Malawry

I remember doing it as a kid. The blister you can get from cooking it on a stone is really nice, plus homemade matzoh is chewier rather than crackery. It makes for a decent lavosh-type sandwich base. Too bad chickpeas are not acceptable in my (Ashkenazic, obviously) tradition because it'd be delicious on homemade matzohs. Homemade matzohs are much, much better eaten fresh from the oven btw. As are most things imo.

I haven't been to Charleston since I was 12 or so, but Bon Appetit did a feature on dining in Charleston in the April 2002 issue. It may be online at epicurious.com; worth a look. I doubt you will find authentic South Carolina BBQ in Charleston proper. Charleston has always had visions of itself as a highly cultured city, as a little cosmopolitan oasis between the ocran and the red-clay wastelands. You're much more likely to find highbrow versions of shrimp and grits or some kind of gourmet version of bbq with chipotle. But you may luck out on the road to or from Charleston, since the best BBQ is often found in those little roadside shacks. You may wish to consider detouring through Lexington, NC on your way South for some renowned North Carolina BBQ, or if you're taking I-85 through Greensboro, NC stop by Stamey's (and don't forget the peach cobbler). I'm very interested in what people have to say about the Gulf Coast. Erin (my partner) and I are considering taking a trip to NOLA and driving along to Florida in June, but we haven't made up our minds what we're doing yet.

I keep wanting to reply to this thread, and then realizing that I cannot say anything that Steve didn't already say. I read the Post story when it came out and wasn't interested enough to pursue the guide itself at the time. I did go poke around it just now and he does get it right occasionally (I live very close to Udupi Palace, and I'd gladly eat there three times a week) it's amazing to me he'd report on hearsay rather than visiting places himself. Peter, what did you think of the guide? Oh, and I miss Brett Anderson too. And Steve, you flatter me.

The April issue of Bon Appetit has a baked alaska on the cover. It looked pretty cool. I eat Fudgsicles in the summer. They're amazingly low-calorie, which is important if you're like me and you NEED ice cream every day in hot weather.

I use Rachel's method of combining molasses and white sugar. It tastes fresher and more flavorful than brown sugar in the box or bag does. However, I've often wondered if there are accepted proportions for making "light" or "dark" brown sugar on your own in this way. I've played around with it a little bit but wondered if there was a simple proportion formula I could follow. Anybody know?

Here is Malawry's Hard Times Vegetarian Chili History: 1. I eat it in 1998 when I work on-site at the FBI when they have a booth for some festival day there. I think it's fine. 2. A year later I eat it at another street festival. Same opinion. 3. Six months after that, my partner Erin's (not edemuth) office moves close to Clarendon. Erin starts raving about Hard Times vegetarian chili and insisting we eat it. 4. I join Erin for dinner there. I order sweet tea and the vegetarian chili over spaghetti with onions and cheese. They've won my heart with the sweet tea (I am a native of NC after all) but am still neutral on the chili. 5. By happenstance, I end up dining there again a week later. Halfway through my plate I realize this is really good. 6. I lick my plate. 7. I wake up the next morning craving more. 8. I start a weekly Hard Times vegetarian chili habit. This lasts for about a year. Current status: I still like it a lot but the worst of my addiction has fortunately waned. I always eat it on spaghetti with cheese and onions, and I usually polish off a piece of cornbread while I'm at it. (The sweet tea, much as I love it, is just too much calorically since I can slurp back a gallon in the blink of an eye. So I avoid it now.) It's very different from my own personal vegetarian chili, but it's still ultimately satisfying. Whoda thunk peanuts would be good in chili? Hm, I should bug Erin about going back sometime soon...

I don't (really) eat red meat, so I don't hit the bbq joints too often. But that being said, I adore side dishes of the sort you might get with bbq. I went to a potluck once that somebody brought Rockland's goodies from, and I really enjoyed the corn casserole she picked up. So, when you talk about bbq joints, please don't be shy and mention the sides. Does anybody do a good hush puppy in DC?

