prasantrin

Your time period may be a little difficult for gettting really good food. Many restaurants, stores, and other businesses will be closed around Jan 1-3 (sometimes longer) for the New Year holiday (oshogatsu), especially the smaller places. You may want to check that out before you leave--even Tsukiji (the fish market) might be closed.

Did anyone notice that Kylie Kwong's restaurant, Billy Kwong, made it to R. J. Apple's list of "restaurants worth hopping on a plane for"? It's in his last New York Times article here (you may have to register to read it). Given his love of good food, that must speak positively about her cooking (even though what I've seen from her TV show doesn't quite strike my fancy).

aka: Pigs in a Blanket, albeit pretty fancy ones. SB (maybe Pigs in a Silk Purse? ) ← Pigs in cashmere? Sausage rolls, actually! They're available in every frozen food department (Schneider's were my favourites when I was growing up) across Canada, though they're more British than Canadian, I think, and they're almost always made with puff pastry. I make sausage rolls a lot using store-bought puff pastry. I add different things to them, depending on my mood--roasted asparagus, roasted red peppers, etc. I freeze them raw, and bake them off as I need them. I should also add that I slice them before baking--it's much easier than slicing them after. I also like to put a bit of camembert or brie with some jam in puff pastry. My camembert/brie always oozes out, but I don't mind. I like it when the jam mixes with the melted cheese, sticks to the pan, and gets caramelized.

I just got my camera back from Canon (after having dropped it in my soup....), and Y18 000 later, I can now take a picture of them. They may have all melted together, though. One of the bags definitely did, since I accidentally sat on them for an extended period of time, so I had to eat them all in one go. Oops! I'll take care of that after I get back from the gym! Oh, about the kuri KitKat. I picked up a non-chocolate-coated kuri kitkat at my Coop last week. It's not for me, so I can't open the box, but I thought it was neat. I'll take a picture of the box if I can remember what I did with it.

Somewhere, in either this topic or another topic on this book, it is mentioned that Dorie gets 5oz/cup using the dip and sweep method. You might want to up your flour a wee bit more.

This is exactly the kind of cake I love!!! It has everything--dacquoise, sponge, buttercream, nuts....the perfect combination. Mmmmmmmm....I think I need me that cookbook!

My mother loves food, and loves eating, but she didn't learn to cook until she had been married a few years. She doesn't have much of an attention span (I think she has ADD), so one thing I never learned from her was how to follow a recipe, and how to use measuring utensils. Even when she bakes, she barely uses measuring cups and spoons, but just kind of throws things together. As a result, she can never bake the same thing twice, and sometimes her experiments have disastrous results (not really disastrous, but her mango pudding with clumps of cream cheese wasn't exactly pretty...). I, on the other hand, am usually quite anal about following recipes and measuring.

While I understand you might not like that style of service, I've noticed at many Chinese restaurants, this is the style. Many places I frequent assume diners have a certain familiarity with the menu, and so they do not stray far from the table, thinking the diners will place their order rather quickly. At a Chinese place, I would hardly refer to it as "a definite no no." Why reply with a baffled expression? Many people don't mind msg in their food (like the millions of Chinese and Japanese who use it in their own cooking, and the millions of Americans and Canadians who eat prepared foods that contain msg). If you put it that way, I can understand why they put the fly in your girlfriend's soup.... About the order of dishes, I think it's important to note that Chinese dishes are often meant to be communal dishes. That $6.50 was probably not intended to be an individual serving, however weak the flavour. And soup is often served along with the other dishes, rather than before other dishes, and eaten along with the meal. Same goes with other dishes ordered--they don't bring the dishes out "too quickly", but perhaps you prefer not to eat them in the style which they are meant to be eaten (in a Chinese restaurant, anyway, where many dishes are eaten at the same time, rather than one by one). While I do not defend the reportedly poor quality of the food you ate, I do take some offence to some of the complaints you made about the service which, at at *Chinese* restaurant, are not necessarily indicative of a bad restaurant. And if you really said the things you said you did, in the same kind of tone in which you wrote of them, I'd have put the fly in your soup, too.

40 Euros?!??!!? Was that just for eating over there, or was some of it for bringing back to Canada? I can't wait to see the rest of your trip! I would love to go to France, but it's a bit far down on my "must-go-to-places" list, so I shall live vicariously through you until I can get.

I think it's usually just eaten with rice. The advertisements I've seen for it have some on top of freshly cooked rice. Think of it as furikake, but more pastey than furikake-y.

If you like steak with anchovies, try it with nuoc cham. It's the standard condiment for steak, prime rib, etc. at our house. Lots of garlic is important.

That's how I guessed, too. At the St. Paul Farmer's Market, though, there are some Wisconsin-based purveyors, so I thought it could be in either state.

Someone in Wisconsin or maybe Minnesota?

Ahem....I think it's Claudia. (in my younger days, I was often mistaken for being a boy, so I'm very sensitive about these things!) Am I the only one who can't get to the pics? I get an error message when I click on the links.

