Malawry

Each quarter of the recipe (you divide the dough into 4 balls) I used about 1/4 cup of jam-crumb mixture. I don't have cake crumbs but I keep challah crumbs around for similar uses, so that's what went into the filling. Warming isn't a bad idea, but won't the heat from the filling make the dough even harder to work?

Mom's making mandel bread and brownies for the hospitality suite. All other cookies are up to me. I want to make ruggies and hamantaschen (this bat mitzvah is in Shelby, NC, f'r cryin' out loud, I must inject some Judaica into the environment!) and then something more chocolate-y. If I can get a good ruggie recipe going I'll make some apricot (my personal favorite), some raspberry (I plan to make raspberry jam in the next week or so) and some chocolate (as the crowd-pleaser). Maybe a big chocolate chip cookie that reads "Shalom Ya'll"? Does anybody have, say, a recipe for the yeasty version of ruggies? I've eaten them but never tried to make them myself. I am an equal-opportunity consumer of rugalach and will eat pretty much any ruggie I can cram in my mouth. Even the not-so-good ones with the weird aftertaste from Costco. I may go bang out another batch of the dough tonight and get it chilling. It means an excess of ruggies, but I'll just freeze them to take if they're good enough for the Bat Mitzvah Lady.

I made the wedges, and used my homemade apricot jam. A fair amount of the jam did indeed ooze out onto my work surface while I was rolling them, which annoyed me since apricot jam is a fair amount of labor in and of itself. I will try the mixer next time. I think there is just too much total stuff for my Cuisinart to handle the dough effectively. Do you just cube the butter and cheese and add them cold to the mixer?

OK, sounds like chilling it more would help. I'll try that, chilling after forming and only keeping a little dough out at a time. They don't have to look good for me, my partner and my housemate to eat them. But it would be nice if they looked good, so I could take them to my cousin's bat mitzvah in a few weeks, where I am helping to stock a hospitality suite.

I just made my inaugural batch of rugalach, using Joan Nathan's recipe in Jewish Cooking in America(which I think she says comes from Maida Heatter). The cookies are delicious, but they look like total crap. They're not thick and stubby like bakery ruggies, they're kind of flat-looking. I tried rolling the dough a little thicker but the cookies still kind of oozed as soon as they went in the oven. I'd like to try again, as I adore these cookies and have always wanted to try my hand at them. I'd like them to taste as rich and cream-cheese-y as these do (the recipe calls for 8oz cream cheese, 1 cup butter and only 2 cups flour for all that fat, so it is very very cheezy and rich) but I'd like a better texture and especially a better look. Suggestions? Recipes I should try? Edit: More info on what I did to make these cookies... I don't want to print the recipe in full due to copyright issues but in addition to the ingredients above there's some confectioner's sugar and not much else in the dough. The recipe suggests you use the food processor, not a mixer, and that you pulse the dough. Pulsing things together didn't work for me and I had to scrape and run/pulse the machine a lot to get everything to turn into a dough. The dough is extremely soft with all that fat. I chilled it overnight, not for just an hour as suggested in the recipe, to harden it up some. Today when I rolled it out it got sticky very quickly, so I started using a lot of flour on my rolling pin and my counter to get the dough to stop sticking. Maybe it was just too hot a day, I dunno. The last batch I tried patting the dough out instead of rolling it because it was so soft and my rolling pin is probably too heavy for this dough. That worked a little better but those cookies are still flat. Baking on parchment or on a plain greased half-sheet pan made no difference to finished texture. Baking dough that was chilled in the fridge for 10 minutes after forming didn't make any difference either.

Reverend, I borrowed the Commander's Palace cookbook from my chef, who used to work there. Great book. Didn't want to give it back. Tonight's dinner: Roasted salmon Ribbons of red onion, red and yellow pepper, swiss chard stems, garlic and swiss chard leaves, sauteed in EVOO Silver queen corn with lots of buttah