I was a big fan of Kaz for a while. I loved some of the Japanese tapas on the menu there, and the sushi really sparkled. But then they started having trouble with the health department. Does anybody know the full story on this? They were listed a few times in the weekly health department closings and I've been too nervous to return since. I mean, an upscale sushi restaurant that has cleanliness issues? SUSHI? I don't get it. I thought the food at Penang was passable but not memorable. Full disclosure: I've only eaten once in the downtown location, and I had a lunch special. Is the food at dinner appreciably better? The service was terrible but I'm willing to forgive since they's only been open a month or so when I went there. Everybody has kinks to work out, after all. I am surprised by the accolades you're heaping upon Osteria. I work in the building that houses the restaurant, so I get taken there by vendors and such periodically. (It's convenient if nothing else.) I think the food there is solid but not particularly creative, and the dishes I've had there do not represent superlative examples of standard dishes. I'd rank it as "very good" but not "noteworthy." I do keep meaning to go there for happy hour sometime since they clearly want the business and since I've heard the chef sends nice little plates of savories out for early bar customers. Edit disclosure: I meant to say Osteria dishes are not superlative examples of standard dishes, and the text now reflects this.

Me, I like always knowing it's Passover. It's the only time of year I eat stuff like matzo ball soup, matzo brei, and my elderly Aunt Fanny's delicious Pesadik jelly roll. I did a seder for eight people out of my tiny galley kitchen in downtown DC a few years ago. It's the only time I prepared a seder meal myself. I usually spend the holiday with my folks and help my mom cook. Here is what I served at my seder, which was vegetarian and fish-free: Hard boiled eggs with salt water Mock gefilte fish with chrain...the mock fish was mostly potato and onion Matzo ball vegetable soup Mixed green salad with lemon dressing, artichokes and hearts of palm The main course: nut rissoles, onion kugel, asparagus in balsamic vinaigrette I don't remember what we had for dessert, but I think it included dark chocolate and raspberry sorbet The recipes for the nut rissoles, the mock fish and the onion kugel came from Jewish Vegetarian Cooking, a cookbook my mom gave me for Hanukkah some years ago. I didn't think the nut rissoles came out so well, and I see little use for mock fish when I now eat real gefilte fish happily, but the onion kugel became an annual tradition. It's just not Pesach without it. It's a mixture of caramelized onions and matzo meal with egg yolks and seasonings...you whip the egg whites and fold them in before baking. Really really good. I've made the vegetable soup for years now. I use a standard mirepoix, and I add a bouquet garni and lots of diced veggies that always include spinach plus a little vegetarian broth powder. It's mostly a delivery vehicle for the matzo balls, which I missed terribly after I stopped eating chicken. I'm doing my first seder in some time away from home again this year...this time with friends in LA who just had a baby. I don't know what we will eat but I am sure it will include a lot of fish...gefilte and salmon, probably. I'll make my onion kugel and the matzo ball soup for sure.

I find Zagat mostly useless. Chiefly because no review or report of a restaurant should put descriptive words and phrases in quotes. Gah!

Malawry -- What did the students eating with you think about your eating only one bite? While duck can be lean, there is usually nice-to-me fat that buttresses, and that clings to, the skin. Are you referring to that fat, or to the "fatty" sensations of the flesh of your duck itself? I have read both of the Ruhlman books, and enjoyed them both...though I think The Making of a Chef was a better, more focused publication. The students I was with were very rushed because they were behind schedule. Staff meal is scheduled for 12:30 and they weren't able to serve until almost 1. They were all too busy scarfing to pay much attention to me despite my persistent questions. I wanted to know everything from what they used to braise the ducks to why they chose L'academie to how they made the lobster oil that finished the ravioli starter to what books they thought I oughta read before entering school. They were nice but not particularly talkative or attentive to me. I am referring mostly to the fat clinging to the skin. The one bite I ate had a lot of skin attached. But I was also trying to mentally evaluate the flesh itself and all that tasted or felt like was fat too. I couldn't bring myself to try another bite without skin. It was further complicated by the unfortunate fact that I have an allergy to oranges, so I didn't want to eat more than a bite or two even if I found I liked the duck.

