Fat Guy

A mouse ate my bread! More later.

Commercial dry pasta -- the kind that's just flour and water -- is allowed. I've got spaghetti with olive oil and garlic on my list of potential dinners. This morning I've got a breakfast date with my rabbi, so I'm going to have to eat a meal in a restaurant. I took a look at the menu online and it looks like my only option on the entire menu is a fruit plate and black coffee.

I did not do well today. The thing about the low-iodine diet, as I have started to learn, is that it's very difficult to eat outside the home. If you're at home and you have a little sense, you can make it work just fine. But once you're out in the world there's precious little to eat. Everything seems to contain salt of unknown provenance, and everything that doesn't breaks some other rule. This morning I was up at the crack of dawn and had to rush out to take our son PJ to see a school he might go to. It's actually the school where I went. While the kids were in their play session, we had a tour and then we sat down around a table with the admissions director. On the table was a platter of muffins. I know from back in the day that the cafeteria at the school bakes good muffins. I started reaching for one and then caught myself: muffins break the rules in several ways (eggs, potentially iodized salt, etc.). I had no other serious opportunity to eat all day, so I muddled through with fruit, walnuts and a couple of unsalted rice cakes I found at my mother's apartment. Yum. By dinnertime I was so hungry I was ready to gnaw off my paw. Luckily there was a dinner plan in place: my mother and I had engineered some Swedish meatballs with egg-white binder that were quite edible. Had them over my house-blend red-and-brown rice. I was so delirious with hunger that I forgot to take a photo until I had eaten a bunch. I also made a couple of salads, but nobody had come up with the lemon-juice idea so I had my salad just with olive oil, salt and pepper. I'll use the lemon-juice trick tomorrow. PJ and I also baked our first loaf of bread. The dough had risen mightily overnight. We punched it down, let it rise another two hours, and baked in a Dutch oven. I'm resolved to plan better tomorrow.

I vastly prefer them skin-on, and fried potatoes benefit greatly from butter, but for a week I can adapt and use peeled with just olive oil. I was actually thinking home fries for tomorrow.

Why didn't I think of lemon?

Those are great suggestions (minus the canned stock -- no cans allowed). I think part of my problem is that I've been so focused on what I can't eat that I haven't given enough thought to what I can eat: meat and vegetables galore.

Trouble is, no potato skins allowed, and potatoes without skins are just weird unless they're french fries. Also, no vinegar except white vinegar. Makes salad dressings awkward.

