Callipygos

I believe Ottomanelli carries frozen game year round. I don't know what might be in stock at any given time, but venison shouldn't be impossible to find in NY if you're willing to buy farm raised venison and particularly if you're willing to buy it frozen. I have had absolutely no experience with venison before this, so buying farm raised wouldn't be something I'd turn my nose up at. I made it his problem -- I asked him where I'd obtain it. He also suggested Citarella, but I'll check at Otamanelli. He also said Balducci's, but they've closed, yes? (I'm much more used to Key Food...) I'll try Otamanelli tomorrow (it's closest to where I live). Now I just have to find a way to prepare it....

Is this the kind of thing where I can obtain just small steaks or chops or something, or am I going to have to roast an entire leg? And, barring my not being able to find it, what would be a close enough approximation? I found a recipe for veal shoulder braised in the style of venison, but that's still "serves 8." I'm looking more for "serves 2." Plus it also called for juniper berries, and that gives me a new problem.

It was suggested to me that I post this portion of my emergency here. My beloved's birthday is in two days, and I grandly announced that as a birthday treat, I would make him a dinner -- "you name it, I'll cook it." Little did I know he would say "venison." It is now Sunday morning. Dinner is scheduled for Tuesday night. Does anyone know where I can find a modestly-sized portion of venison in Manhattan, within the next 36 hours? I don't want an entire leg for an intimate dinner for two...

Okay. My beloved's birthday is in two days. I decided to make him dinner, and grandly said, "you name it, I'll cook it. Anything you want." Little did I know he was going to request: Venison. Artichokes. Hearts of Palm. ....Oh my. The artichokes and hearts of palm I can cheat, I think, and just make a salad with the hearts of palm and have steamed artichokes. (I've never made them, but at least I can grasp the concept, and I have recipes. and I know where to find them.) As for the venison -- I live in New York City. It is Sunday morning. I have 48 hours to obtain and learn how to prepare a modest sized portion of venison -- I have no idea where to BUY this, for starters. And I don't want to serve a whole leg for an intimate dinner for two. Searching online yielded recipes that involved lots of smothering it with mushroom soup and such, and I don't think that's what the gent is looking for. So. 1. Anyone in the New York City area know where I can FIND smaller cuts of venison? A steak, perhaps? 2. Anyone have a recipe that's novice-friendly? Just to make everything more fun, this is the only full day I have to shop for food. Tomorrow and Tuesday (B-day), I work from 9-6 and can't run around tracking down rare ingredients, and will need advance notice for recipes involving marinating and such. HELP.

I don't think Tommy is defending Rocco so much as he's trying to put some perspective on the restaurant industry as a whole. Rocco's an asshat, yes, but the effect of Rocco being an asshat is not going to bring about the entire decline of Western Civilization. That's all.

Desperately trying to remember -- there is a recipe in the Moosewood "Low-Fat" cookbook for an angelfood cake with a coffee glaze. I remember dogearing the corner one year when a friend was considering holding a seder, because "Hey, this would be kosher and I could bring it and wow that would be fun." I am desperately right now trying to rememeber whether dairy was involved; I remember thinking of it as kosher because of the lack of leavening agents. FYI, my knowledge of whether this would work or not is limited because I'm a shiksa.

Went to my local coffeeshop once, and ordered a cup of peppermint tea. They screwed up somewhat, and rather than fetching a peppermint tea bag and pouring hot water into the cup with it, they poured COFFEE into the cup with it. I didn't notice anything was amiss until I tried it. So, while I didn't actually order coffee as such, I'd say that counts as the worst I tasted....

Hell, if it's powdered coffee-mate, no shame -- I've used that to make my own versions of those instant "international coffees". (Whip that through a food processor with some instant coffee, cocoa, and a candy cane, and you have mocha mint coffee mix. Et Cetera.) I'm not embarassed about anything in my kitchen -- if I can do something with it, then good. And, sometimes you just NEED fake cheese and things in "spice packets".

