Malawry

With most fried foods, if it's going to overcolor before it's done in the center, you can drop it in a hot oven to bake until it finishes. I've salvaged all sorts of fried foods that I inadvertedly fried at too high a temperature this way: hush puppies, egg rolls that I should have defrosted before frying, etc.

I think Tom Yum soup would be refreshing in summertime. I crave sour flavors when it is hot out. 1c chicken stock 1 small piece galangal 1 stalk lemon grass, cut on bias 2 kaffir lime leaves 3-4oz chicken breast meat 1-2oz straw or button mushrooms 1 cup coconut milk 1 tsp salt or fish sauce Chile paste, if desired 2 tbsp lime juice 1-2 red chiles Cilantro Heat stock. Add galangal, lemon grass, lime leaf, and chicken. When it’s half-cooked, add mushrooms and coconut milk. Boil. Season with salt or fish sauce. Add chile paste and lemon juice. Add chiles and serve very hot.

I was impressed with Ukrops in Richmond, VA. Haven't been there in a few years but last time I was there it was sort of like a better version of the nicer Harris Teeter stores. Spanking clean, well-lit, everything stocked attractively, pricey but not quite on a Whole Foods level. I've heard the owners are some of the most decent human beings you'll ever encounter. Rumor was, some high school-aged bagger felt like skipping work one day and called in and said his grandparent died. Imagine his shock a few hours later when an enormous flower bouquet showed up at the house! Dunno if this story is true but I hope it is. Winn-Dixie is a terrible terrible store. Even the "nice" ones suck. I worked in a "nice" W-D in Boone, NC for a summer and it was the worst job I ever had. Even when I worked there I shopped at Harris Teeter. If you could get the produce directly off the truck then it was acceptable and if you could get the bread fresh out of the oven it was acceptable but that was about it. I wouldn't shop there or a Food Lion unless there was absolutely no other option. One thing I've seen a lot of in NC is supermarkets as part of Target and Wal-Mart. Somebody mentioned shopping at Target above. My mom took me into her local Wal-Mart's food aisles on my last visit to Greensboro and I was impressed with their Hispanic foods selection, which was about as nice as at my local Giant supermarket (I live in an area with a large Hispanic population). What do you guys make out of their quality, selection and prices? They aren't much of a shopping option around DC, square footage being overpriced for this sort of retailing.

You are scaring me. How did you find these people? We're considering redoing our kitchen and I want to know how to avoid these problems. (With my luck, we'll merely inherit a new set of problems if we manage to avoid these.)

It's one of the many reasons she made such a great housemate. Now I pack a lunch for my partner most days, so I foist a lot of leftovers on him. And since I'm home at lunchtime I make a meal from leftovers often. I currently have zero leftovers in my fridge.

What's the Stupid Pasta Trick? My partner and I live with our best friend. We save all shopping receipts and she pays 1/3 of them. (I do 95% of the food shopping.) I cook dinner for us all once or twice a week, something nice. I'm in charge of almost all food-related chores, I take care of the dishwasher emptying, the dishes, even taking out the trash. I don't have to do any yardwork because of this, which is better for me what with my allergies. The housemate rarely eats things intended for dinner parties, she has learned to ask if I am about to entertain. She is a leftover garbage disposal and will eat almost anything for the lunch she packs every day so we rarely have languishing moldy food hanging about the fridge. But she's moving in a few weeks. We have found a new housemate. No idea how it will work out with the food thing. We tried to work out agreements about food-sharing and food-separating without success, since we don't really have enough information to commit to a system. So we're going to wing it for a month and save all receipts and talk it out at the end to see what we think.

Something like that. I know very little about sewing, but that sounds a little large for the pocket. I figure you lose what, 1/8" on each side to the border, which you double-stitch, right? Then you just double-stitch one or two rows to divide the pocket into smaller vertical pockets for your pens. Or something.

