balmagowry

Ah, Saturday. My final day in the bloggy, bloggy dew. Looking back on it, I can't say it's been a stellar exemplar of time management... Ah well. I went a little crazy and I had some fun doing it. Today being unexpectedly chilly, I am making an executive decision: The clam plan is insane; better I should devote myself to finishing what I've actually started, so I shall try before the day is out to show you the out-and-about-Babylon series, Monday's dinner at the Cinema Cafe, and Tuesday's (or was it Wednesday's?) Kitchen Sink Fried Rice, which... if that ain't a fitting finale, I don't know what is! And then, perhaps, if the fates allow, this summer when things are really in season I'll do the promised spread on the joys of beach living. Clams, mussels, crabs, berries, etc. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the coffee to be ready, and Saturday is also the perfect time for the promised rant about the sale flyers. See, used to be, the sales changed every Sunday, and the supermarket sale flyers were delivered as part of the Sunday newspaper: preparing for the week's coups was a Sunday ritual. After the funnies and the puzzle and the entertainment news, after the first cup of coffee, you'd be ready to plan the campaign: Aha, Waldbaum's has coffee on sale; Pathmark has a good deal on butter but it's limit-2-per-customer so we'll have to stagger our trips... etc. Sounds stingy; is. And comes at least partly from the days of being poor relations and really needing to pinch every penny. Later when our pennies began breathing a little more freely, though, we continued the practice. Partly because it's kind of a game, staying on the qui-vive and keeping the reflexes sharp. (Not to mention that smug, if ill-founded, sense of beating the system....) And partly because of the siege mentality of living in Gilgo. As I mentioned earlier, Gilgo is 20 minutes' drive from the nearest anything, so there's no such thing as a quick run to the corner store for an onion or a quart of milk. You have to plan; you have to prepare; you have to stock up. This isn't purely a matter of convenience. There are times when it really isn't feasible to make that run to the mainland, no matter how badly you need that dozen eggs. (I know that somewhere in these parts I've already told the story about the blizzard and the pregnant woman and the helicopters.) You can get snowed in; you can get flooded in. And on a sunny weekend day in the summer, it's as much as your life is worth to get caught in beach traffic. In order to get on-shore and back we must choose between the Scylla of Jones Beach to the West and the Charybdis of Robert Moses State Park to the East. It's kind of the opposite of a roach motel: we can get out, but we can't get back in. Oh - and again, old habits dying hard, there's also the instinctive memory of an old cheese-paring reason: during our first 20 years or so in Gilgo, before they reorganized the parking fees, we used to have to pay a toll every time we drove through the booths on the parkway! (Remember Sonny Corleone?) So planning the week's marketing campaign can be pretty important. Now... what happens? First the stores start changing their schedules: some - but not all - start their sale-week cycle on Saturday. This is irritating, but it's bearable, because now all the flyers are delivered on Saturday. OK, so we have to remember that Waldbaum's and the Fruitery are Sat-Fri instead of Sun-Sat... we'll live. But then - somebody always has to be different - suddenly Pathmark decides to make its sale week Fri-Thurs! The sheer unmitigated gall of it! The chutzpah! So now, Pathmark's flyer arrives with the Friday paper. Foodtown's flyer comes in the mail - around Thursday I think. The other flyers arrive in Saturday's paper but you still have to remember that two of them take effect that day and the rest not until the next day. I don't even know what Foodtown does. Then you have to remember which ones are 24-hour - Pathmark is the only one I'm sure of. I know from bitter experience that every time I desperately need to stock up on coffee and Waldbaum's has it on sale, I have to make damn sure that I get there well before 10:00 PM on Friday... or I'm screwed. And as you must realize by now, keeping track of time, date, and day of week is not exactly my strong point! Oh, I tell you, my friends, it's hard. I miss the simplicity of the Good Old Days. Christ, what a life. Now if you'll excuse me - my coffee and the week's sale flyers (most of them, anyway) await. Back shortly.

