Priscilla

Salt bagels made by me, toasted. Cream cheese, smoked salmon, sliced onion & tomato, (my amigo at the farmer's market has not-bad tomatoes this December), big old Capote capers (for the Consort to strew -- I told him strive for artlessness), the end of three different varieties of olives. Korbel brut rose, not bad although I do object to their using the word champagne on their label when everybody knows it's only CA sparkling, and QEftSG, the episode with the rock & roll guy.

Oh my goodness. Poor, poor Dr. Batch. I must say one feels simply drained, exhausted, spent, shall one say, after reading of his travail -- and, one assumes, this is only his most recent travail. Poor Dr. Batch. One wonders how he manages. Perhaps we'll get greater insight from future installments.

Has there been a free-the-foie incident other than the recent events in Northern California? Can we count the Smithsonian event cancellation? Also, writing from Southern California, I would like to point out that PETA is based in Norfolk, VA.

Exactly my point. What with Mr. Hefner doing Carl's Jr. burger commercials at the moment and all, I'm thinking maybe, in Today's World, where it is increasingly difficult to maintain one's position on the Outlaw Wedge, he's adding another putatively edgy activity.

Neighbor of mine just supplied a pair of geese to the Playboy Mansion. Dunno what for, but WHAT IF?

Mostly when making veg soups I do not use chicken or other meat stock. Certainly did when I was learning to cook, inserting excellent stock here and there being one of the hallmarks, or perhaps privileges, of the Cooking Novitiate, but over the years I have decided that I usually like the pure taste of the veg to be emphasized, and while excellent chicken stock in no way tastes anything but good, it is not usually what I want in, for instance in this case, cauliflower soup. USUALLY. Usually usually usually. I always allow for exceptions. Influenced by Marcella Hazan, who when somebody said to her about Italians' adding water to dishes is adding nothing, said, "Exactly."

Susan: I am SO putting onion on my next Cubana. The 12-year-old said, as we were eating, that he thought a slice of tomato would not go amiss but we were between tomatoes that evening. Ludja: Cauliflower soup is (another) one of those things so much greater than the sum of its parts. But of course as aforementioned soup is my favorite food. I used creme fraiche rather than sweet cream in the one I made the other day, and it was good, but I think I prefer the creamification to be sweet cream and then a little sour cream dollop floated on the surface, which is how I've usually done it in the past. But the creme fraiche was burning a hole in my refrigerator and so was pressed into service. I love that Austrian pumpkin-seed oil. Like to use it in salad with pepitas and goat cheese, a multi-culti flavoring layering trip, among other things. Lessee, last evening, lovely pale bockwursts from the German sausage guy whose shop we used to live near. Mild delicious Dusseldorf-style mustard. Adorable little pink-skinned fingerling potatoes, steamed, tossed with butter and parsley. What the German sausage guy calls his "cooked" sauerkraut which yes is cooked, but also has bits of smoked this & that tossed in along the way. Cucumber salad with sour cream. Rye bread from the gigantic loaf which the ladies at the counter are nice enough to cut the end piece for me.

Last evening Cubana style sandwiches, ham, roast pork, Tillamook Swiss-type, dill pickle (Middle Eastern dill pickle), mayonnaise, mustard, on soft rolls made by me, grilled a little under the weight of a lovely 12-inch Griswold pan. Cream of cauliflower soup. Such a beautiful snowy big cauliflower from my amigo at the farmer's market. Soup is my favorite food. Georges DeBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau, apparently NOT the one everybody was going on about over on the wine boards -- this one has a colorful stained-glass type lable. And it ain't bad, although as aforementioned the price, EVEN at Trader Joe's, is too high for BN: $8.99. However it was the Consort who brought it home this time, not me. And it suited the meal nicely.

Thank you Susan. We continue to survey available steaks. This Vintage Natural Beef, I don't know about the distribution. The only place I've seen it touted is the small independent positioned-as-upscale market here in Southern California where I have bought it. It's good. This steak survey, years in the ongoingness and no end in sight. Would like there to be an end, meaning I would like to find and settle on a purveyor of consistently excellent beef. There have been some earlier discussions here on eGullet about steaks, mail-order and otherwise, memorably one about NYC's famous Lobel's and a nearly mythological $50-off coupon which whipped through the forums like a roiling wildfire before reluctantly receding. Wonder if it's still on ... wonder if somebody from NJ can point us to the merchant who was offerin' it? Butter, we have also discussed, not to say beaten, whipped, compounded, clarified, et al. Here's one earlier eGullet butter discussion -- there are at least a couple more, too. Salty Danish butter? Would that be the wondrous Lurpak? (Lotsa Lurpak mentions on the Butter Boards.) Salty Plugra is very very good, but as aforementioned running second to Tillamook's saltylicious trump-all from the PNW.

