eunny jang
-
Posts
849 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by eunny jang
-
-
"Young Man With Charisma And Talent Works Hard; Gains Deserved Respect In Industry Circles; Develops An Excess Of Hubris; Abuses 15 Minutes of Ill-Begotten Fame; Is Shunned By The Same Industry That Once Embraced Him; Peddles Wares Alongside Kathie Lee and Madame Alexander Dolls; Takes Short-Lived Radio Gig... Desperate, Acts In Several Cinemax-At-Night Films; Develops Substance Abuse Problem; Discovers Fame Is a Cruel Mistress; Has Epiphany; Cleans Self Up; Returns To What He Knows, Loves, Does Best: Cooking; Finds True Happiness Was In Front Of Him All Along"
A Book Club novel waiting to happen.
-
Blue cheese. Mayonnaise (taste your creme fraiche for sweetness - could be a good sub). Minced garlic, a little milk to thin if it needs it. Salt, pepper. Eat with spoon.
Edit: Oh. Use buttermilk if you want; and definitely add a thin stream of wine vinegar.
-
I tend to agree with wing purists, but for a bit of variety, make a plate of "regulars" and a plate of milder ones with jalepeno Tabasco.
-
Rocco who?
Roc'kin the airwaves.
-
Yeah, it was nice to see that they were preserving this quirky landmark even if they were building more McMansions.
But I thought everyone wanted to live in an enormous house on a 1/8th acre lot with 10 feet between your dining room window and your neighbor's and a Chili's, Outback AND a Macaroni Grill, all in a little pre-fab made-to-look-quaint "town center" within a 10-minute drive. -
i am the egg(salad)man...i am the walrus...goo goo g'joob
-
-
Congratulations!
Nothing really constructive to say, as I don't eat out much OR get proposed to often, but I just wanted to tell this story: When I was seventeen, I hostessed at Red Sage while going to MD. I saw a man pop the question one night - they did the old ring-in-a-champagne flute thing, but the (lovely) lady was quite tipsy already, and gulped down the glass of champagne before the man could get one word out. He panicked and asked her if she'd swallowed the ring - she promptly threw up on the table. Never did find out if they found the ring.
-
Your son sounds like a smart little guy.
Do a modified cordon bleu thing to make everyone happy - take your skinned, boned chicken breast, butterfly it open like a book; put between two sheets of waxed paper or plastic wrap and pound gently from the center out. Don't worry about them getting totally even. You should have one large, flat piece of chicken per person.
Add a slice of proscuitto, a slice of cheese (or ham and cheddar, or whatever you think will please your kids). Top with a sage leaf. Fold the chicken into a parcel around it, toothpick closed, and dredge in a bound breading. Add lots of lemon zest and herb to the final breadcrumb step.
Sounds like that would fit Peter's list of requirements exactly. And it's not so awful - the cheese contributes to helping the chicken stay moist, and Peter can help with every step.
-
Rachel -
welcome to the foodblog - I'm really looking forward to the coming week. I've enjoyed your warm and funny posts immensely since you've started posting here.
Can't wait!
-
Here's my kitchen:
It's even smaller than yours, literally 20 square feet of space, but it's a pretty thoughtful layout. The major advantage is the bar opposite the stove/fridge/sink wall - creates lots of horizontal counter room. Given that, could you pitch the table and install something a little taller that could be surrounded with comfortable barstools to eat on, but is tall enough to use as prep area? I'd also rotate the stove 90 degrees clockwise, to back up to the fridge wall, and fill in the space with counter or another tall table, maybe a drop leaf.
Edit: the pot rack is also an enormous space-saver: it holds all my pots and pans, utensils, and sundry stuff like coffee mugs and paper towels. Consider one...mine is a cheapie deal from Ikea that I installed myself in an hour and holds a great deal of weight.
-
Last night's down-and-dirty smoked brisket, all gussied up and made almost classy with leeks, zinfandel and horseradish in a shepherd's pie (if a shepherd's pie isn't totally declasse by nature)
Meat and Two:
A thick roux, roasted leeks, tomatoes, stock, zinfandel, brisket (relieved of fat and crusty black stuff). Seriously horseradish-spiked potatoes. A "lattice" of butter-dotted fresh sage leaves.
Swiss chard, wilted in olive oil with garlic, pepper flakes and lemon.
Batons of Granny Smith apple, sauteed quickly with rosemary and a tiny little hit of cumin - tart and sweet and herbal, with an ever-so-slightly resilient crisp exterior that gave way to creamy insides. GREAT as a vegetable.
-
Guts - I always cook and eat the insides of a chicken while it's roasting and company hasn't come yet; love offal.
I get a lot of crap for eating guts, and licking my fingers when I'm done.
Something is really very wrong with the above sentence, but I'm too tired to try and figure it out.
