Jump to content

ellencho

participating member
  • Posts

    582
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by ellencho

  1. My family are connoseurs of buffets. Hell, we take two trips a year to vegas and some of us actually go into "training mode" to expand our tummies for all that buffet food. True, Vegas buffets have become pricier throughout the years but I daresay that quality has only gone up along with the prices. Each of us have our own strategies on how we like to eat our food. My mom and my sister are marathon eaters, and start out with lighter fare, like salads and lox, no bread. Then they move on to the heavier stuff and end their meal with some pastry and fruit. My father and brothers and I are short distance eaters. We neglect all salads and just go for meat and seafood. I personally am very careful to leave room for dessert, and even get a look at the dessert section before getting my actual meal. Even though buffets in Vegas can get pretty crowded, that's just the best time to go - when it's somewhat busy. You'll get good turnover of food. But aside from that, I guess what makes for a good buffet is good variety of food, quality of food, quality of bussers, cleanliness. I too, am not a big fan of young children allowed to run unsupervised in buffets, sticking their fingers into the food and running into people holding plates. But yes, I think that the child-sized ice cream/dessert station is a great idea, let them mess their own stuff up :)
  2. I've never purchased food from Eastchester Fish, but the restaurant serves delicious food. I had their Seafood Risotto and enjoyed it immensely. Anyway, I personally know of three great retail places for fish. Apple Farm in White Plains Turcos, and there's a new place in Hartsdale Village called Hartsdale Farm. Please note that I'm not talking about the little farmer's market that they set up on weekends in front of othe Hartsdale train station. It's an actual store. My grandma loves fish, and shops regularly at Hartsdale Farm - she said the fish is really fresh there. Apple Farm has some serious fish turnover going on, but be warned, it can get really crowded there. Luckily Apple Farm has some lightning speed cashiers. Turcos has a great fish dept in addition to a beautiful cheese dept, oh and their deli too! THey also have speedy cashiers too. Apple Farm (sorry couldn't find a phone # for you) 37 Tarrytown Road, White Plains NY 10607 Hartsdale Farm 914-725-8371 214 E Hartsdale Ave Hartsdale, NY 10530 Turco's Super Ranch 914-761-4414 381 N Central Ave Hartsdale, NY 10530 Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
  3. I usually don't make recipes from the Best Of show because I'm always suspicious that the restaurant who supplied the recipe didn't give 100% accurate directions. Anyway, I'd have to agree with everyone who said you might have overprocessed the potatoes, this turning them into glue. My brother once over mashed some potatoes at Thanksgiving one year and the resulting potatoes ended up looking an awful lot like library paste. I have one eensy suggestion for you next time you make potato soup. Unless you're going to be serving all of the soup all at once on the same day, when I make potato soup I only blend a servings worth of the soup using an immersion blender, in a separate pot. I figure, if I'm not going to serving the entire pot of soup but did blend the entire pot, with every re-heating of the soup, it's going to end up thicker and thicker every time. So I leave my uneaten soup unprocessed as insurance against overly thick potato soup.
  4. I make it a point to freeze my pie/tart dough before baking for the shrinkage factor. At first I did it without question, but the other day I saw an episode of Food911 on food network and Tyler and this lady made a chocolate tart. He did not pre-freeze the dough beforehand, and when he took the tart out of the oven, the tart's high walls had become shorter and pulled away from the sides of the pan a bit. So I think that alone makes it worth it to freeze your pie/tart dough.
  5. Hee, I brought food into Return of the King this weekend. I brought a bottle of CVS water, a box of Reese's Swoops (which I did not enjoy) and 2 Valentine's Russel Stover Caramel Hearts. My SO brought a bottle of vanilla coke and a bag of Reese's Pieces. I have no qualms about bringing food into movie theaters, stadiums and the like. To me, it's the same as having a couple hard candies or breath mints in your purse, only bigger and bulkier.
  6. ellencho

    Hideous Recipes

    While most people would find this recipe dreadful and vile, I have to admit, I am a big fan of pork and pork products, especially bacon. Therefore, when I saw the Two Fat Ladies on Foodtv a couple years back making Mitton of Pork, I was thoroughly disgusted but captivated nonetheless. Basically it's a pork bombe. Line an oven proof bowl with bacon, then layer with pork loin and stuffing until you reach the top, which you then layer with a final layer of bacon. Here's the recipe for anyone interested: Mitton of Pork. I'm not sure if this recipe counts as staggeringly vile, there isn't anything ALL that nasty in it, but if you visit the link above, these are the nutritional values for this dish Lastly, does being published on the Food network website count as being a "serious" food publication? Either that, or I'm sure it's published in one of their books.
  7. No I don't believe duenjang will give you a clear broth at all. I think it's a little bit similar to miso and that gives you a cloudy soup. And along the same lines of Grace/Loufood I agree that the clear liquid is weird. I thought about it further and have come to the conclusion that perhaps that clear broth that you saw surrounding the tubu was just water that had seeped from the tubu? Are you positive that it was broth? I don't often make my own banchan, but prefer to buy it from the store. And a lot of the time when I buy tubuchim, the tubu is sitting in a pool of clear liquid, which I always assumed was just moisture that came out of the tubu after the semi-salty topping is added to it in the store. When I eat the tubuchim I actually try not to get the excess liquid onto my plate. Also, I normally empty out the excess liquid from the plastic containers because I just don't like the idea of my tubu sitting in that water in my fridge for the week.
  8. For all you home made dumpling skin advocates: are they worth making if you're only going to be steaming shumai? Or is it better to just stick with the prepackaged rounds for the shumai? I can see how the texture of wrapper is important for something that you might pan fry, like a potsticker, but for shumai I was thinking that the important thing is more the juiciness of the filling.
  9. ellencho

