ghostrider

I certainly wasn't commenting on anyone's dietary choices and restrictions. I guess I should have said, "barring sodium restrictions or other limitations, there ought to be." I think most people here (without such paramaters they must work within) salt their pasta water and assume others do the same. I think I just made an ASS out of ME this time. Sorry! ← Naw I think I was being an ass. I just miss the days when I could throw salt on anything without thinking about it. My palate really has changed over the last year. It's weird.

I take my low salt diet seriously. Seasoning pasta with salt is far from essential in my book these days. Sorry that's probably a whole separate thread that I'm not inclined to start right now. I've just come to view salt from a different perspective than most folks & I was struck by the # of automatic assumptions that pasta water implies salt here. Besides, I want to continue eating pancetta once in a while, & to me that means cutting salt from places where it's not absolutely essential.

Just wondering why many folks here assume that there's salt in the pasta water.

I’ve been unsure where to put this thread. Does it belong in Italy, which is where it all began? Or New Jersey, since one of my goals is to find a reliable local source of good pancetta? That may ultimately become a separate thread. But my immediate subject is pancetta as an ingredient, so I’m assuming that it belongs here. I’ve been on a haphazard quest to perfect my approach to pasta amatriciana ever since I sampled the dish on a trip to Italy about 10 years ago. This of course involves good pancetta, and that’s where the dilemma begins. At the start of this quest, time and time again, I wound up buying chunks of pancetta that were varying shades of grey, and had a bit of that taste you get when meat begins to turn. I assumed that this was a result of the curing process and didn’t think about it further, though I was never completely happy with the results of using this stuff in my amatriciana dishes. Then, on a subsequent trip to Italy, came the revelation. At our hotel in Verona, a platter of thinly sliced meats was put out for breakfast. I became enamored of a particular batch of circular slices and asked the server what they were, she smiled at my appreciation of the flavor and said, “Pancetta!” I was stunned. Every bite was full of wonderfully fresh cured pork flavor without a hint of gaminess. I inspected the slices closely, they were a glowing shade of dark rose from the center all the way out to the edge, no tinge of grey anywhere. So that’s what pancetta is supposed to be like, I’m now thinking. Am I correct? I ask of those who are wiser in the ways of pancetta than I am. Is that greyness a sign of an unscrupulous butcher who is simply unloading old product? Or is that some sort of aged pancetta and it’s supposed to be that way? Recently, thinly sliced domestic pancetta, vacuum sealed in plastic, has appeared in local deli departments. It has the look & color of good pancetta, but the thin slices don’t really work in an amatriciana dish. I’m after a good chunk of the stuff that I can slice into cubes. I bought a chunk of Boar’s Head pancetta for my most recent amatriciana effort. It was a bit grey around the outer edges but the center still had a decent pink cast. I trimmed off the edges and used only the center portion. It was pretty good but still had a bit of that gamy flavor. I have to believe that there’s better stuff out there, whether it’s domestic or imported doesn’t matter to me nearly as much as the freshness. What’s been your experience with pancetta? Do I simply lack a sufficiently refined palate for the delicacies of aged pancetta? Or have I been sold some real crap over the years by some of the most respected butchers in the tri-state area? All comments & advice are welcome.

I think I have a responsibility to complain whenever I feel like it in any given situation. It's certainly not an absolute responsibility. Mark Twain's little story on Travelling with a Reformer offers a interesting perspective on the value of complaint. If you don't happen to have the right Twain volume on your shelves, you can read the tale right here.

Glad to hear you got through it all & are on the mend! I love tea & Douglas Adams' writing, when I re-read the Guide earlier this year that line just leapt out at me.

Or Rome. May not qualify for this thread, but in terms of fresh produce, staying in Rome for a week with a friend who was born & raised there was a revelation in how a city should be run, food-wise. Every neighborhood has its market where stuff is trucked in daily, & not from that far away.

A steamed lobster & a cup of drawn butter. An August ear of corn, with a lump of butter melting over it. A "Jersey fresh" peach. Local strawberries.

The ham goes on top of the cheese, NOT the other way around.

This is on Mountain Boulevard, about a quarter mile east of Mt. Bethel Road. It is in a small shopping center that has all the stores facing each other instead of the main road, making it hard to know what businesses are in there as you drive by. ← Its right across the street from the library. I wonder if the reference to Mediterranean food is to provide a description that is more familiar to more people. Had I not been to Pamir, I wouldn't have had a clue as to what kind of food they were talking about. Its not as spicy as Indian, and there are less curries & stews. So, Turkish might be even more descriptive than Indian, or something else. ← According to the Star-Ledge, the guy serves what he calls a Mediterranean salad, complete with feta. Just doesn't sound very Afghan to me. Not that it's not good! At the Ridgewood place, the cuisine struck me as similar to Indian but less aggressively spiced. I wouldn't have used Mediterranean as a frame of reference. Granted there is a continuum from Turkey eastwards & such. We used to have a Persian place in town that was more reminiscent of what I'd call Mediterranean in some of their dishes.

