was no compromise involved in eating them. It wasn't like with soft cheeses, where they almost always fall short of what you'd experience in France. Somebody let me know when some great soft cheeses become available. Until then, I'm sticking with the hard-cheese strategy.

So after much procrastination, I was at the grocery store this morning and they had a display of Microplane Rotary Graters for $19.99. So I bought one. It has fine and coarse drums as well as two handles (which appear to be identical, so I guess one is a backup?). I'm pretty sure it's this unit though curiously the packaging (and the product) contains no model number.

You want to talk about infestation, the worst experiences I've had have been with reused produce boxes, liquor cartons, etc. Not only do pests hitch rides on those things, but also the containers have often absorbed food odors and residues, so they're pest magnets for as long as you keep them in the home. I have a similar problem with reusable totes -- one of the reasons we don't use them (aside from the fact that I guess I just don't love the earth enough) for food is that we don't want them in the house the rest of the week, giving off food odors. Maybe if we kept them in the car it would be different, but we're in New York City so we don't usually shop with the car.

I wonder what a life-cycle energy analysis would say about the various reusable totes versus disposable plastic bags. Presumably, there's a lot more energy and such involved in creating a reusable tote. I wonder how many times you have to use it before it becomes better for the planet than disposable bags. 10? 100? 500? And I wonder how many times the average reusable bag actually gets used before it's retired and discarded.

A chef friend smuggled a few charcuterie items back from Europe and I was able to try them tonight. This wasn't a structured blind tasting or anything like that, and I have no idea exactly where the European samples came from (I got some general information but not enough to track producers) but it did give me the opportunity to do a casual comparison. North America is still behind. The European (French, Italian) products had depth of flavor that we just haven't captured yet in our charcuterie. The best North American stuff, like Fra'Mani, is in the ballpark, but as much as I think Fra'Mani makes a terrific product I wouldn't pick it over a lot of the European stuff. I wonder why that is. I immediately suspected regulations, such as allowed temperatures.

It definitely sounds like your stain never dried properly. Do you live in a humid area, or is the bar in a finished basement where it's very humid? If so you might want to set up a dehumidifier and some fans and open those doors up for three or four days. Also, are the shelves themselves stained? If so, you might consider sealing those with polyurethane. And you're of course not storing your glasses upside-down . . .

No, though I make stock with plenty of mirepoix so that flavor is imparted to the dish.

On the subject of short ribs, over the years I've developed a small repertoire of dishes that I cook when I have super-serious food people coming over. These are dishes I know I can execute at a high level of technical accuracy, in part because they don't require a lot of skill. And they're the ones that have gone over the best with audiences of culinary professionals (judging not by praise, which is always suspect, but by how many people clean their plates and go back for seconds and thirds). Okay, so I can make this virtual guarantee: if you have chefs, food writers, deans of culinary schools, etc., coming to dinner, you can't go terribly wrong with the following: Short Ribs with Lentils Mise en place: Start by simmering a huge quantity of beef short ribs -- twice as many as you think you'll need -- fully submerged in a good-quality beef or veal stock for about three hours. Yes, you need to have made the stock yourself already. This dish is very dependent on good stock, as you'll see. Remove the short ribs from the stock, strain the stock, and refrigerate the short ribs and stock separately overnight. The next day, when you have time for prep, dissect the short ribs. You want to create four piles: 1- the bones, 2- fat, 3- odds and ends of short rib meat, and 4- really nice thick rectangular chunks of pure short-rib meat. Freeze the bones for future use in stock, give the fat to the dog, dice the odds and ends into 1/4" or smaller pieces and refrigerate, and separately refrigerate the really nice big chunks. Defat the stock and leave in the fridge. To make the finished dish, simultaneously do the following: Cook up a bunch of lentils, using the stock instead of water. You don't need to use any veg in the lentils, but if you want to use finely diced onions and carrots it's nice that way too. Make sure to add salt and pepper at the beginning, in the middle of cooking, and at the end. Some fresh thyme towards the end is nice too. You want your lentils to end up somewhat wet -- not lentil soup, but not just a pile of lentils. This is a dish served in a bowl, not on a plate. So if you need to add stock partway through, go ahead. About ten minutes before you think the lentils are going to be done, add in all the diced up bits of short rib meat. At the same time, in a pot of the stock (with some salt added), gently reheat the big rectangular chunks of short rib meat. To serve, ladle a bunch of the lentil-and-beef mixture into a bowl, and top with a couple of the really nice pieces of short rib meat. Ladle a little extra stock over the whole thing. Garnish with fresh thyme.

