Malawry

I don't have an answer for you but wondered if you could tell us more about the dish. I'm finding it hard to picture. How was the crab cooked? Was the yolk just grated over the top or what?

How about mesclun mix? Do most of you use it? I used to really love the stuff...bought big bags of it at Whole Foods and used it regularly in salads and on sandwiches. But then I got a little disillusioned with it. I am not fond of the dandelion greens in the mixes I usually find locally (I like them, but only in wilted salads), and lettuces I love like Bibb don't show up in the mix at all. Nowadays I buy heads of lettuce almost exclusively. I rotate between red leaf, frisee, bibb, romaine. The pits is the bagged salad stuff though. It always tastes like plastic to me.

We are quite lucky to have Red Dog in Silver Spring. I don't really think this restaurant would be as noteworthy if it was located downtown. I'm delighted to have something this nice close to home. Don, the Takoma Park Silver Spring Co-op opened the Grubb Road store a couple of years ago. (I belong to the flagship at the intersection of Ethan Allen and Carroll in downtown Takoma.) The stores are not all-organic but they are a fabulous resource nonetheless, carrying all kinds of treats including Eco Farms greens, Firefly cheeses, and Spring Mill breads. Check out the Takoma store if you haven't been there...their produce selection is better than the Silver Spring one, plus with more floorspace they carry more of everything else too. Until recently only the Silver Spring store carried meat and fish, but now Takoma carries it too (though it's almost exclusively frozen or canned...so I still go to Whole Paycheck sometimes for my fresh meat).

Since I added meat and fowl back into my diet a few years ago, I've become a huge devotee of the salad-with-meat. Nothing beats the combination of crisp greens, tart or creamy dressing, and some kind of salty meat as a summer meal. Now that baby greens are appearing at the farm market I'm seeing salads for many many dinners over the coming weeks. I especially enjoy classic meat-and-green salads. Tonight I had iceburg lettuce with blue cheese dressing and crisp bacon for dinner. Duck was made for adding to salads...frisee with duck confit, toasted walnuts and thyme-laced vinaigrette is a brunch favorite in my household. I made a five-spice-rubbed seared duck breast salad for my mother-in-law recently, over mixed greens with matchstick vegetables and a plum vinaigrette. I ate the steak salad lunch special at Ortanique when I worked there: romaine with worcestershire-demi-glace vinaigrette, flank steak and housemade potato chips, a scrumptious combination of meaty, cool, rich and crisp flavors. The salade nicoise is a summer regular in my household; I eagerly await the first green beans of the season so I can start cracking open those cans of Italian oil-packed tuna I have waiting in the pantry. I enjoy vegetable salads without meat quite a bit of course, but I eat them almost every day. And then there are the mayonnaise-bound and other creamy non-green salads...I make many of these at work. The chicken salad with walnuts and raisins is extremely popular, and the vegetarians I feed enjoy the black bean salad with sour cream-cilantro dressing. What kinds of salads do you love best?

Get a second pan. Seriously. There is no way around it. If you crowd your pan, you won't get a good sear on your steaks, and how fun is that?

There's a recent story on this from the Washington Post...not about shanks per se but about the rising price of veal. Click here. (Article will expire off the site in one week.)

I'm not sure...I didn't ask about the license. I'll try to find out when I go back...I am trailing on Mother's Day.

I'd add it to cumin, oregano, s, p, and cayenne and fresh garlic to make a paste. Rub the paste on chicken or pork. Grill or saute. Also annatto can work in a sachet for a soup with the flavors mentioned in other posts. Plus it adds a nice color.

I went back to Red Dog for dinner with my partner and a friend tonight. We sat in the dining room (too cold to be outside). I enjoyed the rich red walls and the brick oven...the space feels quite warm. This time Chef Janis saw me and seemed to recognize me so I chatted with her for a moment before making my way to my table. She's ever-cheerful, a really warm person, and her restaurant reflects her personality. This time I ordered the cedar plank salmon-topped salad...spinach and baby arugula, shaved fennel, and shallot-sherry vinaigrette (I asked for a switch from the citrus vinaigrette that came with it; I'm allergic to many forms of citrus). The salmon was cold, had crisp edges, and was flaked and scattered across the salad..they deboned it, which made the salad easy to eat. My husband selected the chicken under a brick , which comes with one of four or five sides. (He picked the house salad.) He received a generous half a bird, with crisp skin and juicy flesh. And our friend ordered the mushroom pizza...I had a taste and enjoyed a bit of crispy char from the floor of the big oven in the back. I only sampled a bite (and it wasn't of outer crust where the true colors of a pizza shine) but it seemed about on a par with what you get at Matchbox. That salad was only $9.95, by the way, and the half-chicken something like $12. I'm really loving that this place is so close to my home and expect I'll be appearing there with some regularity. Extra bonus visits once they get their wine program up and running.

Snowangel, high-quality and European-style butters usually have a higher butterfat content than generic American butters. American supermarket butters have 80% butterfat, while Plugra has 82% for example. The remaining 20% (or less) is composed of water and milk solids. So choosing a high-butterfat butter means less foaming, indeed. Re: stock...I use a ladle to skim my stocks. Yes, I usually lose some of the veg in my stock when I skim, but I figure there's enough total veggies in there that losing a little is not such a big deal to me. Best method: Stick bowl of ladle in center of simmering pot. Move it in small circles. Expand the circles until you get close to the edge. This pushes the foam to the edges. Then it's fairly easy to pinch off using the ladle from the edges of the pot. Confession: I don't even clean the vegetables I put in stocks at work. (I do take this extra step at home, where I make stocks in less quantity.) I figure I'll get most of the dirt from skimming the foam, and the rest of it from straining the finished stock through a chinois. I've never seen or tasted dirt in my stock.

