Fat Guy

In the past few years, Greek (or, more specifically, Greek-style) yogurt has become more available and popular in the US. (I don't know about other countries.) In my opinion, Greek-style yogurt is far superior to any other style of yogurt I've ever tried. It's thick, creamy and tangy -- much more so than other yogurts. And I'm wondering why. My first theory was that maybe Greek-style yogurt just has more fat. But the existence of nonfat, 1% and other low-fat-percentage Greek-style yogurt products would seem to disprove that theory -- those products are thick and creamy too, and they don't appear to contain food-science thickeners like gums. So what's the deal with Greek-style yogurt? How do they get it that way? And do you love it too?

We haven't really followed up on the 2007-08 five-for-a-dollar dumpling topic. A couple of things I've seen that are worth noting: 1 - Fried Dumpling on Allen Street got evicted. (The Mosco Street branch, which in my experience was never as good, is still in operation.) 2 - Dumpling House on Eldridge has fully transitioned to being Vanessa's Dumpling House and has jumped the shark. At busy times it now takes half an hour to get food, thanks to a two-stage order/pickup process, large crowds and a menu too big for the kitchen to handle. Thanks to all that, an order that includes multiple items will usually contain a couple of cold ones. I wish them success but I'm done with this place. In light of all that, I'm beginning the search for a new favorite cheap-dumpling place in Manhattan's Chinatown and would appreciate suggestions. Anyone have other five-for-a-dollar (or, in the case of Vanessa's, four-for-a-dollar) dumpling news, information, opinions, wit, wisdom?

I'm surprised at how many people follow so many recipes. I'm wondering, in the cases of those who use lots of recipes from lots of books: Do you follow the recipes exactly, with no substitutions or changes of your own, or do you follow adaptations of the recipes? If you follow the recipes exactly, how do you manage in terms of stocking ingredients? I find that, for me, preparing a recipe with a long ingredients list is very difficult unless I do inefficient shopping (buying a whole container of something to use a teaspoon) or adapt the recipe.

Chicken under a brick, grilled-cheese sandwiches and various other foods seem to be enhanced tremendously by being cooked under weight. But why? What is it about the compression that improves food? And how can we exploit that phenomenon beyond the normal applications?

I don't really do much. I've found that if you put the apple slices in a small, airtight container and keep it under refrigeration there isn't much browning. Using some kind of acid is more effective but I don't bother. Some types of apples seem to brown more than others but I haven't made a careful study of it.

The New York Times has a dining-section feature today about restaurant matchbooks. The hook is that, while restaurants now pretty much universally ban smoking, matchbooks are still popular.

I'm not concerned about uniformity in the culinary-school/chef-instructor sense, however I am trying to achieve a small dice where there are no wildly outsize chunks. So the pieces can have an irregular shape no problem, but they all have to be small.

I'm trying to produce a quantity of diced celery primarily for mixing in salads (tuna salad, pasta salad, chicken salad, etc.) for crunch. I'm finding that, lately, I'm making a lot more of these dishes. So far, the advice to subdivide the stalks into shorter lengths seems like the best contribution to improved technique. Right now my procedure is to try to split the whole long stalk several times lengthwise, which is an inconsistent process. I think of subdividing as making more work but it probably makes less and improves results. I'll give it a whirl.

Tomorrow PJ has a visit to a prospective ongoing school for next year, so he'll be missing school in the morning. It's not clear when that session will end. Chances are he won't be going to school tomorrow. If he does, he probably won't get there by lunchtime. But if for some reason he gets to school in time for lunch I need to have something ready. Taking nakji's suggestion I added a couple of pieces of inarizushi to the traditional Wednesday avocado maki. I'll bring that along and maybe a couple of other things so there's a light lunch available in a pinch.

In the past couple of years, something called "white tuna" has started appearing at sushi bars all over New York City (and presumably elsewhere in the English-speaking world). What is it? I assume it's not tuna.

I've been dicing celery more often lately than in the past, and I'm realizing that it's a time-consuming and tedious process. Anybody have any technique/efficiency pointers? I'm trying to achieve a small dice.

Today I realized my earlier aspiration to make a tomato-and-mozzarella salad with mozzarella balls and cherry tomatoes. I also had an avocado in the refrigerator that was nearing its useful life, so I spontaneously made mini hummus-and-avocado sandwiches. A little cantaloupe and two kinds of rice crackers and we were all set.

