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Moopheus

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Posts posted by Moopheus

  1. What was there before Rocco's?

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. I wash mushrooms under running water. I put three or four in my hands and roll them together under the faucet. They're never waterlooged or rubbery. Who has time to brush individual mushrooms with a damp towel? No me.

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. i definitely like the ice cream, but beyond that.....

    i ordered a hot fudge sundae (i am from boston, and there's no better sundae than herrell's).

    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.

  8. As such, a better comparison for Food TV would be ESPN.

    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."

  9. I have never seen any other stove of this vintage with its own built-in heater, nor do any of the websites I've visited with old/refurbished stoves ever feature them.

    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.

  10. In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain points out that, if the bathroom's disgusting, the kitchen -- which is infinitely harder to clean -- is much, much worse.

    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.

  11. 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.

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