I attended Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. My college did not outsource its food service, which I always regarded as a good thing. The people who worked in the kitchens had been there for decades, knew and loved the students, and gave half a shit about the food. It was still mass-produced and a lot of it was dreck but there were some gems. Students residing on-campus were required to subscribe to a meal plan. Meal plans were dollar amounts, and every food item had a price on it. Later in my college years they opened an all-you-can-eat line to appease students who wanted food in quantity; they charged like $6 for AYCE lunch or $8.50 for AYCE dinner, something like that. Vending machines on campus were on the meal plan, as were two small convenienece stores. (You could only buy food products with the meal plan, though; you couldn't buy notebook paper or shampoo or anything with it.) I was a vegetarian in college, so my eating experiences were colored by this. My freshman year I was a new vegetarian and I subsisted primarily on grilled cheese sandwiches, salads and baked potatoes. My sophomore year they opened a VEGETARIAN LINE, though. I could get a gardenburger, a not-bad stir-fry over brown rice, a decent chickpea salad sandwich, and more. What a bonanza! The vegetarian line was lunch-only M-F, though, so at nights and on weekends I was stuck with the food court, the pizza delivery service and the Italian joint on the other end of campus. The food court was the most convenient and was a reliable spot for a taco salad and some sour patch kids. They featured hotel pans of this stuff called "dirt," a concoction including oreo cookie crumbs, vanilla pudding and whipped cream. This goop was sold in bulk and was wildly popular. I had a boyfriend who referred to the food court as "food bucket." I also frequented the sub shop attached to the food court for veggie subs. I interviewed some guy in food service for a class project once and he was so proud of that sub shop. They'd designed their menu by going to Subway right off campus and seeing what they sold, and then they bought one of every sub, took them to a campus lab and weighed all of the ingredients. OK, this is turning into a brain dump.

CONSPIRACY! CONSPIRACY! sorry, couldn't resist

This from the Latin American category, in which Cafe Atlantico took second place. Did any of you vote in the polls? FWIW, I thought the top 10 vegetarian were more or less spot-on, though I'd shift the order in which they appear around a little. But then there aren't many more vegetarian (or vegetarian-friendly, like Lebanese Taverna) restaurants in and around DC than the 10 listed.

We went to Bistro Bis for brunch today. We arrived at 11:30, when they opened. The restaurant was very quiet and almost completely empty. I ordered the frisee salad with lardons, croutons, sherry vinaigrette and a poached egg. One of my friends ordered the eggs Benedict, while the other ordered the omelet forestiere (with wild mushrooms). The menu is indeed very lunch-like as Mark suggested, which appealed to me but which may have been a little more lost on my companions. The salad was excellent, everything in it properly executed...plenty of fat lardons, fresh croutons, crisp frisee, tart vinaigrette. My friend's eggs Benedict suffered from the poached eggs being overcooked (the yolks were moist but not liquid), but the poached egg in my salad broke and combined with the greens as expected. The eggs Benedict and the omelet came with excellent breakfast potatoes, skinless, crisp-edged and tossed with some soft cooked onions and parsley. I asked for an assortment of breakfast pastries with my salad and was served a pretty-good croissant and streusel-topped blueberry muffin. In addition, a bread basket contained lemon-poppyseed bread, a banana bread, sliced baguette and a single tiny biscuit. Everything was in the pretty-good-to-excellent category, with the exception of the aforementioned overcooked poached egg. I'd visit Bistro Bis again for brunch. I thought my salad was a pretty good deal at $9, especially since there was no surcharge for the croissant and muffin. I'll try to get to some of these other places next time, and will post about them when I do.

Good stuff. We tasted about 12 oils one day at my culinary school. Click here to read all about it. The truffle and olive oils were more fun than, say, soybean.

Laurel, your meatless meals are beautiful. Mm. Tonight: Raisin-pine nut whole wheat couscous Cinnamon chickpeas with caramelized onions Farm market haricots verts, blanched shocked and then rewarmed in veg stock and butter I'm about to go pick up some ice cream for dessert. My ice cream consumption this summer is at its lowest since I started seeing my partner lo those many years ago. (He's an ice cream fiend, and turned me into one too.)

I've seen people cut planks using a mandoline, which can also create less waste and goes faster than using a knife. If you do this I recommend you carefully stack your planks in order as they come off the mandoline so they'll be easier to line up for julienning. I've cut myself with dull knives and with sharp knives. Cuts with sharp knives are deeper but heal much more quickly.

What exactly is chocolate puff? Does anybody have a recipe for it? Is the technique any different from regular puff? It sounds like it bakes a little differently from Chefette's response.

Stone, that's a common problem. Often it's just that you tend to cut a certain way, and you have to make a conscious effort to compensate for it. If I cut planks without paying much attention they will always be thinner at the end where I finished cutting than at the end where I started cutting. So I make myself cut "up" when I cut planks. It feels weird but it results in more even cuts. Has nothing to do with the maintenance of my knives, which I keep in pretty good shape. Just has to do with my natural inclinations. It sounds like you've worked this out for yourself, I just wanted to tell you it may continue to be an issue after you've sharpened and honed your knives.