We're done with acquisition and ordering, and the recipes are locked in. This is the shopping list. I can't believe how much is involved in making three cocktails and stocking a minor bar for 150 people. Here are the details for those who are into this sort of thing. K&D SHOPPING LIST For the white and red wines: WHITE: Herzog Wine Cellars Baron Herzog Chenin Blanc 2007 (SKU2567) $8.99/btl RED: Herzog Wine Cellars Baron Herzog Old Vine Zinfandel 2006 (SKU11061) $13.99/btl For the cocktails: CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL: Herzog Wine Cellars Baron Herzog Brut Champagne (SKU3992) $10.99/btl TEQUILA COCKTAIL: Juarez Silver Tequila (SKU23410) $13.59/liter SOUR COCKTAIL: Evan Williams Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (SKU2982) $15.29/liter For the Champagne cocktails, the pour is just under 5 ounces in my glasses. Assuming the rental glasses are similar in size that gives us 5 pours per bottle. That means 60 pours per case of Champagne. If we want to have the capacity to serve 150 Champagne cocktails and also pour straight Champagne if anybody asks, that means 3 cases of Champagne. For the Tequila cocktails, assuming we serve them straight up after shaking the mix in cocktail shakers, the ratio is 6 tequila:1 fresh lime:1 lime cordial:1 ginger syrup:10 pineapple juice. The pour size is about 6 ounces in either a rocks glass or a stemless martini glass, because once shaken with ice and garnished with pomegranate syrup the 6 ounces will nearly top off an 8-ounce glass. So for 150 cocktails that means we need 900 total ounces of base mixture. Backing out the 6:1:1:1:10 ratio, that means we need 300 ounces of tequila, or 9 liters. The bottle size is 1 liter so we need 9 bottles. For the sour cocktail, assuming a small rocks glass, the pour size is about 4 ounces because it's a rocks drink. 150 cocktails worth totals 600 ounces. In the 3:2:1 ratio that means 300 ounces of Bourbon. As above, that works out to 9 bottles. Vodka and Gin For vodka and gin at the bar: Vodka: Luksusowa Vodka (SKU1251) $17.99/liter Gin: Boodles Gin (SKU14835) $21.99/750ml FRESHDIRECT SHOPPING LIST Mixers for the vodka and gin Water (still and sparkling water) Soft drinks Pineapple juice. We will need 500 ounces of Dole pineapple juice. 500 ounces is about 4 gallons. The juice comes in half-gallon cartons (http://www.freshdirect.com/category.jsp?catId=dai_juice_pine&prodCatId=dai_juice_pine&productId=dai_dole_pineappl_01&rank=1&trk=srch&trkd=relv) so we need 8 half-gallon cartons. Gallon jugs of water. We're ordering a case of 6 x 1-gallon bottles of Poland Spring water. I will dump out the water at the school and use the gallon jugs to hold the cocktail mixtures, marking off the levels with magic marker. This is the easiest way to do it that I can think of. It's only $8.79 for the case and that's many times cheaper than buying any other containers I've seen. (http://www.freshdirect.com/category.jsp?catId=gro_bev_cs_wtr&prodCatId=gro_bev_cs_wtr&productId=gro_poland_galcase&rank=13&trk=srch&trkd=relv) FROM THE CATERER CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL: I've asked for orange twists but said lemon twists will do. Either way, I asked that they be long twists. (Last year the caterer provided tiny, skinny lemon twists that were about an inch long and were nearly invisible in the glass. We need something long and substantial enough to be visible.) TEQUILA COCKTAIL: We'll need 50 ounces of fresh lime juice. Call it 2 quarts. For the garnish, pineapple chunks. (They will be skewered onto the toothpick umbrellas.) SOUR COCKTAIL: We will need 200 ounces of fresh lemon juice. That's 6.25 quarts. That's a lot of lemon juice but we need it because we can't possibly squeeze that much ourselves by hand. Lemon wedges. I've asked for either half- or quarter-rounds of lemon slices for garnish. (The reason I was hoping for orange twists for the Champagne cocktails was to avoid redundancy here, but if we have two lemon garnishes it's not the end of the world.) The caterer will bring several cocktail shakers, so they can do the tequila cocktail. They can probably fit 3 or 4 pours in a shaker so it's not like it will have to be done 150 times. STUFF I ALREADY HAVE CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL: I have the sugar cubes, the components of the bitters (all kosher certified), and new squeeze bottles. I'll mix the bitters in the squeeze bottles at the school right before the event so as not to break kashruth. TEQUILA COCKTAIL: I have the lime cordial, squeeze bottles and umbrella toothpicks. Ginger syrup and pomegranate syrup are on order. SOUR COCKTAIL: I have the triple sec. OTHER A ton of ice.