Personally, I dislike black jackets. If you spent time baking you just end up with flour all over them. And I think black shows just as much staining as a white jacket. Just a thought. The essential jacket has at least two narrow pockets on the left sleeve (right sleeve for left-handers). These pockets should be able to hold a clipped-in sharpie, a pen and a thermometer without falling out easily. I find pockets elsewhere on jackets to be virtually useless; everything just falls out when you bend over. And I don't like clipping pens sideways into my jacket placket (heh heh) because eventually the clips stop clipping as well and then my pens are falling out all over again.

Leftover tomato-zucchini tart, followed by leftover blackberry-apricot-cherry pie. I need some iced coffee.

Is this the same people as the Cafes Asia on 19th Street NW between L and M and on Wilson Blvd in Arlington?

Hi Michael, I'm curious how CIA changed you. How did you cook, think about food, work in a kitchen before and after you went there?

Bibb lettuce with shaved Vidalia onion, farm market european cukes, herb vinaigrette Heirloom tomato and zucchini tart Marinated chickpeas Blackberry-apricot-cherry pie Mmm, pie.

A leftover dried cherry scone. I made the dough, like, six months ago and froze it to see how it would freeze. Defrosted and baked it off yesterday. Not bad but not nearly as good as fresh. I made a fresh batch to compare yesterday. Biggest difference is the frozen ones tasted like other frozen foods stored near the dough.

Does the type of water used make a noticeable difference? This just occurred to me. I use only filtered water for making coffee, for thinning out sauces, for reconstituting concentrates. (I have a filter, I don't buy water for these applications.) But I use tap water for stocks. Has anybody tried it both ways?

K&W is pretty good. We always liked J&S more, though. I thought their food was fresher. I loved K&W for breakfast when I was a kid. Fried apples and biscuits, mmm! Will you be hitting any of the NC chains? Ham's comes to mind. I love their homemade chips even if the rest of the menu is nothing special. Try to get to the original in Greensboro, along Friendly Ave. My dad used to eat there when he was in high school. Next time you hit a cafeteria or other local-yokel place look for Boar and Castle sauce. Used to be a burger joint in Greensboro way back when, and while it's been closed for decades some factory somewhere still makes the sweet-tart sauce. Not bad on fries. -Malawry, who is a native of Greensboro and whose closest childhood friend lives in Hickory

A canteloupe A sugar baby watermelon White peaches Nectarines Blackberries Zucchini An assortment of red tomatoes Bibb lettuce Red leaf lettuce Yukon Gold potatoes Eggs Cucumbers, European

Smoked cod! That sounds fabulous. How did it come out? How long did you smoke it?

Yeah, they only offered us the RW menu. There was a note on it saying that the items were also available a la carte, but there were no prices listed for a la carte ordering purposes. For what it's worth, we made our reservation via OpenTable and I'd placed a note in the reservation about being there for Restaurant Week. Maybe they didn't bother to show us another menu because of this note in our reservation. But I somehow doubt it. I have the feeling they stuck to the RW menu exclusively at lunch so they could turn their tables as quickly as possible. Service like this would be unacceptable at dinner, but for many would be preferable at lunchtime.

