Malawry

Sorry, I meant to say Polonez is indeed in Silver Spring. It's very close to the intersection with 410 (east-west hwy). If you're heading North from the city along Georgia, it's on the right. It has been there for some time. I think Eve Zibart of the Wash Post wrote a feature on it two years ago. I'd seen it before then, but had not been interested. The awning does read Polonez Delicatessen in white script on the royal blue field. I saw no ice cream, but I didn't look at the fridge/freezer cases at all (they appeared to all be fridges holding bottled beverages of no interest). One might have been a freezer, I dunno. Edemuth and I meant to hit Giffords after the movies a few weeks ago, but we got sidetracked. Haven't been to their new-new location on Woodmont somewhere yet but of course I had been to the location in the building on Wisc Ave (they were in the back, facing an alley/parking lot of sorts). They still sell caramels. Come down and we'll go together. If Giffords used to be in Silver Spring it was before my time here in DC. I've been here almost 6 years. Other candy makers: Ann Amernick makes delicious caramels in her bakery, Amernick, in Cleveland Park. There must be other candy makers in town though. I remember hearing about a chocolatier in NoVa, and I know there was a recent revival of a Washington classic caramel maker...some family member just started making them again 2 years or so ago, they covered it in the Post food section with a nice feature. Somebody who used to sell them near Woody's, or in Woody's, and apparently you always bought them for Christmas in the old big Downtown DC days. They don't make candies, but I have historically purchased a lot of chocolates from the Chocolate Chocolate store on L Street near Connecticut Avenue in the Farragut area. It was convenient to my office. They carry Neuhaus and a decent selection of Scharffen Berger. I also like the individual chocolates in the Lake Champlain line, but the bars are nothing special. I am not especially well-educated on chocolates and candies, and I bet Steve could run circles around my knowledge of what to get in the area and where. BTW, the jam is Aronia. I just checked the jar. Anybody heard of this fruit?

Lesley, thanks, that actually sounds accessible. I might try it closer to the holidays, for giftmaking. Jim, now I'm thinking of making a vanilla ice cream with a ganache ribbon and a mint "pesto" sauce. Mmmmmm!

Monday night I stopped by Polonez Gourmet Delicatessen, 8113 Georgia Avenue, on my way to retrieve my car from the shop. The storefront is decked out with a blue awning and has a sign reading "ICE CREAM" from the side. It's a long, narrow shop specializing in Polish foods. As soon as I stepped in, the proprietor leapt up from his post in the back of the shop and asked if he could help me. I told him I came in because I knew he ran a Polish deli, and I'd never been in one before. I explained I was looking about to see what they carried. He got excited and started discussing their wonderful sausages, which ones he loved best, which ones they were unfortunately out of, and so on. As a recently reformed vegetarian, the sausages did not hold much interest for me. Seeing this, he started discussing Polish sweets. He pulled out Mieszco Duet candy and handed it to me. "You'll like this. Like a sweet gel candy." I bit into the soft, chocolate-covered dual gel: lemon atop a neutral white gel cream. The chocolate coating was dark and a little bitter. He pointed at the wall behind me. "They're over there, on the bottom." I turned around and checked out the wall behind me. There were several kinds of jams. I picked up one in a flavor I hadn't seen before (something like Aronima, I don't remember the exact name) and asked the guy behind the counter about it. "It's an American crop that was exported to Poland, where it became popular as a jam. It's tart, not as tart as cranberries though. It's good, you'll like it." The store offers many baked goods, including babkas and Polish donuts. There is also a full selection of sausages and cheeses, and some preserved fish. I bought a fillet of Matjes herring (a Swedish herring in wine sauce) and some creamed herring. I also purchased the jam and a sack of the Duet candies. The proprietor gave me a list of their specialties and encouraged me to come back and try the pierogies and the babke sometime. He seemed happy I knew what at least some of the foods were and asked if I was Polish. I told him that I am Jewish and grew up with some Polish type foods. After I got home, I toasted a couple of bagels. I put the Matjes herring on a plate and garnished it with sliced sweet onion. I assembled a platter with pickles, olives, sliced cucumber and some scrubbed young carrots. My housemate Abi joined me at the table for dinner. The creamed herring was as delicious as any I've consumed: rich but not overwhelmingly so, slightly fishy, lots of onions in the cream sauce. It was great on the bagel. The Matjes herring was so rich and sweet and oily that the bagel wasn't right for it. We tasted various foods on the table with the Matjes, sampling how the flavor played against other tastes. I thought a tart apple might go well with it, so Abi found a Granny Smith in the fridge and cut a few planks off of it for us to eat the Matjes on. After a few nibbles I decided to add pepper, and then to try it with Maille mustard. Pretty soon I had a new amuse-bouche on my hands: a slice of Granny Smith, an extremely thin smear of Maille, a bit of Matjes herring, a few diced bits of sweet onion, and a scrape of black pepper. Mmmm. This place is clearly not doing so well, and I would hate to see it go when they provide foods that are so hard to find in the DC area. I'll definitely go back periodically.

