prasantrin

Meeeeee too! As soon as I saw the picture I thought it was filled with caramel, and then I lusted after it. Less lusting once I read it was chestnut puree. . . gfron1--do you think the pastry could be done with something like the korova cookie dough? I was thinking it would be really good as a tart. Now I want some korova cookies schmeared with caramel and sprinkled with coarse salt. Darn you gfron1!

gfron1--that's looks awesome! Where did you get the calamansi from? Did you actually juice all those little fruit yourself, or did you manage to find bottled juice?

Could someone translate the first few lines of that recipe for me? I think I've figured it out, but I want someone else's trained recipe translation mind on it. ← replace "garlic" with water in the first instruction and should make more sense. ← And in line 2 you put the garlic and oil in another saucepan, not a saute pan, right? Not that it matters that much, but since you eventually put the pan containing the garlic and oil over the simmering water, it seems you would need to put the garlic and oil in a saucepan smaller than that holding the water. (nice run-on sentence there) One would think Star Chefs would do a better job editing the recipes on their site.

Could someone translate the first few lines of that recipe for me? I think I've figured it out, but I want someone else's trained recipe translation mind on it.

I think you need to clarify what you mean by "authentic" and in what way you deem the recipe as authentic or not. Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe is quite authentic, as is hzrt8w's. But if you want to add more oil and chiles to them, that would probably bring their recipes even closer to one you would get in Sichuan. Although I have to wonder, if you're serving it over pasta, just how "authentic" do you really need it to be?

Is Costco selling Chilean sea bass? That's not good. . . Do they say anything about from where or how it is sourced?

If the chemists don't respond and you don't want to pay exorbitant plumber fees, you can buy your own auger or snake at your local hardware store. Cheap ones start at $10-ish dollars, but you can also rent more expensive electric ones. http://www.zhoujichem.com/english/cpjs-1.htm says:

So how many people have signed on so far?

If you read the article, Anthos supposedly has a $24 prix fixe. Whether that be at lunch or dinner, I do not know. (I just looked at the website--it's now $28 and it's for lunch.) For some people, $30 per person is cheap, or at least inexpensive, especially when comparing it to Per Se.

The New York Times has some suggestions about cheap eats. Suggestions include:

That's service! Of the internet shopping I've done in Japan, the best service was from the guy I tried to order the Meyer lemons from. He called me within an hour of my placing the order to tell me they were out of stock (out of season, actually). I've been looking for other sources of brisket, and have not had much luck so far. It seems most of the brisket in Japan is pre-sliced for bulgogi or yakiniku (I can't remember which, but it's also very very expensive), and larger pieces of brisket are much much more expensive than what this guy is selling for. I did find a source for reasonably priced brisket, but I'd be required to buy two 1-1.5 kg pieces, which doubles what I'm willing to spend and leaves me with an extra brisket I won't need (I've only got 35 weeks left in Japan,so I don't think I need that much meat). I guess if I really want corned beef (and I do!!), I'll have to go back to this guy. He did offer to cover the shipping if a re-ordered it, so in that sense, he's made up for the goof. And I got a free pack of Polish sausage even though I didn't put the freebie code with my order (I e-mailed it later). mukki--I'm surprised about Costco. I checked their website, and according to their FAQ: Assuming Costco Business follows the same terms of service as Costco.com, then they should notify you that the item is not in stock before your order is received. I'd call and complain. Beanie--you may be right about not being able to afford a more sophisticated inventory system. It is a small company, though it does do both retail and wholesale business. But yes, they should definitely have some kind of option to cancel the order if an item is out of stock. Perhaps most of their customers order a lot more than I did, so they would rather have an imcomplete order than none at all, but I only ordered a few things, so it was really quite inconvenient for me!

Thanks, Tess. I just heard from them, and they apologized and said they would waive the shipping charge if I were willing to reorder the item. They also said, however: Even though it's a small company, I don't see how it's not possible to keep track of stock, and I definitely don't see how difficult it would be to e-mail people whose orders may be incomplete due to insufficient stock. It's just a courtesy, in my opinion, and one that any business should provide! At the very least, they should have a box to check on the order page (like Amazon does) asking customers if they would prefer to hold the order until complete or to ship in incomplete. Oh well. It's done, and now I just have to decide if I want to go through with the rest of my order. I really wanted to make that corned beef!! (And plus I ordered their par-baked rye bread so I could have corned beef sandwiches, and now I'll have rye bread with no corned beef!!!) At least I'll have my pork belly so I can start on my bacon!

Last week I placed an order for some meat online. I had asked the purveryors several questions about their products prior to placing the order, including some products listed as "sold out" as well as those in stock. I told them if the "sold out" items would be restocked soon, I would postpone my order, otherwise I would place it immediately. Shipping was going to amount to roughly 10% of my order, and I did not want to increase that percentage. They told me I should go ahead a place my order of items they had in stock, as they would probably not be receiving additional stock until the end of the month. I placed the order, and received a "your order has been shipped" notice, and in that order, they said they were out of stock of one of the items I wanted, so they could not ship it. Then they said they were looking forward to my next order!! With the order as sent, shipping amounted to a whopping 20% of the total order--peanuts for some, but not for me. My questions: Should they not have informed me that one of the items I wanted was out-of-stock before they processed and shipped the order? I certainly would not have placed it the order had I known they would not have included that particular item (it was one of the items I had especially wanted, and I had first inquired about it when I contacted them--it was listed as "in stock" when I placed my order. It's brisket, by the way, and it's almost impossible to find in stores in Japan). If the unshipped item is re-ordered, who should be responsible for paying for the shipping of said item? From their "we're looking forward to your next order" comment, I'm guessing they think I should place another order when that item is in stock again (they say in about two weeks), and pay for the shipping. If that happened, I would only be ordering that item, and then shipping would be about 40% of the total order. It's not going to happen. . . I have contacted them, and am waiting to hear what their response is, but in general, how should back-orders, etc. be handled by retail food outets? If I'm going to argue with them about this, I need some ammunition!

