Alex

Raw, sliced very thin, with avocado and blood orange in a light citrus vinaigrette.

David Blaine:

Thanks for the edit, Maggie. Ann's used to alternate spellings. She's Polish on both sides, so one of her spousal criteria was a last name that's relatively easy to spell and pronounce. Ann will be bonding with her Ph.D. workgroup in Elk Grove Village, so it'll be just me on the 22nd. G. has graciously offered to pick me up at the hotel. Re BYO, any suggestions other than beer?

Oil is more conductive than air. Immersing the cable in oil is not much better than immersing it in water. The cable shorts out. Hmm. I'm not an inventor by any means, but I wonder if it's possible to construct a cable that's protected by a heat-resistant sheath, maybe even with a layer of air between the cable and the sheath. And if the cable is magnetized, it could double as a wine clip™.

i just want to bump this back up and ask this question again, as i'm planning on doing a test run of a deep fried turkey soon. what's the best way to make gravy without the benefit of pan drippings? any help would be appreciated. Real gravy? I agree with fifi -- nope. But a great sauce? Sure. I'm going to pick up some turkey wings, if available, plus see if any of my friends don't have plans for their turkey's giblets (excluding the liver). I'll make a couple of cups of concentrated turkey stock, then use it as a base for a gravy-like sauce (roux + stock + mushroom soaking liquid + shrooms + flavorings etc.). BTW, fifi's thread is must-reading for us d-f turkey newbies.

This will be my first year (of many, I hope) of turkey frying. Thanks, fifi et. al. for the info. The great idea of doing a second turkey hadn't even crossed my mind. :duh: I've read that each successive cooling and reheating of the oil makes it less desirable for deep-frying. Would it be much better in this case to do the second turkey immediately as opposed to, say, several days later? I ask because it may be just the two of us this year, so we'll need at least a couple of days to get through the leftovers. I intend to brine my (organic, free-range, fresh-killed, etc.) bird(s). I assume there'll be no problem with deep-frying so long as I rinse and dry them thoroughly, yes? About how long does it take to do a 10-12# turkey? Do you lift it out after a certain amount of time and check for doneness with an instant-read thermometer? Dave, what is the difference between being in 360° oil vs. a 360° oven that would cause a probe thermometer's cable to expire?

And don't forget that calamari is "gahlaMAHD" I think this is more Italian-American though, and not just regional. People would break your chops if you pronounced calamari correctly in my area. Agreed. Perhaps even Italian-New Yorker (or maybe just Sicilian-New Yorker) rather than Italian-American. I remember that sopresata was super-sot, finoccio = f'-nook, etc.

And not duh-TROYT either. When I lived there the pronunciation of street names got to me: Freud = frood; Goethe = go'-thee; Dequindre = duh-quin'-der; Lahser = lasher. I could go on. I'm 30 years removed from NYC but I still stand on line. I also put up some coffee in the morning. Is that a New York-ism or just me? And thanks, Hobbes, for posting those pronunciations. I always had pronounced "sommelier" with the final "r," dilligently following the mnemonic I learned in high school French: "Be CaReFuL about pronouncing the final letter." I think I'll have a bottle of Château Faux Pas with tonight's dinner.

I try to remember to increase my evening water intake if I'm drinking >1 glass of wine with dinner, as alcohol (and, to a lesser extent, caffeine) is a diuretic. If I forget, I wake up with a serious case of cotton mouth.

I also leave the cheese out when freezing pesto. I don't see a major advantage in keeping it at room temp. In ice cube-size portions it defrosts very quickly (especially in a microwave) and can be used in small doses without your having to use up the rest of the jar before it spoils.

Ditto here. It's worth it, though. We've both slow-cooked and standard-cooked them. This year we'll probably deep-fry. The timing appears to be about the same as a standard turkey, but use your thermometer, of course. Brining is good.

Sautéed chicken livers deglazed with fig balsamic vinegar. Butternut squash with spinach and corn 2001 Yangarra Park Cab Sauv Ginger tea, zinc lozenges, vitamin c, garlic, echinacea

Cook fresh cranberries with fresh orange juice and sugar, press through a sieve, and dilute with the cooking liquid to drizzling consistency. Stir some maple syrup into heavy cream. Drizzle on the soup the cranberry puree, then the cream, making a pattern like Japanese brush work.

