mamster

Excellent, FWED. Thanks and welcome.

Well, my Friday plans are ruined!

That's probably part of it, although parking in Portland is easy and cheap, and they don't have a Cheesecake Factory. I know the Seattle CheeseFac does a huge business with tourists and business travelers staying in downtown hotels.

Maybe midscale chains are taking off downtown because downtown is no longer just a place for sophisticated, citified palates like ours. There still seem to be some markets where chains can't compete, though. Chinatowns and other Asian neighborhoods may have a McDonald's or two, but not a P.F. Chang's. There are no chains that compete with high-end restaurants other than steakhouses. I'm sure there are chain executives trying to figure out how to break into these markets, and it'll be interesting to see what they come up with, but for now, enjoy: downtown restaurants are still the province of small business.

Yes, clear as {expletive deleted}.

I'm not sure I buy that argument--extortionate rent increases are nothing new, but successful urban midrange chains like Cheesecake Factory are. The more dense and successful an urban core you find yourself in, the less likely you are to be surrounded by national restaurant chains. I can't quite explain why that is, though. Maybe our resident economist would like to chip in again.

Yes, it's a yeasted loaf with a small percent cornmeal (10, maybe?) and corn kernels.

I make a bread with both: southern-style cornbread. I hear it's all the rage in Paris.

I picked up a corny loaf this morning and just ate a couple of slices toasted with butter. Excellent. Next month's bread is going to be a dark nutty sort of thing, which I tasted and promptly forgot the details, because it's not really my kind of bread. Okay, but no corn loaf.

I like wearing band T-shirts almost as much as listening to the band. Laurie can vouch that when we go to a show I will quickly look around for the merch table to make sure I get a shirt in my size, and then will stand there at the concert dancing and holding a shirt in my hand like a dork. If it's not deadly hot I'll put the shirt on over my existing shirt, which probably has some other band on it. Anyway, we saw the Pernice Brothers play last month and I got this great t-shirt. It has a sandwich on it. You can see it here, but it's sold out, so nyaa. As I was buying the shirt, I thought, "Hmm...should I really buy a white shirt?" But all of their shirts were white, and hey, sandwich. A couple of days later I'm sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant in front of a big bowl of spicy noodle soup wearing the shirt and saying to myself, "I am such an idiot." I tucked my napkin into my collar and went to work. The stains are only on the sleeves. There should be a song about this sort of thing.

I am all over this like niblets on a cob.

FWED, can you tell us a little more about the food and wine served? Thanks!

A few weeks ago when I set my kitchen on fire making fries, my loyal Kitchen Crate brand oven mitt was destroyed. Now I need some new mitts of some sort. I realize the pros use side towels, and that's a possibility, but it seems the field has grown considerably since last time I shopped for this sort of thing. There are the square silicone grabbers and silicone mitts. Then there is the kevlar glove which looks awesome if it works. Has anyone tried it? They claim you can pick up a dime...a really HOT dime. Is this new plastic stuff worth considering in general? I find the newish silicone spatulas indispensable, and I wish to convert my batterie de cuisine to all-silicone as soon as possible.

I haven't been there, but "Stacatto Gelato" is a great name. I have been to Mondo on Robson in Vancouver, and it's excellent indeed. Their garnishes are beautiful.

Pan-african seems to be an Ethiopian place--at least, there was a bunch of Ethiopian food on the menu. There may also have been stuff from other parts of Africa, though. I didn't look too closely. Slight OT, but I had a good meal at Blue Nile on 12th, near Seattle U, last night. Eight of us, bill came to $45 with a hefty tip.

Broccoli rabe and gai lan are great on pizza.

Senses (which I refuse to spell with a digit) is in the same hotel as Diva; I'm not sure about the ownership situation, but Haas is definitely at both places. I was at Senses just last week and it continues to rule.

I'm going to be at the event and I intend to wave my press credentials around to obtain immoderate hunks of 'cue.

I'm not sure yet whether I can make it--I'll try.

The most flavorful way to do tenderloin, I think, is to slice it into medallions, maybe 3/4" thick. You get more sear that way. If the Lobel's stuff is so good, maybe it won't have that less-than-zero flavor of supermarket tenderloin.

These answers are awesome, you guys. Cured pork jowl is delicious, and that's a fact.

I've always noticed this phenomenon when cooking bacon, but I always think of it at the wrong time to post. Now, the time has come. The fat streaks in bacon go through three distinct phases. Out of the fridge, they're white. After a few moments in the hot pan, they're translucent. By the time cooking is done, they're somewhere in between. The most interesting part of the process is the transition from translucent to crisp. The fat doesn't cook steadily. Suddenly there will be a hiss, and a section of it will turn nearly opaque. This was amazing to watch on some thin-sliced guanciale I was cooking the other day. Pop! You could watch the color change shoot along the strip of cured jowl. Stirring the bacon seems to accelerate the process. What in the world is going on here? It looks almost like a crystallization reaction. This is a very important question for physics, and I'd like to see our Einsteins on this thread soon. Thank you.

My local deli has started carrying Niman Ranch guanciale; I haven't used it in carbonara yet, but I had it on a sandwich yesterday and it's great. The cure is heavy on the rosemary, so it won't work in everything, but I think it will make a fine carbonara. Probably worth ordering off their website if you've never tried guanciale and can't get it locally.

This is so aweseme. RN, why do you think your homemade bacon is better than store-bought? My guess would have been that it would be easy to outdo supermarket bacon but hard to beat the better smokehouses like Nueske.

Are there any butcher shops on Beacon Hill or in the CD? I think of jowls as being associated with black American soul food and suspect that a butcher used to catering to the black community might be able to get you some jowls. Incidentally, they sell the Niman Ranch guanciale at Delaurenti. I have some in the fridge but haven't tried it yet.