The foam is caused by the water in the butter evaporating. The butter stops foaming when all the water has evaporated out of the butter, meaning the fat temperature can then rise above the boiling point and therefore cook food more effectively. There's nothing "wrong" with butter while it is foaming. You can add your food to it during the foaming process, but it will take longer to cook if you do so (you'll be trying to raise the temperature of the food at the same time as you're trying to drive the water out of the butter). Something with "1 1/2 tablespoons" is calling for a tablespoon, a teaspoon, and a half a teaspoon total. (A tablespoon is three teaspoons, so if you lack a half-tablespoon measure in your spoon set you just measure a teaspoon and a half-teaspoon to make up the "1/2 tablespoon.") If that makes sense.

NY strip steak, rubbed with seasoned oil and salt, seared medium-rare and sliced thin Wedge of iceburg lettuce with thick-sliced crumbled bacon and blue cheese salad dressing

Oh, and Hillvalley: I suggested the sour cabbage and pork dish, and I too was pretty glad of its appearance. (I'm a sucker for anything listed as "sour" without the word "sweet" on a menu.) You can also get it with tripe or squid.

I tried to hop over to the Busboy/DCMark/Turtleboy/esteemed spouses table to take photos of their food (Hillvalley and I had the only cameras, and we happened to be at the same table). I didn't taste all the dishes I snapped as a result, so hopefully others will fill in the blanks. More photos: I think this was some kind of a duck dish. This was a deliciously garlicky frog dish. Somebody commented on how many bones there were, but Full Kee ain't the sort of place to debone your frog legs. You gotta go to Cafe 15 for that. These were quite tasty though. The infamous jellyfish and duck dish, laced with sesame seeds. Jellyfish is somewhat squidlike in texture...a little rubbery, a little slippery, a little sealike flavor. Quite yummy, I recommend it. The sizzling oyster casserole deserves another photo. We packed away three of these between the two tables and I think we could have killed a fourth easily. Behind you can see the remains of the preserved egg/pork congee we ordered (I didn't get a chance to photograph it when it initially arrived). I think there were several converts to this comforting, simple rice gruel among those who sampled it. The only dud of a dish, pig skin with turnips. See, it even looks boring! The Full Kee chefs oughta take a page out of Varmint's book. The stuffed eggplant wins my award for most attractive plate...the colors are captivating! Unfortunately, it never made it over to my seat and I forgot to steal a nibble. How was it?

I wrote an article on this subject for The Daily Gullet, as part of my Dispatches from a First Kitchen Job series. Follow the scent of the scraps. I prepare a sandwich for the guy who takes out my trash every day at my current job...he's the only "employee" type there is to feed (well, besides me). I pile on a lot of meat and slather it with mayo, which is how he likes it. Whenever I make a dessert for my girls I give him a couple of helpings of that too. I guess if I had a large staff to feed I'd be less generous but as it is he keeps my trash can empty and he's friendly and kind...so I don't mind giving him whatever looks good to him. I feed myself a salad with some kind of meat leftover from lunch almost every day. I also feed myself coffee with plenty of real cream in the morning.

I, too, had a great time. And my photos will probably not appear here until Sundayish. Have patience.

I use them both regularly. I think they're both worth owning. I often refer to what Bittman and Becker have to say about a recipe before deciding how to proceed cooking it.

I'd be up for a cocktail, if it was late enough. (I don't get off of work until 6:30, and I work about 30 minutes from the downtown area.) I like the bar at Cafe Atlantico, but it gets crowded early.

Just had a business meeting at the Red Dog Cafe. Friendly little place, with an open kitchen and attractive red walls. We sat on the patio, so I didn't get to see much action. I had the mixed green salad with braised duck, lardons and port-wine grapes for my dinner--exactly the sort of thing I like to eat on a warm night. The duck was richly flavored and generous, but the bacon lardons were too small for my tastes...I like bigger batons, not little Chow Mein-noodle-like bacon bits. The decaf coffee I had afterwards wasn't hot enough, which was a disappointment. The menu parrots the coffees as a point of pride for the place. The service seemed friendly but a little absent-minded, which is mostly what I'd expected. No beer or wine, and because I was there for a meeting I was unable to ask if they were planned for the future. For Silver Spring, it's a wonderful phenomenon, IMO. I'll be going back and exploring more of the menu.

My renditions of buttered nuts (ooh), quick waffles, pork chops, and oven-roasted salmon are all based on what Mark suggests in his book. It's amazing, one of my favorites, one I have purchased for many friends. The yellow cake recipe was a dud and I figured I should avoid pastry from it after that experience. I also own, and reference, his Fish cookbook. Mark really knows his fish.

Works for me.

Just spinach and eggs here in Takoma Park, MD this morning, but there's all kinds of new beautiful things this time of year...very exciting. I'm trying to photograph my local market(s) regularly this year, to document the seasonal progression of goodies. I'm posting images in this thread, if you're curious.

I visit once a month and hereby vow to dew my dewty. BTW, the people in my husband's choir (who rehearse not too far from Wegman's) think I'm insane to schlep out just to shop there once a month.

Count me in on the search for tasso ham, Mnebergall. I stocked up while in Louisiana recently, but the gumbo will not be stopping when I run out. (Not if I know what's good for me!)

Cheat sheet? What would go on it?