Fat Guy

I have recently become a smoothie addict. A smoothie has become my typical breakfast. I am, however, at an extremely rudimentary phase of smoothie making. I'm just putting fruit, water and ice in my not-great Waring blender. I'm looking to up my game and I know you all can help.

There has of late been a proliferation of "Green Carts" (sidewalk produce vendors) around NYC. What do we all think of them? Me, I find them an excellent resource for fruit purchases in between the big weekly grocery-store trip.

Popularity has increased over time, though I'm not aware of a particular spike in the past few months. Nor have I been there for dinner in the past few months. Probably 90% of my visits are for lunch, where it's a walk-in situation. The times I've been for dinner, I've been very glad to have a reservation. And I've seen people turned away at the door.

So, no great work of art or architecture, but I'm getting in the spirit:

There are quite a few mentions of Fette Sau around the forums, but perhaps no dedicated topic. I'm not of the opinion that it's a destination-worthy place. I visited almost exactly a year ago when I was doing the rounds for a barbecue story for Crain's, and I thought it was a good place to have in the neighborhood, if I lived in the neighborhood, which I don't. Sort of a light version of Hill Country.

At dinnertime, reservations are usually essential. And since it's possible to make dinner reservations, there's no reason not to. The full menu is available at lunchtime.

I'm blessed with a propensity for early rising, so my plan is to do most of this stuff in the morning prior to departure. That being said, I have two summer rolls from yesterday that I refrigerated overnight and they seem to be in pretty good shape at the moment. Today we did a trial run where I served PJ his lunch in the same containers he'll be taking to school. Pasta salad on one side, cheese and crackers on the other, fruit in a separate container. I took a photo but can't post it until later due to transient technical issues. He seemed to handle it well, even intuitively closing all the containers back up at the conclusion of the meal.

As a demonstration of how little I know about rice balls, I'll note that I assumed until now that they were always made out of sushi rice. Refrigeration also, needless to say, defeats thermal sets and such.

Armed with all these ideas, and having started recipe testing, I'm moving on to the construction phase. You can find the successor discussion, along with some photos of the conveyances I've acquired, over on the larger Bentos topic.

Quite a few pieces of my cookware are Calphalon nonstick that hasn't had a nonstick coating on it for something like ten years. Presumably, I ate all the nonstick coating. I'm hoping it's out of my body by now. As for the cookware, it works very well indeed as good-quality anodized aluminum. As Mr. Goldfarb noted, there may be services that will apply new nonstick coatings to pots and pans. It may be worth it for very nice cookware. Also, even though you bought it at TJ Maxx, you can always try to hit up Calphalon for a replacement. In theory these things are warrantied forever. Several of mine were replaced, some of them multiple times, before I decided just to run coating-free.

I don't know for sure what the other kids eat, because school doesn't start for a couple of weeks. But it does seem that, in general, tuna is a socially acceptable fish here. However, the aromas of lunch stay with the kids. I remember in my grade school there was a kid who ate a lot of egg salad, and he smelled like egg salad for the rest of the day after lunch. This made him an object of ridicule. There are about a million things I can pack for lunch. Once everything that needs to be ruled out gets ruled out, there are probably still a hundred thousand choices. So I'm not all that concerned about losing fish. These are some of the ideas I've accumulated for components of bento-type lunches, thanks to eG Forums topics and discussions with friends and family: Hard-cooked egg - as mentioned above, I've got some egg molds on order Yogurt - the selection of individual servings of yogurt at the average American supermarket is staggering Pasta salads - there are a lot of variants here; today I experimented with making pesto without pine nuts (I substituted toasted pumpkin seeds) and it was well received Hummus - this is an ingredient with a lot of potential uses, both as a sandwich filling and as a dip with chips or vegetables Little balls of mozzarella with cherry tomatoes Sandwiches - even without meat and fish, there are a lot of sandwich options; sunflower-seed butter is a good substitute for peanut butter, and there are a lot of sandwiches that can be built around cheese -- also as you can see from some posts on this topic, the art of cutting and decorating sandwiches is a whole area unto itself Rice - I'm going to have to learn to make rice balls and other sushi-like things; I'm looking forward to that Fritatta Omelet over rice Cold sesame noodles - working on a recipe with no peanuts Tofu - there is surely a lot of potential here Tortellini - this works well cold Vietnamese-style summer rolls - had these for dinner tonight and they got a good review; have to generate a peanut-free dipping sauce, though I'm sure that's just the beginning of a list. Of course that list doesn't include all the side stuff that can round out the meal: fruit, cheese and crackers, etc.

Fish is within guidelines, but bear in mind this is America. If a kid busts out something that smells fishy, it's not considered normal and the other kids give you grief. So I've pretty much ruled out most fish items at least at the beginning. Another thing that may differ from standard procedure in Asia is storage. At my son's school, and I'm led to believe this is not unusual here, the lunch bags are taken from the kids in the morning and put in a refrigerator, then brought out at lunchtime. So frozen items may not defrost as well as in an unrefrigerated situation. This may require some different calculations when it comes to using frozen items. It also means anything in the lunch has to be palatable at near-refrigerator temperature.