Mamster, an admirable interview. We saw a bit of JC we haven't before, even after all these years, and that's right down to you. I am pleased to see her presented evenhandedly -- I never like the usual uncritical, if not fawning, exaltation. Those who have read even some of the aforementioned thousands of interviews with her over the years have seen that she has been, (and, as we see, remains), no shrinking violet when it comes to criticizing others, professional or amateur. I can recall gratuitous rips on American home cooks that would curl a person's hair, for instance, turned up in researching a paper years ago. With aging (admirably well; a model for us all, really), and remaining adamantly vital in her field, JC has, as the elder stateswoman she is, earned the right to be somewhat above criticism. Course that's what they said about Mother Teresa, and then Christopher Hitchens begged to disagree. It was disappointing, while edifying, to read the dismissive comment on Italian cookery. The devil on my shoulder would love to hear Marcella Hazan's response.

Last evening, second trial for Vintage Natural Beef NY strips, grilled over hardwood charcoal. Still good. Not aged, but still, perhaps the best steaks we've ever prepared at home. One of life's ongoing mysteries, of which there is an endless supply; why should Vintage Natural Steaks from the otherwise clueless self-styled soi-disant fahncy market be any good at all? Gotta be innate to the beef its own darn self. Also red-skinned yellow-fleshed potatoes smashed with cream a little simmered garlic and s & p. Good. Also nice skinny green beans, blanched then tossed before service with light-brown butter and s & p. Baguette and salty Plugra, which has soundly but narrowly beat salty Kerrygold, but at this time is running a decisive second to saltylicious Tillamook. DeLoach Zinfandel Russian River lalala 2000, fruit of Trader Joe's having bought up the inventory or some such typical Trader Joe's story. And aren't we grateful, too.

Lessee, last evening, Alaskan King crab meat not eaten on Thurs ... potatoes, onion ... crab hash! A fave, discovered in the PNW, which we'd not had for years seemingly. Have always had or made it with Dungeness, truly a superior crab, but the Alaskan King wasn't bad. Turned out very well, in fact, especially when topped with the Consort's perfect poached eggs. Rye toast and VH1's Spice Girls BtM on the side. DeLoach Zinfandel, just so good.

Immune to tannins? Woodpeckers put acorns by Assiduously The garden welcomes Prized acorny detritus Oaks trying to grow No less welcome are Spiky Engleman oak leaves Ill-advised bare feet Not just woodpeckers Also Mexican Scrub Jays Give acorns a go Mean to gather And on ancient sites I too Will give it a go

Last evening, kaki fry, Japanese-style panko'd oysters, fried. Oyster dishes, a Thanksgiving season tradition, sorta, on account of the oyster/turkey dressing connection and all the Pacific oysters in the stores in support of same. Also mung bean sprouts marinated in mirin, soy, grated fresh ginger, drizzle of sesame oil at service, nice organic green beans from the natural-foods supermarket with Torakris's sesame sauce, quick cucumber pickle, nice Nishiki rice from the cooker. Copying what our favorite noodle house offers with its kaki fry, had okonomiyaki sauce as well as tonkatsu sauce on the table. The Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau everybody's going on about over in Wine ... could've been worse, by a long shot, not worthless, and the label is beeyootiful, but here in CA, EVEN at Trader Joe's, I paid $8.99/bottle, a price point that sticks a bit in one's craw, when one is talking BN.

