Moopheus

Commune, I believe. It was one of Mathew Kenney's last "big" places before scaling back & moving on to Pure Food & Wine ← There were at least two other restaurants there before that, including, as I recall, a burger place/bar that had sawdust on the floor. I don't remember the name.

Just say no to Flavia.

Does your mom know my mom? This weekend I looked in the freezer and the bag of Tanzanian peaberry I brought last Xmas was still there. It was, yes, stale, but still better than the maxwell haus she had before. When I make the coffee she says, "don't make it as black as you like it." She usually drinks tea when she's by herself, so I think she thinks that coffee should look like tea, preferably weak tea. And your mom could do a _lot_ worse than Dunkin Donuts, though I wouldn't use it for espresso.

Peanut butter goop. It was supposed to be peanut butter fudge, but it didn't set up very solidly. Spoonable fudge. That's it. Spoonable fudge. I eat my mistakes. Leave no evidence.

I made chocolate pudding yesterday--real pudding, not from a box. Just plain chocolatey, creamy goodness.

Since countertop space in my apartment is virtually nil, there are no applinces on them. My only work space is my small island. Most of the appliances are kept on open Metro shelving units. There's a wall-hanging thingy for my pots and pans.

In my neighborhood, all of the larger cafes get taken over by mommy gangs in the afternoon--and I do mean gangs, bunches of them sitting around together in groups. When that happens, it becomes impossible to read or work (which for me is reading) The last time I was at one cafe down the street the mommies actually started to have a singalong. There's one place down the street that's still relatively a safe haven, because it is small and the tables are too close together for strollers. I wonder if mommies taking kids to cafes is a relatively recent phenomenon. It didn't seem to be so much of a problem before about 4 or 5 years ago, but it may have been a function of where I was. When I was a kid I'd go with my dad to the Dunkin Donuts or the Pewter Pot for coffee (no real cafes in my town then), and we'd sit around and shoot the sh*t with the other regulars, and the youngest people there (other than myself) would be working behind the counter.

Yesterday I made a Chocolate-Peanut Butter S'mores cake. (graham cracker crust, choclate cake, peanut butter and meringue toppings). Very rich and dense--had a slice last night and still feeling it today. Tasty, though.

Last night we had a packet of McVitie's HobNobs.

A mushroom already has such a high water content it can't really absorb much more. I don't sift either. I always use a scale, so I know how much I'm getting, and that's usually sufficient.

Frozen Desserts by Liddell & Weir has a brief introduction to the basic chemistry of ice cream making that's actually useful for working out your own recipes for small batches. Some of the industrial handbooks have more detail, but as noted, they tend to be oriented toward mass-market manufacturing, and they also tend (judging by the ones I have here) to be very badly written. This web site from the University of Guelph has a lot of interesting information.

Today I made a pan of the white chocolate-coconut cream bars from Fran Bigelow's Pure Chocolate for a lunch tomorrow at the wife's boss's country house. I wanted to make something that looked harder to make than it really was, and I'd been looking for an excuse to try that recipe. It came out pretty tasty.

I haven't had a chance to get more than a brief look at this, but I'm guessing that Damon Lee Fowler's New Southern Baking is going to be a keeper.

On Sunday I baked some almond brittle cookies, recipe from Classic Home Desserts by Richard Sax. There's enough for a week, even after giveing some away at work yesterday.

Unfortunately, we can't get that in New York. We have to make do with what we can get. So no Herrell's. No Tosci's or Christina's for that matter. No Bart's. So while we are in exile from good ice cream, mainly I make my own. There used to be a shop in Brooklyn called Peter's that made good sundaes--all homemade toppings, though occasionally the ice cream would be a tad icy--which sadly closed a few years ago.

Well, he wasn't saying that Food TV IS porn, just that it's LIKE porn in emphasising the gut reaction instead of the extremely nominal "instructional" value, which isn't what people are watching for. It's been pretty obvious for some time that most of the shows on FTV have little or no instructional value. Sports viewing clearly relies on the same reactions. Have you ever listened closely to the way sports announcers talk? It's like listening to Sandra Lee after a few cocktails. Food TV, porn, ESPN, are all just different manifestations of the same basic phenomena. As Chauncy Gardner would say, "I like to watch."

Really? I tried the ginger ice cream there once and it struck me that it might pass as an okay vanilla.

I had an apartment once with an oven/heater combo unit. As I recall the heater worked, but stank up the place mightily and was very inefficient, so we didn't use it. Whe I was a kid, my dad was friends with the last real farmers in the town, and their house a big old cast iron, wood-fired oven. It was the central heating unit for the house.

I have arbitrarily refused to eat things by saying they aren't kosher, in places where I wasn't likely to get called on it.

We were on the road and stopped for lunch somewhere in Virginia (I actually don't know what town it was), at a fairly innocuous-looking roadside diner type of place. The lunch is a buffet. The bathroom was, well, I can't really describe how filthy it was. They had one of those hand-towel things where a cloth towel goes around on a continuous loop. The cloth was black.

Ah, well, I was close. I think Coffee Emergency is also opening up a shop, at least there is something about it on their web site. If you've got two good roasters in town, then you are truly blessed.

Pumpkin Pie. I was at the farmer's market on Saturday and the pumpkins were just calling out to me--they wanted to be made into pie. There was a little bit more of the custard filling than fit in the shell, so I think I'll just fill a couple of ramekins and bake it.

This is reminding me that I need to sharpen a couple of my knives. I just do them when they seem to need it, since one or two knives do most of the work. I use an EdgePro sharperner; I definitely think it was worth the price.

It wouldn't happen to be Coffee Emergency? I think he will hear it from his customers if his quality slips.

Finished off the pecan pie. Don't know what to make next. It is a conundrum.