Since I made the decision to attend culinary school, I've been grappling with the reality that I will have to learn to eat meat and fowl at least so I can cook it properly while I'm being graded on it. So, to that end, yesterday I paid a visit to L'academie de Cuisine, the DC area's only cooking school. I did not mention my vegetarianism in any sense, on the form they asked me to fill out or when I was questioned about my diet. They had suggested I talk with the admissions director and tour the school in time to finish up for staff meal. I joined some students for the staff meal and had mentally vowed to eat whatever was placed before me. So I ate my first duck in almost a decade yesterday. I could only make myself eat one bite, but I felt it was important for me to eat that bite. My overwhelming sense was "boy, is this fatty." The duck had been braised and served with an orange sauce (duck a l'orange?)...the sauce was very mild. I don't know if I ate a bad piece or if it always tastes so fatty. The duck was plated with some "cabbage confit" which had been cooked down slowly in duck fat and I could barely handle that either. I expected to be turned off by a "gamy" flavor to the bird (I've unintentionally put chicken in my mouth over the time I've been a vegetarian and it tasted very gamy to me) but there was no such flavor to the animal. I was completely unappealed and felt I'd done enough by taking a single bite. But then, it's not like I had a regular duck habit before I eliminated fowl and meat from my diet. I've never craved duck or wished I could order it. I'm sorry that this was the meat they happened to have on the menu and that therefore I had to start out with. Sigh. I suffered no ill effects from eating the bite of duck and few bites of cabbage confit, FWIW. However, I did feel obligated to go home and make a nice braised cabbage dish for part of my dinner to erase the memory of the duck-fatty cabbage I'd mostly rejected at lunch. I cooked it with onions, tomato paste, water, salt, pepper and cayenne. It was good and I look forward to lunchtime leftovers. I am, however, less enthusiastic about adding these animal foods back into my diet. Not that I was real enthusiastic to begin with. It's suddenly occurred to me how likely it is to be difficult for me to enjoy them. Though maybe I would have had a better experience if my inaugural duck had been a lacquered smoked Peking duck or something else with the fat mostly rendered out.

I've heard it is now available in the US, but I haven't tried it yet. Has anybody else here? I think meat analogues could be their own, very interesting thread. Well, interesting to ME anyways. Heh.

We got a housemate who eats even things she didn't like as leftovers for lunch. I highly recommend this leftovers technique. I usually pack my lunch out of leftovers from dinners I've made. I try not to eat out more than twice a week during the day, and lately it's usually only once a week that I go out. I rarely do something else with my leftovers. I just heat 'n eat. I'm always impressed with people who do different meals out of a single dish. Though, we do cook extra beans when we bother to make them from dried, and freeze the leftovers for adding to chilis, bean salads and so on.

I, too, keep frozen peas and cheese around. We eat a lot of different types of bread in our house...pita, hot dog rolls for veggie dogs, sandwich buns, bagels, tortillas, sub rolls...and there's no way I could keep that many types of bread around fresh and expect us to eat them before they turn. So we freeze a lot of breads. It's not optimal but it doesn't destroy them either...we go through them quickly enough that they rarely get freezer burnt. I leave sliced bread out of the freezer since we eat it quickly, and if I buy a good baguette or artisanal bread we don't freeze that, we gobble it usually within a matter of hours. We keep a lot of meat analogues in our freezer, since these are a regular part of our diet. Boca Burgers and Morningstar Farms sausages are essential. We're always trying new meat analogues, so sometimes we have several open boxes in there. We also store dried beans that have been partially or completely cooked and assorted leftovers. Erin (not edemuth) just bought me a new freezer so I can start using my veggie scraps for stock rather than pitching them into the compost heap directly. I store our coffee in the freezer. We don't make coffee too often; it mostly gets brewed when we have guests in the house. So we buy really good organic coffee at the co-op we belong to and store it in the freezer where it stays fresher longer. It's easy to justify spending huge amounts per pound on coffee when it takes you several months to go through a bag.

