Fat Guy

I guess it's sort of on the boundary between a composed salad and a crudite platter. I mostly include it in the salad grouping because when I make that platter for our son it acts as the salad course and is made with the same ingredients as the grownup salads, minus the lettuce, and catering to the not-unusual-in-a-child desire to have the ingredients not touch. If somebody just gave me that platter out of context I'd probably call it something else. I still haven't internalized my salad photography routine. I made a pretty nice one tonight for company, with little mozzarella balls, grape tomatoes, arugula, beets and a mustard vinaigrette, but in the end-of-preparation rush it totally slipped my mind to photograph it.

Yogurt works well, though with a high-power blender you can get away with nothing.

The other day I was making a salad and I thought, hey, that looks kind of cool. I took a photo of it, and of the two other salads I made that day. On most of the days when I prepare dinner for our little family of three I make three different salads: one for our 5-year-old son, containing no lettuce (so it is basically a raw-vegetable plate), one big one for my wife that includes a protein like tofu (because this may be the only protein she eats), and a medium-size one for me. Anyway, I figured it might be interesting to start chronicling our salads. I know I'm starting to feel like mine are a bit repeptitive, so maybe this will lead to some inspiration. The salads shown here are undressed. While I acknowledge the superiority of tossed salads with dressing, my family prefers to drizzle balsamic vinegar and other non-fattening stuff, so I go along with that. Here are the last few. I'll try to get in the habit of photographing them whenever I'm the cook at home.

The latest bunch. We had vacation and a number of days off in the past 6 or so weeks, which is why the number of photos is not huge. The photo of the lunch that includes an empty container, followed by a photo of sushi, is from a day when I packed the rest of lunch, then purchased sushi and dropped it at school just before lunchtime. The lack of refrigeration made me reluctant to send raw fish any other way, though I imagine they do it in Japan routinely.

I recently saw a preview of the iPad edition of the Alinea book. I'm considering buying an iPad when it's released, just to use it for the book. There have been some other amazing food-content uses of the iPad, for example the gorgeous iPad edition of ELLE à Table makes me want to learn a lot more French. There are also some weak uses of iPad and ebook technology. The overwhelming majority, actually. But given what I've seen I'm confident that the Modernist Cuisine team has the capacity to do an awesome iPad edition.

Today my physical therapist greeted me, "Oh, I've been meaning to tell you about a restaurant dream I had. I went to the bathroom and when I came out I was in a different restaurant. It was new and not yet open, but they said they'd feed me anyway. They served me, among other things, a tiny deer on a toothpick. It was delicious." It was a welcome relief from the normal restaurant-related talk I get: "What's your favorite restaurant?" "When you review a restaurant do you wear a disguise?" This got me thinking: I have dreams about restaurants all the time. And so must many of you. I'm not talking about dreams that touch on food in general. I'm talking about restaurant dreams. Most recently, like my physical therapist I was dreaming of going to the bathroom at a restaurant. Except, the urinal was so high up on the wall that you'd have needed a ladder to use it. Several of us in the bathroom discussed it and concluded it was because the chef was from Luxembourg. No I have no idea what it all means. Anybody else?

I also chose black and got no error message. I had a red one, and I really liked the color, but I was ready for a change -- as were the other members of the family.

There's a healthy amount of wine material in there. I think the one big omission, which was intentional, is pastry. The pastry arts, always the first to embrace modernism, could easily fill an additional volume. Unless you go very esoteric, I can't think of another big area that feels like it could someday need another volume.

I wondered why there was no color choice on the website, but since the model pictured was black and I wanted black I didn't care. Turns out, there is a color choice. This email just arrived from Blendtec:

The New York Times reports that there's a Dutch movement afoot to popularize the eating of bugs as a superior protein source.

I spoke to a manager at Costco today about the Blendtec. She said they absolutely will take it back for any reason, including if it's because you found a better deal. The only restriction is for a Blendtec unit they need the base, pitcher, lid, book and DVD. I didn't have the book and DVD in the car, so I'll have to do the return next time I go in, but I've ordered the refurb unit since the special ends tomorrow.

Today a friend and I cooked a beef rib roast (bone-in, 4.5 pounds), and we underestimated the cooking time. When the internal temperature was still 66 F and we had half an hour until our late lunch was supposed to start, we agreed that we'd shift the roast to early dinner after his kid's soccer game. The math didn't quite work out, though, so when the internal temperature of the roast hit 120 F I pulled it and tented it. It sat that way for 2 hours. I figured I'd put it back in the oven for 30-45 minutes before serving, but just before I put it in I took a temperature. At the dead center -- 2 hours after being pulled from the oven -- it was at 131 F. I figured it must at some point have been higher than that, and we wanted relatively rare, so I didn't want to pour a lot more heat into the system. After 2.5 hours of resting, we cut the roast and served it. It was beautiful! The extreme rest had evened out the interior such that we had nice pink throughout. The meat was very juicy. And it was still warm. Not hot, but plenty warm to be appetizing. I'm wondering, maybe I should make this part of standard procedure: forget 10, 20 or 30 minutes; I'll rest for 120. Anybody else have experience with extreme resting of meat?

