chromedome

BTW, if you can free up the time (and it sounds like you're already somewhat loaded up with things to do) you can get to St Pierre et Miquelon quickly and easily from Newfoundland. SP&M is France's last North American colony; picturesque and appealing in its own right, and also an opportunity to visit France on the cheap-and-easy. SPM website Necessary documents

Hmmmm.... I was part of the punk scene in Vancouver in the early-mid 80's. Which band did Martin front? Anyone know?

I'm getting word back from my family that nobody there is really that much "into" restaurants; and therefore can't advise on what's good these days. Into round two, I'm now checking with friends and friends-of-friends.

Mackeral? Only one way to do it. When you hear they've started running, you go set your nets. Then you go home and cut up strong white onions into thick rings, and set them to macerate overnight in white vinegar. Next day, go pull your nets. When you drop your mackeral at the fish plant, you keep a dozen or so that are still flopping in the bottom of the boat, and bring them home. Gut them, and give the pigs a treat. Then fillet them and dredge them in flour. Fry them in a hot cast-iron pan, with just a quick rub of salt pork to start off. Serve them with the macerated onions, and drizzle the oniony vinegar over the fillets. Sides? Who needs 'em. A loaf of fresh-baked bread, maybe, to soak up the juices from your plate; and perhaps a cold beer if you've got any room left for one. That's how it's done in northern Newfoundland, at any rate.

Up here in the Great White North, my beans are at least three-four weeks away from kitchen-ready (just beginning to see one or two blossoms...but hey! we don't plant most things until the May long weekend). However, I'm now entirely geared up for when they come through. Gotta love a vegetable that *everybody* in the family likes.

Worked my part-time job tonight, so I ate well. We didn't get many orders for salmon this week so I had last-of-the-old-batch salmon fillet, done precisely as we do it for the customers: brandy-cream sauce; saffron rice with capers, peppers, shallots, & tomatoes; cpl spears of asparagus, broccoli, baby carrots, snap peas. Oh, and a "spiked" icy lemonade from FOH (we eat after service, I hasten to point out).

Andy, most of the caribou served in western restaurants comes from our northern territory of Nunavut. Nunavut is 1,900,000 square kilometres in size and has only 29,000 people, so there is lots of room for caribou! At the restaurant where I work part-time, we serve caribou and muskox tenderloins from Nunavut producers. Most of the bison comes from here in Alberta. Nunavut website Nunavut's Parks

Flipper pie is definitely an old-timer's thing. A very rich meat pie, is the short version. Seal in general is very dark and gamey-tasting, but the flippers are milder in flavour and do make a very good pie. Personally, I think the liver is the best part of the seal. Cod tongues are one of those foods that are rather off-putting, to those who aren't accustomed to them, but they are surprisingly good. A cod tongue consists of two tight balls of muscle, enclosed in a rather gelatinous pouch. Generally, they are simply dredged in flour and panfried (in rendered salt pork, traditionally!); and really they require nothing more elaborate in the way of preparation. The interest lies in the difference between the textures of the muscular portion and the softer enclosure. The flavour is, well...cod. <sigh> Haven't had a feed of cheeks and tongues in a long time. Oh well.

I own the Dr. Oetker book, and it's reasonably good. Haven't made much from it as yet, mind you. It seems to be at about the level of a Time-Life or similar cookbook. There are plentiful illustrations, and the translation is well done. In another thread, on the subject of Dobos Torte, there is mention of a highly-respected book about the pastries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I don't recall the title and am too tired to search for it right now, but it's out there somewhere. The recent "Eurodelices" series of books, from Konemann, include a volume on Pastries (ISBN 3-8290-1131-8) which features recipes from a number of leading German and Austrian pastrychefs. Unfortunately, these come largely without any historic/cultural context. ...it's a start, anyway. I'm going to be looking for similar books (for my own interest) over the next little while, so if I come up with any gems I'll let you know.

Gee, I have two bags of cashews on hand from the little Punjabi store down in the South End. And a couple of litres of egg whites in my freezer. Hmmm.....

