chromedome

Nothing to contribute as far as utensils...but man! what a cool site. Gonna lose an evening there, sometime real soon...

It's all good. I have a small mortar and pestle (a treasured christmas gift) which I use for most things. I have a coffee whizzer thingie that I use for some spices and/or mixes, because I find that things like cinnamon or methi seeds are difficult to grind adequately in my little mortar. And I like pepper grinders for suitably-sized spices, like coriander (though I guess I could use my mortar to bust up larger spices, like allspice, so that they'd fit the pepper grinder...never thought of that before). Use what you've got, is my advice, and if you find yourself longing for one of the others, go buy it. They're all cheap and plentiful; so there's no reason to not have it if you think you'd use it.

The comparison of Cajun with Acadian cuisine is rather instructive. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, the staple starch was potatoes, rather than rice. Soups and stews were a mainstay, often made thick and sticky with grated potatoes; an obvious forerunner to many of the filling rice dishes of Louisiana. "Rappie Pie," for example, is a dish still made by Acadians; chicken or beef or pork slow-cooked in a big ol' casserole dish filled with grated potatoes. You start by frying some salt pork in it, and a bit of onion (and in the old days, perhaps, some salted herbs if you had 'em). Pork, and especially salt pork, was a big favourite. Went into everything, including desserts (take a pastry square, put a piece of crisp-fried salt pork in the bottom, cover with apples, fold up the corners to make a smaller square...when almost done, pour hot maple syrup into the middle...return to oven until it's all bubbled over and sticky...mmmmmmm). Chickens and beef were seldom eaten when young and tender, they were slaughtered after they'd been used up as chicken/milk producers; hence long/slow cooking was a given. Pork was salted down or turned into sausage. Fish was plentiful, and was used heavily in a variety of dishes. Lobster was so common, in some times and places, that it was used as fertilizer for the garden. Seasoning was simple and straightforward; usually just locally-grown herbs salted down for preservation. It was all about filling a stomach frugally but unequivocally. Now take that background, and transfer it to Louisiana where anything and everything can be grown; and where there were a world of new influences to be assimilated...

Hear, hear. Personally I find Japanese to be the least interesting of the major Asian cuisines, so Tokyo would be out for me. As a travel-envious forty-year-old who's not been out of Canada, I find all the arguments interesting if distinctly hypothetical.

I'm ambivalent about Starbucks. On the upside, they pay their staff better than similar chains, and give benefits. They also pay their coffee growers well above market rates, almost-but-not-quite what the fair trade people pay. These are good things. On the downside, their prices are insanely high and their product is, quite frankly, poor-to-mediocre. At my day job we've just recently switched from a local distributor to a "proudly brewing Starbucks" format at our in-house coffee bar. Our traffic has plummetted, though with the increase in prices we're coming out somewhat ahead in $ at the actual coffee bar. I'm down about 200 cookie sales/week, though, on the resultant reduced foot traffic at the bakery counter. I drink a lot of it, because it's free for staff, but I sure don't enjoy my cup of coffee very much anymore.

I used to shop a lot at save-on-meats when I lived in Vancouver, twenty years ago. The quality was acceptable, and their prices were simply amazing. I used to buy chicken necks and backs (for soup) for 8 cents/lb, IIRC; and they had lamb "stew" (aka trimmings) for, I dunno, about 80 cents/lb. And for an offal-eater like me, that place was heaven. All the stuff I liked, and as cheap as any old-school granny could ask.

Sonuvagun. Here I've been cooking and eating those suckers for years, and nobody ever bothered to tell me they were inedible. Go figure. (I skip the ones that've had candles in them, not being partial to the flavour of wax, but to each his own.)

There are a few herbs and spices that scholars debate, but I don't recall which exact ones they were. A popular Roman spice, sylphium, is known to be extinct; it is thought that the last plant known was served to Nero. In later years the Romans discovered the Indian spice asafoetida (hing) which was a close substitute, and is available to this day (warning: there is a reason the name of the spice includes the word "foetid"...) And as for your original question...McDonald's. McDonald's floors me. Maybe it's different elsewhere, but up here they're ghastly horrible; far and away the worst of the fast food chains. How do they keep on selling like they do? It's beyond me.

OK, this is slightly off topic, but I'm gonna ask anyway. A co-worker loaned me one of his vast collection of cookbooks. It's called the "New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook," it was published in 1967 and revised in 1976. It was written by someone named Deirdre Stanforth. While the recipes look good, I really enjoyed the introductory section giving the "biography" of each restaurant. Those in the cookbook are Antoine's, Arnaud's, Brennan's, Galatoire's, Corinne Dunbar's, the Caribbean Room at the Pontchartrain, Commander's, Masson's, Le Ruth's, and Lagniappe. Now I know that Commander's Palace and Galatoire's are still around, but how about the others? Flourishing, fading, gone?

I'm pretty loyal to Assams, generally, and don't really get too far afield into specialized estate teas. At my night job, though, we've recently gotten into seriously specialized custom blends. In fact, our beverage menu has eight pages of teas. Oy! Drove the servers crazy, at first, trying to figure out which was which.

Nice to see a restaurant from the Forgotten Coast make the list. Unfortunately it's opened since I left, so I won't get to eat there for some time.

I would say that 5-6 layers is probably superfluous. At my night job we make 4" tarts using only three layers, and they're certainly sturdy enough to handle and plate. Mind you, the fillings are not liquid, so your mileage may vary. As for cutting we use an xacto knife, and the bottom of a particular-sized can is our guide. It's not elegant, but it's effective and pretty fast, since you can cut through half-a-box of phyllo in one stack.

