Tess

There used to be a demi-glace or two available from D'Artangnan. I thought they were pretty good. The Williams Sonoma stuff is not real demiglace, and I don't think it will work in a recipe that calls for it. It's more or less like bouillion. Demiglace Gold is similar but very weak, I find.

I think this is probably the same article as in the other thread. With regard to the sushi, a number of rolls you see offered ready made have a fair amount of mayonnaise in them. You can tell just by looking.

I crave salt, grease and sugar. With the way I bloat, I need salt like a hole in the head, but now I'm on Weight Watchers I let myself have it because it does the least long-term damage to my diet. If I can manage it, I head down to the Japanese market and pick up some sashimi. Otherwise I get a piece of salmon or ahi or something, and cook it. A good meal of rather fatty fish always seems to hit the spot no matter what I think I'm craving.

I've resisted getting a PDA-- last thing I need is yet another gadget-- but if I had one, I would use it to keep grocery lists, along with lists of what's in the cupboard. My biggest problem is that there are a lot of variables based on what is available or looks good in the store, especially when it comes to produce and fish. Even if I have a plan, I'll often change my mind, and then I can't remember if I have at home the things I want to cook it with. As it it, I have a small notebook with not one but three lists in it, for the nearby supermarket, Whole Foods, and Mitsuwa. And, yes, the new list usually starts the same day I go shopping at whatever place.

The article is sort of puzzling. It treats the restaurant as yet another theme-park novelty but suggests that the owners think it has therapeutic value. Which is it? I spent some years being borderline anorexic, serious enough to have seen doctors for the condition. Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine a special restaurant being helpful in any but the most incidental sense. If you happen to be able to have an enjoyable meal in a restaurant, that may be a small step in helping you overcome the disorder, but why not a regular restaurant? This notional business about separating the idea of the food out from its nutritional content does not seem like the kind of thing that will help at all, rather the opposite. Edited to add: in the words of the article, the menu "deliberately distances dishes from the ingredients they contain," so my last sentence may be a misrepresentation," but I find the whole thing quite vague.

Oatmeal cooked in milk with Vermont maple syrup. Leftover baked pears.

I can't see trying to make anything complicated by following her on TV, that's for sure. On the other hand, a lot of her show seems to be about giving you tips, rather than recipes.

Mitsuwa is great, overpriced or not! I'm in my local(ish) one almost once a week. And, torakris, your blog gives me a lot of ideas about new things to shop for there.

I saw that article in one of those magazines called Shape or something. It seemed like privileged glimpse of the obvious to me. I've been on Weight Watchers for a few months, keeping track of fat and calories, and I think I can tell when there's a lot of fat in a dish just by tasting it. I suppose there still are people who assume dumb things like that all "salads" are low-fat, but that's despite the fact that there are people telling you otherwise all over the place. No question, if you are trying to lose weight or cut fat consumption and have to eat in restaurants a lot if can be a genuine problem. If you travel on business and eat out, especially if you can't choose the restaurant, ordering can be difficult. I kind of like it when they have a so-called "spa menu" or a few things where the nutritional content is listed. Not that I'm altogether sure you can trust the numbers. I ate at a PF Chang once, and I thought the numbers they gave for fat and sodium content in the dishes (they only give them for some) was suspiciously low. I would certainly not eat a lunch there every day trusting that it was only 450 calories or whatever they said.

I got some of the fresh wasabi the other day and it was very nice. Not even outrageously expensive if you price it out per serving as a garnish for sushi or sashimi.

I have avoided eating at a Pot Belly Deli in New England where the sign had an unhealthy-looking man with a belly that looked swollen, possibly from food poisoning. I will not eat Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, and I found it embarrassing when a professional colleague insisted we have dinner at Fuddrucker's. There was a place in New Hampshire called the Owl's Nest. All I would think of was the coughballs and other crap owls keep in their nest. We drove past a Chinese restaurant. It had the unremarkable name "Peking Dragon" but there was a huge dragon on the roof looking like he was vomiting, and thanks to the hokey Asian script on the sign the name could easily be mistaken for "Puking Dragon." I am ambivalent about The Pink Taco as a name for a Tex-Mex restaurant. Well, it is in Las Vegas.

Yes to the last couple of posts. I wouldn't go to LV for the sake of the food. A lot of the high-end restaurants, good as they are, are spinoffs and the originals exist somewhere else. Why not go to those places? But to put good restaurants there is a brilliant idea. You have a lot of people with a lot of money to throw around, looking for some nice food in the evenings. Gambling is considered a sin in some quarters, but it's the hobby of some very well-to-do people. These people are not unsophisticated yokels who keep quarters in a pillowcase. A lot of them also travel with spouses who don't care for gambling and want to be treated to something nice to make the trip worthwhile. LV is also often a meeting place for groups of family and/or friends, because it's an easy place to fly in and out of, and you can often get a very good deal on a hotel. Then you feel you have some monsy to play around with on dining. Also, there are usually a lot of people around for conventions.

To add to the confusion, in Hawaii they seem mean black cod/sablefish when they say butterfish: http://tinyurl.com/6sy8y I know have had something billed in restaurants as "butterfish" which was certainly black cod.

