russ parsons

read again dock. she uses a tablespoon for every 4 1/2 pounds, which (unless my math is completely screwy--a very real possibility) is a teaspoon for every 1 1/2)

for years i had a tiny apartment kitchen and that was exactly what i did. i used a white synthetic cutting board that fit very neatly over one sink. it was incredibly convenient--so much so that i even continued working that way after i got more counter space.

yes, you should try it yourself. 1) yes, leave the meat uncovered. the surface will dry out, but that's what you want--wet meat won't form a crust (and wet chicken skin won't get crisp and brown). 2) type of salt doesn't matter so much except in terms of measurement. 3) i think it works best with beef and chicken for roasting. it does work for braising and frying, too. 4) season as needed, after having tasted. 5) judy says 1 teaspoon for every 1 1/2 pounds of meat, regardless of type. she does take care to sprinkle the salt a little more thickly on the thickest parts of the meat.

that is a GREAT story. michel has been my friend for more than 20 years and that's one of the best things i've read about him.

latest word from a source VERY close to the project (how's that for coy?) is that the restaurant will be divided into 2 parts: a pizzeria that is scheduled to open sometime in September, and an osteria that will open about 6 weeks later.

not so much. i spent a couple days with judy doing the whole pre-salt, brine thing and i don't think it's breaking any confidences that when she tasted the house-brine pork chops by themselves, in an analytical way, she was very disappointed. turns out it's the brine she learned from mark miller way back when and she'd never felt the need to change it. that brine, needless to say, has a LOT of sugar in it. there was another interesting turn on this: the grill cook who cooked the pork chops (5 different treatments), overcooked them by about a minute or two. you could really tell the difference in the brined vs. the pre-salted. the brined were much moister. edit: I should have pointed out that as soon as she tasted the brined chop, Judy vowed to have a new brine developed within a month, and that it would have much less--if any--sugar.

i've done a LOT of both. lately i've come around to a slight favor for presalting with chicken. the big factor for me, and one i've written about a lot on egullet is the utter fallacy of adding sugar to your brine. that is what creates the "hammy" flavor. do simply water and salt and you'll have a lot better results. i see sugar frequently called for in brine recipes and, in my experience, it is ALWAYS a bad idea.

just goes to show you, different tastes ... i ate there last year (irresistible name dropping: with my old friends joe ely and jimmie dale gilmore) and i was REALLY disappointed. meat was pretty good, but the sauce had pineapple or something pureed into it. interesting, because afterward both joe and jimmie said that it wasn't their favorite place, but they thought i'd like it because it was "something a little different." of course, i grew up on texas bbq at the original stubbs bbq in Lubbock, and EVERYONE knows that was really the best place that ever was or ever will be.

this gets to a really good point: why do we shop at farmers markets to begin with? some people do go there for bargains (direct from the factory discount!). some people go for quality (shaky at times). there's another reason, which is more philosophical: if you want the farmers to be there during the good times, you ought to support them during the bad (farming is not manufacturing and sometimes shit--weather, bugs, bad luck--happens). i admit that i'm not very good at this. i just can't bring myself to buy stuff that's not very good. but i do have my favorite farmers and i make a point of buying something from them every market--hopefully the best that they have on any given day

i like the toscana, but i have to admit that i've been converted to columbus. check out their "artisan collection". they make a crespone and a cacciatore that are really fabulous. the crespone is a basic medium-diameter porky dried sausage with good fat cubes. the cacciatore is thinner and has truffles in it (3rd ingredient listed after pork and salt!). these are really good products that should be available at high-end supermarkets. i've also been enjoying some fra'mani and salumi stuff and i do have to admit that this is on another level.

like pontormo, i make a market walk before i buy anything too. but i look almost entirely at quality. i rarely find a substantial difference in cost. if there is one, and if the quality is equal or almost equal, then i'll probably go with the cheaper product, unless its a farmer i really like (though i never haggle ... too protestant). otherwise, buying the cheaper product only gets you right back into the commodity agriculture game of settling for a lesser product because of a slight savings.

i can't seem to get out of this one. 1) there's a difference between being shocked by profanity and feeling the necessity to repeat it in print. 2) i completely agree about tony, but there's a difference between a book and a general interest publication. compare "confidential" with his gourmet writing for example. personally, i don't think it loses all that much.

at the risk of extending this topic (but more on point than you might think), except in very, very rare cases it is the editor who has the sole power of hiring and firing. When writers fire editors, it is more commonly called "resigning".

um, Daniel, when was the last time you used "um" in a direct quote? and do you mean to tell me you never tweaked someone's grammar? i'm not talking about changing meaning or intent, but i can almost guarantee you that nearly every quote in the newspaper that didn't come straight from a press release has been tweaked. people just don't talk like they should (or as they would if they had the luxury of looking at their words in print beforehand).

i have a hard time believing people really think eliminating potty language is censorship. let's get real. censorship is the restricting of information or point of view. profanity does not fit either of those definitions.