A quick question. At my school, we piped financiers into small dome-shaped flexipan molds (about the size of a Muppet's eyeball, or half a ping-pong ball) and then piped a fruit filling into them. These were a nice little petit-four for the Friday buffet, but I know this is not the traditional way to make them. So...what is the traditional "form factor"? What kind of pans or molds are normally used? (PS: like Neil's school, we refrigerated our batter overnight)

The books you're referring to would be his "Professional Pastry Chef" and "Advanced Professional Pastry Chef." We used the former as our text at my school, for the patisserie module of the Culinary Arts program. As you've observed, his recipes are very reliable (they've been honed through his decades of teaching). If I had a complaint, it would be that some of the recipes have been manipulated to make them more "foolproof." His brioche, for example, works out to be only about 20% butter by weight, which (to me) can hardly be called brioche. I'll grant you it's easy to work with, but the result is not quite what I'm looking for. His laminated doughs, similarly, reduce the butter to a level that I'm not quite happy with. That being said, though, his books are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in pastry. I've used my copy a lot, and expect to wear it out over the next couple of decades. I see from his website that the "Advanced Professional Pastry Chef" won a 2004 IACP award. Really should start shopping around for that, I suppose...<sighs, checks bank account, sighs again...>

Freezing products within a bag of water is thought to provide an impermeable seal, extending the usable life of the product and avoiding freezer burn. Not owning a deep freeze I can't vouch for that personally, but I know several people who follow that practice. I've eaten venison from one person's freezer which had been kept that way for three years, and it was absolutely fine. Go figure.

Alexander Keith's IPA is brewed entirely in Halifax NS, in one brewery on the corner of Agricola and Young streets. I used to live a few blocks from there, and walked to cooking school with the smell of their wort in my nostrils. It's not a bad thing. Alexander Keith's 1820 brewery has been restored to a glistening, touristy parody of its original state, and is used to produce seasonal microbrews four times a year for the local bars. They're pretty good, and Keith's (okay, call me a "home-r") is my favourite mainstream brew. It is available pretty reliably throughout Canada, and is classed as a "domestic import"; ie Canadian but out-of-province. Kokanee, likewise, is all brewed at one plant in Creston BC. Most of the artisanal beers in Canada are only available locally, which (I sometimes think) is as it should be. If you're in Halifax (for example), you have Granite Brewery's various bitters to savour; and Propellor Brewery's legendary porter (adjudged one of the world's best in head-to-head competition); and the Maritime Brewery Company's "1749" and "Black Pearl." Here in Alberta the heavy hitter is Big Rock. I find their Grasshopper to be, like Moosehead, too sweet for a light beer; their darker Traditional Ale is quite acceptable. The most widely available artisan brews, I think, are Unibroue and Granville Island Brewery. I love the Unibroue products, which are fermented "on the lees" and have a phenomenal flavour. They've just been purchased by Sleeman's, who are in the process of growing from a scrappy regional player to a noteworthy national player (they've also purchased the Maritime Brewing Company). Could write more, but the wife (and a garage sale) are calling. Maybe later.

Calls to mind Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, lampooning his fellow countrymen (and -women) who affected to have forgotten how to speak English during their three whole months in France...

Tempest in a disposable plastic cup, anyone? I mean, really! Come to think of it, I got royally chewed out once, when I was working in retail, because I used the phrase "rule of thumb." Anyone besides me (and the chew-er) know why that's offensive? As she stalked out of the store, I shook my head and thought to myself, "Okay, so when you and I are dead, there'll be *nobody* left in the world who remembers how that got started!" -Chromedome (has Metis brother-in-law, mulatto brother-in-law, neither of whom really give a rat's ass what they're called)

...and after all that, you can name your daughter after it. (Melissa) [/smartass]

I don't have any personal knowledge of Seattle, but I would suggest an upscale market rather than a hotel or restaurant. Won't hurt you quite so deeply in the ol' student budget. The forcemeats are, all told, rather fun...but peeling the skin off the chicken in one piece for the galantine is a pain in the arse. You may want to buy a few whole chickens; I'd be inclined to practice that particular skill more so than training my tastebuds. Just a thought, from one who'd "been there done that" during the fall semester.

Check that...should read "gourmet shrooms"... (I agree with those who find "gourmet" the most irritating. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Aside, that is, from the obvious "double the mark-up." [/rant])

Oh, good, she's open! I'm desperately eager to hear how things are going, but realistic enough to know that we're somewhere down around the 479th priority on her list right now. And rightly so. Oh well, it sounds like there'll be a few other Gulletters in a position to give us updates now.