Thanks, Stella. Your anniversary dinner sounded just lovely too. (Our anniversary dinner consisted of vegetarian "sausage" subs with onions and peppers and mushrooms and provolone on fresh baguette, and red and yellow chard sauteed with garlic and pine nuts. I made a nicer brunch that morning, tho: pancakes, slow-scrambled eggs, strawberries with homemade sour cream and brown sugar. Sometimes casual food fits the bill, even on a special occasion.) It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that the spa at Hershey Park offers some sort of ganache treatment. I think a warm ganache body wrap would make your skin look and smell great. Of course, I didn't make nearly enough ganache to wrap anybody up. Except for my cat, that is, and she's too dignified for that.

Thanks for all the tips, ya'll. Rachel, I like the bitterness of unsweetened cocoa on a truffle too. Plus I'm fairly lazy, and uneducated about proper chocolate techniques, so I'd be more likely to coat my truffles with cocoa or powdered sugar than with properly tempered chocolate. Chefette, I'll be sure not to serve Steve such inappropriate ganache truffles whenever you guys make it up to our place. Jim, do you mean you used ganache in the ice cream itself, or do you mean you used it as a sauce for ice cream? If you incorporate ganache into ice cream base, what are the proportions? Edemuth's new ice cream maker just begs for experimentation.

See, I remember Tom Sietsema saying in his Live Online chat a couple times that he got his start as a recipe tester for the Wash Post Food section. Did he just test a lot at home as his job? If so, can I please have that job? I feel your pain on the workplace kitchen. My workplace was like that except we didn't even have a toaster until I bought one and schlepped it in myself.

The Post publishes nutritional information with each recipe. How do you do the nutritional analysis? Do you add up the numbers in-house using a nutrition guide (such as the USDA's at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl)? Do you hire a nutritionist to analyze the content of your recipes?

Jeanne, you've mentioned the Post's rigorous recipe testing and rewriting in a couple of your responses. Could you tell us more about the test kitchen? I assume the Post has one, but I realize this may be an erroneous assumption. What's it like? Who does the recipe testing? How do you ensure that everything really is followed to the letter when a recipe is tested? Do you think your recipe testing methods and equipment work well?

I don't find bestseller lists useful in general, and I certainly wouldn't like to see the Food section devote precious column inches to a list of cookbook bestsellers. I do agree that more cookbook coverage would be nice to see in Food, but I don't think a list of bestsellers is the way to fit it in. I assume that if you made space for such a thing regularly it'd appear in the "On the Fridge" section, where you place short descriptions of those previously referenced odd gadgets and products you liked and where Tom Sietsema's "Weekly Dish" appears. (I know you changed your format a little recently, and I normally read Food on washingtonpost.com rather than getting the print edition, so I may not be totally on here.) Could you make room for shorter reviews more frequently in this space? I'd appreciate capsules almost as much as I appreciate longer cookbook articles such as the one you ran recently on Diet Simple by Katherine Tallmadge and A New Way to Cook. Do you necessarily have to run a recipe to discuss a cookbook? I am very interested in reviews of what I call "meta-food" books such as you reference (food writing anthologies, food travel) as well, and would like to see them covered more frequently in the Post. That being said, I don't usually read the Book pages but I wonder if those may be better placed with other book reviews.

In celebration of our first wedding anniversary, today I made my partner and I a butter cake with a ganache frosting. It came out beautifully, easily the best and best-looking cake I've produced to date. I never knew ganache was so easy to work with...it looks so glossy and perfect. Now I have all this leftover ganache. We're about to go out of town, so I doubt we'll manage to eat it all by the spoonful before we leave. (Besides which, there's all that leftover cake!) Does this stuff freeze well? How should I store it, and how do I thaw it and prepare it for use? Also, interesting ideas for what to do with my leftovers would be welcome. (Frost another cake? Sandwich cookies? Make hot fudge sauce for ice cream? Make truffles? Finger paint?) Thanks.