On Sunday I was at the supermarket where I do the big weekly shopping (Fairway, in New York City) and I saw a couple of things I figured I'd try out for school lunches. First, they had some surprisingly appetizing sushi made with brown rice. As I've found that brown rice, in other contexts, holds up under refrigeration better than white, I thought maybe this property would extend to maki. I bought a roll for PJ and a roll for me. When I tried my roll after a night in the fridge, I thought it was pretty good. Also, because of the size of the roll and the thinness of the cut, the rubberiness of the nori was less of an issue than with normally proportioned maki. I also saw some nice little mozzarella balls that I thought would be great with cherry tomatoes on account of their near-identical size. So I got a small container of mozzarella balls, only to get home to find that Ellen and PJ had just eaten all the cherry tomatoes as a snack. So I just packed the mozzarella balls without tomatoes this time around. Our friend Shaun, who's an amazing baker, made us an apple crisp the other day. I've been snacking on it direct from the refrigerator, so it occurred to me that I could pack a little bit for PJ in his lunch. Also some grapes and some rice crackers. In the post-lunch inspection, only a few grapes and a couple of mozzarella balls were left over. I ate them in Central Park on our walk home. This week there may only be two lunch opportunities, because we have admissions stuff (for the schools we're looking at for kindergarten next year) on Wednesday and Thursday that will likely require missing lunch, and there's no lunch at school on Fridays on account of the early dismissal. So I just have to make today's lunch, which will be a light one because this is the day he goes to grandma's house after school and he's typically well-fed there. The light week in terms of preparation duties will give me time to consider a new issue: I think I may have successfully negotiated a way around the refrigeration policy. In a conversation with PJ's teacher, I learned that we might be able to get away with not submitting the entire lunch for refrigeration, and instead storing some components of the lunch (like an insulated container for a warm item) in the bottom of PJ's classroom locker. If this plan works and doesn't bring down the wrath of the authorities, it will require that I rethink the whole lunch strategy for the year. To answer a few queries from above: At the moment, what you see in today's photo represents the universe of lunch containers in our possession. They're all from H-Mart, a Korean supermarket/superstore, in New Jersey. I've been meaning for weeks to make a run to Mitsuwa, the Japanese equivalent of H-Mart, also in New Jersey, but the opportunity has not arisen. Mitsuwa, as I understand it, has a broad selection of Bento-type stuff. With respect to the various methods of preserving the nori in a non-rubbery state, I'm thinking about options. The most commonly utilized option, at least here in the USA, by the way, is to make the maki inside-out (uramaki). This makes the texture of the nori a lot less relevant. In terms of the inarizushi question/suggestion, that sounds like a great idea and I need to look into it. By the way what is the actual definition of "bento"?

I imagine that was the reaction of most Times readers: didn't get the reference, didn't care. But care or not, it adds up to bad writing. Here's what I knew. I knew those were lyrics from a Ramone's song. I knew it had become very popular at sporting events, along with "We Are The Champions" and a few other mainstays. And I knew that the Ramones were a big act at CBGB back in the day. When I Googled it, I realized that in the recesses of my mind I knew the song was called "Blitzkrieg Bop." All that knowledge doesn't add up to me comprehending the reference. Maybe someone with deeper knowledge of the whole scene can explain it better. I'm even more ignorant with respect to the next song reference: "We ain't got time for that now." Fleetwood Mac, right? Did they ever even play CBGB? My CBGB cred is minimal, but at least I was there, so if I'm too dumb to get this reference then what significant percentage of Times readers will?

I don't think I've ever accomplished more than about a 25% yield by weight from a lobster. I use 10% as my rule of thumb for crab. Not that I cook it often enough to have a rule of thumb. But once in a blue moon when I buy and prepare crab I assume 10% of the weight will be the servable meat portion. People who are really experienced with crabs will get more. Dungeness will yield a lot higher than the crabs we see in the East -- that's part of what makes them desirable. Which is to say the 25% number sounds credible for an experienced cook, but if I did it I'd probably get 20%.

I'm not sure whether, emotionally, I can survive confronting this issue. I'll attempt to do so, eventually. If I may introduce a corresponding phenomenon, though, by way of compensation, I'll note that sometimes I use a kitchen tool that has been dormant for years. The fact that this ever happens, no matter how rarely, consistently deters me from getting rid of stuff. I say, "Well, I pulled out the spice grinder after all these years, how do I really know I won't ever use the strawberry huller?"

When a writer is making a literary (or musical or other) reference that is not likely to be understood by most readers, and he or she doesn't plan to explain the reference (which, indeed, can be clumsy to do), then the test is whether the reference if not understood will still read like good writing. In the case of "HEY, ho, let’s go!" it seems like incredibly bad writing unless you get the reference, and even if you do get the reference it may seem like bad writing. It does to me. More importantly, I'm wondering what is meant by the reference. Is it a self-important "HEY, ho, let’s go!" -- I'm writing my first review here, it's the dawn of an era, let's go? Is it "HEY, ho, let’s go!" we're going to have a restaurant review here? Is it "HEY, ho, let’s go!" Daniel Boulud has done it again? Am I the only person who thought this was a poorly written review?

The nori seems to get rubbery within a few minutes of making maki. It doesn't seem to get a whole lot worse overnight -- no worse than the nori on sushi sold out of refrigerator cases even, I am told, in Japan. It's not my preference but it's probably better than nothing.

