ghostrider

Globe didn't requre me to register. Nice article. Eggs + butter + shrimp? Pass the Lipitor please! Had the shelled ones again last night. Same deal: subdued flavor & about 1/3 of them just kind of dissolve in your mouth, like Ferran Adria is sneaking some kind of bizarre shrimp foam concoction into the mix, or somebody dumped the mock shrimp pudding pops in with the real shrimp. The counter guy confirmed that the shrimp are not shelled on premises but arrive that way from somewhere further up the line, he wasn't sure where. Annoying, but I suspect I'll keep trying them anyway a/c convenience.

Now I understand. With the closing of my local Shoprite, I went & perused the bread selection at the Stop & Shop, my next closest market. A wide variety of "artisan" breads at $2.99 - $3.49 the loaf, all laced with partially hydrogenated oils &/or high fructose corn syrup. Lord that was a depressing sight. My local Shoprite offered "pure" ryes, pumpernickels & Italian loaves for $1.79. This is really sad. (I got the name of the distributor who supplied them & will try to track down another source.)

Spice - turmeric (tho you've got to have cumin & coriander & maye some cardamom to go with it, not to mention chiles garlic ginger & onion) Herb - rosemary

Weekly cart-filling shopping trips are something I've never done. That may be about to change. For 16 years I've had the luxury of our town's supermarket being basically just around the corner, so I always went every couple of days for whatever we needed & zipped through the express line. Since I generally did that right before cooking dinner, snacking was never a temptation. Anyway our market is closing, as reported in the NJ Forum. Its shelves are now pretty much stripped bare. I'm in the middle of rethinking my approach to food shopping.

Thanks. If we get inundated with basil again this year I'll remember that.

Don't have rice cooker, I use an old Revereware pan on stovetop. Use Texmati rice pretty much exclusively. The white basmati takes twice as much water as rice, the brown basmati, a tablespoon or two extra water beyond 2x. This learned from experience with my particular equipment.

Don't have rice cooker, use old Revereware pan on stovetop. Use Texmati rice pretty much exclusively. The white basmati takes twice as much water as rice, the brown basmati, a tablespoon or two extra water beyond 2x. This learned from experience with my particular equipment.

Glad to hear it. I guess it comes down to the individual store's handling of the peeled guys, & perhaps how long they've been out of shell.

An update on After Athens - we wound up going there a couple of weekends back for dinner with friends who'd come out from NYC for the day. We got several of their Pikilia platters wth various grilled items, all really tasty. One of our friends, who'd lived in Greece for 2 years, deemed the Keftedakia the best she'd ever had. I've always liked the way After Athens does those little meatballs but that was high praise indeed.

Never been able to freeze basil successfully. Or, at least, thaw it successfully. Always comes out a soggy useless mess. Any tips on technique would be appreciated.

I've dried lots of greenmarket herbs (rosemary, thyme, basil & sage) over the years. The basil & sage, I plucked off individual leaves & spread them out on plates well out of a cat's reach. Rosemary & thyme, left on stalks. Plopped 'em all in their own glass jars after drying. I didn't find that the basil offered any advantage over the dried stuff from a good spice merchant; the others produced strong, aromatic flavors that were decidedly worth the effort. These days, I'm older & lazier, & since various greenmarkets & farm markets in my area offer fresh herbs year round, I tend to go with those now. I keep them in the produce drawer in my fridge & just use them up.

Hmmm. I'd venture to say they might have been frozen and thawed for display. Sounds like it's possible but I wonder... BTW, How did you prepare/serve them? ← The sign on the shrinp bin said "Fresh/wild caught." Can we believe the signs at WF? Frozen - now that you mention it, they were sitting naked on a bed of ice with no shells to protect their tender flesh, so maybe that had an effect. This was my usual lemon juice & linguini preparation, which I've done a dozen or so times. The difference this time was huge. WF seems to do a good job with the handling as long as they leave 'em in their shells; apart from this instance I've never had a problem with freshness. (Can't say the same for Stop & Shop, which stocked them intermittently last year.) ← WF had another peeled batch, now for $7.99 / lb, so I had to try 'em again. Better than the first batch - over half of them had decent texture this time - & some decent flavor though still weak. I'm starting to conclude that they simply don't take well to being peeled & then sitting around for hours. Honestly, I've had better frozen Maine shrimp in restaurants many times (& I presume that they're flash-frozen as soon as they've been peeled).

It's good to hear some corroboration here. I guess the next logical question, then, is where can stuff at this level of quality be found retail? Perhaps there's some mail-order source, at some price point -- even if it's outrageously high -- that can provide herbs as good as my friend's family's oregano from Sicily or your girlfriend's mother's from Capri. ← My local herb & spice shop (Spice It Up in Montclair NJ) sells both Mexican & Greek oregano. Their aromas are markedly different, the Mexican being more pungent & overpowering, the Greek sweeter & milder. I went wth the Greek since I wanted something that would complement a tomato sauce. Whether this is anywhere near the quality of the home-dried stuff, I can't say, but it's a sign of the variety that's out there, if not readily available.