It occurs to me that while peanuts have been part of the Asian pantry for centuries, peanut butter was a late 19th Century American invention. I wonder when peanut butter made it to Asia. Although, even if it happened as late as World War II, half a century is plenty of time to establish an ingredient as "traditional" if it's widely used. Is it widely used over there? Someone from Asia please speak up.

Today I had an opportunity to administer a blind tasting, albeit on a very small scale. I was making pesto and had a clove of each garlic (the pre-peeled and whole, both from Christopher Ranch) on the cutting board, and I was shaving off paper-thin slivers with my knife and tasting back and forth, when my wife wandered through and asked what I was doing. I asked her if she'd mind tasting two samples of raw garlic and giving me her impressions. At first she thought they tasted the same, then she said she liked the pre-peeled better (not knowing that it was pre-peeled). I asked why, and she said it was less bitter. I asked which she thought was stronger and she said they were about the same in strength. At no time did I tell her what the comparison was about. I have no idea what this information is worth.

Are peanuts not a traditional Chinese ingredient? I thought peanut oil, crushed peanuts, et al., were common in various Asian cuisines. I think peanuts have been over there for hundreds of years -- probably for as long as hot peppers. I'm also wondering if the choice to use peanut butter over sesame is more about cost than availability. Presumably, peanut butter is cheaper than sesame paste. Or isn't it?

China is the world's largest peanut producer, for what it's worth. As I understand it, the difference between Middle Eastern-style and Asian-style sesame pastes is that the the Asian-style ones are made from unhulled seeds. Tahini, however, is not a monolithic product. I see it made from raw seeds and from roasted seeds, in a variety of darknesses and thicknesses. Package ingredient listings don't seem to specify hulled or unhulled, and I'm not sure what affect that has on flavor.

I rarely if ever allow multiple items to accumulate on the cutting board. I like to work with an empty board, no matter the board's size. For dishes where I know the routine, I often prep as I cook. This is a huge time-saver. But that doesn't count as board prep, as far as I'm concerned, at least not in the sense of keeping multiple items on the board. Where the timeline or organizational requirements rule out prep-as-you-cook logistics, I use bowls. I have a lot of small prep bowls in various sizes -- probably in the neighborhood of 30 -- as well as a couple of dozen regular bowls that can be conscripted when necessary. I will say, prepping as you cook always involves some risk. This is probably a worthy topic of its own, if we haven't already covered it. Were I cooking for a visiting chef-instructor, I would never, ever prep while cooking. The margin of error is just way narrower when you're prepping while stuff cooks. If I want something to be exactly right, with the minimum risk of mistakes, I see little choice but to do mise-en-place as at a restaurant: everything in advance that can be done in advance. Even for dishes I've cooked a million times. But if I'm cooking a quick everyday dinner for immediate family, sure, I'll prep as I go.

Except that peanut butter appears, from my examination of dozens of recipes, to be the standard ingredient. Tahini seems to be the adaptation. Which is odd because the dish is called "sesame noodles."

Interesting. Bittman seems to consider peanut butter and tahini interchangeable. I find the tastes of those two products to be quite different. I wonder if, as part of the sauce, they're more similar.

I was also thinking about sunflower butter.

In general, the recipes I've seen for cold noodles with sesame sauce are actually recipes for cold noodles with peanut-butter sauce flavored with a little sesame oil. This is also the case with all the examples I've been served in Chinese restaurants in the US. Is there such a thing as a recipe for sesame sauce that uses no peanuts? (This is an allergy-related request; not my allergy but I'm cooking to accommodate it.)

Long-time lurker, first-time poster . . . Our son just turned 4 and is about to start Pre-K here in New York City. He will be bringing lunch every day. We have some restrictions I haven't heard about on this topic, namely that the lunches need to be kosher-dairy, which in essence means no meat, shellfish or mollusks. Also there's a nut-free policy at the school. I'm feeling radically behind-the-curve on the art of packing kids' school lunches with style, but I'm determined to get caught up. To that end, today I dropped in at H-Mart in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to begin the process of acquiring equipment for packing lunches. Here's what I bought today (actually, the water bottle was an earlier purchase): I also have some egg molds (H-Mart didn't have any) and rice molds on order.

Classification-wise, under the kosher dietary laws, pigeon is just like chicken. So there's no theoretical reason why pigeon, and pigeon fat, wouldn't be kosher. However, a pigeon would have to be slaughtered and handled according to the prescribed rituals, so shooting a wild one with an air rifle would render it unkosher. Chances are, to produce kosher pigeon, one would need to raise them on farms and process them according to the kosher dietary laws.

To a lot of people, those are secrets. And in terms of the specifics of implementation, for some people it's intuitive whereas others can use some coaching. I hope I provided that for the 17 people who bought my book.

Kara Newman picked up on this subject and did a blog entry about how to become a regular at a bar: http://karanewman.wordpress.com/2009/08/27...come-a-regular/ Among other things: go early (or late), order a memorable drink . . .