ned

I've eaten whale sushi at Alex Sushi a couple of times. At the time I remember my impression being that it was like beef infused with fish oil. Very interesting. Another great thing to get at Alex is kveitfett sushi--halibut fat sushi. The fat is chopped with scallions and wrapped like uni sushi. Now that was really something.

I'm talking about veal sweetbreads, specifically heart or throat breads.

I've been eating lots of sweetbreads lately--cooking some for myself, eating them in restaurants and also at friends' houses. I've tasted a pretty wide variety and have reached a point where I have some questions. I like the crust you can get on a sweetbread when it is seared in a pan. Sometimes on the inside it can be chalky and sometimes it is juicy as all hell. I don't know what issues are at play that combine to cause these results. Is there collagen in a sweetbread? Ought it be served rare? The best I've had of the species is at an NYC restaurant called Prune. They deep fry. I wonder if deep-frying obviates the setting in boiling water. I wonder if setting is necessary? When I cook a steak, I do it fast and hot. I want it crusted on the outside and rare and tender on the inside. When I cook a lamb shank, I sear first for browning reaction flavors and then cook it low and slow to melt the collagen. I do things this way in no small part because of Mr. McGee's scientific explanations in his book "On Food and Cooking." I'd like some similar explanations of sweetbread cookery that take into account the specific properties of the sweetbread. Anybody got any?

The beer is sweetish, not as dark as Guiness and not at all light. More carbonated for sure. The sour cream is spooned in and stirred. Clumpy.

On Friday a Ukrainian friend named Ludmilla mixed me a drink using Ukrainian stout beer and sour cream. Tasted a little chocolaty. . . but ultimately to me was kind of undrinkable. She claims this concoction has cleansing properties or something. Anybody heard of this?

I had to be somewhere else at three--a baby shower if you must know--and was unable to attend the panel discussion. My curiosity has been piqued. What the heck was the big surprise. Forgive me if it's already been divulged and I skipped over it. Steven, you lucky bastard pickin' that pig with Mr. Mitchell.

Whew. What a day. First of all Mitchell's pork is worth waiting nearly any amount of time for. I put some of the hot sauce on the side. Heaven. I can't say enough about the complexity of flavor and texture in this pork. The moistness throughout, lovely vinegar and seasonings, the heat. Never has so much bread been used as a napkin and tossed in the garbage. Here's a tip: when you get to the front of the line, buy lots of whatever they're selling. No matter whether you're at Mitchell's or Blue Smoke or Salt Lick or wherever. It's going to be a while before you eat the next thing and surely it's going to be a long time before you eat anything that good again. Both briskets are good but for my money, K. C. Baron of Barbeque's R.U.B. BBQ is the best. The only thing I didn't get to was pork shoulder. The snoot sandwich is good but it could be better. I think it isn't seasoned all that well and then after that, a thing that is in large part about crunch is made soggy by sauce. Still worth trying if only so you can say you did. The lines are horrendous but at the beginning and end of the day they are less so. They quit selling tickets at a certain point today and it became possible to actually find a line and stand on it. Some lines are bigger than others. Mitchell's as was noted before is quite the longest, and snoot the shortest (you can just walk up there--oops you can just fight your way through the crowds tripping over dog's leashes, knocking over old ladies, getting threatened by fat men and squashing small children) followed by Blue Smoke where people seem to think that they are making what they always make. NOT SO. Their normal ribs are awesome. These today were significantly better. Finally, I carried beer all over the place and nobody noticed or cared. I recommend you all do the same. It's hot out there and you are eating barbecue. Maybe it will rain tomorrow. We can only hope.

More pics. Cracklin: Brisket: Time for a nap. Nice meeting you Steve.

9:00 am, mopping it up. Pigs stacked and ready for pickin'

If you really want to have some fun, post this question on the urbanbaby.com expecting board and watch the floodgates open.

. . . checking airline schedules. . .

That's how everybody gets to Wo Hop. Me too only after being at your end of the dragging a couple of times, I've switched. Now I'm doing the dragging. Daybreak: salt and pepper squid and Beijing style pork chops with tea and coke. Fond memories of that. Tried once shortly after sunset and it wasn't nearly the same thing. Maybe fourteen aquavits followed by seventy-five beers can affect the palate?