So, what went into the "term paper" you referenced? (The document you wrote explaining your thoughts on the Food section, your intentions and your goals if chosen as editor) What have you done to realize these visions of what the Food section could become under your leadership? Editorial aside: I can't believe your Sports coworkers hung out at Timberlakes! I'm reminded of the defunct Crappy but Good column...

Last summer, Edemuth and I made a big Spanish-style dinner for her birthday. We picked up some of the accoutrements from the Takoma farm market. While I was in line at one stall, she went to a different stall and came back bearing a plastic sack of dark cherries. The kinds of cherries that you imagine on the label for black cherry soda: black-red, obviously bursting with juice, a slightly sticky/chalky feeling when you touch them contradicted by their supershiny appearance. They were almost obscene they looked so perfect. "Chef's treats," she said as I peered in the sack. After we got home, they sat in their sack on the counter above our garbage can. The sack slowly deflated as the trash can got stained by the pits we spat in there as we nibbled the cherries. I remember cooking barefoot, Edemuth working quietly beside me, and the occasional rustle of that plastic sack and the rapid reddening of our tongues. What a way to spend a summer afternoon. I can't wait for the cherries to appear again this season.

I note from your bio that you have worked in several different parts of the paper, including a lengthy stint with the Sports section. How did you end up at the helm of the Food section? What was your personal history with food and food writing before coming to the Food section, both during and before your tenure at the Post?

What trends do you see in the types of writing and subject matter appearing in newspaper food sections? What do you see coming in the future? How is the Washington Post preparing for and staying ahead of those changes?

Jeanne, thanks for doing this chat. As a Washingtonian and an avowed food geek, I devour the weekly Post food section every Wednesday morning, and I'm excited you'll be joining us on eGullet. I have often wondered where you get your story ideas, and how you decide which ones make it into the paper. Do individual writers come up with most of their stories? Do you host regular brainstorming sessions? Also, how do you decide on section themes? Are they set far in advance or are they more happenstance?

Sometimes I use a fork to remove clumps of eggy crumbs aside. I also find that shaking the plate every so often helps keep fresh crumbs available for breading. I kinda like the effect of breaded fingers, personally. But I'm weird that way. After reading a James Beard essay about cooking with your hands I've experimented quite a bit with it and it really is a different way of getting to know your food. Plus it's kid-like fun!

Dinner last night was unremarkable (toasted baguette smeared with butter and jam), but brunch was lovely: Arugula salad with mustard-shallot dressing and a poached duck egg Herbes de Provence goat cheese croustades Homemade spinach-ricotta ravioli in a sage-butter sauce with fresh peas And my friend brought a blueberry lemon tart. Very spring-y.

I've heard this many times and from many sources. Perhaps I'm a naive optomist about these things, but sometimes I wish farm market vendors would take a chance on their clients. I tend to go out of my way to buy strange and interesting products that appear at my market, because I want those items to keep appearing and because I like to try new things. I understand it's a financial equation, and that the margins are frighteningly narrow for farmers. But that doesn't mean I don't want access to the same products a restaurateur can obtain.

Buttah's it, baybee. On a totally frivolous note: the image of the guy with his head in the oven...is that Bittman himself? And is that his home kitchen? On a more serious note, I didn't learn much from the article, but then I know enough about the differences between restaurant and home cooking that I'd already gotten most of what he conveyed. I don't take many shortcuts when I try to do a good meal at home. I don't shy away from multiple shopping visits or spending several days preparing a single meal. (I don't do it every week either, but I do it at least once a month.) I did enjoy reading the article (it was the first thing I read on Metro this morning) but I didn't learn that much from it. What I'd be interested in learning is how a home cook like me could get her mitts on stuff like micro beet greens. I can't seem to find those, or duck eggs, or lots of other funky and cool ingredients like that around these parts. I like working with some of the great things I can pick up from the farm market and Fresh Fields but I'm always wishing I had access to more. The most frustrating thing about trailing in a restaurant kitchen was tasting all kinds of lovely things that I won't be able to buy and play with myself. I'd also be interested in learning more about what you can and can't make in advance and why. I've learned a lot of that stuff by experimenting but imo that's one of the huge things that separates home cookin' and restaurant cookin': restaurant cooks know exactly how much they can do before service, and how long they can stay fresh and tasty in that state. Home cook unfamiliarity with the ins and outs of food storage lead to the Thanksgiving catastrophes Bittman references.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2002May14.html Poor Rose! The last paragraph made me jealous though.