Last evening a take on Marcella Hazan's polpette pizzaiola, something of a staple in our house from one of her first two books ... for some reason it didn't make the cut when years later they were revised and reissued as a single volume. A shame, really -- yet more evidence of the essentiality of the originals. ANYways, instead of all beef it was 1/3 each ground chicken, lamb, & beef, on account of the nice man at the Middle Eastern market having all those freshly ground in the case there. Nice patties, passed through dried breadcrumbs, browned on each side, into the shallow casserole, each getting its slice of tomato, s & p, sage leaf before being bunged into the oven for a while, joining the pan of Jim Dixon-Amanda Hesseresque roasted cauliflower in progress (little garlic tossed in with the olive oil for the cauli), then the final dressage of a slice of whole-milk mozzarella and an anchovy fillet, returned to the oven until meltage was achieved. Hadn't prepared the roasted cauliflower for quite a while -- beautiful fresh cauliflower at the Middle Eastern market brought it to mind, and it was so good, as pretty much everybody knows already. Lovely redleaf salad with nutty delicious Ligurian olive oil. Skinny ficelle-like baguette, saltylicious Tillamook butter. CA wine with the novelty name Bocce -- a little thin, but drinkable.

What is now our Beverage Refrigerator was the first refrigerator purchase of our adult lives, too. I well remember the huge happiness ... seemingly irrational, yet also not. For years this little (by most standards it is little; we lived in teensy places) frost-free Kelvinator was our sole fridge, but now it is happily (I feel certain it is happy) ensconced in the barn, whirring away, chilling and protecting vital materials. Inside: Whites, roses, sparklers, mineral water (Gerolsteiner just now), beer, 100% grapefruit juice in cute little bottles, the last of the homemade arancella. Some ingredients, like cornmeal -- regular, coarse, blue -- rye flour, & similar. Presently too the turkey and the pork loin we'll be brining and cooking for Thanksgiving reside there. In the freezer, the excellent little samosas made by a Pakistani lady, bags of really good potstickers, a flavored vodka somebody brought, ice.

Varmint, I love colored dishes, and I thought yours looked groovalicious. Oh, of course I've got Regulation Big White Plates among my colored ones, and yes, people love 'em, but I defend colored plates against conformist hegemony.

Boy, you should really come to Scotland you know. In Italy (forget the region) they also do fried sandwiches: Moz, Parma filling, dipped in egg then fried. Tastes good, burns mouth. Where does this "Monte Cristo" orginate? An illiteration of "Much Crisco"? Yes, mozzarella in carozza, sometimes anchovy allowed in there, too? Very nice. (Would also like to get in on the Varmint's Catfish Admiration Society ... puts me in mind of fried catfish with Creole sauce, a little updated! Very cool.) It's a disappearingly fine line between roof-of-mouth-debriding molten cheese and pleasantly melted, isn't it? The sort of super fine point that can keep a person keeping on cooking. As we ate our Monte Cristos we reminisced about how we did once experiment with Scotland's indigenous deep-fried Mars bar, keeping in mind that what WE know as a Mars bar is not what Scotland knows as one -- I think, could well be wrong, would like to be corrected if so, but I think that a UK Mars bar is more like what WE get as Three Musketeers. (Makes no sense, titularly (you heard!) -- the Three Musketeers bar has only TWO components, the soft middle and the chocolate coating. I've thought since I was a child that another Mars product, what WE know as a Milky Way, and which has THREE components, caramel, soft middle, and chocolate coating, oughta have been called Three Musketeers, leaving the Milky Way monicker for what WE know as Three Musketeers. What we know as Mars has a firmish nougaty layer and then a few almonds and THEN the chocolate coating.) Just now I found somebody's else's research on the subject, and I was interested to see there is a California origin suspected. (It is famously served at a restaurant inside Disneyland; never had it there and probably won't, as I try to go to theme parks just as infrequently as possible.) The very best, the most excellent, the Perfection in Monte Cristoage, was had by me sometime in the 1980s in Las Vegas, in the 24-hour coffee shop inside a big hotel famous (only) for its 200-lane bowling alley. (Why I happened to be there especially during a bowling tournament, don't ask.) This coffee shop was a spit 'n polished unreconstructed 1950s archetype, complete with venerable waitresses whose gravity-defying 'dos had adorable teensy white hats perched atop, and pink uniforms with a hanky pinned on. My Monte Cristo came origami-wrapped in a pristine white paper napkin with hospital corners so tight you could have bounced the proverbial quarter, the whole thing, napkin and all, cut perfectly corner-to-corner. Breathtaking, really. And so civilized! Perfectly fried perfectly golden, not too battery, but there was batter enough. Cheese, turkey, ham, everything that was supposed to be in there and nothing that wasn't. And, currant jelly on the side. Currant jelly on the side shows 1. a strong commitment to tradition, or 2., some class, or 3., both!