One of my colleagues worked for a local chain, Joey Tomatoes, right across the street from an Earl's (a powerhouse regional chain). They collaborated frequently on perpetuating the "gas the new guy" tradition. One favourite was to send the newbie across the street to ask the hostess for a "longstand." The hostess would say something like, "Okay, hon, I just have to seat a couple of tables and then I'll look after you." After ten or fifteen minutes, that one would generally sink in. I guess every industry has these. At Radio Shack, one of the standards was to get the new guy to count the bulk wire and cable at inventory time. "How do I do this?" was their inevitable question. We'd point to the floor and say, "The tiles are 18 inches. Just pull all the wire off the spool, count the tiles, and do the math." And then we'd see how long we could keep a straight face. My brother-in-law works in the oilpatch, and they've got some *serious* practical jokers there. One of his co-workers got pushed into his locker, the lock was closed and then the lock was welded shut, and the locker was then transferred to a remote portion of the site and left for two hours. ....of course you know, payback is a bitch...

I think that the underlying motive behind many of these foods was, simply, desperation. When the alternative is starvation, humans can be very creative. People get sick from eating "x"? Why don't we try cooking it? Still get sick? Hmmm...let's try soaking it first and rinsing it. Not quite as sick? Let's try cooking it two or three times and squeezing the water out reallly well, in between. Hey, look at that! We're still standing! Funguses in general strike me as being a big one. I mean, aside from their observable tendency to make people twitch and die, they just *look* rather...icky. I mean really, think about it! "Aw, crap, my ears of corn have been overtaken by this black slimy stuff! ....<pause> I wonder what that tastes like?" The Chinese, I think, are the past-masters of this. My father defines the Chinese approach to food and cooking as, "If it's carbon-based, we can cook it. If it's not carbon-based, well, we'll at least think about it a bit." I mean really...birds' nests? Made of twigs and spit? How hungry do you have to be to play around with that?

My mother has a photo which never fails to bring a smile to her face. Let me set the stage: When I was about four, and my parents were just in their mid-twenties, we lived on a small back road in rural Nova Scotia. My father went out fishing one day in the shallows of the lake down the road from where we lived (a part of Grand Lake, for those who know the area). Failing to catch any fish, that day, he was intrigued to spot a turtle lounging along the shore. My father was always up for trying something new, so he pounced on the turtle and brought it home in a bag. He went into the house and announced proudly to my mother that they'd have turtle soup that night, as a special dinner before he went to sea the next day (I'm a Navy brat). He fetched his axe, gave it a few (entirely unnecessary, knowing him) licks with the stone, and plopped the turtle down on the chopping block. The turtle, knowing what was good for him, hauled all of his extremities into the protection of his carapace, and stayed that way. Dad, for his part, hovered at the chopping block - axe raised - like a vulture waiting for its prey to expire. The standoff lasted for well over an hour. Mom got a picture. Eventually, the turtle decided (fatally) that the coast was clear; and Dad prevailed. By that time of course, it was much too late to start the soup; so Dad cleaned the turtle according to the instructions in an old cookbook he had, and froze the meat. Unfortunately, while he was at sea, our refrigerator calved and everything in the freezer went out to the garbage in consequence. So, Mom never did get her turtle soup, but she still pulls that picture out once in a while and snickers over it.

That's major. I'm reluctant to even surrender the bones.

I'm at the oven all day, every day. Frequently I don't even notice that I've burned myself until I go to wash my hands. Then the hot water reminds me! I've had a few good ones, over the years. Like the time I pulled the stock pot off to the side of the burner, because it was too hot (boiling, not simmering). Having adjusted the flame, I reached up and pulled the pot back onto the grate...using the handle that'd been over the flame. Matching blisters, finger and thumb. Then there was the heating-my-sugar-to-start-work-on-my-centrepiece incident, which saw a large bubble of lava explode over my right hand. The blisters lasted a few weeks, but (bloody-minded sort that I am) I bandaged and gloved myself and proceeded to pull the damned sugar. In my defence, let me say that I iced my hand every ten minutes for the rest of my lab time that day. And at school, of course, there were always people who were "too busy" to stack things properly on the cart we used for hauling our stuff to the dish pit. So periodically one of us would have to go and organize things. I always seemed to be the one who organized sheets straight from the oven, or saute pans straight from the stove. That loud sizzling sound is classic comedy, every time.