Thanks guys. Plataforma it will be. FG, point well taken about the noisiness. I was imagining a certain type of Times Square restaurant but knowing now that Plataforma isn't that, I guess I can only say I'm duly reassured.

I've read a lot about Plataforma. . . but it's in Times Square and apparently noisy and. . . well I'm an little suspicious. Any opinions about what the best churrascaria in New York (any of the five boroughs) is?

Tighe, hear what you're saying and I would tend to agree with you, not about missing any visits to Lampreia which I'd rather go broke than do, rather about there being a roaring chasm where middle-high end restaurants are. To that I offer a possible explanation. Despite that Seattle has been around in one form or another for better than a hundred years, it has yet to really get a sense of what it is from a culinary perspective. Yeah we all know about fresh veg and salmon and morel and coffee and eastern Wa. wine and micro-brewed beer and fusion and Tom Douglas and his silly James Beard awards but in terms of a real local cuisine that explores the dialectics of the area as a whole, well I agree with your claim that Lark may be signaling the dawn of that era. I ate there about three months ago and had an excellent experience. Think the interior design is dodgy but look what they had to start out with. And I assume since the chef is young and this is his first solo venture that he was a bit under-capitalized. My overwhelming feeling was that they should fire whoever is currently running the show at Canlis and hire Johnathan Sundstrom. Give him the run of a restaurant that historically and architecturally (Roland Terry) reflects a central gestalt of Seattle. Let the rest follow him and we are off to the races.

Well here's another one. It needs a little access-getting. There's a little joint in Broadmoor that makes burgers to rival Red Mill. Yeah you read right, in Broadmoor. It used to be known as Rosie's but sadly she has passed. Well to me the snack bar at the ninth tee will always be known as Rosie's. I never was a member of the golf club but I did caddy there a couple of summers and did grow up between the pearly gates there too. As such I had plenty of opportunities to eat Rosie's cheeseburger. It sets the standard for burgers as far as I am concerned. And aside from the trick of gaining access to Broadmoor, like just getting in the gates which you can do by perfecting a certain self-assured wave, all you have to do is find the ninth tee and walk up to the window (as I did on my last visit to Seattle) and ask the girl with the pierced tongue who is smoking Camel Lights and reading White Noise to make you one of Rosie's cheeseburgers. Edited to add: I was thinking dives. Well Rosie's is its own form of dive for sure but I remember now that this thread is about breakfast. I'm not really sure what that girl would do with eggs. You're probably better off going to Beth's. . . or this Chinese-run diner on the way up to Anacortes that sells breakfast meats by weight. Yeah I'd go there. Tell them not to burn the eggs.

Those taters are glutinous because the otherwise extremely talented chef at Lark is using the wrong damn potatoes to make Robuchon's signature dish. He's using Yukon golds. Should be using a good baking potato, a russett. What in the world are you talking about. Nothing is passing you by, it's sitting there right under your nose. Get thee to Lampreia.

Two nots on E Harlem Patsy's: I'm sure y'all have already experienced this but just in case you haven't, I was shocked to find that Patsy's for dinner is a very different place from Patsy's at lunch. Very cozy, an excellent and dedicated waiter--an older fellow--and a full bar. I am committed to their plain cheese pie and try to eat one for lunch at least weekly. The wife and I went last week for dinner and were offered a fresh mozarella pie and after we polished it, a portabello mushroom pie. As much as I love fresh moz, I think this pie was not as good as their straight cheese one. The portabello pie however. . . well that was something entirely different. Very thin slices of mushroom, not too assertive, just lending a baseline of rich flavor. I'll go back in for that one, minimalism be damned. They've been working on the space next door for a couple of years and it's finally open. It's a long, rather lovely bar. If it were somewhere else, I'd go there pretty regularly. Finally, and I say this with sort of a sheepish NYC transplant grin, the crowd at dinner is colorful. I kind of expected Artie Buco to come out of the kitchen and offer me some crazy Italian-American dish that there's no spelling for. I guess this is a long way of saying that if you haven't been to Pasty's for dinner, you had ought to go.

In the US when some one says "let's go to that new tapas restaurant in Nolita, west village, tribeca etc. . . " what I hear is "let's go to that new clip joint that doesn't have a liquor license but will gladly serve you Manischevitz with rotten apples in it for 35 bucks a pitcher and that calls itself a restaurant but doesn't want to buy anything other than a microwave and some frozen shit from costco." The word tapas has been used to violate well-meaning diners all over the US. It would take a couple of excellent recommendations and a team of mules to get me into an American tapas place.