Aw... that's cute. And yes, it's very hard to imagine as an exchange between a grocer and a customer. I don't know if that one can be told in writing, but I'll give it a shot. It's only mildly offensive.... Mrs. Smith goes to the corner grocery just before closing time, and she says "Please, please, Tony, before you close the doors - please, I just need to buy some onions." Tony says, "I'm-a sorry, Meessees-a Smeet, but I ain't gotta no onions." "Oh, Tony, come on - please? I really only need one onion!" "But Meessees-a Smeet, I ain't gotta no onions." "Please, Tony, please, I'm begging you... half an onion?" "Look, Meessees-a Smeet.... you know how you take-a da 'tom' outta tomato?" "Yes... but..." "An' you know how you take-a da 'pot' outta potato?" "Yes...." "An' da 'car' outta carrot?" "Yes...." "An' da 'fuck' outta onions?" "But... Tony... there's no 'fuck' in onions." "Dassa what I'm-a tryinna tell you! Dere ain't no fuckin' onions!"

No, nothing obscene or off-color in the story. Actually, there's nothing off-color about this one either. Maybe I'll tell it later. It's kind of cute.

I love Harold in Italy. But I also like the joke. Who says you can't have it both ways?

Point taken. Sorry, BTW, if I seemed to single out your post as a target for my little rant; that was not my intention. I was really responding to what I perceived (both on this thread and in the world at large!) as a more general tendency to forget that there was any French cuisine worth knowing about before Escoffier. And yes, I'll agree to pass on the early hominids. I do think, though, there's a case to be made for a major change having occurred around 1800 +/- 20-30 - and an observable progression since then. (Previous disclaimer still in effect, of course. )

And now we come at last to Those Magnificent Foods in Their Frying Machines.. To begin with, let's fry up the Blinchiki. In butter, of course. And this time... ...on both sides! Ordinarily, as discussed in earlier post, you'd serve these accompanied by bouillon, in which you would dunk them. (I do, ahem, have bouillon cups to match the plates we're using, but I didn't think to photograph one; and in real time they are in Gilgo and I am not. Maybe I'll fix this dreadful barbarism tomorrow... and maybe not.) As it is, we're making do, for tonight, with a little sour cream. After eating the Blinchiki, and after studiously avoiding each other's eyes while furtively licking the plates, we take a brief hiatus to assemble the rest of the dinner. (Something simple to set off all this fried stuff - noodles, cooked in chicken broth.) The Kotletkii are fried (I like to use a mix of butter and oil, roughly half-&-half) over a fairly high fire, until they're quite brown, on both sides (they plump up rather enticingly after you turn them - and this is how you know that that little nugget of fat in the middle is doing its job: when you cut into one of them with a fork it will, er, ahem, spurt juice at you).... Ordinarily I'd be doing these on a cast-iron griddle, but tonight we're being naughty and having the traditional Sauce Smitane with them, so I decided to use a deeper pan for the sake of simplicity. Anyway, as each batch is done, I set them aside in a Pyrex dish while I fry the next batch. If I'm making a lot I'll put the dish in the oven to be kept warm by the pilot light. Tonight I don't bother. Now for the veg and the sauce. Here's some of that broccoli rabe I admired at the Fruitery yesterday. I'm not going to do anything complicated with it. I've trimmed the tips of the stems and that's about it. A clove or so of garlic, pressed, sauteed lightly in oil in one of those non-stick demi-wok-ish pans my mother loved so much. (BTW, the oil I'm using for this and the Kotletkii is whatever neutral stuff they keep in-house - canola, probably.) I've also cleaned a couple of Portobello mushrooms (ordinarily I'd use plain little white ones, but as you may recall I stopped too late at the Fruitery and there weren't any - under the circumstances there's a touch of irony, I suppose, in the thought that beggars can't be choosers! ) - and I've cut them up into smallish bits. Toss the broc rabe in with the garlic, stir and let it cook down a little; then add a little mushroom soy, and it will be done around the same time as the sauce - and make a nice foil for its richness (Papa, who doesn't care for rabe, will get his foil effect from frozen baby peas, lightly killed). Meanwhile, saute the mushrooms in the fat left from the Kotletkii frying; Then lower heat and add a goodly dollop of sour cream :wub: (I used it ALL UP!!! :gloat:); swirl it in gently, and then stir until smoothly combined. And now, at long last, it's dinner-time.

