vengroff

Had TJ's Australian strip steak tonite. $4 for a 10oz steak. It was nicely trimmed and good and beefy. Not prime steakhouse quality, but well above the average supermarket steak. I don't recall ever having Australian beef before. Does anyone know how it is generally raised as compared to American beef? I asked my wife to bring in a bottle of the Chuck Cab to go with the steak, but she had a better idea. She brought an '82 Faustino I Rioja Gran Reserva. That frosted bottle kills me every time.

Lesley and Mark, Thanks for the great recipes. I took the liberty of adding them to the eGullet Recipe Archive under your names. Feel free to edit them, or let me know if you disapprove in any way of what I have done, or wish me to delete them. Here are the recipes for Moules Casserole and Mussels with Thai Basil and Chiles.

that was my initial thought. i suppose there are a few gems, but for the most part, those places look disgusting. flies. odor. the whole thing. I don't know. I always went uptown to wild edibles. Expensive, but excellent quality.

It's funny that they refer to Anchor Steam as "Californian Common Beer."

The good thing about fish is that it's pretty easy for experienced consumers to judge quality at the time of purchase, wherever they happen to shop. Some things to remember: 1. Buy whole fish whenever possible. They are easier to examine at the time of purchase, and presentation of the final product is great. 2. There should be no "fishy" smell in the shop or on the fish. Obviously there should also be no smell of ammonia, chlorine, or other chemicals that may have been used to clean and cover the smell in the shop. 3. Check the eyes. They should be clear. 4. Check the gills. They should be red and vibrant. Follow these steps, and you'll end up with good fish on your table.

If you're in the mood for a road trip, Zingerman's in Ann Arbor has a good selection of Balsamico.

Chuck's merlot blows. Awbrig and I independently tasted in the same night and reached similar conclusions. See the Trader Joe's thread for details.

New York's law has been struck down by a recent court case, but remains in effect pending appeal.

What do they do is Sweden?

State control of importation and distribution of wine is getting hit hard on a number of legal fronts. This can only help. The only group that seems to be seriously fighting liberalization are the big distributers that are going to get cut out of the middle.

Excellent report. I'm sorry to hear that the weather interrupted your trip south in pursuit of a Virgina ham.

So why would fermented cashew paste be OK if raw milk cheese is not? Or is the nut cheese not actually fermented? Is fermentation allowed or not according to Roxanne's rules?

It's not that we don't have the linguistic constructs to form a negative definition. It's that any such definition, which lumps all kinds of things together that are completely unrelated in any positive sense, is going to have inherently exclusionary connotations in many people's minds. I'm not sure that choosing another word is going to result in the categorization it describes being any more palatable to those who already dislike the term ethnic.

Try asking about this on the UK forum, or maybe just the cooking forum, where Brits will also be found. It sounds more like the bacon they have over there than what we are used to in the US.

I think it's pretty difficult to come up with a replacement term. The inherent problem is that it's pretty damn hard to come up with a term that whose definition is, "the wildly varied food eaten by the overwhelming majority of people on earth every single day, minus the cuisine originating in a certain parts of Western Europe and North America." There's nothing positive to hold the definition together. Thiebou dienn has nothing to do with chicken mole, and neither of them have anything to do with pho. All that brings them together into a category is what they are not.

Yup, email, voicemail, faxes, PMs, you name it...

Had some of TJ's Kenya AA Arabica coffee this morning. Very smooth. The big coffee drinker in the house (not me) liked it too. I wonder how much difference the nitrogen-filled packaging makes in flavor and/or shelf life.

I was just jumping on line to report the same. The Merlot burned when I first smelled it-very astringent. On the palate, it was watery, but not nearly as harsh as on the nose. After some time in the glass, it ended up being drinkable, but only in the sense of not being overtly awful any more. We pressed on through the bottle, and the conclusion we came to was that it was like airplane wine. You know, the stuff in the twist-top bottle that they serve with your choice of dried out beef, rubbery chicken, or mushy lasagna. In that context, it can be the star of the meal. Back at sea level, I'm not so sure...

Fiji blows it away! No contest. We're going to get some Evian and do a blind taste test. That way we won't be biased by the fancy waterfall inside the Fiji bottle. I'm pretty sure the taste difference will be hard to miss, but I want to do a fair test.

Great pics, Awbrig! We just had at TJ's lunch. The great revelation of this meal was that the half-sour pickles kick butt. They're very garlicky and much crunchier than any other supermarket pickles I've ever had. The liquid they are packaged in is slightly carbonated. It bubbles when you open the jar. I assume this is due to fermentation in the jar. Shredded BBQ pork was also a pleasant surprise. There were good size chunks of pork, worthy of further pulling, not just some stringy bits in a tub of sauce. The sauce itself wasn't bad; in fact, with some hot sauce added, it was a good quick lunch. On the down side, the bread doesn't seem great. Fiji water, which I've never tried before, tastes purer (in the sense of lower mineral content) than my usual Evian. I don't have a bottle of Evian to compare the labels. We'll have a bottle of Chuck tonite.

It's all over Chinatown in NYC. In my experience, there is tremendous variation in the quality of the underlying tea, which makes a big difference in the final product. I assume that one or more groups are hard at work trying to Starbuckize it for the mass market.

Just came back from my first trip to Trader Joe's in Arlington, VA. What a pleasure. I can't believe I've been shopping at Giant and Whole Foods since I moved here. We picked up a bunch of different things to sample from different corners of the store: everything from coffee to pasta to rack of lamb to half-sour pickles. Of course we also got some Fiji water and three-and-a-half-buck Chuck. I look forward to sampling the goods over the coming days.

I just counted a measly 58 on the shelves where I keep most of them. There are probably 10 more scattered randomly about the house.

Do they melt easily, as fat would?

Here is Jason's recipe for Mezze Rigatoni con Pancetta i Cipolla Verde.