About the recipes, I think it's great you're willing to leave them for them. When you do quit, however, (if you haven't already), I would make it known to them that you are doing them a favour by doing so. Something along the lines of..."I'm very sorry, but this really isn't working out for me so I've decided to leave. I've developed a number of recipes for you (show them the recipe book here), and if you like, I'll leave them for you so your customers can continue to enjoy the same products they've come to love." I know it may seem petty, but given how clueless the owner seems to be, I think you need to make it clear just how much you've done for the bakery. I doubt they realize the goods they sell are really a product of your work, not just a recipe out of a book. If the wife really is as vindictive or controlling as she appears, she'll probably decline and that will give you the opportunity to take all your recipes out of there without bad feelings on either side. I suspect if you leave the recipes, they're going to tinker with them, and the quality will go down, but they're going to claim they are using the same recipes. Then they're going to find a way to blame you (to the customers) for the crappy goods.

well if this isn't a coinky-dink! I just arrived home from Kyushu an hour ago, and was going to post a pic of the pumpkin KitKat I bought there! They were called mini KitKat or something like that, and are little round balls. I thought they were chocolate-covered almonds at first. Even though iw as scooped, at least I won't have to deal wtih image gullet now!

Another Filipino blog I like, though she doesn't do Filipino food exclusively, is Desserts Come First. I love her pictures!

In some cultures, what you call "lying" in this context is called "saving face". And even if you are the one being offended, it's still important to help the offender "save face". And in some cultures, "a lot of harm, and needless confusion, and bad feelings come from" telling the truth about something so minor as eating not-so-good food in a restaurant (and really, bad food is pretty minor unless you get sick or die from eating it).

I write a letter, if it's really that important to me (and it very rarely is, with regards to restaurants, anyway). One thing that I think should be remembered here, is that different cultures have different ways of dealing with giving (and receiving) criticism, whether it be constructive criticism or otherwise. My mother is Filipino; she can complain with the best of them, even if there's really nothing to complain about. My father was Thai; he could put up with just about anything. I mostly take after my father--unless strongly provoked or offended, I won't make a fuss. In order for me to complain at a restaurant, the food would have to be inedible or there would have to be something disgusting on/in my dining ware. Otherwise, it's not really that important in my world.

I almost never, ever, say anything critical. I like to stick to, "Everything's fine." The food would have to be really, really bad for me to say anything negative, or there would have to be a bug or something gross in my food or beverage. But then, I have suffered (and still occasionally suffer) through decades of embarrassing dining episodes involving my mother, who doesn't hesitate to complain, and who rarely does so in either a friendly or a positive way.

CRAAAAAAAPPPP!!! All this time, I've just been glad you didn't have any pictures to make me feel worse for missing this. And now you post pictures! That Persian fairy floss looks a lot like the sugar stuff used in Roti Sai Mai (I think that's the name)--have you ever had it? If you go to the food floor at the Emporium one of the stalls sometimes has it. It's like cotton candy (but with better flavour) rolled in thin pancakes. I think I'd love that dessert--I'm a sucker for anything with cotton candy! Edited to add: I just did a search and according to one site, roti sai mai has Islamic origins, so I guess the Persian floss and sai mai must be related!

I don't know how much you're willing to spend, but these tents from Costco are decent. I'm not sure if they carry these particular tents in their stores, but if you drop by your nearest Costco, you can take a look at their stock. (They may not have a lot, because the tents are usually summer items.)

I don't wrap in foil. If I'm doing a whole loaf, I cut it in half, lay it out with the buttered side up, and then toast/broil it (in Japan I always use the toaster oven for garlic bread). I don't notice that it burns the garlic (I'm using dried, anyway) so I assume it doesn't, and I like the crispiness of the buttered side. Wrapping in foil, to me, just makes soft (sometimes slightly soggy if you don't unwrap it in a timely manner) bread.

I have always made garlic bread with minced garlic (fresh) mixed into butter, spread on bread, and sprinkled with a bit of salt. It was great, but I also thought something was missing. Then I bought some very good quality dried garlic--coarse, not fine--and sprinkled it on buttered bread with a bit of coarse salt. That did the trick! It's just what I crave when I think of garlic bread. I guess all those not-so-good Italian restaurants had an effect on me, afterall!

Thanks! I made some tonight (which is breakfast time in most of the eGullet world, so I feel I can post this here), but I couldn't remember where I put my dried chives so I used Sunny Paris seasoning from Penzey's (which has dried chives, dried shallots, and other good stuff). I used about 2 tsp, or maybe 1--I didn't measure, so I can't be sure. The flavour of my biscuits (which were more like scones since I was too lazy to cut them out and just made wedges) was amazing. I used a very aged cheddar, so the cheddar flavour was very pronounced, but the Sunny Paris was equally strong so it was a great combination. Too bad everything else about them sucked! I wonder if there's a baking failure topic where I can post pictures. (I'm still going to eat them!)