Rachel Perlow

He's nuts. He loves it I tell you! He gets to eat the other half of the bagel! Seriously, if I wrap the remaining half, it doesn't go stale so quickly. And who wants to put blueberry cream cheese on an onion bialy? It's just bagels people! For the record, I do not only take muffin tops!

Fresh sausage, as in raw. It says so on the label.

It really isn't. I've made it a bunch of times. It's basically a rice pudding. In fact, when I haven't had the correct Thai rice, I just make rice pudding and serve with diced or sliced mangos. Make a rich rice pudding, with egg, and use some coconut milk for flavor.

Anyone make any soup lately?

Wonder if I can find a mutant chicken with two backs! ← Hopefully they aren't from mutant chickens, but I buy a package of chicken backs at my market when stockmaking. No reason you couldn't get them just to add to your batch of fried chicken. Some people get extra drumsticks, you could get extra backs. :) Just had to laugh (and sympathize) with that one!

I use the recipe in Hot Salty Sour Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. If you don't want to buy it, check your local library. I'm assuming that you're serving the beef on the side so the veggies can have at the salad too? Fried & marinated tofu would be a viable option for them.

We returned to Little Saigon last night with my parents. Pluses, all the food was excellent as usual, especially the fried squid appetizer, grilled rolled beef with lemongrass and the chicken with fried rice cakes. Service was still a little scatterbrained. Pace your ordering (order apps then more after those arrive) or you'll get your food in very fast yet random sequence. Note for next time: order the sweet potato nests filled with shrimp. This dish passed by our table at least four times. It looked fantastic, but we already had plenty of food on the way.

My new toy arrived yesterday and Mexican Hot Chocolate was it's inaugural creation. First we used the lower Variable setting to chop the Mexican chocolate, then added warmed milk and blasted it on high until hot. Makes a very very frothy hot chocolate. Seriously abundant and thick foam!

The reason Thai Chef is probably failing is that it is ALWAYS EMPTY, and imo, this is because their service was so incredibly horrible the time I went I've never had a desire to go back -- I'm sure that is the case for most of their original patrons. If you stop in for lunch and it takes forever because they forget one of your table's orders and the ones they do remember take a long time too, would you ever go back? Regarding the parking, yes there's a huge parking lot. There's also signs posted all over the place about the parking time limit. I don't recall how long it is, but that's a little intimidating as the Englewood ticket patrol is very vigilant. I'll check next time I'm over there. Anyway, the reason I haven't been back is that the experience I had the first time was very bad. And I don't like to sit in empty restaurants. They should have put up some pretty curtains instead of having walls of glass, it's so obvious that it is always empty. Oh, and their famous signature souffle? Special ordered in the beginning of our meal, yet still they forgot about it and we had to re-order it and wait, and then to top it all off, it arrived over cooked!!!

As an ode to the hot dog tasting runs we've done in NJ, how about "Hot Dog Run" or "Hot Dog Hopping"?

Melt is now open, here's a link to the discussion thread about it. I'm now closing this planning thread.

I'll have to check the book, but I recall 2 Tbs to sweat the onions, then 6 Tbs added to the poaching of the mushrooms.

How do you feel about using a whole stick of butter for 4 servings of soup?

It doesn't have to be days of planning. I've posted there just a few hours before heading over to a restaurant. Less chance of others joining you, but you never know.

Update: Marva's closed a couple of months ago, but there's already something new in it's place. Interestingly, the menu is pretty similar, but with less emphasis on soul/southern food. Fat's Chicken & Rib Joint 1287 Teaneck Rd, Teaneck 201-862-0018

Just caught up with your blog and I have a couple of suggestions, jic you didn't think of them already. You mentioned one of your ovens doesn't work properly and that the university provides maintenance to the kitchen. Can you not get them to get it functioning? No meat slicer? You have excess budget, can you purchase equipment with it? Cleaning the grease trap... Pledge chore? Han Ah Reum... Does yours have one of those rice cake making machines? They are really good, thought you might like to suppliment the girls' chips with some bags of that. Boboli - Do they come frozen? They can be stored at room temperature for quite a while if not. I don't see why you need to have them taking up room in your freezer, since you must go through them at a brisk rate. A case a month, more? Back to equipment purchases... Do the girls have access to a microwave and or toaster oven when you aren't there? You could make the Boboli pizzas a "do it yourself" item, like the salad bar. Speaking of the salad bar... Fruit salad, carrot and celery sticks. The croutons don't need to be in the chilled section, do they? Back to excess budget... Perhaps a luxury ingredient dinner once a month, like lobster, crab, or rack of lamb? Something to expand their palates and increase the prestige of the house. Sounds like your house if very lucky to have you.