There was once what I thought was a great Afghan place in Ridgewood that we went to regularly for a couple of years after we discovered them, but then they closed. I still remember their spinach, a wondrous thing. I'm curious about all the references to Mediterranean food though? Is that a deliberate attempt on the owner's part to bring in a wider clientele? It's not a term that would have leapt to my mind in the context of the Ridgewood place. Star-Ledger doesn't give an address for Silk Road either, only that it's across the street from the municipal bldg. What street would that be?

I had the same experience in the past with the codeine cough syrup. I theorised that one simply became acclimatised to it after a few days. I couldn't figure out any correlation between diet, nausea & syrup dosage.

I've always liked that theory. My problem has been that I really, really, REALLY like ice cream. After 30 years of following this notion, I've recently had to give it up, on doctor's orders, as my blood sugar is spiraling near out of control. The obvious counterpart is moderation in everything. Easier said.

Negative: it floors me that people STILL go out to dinner having drenched themselves in cologne or perfume & completely screw up the experience of flavors for everyone within 15 feet of them. Positive: it floors me that certain staple flavors (e.g., garlic & onions) haven't lost an iota of their appeal to me in c. 50 years of life on this planet. Some of us really must be hard-wired for this stuff.

I had a taste for Pu-erh teas in the 1970s & 1980s. Then I just kind of lost it, along with my taste for Chinese teas in general. I still appreciate their excellence but don't buy them much. I have been awash in Assams, Ceylons, Darjeelings, & the occasional Nepal & Sikkim, ever since. My current faves are the Doomni & Meleng Assams from Upton. Can't imagine a morning without them in the tea cabinet.

Same tea runs approx. $53 per lb from Upton Teas (Upton uses metric quantities so it's a rough price conversion). But note that Upton has 4 different varieties of Makaibari FTGFOP1S - two first flushes & two seconds - at slightly different prices. I presume that these represent pickings from different areas of the Estate, perhaps picked at slightly different times. Whether House of Tea has the best Makaibari ever, or is simply charging what the traffic will bear, can only be decided by tasting, & that's a pricey decision. It's a bit odd that House of Tea lists Sikkim under Darjeeling, & Nilgiri under Ceylon - not too far off, flavour-wise, but they're not the same regions. The prices at SilverTips seem quite good, though a couple of their Assams are pretty expensive. That particular Makaibari may be a genuine bargain, or it may be from a picking that's getting old. At Upton I've found that you generally get what you pay for. In the end it all comes down to personal taste; sometimes the premium on the more expensive varieties seems worth it, sometimes not. You never really know until you try.

I'm no expert, & you don't have to be in the business to have seen hundreds of restaurants come & go. But location may turn out to be a huge plus for this endeavor. Things are happening in JC. Besides, if you don't follow some of your dreams, what's the point of living?

10 big stones LOL. Best fast food fries I've ever had were from Ranch One, an NYC chcken sandwich fast food chain. Totally crisp & brown, never soggy. Hand cut? Who knows, who cares, it's the crunch & the taste that matters. Not sure if the chain is still in biz tho, the branch I used to eat at had closed last time I walked by.

Somewhere in Hoboken, the legend has it, there's a slicer that goes to 11.

Did that happen before or after they started airing those creepy "The King" commercials? Which I know have been discussed at length here. My guess is before, those ads smacked of desperation.

Congrats!

eGullet is remarkable for gathering so many folks who share two of my passions - food & language. I will forever remember 10/19//04 as the date, and eGullet as the place, where I first saw "snark" used as a verb. I had finally gotten used to the notion of "getting snarky with" various & sundry. Then I log onto eGullet and the phrase, an opportunity to snark on the Sox, leaps off the screen at me. The usage may already be passe now - hey, it's been ten days - but for a brief moment there, I felt like I was on the cutting edge of linguistic evolution, actually watching it happen, thanks to eGullet.

Spoonerism! Thank you! I knew that "dyslexic" was the wrong term & have spent the last 3 days wracking my brains, to no avail. (Yes, way too late to edit the post, but still I obsessed.) It's a sad thing when the memory starts to go.....

I feel a need to point out that not everyone, or even a majority of everyone, tips 20%, much less tips 20% on the total after tax. Some people tip 15%. Some tip 10%. Some tip less than 10%. Some regularly tip 5%. Some think 50 cents a person is still a good tip. And some people never ever tip anyone under any circumstances. That's just the way things are. ← When did it become customary to calculate the tip on the after-tax total? Or is it? I've always calculated 20% on the pre-tax total because taxes vary so much across this great land of ours. (That 20% being the starting point, of course, the actual tip may rise or fall from there depending on the quality of service.)

Extending the countertop over the radiator is a good idea. The previous owners of our house did that. The countertop gets kinda warm, so you need something that won't be affected by heat. There's about a 6 inch gap in there, so the heat doesn't build up too much. Putting a permanent facing over the front of the radiator is NOT a good idea. The previous owners also did that. I can't imagine why. I had to bash out the metal screen a couple weeks ago so the plumber could get at the thing & repair some leaks. Good luck! I had a MUCH smaller kitchen for 20 years in NYC, you'll do just fine.