I have a dear friend who's a musicologist, and whenever I go to one of her big dinner parties, I seem to get stuck at the end with all her friends from grad school, who are whooping it up with "inside music" (like inside baseball) jokes that have punch lines like "She thought he played the French HORN!!!!!!" And everybody around me collapses in laughter and I just sit there smiling politely, like a Japanese tourist at a Jackie Mason concert. Ah yes -- this takes me back in time. Much too far back for my taste actually. A sample: Q: How do you tell a viola from a bass? A: The bass takes longer to burn. Q: How do you tell a violist from a percussionist? A: The violist wears jewelry louder than anything the percussionist plays. And so forth. Oy. Oh, no. I'm really sorry, Mags, and I'll understand perfectly if you want to go hang out at the other end of the table with somebody who's nicer than I am... but now I'm going to have to tell it - secure in the awful knowledge that only about three of the 12,000-odd people here will get it and the rest will go down to your end of the table where the sane people are and mutter, "I guess you had to be there...." OK, everybody braced, and 99.999% of you covering your eyes and ears? Right, you two or three co-music-geeks, say it with me and let's get it over with: Q: What's the longest viola joke in the world? A: Harold in Italy. OK, it's over. It's safe to come out now.

I have a dear friend who's a musicologist, and whenever I go to one of her big dinner parties, I seem to get stuck at the end with all her friends from grad school, who are whooping it up with "inside music" (like inside baseball) jokes that have punch lines like "She thought he played the French HORN!!!!!!" And everybody around me collapses in laughter and I just sit there smiling politely, like a Japanese tourist at a Jackie Mason concert. Or like two dancers having lunch with a writer. Even the dumbest jokes I told them would elicit either a murmur of "just nod and smile... nod and smile..." or a more defiantly deadpan "Was that JEW-ISH HU-MOR?" Guess I'd better not tell the world's longest viola joke, then, huh.

Ok, so I guess it isn't the one about taking the fuck out of onions....

Either that, or silver threads among the gold.

Nope, you're quite right, AFAIK - it's an old Jewish story, at any rate, and its exact provenance, who knows? And... Cartoon? What cartoon? You didn't think I got it from Milt Gross, did you? No, no, sorry if I gave that impression - I was just borrowing his style as a framing device, same as I did yesterday for the story of Water to Cover. I know the story because my parents told it and their friends told it and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts told it, and we've all known it so long that no one has any idea who got there first or who heard it from whom. IOW, oral history. In my family "Oy, kreplach!" is on a par, as an expletive, with "Oy, gevalt!" or "Oy, a klogg is mir!" Hmmm... might not be the one I'm thinking of, which I've always heard told in an exaggerated Brooklyn-Italian accent as an exchange between a grocer and an insistent customer. Funny how sometimes folk and/or immigrant humor can become completely ethnically-interchangeable (Italian/Jewish, Polish/Belgian etc.) - just as many viola jokes (NOT, however, my very favorite one of all) can be "transposed" for tuba or saxophone or accordion....

Practice! Seriously, it's easier than you think. Go outside with your skillet (10" is a good size to start with) and a bag of dried beans. Start with a handful or two of beans in the pan and start flipping. When you get the knack of making them turn over en masse, add another handful and repeat. You'll pick it up fairly quickly, though you might feel a right fool while you're doing it. When you get back in the kitchen, start small - a fried egg, toasting spices to go in the mill/mortar, etc. One other thing - once the food is in the air, pay attention to the pan, not the food. The food's got one direction to go, and that's down. If you make sure that the pan is under the food, gravity will take care of the rest. This is where an early training as a jacks player can really stand you in good stead! Seriously - if you've ever practiced flipping single-handed (I was taught that only sissies flip with both hands - no challenge in it at all), if you can get all 10 to the back of your hand in one move and back to the palm in another, then you've got it made: it's only one small lateral step from flip-jacks to flap-jacks. (:groan:) Also - I first started doing the flippy thing, not with crepes, but with mu shu pancakes, which are made of a firmish dough, rolled together in pairs, and cooked dry. Much MUCH less messy if you blow it! That's the kind of practice that can really give you confidence before you start messing around with thin batters and melted butter....

I've said it a million times,and now I'll say it again: (Maybe I should just start using that as my sig line.) Sick puppies of the world, unite! Not for nothing am I the co-author of a recipe entitled Boiled/Drowned Baby! And then there's one of my favorite Sunday brunch treats: Dutch Baby.

I have seen kreplach served deep fried -- that's how my mom makes them. Oooh, YUM! I stand corrected, then - here I thought boiling was the most traditional treatment. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio.... Deep-fried... must... try... that...! And hey, it's only a hop/skip/jump from potstickers. How I love these convergences! Well, as you will see when the next instalment arrives, Blinchiki are re-fried - not deep, but in plenty of (sorry!) butter.