I've been in that situation with book reviews. I think it's tolerable if you have the choice not to review something at all if you can't say anything nice. It also helps if you are allowed to point out relatively strong points in such a way as to make it clear there are weak points and if you can say things like, "These people position themselves as [whatever] and for that they do a pretty good job," in other words identifying something that is not aiming all that high. I would not write a review that would lead people to spend money on a book and then be disappointed. In my view, that is where you draw the line.

I recently put some bitter melons, sliced and lightly sauteed, into a curried soup with winter squash, shallots and assorted leftover vegetables. The bitterness is a good balance to the hotness of the curry. At first I thought I didn't like it but as I kept drinking the broth I found I appreciated the balance. I will certainly put bitter melons in that type of soup again.

Another fan of recipes here. I follow the instructions exactly the first time to see what I'm working with. After that I am quite prepared to alter it. I do sometimes buy ingredients and just fool around with them and see what happens. A lot of my soups and vegetable dishes are like that.

I love it when small entrees are available. It makes it possible for me to have an appetizer and an entree. Ordering two appetizers is fine in some circumstances, but not always. Lots of times, you want one of the entrees. The last time I was at Roy's in Honolulu, they were offering half portions of most main courses and we gladly took advantage of that. That sort of thing might well figure into our choice or restaurant when traveling (no place to stash leftovers) or at a fine dining place (my partner doesn't like to ask for leftovers boxed up at fancy establishments.)

I'm sure that is it. I think Abra posted about liking some fat-free chese-- Lifetime brand?-- as an ingredient. I also find fat-free feta serviceable as an addition to some recipes. I'll squeeze some lemon over some and add it to mixed vegetables or incorporate it into a topping for burgers. One reason I'm not doing Core is that I would probably be very busy finding ways to outsmart the program. Even on Flex, I often catch myself doing things to get the most mileage out of my points, like eating a lot of foods whose calorie content is relatively high in relation to the points count. But even if you're doing this, it is still hard to eat an outrageous number of calories as long as you are at least counting points.

I would normally have asked to have an unsatisfactory dish replaced or taken off the bill. With the service issues he was having on top of problems with the food, and the fact that he was being being rushed, it would have seemed like kind of a hopeless or even risky thing to do. Yes, it is good to get things rectified on the spot, but it doesn't sound like that was a serious possibility. If I ever had service issues like that in the future, I think having read this thread I would be inclined to email the manager or send a letter, describing what happened. At the very least, the manager would know that s/he can't confidently tell people to come in at the last minute. That sounds like the biggest problem right there. I feel sorry for the owner who never heard word one about this until it was on the internet but it sounds like he was really let down by the wait staff, not the customer. The people had been told they were welcome at that hour but the wait staff didn't think they had to make them welcome. Perhaps they hadn't even been told that the customer had checked ahead of time and thought he was inconsiderately barging in at the last minute.

The thing with Asian pears being no points surprised me. I can tell they have less sugar in them than some other pears, but I would have put them around the same amount of calories as apples. As far as how many calories you eat on WW, I've discovered that-- talking Flex now-- if you are eating 20 points that can easily come in anywhere from 900 to almost 1500 calories a day because the correlation of points to calories is not direct. You can have more to eat if you exercize, and you get 35 spare points to use during the week. Sometimes 20 points seems like almost enough to me; other times I feel like I am starving.

I understand the point of complaining on the spot, but as a diner I find that it's a pain and not worth my time. I think I'm good at complaining clearly and assertively and I know what kinds of input will be useful. (I've not owned a restaurant but I have owned a retail business.) But the few times I have complained in a restaurant, it ended up being a great big hassle, even though it was invariably about a very clear issue like an item not being the way it was described on the menu at all. I actually had one manager bring the menu back and start going over the description word by word to try to persuade me I was wrong. For heaven's sake, the thing said it came with a sauce but it was served with no sauce. You should have heard the verbal gyrations she did to try to justify that. Anyone who's had experiences like mine is going to be very leery about getting into that again.

Absolutely not the diner's duty to speak up, and s/he has every right to post about the experience. If this place were in my neck of the woods I would be crossing it off my list.

Marmish, where in Chciago are you finding the Krinos Yougurt?

I tip 20% on a normal bill. I sometimes feel bad for failing to reduce a tip for bad service that's obviously the server's fault, but I really cannot bring myself to leave a low tip unless the bad service comes with attitude. I'm prepared to go down to 10% in those cases. If a server is just bad and probably hasn't been taught any better, I'll give them 15% but I will not give that restaurant too many chances. Quite a bit of the bad service I've had seemed to me to be stuff the management should have been addressing with their staff.

In my experience, if you ever once have a bad reaction to one of those sugar-alcohol things, you can have one again from taking very little amount. I got really sick over some mints with some sorbitol in them, but I had a few mints in a few hours and I thought that a little bit might be OK. Not so. Even if I take a tiny amount by accident, I can tell. I love to make dips with Total yogurt. I'm not on core and am prepared to spend the points for the 2% stuff which I think is a lot better. I make tzatziki or a cilantro-oinion dip. (Process the cilantro to a paste; don't just chop.)