So, on Friday, as soon as we got to my house, edemuth and I broke out my new bottle of Campari, some grapefruit juice, and the liter of Wink soda I bought at the liquor store last weekend. I made up a Wink-and-Campari and a grapefruit-and-Campari and we did a little taste test. The Wink-and-Campari was truly excellent. The soda is not excessively sweet, which helps, and the grapefruity-citrusy flavor worked really well with the Campari. The grapefruit-and-Campari is good, but not nearly as good as the Wink version. It has a more strongly bitter flavor...the Campari does not bring out the sweetness of the juice but instead plays up the bitterness of the pith. But it's still tasty, and I regard it as worth drinking. I have now been officially converted to Campari fandom.

I loooooove Fritos Pie, and if you use vegetarian chili it's just as good. I haven't made one of those ina long time. A Fritos Dawg sounds pretty good too. Thought I'd post a postmortem on our menu. Some things worked better than others, of course. Edemuth's liptauer cheese was very popular...we couldn't keep our hands outta it and kept smearing it on cocktail rye, Stoned Wheat Thins and celery. I was unable to procure pomegranates anywhere, and I tried a lot of stores (I thought they were in season in the dead of winter? I guess I was wrong.) So I ended up using grenadine (it's pomegranate syrup, right?) on the cut up grapefruit. Just a small splash. It actually tasted pretty good, plus it make the already pink grapefruit look somewhat flourescent. Space-age grapefruit. Most of those old-style fruit cocktails used some kind of syrup or else a syrup-based sauce (I saw recipes for dousing fruit in ginger ale in the aforementioned Settlement Cookbook). The entree was a little more mixed in its reception. The casserole was tasty, and the noodles appropriately delicate, but it was a little bit on the dry side plus I think the baking and reheating made it a little overdone. I think my bechamel was a little too thick. My overall assessment of making a tuna noodle casserole from scratch is that it is better than the Campbell's cream of mushroom-Mueller's egg noodle type, but it's not significantly better...not so much better to be worth the effort. If you're going to make part of the effort and you have a machine, expend the effort on making the noodles. Use the canned stuff for the sauce. The noodles made the biggest difference. Everybody seemed to like the onion rings we plated on the top, which were dunked in a thick beer batter and fried in small "nests." And the green beans in lemon vinaigrette were not as lemony as we would have liked, but they were still pretty good all told. The dessert was a big hit. The pineapple was nicely spicy and a little syrupy in its butter-rum-brown sugar sauce. The cake was delicate and buttery and very light without being too egg-y. And the sour cherry sauce was incredibly satisfying for such a simple concoction (sour cherry jam, reconstituted chopped dried cherries, the cherry soaking water, and lemon juice). I bought coconut sorbet and bourbon vanilla ice cream to go on top from Sutton (the pints carried the Balducci's label) and most people chose both. They were pretty good, too. I'd definitely make this again for the right occasion...way better than the classic pineapple upside-down cake with canned pineapple and maraschino cherries. I think I'm done with "comfort food" until next winter, though. This stuff is way too rich to eat regularly.