Moving on to Sunday night, Part III. BTW I got a little confused last night: this next episode is not Those Magnificent Foods In Their Frying Machines - that comes after this one and will cap Sunday night (whew). This one is entitled: Story Time. First, though, one small frying interlude. The Kotletkii having been shaped and laid out, the tray goes into the fridge while the Blinchiki get made and assembled. (BTW it is a good idea to chill them for a while even if you don't have something else to do in the interim: one of our SSBs can probably tell us why, but all I know is it makes them fry up better.) Out comes the Blinchiki batter. (If it has thickened while chilling, thin it with a little more milk.) And remember... "Don't bother" to brown the second side! I didn't - but I turned over the top one on the stack for this photo-op. Some explanation of the part I'm skipping tonight: The traditional filling for Blinchiki is made of cooked beef and uncooked onion. You get a lot of beef bones and a great big hunk of chuck roast or something like that, and you cook it all up stockwise, with an onion and some celery and carrots and whatever else you like to add - herbs and the like - plus S&P, of course. You cook and cook and cook it until you have a nice powerful broth and the meat is falling off the bones. Strain. reduce and clarify the stock. Pick over the meat, separating it from the bones and groozly bits; then chop it up, along with a raw onion. (It is perfectly OK to do the first cooking stage in the pressure cooker and the chopping in a food processor - I generally do if I'm short of time.) The meat/onion mixture becomes the filling; the broth is usually part of the final presentation. It won't be tonight, though, because I'm using leftover filling from a previous batch. That's OK - for once we'll get by just fine with a dollop of sour cream instead. And now we come to Story Time. Oh oh oh, I've been wanting to do this for such a long time! Nize baby, itt opp anodder spoon Epplesuss, so Momma'll gonna tell you de sturry from de leetle boy what didn't like his Momma's Kreplach, ooh dat doity rotten leetle keed. (For the uninitiated: Kreplach are not quite the same as Blinchiki: for one thing, they are kosher. They are dumplings made of chopped meat wrapped in a flour/water dough - and they are boiled and served in soup. But every time I make Blinchiki I think of the Kreplach story. So now I shall tell it as I've always wanted to, and in future perhaps the same will happen to you!) [WARNING: Jewish humor ahead!] Wance oppon a time.... Once upon a time there was a little boy who hated kreplach. His mother was at her wits' end, because she made them often, and she just couldn't understand why he wouldn't eat them. So at last one day she came up with a scheme to persuade him to give them a try. "Semele," she said to him, "sit here with me while I make something nice for dinner. Look - here are some beautiful pancakes and some nice chopped meat. What do you think?" "Looks good," said the son. "Good. Now I'm gonna take a little of this meat and make a nice little lump out of it. Okay so far?" "Great," said the kid. "Good. Now watch, I'm gonna put this meat on a pancake. You like that?" "I love it," said the kid, mouth watering. "Good. Now watch: I'm gonna fold the far edge of this pancake over the lump of meat. How's that?" "That's great," said the kid. "Good. Now... I'm gonna fold this side of the pancake over onto the meat. Does that look OK to you?" "It looks terrific," said the kid. "Good. Now... next, I'm gonna fold this other side over too. You like that? "I sure do! When do we eat?" said the kid, eyes wide. "Good, good... good. And now... I'm gonna roll this last edge over it, and I --" "OY! KREPLACH!"

Cool! Now that's a kind of honor worth having.... The artichokes up-thread were sort of borderline; upon arrival at their centers I found some chokes developed, some not. This may explain why they were so cheap; I've seen that same package since in a couple of stores and it's always quite the bargain. From my standpoint this is just fine, as "baby" artichokes were not really what I was after. The only artichokes I avoid are those big round flavorless spineless ones - other than that, any artichoke is a good artichoke, as far as I am concerned. Given my druthers I guess my overall choice would be a big one (or two... or three...!), very fresh - but these adolescent artichokes were very good and were one hell of a deal for the price. In answer to your question (oops), I do see real baby artichokes here from time to time, but never pre-packaged like that. Which is a good thing: if I really wanted the babies I'd want to pick them out individually, by hand, as I do string beans or snow peas.

