Fat Guy

I never thought of that. I'll have to investigate the sushi-counter schedule.

I just tasted another and am now convinced that those who like these things must be reacting to the rather extreme push and pull of sugar and salt.

I know it's kind of an odd request, but I want to bring sushi as a show-and-tell/snack-type item for my son's kindergarten class. Ideally I'd like to get like 10 inside-out avocado rolls, since this will be ultra-beginner sushi. The thing is I'll need it in school at 8:25am for presentation around 9am so I'll need to be able to get it earlier than that. My backup plan is to go very late the night before to a Chinese restaurant that does sushi and refrigerate. But if there's anyplace open in the morning I'd rather have it made that morning. Quality does not have to be terribly high, but supermarket-type prepack sushi won't work because I need to be able to customize the order (e.g., no sesame seeds).

Okay I just extracted one from my son's Halloween candy haul in order to start thinking about replication. I think the two essential elements are a lot more sugar in the chocolate and more salt in the peanut butter than you'd ever put into an eaten-straight product. (P.S. I did not detect any arguable graham cracker crumbs in the filling.)

I just performed the following experiment in honor of the old Reese's commercial: I took a square of a Valrhona Jivara milk-chocolate bar -- perhaps not the absolute world's best chocolate but definitely top-echelon -- and I used it as a scoop in a jar of what I believe to be the best retail peanut butter out there: Trader Joe's Valencia Peanut Butter with Roasted Flaxseeds. Then I ate another, and another, and another. It was delicious. It didn't taste anything like a Reese's peanut butter cup, which to me is a good thing but to some might take it out of contention. I suppose one could melt and mold and properly fabricate a peanut butter cup from those ingredients, but that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Perhaps a mascarpone cheesecake type thing.

Beer yes, wine no. That's the rule for supermarkets in New York City. I believe the "rationale" is that beer is considered food and wine is considered liquor. Food and liquor cannot be sold in the same store. So you never see wine in a supermarket or food or beer at a liquor store in New York City. What-ever.

I grew up on the Upper West Side and am living there again now, and I have long believed that the close proximity of Fairway, Citarella and Zabar's makes the Upper West Side one of the great food shopping neighborhoods -- especially when you take value into account. Recently, Trader Joe's opened on Broadway between 71st and 72nd Street. It's a gutsy move to open a food store so close to the neighborhood powerhouses. But Trader Joe's stands up to the competition. It's not an entirely even match across all categories, but since it opened I've been in the store something like 20 times and, for the past few weeks, I've done the main weekly shop at Trader Joe's. It takes years for me to get to know a grocery store well, but some early impressions: Trader Joe's excels in the area of dry goods. Their snack foods, crisps, chips, cereals and such are amazing and blow everyone else away. The nuts I've tried have mostly been excellent, except the almonds which I think are mediocre. Grocery items like flour, sugar and such are good and very well priced. Also absolutely first rate: many frozen items, including both prepared items and raw ingredients like seafood. Produce is good not great. Dairy could use some work. The yogurt selection is poor and the cheese selection just okay. Meat is shrink-wrapped but of pretty good quality.

Yes, specifically you want Trader Joe's Valencia Peanut Butter With Roasted Flaxseeds and Callebaut Semisweet Chocolate Chips (though the TJ's house brand will do if you don't want to go to two stores).

I think Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are gross. And while in theory I like the combination of chocolate and peanut butter I've never had a commercial candy with that combination that I didn't think was terrible. I've had some petits fours at fancy restaurants where they did a good job with the combination, but I guess when you have to do something shelf stable you have to go way down in quality. If we can include a nomination for peanut (as opposed to peanut butter) and chocolate, then I definitely support Goldenberg's Peanut Chews.

Askinosie is the only white chocolate I think is competitive with El Rey, though I like El Rey better. I'm pretty sure they are the only two brands -- El Rey used to be the only one until recently -- that use non-deodorized cocoa butter in their white chocolate.