Since someone has introduced politics into this topic -- has anyone heard of this: Star Spangled Ice Cream This was a company started by a group that was so incensed that a lot of Ben & Jerry's profits goes towards charitable contributions to liberal causes, that they started their own company expressly to donate the proceeds to CONSERVATIVE causes. Not sure how their flavors are, but something about the whole enterprise strikes me as, "well, you're letting something REALLY minor bother you more than necessary."

Because Confession is good for the soul... My SO and I were at dinner late last night at a little place on the Lower East Side that just opened a couple weeks ago. Now -- he tuned into THE RESTAURANT out of curiousity because he works in the business, and I tuned in out of curiousity because he works in the business (and because I'm a geek). Anyway -- it's about 12:30 or 1 a.m., and we're sitting and enjoying our meals and the general ambiance of the place. We're talking, and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I see someone enter the place that looks familiar. I turn to get a better look -- and then grab my guy's arm and point. Because it is LAURENT that has just walked in. What I wish to confess is that, as soon as we realized who it was, we both turned into giggling, geeked-out dorky fans and had to restrain ourselves from jumping up and getting his autograph. Oh dear.

Okay, I blame you all for this... I'm trying to make ice cream today. About ten years ago, when I was still in college, Ben and Jerry's had a contest/sweepstakes tied in to their "Vermonster" sundae in the scoop shops. The premise was, if you went into a scoop shop, and either by yourself or with others, managed to polish off an entire Vermonster sundae, your name was entered into a drawing for the grand prize -- a tour of the plant in Vermont. Now. The Vermonster, for those of you unaware, is enormous. They START with 20 scoops of ice cream, and then they start piling on the add-ons (I think it's something like four sliced bananas, a cup of hot fudge sauce, a cup of butterscotch sauce, two bags of M&M's, four crumbled-up brownies, etc.). They bring it to you in a bucket. Some friends and I all ventured down to the scoop shop near our dorm to compete. We figured with six of us it would be no problem, and we were even talking about going out for tacos after or something. It took us 2 hours to get through the thing; two people dropped out and had eaten their fill after about ten minutes, a third person dropped out after 45 minutes. The three of us left over finally polished it off though -- even though at the end we were reduced to trying to make it melt and adding water to thin it out so we could drink it with straws. But we finished it, added our names to the drawing, and then -- tacos be damned -- we waddled back to the dorm, retired to someone's room, and sat around staring at the wall for about an hour. One of us kept the bucket -- she uses it for storage (she buys the ten-pound bags of rice and stores it in that). None of us got the grand prize. But - what we DIDN'T know is, each individual scoop shop was holding their own drawing for their own winner, and THOSE were the names sent in for the grand prize drawing. The winner in each shop, in addition to getting entered in the grand prize drawing, also received an apple basket containing a Ben and Jerry's t-shirt, about $100 worth of various Vermnont food products, and a copy of the Ben and Jerry's cookbook. And I won THAT. It had maple syrup, a jar of Ben and Jerry's own hot fudge, soda crackers, Vermont cheddar cheese, some maple sugar candy, some kind of locally-produced (to B&J, anyway) chili and salad dressing, and the cookbook. So I now know how to MAKE Dastardly Mash, Mint Oreo Cookie, Chunky Monkey, and all that. I also have the exact recipe for the Vermonster, the exact recipe for the chocolate chip cookie dough used IN chocolate chip cookie dough, and a few other sundae ideas (including one, called the "Charoses Special," which I plan on sprining on my SO for Rosh Hashanah). So all this talk has made me dig the thing out. I'm trying for the peach today, I think...

For one glorious summer, the scoop shop near me had the flavor "Chocolate Cointreau Orange Fudge." Has anyone tried the "brownie batter" flavor? Same principle as chocolate chip cookie dough, but different dough.