So, good morning. As advertised, I've actually been up since 7:30. (I imagine I'm scheduled for a hell of a crash this afternoon, since that represents something like two hours' sleep.) Every time I see the real morning I am reminded how much I used to love it. I shall desire its more acquaintance. Still not sure how the alarums and excursions of the rest of the day will shake out, but I'm not going to worry much about that until I finish this coffee. Meanwhile, I have plenty to do just getting the rest of Sunday cooked and served! Lucy - Thank you....

and please, who or what is Gilgo? Fi Explanations can be found up-thread in the following posts: this one, and also this one.

It would be desirable that someone should come up a kind of “Library type gourmet selection”: Old & new classics, great hits, public favorites. But will certainly be objections to this based on subjectivity. Who is going to make or who made the first best duck and peaches? … It should be the work of an historian. .... The reproach I am making is denouncing this chronic French “navel gazing” centralized self-satisfaction around the few with a lack of a global and united view. To date, many books have already been written in an effort to provide an inventory of all the gastronomic riches (dishes) of this country. Escoffier's method being the uniting factor of all this for training purposes (as for young chefs in training for their CAP). But, a very positive note here is that in the great culinary challenges like the “Bocuse d’Or” and all MOF competitions, we see that the creativity factor is vital and the judges are the men from the trade. This is a remnant of corporatism. It could be a good idea to ask an international jury of recognized gastronomes to organize such event. What do you think? Yes; it should indeed be the work of an historian! I think Robert's points are well taken and merit further exploration. What still troubles me, however, in these and subsequent posts about revisiting the cuisine of the past, is that the past appears to consist entirely of Escoffier. Granted that Escoffier's work is (and no doubt should be) the standard on which early culinary training is based; still it seems to me terribly important to recognize that - just as music did not begin with Mozart - the traditions of French cuisine go back more than a paltry century. It might not be feasible to extend such historical forays too far into the past; but to cut off the exploration at the late nineteenth century is to dismiss the important innovations, discoveries and writings of Careme and his contemporaries; the men on whose shoulders Escoffier stood. Is it not enormously important to understand the sources and evolution of his work? The culinary sea-changes that produced the cuisine of Escoffier began with the aftermath of the Terror, and they owe much not only to Careme but to intelligent and eccentric gastronomes like Grimod. Not to mention Brillat-Savarin, who was after all only an inspired amateur. Ignoring all this is merely another kind of navel-gazing, which inevitably results in a loss of perspective. And - this may seem a bit extreme to the culinary purist - IMO it is also relevant to understand something of the social/political changes which affected the approaches to food during that same period. These can't legitimately be dissociated, any more than trends in cuisine can be well understood outside the context of contemporary fashions in art and architecture. Robert's point about Beethoven et al is peculiarly relevant here: Beethoven and Careme were contemporaries, and both were equally influenced by the neo-clacissism of their period. Buildings, hairstyles, dresses, painting, music and pastry all bore its unifying mark: my favorite instance being that Beethoven and Careme both executed pieces entitled "The Ruins of Athens" at about the same time. All right, that's a bit far-fetched for the present discussion, but the point, I think, is that none of these events occurs in a vacuum. Escoffier did not spring full-blown from the void: he had a past as well as a future, a past which he studied and revered. And the key to creating and enjoying the gastronomic golden ages of the present lies at least partly in understanding those of the past. :climbs down from soapbox: [Disclaimer: yes, I am biased by my own special interest in Careme and his contemporaries. Someone has to be! ] EDIT - Esprit d'escalier: a frivolous parallel occurs to me - the frequently-heard remark that "young people always seem to think they invented sex." But their parents and grandparents must also have known a thing or two on the subject....

