ExtraMSG

Just to be clear, if you go back and look at this thread http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=48119&st=0 I think you'll see I'm not confused on that point, mongo. And it's a good one. I'm more concerned about maintaining knowledges/technologies, especially as they relate to quality and diversity. But I certainly wouldn't ever want a person to avoid ever making Indian food because it seemed overwhelming to make their own masalas.

mongo, arguments by analogy always fail because you're never talking about the thing itself, but always using something similar to the thing itself. They always take a little charity. I don't want to give the impression that I think packets of pre-ground spices or mixes of spices are bad. In my own pantry I have many pre-ground spices and chiles. For some of the more important items that are easy to keep in their whole form, such as coriander seed, cumin, cardamon, clove, chiles, etc, I also have them in whole form. Depending on the circumstances, I'll use one rather than the other. My problem is more with the idea suggested by your original critique that exalting the ideal of food from scratch is wrong. I don't think anyone suggested that it was evil to use pre-ground, but I do think: 1) You don't save much time by getting pre-ground 2) It's cheaper to grind your own 3) You can keep your spices and mixes fresher by grinding your own 4) You can taylor it over time to your own tastes 5) You're sustaining a technology/knowledge Also, one of the problems in the US is there really aren't that many cities where the turnover, even in Indian grocers, on spices is that good. And you often have to buy relatively large bags, like a cup or more, at a time of spice mixes, meaning that people like me who make Indian food occasionally, rather than daily or often, have spices sitting around getting stale in the pantry. PS If it was possible, I'd probably grind my own wheat, and I know I'd grind and nixtamalize my own maize. And, I don't eat or keep mayo that much, but I do make my own when I need it most of the time. Mayo's really not that hard to make with a cuisinart. I'm not saying that everyone can or should do this, but I think keeping it as an ideal is a good thing because it's not unrelated to quality.

And this is a good thing? Most people can't tell the difference between Olive Garden and Babbo, but would you exalt that?

Really, mongo? Not to get into yet another argument on authenticity/traditionality and cooking from scratch (see my most recent comments in the Texas thread), but I think that's one of the worst sentiments I can imagine for a food lover. Some results of taking that literally in America: * Only make mac and cheese from boxes of Kraft * Pasta sauce comes from a jar * Garlic bread comes out of a foil-lined bag * Cheesecake comes from a box in the freezer section Etc. Further, you could only buy your produce at the local mega-mart, and if your tomatoes are tasteless, and your apples taste like carboard, so be it, at least you're not "more authentic than the people who actually...eat the food on a daily basis". There are lots of advantages to cooking from scratch: cost, flavor, experience, etc. Usually, the only advantage to not cooking from scratch is time. It can be an important or determining factor, I understand. But a lot is lost in privileging convenience. How many people in the US know how make pasta sauce, bread, mac and cheese, or cheesecake from scratch, even following a recipe? How long following America's lead before India is the same? If it's just about convenience, go out and eat. If you're just trying to get something quick, they can probably do it better than you anyway.

http://www.extramsg.com/modules.php?name=N...=article&sid=19 Spent a week on Glen Lake near Traverse City, Michigan. Didn't eat out as much as I normally do, but still got a chance to sample a lot of food. My favorite spot wasn't actually in NW Michigan, it was outside of Ludington: Bortell's Fish Market. Fantastic spot. Had some excellent whitefish. Pleva's Meats in Cedar was also a big highlight. Cherry-pecan brats, house-made jerkeys, and pepperoni sticks made great snacks. The place smelled of smoking meats. Mmmm. Hit lots of produce stands and sampled a 1/2 a million strawberries and twice that many cherries. Very enjoyable. Follow the link above for my full report and for a link to lots of photos.