What we're doing is somewhere in between completely turning the concept of a particular dish on its ear and using convenience products. For example, I'm cranking out fresh homemade egg noodles for the casserole, but I'm using Italian canned tune (the kind that comes in olive oil). I'm using a sour cherry jam I picked up recently as the base for the sour cherry sauce on the pineapple upside down cake. And the cocktail pumpernickel that goes with the liptauer cheese is the good ol' Rubischlager you can buy in the deli section of any big grocery store. There just isn't enough time or energy to absolutely make everything from scratch in a unique and amusing way. About those noodles: I've decided to use all unbleached white flour in the dough. Normally I would use all semolina or 50-50 semolina-white. I'm considering replacing a small portion of the flour with cake flour which is still lower in gluten and therefore chewiness to make the noodles really tender and innocuous. I do a retro dinner party maybe once a year. One out of a dozen or so bigger parties, plus another 20 or so nights when we have just a couple people over, is not a lot of retro food cooking. The last time I did one I made individual tofu pot pies in puff pastry crusts. People loved 'em. But I don't think that cooking this kind of food is as interesting as exploring less familiar cuisines or tackling new dishes. I like to do the retro thing when it's cold, because that's when I think of eating these kinds of rich creamy food. I'm already starting to dream of asparagus with eggs and little baby green salads with nasturtium blossoms, so I guess it's good we're almost done with winter. Some of my personal comfort foods include cream cheese and olive sammiches, PB&J on toasted whole wheat bread, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, gefilte fish with chrain, apples with peanut butter. Simple foods, caloric foods, foods that take no time to prepare or assemble. I eat all of these on a fairly regular basis and I don't mentally attach them to any particular time period. I have associations with things like tuna casserole, but I see no reason to eat that sort of thing regularly...you can't make just one serving easily, and it's not a set of tastes I need often. Cream cheese and olive sammiches, particularly those made with Santa Barbara Olive Company Martini Olives...I need those once a week!

That's it. I'm picking up a bottle of Campari before I head home today. (Thereby making edemuth a very happy girl indeed.) I hope it goes well with tonight's paella dinner...

We've talked about doing a potluck dinner, but giving everybody the recipes we want them to make rather than making it truly "lucky." I've heard of people doing this before. I've held off on trying because, well, it seems a little gauche to tell guests what to make and what method to use to make it. We've also talked about the same idea but telling people what generally to bring without giving them an actual recipe, or telling them to bring a side dish/dessert/appetizer that fits with whatever theme the meal will have. Anybody tried this? I used to attend a lot of meetings that were "potluck dinner" meetings, back in my more activist days. I always made the effort to bring something decently prepared that most anybody would eat...some chili, baked pasta, a strata...simple but good dishes. I got really sick of being the only one to contribute something I'd call "dinner." I finally cried foul when I brought this nice baked pasta dish and found only two other meeting participants (of the 10 or so present) bothered to bring anything...one brought a 2-liter of Diet Coke, and the other one brought chips and salsa. Of course everybody leapt upon the pasta and demolished it before I could even get a small portion for myself. So after all my work I left the meeting hungry and went home and had cereal for dinner. Never have I felt so unappreciated.

I think smoked haddock with an egg sounds pretty good, actually. But I think comfort foods aren't comforting per se unless you grew up with them. I find gefilte fish quite comforting but most people who aren't exposed to it as children seem to find the very idea unappetizing. About new versions of rice krisipe treats: These don't feel very sophisticated or "adult" to me, and I don't plan on making any of them, but the Washington Post food section yesterday covered a slew of similar recipes. Make! Don't bake <---click there!

