mamster

And the next one here. * * * Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

"Box" is not just a clever name. There's a long stand-up counter and, when I was there, three tables, including one four-top. It seemed like there was room for a couple more, though. And lunch on the 16th or 17th is a possibility.

These aren't banh mi by any stretch, and there is no vegetable sandwich. I thought it might be Macrina bread; I know they make a less crusty loaf (the giuseppe). Maybe they could be cajoled into trying that.

C'mon, people, we are supposed to be the culinary avant-garde here. Is it possible I'm the only one who's been to Baguette Box? First of all, let's clear up some misinformation. Both the Times and the P-I got the address totally wrong. It's 1203 Pine, NOT 1201 E. Pine. The latter is a furniture store. Baguette Box is located just across the freeway from the Paramount, on the same block as Machiavelli. It's a great space, with soaring ceilings. When I got there around noon on opening day, they were busy fielding calls ("Where the hell are you guys?") and Eric Banh was there shaking hands. Here's the menu in its entirety: Baguettes: Crispy drunken chicken $6.50 Hoisin ground pork $5.90 Salmon gravlax $7.50 Salumi's cured meat $6.90 Roast leg of lamb $7.90 Veal and beef meatball $6.90 Soup $3.50 I got the crispy drunken chicken (the word "crispy" gets me every time). This is the same as the crispy chicken at Monsoon, but on a crusty baguette with lettuce and sauteed onions. All of the parts were good, but it was impossible to eat as a sandwich--chunks of chicken kept falling out. This did stop me from eating the whole thing. (If you haven't had the crispy chicken at Monsoon, it's basically really good General Tso's chicken.) I thought baguette (I didn't ask whose) was also a little too rustic and would like something slightly less crusty, more toward the banh mi end of the axis. Someone near me was oohing and ahhing over the meatball. I can't wait to try the other fillings; they need to fine-tune the food a bit, but this place is practically on fire with potential. Hours: Sun-Thu 11am-9pm Fri-Sat: 11am-3am Now, let's get going--I want to hear about the salmon, the salumi, hell, I want to hear about all of them.

QFC has sockeye fillets for $10 starting today. Now I'm in.

Lunch with Jon Prinz, a dentist turned oral scientist, now at the University of Utrecht Medical School. He is well known for producing "interesting" experiments -- he once fed Heston Blumenthal custard loaded with sand to demonstrate how texture affects taste. Ride along to Erice, Sicily, with Jack Lang and his molecular gastronomy comrades. +++ Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

One of my favorite things in Kitchen Confidential is where Bourdain says that one of the differences between home cooking and restaurant food is that home cooks never buy shallots and he goes through an enormous sack of them weekly. A great dish for comparing onions and shallots is larb. I think we may have a thread about larb somewhere.

Fishmongers always give you more than you asked for, in my experience. When I'm buying filets, I usually ask for 3/4 pound and figure I'll get a pound. It's kind of like inviting people to a party at 7:30, meaning 8:00.

That does it, we're moving to Florida. Hey, MsRamsey, how did your fresh shrimp turn out? And BastilaShan, Laurie and I have had the life-changing Thai seafood experience. I recommend it.

To clarify, what they're hawking at Mutual isn't live shrimp, it's shell-on but beheaded shrimp air-shipped from Georgia. They look exactly like any other gulf whites you'd buy and can be prepared the same way. I didn't devein the ones I bought -- I find you rarely have to do so for shrimp this size, and I didn't notice any vein while I was eating them. And between yesterday and today, I ate over a pound of them. Is there such a thing as shrimp overdose?

The white salmon I've seen around is priced comparably to troll-caught king salmon, because that (as far as I know) is what it is. We have fairly sophisticated consumers here, many of whom will not dismiss white salmon as a pale imitation. I've had it and doubt I could tell the difference from wild king if I were blindfolded.

White salmon is sold all over in Seattle. I see it regularly at Whole Foods and University Seafood and Poultry.

