Malawry

My partner, who now eats fowl and pork but not other red meat, is unlikely to be charmed by that idea. I'll file it for sometime when I'm dining alone, though. Thanks.

I'll be somewhere around Clarendon. Where should I go? Not expensive and not Cheesecake Factory please. I am considering Hard Times.

The Washington City Paper has hired a new restaurant writer, Bill. They had a job announcement almost a year ago for the position, actually. No idea what transpired after that.

Wow, these are fascinating stories. Has anybody ever witnessed a fraternity or sorority chef who was a professional, concerned with presenting balanced meals of real food while sticking to a strict budget and caring for the brothers or sisters in the house? I am considering a position as chef for a sorority house.

Has anybody ever cooked for a sorority or fraternity house on a college campus? Or do you know anybody who has? Any thoughts on this type of job?

Aww, but it's so fun to speculate!

I felt like slapping a few vegetarians around after reading today's chat. And I was one of their rank not so long ago!

My experience with benne wafers is that they are, well, wafer-thin. Too thin to fill, really. If you make a filling I'd make it really thin and only put a small schmear in the middle of the cookies. The flavors sound good to me.

There is a place in Hyattsville that makes tortillas. There was a story in the Post Food section on this several years ago. An archive search on washingtonpost.com may turn it up. Pupuseria Vanessa is a pupusa truck, BTW. There's a lot of them around Langley Park. Erin, have you ever picked up a pupusa from them? They look...cleaner than most of the trucks I've seen, especially the scuzzy looking one near Baskin Robbins on Piney Branch.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I don't believe in going out for New Year's Eve. Meanwhile I still haven't figured out my own plans...and probably won't get it together until after Christmas. If I just had to dine in a restaurant and was trying to figure out where to go and I had the cash I'd probably shoot for a place like 2941 though.

We're at an hour now, and I just checked on it. It's noticeably more tender, not meltingly so but I think it will get there over the next 30-45 minutes. Seems like it's working! Sam, there's way too much of this pork for fried rice, and I'm out of white rice, and besides I don't think tiny bits of tough pork in fried rice sound so appealing. It's not a bad thought though. I brought it home because I knew I couldn't eat it but I couldn't bear to pitch it. This was from Cubano's in Silver Spring, for those of you playing along from the DC area. Don't get the fried pork. DO get the mashed yucca stuffed with ground beef from the starter menu.

Yeah, the pork isn't spoiled, just mistreated. I colored off some aromatics, deglazed my pan with wine, cooked the wine down, added the pork and some stock, and got it going in the oven. It's been a half hour so it's too early to tell but I am optimistic this will help save it. If it's noticeably more tender after an hour and a half, then I'll add the beans.

I just came back from dinner out with a friend. I ordered something described as fried morsels of pork. Sounds good, right? I got chunks of random pieces of pork that had been tossed in the fryer. No sauce. Tough and not very tasty, though they were seasoned before frying at least. I couldn't eat more than one chunk, but I want to see if my leftovers can be saved. Is it possible to braise something like this until tender if it's already "cooked through" (no pinkness in center)? I was thinking of braising it with some stock and some frozen baked beans I made last summer, to make my lunch tomorrow. Will it work?