I definitely suggest reading the high-power blender topic. It's a different category of appliance. Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

I'll let you know tonight... Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

I'd have told you not to order 10,000 originally, and I'd have been wrong. So I'm not sure my advice is worth much (what else is new?). It seems to me, however, that the argument for 20,000 is pretty strong. I'm operating under the assumption that you achieve your greatest cost savings at 20k copies and that there's not much to be gained from going up to 25k or 30k. The advantages of going to 20k are 1- you get a crack sooner at correcting typos and such for the third printing, and 2- you limit your exposure a little if orders dry up in the teens. The disadvantage is that you're not as prepared for Christmas if you do big numbers, but it seems to me you'll have a lot of sales-trend data to work with by summer so you can always do a big Christmas order in August if you need to. That leaves the one downside scenario as the one where you only need 5,000 more copies so you overpay per unit. I'd rather risk that than risk getting stuck with 5,000 unsold units.

Maybe I should return my Blendtec to Costco and buy this one instead. Longer warranty and two pitchers? That is so awesome.

The claim that modernism is imploding is more of a leap than the evidence can support. El Bulli is not closing as in going out of business. It is closing to retool as part of a nonprofit foundation and the planned reopening is for 2014. It goes into its hiatus as the top restaurant in the world -- not because, for example, the clientele got old and the food got boring. Achatz and Kokonas are opening an arguably non-modernist restaurant (if anything it is postmodern), Next, but Alinea is still going strong. Alinea and Achatz are currently emphasizing the emotional component of food, and it's true that Achatz in public appearances is saying we're moving beyond modernism, but the Alinea kitchen remains resolutely non-traditional and high-tech. That 6,000 copies of this $500 book have been snapped up is just amazing. That the current internal debate is whether to order 20,000 or 25,000 more is pretty strong evidence that modernism is not imploding. Rather, it seems to evidence that the trickle down has been profound in its extent. Home cooks using the Sous Vide Supreme, etc.

With Takashimaya gone, where can one go to get a first-rate Japanese teahouse experience in New York City (or surrounding areas)?

There are a lot of ways to garnish the soup to make it look more appealing, and you can do more than one. Chopped parsley works, as does a single whole leaf of something like basil. Bacon bits look attractive, and if they're optional then you can make a vegetarian soup that only becomes non-vegetarian when you add the bacon. Slices of sauteed mushrooms look nice scattered on top of a soup. A sprinkling of Parmigiano. As mentioned above, you can do a dollop of creme fraiche or sour cream. Your choice of bowl can also make a big difference: earthenware bowls give a rustic look, and the narrower the opening the less surface are you have to look at; you can even use coffee mugs.

Because the ice cream makes the pastry soggy. (Also, at a lot of places the pastry is dried out by the time they use it.)

Have you ever had a good profiterole filled with ice cream? I haven't. I think it may be an impossibility - an inherent tension between the pastry and the ice cream -- as I've had them at some very good restaurants and nobody has nailed it. Or have I just been unlucky?

I had an interesting chat the other day with Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas of Chicago's Alinea restaurant. They are on the road promoting their new book, Life, on the Line, which by the way is well worth reading. On Monday at a talk Kokonas made the argument that "local, sustainable and organic is now the baseline at any great restaurant in the world." I followed up with them on Wednesday and they were sticking to that position. Alinea, a modernist restaurant with a reputation for technical wizardry, doesn't put the names of farms on its menu -- you don't even get a menu until you leave -- yet they work with 138 purveyors and care deeply about the provenance of their ingredients. Is there a great restaurant that isn't focusing on local, sustainable and organic to at least some extent? If so, name it. If not, what does it all mean?

I was walking along Grand Street yesterday when I noticed that the Italian Food Center was closed up. I remember 10-15 years ago the Italian Food Center was an amazing deli-grocery. The last time I checked in, maybe 2-3 years ago, it had become more of a mediocre-looking pizzeria. Now, it's gone. Makes me a little sad.

I'm not sure how, from a theory standpoint, using the oven would produce more or less sticky results than the stove top. I'd have to confirm this experimentally, but I just don't see it. The reason I've never used the oven for rice is that it's not efficient. Why heat up the whole oven when you can accomplish the same thing with a low flame on the stovetop?

This week at Western Beef we have rib-end pork chops for $1.58 per pound and boneless, skinless chicken breast for $1.48 per pound. Drumsticks are 99 cents per pound and thighs with drumsticks are $1.19 per pound. Ground turkey is $1.39 per pound.