    my chicken stock

    Alex, did you try smacking your two bags against the kitchen counter? I've frozen two wet bags of liquid together and a good smack did the trick to liberate them from eachother. That way you can avoid the self-doubt that might occur from running water over them.
  10. Thanks for the feedback guys. Glad to know that my pralines turned out the way they were supposed to. If I make them again perhaps I'll try a recipe for creamier less gritty ones.
  11. I was thinking the other day that aside from steaming foods and making plain rice, would it be possible to use a rice cooker to make rice dishes such as arroz con pollo or biryanis? These cookers work because they detect the change in temperature that occurs when water evaporates so when the temp in the cooker goes up it shuts itself off automatically. So if that's the case, wouldn't it be possible to cook a rice dish like arroz con pollo in it and eliminate the worry of burnt rice stuck to the bottom of your pot? Of course one would have to pre-cook the other ingredients in another pot before transferring to the rice cooker pot. Has anyone else used their rice cooker in this manner?
  12. ellencho

    Pork Belly

    Pork belly is delicious. Koreans use it and love it too. To whoever asked about a better place to get pork belly in NYC try 32nd St's Koreatown (between broadway and 5th). There's plenty of Korean supermarkets there (I can't recall the names) but they all should sell pork belly - either sold in slabs or sold sliced. I'll cook the thinly sliced belly in a cast iron pan until crispy. The slabs I'll bake in the oven at a high temp - say, 425 degrees, coated in a bit of salt pepper and oil so that the skin can crisp up.
  13. Granted, I've been out of college for a couple years now but I've always noticed that the simpler, the better. Maybe an assortment of grilled cheeses, served with tomato soup and fries? Any sort of potato even - tater tots, curly fries, whatever.
  14. Hello all - can anybody school me on pralines? I live nowhere near the south (I'm from NY) and have never been there with the exception of Florida when I was 9 so I have nothing to reference this on but, what is the proper texture for a praline? I had never seen them before except on tv so I attempted to make my own, and they look like all the pralines that I've seen but I was a bit surprised at the texture. It was almost like vanilla fudge with nuts in it. Are they supposed to be a little bit gritty/lightly sandy? Is that how it's supposed to be? I used Shirley O Corriher's recipe that she has in her book, Cookwise. She has two recipes, one from a friend of hers, and another her own. I used her friend's recipe and it was supposed be all authentic and stuff.
  15. Yikes! Loufood let Grace know I didn't mean to rile up a fellow yuhjah! Admittedly, the last time I stepped onto Korean soil was 10 years ago in the early 90s, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then.
  16. We have one of those bottom drawer broilers and I hate it with a passion. First off, you can't just stick anything under the broiler - it has to be a flatter item so no whole birds or roasts. Secondly, in order to keep my food edible I have to lie down on the floor to monitor the bubbling of the cheese on top of gratins and the like. Does a horrible job with creme brulee too but I'm too cheap to purchase a blow torch so I guess it's my own fault.
  17. We once went to a fried chicken place in Seoul and even though I enjoyed it, I thought their side dish of mayo/ketchup/shredded cabbage made for a very odd "cole slaw". And once we had cheesecake that actually tasted like American cheese. I don't think I'd ever try it again. Maybe they don't have good cream cheese in Korea? I've never seen any bagels being sold there so perhaps there's no market for cream cheese. And I know this isn't necessarily a food interpretation but I find it quite amusing that Koreans tend to eat their pizzas with a knife and fork, especially from having grown up in Brooklyn and watching people eat pizzas "Tony Manero" style, with two slices stacked up, and folded in half.
  18. ellencho

    Cherimoya

    Ooh, I love cherimoyas - they're so creamy. But once I made the mistake of getting a little too overexcited about buying one so I ate it before it had fully ripened. Big mistake - very piney tasting.
  19. I enjoy mini items because sometimes they're easier to bite into. Admittedly I'm a bit OCD and don't like the feeling of food touching the very corners of my lips mostly because I'm afraid of breakouts there. A friend of mine and I have an agreement that when we share fries, she eats the large ones and I eat the smaller ones. I also prefer the broken crackers, chips and stuff on the bottoms of snack bags. Not the ones ground into find powder mind you, but the smaller, easier to handle pieces.
  20. First post after lurking for the longest time. Here's my culinary axis of evil: 1. eggplant 2. asparagus 3. food that should be served crunchy but is microwaved by Mr Ellencho who refuses to heat it up properly in the oven
×
×
  • Create New...