I don't know, Mongo. I always make my own garam masala. It's always more fragrant than what I get at the Indian grocers and I know how fresh it is. Plus, I can play with the amounts to fit my needs. It's pretty damn easy to make. Toss some spices onto a piece of foil in the oven until fragrant. Whiz in the coffee grinder. My rec is to get an Indian cookbook (Sahni or Jaffrey) and play with their combos. Peterson's Sauces is also a resource I like. Mexican women use Dona Maria mole and Americans use Ragu pasta sauce, doesn't make it right. It's a convenience, but I don't think it's much of one.

Okay, I'm coming to Memphis through Little Rock and driving back home (to Oregon) on Sunday the 22nd. Give me the best that I can get in an afternoon, especially BBQ. I will hit multiple places and certainly overeat. I will have a friend with me, so that helps. Is Sunday a problem in Memphis and Little Rock?

New taqueria, a little dive just north of Tacoma on 17th in Sellwood. But it was quite good. I had three tacos with freshly made tortillas (25 cents extra -- but ask for it): carne asada, adovada, and al pastor. They had sold out of carnitas. All three were good. They cook each to order and do a good job of keeping the meat tender while searing on a caramelly crust. The marinades for both the adovada and the al pastor were tasty. The tortillas were tender and the tacos included cilantro and cabbage. Their salsas are acceptable, their red a slightly watery tomato and chile de arbol salsa, the green, an avocado puree. If you eat in, they also give you free chips, which are premade and mediocre. But chips aren't something I expect from a taqueria and it's a real bonus when they're the quality of La Iguana Feliz's. The menu included burritos, tortas, tamales, and enchiladas. There are several specials, too, such as three tacos, beans, and rice for $5. They also have eggs and chorizo.

Squeat, that's sad if SF's service has gotten better. I go to the bay area once or twice a year, but my big trip was last summer. If it was worse before that.... In SF we hit Masa's, Gary Danko's, and Fifth Floor on the top end, plus several lower and mid-level places. Several major service glitches at all three of these, plus long waits between courses. But the lower and mid-level places weren't very accomodating either, even for the lower price. eg, at Zuni, my friend and I just wanted to get some oysters and go. They said no (there was no line or wait). Other things here and there and just a consistent level of rudeness that wouldn't be tolerated here in Portland or in my friend's home of Dallas. Never encountered that on other food trips. I had really, really good service at both The French Laundry and Chez Panisse however. Admittedly, I've had better luck at some ethnic places in SF like Salvadorean and Mexican restaurants. (Chinese, however....)

Eagerly awaiting pictures.....

The worst service I've ever encountered was in a "food city": San Francisco. Abyssmal service pretty uniformly, at both high end and low end places, and on things I think are pretty fundamental, like course timing. Dinners would take a minimum of 3 hours with waits of 30 minutes or more between courses. Only once you got out of SF, even just over to Berkeley or up to the wine country, did things improve. I'll take the NW's laid-back attitude with minor gaffs here and there over professional, but fundamentally flawed, service anyday. I wouldn't mind if PNW servers paid a little more attention to the details, but not if it meant they were going to cop an attitude. I can wear shorts and a polo to almost any restaurant in Portland and still be treated as well as a customer in suit and tie.

It's also style. Many NWers don't even like the high end dining style with formal service and architectural presentations. And one diner's creativity can be another diner's pretentiousness. Personally, I like both styles. When I visited the bay area, I enjoyed my meal at Chez Panisse equally with The French Laundry.

I've always found that if you take the top restaurants from a lot of major cities and put them up against similar top restaurants in cities like SF or Chicago, most cities do okay. But once you start to broaden things, throwing in ethnicities, trying to eat at a different place every night, etc, you see the weaknesses of these lesser food cities. If I go and get the things I like at my favorite places in Portland, I would put them up against some of the best dishes I've had at five star restaurants throughout the US. If I just compared our best Cuban or our best Mexican or whatever, we might be fine as well. But the sheer quantity and diversity that a city like NY has keeps cities like Seattle from truly competing. In basketball terms, cities like NY have a deep bench.

Thanks for the detailed report!

