QuinaQuen

Heck yeah. Did you know that pho, while not specifically prohibited in name, was all but impossible to dish out legally in Vietnam until a few short years ago? Something about conspicuous consumption... At any rate, everything's O.K. now. Do you take yours with just the simple stuff, or do you go for the lovely crunchy things that come from the more obscure portions of the cow?

That is sweet. Happy Flavor sauce would be right at home up in there.

Chef did rock. Would that I had the juice to go off on ignoramus customers like that! A fella can only dream...

*imagine snippy tone* That was on NBC... Great book. Got us pegged all proper like. But will it work as a show on any network?Mr. Bourdain is frightfully conventional at heart as far as his culinary standpoint, and Standards&Practices will certainly dispense with anything else that's even remotely interesting.

Go Astros! Chili dogs with reprehensible cereal weeeners and canned chili are probably our best playoff eats, since inevitable heartburn is such a perfect palimpsest of inevitable heartbreak. Go Astros! Make me eat these words.

It's the only time I can get the immediate family down from the ancestral homes in Travis and Bastrop counties. And I never miss the chance to show off the degree to which my father's adventurous sojourns into pre-fad Asian eats influenced my diet and my style. A big old black drum with the fillets and body did up in three different sauces is the usual centerpiece. Czech cuisine is really boring, see. There's a reason why all our ancestors came here from wherever they came from.

Perhaps there should be a MedicAlert bracelet for neuroses? Just flash it at your server, and you can have all the jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off and cut in triangles, not rectangles, you want for the rest of the night.

The Brikka is dynamite! So temperamental, though. It's still my sole hypo at home, especially after so many machines have succumbed to impossible-to-fix maladies.

Back when I ran my little espresso shop, the books actually came in pretty handy. But there's no substitute for fiddling around with the blend, the grinder, and the espresso machine until you get exactly what you want. If you really want to know the most important thing about good commercial espresso, though, it's that you simply must grind for each shot. So very few establishments do this, and that's a big part of the reason that so few people know what a good shot should taste and feel like. And watch out for Big Green's policy of setting up shop within two blocks of every single competitor, no matter how small and nonthreatening that competitor might be. My little mesto is not the only one I've seen ruined by this 800# gorilla policy.

San Miguel is precisely what American beer would taste like if American beer tasted good. Let that be a lesson to AB, Miller, and Coors: beer made with rice as the predominant grain can be good if you so much as try. In fact, Asian macrobrews are consistently better than their Asian and American counterparts, even though they come from such very disparate cultures and climates as the Philippines, Japan, China, and Thailand. Anyone want to venture a guess as to why this is? And more importantly, where can I get a'hold of some of this Yuengling stuff everyone is raving about?

Tee hee, it just goes to prove the old saying: It's not the worm that makes you hallucinate, it's all the mezcal you have to drink to get to the worm.

1.000 apologies if someone already mentioned this whine and I missed it, but here's my favorite: A couple of years ago, this one well-adjusted fellow wrote to W&D to complain that during the appetizer course at a certain Thai restaurant, some "debris" (garnish or something) fell off the plate and onto the table top. When the waiter bussed the appetizer plates, the debris remained on the table. The diner and his companion were so traumatized by that debris that they could hardly bear to touch their entrees. Perhaps the editors find these letters amusing; there is a certain chuckle factor in letting people rant about things that others would rather keep to themselves.

Almost as bad as the overstuffing is the waste that follows from the restauranteurs' tendency to try and awe the diner with a huge portion. How many french fries, baskets of bread, tortillas etc. are going in the trash each night?

If you have Snoop, it might just be one of the last promotional items they ever made. Just before they went bankrupt and shopped out their brands to regional breweries, the Poet was quoted as saying:"F**k 8Ball, causes St Ides is giving ends".

No use telling you the recipe for happy flavor sauce if you're blenderless. You know, a good blender isn't expensive...But anyway, here's ZANAHORIAS MAGICAS for your habanero-using pleasure... As many habaneros as you can handle in one day As many limes as it takes to cover the habaneros with juice Using the sharpest prep knife you have, halve each habanero. If you live north of, say, Interstate 10, remove the placentas and seeds. Otherwise, save yourself the trouble. Chiffonade the halves. Get them as thin as possible. Marinade them in lime juice for at least one hour. What you don't intend to use right away, pack in thick ziplocks and freeze as quickly as possible WITH THE LIME JUICE. This is the purest apotheosis of habanero flavor you can possibly achieve. Use zanahorias magicas only to exponentially augment the flavors of strong and simple dishes. Cabrito is in, birria is out. Fried carp good, poached snapper bad. You get the picture.