On a tangent -- there's no online link I see now, but can you give a more detailed summary? I'd never be able to afford eating there in this lifetime, but WD-50 is on my block and I'm curious. I live on a street that when I moved in ten years ago was kind of "wrong side of the tracks" but has now become the city's second "restaurant row". It's been fascinating from a sociological standpoint. Especially since all of these restaurants have only sprung up within the past year -- actually, you want whiplash, THIS is whiplash.

Why pick one? Seriously, the one and only such club I went to was something rather unusual -- it was run by this German expatriate whose taste was considerably closer to CABARET than to Hooters. So there was a "performance" aspect to the acts that I haven't seen from the more stereotypical places. So I, as a woman, felt comfortable there. As for the acts, there were mostly women, but there were a couple men too (there was a fire eater who entered clad only in a leather loincloth, but then after a few minutes he dropped that to do some VERY interesting things involving a chain, a match, and something pierced on his person). The performance aspect was entertainng enough, and when it wasn't, I was also amused watching the reactions of the guys in the group.

I just want to say, this made me do a spit take across my computer. Albeit a gleeful one.

See, I make it a point of pride to consider my guests' preferences BEFORE I plan the menu. Or, I provide a lot of choices that can accomodate any food quirks, be it vegitarianism, allergies, or just simply "I don't like mushrooms". After all, these people are my friends and family. They are different from me, but that's why I like them. I care about them. And part of caring about them, I thought, is respecting their food preferences. So some of them may be weird? Who cares? They probably think some of my food choices are weird but they love me anyway. If you have relatives who are on a fat-restricted diet, why are you making your lasagna for them anyway? If they ask for it, why not just tell them, "well, it really doesn't work with fat-free cheese, are you sure you still want me to make it?" I know people are just venting, but if you wanted a meal to satisfy YOU, then you should have eaten alone. Sorry. And, I also know that there are indeed times when you try everything to accomodate guests and they still are difficult. The guests ain't perfect either sometimes.

I think we are actually at the point where there are more restuarants than tourists anyway, so that may not be a problem.

Oh, that's relatively normal. I'm dating someone that consumes an occasional spoonful of barbecue sauce when no one's looking. Or even when they are looking. He doesn't care. He's also been known to sample little sips of Worcestershire sauce, salad dressing, and soy sauce. (He keeps saying that Kikomann tastes like chicken bouillon, in an effort to get me to try it, but I just tell him I'll take his word for it and have politely declined.) Speaking of Hershey's syrup: When I was a child, mom used to make us chocolate milk with Bosco syrup. There always was a puddle of syrup in the bottom of the glass, so I used to mix in hot water to drink down the last dregs. Everyone told me it sounded gross, so I shrugged and started calling it "yucky tea."

NYU class of '92. Our rule of thumb was that if the main meal in the dining halls looked inedible, you could always fall back on a cheeseburger at the grill. So if you walked in and everyone else was having a cheeseburger, you were in trouble. Periodically, the dining hall offered a dish called "Grandma's Chicken Pugliese." For four years I wondered what THAT meant. Finally, my senior year, I ended up with a weekly column in the school paper dealing with dorm life issues -- and for one of my columns, I made an appointment with the head of dining services specifically to interview him for the purpose of explaining just what the hell "Grandma's Chicken Pugliese" was once and for all. (Turns out it was the winner of a long-ago recipe contest the dining hall held -- Pugliese was the winner's last name and it was her grandmother's recipe.)

Whenever I am at a Starbucks and I am asked what size I want, I say "small." If they ask me, "a tall?" I repeat, "Small." If they want to call the smallest size something completely the opposite of "small", fine, but I don't have to also.

Well, ONE advantage to doing this in a fast-food restaurant, is that this almost guarantees that your burger is made precisely then as opposed to having been something that was made some time ago and just kept under a heat lamp. Spend six months in the trenches in high school and you learn things.