I just posted on the larb thread the version of nam sod I've had (more or less): http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=12302&st=420 Thompson has the sour sausage as "naem". I think that I've had the sour sausage at a local place, but they call it a non-Thai name: Heavenly Ring. It was sourish and didn't taste like other Thai sausages I've had. I don't think Thompson has this salad that I've had. But working with Thai transliterations are a pain. "Naem" is the sausage, right? But "nahm" means water, right? Is there also a "nam" that rhymes with "lamb" that means something else? And what's "sod" mean? What specifically does the kao tod part refer to?

Larb alternative, nam sod: Made it jumping off from this recipe: http://importfood.com/recipes/naemsod.html I ground the pork instead and blanched it. I also julienned the onions and added just a bit of sugar to take the edge off my not-young ginger. Some fish sauce for salt. I also used red cabbage and julienned it and put it underneath to make it eat more like a normal salad. Could be improved, but decently tasty alternative to larb. There seem to be many variations. There's a recipe for a version in the recipe gullet by PIM: http://recipes.egullet.com/recipes/r765.html

Sophie D. Coe in America's First Cuisines on river snails (speaking about Mayan foods):

There seems to be a lot of confusion over terms. There can be an authentic cuisine, an original cuisine, and a traditional cuisine. None of these are necessarily the same, however. God didn't say "Let there be Mexican food" (although if he had, he certainly would have saw it was good), and I think it would an elusive pursuit to try to find the "original" Mexican cuisine, even for an anthropologist. The best you can do is ask what people in Mexico were eating at a specific time and place. However, certainly there is an authentic cuisine and a traditional cuisine. How do you know if something is authentic Mexican? Well, do Mexicans eat it? Have they ever eaten it? When they eat it, do they consider it the food of their country? A salsa made of soy sauce spiced by wasabi is probably not authentic Mexican. Could it be some day? Sure, if Mexicans start making it and serving it in their non-Japanese restaurants. Would it be traditional? No. At least not for a few generations at least. Just like a metate or molcajete is traditional and a blender is becoming so, but isn't really yet worthy of being called traditional since it's only been around for a few decades. And these questions are totally separate from the question of quality. When it's not tomato season, canned tomatoes are certainly something any cook should look at. And chips and salsa were a great invention that I wouldn't be at all disappointed to see adopted in all of Mexico.

Thought I'd hit one of the few BBQ spots that I haven't tried in Portland, Russell Street Barbecue. The restaurant is pretty nice (for a BBQ joint) inside. It's clean, open, and pleasant. I got there at the end of the lunch rush and made a takeout order and was told it would take 20 minutes. 45 minutes later, I had my food. They gave me a free pecan praline to apologize. 45 minutes, though, is a hell of a long wait for BBQ. However, for really good BBQ, I'd gladly accept the wait. But Russell Street's Q isn't really good. It's okay, though. I got the meatapalooza ($15, overpriced), the three meat combo. I chose the pulled pork, baby back ribs, and beef brisket. The worst of the three were the ribs. The texture reminded me of poached chicken -- not braised chicken, poached chicken. The ribs weren't adequately smokey, imo, and I suspect that they're par-boiled. They were also small and not very meaty. I generally prefer spare ribs, though. The next best item was the brisket. One of their mistakes may be explained on the back of their menu: "We provide the freshest natural meats, very lean and never fed animal proteings or hormones." It's the lean part that raises my suspicions. This is BBQ folks -- a method of cooking, like braising, where you are, essentially, purposefully overcooking the meat. It needs fat to render and lubricate the sinews. RS's brisket is too dry. It's tender (probably too much so, since it's in lots of little pieces) and adequately smokey. There's a slight bark, but not enough to make up for the dryness. A little better is the pulled pork. It wasn't really any less dry, but the flavor was a little nicer and the texture a little better. The back of their menu holds another clue as to why their Q may not be as good as one would hope: "In our pursuit of regional barbecue, we have found that while different meats are regional, the real difference lies in the sauce." Sauce should not be the first thing mentioned when you talk about your BBQ. It's like basing an opinion of McDonald's french fries on the ketchup. Their passion for sauce was apparent when I received my meats covered in sauce even though I asked for it plain. Again, it's not bad (it's no Big Daddy's, that's for sure), but it's not LOW or Campbell's. It's mediocre BBQ.