Well, luckily there are some DELICIOUS sample menus provided that require only basic cooking. Although, some demands ("2 slices homemade white bread") seem a bit unrealistic for most people. Here's a day's helpful sample program: I think we can do a bit better.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go a week without eating any foods containing iodine? Me either, until recently. To make a long story short, I had thyroid surgery at the end of November. Next Wednesday, for follow-up, I need to take a dose of Iodine-131. In preparation for that I need to cut iodine out of my diet for a week -- the basic idea being that if I deprive my cells of iodine they will more readily suck up the I-131. That's all I'll say about the medical aspects of this, however from a culinary standpoint there is much to discuss. When I was thinking in the abstract about a diet without iodine, I figured how hard could it be? I mean, it's not like I crave iodine, sprinkle it on my food or even have any around. But then I started reading the booklet my endocrinologist gave me. The first thing you have to avoid is iodized salt. This sounds simple, and when it comes to home cooking it is: you can just use non-iodized salt. But everything prepared in a restaurant, commercially, or in anybody else's home is suspect. Basically, for the week I can't eat any restaurant food, any packaged food, or any food anybody else cooks unless it is supervised by me with great rigor. The salt issue is compounded by a ban on sea salt -- anything from the sea is banned. That does still leave non-iodized kosher salt, though. I guess all salt, even rock salt in mines, ultimately traces back to the sea, but after checking with multiple authorities I learned that my bottle of David's kosher salt is okay for the diet. The salt restriction also applies to salt variants like garlic salt and onion salt -- not that I care. Then you're not allowed to eat any milk products. I don't know why this is exactly, and some sources have led me to question the restriction, but I'm not going to start being a difficult patient about it when it's just for a week. And no fish, at least not fish (or seafood) from the sea. Freshwater fish are theoretically allowed but it's not like I'm going to seek out any fish. The ingredients iodates, iodides, algin, alginates, carrageen, agar, and kelp are forbidden. The iodate restriction rules out all commercial bread products. It may be that some are made without iodate but it's a blanket restriction because there's no way to know. No eggs. No vitamin or dietary supplements. Nothing with red, orange or brown dye. No iodine on cuts. No soy products. No canned foods. That's the short version of the list. If you unpack each item you get much more detail. So for example the brochure I have elaborates on the commercial-bread restriction thus: "Avoid: All commercial breads and rolls, processed boxed cereals, salted crackers, potato chips, pretzels, bagels, bialys, Melba toast, all other crackers, egg noodles, packaged rice and pasta mixes." It goes on like this about everything. Now, a sane person would probably just avoid bread for the week. But I decided to bake. Heckers says there's no iodate in their flour, David's says the kosher salt is neither from the sea nor iodized, Red Star yeast is approved, as is tap water. I decided to give the Jim Lahey/Mark Bittman no-knead recipe a try. My son and I made the dough last night and will bake this afternoon after school. Last night we had a farewell-to-iodine supper at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem. I made the joke, "This iodine is so great!" a few times too many. The group ordered me to stop. I even tried a little salmon, because I could. So, join me this week for a chronicle of the low-iodine diet. If you happen to be on a low-iodine diet, or have expertise in this area, or even if you don't, I'd love to hear your ideas.

Excellent idea. So you're talking about this product, right: http://www.moninstore.com/prod_Detail.html?prodID=43&flavor=Pomegranate And I just fill a squeeze bottle with it and squeeze maybe 1/4 ounce on top of the cocktail as a garnish? I got hold of the Monin distributor in New Jersey who handles restaurants and bars in the city. He's delivering to a restaurant a few blocks from my house early Wednesday morning so he's going to bring me half a case of ginger syrup, and I can just as easily get a few bottles of pomegranate added to the order.

I guess I need a fresh pineapple cube to weigh down the cocktail umbrella.

Tonight I had some friends over and ran through the three cocktails. They were well received, but there's still some work to do. The Champagne cocktail came out very well, I thought. I made a mixture of Angostura bitters (I still need to get more of these -- I was working from my home supply which is down to an ounce or so) and orange oil, then soaked sugar cubes: Then topped off with Champagne and a lemon twist: I wasn't happy with my lemon twists, and worse the caterer will be providing the twists so I'll have no control over them. Still, I thought that flavor-wise this was a good cocktail. Next, the tequila/pineapple/lime/ginger cocktail. Monin ginger syrup is a good product -- it elevated this cocktail above the mundane sweet-punch-like cocktail norm. I made a pomegranate syrup from Pom and sugar and topped the drink with some of it out of the squeeze bottle. But it didn't give a particularly nice effect. It just made the cocktail a reddish-brown color. I made a batch in a Mason jar and used a cocktail shaker to do this as an up drink. I wonder if it will be possible to pull that off at the event. I suppose it will be fine on the rocks if necessary. The 3:2:1 Bourbon:triple sec:lemon cocktail was, in my opinion, excellent. But I need a better garnish. The lemon is redundant with the lemon twist from the Champagne cocktail and I did a lame placement. I also felt there wasn't enough diversity in the colors of the cocktails.