I once tried making "minestrone" out of a can of mixed vegetables and a can of Beefaroni. Add water until soup consistency. I've actually had two experiments that turned out great -- I once saw a former roommate of mine walk into a kitchen that contained nothing but two potatoes, some shredded cheese, and a package of veggieburger seasoning, and say, "hey, I can work with this." He mashed the potatoes, seasoned them with the veggiburger stuff, added a little flour and made big dumplings out of them with a spoonful of cheese in the center of each, and then baked them. Surprisingly good. Another time I had two other roommates who once served this amazing vegetable lentil soup with really unusual spices. I kept raving about it and asking for the recipe, and they finally shamefacedly admitted they didn't know. What had happened was, they had tried to make vegetable juice in the juicer, using primarily lettuce and celery and other green leafy vegetables, but the resulting juice was apparently horrible. So they decided to make it into a soup base, and "we just sort of kept throwing things in until it tasted good."

I will never decide make a recipe that calls for raw lobster because I live under the misconception it is as easy to remove from the shell as COOKED lobster. Hell, I'm just never going to make Dublin Lawyer again. Ever. Or anything else that requires I kill a live lobster by stabbing it in the back of the neck. Nor am I going to eat bacon without being sure it's sufficiently cooked. ...Actually, the best kitchen disaster story I've heard concerns the sister of a friend -- my friend says one day the family was out on an errand, and her sister was at home making a cake. They came home to find the poor girl scraping burnt cake OFF THE WALLS OF THE OVEN, for somehow the cake had exploded during baking. She paused, looked over her shoulder at everyone, and levelly said, "I DON'T want to talk about it." To this day, years later, anytime someone asks her, "So what did happen, anyway?" She STILL says, "I DON'T want to talk about it."

Okay, jumping on the "food quirks in SO's" tangent for a moment before it segues into a slightly embarrassing moment in a restaurant -- albeit embarassing for different reasons. One person I dated VERY briefly had the most oddball food quirk I've ever encountered -- he would only eat meat if it did not look like it was an animal part. For instance, he would eat a Chicken McNugget, but not roast turkey. He'd eat meatloaf or hamburger, but not steak. Sausage yes, pork chops no. ...Just an odd one. Then these days, I'm seeing someone who drinks condiments. Seriously. He will occasionally take bottles of soy sauce or salad dressing or what-not from the fridge and take a little taste. Just -- because. And now for an embarrassing moment -- the aforementioned gentleman and I were at dinner once, and were enjoying a rather...er...suggestive and racy conversation. And were rather self-absorbed in the conversation. Which is why we did not notice until it was too late that the waitress had arrived with our entrees at the very same second as the word "boobies" was leaving his mouth. Heh -- I'm also told about something I apparently did when I was twelve. I was out with my extended family for dinner, and my cousin, who was then only two, was having a bit of a tantrum. My aunt was trying her damndest to calm her down, but after about ten minutes of my cousin screaming, and nasty looks from other people, my aunt gave up and left with her for the parking lot to settle her down. As they left, I apparently turned to my parents and said, "okay, everything *I* did when I was two? I am SO SORRY."

Erm.... I realize you're concerned, but this may be something to just drop, actually. Not belittling your concern in the least. But, she's an adult. I imagine you'e expressed the thought that "look, I'm only saying this because I know this could be affecting your health, and I just want ya around, is all," but ultimately, she has final say. Assuming she really has considered that and all other factors in influencing her eating habits, she's drawn the conclusion she deems best for her, and that's her bag. I approach this from the perspective of someone whose SO also indulges in a habit with questionable effects on his health, too -- he smokes. He knows I wish he didn't -- but because I wish NO one did, because it is unhealthy. But he's also a functional adult, and for whatever reason he has made his choice, and there it is. He knows that should he choose to give it up, I'm behind him 110%, but until then, I'm not going to try to nag him to do something before he's ready to do it. That's the quickest way to make someone get defensive. Also, I ain't his mom.