-
I think a lot of people here cook at home, but many of those accounts end up in the general food or cooking forums...and the rest of these seeming non-homecookers do it for a living (and deserve to have stoves at home covered in cobwebs).
Yah, I know...sometimes it just seems like this forum's nothing but Restaurants! Restaurants! Restaurants!!!!!!!
-
We now have about 5 pages documenting the undisputed fact that the grocery stores in DC suck. Have there been any posts that seek to offer reasons "WHY" they suck?
Could it be that the bar is set so low that none of the stores have any incentive to rise above the scum? Can the existing stores make a ton of money without having to compete with the other stores. Are the existing stores too far apart, making competition unncessary.
Judging by the traffic and content on this DC board, no one, apparantly, in DC cooks - we all eat out. The grocery stores just need to carry fancypants lavender mustard and duck sauce and bottled water. We should feel lucky that we can even buy milk once in a while.
-
yankee bean soup.
LET'S GO YANKEES
-
Oooh. As a general rule, I don't really eat or particularly like candy, but I can always make an exception for candy apples and those caramels with the white creme center this time of year.
-
What's that big barrel-shaped place in Germantown?
-
Dinner!
Click for pics: brisket
-
Coffee, eggs over-easy, sagey sausage, toast, the paper, and cigarettes.
-
-
So.
A top-of-the-line wood-fired smoker, bought capriciously, used once, and forgotten about, has been idling on Jeff's deck for two or three summers now. Last weekend, we made it our mission to fire the thing up and smoke the best damn brisket in the world, armed not-very-promisingly with zero experience, more or less nothing in the way of resources, and only our unshakeable faith in the sanctity and nobility of the cause protecting us from apocalypse.
Saturday, 9 October
8:30am
Good morning. We woke up early on Saturday, yawned, and started planning the shopping list, sequence of events, and how much beer we'd need. We went to our (inexplicably) favorite diner in the world:
The Tastee Diner in scenic Laurel, Maryland. The day was a little overcast and gloomy, the clouds swollen with a threat of cold drizzle. Nonetheless, we soldiered on with our plans.
We formed a plan of attack over eggs, bacon, corned beef hash, potatoes and coffee. <A side note: the Tastee Diner is run-down and shabby, the sort of place where the waitress lights a Bronco 120, leaves it burning in the ashtray, and strolls over to take your order. The potatoes - no fancy "home fries" or "hashbrowns" business here; just "potatoes, with onions or without" - are excellent, boiled, roughed up, and crisp round the edges like a perfect frite.> Note Colonel Klink's excellent eGCI course on the table, along with lists of things to buy and maps of where we'd accumulate all our supplies.
Please note the rubber band in the upper-right corner of the flag-trivia placemat, found lurking in the aforementioned (still) wonderful potatoes.
Filled with youthful hubris (and keeping in mind the protection given to drunks and fools), we hadn't put much thought into where to obtain the brisket. I'd posted in the DC board for suggestions but hadn't called anyone yet, thinking that it would be an easy matter of strolling into a deli or butcher and just picking one up. Unfortunately, we'd forgotten that the kosher delis would be closed on Saturdays, and every other place we called seemed to think we were nuts when we asked for a whole, untrimmed brisket. We did find one place - Wagshal's on Massachusetts Avenue in DC - but they were insistent on charging $6.99 a pound for the beast, which seemed a little ridiculous. Deflated, we started altering plans for a trimmed flat, deciding to mop with beer and mustard. It still seemed doable, but not nearly on the all-out overkill scale we'd been envisioning.
We pulled out of the diner's parking lot, a little wind taken out of our sails. Then, we saw this:
The Laurel Meat Market. The giant fiberglass cow out front gave us hope. Our hearts thudding, we went to the meat counter, and happily took home an 11-pound baby with beautiful fat to the tune of $2.99 a pound.
Oddly, the meat market (which in a perhaps synergistic relationship is a block from the equally incongruous Outback Leather, with a giant fiberglass cowboy out font) appears dingy out front, but hides beautifully colored, fresh-smelling beef, pork and fish inside for surprisingly low prices. The tilapia was particularly enticing, snowy-white and fleshy, for $4.15 a pound. We will return.
11 am
Meat in hand, and feeling pretty good about the day, we went to get wood. A bit down Route 29 from Jeff's house, we found a farmstand that sells 'lopes and corn earlier in the summer and pumpkins and firewood at this time of year.
After some conferring with the sweet lady who seemed to run things, we loaded an entire tree's worth of seasoned hickory into the back of Jeff's truck.
She sold it to us for a dollar a stick. When given the opportunity to count what we'd loaded, she said, "I trust you", smiled, and waved us off. We went grocery shopping for peripheral foodstuffs, and went home.
3 pm
Time to start cooking. I started some quick spicy pickles:
by submerging some kirbys overnight in a boiled and cooled brine of wine vinegar, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, peppercorns, salt, pepper flakes, cilantro and dill.
