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I don't think I've ever had Mexican rice in Mexico. Just in Tex-Mex and other Mexican-American restaurants. I found white rice way more common. Maybe it's just when I get that sort of thing it's at some cheap place serving comida corrida.

Is there any difference in crockpots whatsoever? Multiple temperature settings and size are the only differences I've ever noticed.

Here's where I need a personal chemist. My understanding is that you want to melt the collagen and other bits from the bones and connective tissues without using a temperature that is so high that it coagulates the bits in the bones instead. My understanding of a pressure cooker is that it lets the water reach about 250 degrees instead of 212. Even a boil will not merely let the bits melt into the stock, I thought. However, that said, the Iron Chefs use pressure cookers for stocks.

Fifi, I don't disagree with you on the broad strokes, just in the particulars. I don't think there is much of a tradition of using squeeze bottles and seeing how high you can pile stuff. Also, I do think Mexico City is a mixed bag. You have the Palanco district diners who seem as snooty and cosmopolitan as any NY foodie.

I've eaten at both Topolo and Frontera. I think you're wrong, though. He has applied French techniques at Topolo and to a lesser extent Frontera. Presentations are certainly enhanced and much more New American or French than Mexican. But that's not substantive. He does use and cook cuts of meats, eg, in ways or with dishes that they wouldn't traditionally be served. It's actually one of my complaints about his restaurants. I think he tries to make his customers feel like they're getting what they're used to as upscale food. And in that process, he does compromise traditional Mexican to some degree. eg, at Frontera I had a *wonderful* pozole verde with stewed pork. But then he felt it necessary to plop some sliced pork tenderloin (overcooked, too, the bigger sin) on top of it. I'm not going to complain about extra food, but the way it was handled just felt like there was a disconnect. But I guess this is all beside the true point. But it does remind us that traditional ethnic foods do need to be hauted up for the average fine diner to deem them worth the extra dough. Some stupid vegetable terrine draws higher dollars than a mole or curry. Ridiculous. Cafe Azul, here in Portland, did a much better job of remaining faithful to the tradition while providing dishes using high quality ingredients and impeccable preparations. But they went out of business recently after several years of success, including allegedly being Diana Kennedy's favorite Mexican restaurant in the US and making Gourmet's top 50 restaurants and being named on every local critic's favorites list. I think ultimately people didn't associate a mole with upscale food. I certainly talked with enough people who complained about how expensive it was relative to other Mexican places (the entrees ranged from $15-20).

Thinking of getting a pressure cooker, however: I know they cook faster and understand why they cook faster, however, are the results equal? eg, say I do an Indian curry and it takes a half hour of pressure instead of an hour and a half of stewing for the meat to be done. Will that meat be infused with as much flavor in the pressure cooker? Are textures ever hurt by the higher heat? What are the disadvantages (besides the dangers of explosion) to pressure cooking? I ask these questions mainly because time is a secondary concern to me right now since I work from home and have time to start something and let it simmer for hours.

Long grain white rice. btw, I sometimes toss the rice with squeezed citrus after it's done. Orange is really nice.

Exactly, zora and pan. However, it should be known that capsicum can destroy, I believe, taste buds, but they grow back in a couple weeks, I think. But it's not like any amount of capsicum does that. It's just like if you drank some coffee that was too hot. Beans, what we probably need are more students who are willing to go learn at [fill in culinary tradition here]. More diversity from culinary students. French culinary masters aren't the only masters. There are many cuisines that have long and illustrious food traditions.