Critters is fed. Shall resume Sunday's preparations in a minute. First, though, I thought I'd show you this, on the chance that it might alleviate the Gilgo-vs-Gilgo confusion. Or - wait - no, let's do it this way. Here is a link to the Gilgo Heading Tide Table, according to which prime clamming time during the next couple of days will be mid-afternoon, by normal people's standards. No guarantees! If the water is too cold, or I'm too rushed, the clam deal will just have to wait until normal season. Get it? Got it? Good. Anyway, on that page you will also find a Mapquest link which will show you where all this is going on. Of course, the tide is measured at [REAL] Gilgo, not West Gilgo, so that is also where the map coordinates go. But if you look closely you'll see West Gilgo too. And if you zoom out a bit and look Eastward, aye, look Eastward (I have GOT to stop all this obnoxious quoting), you'll see a road that appears to walk on water - yup, that's Robert Moses for ya - but it actually represents the bridge shown in previous post. Sunday night, Part II: Shall you drive in a droshky? Shall you see the Tsar? I'm going to make two traditional Russian dishes: Blinchiki and Kotletkii. I think we've discussed the former somewhere here before, in all its various slavic-nomenclatural permutations... no, maybe that was Golubtsi... but I'm pretty sure I mentioned Blinchiki. As the name suggests, they are a form of blintz, but a highly specialized one. Tonight I'm skipping some of the normal preparation steps because I happen to have some leftover filling in the freezer from the last time I made them (Julia would be proud!); unfortunately this means they'll have to be served without the usual beef bouillon accompaniment - I'll explain further and fill in the blanks as I get there. Otherwise, I seem to have fallen into the habit of this blow-by-blow tutorial format... so you can follow the bouncing ball and cook along with Baba Lisa. Blinchiki first, then Kotletkii. These are sometimes known as Kotletii, or Cutlets, Pojarski; but beware of impostors. There is a recipe circulating on the web for Kotletii Pojarski which is... well, it ain't RIGHT, is all I can tell you. Who or what is right? Got me. But don't believe everything you read. Including this, I guess. Myself, I prefer to trust the real Russian women whom I knew and from whom I am descended. OK, Russia is a big place. And the part of it my people come from is now part of Lithuania anyway. So... let's just say I will show you how you would have made these things if you had been living in Vilna (now Vilnius) a century ago... but had had access to certain American mod cons. Deal? Deal. Anyway, Kotletki has roughly the same etymology as "cutlet" and may well take its name and composition from the heyday of French cookery in Russia. But it's Russian now. (BTW, if you've ever had Chicken Kiev, what you've really had is a Kiev Kotletki - the only type I happen to know that is not made from ground or chopped meat.) The original Kotletkii were made from beef, and that's what we're having tonight; variations can be made with salmon or, greatest luxury of all, chicken. (Greatest luxury because in the old days you couldn't buy ground chicken: you had to either grind it yourself or buy it from an unusually obliging butcher....) But I'm blathering. Let me get started - it's easier to show than to tell. (Caucasian Sketches on the radio. How appropriate. I love all those hyphenated composers. ) First order of priority: make the batter for the blinchiki, so it can rest and chill while I prepare the other things. My mother's scribbled recipe is an adaptation from a Dione Lucas crepe. At the frying stage she says in her notes "don't bother to cook other side." Little did she or I know - until I learned it here on eGullet! - that this isn't about not bothering; indeed it is the very definition of the distinction between a blintz and a crepe. Flour, milk, eggs (one whole and a yolk), oil. What a dingbat I am, not to have taken a picture of the kitchen itself. I have some, though, and can take more in the next day or two. Whisk it all together, thinning with extra milk until the consistency is right. OK, it's right. Put in fridge and start the kotletkii. Here's a kotletkii bowl and chopper. The bowl is just a plain wooden bowl. The chopper - I don't know what else these are ever used for. I don't like that little slit in the middle, nor do I have any idea what it's for. There is a plain chopper somewhere here, but I don't remember where it lives until it's too late. Bummer. Oh well, that should be the worst. Kotletkii are one of three applications that justify, IMO, the existence of el-cheapo Wonder-style cotton white bread. The ratio is eight slices to the pound of meat - we have an extra quarter-pound, so I'm using 10 slices. You cut off the crusts (application #2: dry out the crusts and make bread crumbs out of them). Then you soak each slice in water, squeeze it out mejumishly, and put it in the bowl with the meat. Ah - I see I've already put in the egg. Normal ratio: one egg to two pounds meat. So half an egg to a pound, which always annoys me (and which is why I almost always make at least two pounds' worth). Spose I could be virtuous and creative and use the extra white from the Blinchiki, but the hell with that. After all, there's an extra 1/4-pound of meat here. If I use a whole egg that will be exactly 3/8 more egg than it oughta be, and that is exactly the kind of precision I prefer to eschew. It ain't gonna make them that much heavier! I put in the whole damn egg. After all the bread has been soaked and squoze and put in, season with S&P. (BTW, if you were making salmon kotletkii, at this point you would add some bits of sauteed onion; if it were chicken, you'd have soaked the bread in chicken broth instead of water, and then you'd add chopped parsley at this stage.) Then sit down and start chopping. Kotletkii must always be chopped by hand. It is almost the only process I can think of for which there can be no satisfactory mechanized equivalent. In the spirit of scientific experimentation I have tried it with grinders and food-processors and blenders, and I have proved to my entire satisfaction that chopping by machine always produces a gooey, gummy, unpleasant and ultimately tough texture. Besides, it's such an... Old-Country thing to do.... So I chop them by hand, and glad to do it. It shouldn't be a perfectly homogeneous amalgam... but it should be pretty well-mixed. Very important, perhaps even more so than with hamburger: the meat MUST NOT BE TOO LEAN! This is 80%, I think, and it has done exactly what it ought to do: left a thickish film of soft fat on the blade of the chopper. Good. This is precious stuff. Now use the chopper blade to divide the mixture into equal portions, generally eight per pound of meat. (Again, in this case it's 10, because of that extra 1/4 pound.) With wet hands, scoop up a lump and form it into a rough ball. Poke a deep dimple into the center of the ball. Then take a little of the fat from the chopper, poke it into the dimple, and shove the edges back together, enclosing the fat in the middle of the ball. (Note - this doesn't apply to the salmon or chicken versions, though you can do something similar for the chicken ones with a little dab of butter.) Pat it into a more elongated shape, put it into a pile of breadcrumbs, bread it all over. Then press it flat, lay it on a tray covered with wax paper, and lather/rinse/repeat with the rest of the mixture. If I were making more than would fit on the tray, I'd put another sheet of wax paper over these and start a new layer on top of them. Ooof! Real-time: I was going to post more of this tonight, but though it's only 2:40 AM I'm tired. Tomorrow I have to get up at a normal person's time (7:30 AM! the middle of the night!) because Phyllis is coming to clean. So I'll get an early start to the sequel then - I promise. Title of Sequel: Those Magnificent Foods In Their Frying Machines

