Fat Guy

The other day some friends and I were speculating about the number of calories in a pastrami sandwich from the local Jewish deli that makes obscenely large sandwiches. The sandwich contained about 12 ounces of pastrami. How many calories do you think are in 12 ounces of pastrami? I figured about 1,200, not to mention the bread (the mustard contribution is de minimus)? I was surprised at the results of a Google search. While there might be variations from establishment to establishment, when you check the calorie count of commercial pastrami products the numbers are surprisingly low. So, for example, Carnegie Deli Fully Cooked USDA Choice Pastrami rings in at 40 calories per ounce. That's right, a 3-ounce serving is 120 calories. Making our 12-ounce giant sandwich less than 500 calories of meat, plus whatever the bread contributes. This number, or close to it, shows up on the various "nutrition facts" labels I was able to find online. I'm surprised.

I recently received an email from Zagat linking to this list of, purportedly, the 8 best Chinese restaurants in the city. According to this list they are: Pacificana 813 55th St., 2nd fl. (8th Ave.) Phone: 718-871-2880 Wa Jeal 1588 Second Ave. (bet. 82nd & 83rd Sts.) Phone: 212-396-3339 Shun Lee Palace 155 E. 55th St. (bet. Lexington & 3rd Aves.) Phone: 212-371-8844 Tse Yang 34 E. 51st St. (bet. Madison & Park Aves.) Phone: 212-688-5447 Oriental Garden 14 Elizabeth St. (bet. Bayard & Canal Sts.) Phone: 212-619-0085 Phoenix Garden 242 E. 40th St. (bet. 2nd & 3rd Aves.) Phone: 212-983-6666 Philippe 33 E. 60th St. (bet. Madison & Park Aves.) Phone: 212-644-8885 Nice Green Bo 66 Bayard St. (bet. Elizabeth & Mott Sts.) Phone: 212-625-2359 I think we can do better than this list.

I went there once and thought it was quite good, but no way are you going to get me to define it as Upper West Side!

Peeling carrots. There has got to be a better way.

This morning my son asked for home fries. Trouble was, he asked about 15 minutes before we needed to leave for school and we had only raw whole russet potatoes. I thought to myself, "What would those Modernist Cuisine people do?" I cut a potato fairly small and mixed the pieces with a little water, then microwaved covered for 4 minutes. Got a pan screaming hot and threw them in with neutral vegetable oil, and salt. Finished with a knob of butter. Voila, very good home fries in 12 minutes.

It's a remarkable work. I've completely fallen behind on everything else I had to do today. It's easily the best cooking reference I've ever seen not to mention one of the best reference works of any kind I've seen. I think it's up there with the 11th edition Britannica and the Steinsaltz Talmud. It's very difficult to do a project like this within the mainstream publishing industry. You need to go back 100 years when priorities were different, or look at religious projects where the authors are motivated by fealty to a higher power. Nathan and his team have a similar relationship, it seems, to food. I've been trying to think of criticism of the volumes, because I don't just want to pile on with praise. I guess the only thing I can come up with is that if the food made from the recipes doesn't actually taste good then I'll consider that a failing. But having not tried any of the recipes there's no way to know yet.

For the first 35 years of my life, I could eat anything I wanted at any time in any quantity without any gastrointestinal repercussions. I remember vividly, when our son was born in 2005, I was rushing to and fro around Mount Sinai hospital in New York City, subsisting on a diet of candy bars and bacon-and-egg sandwiches for several days while he was in the NICU (for, it later turned out when the test results came back, no actual reason other than to wait for the test results), at one point I got a burning, tightening, radiating pain sensation in my chest. I thought for sure it was my heart. I guess that's a pretty common reaction. A couple of doctor's visits later and we had a diagnosis: GERD aka gastroesophageal reflux disease. I started with Nexium, then Priolosec, then Protonix, based on whatever was the pill-du-jour that the insurance company would cover. Eventually, though, I decided the better move was lifestyle change. Losing 100 pounds seemed out of the question but some better choices made a lot of difference. I guess the reflux thing presents in various ways for various people. I know some folks who take one bite of fried food and it triggers the burn. Not for me, though a while back when I was in Alabama and EVERYTHING was fried I got chronic heartburn after a couple of days. For me, though, the primary important thing is to give myself plenty of time to digest after eating a meal. That means if I have to do any exertion, like walking to school with our son, I eat very little beforehand or I eat a couple of hours beforehand. At the moment I'm drug free and not having any issues as long as I stick to the plan. Are there any other sufferers out there? How are you coping? Drugs? Surgery? Lifestyle change?

What's currently the best? Is it just Gari end of discussion?