That's still a popular catchphrase. Now, of course, they can also watch hockey...oh, wait...

Guy Fawkes Day is still celebrated, in attenuated form, in some parts of Newfoundland (it is referred to as "Bonfire Day"). Celebratory comestibles are random, ranging from hot dogs to fresh fish to frozen McCain cakes (dunno why). Copious quantities of alcohol will be consumed, regardless of the food, but this is a given whenever Newfoundlanders congregate to celebrate.

I'll throw in a plug for an East Coast product...Blue Star beer from Newfoundland. The other main indigenous brew, Black Horse, was in my day a decent if uninteresting brew. Blue Star, on the other hand, was reprehensible (and gave me the trots, as well). Many brands varied from one province to the other, so that "Pilsener" in Saskatchewan was acceptable, while the same in Alberta was notoriously something that only a pensioner with a limited budget and atrophied taste buds could look forward to. One of the worst summers of my life involved being in Calgary during a beer strike (was that 1985, or 1986?). All we had to drink was Colt 45 and Old Milwaukee, both of which tasted like a long-dead muskrat.

Now that I have my "awake, post-coffee, less facetious" head on, I should add that I consider eGullet to be one of the finest Professional Development tools any newly-minted cook could ask for. Where else could I find such an amazing group of great cooks (professional and home) to crib from? And the daily count of belly-laughs is certainly therapeutic to my overworked soul.

I tripped across eGullet late last year. I was listening to an amusing CBC Radio program called The Vinyl Cafe, hosted by journalist/educator/humourist Stuart MacLean. He spoke of a recent visit to Vancouver, and how blown away he'd been by his visit to Vij's, and by Vikram himself. Well, as a paid Googlista, I of course mounted up my favourite search engine and found that about 40% of the first few pages of results came from this..."eGullet" place. That I did not join at the time seems incomprehensible to me, and I can only attribute this to my absorption with my finals. A few weeks later (January) I realized that I'd misplaced David Leite's pasteis de nata recipe and went looking for it on his website. There, I spotted a link to eGullet and thought, "Hey, I meant to go back and look at that place some more!" The rest, as they say, is history. That, Daddy-A, has got to be the eGullet credo in a nutshell. I love it. I want the T-shirt. (Sorry, Fat Guy, I'm 100% behind the lofty aims of our collective Society mission statement, but credit where credit is due, y'know?)

Hey, Tana, which shark is your nephew? (------------> Jonesing Canadian hockey fan clutching at straws)

We use La Forme at my night job, in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are durable and work very well. Personally I have no preference between springform and slip-bottom pans, though as an occasionally clumsy person I have found that I'm more accident-prone with the unsecured removeable bottoms.

I don't really follow baseball (it interferes with the end of hockey season - when we have one - and conflicts with CFL football) but congrats to all the BoSox fans who kept the faith when things looked so dark. I have to say, Schilling impressed the hell out of me. His performance against the Yanks was right up there with Bob Baun playing an entire Stanley cup game on a broken ankle (and scoring the gamewinner, to boot!). I know every professional sport requires players to play through pain, but Schilling's performance was worthy of football or hockey, infinitely more physical sports. Good on him. As a transplanted Easterner (Canadian, but still...) I'm happy to have an excuse for a big pot of chowder.

I'd eyeballed those things for years, wondering idly how they worked, but never actually asked anybody (in East Vancouver, they're a common decorative element). Having read this thread, though, and armed with the knowledge contained therein, I treated myself to a battered aluminum moka at the local thrift store. For the princely sum of $2.99 (CDN) I got an ugly little lump of metal which makes absolutely gorgeous coffee. It proudly proclaims that it is "Made in Italy," but declines to furnish any other identification. I don't care. I wanted one, I've got one, and it works. Only thing I've noticed is that the seal is a bit lacking, and if I don't screw it to the exactly correct degree of tightness it'll leak. I can see that a new seal is in my immediate future.

It's all good. Your gnocchi will be hit-or-miss for a while, anyway, until you get a sense of what they're supposed to feel like on your fingers. If you've got lots of squash, try that. If you've got lots of potatoes, try that. And then make them every chance you get, until you're happy with them. Flour and potatoes are pretty cheap, after all, and so are squash in season (which they are, now). Go nuts!

We have a couple of old Kenwoods at my night job. I've never made bread in them (we buy in our bread) but they get used constantly. The resto's been open for 24 years, and they were bought used, so they were probably new around the time the ark landed on Ararat. I'd have no qualms about buying one. And their oddball two-arm dough hook has always struck me as being more logical for a small mixer than the one on the KA.

It makes a good textural accent, I guess...should we dub it the "green feuilletine"? Personally I'd just as soon shred up the ribs and hearts of my romaine for that purpose, but to each his own. Growing up I was never keen on lettuce, but at that time in Nova Scotia iceberg was the only variety known to man (or Mom). It was an amazing revelation to me that there were actually a great many kinds of lettuces, in various textures and colours and (most shocking of all) flavours. I'd always thought of the lettuce as sharing moisturizer duties with the mayo, nothing more.

Lubeck is a remarkably beautiful city, and is the world capitol of marzipan-making. They have a civic website with a breathtaking virtual walk-around, but I'm too tired at the moment to look it up for you (been to the Rocky Mountain Wine & Food Festival tonight, and I'm a bit worse for wear).