I can't believe he doesn't mention shrimp and grits, which seems to appear as an appetizer on every menu around here.

I made a big pizza last night with spinach, mushroom, red onion, red pepper, and artichokes. Plus a tossed salad with more red pepper, more red onion, more artichokes, hearts of palm, cucumber and carrot. You know it's summer when the menus are extremely veggie-heavy. My farmer's market STILL didn't bring back duck eggs this week. *cry* I think that's it for the year. I KNEW I shoulda bought them when I saw them! I wanted to make a wilted arugula salad with a poached duck egg.

I find DC fairly easy to navigate, especially compared to unplanned cities like Boston. I could conceivably have swung by that HArdee's if I'd known about it since it's not too far out of the way of the route I take downtown every morning. But I didn't know about it. Sigh. BTW, DC was designed by Pierre L'Enfant. We actually discussed this over dinner last night. (See, we really did talk about things besides chicken berries!) Jillian, NC is about a half hour from Greensboro in the general direction of Asheboro, NC. I don't think Fran's is open any longer, though. I should hunt around eBay for her cookbook though. Thanks for the compliment, the food really was incredible and authentic. edit disclosure: forgot to add additional detail on Fran's.

I'm a native of North Carolina, and resided there until I moved to DC in October 1996. When I came here I experienced culinary culture shock. Nobody makes a proper biscuit, "sweet tea" gets you a strange look, "iced tea" gets you a bitter, cloudy brew, and people pronounce the first "r" in "cornbread." Now, there's some wonderful ethnic food in DC...I challenge any North Carolinian to find a Vietnamese meal that compares to our experience last night at Minh's...but sometimes a girl just wants some down home food. The worst part of this tragedy is what passes for Southern cookin' around DC. I like the gussied-up versions of classic dishes served up by the likes of Vidalia, but if you're jonesing for the real thing that's not the place to find it. There's also Georgia Brown's which commits offenses such as flavoring their iced tea with some kind of peach nectar. And then there's a few places you can get soul food, which is nice but which isn't exactly able to fit the same need as my craving for Southern food. One of my favorite places to eat growing up was Fran's Front Porch in Jillian, NC. Fran's was across the road from Jillian's airport, where rural hobbyists would go barnstorm in their biplanes and small Cessnas. The sound of little planes taking off and landing were the only noises you'd hear out in the yard at Fran's, with the exception of the usual crickets and katydids. Fran's yard had a couple big ancient oak trees and a wraparound porch reminiscent of the house in the movie "Forrest Gump." When you walked in Fran's front door there was a little room with homemade crafts (I wanted a country Raggedy Ann doll) and a small table carrying Fran's church-type cookbook (which I should have bought but never did). There was a small room off to your left with a couple steam tables. You'd pick up a tray and order whatever caught your fancy. Salisbury steak, ham with red-eye gravy, simple country meats. The best Parker House rolls in the universe...I could babble forever about their yeasty, buttery, flaky goodness. I didn't eat cooked veggies as a child, so I usually ate a salad with housemade thousand island dressing using homemade pickle relish. The highlight was always dessert. I never strayed from my devotion to Fran's chocolate chess pie. The sweet top would crackle when you put your fork blade against it, and then your fork would sink through the silky, rich filling until you got to the perfectly flaky (probably lard-enriched) crust. Ohmy. So you'd take your laden tray to a table in one of Fran's side rooms and sit and eat. And eat. And eat. Those were happy days. You can't get that kind of food here in DC. But part of what does appeal to me about DC is the way it's a bridge between the Southern states and the Northern cities. My personal beliefs and my lifestyle fit the pace of life in the Northern cities, but my hospitality and generosity move more to a Southern frame of mind. Part of the reason I moved to DC was because I could enjoy most of the good with less of the bad of each region. Still, there are times when DC just cannot satisfy. Ham biscuits seem to be one of the things that fall through the cracks.

Funny, Edemuth was lamenting the lack of Hardee's around here. She kept saying we woulda succeeded if there had been one. I responded by saying I missed Biscuitville. I have no idea why Vidalia took biscuits out of their bread basket. Their biscuits were pretty darn good, and weren't as yuppified as some of the other things on their menu.