Chef Tom, the exec chef, did most of the pastry himself. His sous-chef, whose name I forget, was interested in learning it so he started doing some of it too. This was late last year that I trailed there so the situation may have changed since then. I don't know what kind of pastry experience Chef Tom had before running Corduroy but I know that the lack of a pastry chef was at the time neither temporary nor unintentional. I made it to Tosca yesterday. What a machine that place was, they were turning those tables in about an hour at lunchtime when we went. They brought our plates virtually the second a course was cleared. Clearly these guys wanted to make the most out of RW, what with their extended RW menu (there was no other menu offered), the brisk well-coordinated service, and so on. I'd have been irritated by such service at dinner but didn't consider it to be a big issue at lunch. (Actually, if you have to get in and out rapidly but want to eat a nice lunch during the workday, seems like Tosca would be a good choice.) I visited with Edemuth. We agreed to split everything we ordered. For the starter, we shared a chilled yellow pepper soup with calamari and a duck strudel with mache salad and fava beans. The soup was great, tasted strongly of yellow pepper. Sunny and not very rich. The cold calamari in the middle of the soup was a little lost on me. It didn't seem to add much to the soup's flavor, it was just...cold calamari. The duck strudel really needed a sauce, it was dry and just not that special. Your basic duck in phyllo type starter. It came with a big pile of mache salad with a few bits of pancetta, which I didn't really want to share because it was fresh and tart and salty-bitter. Perfect summery salad. For our entrees, we shared fettucine with veal ragu and spring peas, and ravioli with ricotta and raisin filling. The fettucine was thinner than any I'd seen before (the ribbons looked more like linguine to me) and came with plenty of meaty sauce. There was a generous shower of the peas on top. This pasta was very satisfying, it's a bunch of my favorite foods put together, each cooked perfectly: slightly bouncy noodles, tender veal, rich tomato, crisp bright fresh peas. The ravioli came in a light butter sauce flavored with sage, and tasted of gentle egg and ricotta flavors. I was a little put off by the sweetness of the raisins, which came close to overwhelming the soft flavors of the pasta and filling. Dessert, we shared the tomato marmalade tart with basil ice cream and the watermelon granita with melon and blueberries. I would have liked the tomato filling to have been a little less sweet, but it was still scrumptious with that buttery flaky pastry and that rich, slightly herby ricotta-basil ice cream. I think Tosca deserves Restaurant Week bonus points for putting something less mainstream like this on the dessert menu. The granita was all right, just your standard granita with a few canteloupe balls and some superfresh blueberries. Icy and refreshing. I spied Chef Cesare in the dining room briefly towards the end of lunch. He looked a lot more collected than I'd have anticipated, given the packed dining room. I'd really have liked to have seen the kitchen in the midst of the onslaught, it must have been a remarkable machine considering how efficient they were.

That "kitkat" dessert really is lovely. Did you know that Corduroy does not have a pastry chef? Or at least they didn't when I trailed there late last year.

Thanks, it was good! Steve Klc is somewhat responsible for my interest in putting desserts into glasses (the rest of this interest comes from the lovely and talented Edemuth, who is an aficionado of trifles). As long as the components are cooked properly you can have very simple ingredients yet create a real impression. The cookies: easy. The pineapple: easy. Whipped cream with rum in it: easy. Together: yum. If I'd piped the whipped cream instead of spooning it the dessert would have looked even better, but my guests had already arrived by the time I was assembling the dessert so I didn't want to take any extra time.

I try to make a good dessert once or twice a week. I love desserts and try to keep developing my pastry skills. I don't ever have people over without preparing a dessert, unless it's brunch in which case I prepare a breakfast pastry of some sort. I think it's part of a quality meal.

Grilled mustard-glazed salmon with papaya-cucumber-basil salsa Grilled veggies: squash, zukes, asparagus Very garlicky fingerling potatoes A wineglass-assembled dessert: crumbled shortbread cookies, grilled pineapple, rum-flavored whipped cream in layers. Everybody licked their glasses. I love grilled pineapple.

Get JAZ to write a Restaurant Week etiquette guide for the WashPost, mayhaps? The problem is, it's really hard to educate a diner about this sort of thing without altering their mood for the worse.

Jeez, what a bunch of ingrates, Mark. There was an extension week of RW last time; not all restaurants who participated initially participated the second week. I know at least one place got listed on the materials for the second week even though they hadn't planned to participate. Bet that made for some interesting supplies and staffing shenanigans. And then there are places that continue to offer the deal, without advertising it, well past the end of RW. If you're a diner and you want to take advantage of the RW deals it's worth your while to call and ask if the promotion is continuing at your target restaurant, even if it's a few days after RW ends. I'll be hitting Tosca and Charlie Palmer Steak this week. Bilrus, thanks for your report, I think I will have to try that tomato and basil dessert.