This morning I was taking our son to school on the subway and look what we saw on the platform: I was bummed that I couldn't take this thing, because I was going away not toward home, but it reminded me of various great kitchen things I've seen in the trash. Actually our best find ever was a living-dining-room piece, a chair we fondly call "the garbage chair," but there have also been cast-iron skillets, mugs and trays -- people seem to throw out a lot of trays. Have you found any gems in the trash? Is this just an urban phenomenon?

We recently got a Trader Joe's in the neighborhood and I've noticed a pretty broad selection of frozen fish there. Not fish sticks, but what is supposed to be high-quality fish. Most shrimp I've bought in my life have been frozen at some point. Most sushi served in the US has at some point been flash frozen. Who out there is cooking with frozen fish? Is the argument true that when you freeze it on the boat the quality is as high or higher as fresh that has been sitting during transit? What are the necessary techniques for working with frozen fish? Do any particular fish freeze better than others?

I rarely watch food programming on TV but this weekend I was at someone's home where the TV was on various channels with cooking shows for many hours. What surprised me was that the programming was so repetitive, especially in terms of what they were cooking. Did I have a bad sample, or have they just been cooking the same stuff over and over since the 1990s?

What are your opinions on nonstick spray? I have a few observations: First, the oil in those cans tends to be kind of crummy. Second, if you're spraying a pan, it seems that just putting in a little oil and spreading it with a paper towel works as well as spraying. Third, those Misto things don't work very well, or at least not for very long. Fourth, the high-temperature sprays are really hard to clean off your pans after cooking.

The knife slipping and attacking you is one type of accident, but most cuts I've experienced have other causes. Putting a part of my body in the path of the knife is the number one culprit around here.

Yesterday I was cutting a cucumber with one of the extremely dull knives in my mother's kitchen. I wasn't being careful or paying much attention at all, and the knife attacked my left index finger. The knife was so dull, however, that it didn't product any injury. Had that happened with a very sharp knife, I'd have severed a finger. The conventional wisdom among knife aficionados is that you're better off getting cut by a sharp knife because it "produces a cleaner wound" or whatever. I suppose that may be true in some cases, but overall I think the conventional wisdom is probably nonsense.

I'm really ambivalent about the practice of not writing the order down. But I have to confess, this morning at the diner a server totally blew me away. Party of five with an extremely idiosyncratic and difficult order. Not a single error. But I wonder, even if you have that kind of capacity, why not write it down anyway? I wonder if anyone has assembled data on whether the memorization trick improves gratuities.

This one is also kicking around the family.

Occasionally. All the recent maki photos have been of purchased sushi because we're between apartments and I don't even have a decent knife here. Far uptopic there are some photos that show maki rolled (badly) by me.

I think historically before tempering and conching and all that were figured out, hot cocoa/chocolate the beverage was the only way chocolate was consumed. So the "hot" wasn't necessary back in the day. But now it serves to clarify.

You put the bread in, squeeze it shut, then run a knife around the edge to trim corners. You just have to make sure any filling, like cheese, is only sitting on a circular area so it doesn't leak out the edges. I wanted to illustrate the process but my mother made the sandwiches for my son with no warning and I didn't walk in on them until he was up to dessert.

Is it possible we have gone nearly a decade without a celebration of the toast tight? My mother has an ancient device that creates a sealed hot-pocket type sandwich. It's great for grilled cheese or just about anything (pictured below, a dessert sandwich filled with apples). I've seen modern, electric versions of this but they're not nearly as cool. It seals the edges so it's not the same as a panini maker. Everything tastes better in the toast-tight device. Does anybody else know and love these things?

For me "hot chocolate" could describe something other than a drink, whereas "hot cocoa" is predictably a beverage. Although, they're probably functional synonyms.

Peter and Mitch: The layering is just the gift presentation. The recipient is supposed to mix the mix, either in a bowl or by shaking if there's jar space. Once it's all mixed together, you fill a mug about 1/3 full with the mix, top off with either hot water or hot milk, and stir.

I recently had a green bagel in honor of the Jets. No noticeable flavor difference. Just fun with food coloring.

This past weekend the family headed up to Wave Hill in the Bronx for the "Hibernator's Ball," which included a series of events targeted at kids and families. Much to my surprise, one of the stations at the event was occupied by a woman demonstrating how to make your own hot cocoa mix. I had never considered doing this -- never really even thought about the composition of a hot cocoa mix -- but the stuff she made was delicious (there were samples available for tasting; I had many) and would make for really cool gifts. Cell-phone photo: The basic idea is you mix sugar, cocoa powder and dry milk. If you want to layer it you can add some chocolate chips to make it look nicer as a gift. Corn starch makes it thicker. You can add cinnamon and chili powder to give it a Mexican twist. Etc. Mix with hot water or, for a richer product, with hot milk.

How many of the white-plate crowd serve actual plated dishes at home? I know in our house it's usually family-style service.