Sandra Levine

Rachel Perlow would know best. She and Jason planned the NJ banquet and frequently dine at the restaurant. Perhaps bpsklar should msg Rachel for more information.

One of my favorite uses is for the cheese filling for blintzes!

Thank you for the compliment. I do love Indian food, as I know it. I regret that I have not actually been to India. If you are tasting, it might be better for each of us to prepare a different dish -- to test the book, in other words, rather than turn the tasting into a cooking competition! In flipping through Mrs. Singh's book, I saw that she has a recipe for ras malai, my favorite Indian dessert. It appears to be quite an undertaking, and far more calorific than I realized. (My capacity for self-delusion is unlimited.) I plan to make the ras malai one day, to see what they are really supposed to be like.

China 46 NJ e-Gulleteers banquet menu Hope this helps. Edit by RPerlow: Fixed broken link.

Generally, I use green for desserts and lighter dishes and save the brown for meat.

An ear of corn has fewer carbs than a potato, but who eats only one ear of corn? Here is a link to carbohydrate counts: carbohydrate counts

I think of it as "absorbing" rather than imitating.

That's interesting, Jinmyo. Do you think it might be because pizza came to Japan via America rather than Italy? Corn is such an American ingredient (origin, use) although, of course, there's also polenta in Italy.

Newfoundland: Cloudberries, ginger muffins and other ginger-flavored treats, capelin (a sardine-like fish), seal flipper pie

On the other hand, depending on the way you learn, it may be helpful for you to know what a "cocotte", looks like, or what the broad differences are between braising and broiling,, as you taste. (I couldn't learn to ride a bicycle, for example, until someone expalined the principle of the gyroscope to me.)

La Techniqueby Jacques Pepin and a second volume by him, the title of which I cannot remember at the moment, are illustrated by black and white photographs showing every step of a particular technique, as applied to a wide variety of foods, meats included. The Cook's Catalogue has hundreds of photos of pots, pans, cocottes, casseroles, knives, baking dishes and much, much more.

I buy a pound of butter at a time, keep one stick in a glass butter dish in the refrigerator and the rest in the freezer at -10 F. If the butter is wrapped in something other than foil, I overwrap it and sometimes put it in a zip-lock freezer bag. I think butter, because of the high fat content, is one of the food best suited to freezing. I can't detect the difference between the unfrozen and previously frozen quarters once they defrost. The next butter I try will be anItalian butters mentioned above, or Lurpak. I also like Plugra and the various French butters when they are reasonably fresh.

Rachel, I think Keller's makes more then one kind of butter and the Plugra equivalent is the "European-style" with a higher amount of butterfat.

I strongly suspect that depends on the ethnicity of one's parents.

Szechuen or Sichuan pepper is a key ingredient in "Millionaire Chicken," see link below. I originally found this recipe in Grace Zia Chu's "The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking." http://www.themessingfamily.com/recipes/Mi...e%20Chicken.htm My edition of this book (paper, 1969) falls open to the page this recipe is on. It's a great picnic dish that used to be very popular when this was the Chinese cookbook of choice. Chu notes that the original Chinese name is Odd Flavor Chicken.

Yes, that's true, but a rib lamb chop?

Speaking of baby steps, lamb is often the first meat fed to babies. Maybe the taste is more accessible or likable than that of beef, although those characteristics are not obvious to those of us who are used to eating meat.

I don't know about a rule, but I have six place settings of James Robinson silver in the Trifid pattern with three-tined forks (and cannon-handle knives.) I would love to get two more place settings, but the silver has become prohibitively expensive and I have other priorities now. For daily use, I finally replaced my odds and ends with an inexpensive stainless steel set that has a nice weight to it. I have enough for a party.

I, too, have already seen and loved the exhibit, but would also appreciate the private tour. I'm so glad that Wright is enjoying a revival. My dishes are unWright-like: a Wedgwood eartherware pattern, "Lotus," vaguely Chinese in feeling, with a pale blue-white background and lots of cobalt blue and sienna in the pattern. My husband chose the pattern at the time we got married, 25 years ago, having grown up in a home where the Royal Copenhagen mentioned above was "good" china. I tend to feel that plain white is best for showing off food, but I do love my Lotus. I often mix it with solid blue pieces.

I drink NYC tap water at home, because, to my palate, it remains the best tasting water. When I am traveling, it is the "food" I miss the most. I've never had a bottled water that could compare.

There's Josephina, a casual place with good salads and sandwiches.

Crif's is at 113 St. Mark's Place

My admiration for your accomplishments franklanguage, and thank you for telling us. The first thing I ever made was baking powder biscuits in home ec. My father said, with tears in his eyes, that they were just like his mother's, and I was off and running. I learned by trailing my grandmother and our next-door neighbor, by reading cookbooks, and watching Julia Child. Like many of my contemporaries, I worked my way through her Volume I of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I used to give myself courses, in the sense that I would concentrate on fruit tarts, pastry or bread, or meat stews for weeks or months at a time. I would generally start with a recipe and then try my own variations in the attempt to improve the result. I actually cook very little now, but I was very serious about it at one time. It was a great triumph for me when my grandmother finally admitted that something I made was better than her version of the same thing.

It's available at the Union Square Greenmarket in season. (Liza sill tell us when, I'm sure.) Farmer's markets in NJ must carry it. Purslane is more about texture than flavor. The leaves are fleshy and somewhat gelatinous in a very pleasant way. It's one of the few salad greens with a chew. The smaller, thinner stgems are edible, but you should discard the larger stems. Chopped hard-cooked egg is a often added to a purslane salad. A warm dressing that you might use to make a wilted dandelion salad is appropriate, but vinaigrette is just, fine, too.

I would like it -- and, I have some brown cardamom to give you in exchange.