You're forgetting that Manitoba has the third-largest French-speaking minority population in Canada. If you go to almost any restaurant business in the St. Boniface area of Winnipeg, you can get service in either French or English! Plus there are loads of French restaurants and bakeries (including my favourite bakery, Le Croissant) in St. B.

I had to look back to see what you were talking about, and yes!! ChefCrash--please visit Labib's Bakery to try the saj manaeesh FoodMan is talking about! And see if you can get that recipe, too! While you're in Syria, perhaps you can try baklava from many different bakeries. I still believe the best baklava/baqlawa I've ever had was Syrian, but I don't know why it was the best. I do think Middle Eastern baklava/baqlawa is much better than the Greek version, though.

Why should the number of people signing on influence whether the list is published or not? I would think it should be published regardless.

Agreed that moron may have been harsh, though I was calling Julie a moron, not Julia (I have little patience for women of Julie's ilk who whine and complain and act like little children--which is pretty much what we see of her in the trailer). And I wasn't angry about it. It was more of an eye-rolling comment rather than one of anger.

That may be a little harsh. I never met her, but the Julia Child I know comes from reading many books and watching all ten years of The French Chef (on dvd) and most of Juila and Jacques: Cooking at Home (on PBS). Meryl Streep's portrayal appears faithful to me. The Hulu clip is unavailable outside the US, but YouTube is here. <edit for spellling> ← In what way was it harsh? The character Meryl Streep portrayed, as seen on the preview, is little different from the character Dan Akroyd played on SNL. Granted, we are only seeing snippets of the movie, but from what I saw, Julia Child was no deeper or more complex than a pot of boiling water, and to top it off, from the trailer I got the feeling she was merely a silly woman who wanted to cook. I think there was a lot more to her than that. (And am I to believe she gave a raspberry to some lady who told her she had no talent for cooking?) Poetic license, blah blah. Julia Child was a real person, and if the trailer is an indication of how she is portrayed in the movie, then she deserved a more respectful portrayal than that (but if the movie were true to her life, it never would have been made into a movie--certainly not enough of a hollywood-esque life to entice the masses).

To some degree, I think having an eG code of ethics and accompanying "badge" implies that eG has more power or at least prestige than most similar organizations. If you didn't believe it did, why bother with it at all?

It won't. A bum recommendation isn't a question of ethics. We're not trying to solve all the world's problems, or even all the world's ethics problems. We're trying to provide some good guidance for online writers, and I think we achieve that with the code. ← If an undeserved recommendation is given because of a personal relationship of the blogger/poster with the restaurant owners/chefs/etc. then is that not an ethical consideration? This point is somewhat covered by having to dislose comps, etc. but not entirely.

This may have already been mentioned, but using chile-infused olive oil for roasting cauliflower (and asparagus) is really really good!

I watched the preview. I'll be passing on this one. Just judging from the short bit I watched, they seem to have reduced Julia Child to a caricature. And the Julie character (I say "character" because I don't know how much of "real life" made it into the movie) seems like a moron.

Is that the same as sapodilla? They're called chico in the Philippines, I think. Oops. I just looked up Chrysophyllum cainito L. and that's the star fruit I know. But I thought the flesh was white. When we bought them, the skin was still more green than purple, so perhaps that's why the flesh was more white? The syzygium samarangense is what I know as rose apple. It's the star apple which looks like passion fruit. When we were looking for star apples, we found the passion fruits looked very similar, at least on the exterior. The interiors of course were very different. This is what the star apples we found looked like http://tropilab.com/chrysop-cai.html and the passion fruits looked like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passiflora_edulis , especially the picture at the bottom subtitled `purple passion fruits for sale`. All those pictures of delicious tropical fruits made be go looking for mangos today. In Tokyo I got 2 Thai mangos for Y498 and 3 Filipino mangos for the same price. Today I found just 1 Thai for Y498 and 1 Filipino for Y450!!!! The same varieties, too! Oh well, I`ll just have to live vicariously through torakris`pictures.

Is the jackfruit the one in front of the lime-like fruit and to the left of the pink dragon fruit? If it is, the fruit immediately in front of it (white but with a pinkish tinge to the outer part) is star apple. The rose apple is the one that's kind of bell-shaped that's got white flesh and pink/fuschia skin. Star apples are one of my mother's favourite fruits, and we scoured the markets in Siem Reap looking for them (they kind of look like passion fruit, so we sometimes got confused between the two). May is a good time for tropical fruits, but not a good time for weather unless you like hot and humid! That's my dilemma. I love tropical fruits, but I hate hot and humid weather!

That sounds easy enough! Hypothetically, the de-greaser could be sourced today! Thanks! (hypothetically, of course. )