I ate smoked horsemeat, sashimi-style, when I lived in Japan. It tasted like, well, smoked meat. It was a little chewy but not at all tough or stringy.

Alternative garnish for soup: Cook fresh cranberries with fresh orange juice and sugar. Press through a sieve. Dilute as necessary with the cooking liquid. Drizzle over the soup. I also do an additional drizzle of heavy cream mixed with maple syrup. Or you can try this recipe from the Heartland Gathering, using butter and a chipotle instead of bacon.

King salmon, roasted; sauce = butter, shallots, morels, tomatoes (fresh + sun-dried), rosemary, cognac (flamed), cream Brussels sprouts, chestnuts, and bacon, with a little honey drizzled on top Redskin potato 1999 The Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir Mini-Mounds bars, formerly residing in the Halloween bowl by the front door Decaf A perfect fall meal

1. The Cook's Bible 2. The Silver Palate Cookbook 3. The Splendid Table I refer to my bound Cook's Illustrated volumes a lot, but that wouldn't count as one cookbook.

I'm with you, Tammy; I virtually never order restaurant coffee any more. Perhaps most customers have stopped caring, or just don't speak up. There was a recent thread about French press coffee. That, to me, would be a reasonable option. A grinder could be devoted to that purpose, 190-200°F water is easily produced, the cost wouldn't be prohibitive as Kona or JBM isn't mandatory, and training wouldn't be difficult.

As someone who did the Japan teaching thing about 15 years ago, I certainly can support a non-megalopolis option. I lived in the Hamamatsu-Iwata area, and while it supported most of the big-city niceties (including a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop and the best reasonably priced French restaurant I've ever eaten at) I could hop on my motor scooter and be in the middle of rice and tea fields in ten minutes or at a deserted Pacific Ocean beach in twenty. The cost of living, especially housing, was significantly less than the large urban areas. (Fûkuoka City's population is no small potatoes, though, about 1.3 million.)

Yep, I agree with them other folks: too much hooch. Cook's Illustrated recommends 1T vodka per 2 cups fruit (+ 2T lemon juice for plums). They also recommend that the sugar (1c for plums) be stirred directly into the puréed fruit for several minutes rather than using a simple syrup. I've also found that the canister needs to sit in a freezer at 0°F or lower for best results. Good luck! Plum sorbet sounds wonderful.

If I were a parent there, I'd be impressed that you actually thought about what the kids would like. I'd be further impressed by the kids' thinking that the brownie/ice cream bar was the coolest thing about the whole party. I would have traded half my baseball card collection for a dessert like that at my bar mitzvah reception.

As a pickled/preserved vegetable, Kimchee should keep for a long time when it's refrigerated, which is how our local Korean markets store it.

Glasses and mugs. Don't see the stemware. http://store.yahoo.com/sanriostore/categor...ccessories.html For the vibrator (your choice of regular or deluxe) and numerous other HK items, go to J-List, click on "View All J-List Products," then do a search for Hello Kitty. I love this web site.

Indeed, what a treasure you have! I hope it can be passed down for many more generations to come. But back to cookbooks... I couldn't resist The Good Cook's siren's song of 4 books for $1 if I re-joined. Winging their way to me are: The Babbo Cookbook (counts as 2) Forever Summer (Nigella) The Paris Cookbook (Wells) Also, from Bargain Books: Julia and Jacques Mostly Mediterranean (Wolfert) The Essential Mediterranean (Nancy Harmon Jenkins) -- great book!

...and this, I hope, also will be my last post on this thread. First, an apology. We were having way too much fun at the Heartland Gathering to do a "serious" blind tasting. I did do several tastings on my own with <$15 reds. The results were consistent with my previous tastings and with Mark's. There consistently was a difference between the treated and untreated wines, with the difference disappearing after 5-10 minutes. I often found that the "softness" of the treated wine also meant that it had less bouquet and was less interesting in the mouth than the treated wine. On the other hand, the Hello Kitty vibrator (scroll down the page a bit) appeared a little happier with the clip than without.