Tina's and Red Hills are the other two that are the established favorites. I haven't been out that way since last summer, though, so I'm not up on what's new. That "tart" was like a cheesecake without cheese, only mushrooms -- a shroomcake. Way too much of the same flavor. A sliced mushroom galette would have been so much more elegant and so much more satisfying. And it would have taken a hell of a lot fewer mushrooms. Blech. One of the worst dishes I've had in an upscale restaurant.

We were there at 9:00 and most of the tables had people. That was on a Wednesday. They just got featured in Portland Monthly, too. It's not a big place and they generally only have two people working the kitchen, often only one. I don't think turnover in a place like this matters quite as much as a Mexican-American restaurant where lots of items are premade and sitting around. Most things appear to be made ala minute (including the tortillas).

Mixed results on my third visit to Nuestra Cocina. Got the sopes that I got on my first visit for an appetizer. They've definitely reduced the size of the portion. It was a big portion before. Now it's a small portion -- three silver dollar sized sopes. Had the ceviche also. I'd say it's a bad ceviche. The fish was ground up You get none of the nice texture of the fish. The fish was a little fishy, too, and the ceviche overpowered by onion. The chips that came with it were decent, though a few were a little overcooked. The entrees, however, were much better. We got the huachinango (snapper), the tamales, and the camarones al mojo de ajo. All three were fair portions and tasty. My shrimp were the most expensive item at $16. The tamales were vegetarian, the masa light, and the tamales flavorful. The snapper is still one of their best dishes, cooked in banana leaves and served with roasted potatoes and a couple salsas. The shrimp are garlicky and smoky and served with some nice beans. I was definitely disappointed with the appetizers this time, but the entrees were very good. I can't an old menu, though, to compare whether the menu is changing much or to see if the prices have changed at all. I went to Taqueria Nueve not long ago. I like both about equally, I think. And I still think both are slightly better than La Calaca overall, which is often overpriced and inconsistent on the more expensive entrees. Still, none of these are in the same league as Cafe Azul but they're worth eating at and some items are very good.

skyflyer3, that description is appropriate, I think. The Northwest style is very "clean". clarklewis is even moreso. Either here or Chowhound, or maybe both, I've heard some complaints about the depth of flavor at clarklewis. Except in the winter with braises, I just don't think that's the northwest style. Many of the best things are often lighter, maybe more Mediterranean. Like light Spanish or Italian dishes.

I'm looking to make a similar dish. Thompson does have a recipe. Pim, also has a version in the recipe gullet, which is better formatted on her blog: http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2003/07/n...d_kaotod_n.html Not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for. A local Thai place here makes something they call nam sod which is a lot like you describe, essentially a larb with different flavoring. Here's the recipe from an online source I'm looking at (minus the pork skin): http://importfood.com/recipes/naemsod.html

Thanks for the showdown. I usually get banana leaves in the freezer section of Asian grocers, although some Mexican grocers have them, too. I've never had cochinita pibil in the Yucatan, so I don't know what's most traditional, but I have had it at several restaurants that are trying to make regional Mexican food, and it's never been stewish. More like a roast. Certainly there's some liquid, but not as much or more than there is meat. Again, like a roast rather than a stew. My understanding is that it's traditionally closer to Carolina BBQ or Hawaii's kalua pork. Here's Zaslavsky's description in Cook's Tour of Mexico: Interestingly, if you have Ortiz's Complete Mexican Cooking (at least the 1967 edition), her recipe is for a 10 lb suckling pig.