I grew up with Hershey's, like most Americans of my age, and didn't have good chocolate until I was an adult. However, the first pastry chef whose work I developed an appreciation for was a proponent of El Rey. (Chris Broberg.) He also used Valrhona and was one of the early adopters of Scharffenberger, so I got to try them all in various configurations at a time (mid 1990s) when few people were talking about chocolate in a serious way. El Rey is gritty, it's true, although two of the formulations (Mijao and Apamate) are substantially smoother than the other two (Bucare and Gran Saman) on account of increased cocoa butter. But I think the flavor of El Rey, despite its grittier-than-European texture (which I've come to like), is the most interesting. It tastes more like chocolate to me than the European chocolates with their fruity, wine-like flavors. It has a funky, earthy, woodsy component that nobody else seems to have. I also think, for those who like white chocolate, El Rey's is the best period. I've done two blind tastings of white chocolates and it wasn't even close.

I saw Pete Wells's story when it came out, and I have a pastry-chef friend who keeps giving me Amedei to try, so I feel totally ignorant when I taste it and think it's just okay. She, on the other hand, thinks I'm a barbarian for liking El Rey.

Especially if value is a consideration, for eating straight my pick is El Rey. It's not as smooth as the European chocolates, but it has character. And it's cheap -- an 80g bar at the store where I do a lot of my food shopping is $2.75, and if you buy in bulk I'm sure you can get it much cheaper. I like a strong chocolate taste so my favorite of the portfolio is Gran Saman at 70%.

Have you ever tried the Jean-Georges method: plating the fried rice and topping with a fried egg? (Garnished with crispy minced ginger and garlic.) I highly recommend it for "company" fried rice. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/dining/27mini.html?_r=1&ref=dining Short of that, the only system I've ever been able to make work well has been to cook the egg first, cut it up and add it back in at the end. I've seen a Chinese-restaurant chef do it mid-cook, but I think that approach must require a hotter wok than I can achieve at home.

Prawncrackers, with respect I must state objections to mixing the egg in with the rice before cooking fried rice. I prefer actual pieces of egg in the finished product. If you mix the egg in completely, either before or during cooking, you get a barely perceptible egg coating but no actual egg you can sink your teeth into.

Now that Ben Leventhal is doing NBC's Feast blog instead of Eater, I think Feast is probably on the short list: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/feast/

It has a huge following in the UK, among Anglophiles worldwide, and in various pockets elsewhere. There are fan sites and everything. I can't think of an equivalent US condiment. It's maybe a little like a less tomatoey A-1 with a much milder flavor with prominent dried-fruit notes.

Not comprehensive but Grub Street tried something along these lines a couple of years ago: http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2008/07/the_new_york_chef_tree.html Also, someone did a really nice on for Los Angeles chefs: http://discoverlosangeles.com/play/dining/familytree/

Would anybody care to put forward an example of what he or she thinks is a good restaurant website?

I agree. I think it's probably something else. Unless the point is that the magazine as an entity is the plagiarist. But that's not a conventional model. It's an odd species: a cut-and-paste magazine.

It may be plagiarism. It is probably not textbook. To summarize, the links you gave point to two things: a single recipe from the Food Network, and an article from that magazine that includes the same recipe (retitled). You're not going to find a lot of people out there to say that copying a simple recipe is plagiarism (or a copyright violation). I happen to think it is, and have been arguing that point for years, but even I have to admit that it's not the mainstream view. I think it's kind of ironic or at least amusing that so many bloggers are now in a high fury over issues of copyright and plagiarism. The best reason I can think of for this to be happening now, aside from herd mentality, is that here we have an example of print stealing from online and not vice-versa (which happens so much more often).

Correct. There's no error. It's also not plagiarism. Plagiarism involves representing someone else's work as your own. What these folks are accused of doing amounts to copyright infringement. They give attribution. They just don't seem to get permission.

The edrants.com piece is compelling.

I'll be happy to heap scorn upon the offenders, and unlike most of the hysterics out there we here on the eGullet Society team have a long track record of standing up for intellectual property, but so far we are dealing with unverified claims. It sounds like the worst is probably true, but it's still premature to get spun up about it.