7 pm
Jeff got home from the gym, came out of the shower, and was seized by an irresistible urge to wrestle with the brisket. As you can see, it got the better of him:
But not of me:
After some earnest consultation with Col. Klink's course, the web and various anecdotal sources, we decided on a cumin-spiked version of Klink's rub for the meat. We were told, variously, "just salt and pepper", "every spice you can use", and "carefully blended flavors". Our dry rub consisted of salt, brown sugar, pepper, cumin, red pepper flakes, turmeric, dry garlic, oregano, thyme and parsley.
The second photo pretty well describes the vision in our heads at that point - meat, endless fields of meat. Taking this as a bad sign, we cleaned up for the night and went to bed.
Sunday, 10 October
8 am
The day started like any other Sunday, though the spectre of the smoker looming outside the sliding glass door, and the tray of meat bowing the shelves in Jeff's fridge, lurked in the corners of our eyes and put courage in our hearts.
It turned out to be a beautiful day, cool and sunny buried in the woods where we were.
It took us a long time to get the fire right. Every fire we started seemed to consume the kindling, catch the logs, flare, burn brightly for a few minutes, and then peter out quickly. Blowing; playing with the damper; opening the lids for airflow; nothing helped. Desperate, we stuffed way too many logs in the firebox and lit the whole thing with a kilogram of C4.
Actually, we just kept adding wood until we had a big, bright self-sustaining fire going - the highly technical barbecue jargon term for the scene above is "too damn hot." The temperature reading on the closed smoker lid was going nuts - the needle was straining above 475, the maximum reading. We decided the best course of action would be to open the smoker lid, open the damper entirely for maximum airflow, and let the fire burn down to a more manageable state.
12 pm
Luckily, it was noon at this point. Aaaaaaahhhh.
The beer we drank yesterday is a (formerly local; now it's brewed in Wisconsin) beer called National Bohemian, or Natty Bo for those in the know. It's the Baltimore beer of choice for broke UMBC and Johns Hopkins students, bums, and insufferably smug hipsters who drink PBR in NYC bars because it's, like, retro, man. Though it tastes more like sugar water than beer, we thought it was in keeping with the commando spirit of the weekend - not to mention that, at $5.10 a 12-pack, it opened up our beef budget considerably.
We finally got a handle on the fire,
and put the meat on.
Jeff busied himself with splitting wood,
While I smoked meat and cigarettes.
1 pm
Around this time, we figured out the best way to manage the fire - we soaked split sticks in water, in a pot sitting above the firebox - a hot-water soaked stick, when placed in the fire, created a lot of smoke and caught quickly without flaring the temperature too much. The inferno we'd imagined was too hot for our purposes; a steady, smoldering 225 meant just about one small, soaked stick resting on a bed of embers.
4 pm
It was a really beautiful day, and we were sitting outside, soaking up the last of the Indian summer sun, watching the fire and drinking. Though the chimney was belching out delicious-smelling smoke, we were sitting upwind and didn't notice. Jeff's roommates emerged from the house, drawn inexorably by the pervasive odor leaching into the vents.
"Dude, what is that?"
"Dude, it's eleven pounds of meat."
"Oh."
5 pm
This is what the meat looked like at 4 hours and 3 beers:
7 pm
While Jeff was outside, diligently tending the fire and checking the brisket (a seriously good-looking, charred black piece of baby-bottom soft beef at this point),
I busied myself with a scallion-y potato salad and other peripherals.
8:30pm
Check out that smoke ring:
We're eating the brisket - succulent, juicy, and deeply smoky, suddenly not just beef but transubstantiated into something miraculous and wholly different - along with delicious pickles, onions, potato salad, wonder bread and garlicky Texas toast while watching the Redskins-Ravens game. It's Sunday night; my clothes smell like smoke; we're curled on the couch with a fire in the fireplace and a distinct chill coming in through the open screen door. BJ Sams scores an out-of-nowhere touchdown for the Ravens; Joe Gibbs looks terrified and constipated.
We're comfortably full and sleepy, happy with the success of our grand project, ready for bed.
-
Awesome-- I now have my Sunday project! Thanks!
How'd it go?
-
Behemoth: AWESOME!!!!
Looks spectacular. What did you think? How did you cook the meat?
Bellflower is the best, huh? I keep trying to think of ways to use it in non-Korean preparations, but haven't been able to think of anything clever thus far. Great picture!
Romantic Proposal Dinner
in D.C. & DelMarVa: Dining
Posted · Edited by eunny jang (log)
Nothing says "You know what? Turns out I don't love you" like seeing your "loved" one upchuck...and sneaking home before he comes out of the bathroom.
Sigh, Topic: this link is good for general ideas, while this is Tom Sietsema's piece on proposing in DC restaurants. It's old, but an interesting read nonetheless (odd that I can't find it on post.com, and had to resort to a google search to find a wire pickup)