I have it on good authority that, within 6 months, my local Whole Foods will be selling nothing but certified organic chickens. No more "all natural" birds @ $4.99 - $6.59 / lb for boneless breast parts, nothing but 100% organic @ $9.99 / lb. If my branch is doing this, I assume it's being done nationwide. While on the surface this level of pricing seems insane, given Whole Foods' track record, I wouldn't bet too much against them. We have a friend who opened a (non-food) retail business a year ago who tells us some interesting stories about merchandising. If you have only a handful of a certain item and have them in a bin marked "Sale!," they won't move; consciously or unconsciously, most customers conclude that the items are somehow tainted. However, if you take a full shipment of the same item, pile it in a huge heap & jack up the price, it takes on an aura of popularity & desireabiility & starts selling like hotcakes. I suspect that Whole Foods is applying a similar strategy to their chickens. I'm sure that they've already done their market research & think that their core customer base will go along with this. Still, I wonder if it'll work long term. I guess I'm not part of their core because they're going to lose me if this comes to pass.

Aw jeez you didn't give us weekend warrior types a chance to vote: 1950 - 2000 Burgers Dogs Fried Chicken Apple Pie Pizza 2000 - 2050 Burgers Dogs Tacos Pizza Big Salads Can't bring self to think of Coke as a "food," otherwise it would top bpth lists.

Oh, my God, Chicken Delight. We had 'em too on the West Coast. Same jingle, I can even remember the tune...................which will now probably be stuck in my head for the rest of the day ← They must've been nationwide. I remember that bloody jingle on St. Louis radio in the 60s. Just how big were they, I wonder? And what made them go under?

There's a curious little pizza chain out in the heartland called Il Vicino. We stumbled on the one in Clayton MO because it was near our hotel & they were open later than most other places in the area when we needed a late dinner. The pizza was superb, with top-notch ingredients, & the wood-fired oven was all it was cracked up to be. We thought it was a terrific place & returned a couple of nights later. At the time we thought it was a local place. There was absolutely nothing in the restaurant to indicate that it was a chain; it wasn't until we returned home & I googled it that I realized. I felt like I'd been conned a bit, but that hasn't kept us from going back every time we're in St. Louis; it's still darned good pizza. With only 8 locations I guess they're a nascent chain right now. Their strategy of hiding their chain-ness is interesting. Do other emergent chains do that? I have no other experience in this arena.

Steak & Shake, regional midwest burger chain, of both yore & the present day. When I returned to my hometown of St. Louis in the 1990s after an absence of c. 20 years, I was astounded to find them still going strong. I figured that they had to have vanished along with the rest of my youth.

I've always used peanut oil in such circumstances, but must admit I still haven't tried grapeseed.

Are we talking pureed peas here? Yikes. Until just now I was seeing "stick blender" as "stick of butter." Not reading carefully enough. What is the purpose of putting the blender to them? I would just leave them alone. In Italy one time I had a spinach farfalle w peas, prosciutto & cream. The peas were left whole & it was totally delicious.

Kate's Homemade Butter from Maine, whch is possibly the best butter made in the northeast, packages their Eastern-style sticks 4 flat, perhaps in an effort to differentiate themselves further from more ordinary butters.

"Ancient grains" -- faro, spelt & quinoa -- seem to have become trendy all of a sudden.

Gosh, there could be any number of reasons why you aren't seeing a whole wheat variety being offered. Maybe customer demand is non-existant. Maybe none of the contracted bakeries offer that variety. Maybe the ShopRite chain just hasn't found a good supplier yet. Really the biggest difference between bread flour (or all purpose flour) and whole wheat flour is the inclusion of the germ (okay, and the bran, too -- but bran doesn't go rancid). The germ is what gives it that "nutty" quality. But it can also oxidize quickly -- and even if extenders are used (oil or sugar) to keep the bread from getting stale, if the germ oxidizes, then you lose some of the flavor. The best whole wheat bread I ever had was a loaf I baked myself with whole wheat flour I had freshly ground myself and used right away. Unfortunately, not many of us have time to do something like that. ← Thanks. Sorry, I wasn't very clear there; the breads that we get all have a very substantial & crisp crust. I don't know that I've ever seen a whole wheat loaf with such a crust, they always seem to be done with a softer American-white-bread style crust, regardless of the bakery. What I really wanted to ask was whether there was something about whole wheat flour that doesn't lend itself to making crusty bread, is the germ more prone to burning at crust-producing tmes & temperatures, etc. I've seen lots of crusty mixed-grain loaves of various sorts, but not a pure whole wheat that I can remember.

I thought it went without saying that, if you're eating the crust, you're also eating the soft innards. It's pretty difficult to eat just the crust, & if you did manage to separate it precisely, what would be left to absorb the EVOO? Conversely, it's simple to remove the crust & be left with nothing but soft innards if that's your preference.

Now that's interesting. Probably explains why my local ShopRite chain, which contracts with local bakeries, offers fresh-baked no-sugar/no-fat Italian, Rye & Pumpernickel loaves, but not whole wheat. (Nor do they sell them as "artisanal" or charge a premium for them. Unlike the Stop&Shop chain.) On second thought, that wouldn't explain it, since the breads are baked fresh daily. Is there something fundamentally different about the baking process for whole wheat that makes t unfit to bake with the others?