Welcome, Zwaeback. The sushi places we've discussed more than any others in Seattle are Shiki and Mashiko (try a search on these), but there are many other highly respected places, including I Love Sushi, Shiro's, Saito's, and Kisaku. Mashiko is a highly eclectic, casual, and modern sushi place that with a huge menu, and it's won a lot of fans here.

My dad and I went to Lowe's today because I needed a new showerhead (the one in Laurie's and my new apartment was mounted with short people in mind, and while we have nothing against short people, we are not them). On the way, we passed Mutual Fish and noticed on the sign they were advertising fresh Georgia shrimp. The only times I've had fresh, never-frozen shrimp were in Louisiana and Alaskan spot prawns plus whatever kind of shrimp they have in the tanks at sushi places. (These look similar to spot prawns to me; are they?) I've never cooked any at home. So we had to stop. The shrimp are medium sized, maybe in the 26-30 range, and they were $12 a pound. I ended up sauteeing the shrimp and serving them atop a radicchio risotto, but as a trial run I just fried some up with butter, olive oil, S&P. The difference between these shrimp and most thawed shrimp isn't subtle -- these are seriously great shrimp, and I like the frozen kind just fine to start with. No idea how long they'll have them or if they always have them and I just never noticed (I don't go by there often), but by all means check it out.

This may be my first post on Pennsylvania. Hi! Sorry if this has been covered before, but I figured it would be of interest: Chinese Philadelphia Food

"There's a huge overlap between ingredient and method. I even wrote and submitted to the publisher a recipe for emulsified dressings twice, once from an ingredient point of view and once from a method point of view and hadn't even realised it. . ." Our own Andy Lynes interviews Britain's own chef/writer Shaun Hill. * * * Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

I've been living with the Polder for a couple of weeks now, and I still like it, but it has one annoyance that hadn't occurred to me earlier: you can't add time to it. If the timer has five minues left on it and you want to add five more, you have to stop, clear, and enter ten minutes. You can't just stop it and hit the "minute" button a few times, because there is no minute button.

Actually, I was glossing. I think the sour tang is acetic acid waste from bacteria, not anything to do with yeast at all. At some point, of course, yeast will die off because they can't live in an environment above around 17% alcohol, but that's not what's happening here. Fair enough?

Right, that's what I had last night and again this morning. How did you know?

I had them for dinner last night, and breakfast this morning! Murrmaid, I don't have any good explanation for why your treatment of the butter should make a difference, but when I make the waffles, they definitely have enough lift.

It's the pressure that makes it hotter, not the salt. So if you boil water in a pressure cooker or at the bottom of the ocean, it's much hotter than 100 degrees. The amount of salt you add when making pasta doesn't make a difference. edit: Also, Thai/Vietnamese sticky rice is a long grain rice, not short or medium grain. It looks like Jasmine rice only it's opaque when raw and is more brittle.

I popped in for lunch today at Square One. Great menu this week. It's Northwesty; I had lemongrass soup with a seared spicy shrimp, followed by wild Alaskan silver salmon with roasted cherry tomato sauce, a great potato cake, and sauteed pea shoots. Then your basic molten chocolate cake. It was a tough choice between the salmon (I was really after the potato cake and the pea shoots) and the herb-roasted duck breast with frisee aux lardons. There was also leg of lamb and other stuff I can't remember. The menu at One World is Mediterranean. If they would just post the menus on the web site, I'm sure a lot of us would go more often.

The whole pods come in two varieties, sweet and tart. The sweet are almost never what you want, but they're not always clearly labeled.

They have Pellegrino Aranciata and Limonata, but be forewarned: they charge $2.75 for the little bottle. The pizza is cheap, though, so I didn't begrudge them the drink prices.

As soon as Iris gets up from her nap we're heading down to Vivace for a macchiato. The only problem with Vivace is bad croissants. I guess I could get a Le Fournil croissant at Le Petit Cafe and get the macchiato to go, but then it wouldn't be in a porcelain cup, and that would be quite lame. Maybe an anonymous note is the way to go.