I just got my invitation for this year's Beefsteak and am so there. February 16. An email I got says "600 pounds of Certified Black Angus Strip Loins dry aged to perfection by DeBragga and Spitler ... 1,000 certified black angus Mini Burgers, 35 pounds of Crab Meat, 75 pounds of Shrimp, 600 Lamb Chops, 40 pounds of Bacon Wrapped Kidneys, and 50 pounds of Aged Cheddar, all washed down with 900 pints of Brooklyn Brewery’s Specially Brewed Pilsner and 36 liters of Maker’s Mark Bourbon."

I was in Zabar's this morning. I went in to look for bitters. I must have been staring at the Monin rack for 2 or 3 minutes before I realized it was a Monin rack. I picked up a bottle of the ginger syrup for R&D. However, I also got in touch with the NJ distributor and I think I can get a better price from him. In any event, we'll have Monin ginger syrup. No bitters yet, though. I still have to try the Dean & DeLuca branch near my house, and if that doesn't work I guess I'll have to schlep to Kalustyan's. The triple sec solution is going to be DeKuyper. It's probably not as gross as LLords, though probably not great either. But it has kosher certification and I'm hoping it's going to be decent in a mixed drink. The Bourbon is going to be Evan Williams. So that 3:2:1 cocktail will be Evan Williams bourbon : DeKuyper triple sec : fresh lemon juice. I'll make one tonight to see if it needs any simple syrup. I guess garnished with a lemon half-round? I don't know. The tequila will be Juarez silver. That tequila cocktail will be some mixture of Juarez silver tequila, Dole pineapple juice, Rose's lime, fresh lime and ginger syrup, garnished with pomegranate syrup for sort of a tequila sunrise-type effect. Anybody with thoughts on ratios please let me know. Otherwise I'm just going to do it by trial and error tonight. I got those little paper umbrellas for the tequila cocktail. I still need bitters for the Champagne cocktail, but when I get them I'm thinking to do a sugar cube with a few drops of bitters (or maybe I'll mix bitters and that orange oil I found), topped off with Herzog sparkling. Garnished with a lemon twist, I guess? For batching, I have four brand-new/never-defiled medium squeeze bottles for the pomegranate syrup and a couple of tiny ones for the bitters or bitters mixture. The Champagne cocktail doesn't need big batch containers because the volume of liquid comes out of Champagne bottles. For the other two, I was thinking of getting a case of Poland Spring gallon plastic jugs of water, dumping the water, and drawing lines on the sides in magic marker for the different measures. I'm sure I can engineer that. I assume for just a few hours the plastic won't be particularly reactive with the mixes? All wisdom welcome. I absolutely do not know what I'm doing and will need to make a mighty effort to fake it on Saturday night.

When I look over the photographic record, I'm amazed at how few days of school there have been this year. I've photographed every lunch I've made -- with an exception I'll explain below. And I've made lunch every schoolday except for during a two-week period when I was laid up. But even in a full week there are only four lunches (no lunch on Friday on account of early dismissal) and there are so many Jewish holidays, American holidays, days when we missed school to visit other schools... Anyway, getting caught up here: Now this next one was a comedy of errors. The night before, I thought I pushed start on the dishwasher. But in the morning when I went to get his lunch containers out of the dishwasher I learned that I hadn't started it. It was full of dirty dishes and detergent. So I had to fall back on the lunch containers that he hasn't been using because his little fingers aren't strong enough to get them open. Plus one container he could open. Then, on the walk to school, PJ asked me what I had packed him for lunch. I told him all about it and, as I was narrating the lunch, I noticed a nagging lightness on my person: I had left my bag, and therefore his lunch, at home. We negotiated, and we agreed that after dropoff I'd go over to my mother's apartment and make him something then bring it by school before lunchtime. My mother doesn't have very good packaging so we basically made him a buttered roll, chips and assorted fruits, all in their own small zipper bags. I called home and asked Ellen to refrigerate the lunch, except for the potato chips, so I could send it with him the next day. At least that part of it went smoothly. On to two days later... That brings us up the present.