My partner Erin was raving about this goat cheese/roasted red pepper/sundried tomato pizza he gets at this place close to his office. So I suggested we swing by (rather than hitting my usual chili spot) when we had an engagement near his office after work a couple days ago. Now, I'm not generally a believer in putting goat cheese on pizza. But I do like goat cheese in general, I'm neutral on roasted red peppers, and I adore sundried tomatoes. However, this combination did not work well. The cheese was in soft crumbles on the top and competed with the sweet-acidic tomatoes rather than complementing them. The thinnish crust had no "chew" to it...it was almost biscuity despite a yeast flavor. And the roasted red peppers were just overall limp. The regular sauce and mozzarella cheese that were also on this pizza were just fine...not great but adequate. I found myself far preferring the plainer pizza (we'd decided to split two) which had an ample, tasty pile of fresh basil on top. I think even a terrible pizza (which this wasn't, it just wasn't GOOD) is still worth eating. I love pizza and in my opinion it's hard to make it inedible. But most pizzas aren't worth an extra effort to obtain. Very few pizzas merit going out of my way. I regard frozen pizza as an entirely separate food category from a fresh pizza. A desire for one cannot be fulfilled by the other. The ideal thin crust will be a New York style crust: crisp, thin, with a few blisters from the oven floor. The "bones" should require a short tug in order to bite off a piece. The tip of the piece should not droop. There shouldn't be a bunch of toppings on top of it to weigh it down. And the slice should be large. There should be no "individually sized" thin crust pizza, there should only be full pies. I am not as opinionated about the sauce, as long as it doesn't slop all over the place (like the pizza sauce they serve at Lombardi's does). If there's anything on my fingers after I pick up a slice of thin-crust, it oughta be cornmeal, blackened flour, and maybe a bit of cheese grease. Not sauce. I also like thicker crust pizzas. I prefer a biscuity crust, ideally with a slight sweetness to it. In my experience, yeasty crusts don't bake so thoroughly. I like to load on the toppings with thick crust pizza...favorites being spinach, mushroom, and onion. I also like a lot of thick, oozy sauce on a thick crust pizza, and plenty of high-end mozzarella to keep it covered. This is the sort of pizza I normally make at home, and I admit to using Pillsbury's Hot Roll Mix (with a few modifications to the printed recipe) since I'm lazy about making my own dough.

I once tried a from-scratch variation of the green bean casserole, and it too was somewhat disappointing...not to mention labor intensive! But I have made other "cream of soup" casseroles from scratch before with great success. Broccoli-cheddar-rice casserole went over well, for instance. And I have made baked macaroni and cheese many times in different variations. So I feel reasonably confident about trying the same methods out on a tuna casserole. If it's not da bomb, well, we just won't make it again. I always put water chestnuts into my tuna noodle casserole, but come to think of it edemuth and I haven't discussed whether or not we oughta throw them in. (I keep canned ones around the house, so we could decide at the last minute.) Should we? FWIW, I'm from North Carolina, not from Brooklyn, and we used 'em there.

I thought freezing potatoes causes them to separate? My assumption was that all those commercial frozen potato products were flash-frozen. I don't have any method of flash-freezing at my disposal. I guess I'm a little confused by your post since you mention flash-freezing. I will continue to make latkes for my friends at Hanukkah, but in the future I'll do it as an appetizer, or pass them at a party. None of this serving 12 people a meal of latkes.

I'd like to add to this that the pineapple upside-down cake idea came from the discussion on that very subject here. We're doing a deconstruction of the dish, with fresh pineapple sauteed in a rum-brown sugar sauce topped with a slice of yellow butter cake, the sour cherry sauce, and the sorbet or ice cream. I derive a lot of comfort from foods like tuna noodle casserole, and now that I have the noodle/pasta roller I've mentioned before there seems little reason to resist doing a high-end version of said dish. Maybe we'll incorporate black truffle oil (sprinkled atop the onion straws?) to make the experience complete. I looked through my housemate's mid-1940s The Settlement Cookbook for ideas and was surprised at some of the recipes I found there. The author mentions foie gras a number of times, and the idea for the grapefruit-pomegranate fruit cocktail came out of there. The food my grandmother taught my mother to make was mostly based on convenience products; growing up we always had eastern european Jewish classics made from scratch but almost everything else seemed to come from a package in some sense. So I suppose I underestimated the foods people might have actually prepared in the 1950s and 60s. I wasn't born until 1974 so I don't have much perspective on the issue, and was interested in the thoughts of others on the subject.