But that's not exactly how we use "haute cuisine". "Haute cuisine" means more than just French high cooking. Sure, the word derives from that, and it certainly can mean that, but we use the term "haute cuisine" to refer to all high cooking, I think. It's largely that same as "fine dining" except the emphasis might be on the quality of the food. So, the way we use the term generally in America, I think, haute cuisine can be American, Italian, French, and so on. It just happens that French and New American most often gets the designation. A bigger question, off-topic, is probably what the minimum threshold is for haute cuisine. Some would probably insist that only the very highest level of cooking, maybe 20 restaurants in all of the United States, eg, be called such. While some might expand this designation (and I've seen it done in reviews) to most places that have a wine list and make some effort at presentation and fancy ingredients. I do think there's a bias against non-French tradition food. All five star Mobil restaurants are New American or French. Most 3 star Michelin restaurants are French. If a place like Arun's in Chicago that does a wonderful multi-course fixed-price Thai dinner in a beautiful restaurant with a brigade system for service can't maintain four stars, there's a bias in the ratings, imo. I have a hard time believing that people immersed in spicy food cultures think they're ruining the flavor of quality ingredients. It'd be interesting to hear from a Sichuan, Indian, or Thai chef used to using expensive ingredients.

I got it the first time. But Americans rarely use the term "spicy" to refer to merely food with spices. And even less do we use the term "hot" to refer to merely food with spices. Only when we get in a discussion of Indian and other southern Asian foods does the issue usually come up because we're trying to describe food that has so many spices that isn't necessarily piquant. I imagine it's a result of our heritage from a country that thought boiled meats were flavorful dishes. Maybe you easterners use the term "spicy" more for things like mild Indian. I'll qualify my statement by saying that we westerners rarely use the term "spicy" to describe food with lots of spices unless they are also piquant. I don't know if it's wrong so much as not always right. Capsicum can be used to balance and bring out other flavors and create a new, more interesting whole. I just don't think most classicly trained chefs know what they're doing with chiles. I watched the Master Chef exam at the CIA on FoodTV a while back and was amazed by how out of the loop most of the chefs were when it came to non-European lineage cooking. Personally, I think wine (and truly almost anything but water) and hot (as in temperature) foods mask as much or more of the subtle flavors of foods as capsicum. But those are traditional ways of eating food in the west so it's okay and we even come up with ways of describing how they enhance a meal and a dish. Or we go out of our ways to use ingredients that are appropriate. I don't see that capsicum couldn't be thought of any differently. I imagine it will as the people who have grown up on spicy Mexican and Thai and Firey Pringles, etc, start eating out at nicer restaurants. There's already a certain critical mass, I think, of people who like piquant foods even among the wealthy.

We do need to just start using better words than "heat" or "hot": * This food is hot. It spilled and burned me. * This food is hot. My lips and tongue are tingling. * This food is hot. It's helping my digestion. I like "hot" for the first one, "spicy" for the second, and "warming" for the third. But I'm sure we'll just keep on using "hot" for everything. "Spicy" even means both the second and third. I don't think it's very widespread, though. You name primarily NY references. Chicago does have Arun's, a Thai restaurant that attempts a haute dining experience. Trotter's and Tru both in Chicago both use fusion bits here and there, but I never got anything remotely spicy or picante there. Maybe Trotter's Cabo restaurant. The Mansion in Dallas does SW haute cuisine that has some spiciness. If you do a search in Mobil for four and five star restaurants they're almost all French and New American. (Even Italian rarely makes it and they've recently cut out some like Arun's from ****.) I think one of the big problems is that ethnic food is so associated with low-cost food that it doesn't give those foods much of a chance to make it as haute cuisine. eg, Cafe Azul here in Portland, the best Mexican food restaurant I've ever been to in the US (and better than most I've been to in Mexico) recently closed. I loved them, but people often complained because their entrees were $15-20 (second tier pricing in Portland; our highest places are only in the $20-$30 range, really). Mexican food, they would say, should only be $10 at the most. It didn't matter that she was making complex, wonderful moles and using fresh, high quality ingredients. Even wealthier people associated the food with its cheaper cousin. I would love it if Indian, Thai, Sichuan, Mexican, etc, were allowed to attempt haute cuisine. But the market, especially as you move down to towns of only 200k or 100k and below, just doesn't support it. I think truly spicy food can be used if used with smart and creative menu and dish planning. eg, just like the contrast between hot and cold (temperature) on a plate, you can have spicy and taste-bud cooling items. So, you could have several slices of venison or elk or bison tenderloin cooked medium rare and infused with lemongrass and galangal sauced with a spicy green curry and a cooling sweet coconut milk sauce. Spicy foods may be a good excuse to use bolder flavors, such as game meats. Likewise, if you're doing a chef's menu, the chef can create a progression of dishes. eg, he can increase the spiciness as the meal moves along. Or, he can alternate spicy and mouth-cooling dishes. I think spiciness also often balances out flavors making a more subtle and complex product in the end. Thai curries are an excellent example because of their use of coconut milk. I think coconut milk has a very overwhelmingly uninteresting flavor by itself. Only with enough spice does its flavor get balanced, imo. And with the other strong and aromatic flavors of galangal, lemongrass, cilantro, fish sauce, lime juice, etc, you actually tone down these flavors with the spiciness and create a balance whole that takes an aware palate to distinguish. All the flavors are bold, but well-balanced they make a whole that has a type of subtlety. But that does mean you have to use meats, fishes, and vegetables that are up to this overall bold creation. But what's wrong with that? There are a lot of great aggressive ingredients out there.