No cocktailian am I, but recently I was drafted to work on a cocktail project because compared to the average person I know something. I always sort of knew that it was hard to get good cocktail stuff in New York City, but now after spending the weekend in search of ingredients I'm simply appalled at the state of affairs. General liquor isn't much of a problem. The good liquor stores seem to have decent selections of gin, Bourbon, whatever. As long as you're not totally wedded to a particular brand, you can get something good in most any price range. Specialty liquors are a little more difficult to find. Liqueurs, forget about it. I haven't been to a single store that has what seems like a great selection. Even Astor, which has the largest selection I saw, doesn't seem to have enough stuff to stock a good bar. Where do places like Pegu get all their ingredients? FedEx? (In my search, I've had the additional restriction of needing to use ingredients that are certified kosher, but even absent that restriction the situation doesn't seem great.) And then, when it comes to things like bitters, the situation is alarming. Apparently you can't buy these things at liquor stores because they're considered food? That's what one clerk told me at least. Not only is that completely stupid, but also it's not like you can walk into Gourmet Garage and find six choices of bitters. You actually can't find any bitters or even a clerk who knows what bitters are. Am I completely crazy or is it just a disaster out there?

The restaurant-supply stores around here seem only to sell equipment. I called a couple of the places I normally use for pots and pans and such, and they were like "Huh?" I've also emailed the sales rep listed for the NY area to see if he has ideas on retailers.

I just haven't seen the Monin syrups. The closest I came was a false alarm at Food Emporium, where they stock Monini olive oil.

I haven't yet been to Kalustyan's, but so far I haven't found a bottle of Angostura bitters anywhere. I've surely been to 10 stores now. It's amusing to observe the reactions when you ask supermarket clerks "Do you have bitters?" Mostly they're like "What's that?" Eventually you get steered to wherever the Rose's lime is. But at this juncture in history there doesn't appear to be any Angostura on the shelves.

With Angostura bitters, what's the quantity of product needed for a traditional Champagne cocktail? It's just a few drops but how is that measured as a portion of a 10-ounce bottle? How many bottles would it take to make like 150 Champagne cocktails? And where do I get Angostura bitters these days? I thought they were a straightforward supermarket item but I checked two supermarkets and Fairway and nobody had them -- they just had stuff like Mrs. T's bloody Mary mix, and Grenadine.

The good Dole pineapple juice that comes in half gallons in the refrigerator section has kosher certification. I think that may make for a passable cocktail with cheap tequila and Rose's lime, plus whatever else needs to go in to balance it -- maybe some fresh lime, some bitters, ginger syrup if it can be done... Also this one demands to be decorated with paper umbrella toothpicks.

Pom does have certification, albeit well-hidden on the packaging.

Rose's lime does have certification so I bought a few bottles this morning and will work it in to that tequila/pineapple drink. I found some kosher orange oil, highly concentrated. I acquired a tiny bottle so maybe I'll work that in somewhere. No kosher ginger syrup out there that I could find. The only solution I can think of there is to cook up a batch at the rabbi's apartment some time this week. I'm not sure the effort is justified, though he is excellent company and would probably indulge me. Llords triple sec seems to be the kosher option that's not crazy expensive. Indeed, it's 5 bucks a liter. I'm sure it's junk but maybe it won't show much in a mixed drink.

I examined Aperol bottles at K&D and also found no certification. Apparently Angostura now has (as Chris Amirault noted) certification. My older bottle doesn't, so I have to find some.