In the Jewish mourning tradition, after the funeral the family of the deceased "sits shiva." This is a process where a lot of meaningful reflection occurs, people visit the home of the deceased's family and an incredible quantity of food is consumed. Our friend recently lost her mother. Yesterday, we paid a shiva call to her home in New Jersey and the spread of food was extreme even by Jewish-American shiva standards. It was as though a delicatessen had staged a grand opening in their home. As we are inner-circle friends, we stayed until almost everyone else was gone. At that point we were implored to take food home. Had we taken enough food home to feed 25 people, we wouldn't have made a dent. I immediately thought about school-lunch opportunities for PJ. Unfortunately, because of the no-meat rule, deli food is not the best marriage for PJ's school. There were also some nut issues and other concerns. However, I did manage to pull together a lunch. And, because we had proceeded directly from school to the shiva call, I had all of PJ's lunch containers in tow. It was possible to clean them out and pack the next day's lunch in one seamless process. (We also took home a ton of deli meat in zipper bags.) Here are the non-meat items I was able to pull together for today's lunch: That's a crustless double-decker egg-salad sandwich; a tray containing pickles (pickled cucumbers), olives and tomatoes; pasta salad with peas; and dessert of honeydew melon, pineapple and rugelach (a cookie-like pastry that I hope doesn't contain any nuts -- I ate about ten of them to make sure and I think these ones are nut-free).

Yesterday's lunch included avocado maki, pasta with pesto, and fruit. It seems that Wednesday is becoming sushi day. Because PJ spends Tuesday afternoons at my mother's apartment, and because there's a pretty-good cheap-sushi place across from my mother's apartment, and because it's hard to prepare dinner on days when he has to be picked up across town just before dinnertime, I'm getting into the habit of picking up takeout food for Tuesday dinner and getting an extra roll for Wednesday's lunch. If this pattern holds, Wednesday will be sushi day. The restaurant is a Chinese restaurant which, as is common these days in the US, has a sushi bar and offers a lot of non-Chinese Asian hot menu items (Japanese, Thai, etc.). The restaurant's name, which has evolved over the past couple of decades, is currently Empire Szechuan Kyoto Sushi. Not the world's best sushi, but entirely adequate. With an order over US$10 or $20 (I can't remember which) at Empire you get one extra item included at no additional charge. I usually get the cold sesame noodles and ask to have them packed with the sauce on the side. Yesterday morning I briefly considered saucing and including some leftover cold sesame noodles with PJ's lunch, but then I remembered the nut-free policy and, because the sesame sauce probably includes peanuts, quickly ruled that out. But I still had some of my nut-free (made with toasted pumpkin seeds) pesto left, so I mixed leftover undressed cold noodles with the pumpkin-seed pesto, then cut up the noodles for easier eating.

I'm not 100% clear on the definition of bento box. I may have none. What I do have are about a half dozen small containers, a couple of which have dividers. I don't have any multi-compartment bento boxes like I've seen at Japanese stores (everything I have so far is from H-Mart, a Korean chain). Yes but I usually don't. The timing is such that if I want to have the containers available early every morning I'm better off hand washing during the week. Also I'm led to believe the containers, especially the gaskets, last longer if you hand wash. Not that I care -- I doubt these things will stay in use long enough to wear out. Yes. The school's practice is pack-it-in/pack-it-out. The lunch bag and all its contents come home just as they went in. I prefer to prep the morning of. I generally wake up before he does, in which case I can pack the lunch then -- it's really only a <10-minute process if you have all your ducks in a row. We also allow plenty of time in the morning for him to sit and have breakfast, and if I don't wake up early enough to pack his lunch before he wakes up I can pack it while he's eating breakfast. Having only one child is also helpful in this regard -- having three would surely affect all these logistics. One morning -- this morning -- I packed lunch the night before on account of unique circumstances. But I think the food is more appetizing when packed the morning of, so I prefer to do it in the morning.

I thought it was more along the lines of "trying too hard" than "finding his voice." In any event, I emphatically do not agree with those who've said it was a well-written review. I found it to be the worst piece of writing I've ever seen from Sifton. Not that I've read everything he's ever written. No matter whether you're writing about CBGBs, "HEY, ho, let’s go!" is a poor opening gambit. Not to mention, what percentage of Times readers will even get that reference? Sifton is a terrific writer and may very well shape up to be a great critic -- he's the best shot the Times has had since Ruth Reichl for a critic who may be able to satisfy both serious food people and those who only read the reviews for entertainment. But this review is a bad start.

Just based on a quick perusal my use percentage is a bit less than 1%. My excuses: "I read cookbooks mostly for ideas and inspiration." "I get lots of review copies and am too much of a packrat to get rid of them as quickly as they come in." "I only really use recipes when I bake."

I hallucinated that you said it was from W-S. They never seem to care about receipts, though.

I think when you're talking about food at the gastronomy/art level, quantity isn't terribly relevant to the question of value. I'm sure a meal at Momofuku Ko is about a million calories anyway, but especially without a bread service it's not going to be as filling as a meal at a restaurant where you can have multiple pieces of bread throughout the meal. I actually like the fact that I can leave Ko without feeling stuffed. Allows for a slice at Artichoke after.