Monte Cristo sandwiches -- had some nice leftover turkey, and ham, and Swiss cheese, and had been pondering rye-bread Monte Cristos, and well, it all came together in the old deep fryer, which is one method of cooking Monte Cristos. As aficionados know, there is also the perfectly respectable pan-fried, or the slightly less Monte Cristoish pan-grilled, but it is the deep-fried which is the holy grail of Monte Cristos, for me. This time I made a thin water-egg-flour batter that some Monte Cristoites recommend ... nice, and nice to look at, but I think I may prefer the more French toasty egg-rich dip. But for deep frying, the flour encasement does what it is supposed to do, namely, encase. Strawberry preserves, preserved lingonberries, maple syrup, yer choice. Fresh-squeezed orange juice for the under-21 set, with some added inexpensive Spanish sparkler for adult Mimosas.

Tommy. Cracking great writing. Please do carry on.

Ritter Sport with peanuts ... seemingly unavailable in the U.S. Other flavors, yes, but not peanut.

Very nice sea scallops, entwined with par-cooked uncured Niman Ranch bacon on thick bamboo skewers that the 12-year-old author of an award-winning Vietnam War research project morbidly calls pongi sticks, grilled over mesquite whilst being painted judiciously with butter. Succotash mashed potatoes, succomash, as we say -- corn, tomato, little onion, and the potatoes, 9 or 10 or 11 fresh sage leaves cooking along, mashed roughly with some creme fraiche that'd been kicking around and plenty of s & p. Made a nice bed for the scallops, which themselves turned out to be exceptionally good tasting. Nice little salad of redleaf with grapeseed oil/white wine vinaigrette. LBB seeded baguette, saltylicious Plugra. Spanish rose ... not bad.

Last evening, gulyas. Pretty close to the equal-weights-onion & meat instruction of some Austrians & Hungarians, big hit of Hungarian sweet paprika, tiny hit of hot Spanish smoked paprika. Few cloves of garlic. No marjoram, but a nice bundle of thyme from the garden simmered along, and a bay leaf, whose flavor seems key to this dish. Glugged in a little wine, too; non-trad. Little parsley-flecked potato dumplings dropped in & cooked just before service. Sour cream on the table, along with LBB seeded baguette & saltylicious Plugra. Peachy Canyon Zinfandel, inexpensive and good.

Charming little book, Fine Preserving by Catherine Plagemann, has been very useful for me. There is an edition, probably the easiest one to find, reissued with annotation by M.F.K. Fisher, whose notes are interesting. But even without the M.F.K.F. commendation this is an inspiring, and confidence-inspiring, book. Mrs. Plagemann works with small batches, encouraging to the novice or sometime canner/preserver, and sophisticated flavor profiles that are fresh even now, many years after her book's 1967 publication. (The Fisher-annotated edition came out in the late 1980s.) The Ball Blue Book or the Kerr Canning Guide, with their meticulous instructions and basic formulas and recipes, have been just indispensible, as well.

Last evening, one-stop-and-that-stop-is-Trader Joe's: Pork loin slices, pounded to a fare-the-well and floured, egged, and then Parmigiano'd-Pecorino Romano'd before being gently fried in grapeseed oil until cooked through and crispy on the outside. Served over risotto flavored with the few strands of saffron my little crocuses have provided thus far this season, the harvest of four or five blooms, enough to brightly, if not deeply, color and flavor the dish, which was extra-creamified so that the pork could be arrayed in repose upon it. Whole little Nantes carrots, the only sort of little carrots which earn their keep flavorwise, in my experience, blanched and then glazed in butter, garlic, and a little brown sugar, salt & (loads of) pepper. Nice Romaine salad with a vinaigrette of lovely green fruity nutty olive oil a friend brought from a recent visit to Liguria. LBB seeded baguette, as usual the seeds providing a value-added experience beyond what logic would suggest. Saltylicious salted Plugra, not as saltylicious as salty Tillamook, but what TJ carries in the saltylicious category. Rabbit Ridge 1998 Carignane, inexpensive and interesting, improving as the meal progressed.