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.

Close enough! In ideal conditions, they grow into compact shrubs about5-7 feet high. Chiles de Arbol are the standard-issue dried capsicum frutescens in any area where most of the Mexican immigrants are from Puebla or Guerrerro. Pretty much the same as cayenne, with a little more arrebatida. Lots of quick heat, little or no lasting burn.

If you have a few good asian markets in your town, it's well worth your while to find a brand of Vietnamese coffee with butter listed as one of the ingredients (memory fails me as to the exact brand). It's a bit much straight up, but it's truly extraordinary in sua da.

yikes, Germany. Look up ca phe sua da on google if all else fails. But hop the old eurail to the Czech, and you might just find a Vietnamese community left over from the communist era. And even if you don't find the contraptions, that Becherovka liquor seems almost divinely predestined to be mixed with sua da. A little chicory coffee dripped into frozen sweetened condensed milk with a standard-issue melitta filter, and you pretty much have it.

There's probably no other liquor with a wider variation in style and quality than Mezcal, even if you count the zillion beverages that call themselves "whiskey". From spring break benders to pinky-in-the-air revelations...who has a good mezcal story?

But that aside, my best wacky food is stir-fried grasshoppers from my own yard. During the drought season at the ancestral home in Bastrop County, you can't step on a spot of grass without a cloud of grasshoppers jumping every which a way. They're so easy to catch that you can't use them all for bait. All you have to do is break off the jumpers on the hind legs and toss them in a hot wok with a splash of oil. The flavor is so concentrated you'd think they have fish sauce for blood.

A splash of nam pla hitting a smoking wok full of dried Arbols in sesame oil. Any other ingredients are just dilution.

Sur La Table is the closest brick'n'mortar, but I get my Globals from NorthwestCutleryAndMore.com (or something like that). The selection is extremely comprehensive, though after a couple of years with my G7 I don't see why you'd need anything else. The prices are are about as low as it gets, too. J.D. Prince (once again, something like that) has a pretty good selection of Global and their more traditional line, plus some nice Macs and Shuns. The prices are a little too steep, though.

Is there a problem with Steel Reserve? Someone had to pick up the torch of brain damage malt liquor after Heilemann's went bankrupt and discontinued St. Ides. If St. Ides had never existed, I would have attended the occasional class back in college and ended up wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and not ended up in the restaurant biz. Thank you, St. Ides, and your deeply gratifying protegee Steel Reserve. What was the question, again?

Pretty boring, but don't let that stop you. It's just one of them starches.

Yes, because in humoral terms, durian is considered the hottest (or heatiest) fruit, and alcohol, the hottest drink. Welcome to the site, Gul_Dekar. Not to worry, y'all, the whole hot/cold dichotomy has fallen out of fashion along with the whole four elements thing (ba de ah dancing in September aside). Smoothies of homemade durian paste, tamarind squeezins, and cheap aguardiente have never done me wrong, though the mood for such difficult concoctions strikes very rarely indeed.