The best book I've found for Mexican-American cooking is Peyton's La Cocina de la Frontera ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=books&n=507846 ). His recipe is a good one: 1 1/2 C white rice 2 roma tomatoes 1/3 C chopped onions 2 large cloves garlic 2 1/3 C water or chicken broth 3/4 tsp salt 1 1/2 C oil Broil the tomatoes until the skins are well charred. Place the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and salt in a blender and puree. Brown the rice in the oil, then strain. Return to heat, add the salsa (puree), and cook on medium until the liquid has been absored and the rice grains don't stick together, about 7 minutes. Add the water/broth, bring to a boil, and turn to low and cover for about 20-25 minutes. Remove from heat and leave covered for 15 minutes. The only way I'd change this is to add a little ground chile to the salsa, like ancho, New Mexico, or guajillo. Though I definitely don't stick too tightly to recipes. I might also fry the salsa first to deepen the flavor. Edited to add rice in the recipe. Apparently Cynthia G needs everything spelled out for her.

I think ethnic ingredients and preparations are sneaking in to lots of fine dining, including spiciness, at least New American fine dining. I think it's just a matter of tradition. 1) fine dining stemming mostly from French doesn't have a strong tradition of using heat, 2) subtlety has often been a goal of fine dining, which heat is thought to destroy. I also don't know how wine drinking plays into this. A lot of these places make a lot of money off of wine and I don't know how well (not being a wine drinker) most wines match up with spicy foods.

Mangoes for eating. Especially ever since on a hot evening my wife and I used them in....um.....a recreation of scenes from 9 1/2 Weeks. I love making mango for my wife and then sucking on the pit. However, since a friend told me that there's a reference to "sucking the mango" in the Kama Sutra as a method of fellatio, I've been questioning my sexuality. For juices, passion fruit, guava, or guanabana all rule. Just depends on my mood.

Tim's are good, especially if you like the thicker potato chips. My wife isn't a big fan because she doesn't like thing that are too thick and crunchy. She prefers a very light chip. Tim's are good stuff, though. I'm going to commit heresy, though, and say that two of my favorite chips are the most processed, unnatural chips out there: Pringles and Doritos. As long as you keep eating them, they're quite tasty. Each does leave a little bit of an aftertaste, though. A lot of salt, a lot of MSG, not too greasy, very light and crisp with a surprising range of flavorings in each Doritos flavor. The Cheetoh is another addictive chip. I probably like the classic Nacho Cheese Dorito and plain Pringle the best. I guess it depends on what you want out of your chip. I don't eat chips that often, but when I do, I want something that attacks my taste buds and is addictively crunchy.

Maybe I'll try to get in to one of the Vietnamese restaurants in town that serves a great salad from them and see what they're doing.