OK, here's some Sunday. (Color balance... inconsistent... sorry... 'nuff said, for now. :sigh:) Did I mention that I seem to have eaten a pear at some point? Well, I must have done. Can't imagine why else I'd have bothered to photograph it. Sunday Evening, Part I: In Which Piglet Is Completely Surrounded By Water [You may remember that I posted, retroactively, a daylight image of the diner we went to on Friday night. I actually stopped to take that picture on my way over to Gilgo to make dinner on Sunday night.] So - it's now Sunday evening. I'm on my way to Gilgo. For some reason I'm in the mood to do something Russian - go back to my roots and cook some of the dishes I learned from my mother, who learned them from hers, who learned them from hers. And so on. Fortunately I happen to have some mushrooms that need to be us... eek! no! I don't! I already used them last night! One quick stop at the Fruitery to grab MUSHROOMS, then, and a couple of other things. But - how can they possibly be out of mushrooms? Oh. Right. It's Sunday night, isn't it. They're probably out of lots of things. And they close early. They're about to do so. NOW. Fine, then, I'll take what I can get. Three or four portobello mushrooms will certainly suffice! Small thing of sour cream. Bunch broccoli rabe. And go, dog, go! (Literally. Luke is waiting in the car. I don't like to leave him there!) We're off. On the way to Gilgo it occurs to me that maybe I can give you some idea what the area looks like. Kids, do not try this at home: setting the camera on Auto (Auto!!!! ha, sometimes I'll keel myself leffing!) I start shooting from the hip, or rather the steering wheel. I SWEAR I do not take my eyes off the road for more than a half-second. Honest. Not surprisingly... not many of the pictures are any good. At any rate, here's a glimpse. Southbound from West Islip on the Robert Moses Causeway, toward the Robert Moses Bridge. On the bridge itself, over the Great South Bay. Those arches over the middle span... in summer I sail under those. Done it once by moonlight. (Go ahead, hate me now - if you didn't already, what on earth have you been waiting for?) Past the arches and headed back down. The land ahead, such as it is, is the northernmost edge of the barrier beach itself. Headed west along Ocean Parkway. Can't get ocean pictures from here due to the blessed dunes, but can and do get one reasonable shot to my right: I realize all this is getting to be awfully Uncle-Ted-coming-round-the-side-of-the-house, but there is method, of a sort, in my madness. The point, such as it is, of this picture and the previous one is to illustrate one of the salient features of the salt marsh: in case you hadn't noticed... it's FLAT! Making the turn into Gilgo itself. (I really should be more careful about calling it Gilgo, which isn't really its name, lest you confuse it with the other place a half-mile away which is named Gilgo... but West Gilgo Beach is such a mouthful, don't you know. So Gilgo it is. If I ever have reason to refer to the other Gilgo I will specify. Confused yet?) The gatehouse. Bloody elitist snobs! Sorry, but that's us, all right. [Real-time pause to feed the animals their supper. Then I'll come back and do Part II.)