My feeling is that, unless you can do better than pretty decent braised short ribs and mashed potatoes, don't try. Because pretty decent braised short ribs and mashed potatoes make for a terrific meal, whereas pretty decent bouillabaisse isn't really worth making or eating.

There are many topics throughout the eG Forums that touch on issues of grocery shopping, and I always feel that, as a New Yorker, I'm somewhat out of step with the way everybody else in the USA (and, these days, much of the Western industrialized world) shops for groceries. A couple of the main points of differentiation: most New Yorkers don't use cars for grocery shopping, most New York stores are much smaller than their suburban counterparts, there are a lot more specialty stores in New York City than in most places, New York City kitchens and refrigerators tend to be small, people dine out a lot here. I'm sure there are others. Me, for the past few years the anchor shopping trip each week for me has been to Fairway on Broadway between 74th and 75th. If you ever want to find me -- as I am somewhat of an anti-social recluse -- your best bet is to stake out Fairway around 7:30-8am on a Sunday. I usually meet my mother there, we both do our shopping, I help her home with her groceries, and then I head home with mine. If I buy a lot of stuff, I take a cab home, dropping her off on the way. I live on the East Side, but if I buy more than about $50 worth of groceries at Fairway instead of at one of the stores in my neighborhood I save a lot more than the price of cab fare, I get better quality, and I get to maintain the family tradition. Fairway shopping centers mostly on produce, milk and other fresh food items. For staples, bulk items, dry goods, that sort of thing, we go about once a month to Costco in Yonkers, by car. That Costco is in the same plaza as Stew Leonard's, and the next exit off 87 is ShopRite, so we can get just about anything imaginable on that trip. The rest of our shopping we do at a variety of places. We go to Chinatown (Manhattan) for dinner usually once a week, sometimes not for two weeks, and we always try to get fruit and vegetables there, not to mention various Asian ingredients. But since we're usually on foot and far from home, and managing a baby, we tend to get only small quantities -- a few oranges, a couple of pounds of red globe grapes, some curry paste, etc. Some years -- the years when we know we'll be around for the summer and have some predictability to our schedule -- we do the Yorkville CSA for the summer-fall part of the year (at peak CSA time, my Fairway shopping gets so small I can walk home with it in a small backpack). The Union Square Greenmarket, so heavily utilized by so many cooks I respect, is a place I only get to a few times a year. Apple season and tomato season are the two times I'll go out of my way to make a special trip down there, because there's nothing comparable available elsewhere. Otherwise, I go when I happen to be in that neighborhood on a greenmarket day, in the morning. No, the other greenmarkets don't measure up. We try to shop according to a plan that allows to avoid most trips to the local bodega or bad supermarket, but of course sometimes we get caught short and have to buy an onion or whatever. As much as it annoys me to pay bodega prices, I'm thankful for 24/7 access to just about anything -- so it's worth that premium. The one thing I find that it's kind of impossible to buy a week's supply of is fresh bread. We live close enough to a Pain Quotidien branch that excellent fresh bread is always in reach, and there's a small market across the street that has several good breads. A little farther away, though en route from our most frequently utilized subway station, there's a small market that sells Balthazar breads. Fish is a perpetual bugaboo for me. I'm never satisfied with what I can get, even at the most celebrated places. I wind up just not buying a lot of fish, and leaning heavily towards fish when I eat at good restaurants. And you?

In an unexpected turn of events, in the past couple of weeks the majority of grapefruits at the market where I shop have been white. I wonder if the late-season crop (these are all from Florida) tends white.