Just lunched there with a friend. The wine list has already changed (!) and we had a nice time chatting with Evan the front-end guy about it. He's very proud of this little list and sold us both on glasses of wine to go with our meals. Like a dork, I failed to write down what I drank...it was some kind of dry muscat. It had that typical sweet-floral muscat aroma, but the taste was more bracing than expected...then the aftertaste was fruity. Quite a nice sensation in the mouth. My friend ordered the house salad and a pizza, while I went with the cod sandwich and a side order of endive with proscuitto. The salad looked like an in-house mix rather than the usual stuff in a bag (this perception could be because the salad included mache, which doesn't tend to hold up well in a bagged environment) with wafer-thin onions, some green beans and a light, tangy dressing. When the salad came out I was given a little espresso glass of some kind of apple-curry soup, "to keep me company" while my friend ate. Nice touch. The bread basket this time included housemade brioche brushed with butter, which definitely did not suck. And then the entrees came. That same housemade brioche, toasted, smeared with remoulade spiked with plenty of cornichons, and a tasty fried piece of cod arrived open-faced. The sandwich was garnished with organic frisee tossed in a lemony vinaigrette and came with some of the best chips ever, made from fingerling potatoes and showered prettily with dill. Mmmmmm. The endive with proscuitto included more haricots verts than endive...I like both vegetables but didn't remember seeing the haricots verts listed in the menu description so I was surprised to see so many of them. The endive was slightly caramelized and cut down into small enough pieces that I didn't have to use my knife to eat them. My friend's pizza had broccoli raab, house-cured anchovies (it's a lemon-olive oil cure according to Evan), and some grape tomatoes on it. I thought the crust was simply okay, but the anchovy was fantastic. These pizzas might make a good starter to share at dinnertime or a quick meal with a glass of wine but I'm not yet convinced they're worth a detour. To be fair, I only had two bites and didn't get a chance to sample the outer crust where you can really taste the dough. Cinnamon lollipops came with the check. We left stuffed and satisfied.

Giant carries it, at least in my neighborhood. No idea how good the quality is. Actually I'd love a tutorial on choosing a good salt cod. I had cod cakes made with half salt cod and half fresh once that I really loved and wouldn't mind replicating them at home.

I just had lunch there because Tom Sietsema told me to in today's Live Online chat. (Between this guy and Dave the Cook I've got my dining out and home cookery covered. ) I enjoyed a pissaladiere classique and the duck confit composed salad. The pissaladiere is a small round of fresh dough topped with sweet caramelized onions, some slightly overdried but still delicious anchovies, and pitted nicoise olives. It came with a small, unseasoned salad of frisee and walnuts which I had to salt at the table. It occurred to me that it might have been deliberately undersalted because the olives and anchovies are very salty. The duck confit composed salad is a crisp, hot, perfect leg of duck confit with a large pile of mache salad topped with small coins of duck proscuitto. Some sliced, gently cooked apples fanned out complete the plate. I practically gnawed on the duck leg bones...there's nothing unusual about this confit, but it's plain good eating especially on a rainy day like today. The mache salad had a lightly creamy dressing and was, again, unseasoned, but the duck proscuitto was terrific and a great foil to the other flavors on the plate. I didn't like how the apples had their skin on them, they were a little dry around the edges, and they were served warm but not hot...I only ate a few of them. Disappointing, they could have been a welcome foil to the rich/salty/fresh flavors on the plate. Total tab $23. Nice lunch. Slow service, they were about 80% capacity but only had two servers which is unfortunate. They have a "rapid lunch" deal every day, salad, an entree, and I think coffee or tea for $15...today's was calves liver with a raisin sauce. If I happen to be in the area for lunch again I might order this, it seems like a good deal. The dining room was filled with ladies who lunch and what looked like a few office grunts who made the schlep. There was a group of eight women celebrating a birthday together, so between them and the nice gas logs in the center of the dining room it felt very cozy and welcoming.

The guy I buy my eggs from at the Takoma farm market has thrown in yellow teardrop tomatoes, a scoop of homemade sorbet, or an extra dozen eggs on occasion. I bring him back all my egg cartons...apparently they cost him about .35 each which ain't cheap so by recycling them I save him a lot of money. He more than makes it up to me with the occasional freebies. His eggs are the absolute best, too.

The takeout and delivery menus remind me...I bet you can order from Mr. Chen's Organic Chinese and have them deliver to your office. They're a cut above most of the other takeout Chinese in the area.

Bagels suck-diddly-uck in this town. And I have a looser definition of a "good bagel" than most self-respecting Jewish people do. I've actually stooped to the level of buying Einstein Bagels in recent months, from Costco. What was this place that closed, Heather? I've had marginal bagels from Snider's, Chesapeake Bagel Bakery, Greenberg Bagelry, Whatsa Bagel, and that place in the shopping center with Office Depot in Rockville...I think it's called Bagel City? I like the kitsch factor at Bagel City but the bagels themselves rank only as marginal. I eat mostly onion bagels, FWIW.