No almost about it, keedoh - that much I can vouch for. Oh ma-a-a-an, am I going to have to cop to being a mensch after all? How embarrassing would that be? Sheesh. Nope. Or as Mrs. Yifnif would say... Nup! I love Nize Baby. The cartoons have more than a hint of George Herriman about them... but it's the stories that are priceless. Speaking of which, of course there's a story connected with this. But I'm not gonna tell it right now, or we'll never get to the first course for Sunday.

Either someone beat you to it or you've been very naughty.... publishing elsewhere under a psuedonym and not letting us in on the details (Lisa... couldn't you come up with a better alias than "Doc Love"?). Not to mention that I already have dibs on the name. I give you..... The System But who needs such trickery like that when food can be the fuel that drives the engine of seduction (did you really think I did all that blog work just because I like to cook and eat well?) Dang - looks like I'm going to have to come up with a more original name for it. The pity of it is that calling it The System was a lot more interesting and original than it sounds (like calling someone much prettier than she looks, perhaps?) - it was based on one of the tag lines from Milt Gross's Nize Baby, wherein whenever someone comes up with an idea that works brilliantly for him he is apt to exclaim, "is diss a system!" Oh well. Oh, no doubt about it, I have been rather naughty on occasion - and if I ever do publish a self-help best-seller you may be quite certain I will indeed do it under a pseudonym! - but... er... I do assure you it will not be that best-seller or that pseudonym. <-- me, doing all those press interviews incognita....

i'm sorry, but this is COMPLETELY unacceptable! Couldn't agree more, me boyo - it's driving me nuts!

Isn't it funny how the more determined I get to catch up, the farther behind I get? Here it is Thursday, and I'm just getting started on Sunday's pictures. Sigh. Well, at any rate, here's Sunday's lunch, which will have to hold you until I'm ready to post dinner. (And there's a lot of dinner.) Sandwiches from Saturday night's leftovers: skirt steak, sliced and warmed up a bit; on toasted Portuguese bread, buttered; with lettuce, S&P. I appreciate fancy stuff as much as the next gastronome, but oh how I love good simple food. These sandwiches were almost achingly good. I must apologize for the problems with color balance. I know, for instance, that this picture is way too red - it must be; but I can't see it, owing to my monitor still being wacko. We re-calibrated it, but it still displays things a little dark and a little blue; I think it's gotten worse; I'm afraid there's nothing for it but to get a new monitor. The thing is, I know my flash adds slightly more of a blue cast than it should, and conversely that most of my indoor shots taken with available light come out a little too warm, but at the moment I have to guess at how much to compensate. This is one of many reasons I'm keeping the images off-site - I'm hoping one day to get a chance to adjust the worst of the pictures retroactively. Meanwhile, bear with me. [EDIT an hour later to add: Have now changed it, and I think this is a lot better - will check on other machine.] Quick rundown on today. You saw what happened when I went to get my coffee. (Boy says: yes, I did try to clean off the bottom but couldn't get that stuff to come off. You did what? Wet it? Aren't you clever!) After that - I fed myself brunch, sort of, I guess: nice hunk of toasted Portuguese bread, buttered. Red grapes. Oh, and who was it said I needed more snacks? Toliver? Not to worry. Today I used the high vantage point gained during my microwave-cleaning activities to spot in its hiding place a partial bag of... POTATO CHIPS! Huzzah! Immediately snarfed them. Then for my sins, ran off to Pilates class. Not really for my sins - I love the class, always look forward to it; and the teacher is a friend, even though she's (gasp) a vegan. I can't easily cook for her, but I can teach her stuff about gardening, so there's enough common ground to be getting on with. The ultra-observant may have wondered why I'm posting now when I'm supposed to be at Grand Szechuan; alack, I PM'd Stone this afternoon that I would have to cancel. Logistics; complicated; having to do mostly with the comings and goings of The Boy, and various work-related stuff too dreary to contemplate. Instead, Wednesday's leftover fried rice (there was quite a lot) will warmly furnish forth the Thursday table - and maybe I'll get it together to make the dessert I blew off last night. I bet The Boy could be persuaded to go out and get some heavy cream....