Abra

Thanks for the continuing advice, Sam. I'm so relieved to know that was a quadruple batch. I was making them exactly as you describe, except that I held the pan at a slight tilt and poured onto the upper edge, swirling downward. I've been having wrist tendonitis problems, and that seems like an easier motion that swirling from the center out. Next time I'll try it your way, though, because I want to get it right. I continue to try to understand the color issue. Bryan's are pale, delicate, and unspeckled, the second set of Grub's are uniformly browned and crisp-looking. Sam's are uniformly speckled/brindled, and mine are on that path, but not there yet. Is this caused by a difference in pans, or is it technique? Bryan and Grub, will you show us your pans? I was dining alone last night, so I put my first batch into the fridge. Tonight I'll fill them with something nice.

Andina! Check out the pictures I posted on the Andina thread a couple of days ago.

Ok Sam, instant feedback/retribution! This series of photos will make everyone else feel a lot better about their own crepes. I start seasoning my untempered pan. When I see it look like this I feel like a moron. Carbon steel, just like my wok. Needs to be seasoned. Now why didn't I think of that before? Nasty junk starts burning off and I have to turn on the fan. Perhaps I go a little overboard with wanting to burn off the crud. Here the pan is actually white hot, except for the parts that are burnt black. So when it's cool I give it a very little scrub with a steel scrubbie just to get the char off, heat it, oil it, and Uh, crepe number 1. But the first one's always bad, right? Crepe number 2. Hmmm. Evidently we're having a "sunbreak." Crepe number 3. Hey, got to admit it's getting better. Channeling Sam. So, my issues are: mine aren't nearly as evenly browned as Sam's are. That's probably the fault of my ceramic cooktop. Nothing I can do about that. Or maybe the patina will even out with more use? And I only got 7 usable crepes out of the one recipe, nevermind the two that were hopeless. Probably I should have thinned the batter. And I keep seeing recipes that call for 2-3 T of batter per crepe, but I had to have 1/3 C, or 5 T, to fill my pan completely. They aren't thick, per se, but probably should be a lot thinner, based on how many Sam has in his stack. Finally, you know that little bit of leftover batter that's not enough to make another crepe? Cook's treat, right? So I toss the bit of batter into the pan, turn around to rinse the blender, and voila Think I could sell this on eBay to some cat worshippers?

Sam, it looks like you're the resident expert on this one. I'm going to go season my skillet right now, but since I don't have or ever use shortening, I'll use canola. Can you share your recipe? I know they're pretty standard, but I want crepes that look exactly like yours do.

Thomas, that's a gorgeous brisket. Will you tell us more about how you made it?

Beautiful dinner, Tupac. I especially covet that dessert!

Ok, perfect timing for me. I was given a pan, and it's huge (although Sam's looks huge too). Mine's maybe 10", and it's not non-stick. And I can't get it to work worth a damn. And I know a crepe is the easiest thing in the world to make, but I quail before that pan. Help! Sam, do you temper that pan? I think that's what mine would look like if it weren't currently more of a dull silvery gray.

Michael, I'd love to see the Bouchon version! And I'll be sure to document the boudin noir process. Since you caution not to make it ahead, it'll be about 10 days before I can make it, but I have the blood, which is the first step. Chris, I'm with you in loving the Grizzly. Of course, it's the very first stuffer I've used, but it works a treat. We did try to use sheep casings with it, when I did the merguez at our Play Day, and kept having them tear. Does anyone have sheep casing tips? They'd been soaking for a couple of days, and we were using the smallest nozzle. And edited to say that I'm an idiot - my course is a Leonetti merlot. There's a Cayuse syrah, but someone else gets to pair that.

Happy 2006, time to get going again on the vin de noix. I had the distinct pleasure this past weekend of taking Jim Dixon a bottle of the vin de noix I made with his walnuts, and hearing "oh my god" be the first words that crossed his lips. Ok! So as soon as his walnuts are ready again, in another week or two, I'll start all over. I never did get any vanilla bean, or long pepper, or grains of paradise into last year's batch. So now I'm wondering whether I should stick with my excellent recipe from last year, or branch out, as it were. Who else is making some this year?

Thanks, Michael. I have been, in fact, planning to do a Keller recipe. It's stuffed with sweetbreads - is that the one you mean? I have the FL book, but not Bouchon, and I found this recipe here. Is that the one? Doing it a week ahead sounds really good. I'm thinking that, plus boudin noir (trying out my pre-salted pig blood), and pork confit rillettes (put up the confit last month), plus a pate de campagne. It's meant to be a tasting plate to accompany a bottle of Cayuse Merlot, which warrants extra effort. If it looks like I'm making a mistake here, please set me straight!