You can get pizza dough at Trader Joe's stores. I hear it's good. I usually just make my own though.

So did your cats come from the farm market too then? If so, that is absolutely the coolest farm market find to date.

More thoughts: I am very fond of Snider's and am pleased to hear from anybody who shops there. One of my friends ordered a bunch of their chubs for our semiweekly pre-farm-market breakfast a few weeks ago and they were fantastic...reminded me of childhood bat mitzvahs. I love their deli. Their homemade slaw and whitefish salad are great. And they sell BreadLine baguettes! There is a Costco in Beltsville, MD just down the Beltway; sometimes I go there and to the My Organic Market (MOM) on Rhode Island Ave just down the road in College Park for supplies. When I need Ting soda and some Jamaican goodies I hit the Jamaican market on NH Ave in Langley Park. There's a little tienda near the bowling alley in downtown Sil Spring where I buy Ibarra chocolate, cajeta and other Hispanic specialties that I can't always find at Giant. (The Giant on Arliss Ave in Sil Spring has a large selection of ethnic foods, including less common produce, and is worth a visit.) Santucci's deli in Four Corners will do if you are in a bind and must have some Italian ingredients pronto, but one of my L'academie classmates who lives nearby and is a Real Eye-talian New Yawker says Luigi's in Wheaton makes a much better sammich. (While you're in Wheaton getting an Italian sub you can hop over to Shalom Kosher in the next strip center over for the same hummus I just told you to buy at Katz's Kosher. Just don't carry the sub in the door with you.)

The Takoma market went year-round last year I think. Their off season starts this Sunday which will mean a shift in who vends there, and the market will be smaller until the season kicks off again in April 2004. Still, worth a visit for apples, winter squash, and the MUSHROOM LADY is coming back. I just hit the Thai Market on Thayer the other day for pad thai noodles. I buy prepackaged stuff there...Thai curry pastes, noodles, fish sauce...but their fresh and frozen selections are lacking. Han Ah Reum in Wheaton on GA Ave is better for Asian goods in general and their fish department rocks. I know what you mean about the Whole Paycheck-Silver Spring but it's most of what's available around here. (I live in Takoma just down the road from you.) I do buy a lot of my food at the mostly-vegetarian Takoma Park Silver Spring Coop on Ethan Allen Ave in Takoma. They have a good, intelligent cheese selection to offer and their produce is usually pretty good although not as diverse as the offerings at WF. They carry hot chiles and mesclun from Eco Farms which are a big favorite. I pick up a lot of my specialty foods along Rockville Pike, believe it or not. Yekta Market sells less-expensive saffron and middle eastern goods like glaceed apricots and sumac. Katz's Kosher is worth hitting for the Sabra Salads hummus and the onion rye bread...their hamentashcen aren't bad and my folks always go by for corned beef and pastrami when they're in town. (You can get some of that stuff from the counter at the Parkway Deli on Grubb Road in Sil Spring btw.) Trader Joe's is good for all kinds of deals on gourmet provisions, especially $3/lb Plugra butter and cheaper goat cheese than most places carry. I also like the Lotte market (not as good as Han Ah Reum but it's right by Katz's and therefore convenient) for Asian foods. You want a good bakery around here? I don't recommend the Woodmoor pastry shop for anything but the apple fritters (which are damn good actually, if you like that sort of thing). The TPSS coop carries Firehook, Marvelous Market, Uptown, and LBNY baked goods and breads along with Spring Mill Bread...the Spring Mill honey whole wheat is a gold standard in my house. There are a lot of ethnic markets around Langley Park, clustered around the intersection of University Blvd and NH Ave. I've picked up Indian staples at a little market down the side street by Aldi's and the car wash on NH Ave. I've heard Americana Market along University has good supplies from around the world but have not yet gone there. Hope this helps some. I've lived in Takoma for the past four years.

It's about damn time.