They come with Alsatian raviolis. I was fortunate enough to be gifted with one when I ate there, from my friend's plate. Ohmy. Like little meaty glazed morsels on a stick (bone). I also had the fun of doing some trimming on those puppies when I trailed there. They're remarkably satisfying to work with. Mark, did you have Max as your server by any chance?

I have that same bread knife. Love love love it. Great class, Zilla. I never mastered the fluted mushroom and was really impressed that you included it. At the restaurant where I worked we went through a lot of mangos. The method you showed of cutting a mango is all right for some applications but we used our mangos julienned for a salad and brunoised for a salsa as well as in larger chunks for a dessert. The method of handling mangoes that I felt worked best: Start by peeling the mango. Cut a thin slice off the bottom so you can see the imprint of the white pit. Using the imprint as a guide, use that bread knife to slice the flesh off the pit in two large pieces. You can recover some of the flesh off the the sides of the pit using a paring knife. Use the bread knife to cut and trim planks for julienne or brunoise from the flesh. Then use a chef's knife to perform the final cuts. Your chef's knife must be RAZOR sharp to make these precise cuts with such a soft fruit. I've accomplished the necessary cuts using just my bread knife but I think the final cuts are better done with a chef's knife which gives you more control. I'd rather brunoise a mango than a papaya, that's for sure.

What sux about them? I checked them out right after they opened and I wasn't too impressed but I couldn't quite put my finger on what disagreed with me about the place. Something about it had me vaguely skeezed out,

Tofu satays with peanut sauce and Thai-style cucumber salad Pan-fried catfish, spiked with Chinese five-spice powder and drizzled with Chinese mustard glaze Hansen and bibb lettuce salad Blueberry trifle

This morning, Takoma Park, MD: Mideast cucumbers, small and sweet Hansen lettuce, a headlike type I hadn't seen before Bibb lettuce Sweet little carrots Three tart apples Three sweet peaches Haricots verts Eggs And a flat of apricots, for jam batch #3 (tomorrow or Tuesday)

Brunch seems to be an odd meal in the restaurant world. I don't eat it out much anymore, because I can cook brunch-y food just as well at home using fresh foods from the Takoma farm market around the corner. I've seen way too many restaurants where brunch is just an afterthought; I used to live in Dupont Circle and at that time this was just about the only type of brunch available there. Just the same, sometimes it's nice to head downtown and enjoy a lazy late-morning meal with friends. Where do you like to go for brunch in and around DC? Who does a great job? We've talked about the dim sum brunch at Cafe Atlantico in detail before. I've had brunch at Cashion's Eat Place a few times. I believe this is the only Cashion's menu that doesn't change week-to-week, and it includes a nice trout with beurre blanc and hot house-made croissants along with the usual egg type dishes. I also liked brunch at Tabard Inn, where I shared homemade donuts with my friend and enjoyed a properly made omelet. I've always wanted to check out breakfast at Melrose; I asked Chef Brian McBride about his breakfast offerings when he did a demo at L'academie and his obvious pride in what he described as "the best breakfast in the city" piqued my interest. But is Sunday morning a good time to go there, or should I try for a slower Wednesday or Thursday morning? I see from searching OpenTable that Bistro Bis, 15 ria, Firefly and New Heights, among others, are open during brunch hours. (I'm assuming here that they offer a brunch menu to tables at 11am on Sundays.) I'm supposed to have brunch with a friend downtown next week, and these look like interesting options. Anybody tried them in the morning? Anything else I oughta check out?

Mamster, I defer to your superior knowledge of Asian cuisines. Whatever you call it, it's an excellent soup.

I shoulda figured you'd know exactly how far north they get. What is the deal with the regional focus of this chain anyway? In DC there's nothing like this, and it's not like we have Joisey Greek diners to take their place. There are a few places that try...Bob and Edith's, Tastee Diner...but if I can't have Jan's House in Greensboro, NC I want me some Waffle House instead. obChains: I should admit that I stop at Burger King on the road occasionally, for the purposes of consuming a BK Veggie.

Avoid Mister Omelet, Huddle House, Pancake House, and all other pale imitators. Waffle House is it. Scattered smothered covered hash browns and pretty good coffee, plus you can listen to the country-western Waffle House song on the jukebox while you slam it back. I remember them having a pretty good pecan waffle too. Haven't eaten in one in years, they're not as far north as DC apparently. Mark, we hit Subway as our fast food of choice on the road. It's not half bad. At least there are vegetables!

Bourbon-marinated shrimp and xtra creamy grits Seared zucchini