Pan and Big Bunny, Yep, a big purple blossom, which I peeled away until I got to a "creamy" center. I essentially thought about it like an artichoke heart. Even the most inner pieces, though, had a banana peel flavor. You know what I'm talking about? It's that kind of film-on-your-tongue, dry-your-mouth-out waxy/bitter taste like if you've ever bitten into a banana peel. It wasn't that harsh, but it was there. Do they need to be boiled or cooked first? I assumed they'd just be used like a vegetable. Do they need to be pickled or anything first. The ones I've had at restaurants taste fine.

It was nice and tight like it's supposed to be. I bought it at a Vietnamese grocer.

I've had banana blossom salads at Thai and Vietnamese restaurants and really liked them. However, I bought a banana blossom the other day and followed David Thompson's instructions (take off leaves to the white core, toss out the stamens, and shred) for preparing it and it tasted like banana peel. Yuck! Any recommendations?

According to the back of the jar, they're less than 1 g per serving. Nice and crunchy. My method is more to create diversity through cuisines. However, even though I like carbs (generally if enough fat and salt is added to them), I think about them as filler. They're there to give empty, cheap calories, in my mind. Basically, a starch is just a vehicle for the flavor of butter and salt, imo. I'm in favor of "replacements" if they work and create better food. But things like Atkin's bread -- the equivalent of diet soda -- is just yuck. We've been so anti-fat as a country, it'd be interesting just to spend some time in ethnic groceries looking for items that are low carb. For example, looking in my pantry, bamboo shoots are very low in carbs and have a nice crunchy texture. Bean sprouts, also, though they can't really be used warm, imo. I've been doing Thai cooking and there are some interesting methods for "straining" scrambled egg into simmering water or oil to cook them so they look like strands or almost like noodles. You know what would be a good snack substitute for crackers and chips, but will never go over in the US? Bugs. They're crunchy and probably all protein. Nuts are too high in carbs to really much on. But insects.... Also, don't the Japanese and other Asians fry fish skins and bones until they're crispy and brittle? Looking to ethnic cuisines, especially non-western ones, is probably the way to go.

I have the Nutristeam by Farberware. I think CI liked it second to the National (among the basic models). I find that if I leave it warming for too long it will develop a light crust, especially if I've tossed fat in with the rice. Not rinsing the rice seems to increase this possibility. What I've come to do is that when I hear it pop up to "warming", I either unplug it within a couple minutes or even remove the pot/insert from the warming element. It comes right out. I actually do like that crust sometimes. I think Koreans and other Asians have dishes or snacks specifically using that crust as well. The fuzzy logic models are soooo much more expensive than the standard models. (Mine's a 10 C and cost me $30 when I got it.) Can the fuzzy logic models cook sticky rice?

I prefer: http://www.nutritiondata.com because I have a better feel for what 3 or 4 ozs of something is than 100g. I also like the layout better. Here's cassava: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-001-02s01ud.html Way high, as expected. It's pretty starchy. Recently went to a Northern Chinese/Korean restaurant where they made egg rolls by using a very thin, crepe-like skin of egg, a thin omelette, essentially. The put everything in it, lightly dusted it with flour, and then deep-fried it. It was very good. I don't use too many substitutes on low carb. I just don't like the idea of it in general. I like to alter the way I eat instead. I think it's a better way anyhow. eg, instead of serving flank steak with mashed potatoes, I'll just have it on top of steamed vegetables nicely coated with butter and salt. Or on top of a salad with a homemade blue cheese dressing. So many people are meat and potatoes people, or meat and starch people. Vegetables in much of the country often just means some corn on the side, but nothing green. If people like this can restructure their eating habits to green things instead of white things (except cauliflower, of course), they'd serve themselves well. Here, I have one nice ingredient to use instead of croutons: fried onions. You can get them in any Asian grocery, pretty much. They're nice and crunchy, one of the more difficult textures to find in Atkin's besides chicharrones.

Scott, what'd that set you back?

Well, you're sure lucky this isn't my site. You'd be out!

If it's not a Friday or Saturday, you'll probably be okay. I imagine if they're booked they'll still try to fit you in. That's been my experience here in Portland. There aren't many restaurants here that can afford to turn away people.