Sooo... Why did you wish you had cooked it? What was groundbreaking about it? DETAILS, man. OK Fifi, you asked for it. The trimmed 5-7lb veal breast was soaked overnight in a brine (cure?) composed of salt, unrefined sugar, star anise, cinnamon and a ground dried pepper--guajillo I think. This all happened before I arrived at the cooking site. It was then smoked in one of those green eggs for upwards of ten or twelve hours at varyling low temperatures, seldom higher than 210 I'd say. As far as what it tasted like. . . the closest comparison I can come up with is pork belly (and incidentally the chef in question has used almost the same brine/cure with pork belly) but with less fat and the milky lightness of veal rather than the heady aromatics of pork. The crust on the breast was sweet and caramelly, the flesh inside white and juicy. Not at all falling apart, rather, meltingly tender in a springy sort of way. I call this hunk of meat groundbreaking because I've never heard of smoked veal. It is understandable that people don't think to smoke veal. BBQ is about the waste cuts, the cheap and tough cuts that need long treatment to become edible. Veal is expensive and famously tender. One wouldn't imagine that it would call for such an intervention, despite that osso buco, veal cheeks, veal breast, to name a few cuts, all call for some sort of collagen melting treatment. My dear friend and partner in crime chef Dave was, in my view, thinking outside the box (hate the expression but it suits this circumstance). I'm jealous that he thought of it and not me. That's why I wish I'd cooked it.

Brined then smoked veal breast. I didn't cook it but I wish I had. Groundbreaking.

This thread could go on and on. Mention of Beijing reminds me of a dinner I had while visiting a friend in there. We were in a part of the city that english-speaking expats call Uighurville (pronounced Weegerville). Uighurs are from far Northwest China and their food is pretty different from typical Beijing fare. We ate something not unlike spaghetti bolognese, which was tasty but is not at all why I write this. The street is packed with restaurants and in front of each one are a couple of guys whose job it is to convince diners to eat at their place. They do this by running out, grabbing an arm, a leg, then another arm suddenly you are aloft and being carried into the restaurant. It's worth mentioning that Uighurs are famous for their ferocity, all around toughness, and strength. I'm not a small fellow so they had more than a little trouble moving me but my friend, I had to chase him down as he was whisked away. When we finally sat down to the aforementioned plate of not-really-spaghetti (in the restaurant where my friend had been deposited) we were only interrupted once. Midway through the meal, shortly after tea had been poured from a pot with a spout three feet long tapering to a tiny hole from which tea is poured in a thin stream five feet from its target, man burst into the restaurant running at top speed. He ran through the dining room, back into the kitchen and then up over wall behind the restaurant. Moments later two breathless policemen entered looking not unlike the Keystone Kops. The waiters acted as if they'd seen nothing, cool as cucumbers and the door to the kitchen had mysteriously closed. The police angrily questioned the waiters. There were denials, shaking of fingers and finally the police moved on. These people also do a brisk business--at least they did six or seven years ago--selling shishkabobs of meat cooked on braziers that are mounted on the back of bicycles. The reason for this hybrid BBQ-bike is that for some unknown reason, the Beijing authorities don't allow the selling of shishkabobs from the back of Uighur bicycles. So it's not uncommon to see a man furiously pedaling while looking over his shoulder, smoke trailing behind and a bouquet of little sticks poking out of a little metal box on his bike rack. The shishkabobs, by the way are a little spicy, and I kind of remember cumin being a dominant seasoning. Don't remember what kind of meat they use. edited for spelling

That happened. Lucky for me my guests were pie-eyed and couldn't hardly see what they were drinking. Next time, crema de mezcal.

Woops. Bad reading comprehension. Maybe blurred because before the original posting I ended up subbing, and it worked even though you'd think it wouldn't, Bailey's. Just a couple of drops.

Went to the source. Here's some creme de mezcal, actually they call it crema de mezcal: http://www.mezcal.com/crema.html Also, incidentally, here's the recipe for the drink that inspired this search. Regular tequila won't do. Sorry this is kind of rough: puree of cilantro, lime zest and lime juice simple syrup small amount crema de mezcal (or else maybe just a dab of heavy cream?) mezcal about equal parts simple syrup, cilantro puree and mezcal.