Wow, Tupac, whose beautiful kitchen is that? Are you renting that house, staying with your parents? I must have missed something. I don't know which is weirder, the fact that you count out your fruit, or the fact that Tryska counts your fruit!

Now that I've finally gotten a source of cherry, I'm really liking it. The fragrance of the smoke itself is intoxicating. But I find that I still want that hickory hit with some foods, like ribs, and I like to add a bit into the cherry with bacon.

Copper River sockeye at just $12.95/lb tonight, just to inject a little CR porn.

This is the Salmon Poached in Olive Oil, made with Copper River Sockeye. The texture is utterly amazing, sous-videlike in its melting tenderness. It looks like sashimi, but it's cooked through, and hauntingly sweet. There are some home-cured tasso lardons on the salad, but the salmon totally outshines them, and that's saying a lot. That's freekeh it's resting on, and it's a nice complement.

Wow, I go out of town for a week, and look how much you guys get done, including getting new converts. Welcome, new folks! And you have saved me from a grievous error. My Bactoferm arrived while I was away, and now that I'm catching up, I see that I ordered the wrong stuff, since all I got was the M-EK. Drat, if I only read the book more carefully, I'd be ready to start now, instead of having to wait for another order to arrive. I wish the B-P site were more specific about the various uses, but I guess they mostly deal with the pros, and the likes of us have to scramble to keep up. When will I learn to RTFM? In the meantime, I'll be concentrating on terrine, rillettes, and stuffed pig feet, in preparation for a party in a couple of weeks. Those pigs trotters from Niman are as long as my forearm, which is pretty long. I'm going to try a boned, stuffed, rolled thing that I'm hoping will be impressive. I'll show it off, if it works out.

I actually think I might have said "please break your yolk and expose your hash." I blush to remember that now!

We went to BeWon this past weekend, and had what everyone on this thread has had, the seven course set menu. It's a different style of Korean than I'm used to, much more refined, nothing in the least spicy, sweeter. We did ask for and got a couple of delicious hot sauces, and learned that Koreans normally wouldn't add condiments to a prepared dish, that it was perhaps a bit of an insult to the chef. But still, we all wanted it spicier, and so we forged ahead somewhat abashed but rudely. The service is indeed fantastically informative and friendly, and we had a great time. I'd unhesitatingly send people there who haven't had Korean food before. I recommend against the "wine pairing" option. We all had it, but it's a pretty silly concept. The wines weren't very nice, and very few of them belonged with Korean food at all. We suggested that maybe a beer pairing might be more in the spirit, so if you go and see that on the menu, you heard it here first. Our pumpkin juk looked just like ExtraMSG's, except his in in focus and mine isn't, so I'll spare you that. the fixings for the little stuffed crepes and one assembled japchae the 9 panchan, and two dishes of heretical hot sauce tofu soup pork chicken rib eye and my salt mackeral, surrounded by panchan sort of a little crispy rice meringue. So, all in all, a delicate and lovely meal.

Yesterday we were fortunate enough to share Sunday brunch at Simpatica with Tejon, Duckduck, eJulia, Cat Lancaster, and a couple of their buds. It's an unusual place - a caterer by day, an email-list weekend dinner spot, and open every Sunday for brunch. Duckduck is a friend of the (really nice and clean) kitchen so they treated us really well. It's a very hard menu to choose from, as everything sounds great, and all the passing plates are appealing. These pictures aren't the best, and I missed a few dishes in the rush to make new friends, but here's some of what you can expect if you manage to go there. Eggs Benedict with house-cured ham and roasted potatoes. All of their meats are house-cured, which is a real treat. Andouille and smoked salmon hash The kitchen sent this out, since none of us had the good sense to order it - Crab and shrimp strata, even better than what I ordered. I hate it when that happens. their house-cured bacon (and I have to say, not quite as good as what we've been making over on the Charcuterie thread, but still very tasty) crepes stuffed with asparagus, ham, and er, something. I didn't take notes, so I'm just winging it here. fried chicken and waffles, with strawberry sauce. They had two desserts on the menu so we ordered one of each for the table - a chocolate decadence-type cake, and an olive oil and lemon cake with a rhubarb compote. The kitchen also sent us a great panna cotta with a compote of dried currants, raisins, and blueberries. They all disappeared before I could get my camera to focus, at least, that's my excuse. It was a true pleasure to meet such a lovely bunch of Portlanders, and to brunch together in the cozy and yummy Simpatica Dining Hall. Go, if you get a chance. Reservations for groups of 8 only.