Next time you guys are going, post on the ISO: Dining Friends thread, maybe we or someone else will join you and you could finally order the moo ping!

I hope they have that pork dish at today's brunch, now I HAVE to try it.

I added captions to Jason's pictures, above. The fried buccatini were amazing. We were all surprised by the prociutto wrapping, and didn't notice it at first, but they were so tasty and meaty without being obvious, a closer inspection of the second bite revealed the prociutto. My clams casino-like preparation came out pretty good. A little more olive oil next time.

Ah yes, the wasabi pretzels. An old joke, but a classic. For those who don't realize why I was so easily amused, click.

This past Tuesday's episode of the Gilmore Girls was titled "Jews and Chinese Food" which tickled me. Of course the two were not related, the "Jews" was the elementary school production of Fiddler on the Roof while the "Chinese Food" was Rory and her new buds going to an overpriced Chinese restaurant. The final bill was $75 per person! I've never had a Chinese meal cost that much, but then again, these guys seem to be heavy drinkers, so I'm guessing they had a large bar tab. Actually the best part was that one of the girls was totally envious of Rory's ability to eat. She sat there sipping her water or whatever, while being completely amazed that Rory was actually going to eat a fried shrimp!

I made two soups last night: Les Halles' Mushroom Soup and Beef and Mushroom Barley. I followed Bourdain's recipe most closely, although it felt really weird to not cut up the mushrooms before cooking. I think either the timing is short or my burner can be lower than the average stovetop's. Being that I have a Garland, my low setting probably is lower. So the initial onion sweat took about 10 minutes, but after adding the mushrooms, they didn't look even warm after the 8 minutes the recipe outlines. Turned up the heat slightly and gave them another 10. I did a double take when I realized how much more butter the recipe called for. At this point you are basically poaching the mushrooms in stock, I just don't see the purpose for that much butter. I suppose it is in lieu of adding cream at the end? I had added two large slices of dried porcini with the button mushrooms (cremini), but at the end, it still lacked the mushroomy-oomph of the mushroom soup we like, so I cheated, crumbling in an Italian porcini boullion cube. Not chopping the mushrooms did save a major PITA step, especially since you puree the soup in a blender regardless of pre-chopping the mushrooms or not, so I liked that part. Next time, less butter, more real dried porcini. I usually use a potato to add body instead of butter or cream, that works well for us. Didn't follow a recipe for the Beef & Mushroom Barley. Diced onion, celery, carrots, quartered mushrooms, beef ribeye, 28 oz can tomato puree, 1 quart chicken stock, about a cup of pearl barley (par-cooked in water). The meat was frozen bulgogi meat, not really the right kind of meat, but after a long simmer, it eventually tenderized. Salt, plenty of pepper and some zatar (Greek seasoning) perked it up nicely. We had recently had some Beef Barley soup at a Greek place and that put us in the mood for more of this kind of soup, hence the addition of zatar.

Draw on the walls where the piping should be.

It's nice that we like C46 and all, but if you title a thread about Sally Ling, talk about Sally Ling, OK? For what it's worth, we went to Sally Ling's once or twice when we lived in Fort Lee. Fancy, good food, but overpriced and Americanized.

I don't know about sherbet, but I loved the "Sorbet and Cream" line they had years ago. Vanilla Ice Cream with a swirl of tart sorbet running through it. I remember orange, raspberry and lime. Lime was the tartest, my favorite, and it was about the same white color as the vanilla, so it was more of a tart surprise when you ate it.