Ok, time to bring this thread up to date. We had a beautiful dinner at Andina on Saturday, celebrating our anniversary. When making the reservation I'd mentioned the occasion, and they'd saved us a really nice table. The food was truly delicious, and the cocktail list was the best I've ever seen. Ok, I don't look at many cocktail lists, but this one was amazing. Since I'm not normally a cocktail person, I usually would have had wine with this meal. But the cocktails sounded so exciting that I had to have them even with dinner, however un-Peruvian that might have been. Here's just the "novelty" portion of the list. It blows me away I had the Fuerte de Tamarindo with the starters and the Ron-Yki-On with my main They start you out with made in-house quinoa bread with three dips a peanut and mystery herb, a passionfruit, and a jalapeno, all delicious. Aren't you ready to go to Andina just for the drinks? But that would be crazy, because the food is really super. The starters come in small, medium, and large, and are an incredible bargain. The two of us shared three small plates, and five or six would have made a meal for two, if we hadn't been dying to have the mains too. It was a really tough choice, but we went with piquillo peppers (yes, this picture is sideways - it just looks so...anatomically correct that way!) stuffed with cheese, quinoa, and Serrano ham a purple potato cake filled with smoked trout and topped with what looks like the world's largest olive and quinoa-studded crispy prawns, with a dipping sauce of that same mystery herb, I think. I'm sorry the tails aren't showing in the picture, they were so yummy and crunchy. It might have been prudent to quit right there, but bravely, we soldiered on to chicken escabeche with roasted sweet potatoes and onions, topped by a poached egg, and roasted rack of lamb with a potato and three cheese timbale that is a very popular item, judging by the plates we watched being delivered to neighboring tables I asked for, and received it, perfectly rare Only because it was a special occasion, we decided that somewhere we had room for dessert. Our excellent and just-attentive-enough server was strangely missing, until she unexpectedly appeared with this beautiful complimentary dessert a chocolate cinnamon cake with a scoop of lucuma ice cream, lucuma being a tropical fruit we'd never heard of before, but want to find again now. We might possibly have to move to Portland now. That was one of our favorite meals in recent memory! And not to rub it in, or anything, but the bill, before the tip, and remembering that the dessert was comped, was $78. I swear I'm not making this up.

Wowsers, Andina was awesome! I'll post pictures and details when we get home in a couple of days, but we might need to move to Portland to eat there more often.

It's tomorrow. We arrived at the hotel to find rose petals strewn in our bed. Nice!

John, we're going to Andina on our anniversary, so I'll eat (and drink) extra for you!

Yes, the wonderful book tells you how to make bacon in the oven. I haven't tried that yet, so if you do, save a bite for me. Chufi, when you're here in September, we'll charcute ourselves silly!

Here's my Charcuterie Play Day report. I was so busy charcuting that I didn't get a lot of good pictures, but a couple of other cameras were hard at work, and I'll try to get those guys to post here too. Before the chaos descended, I managed to arrange this plate of my lamb prosciutto and saucisson sec. The saucisson is actually my least favorite of the stuff I've made so far, but other people seem to really like it. If we had anything, we had the gear! These are 4 of the 5 KAs we had to work with, before the great crash. Here's the absolutely scrumptious Pate de Campagne, wrapped in caul fat, and made for us by SeaGal and in its incarnation as tonight's dinner, on sandwiches with chicken breast and Creole mayonnaise, with a bit of chive blossom, lemon thyme, and salad burnet. Prepping that Duck Sausage was a lot of work, requiring Little Ms Foodie and TallDrinkOfWater as butchers and Sparrowsfall as supervisor Grinding the Merguez - contains vegetables! At one point we had three smokers going. Here's the big one, with three bacons and a pastrami smoking over cherry wood. and a pile of Tamiam's Smoked Andouille waiting for smoker space Slicing into the bacon fresh off the smoker There's also a shot of a slab of bacon being held in revealing proximity to a portion of the anatomy sometimes associated with porky goodness. I'll be auctioning that one off on eBay. It was major fun, and I highly recommend getting a bunch of your porkiest friends together for a similar exercise. As one of us said "in this group, there's no shame in admitting to loving pork fat."

I just want to post a teaser image from our Charcuterie Play Day. Twelve of us made sausage and smoked bacon and pastrami all day long, and ate and drank enough to sustain ourselves through our mighty efforts. There were five Kitchen Aids in attendance with their owners, although I think our vertical stuffer did all the stuffing, while the KAs were relegated to what they do best: grinding and binding. This is actually an evening-after shot Duck Sausage with Roasted Garlic and Sage on the far left, nestled in next to Chicken Sausage with Green Chile. And their friends, grilled poblano pepper, grilled plaintain, Rum-Soaked Baked Beans, and salad with walnut mayonnaise dressing. By the way, the slo-mo sight of a folding table collapsing and four KAs crashing slowly to the floor is one you never want to see, take it from me!