1) quotes are cleaned up all the time, for the reason cited above: most of us, if quoted exactly, would sound like babbling idiots. spoken language and written language are only loosely congruent. this is not censorship, it is kindness. 2) just because your interview subject drops the f-bomb doesn't mean that you are obliged to transcribe. there are a couple of considerations: a) what is the nature of the publication? who is the readership? and b) how important was the word to the story? i can imagine times where the word would provide a necessary jolt that could not be supplied any other way, but i think those are few and far between. 3) in fact, in 30 years of journalism, I have never published a story with f*** in it, or even s***. and those words have been uttered in my presence a time or two. i don't think that the stories have been any weaker for that omission and i don't think that in any of those cases i was prevented from relaying a sense of the personality involved. i do remember one time in my mis-spent youth as a rock writer when i interviewed ozzy osbourne and, truly appalled by the poverty of his language and imagination, i substituted a nonsensical word for every profanity. it got the point across well.

well, one of the things about oysters is that they do travel fairly well (they're still alive, after all). still, there is something about popping them when you can smell the salt air. of course,my favorite place to do that is on the back porch at hog island in ferry plaza.

would that things were really this easy. in fact, you can usually tell an heirloom tomato by looks, but whether a tomato is an heirloom variety is only part of the equation that leads to great flavor. and a fairly small part at that. it all comes down to farming. i've said it before: agriculture is not manufacturing and varieties are not brand names. buying a "Brandywine" tomato is not a guarantee of quality, though a Brandywine grown by a good farmer is certainly a wonderful tomato (one of my favorites, in fact!). it used to be, 5 or 6 years ago, that "heirloom" meant more, because the only farmers who were growing them were passionate about tomatoes. but once they hit the mainstream, it became a crapshoot. this has been a tough summer so far for tomatoes in california, and actually the best luck i've had has been with little cherry tomatoes from trader joe's.

just for the record: Supersweet is not a variety, it's a class. And almost all fresh corn you'll find today is supersweet. there are three different categories of it (se, su and sh2, if you must), that vary in the amount of initial sweetness and in the rate at which the sugar is converted to starch after picking. Sh2 is the sweetest and maintains sugar the longest, but it is not seen very often because the seed is very expensive and farmers have so far not been able to convince people to pay more for it. Color also makes very little difference: white, yellow or bi-color, they're all one of the sweet varieties (and the pigment that makes yellow corn yellow is actually flavorless).

change is usually hard to see when you're in the middle of it. one of the advantages to being an old guy is that it gives you a little perspective. to me, the discussions we're having about produce today are very much the same as the ones that were occurring in england in the '70s about real beer, and to the ones that were happening here in the '80s about bread and cheese. In none of those cases has good triumphed over crap, but in all of them it has demonstrated that it can be an economically viable alternative.

modern american agricultural policy was established during the Depression, when food shortages were a reality and even famine was a very real possibility. That we don't remember this, or even regard it as unthinkable, is a tribute to how well these policies have worked. The question now is whether they have worked too well. There are those (including myself) who argue that cheap food has become a problem. But those of us who think this way have a responsibility to remember that our solutions might (almost certainly will have) the same unintended consequences as the policies that were designed to eliminate hunger. we must take care that our fixes don't create even more disastrous problems. I've said it before, but I really do think we are living in a golden age of food, where those of us who love flavor can find almost anything we want and, if we are willing to pay attention and follow the rules, can find it in very high quality. At the same time, the majority of folks who simply want to fuel efficiently can do so as well. And, also repeating myself, but this is an important point, it's really important to remember that when we talk about "industrial agriculture" or "corporate agriculture" that we are really oversimplifying a very complex problem. Consider that california produces most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat, yet more than 70% of the farms in the state are smaller than 100 acres and more than 80% are family owned (and that doesn't include family-owned corporations). The problem is really systemic--it affects every level of the food chain from the growers to the middlemen to the retailers and even (and perhaps most importantly) the consumers, many of whom insist that taste and ethical questions are most important and then shop where they can save a dime a pound.

the name "silver queen" has become generic among farmers market vendors for many different varieties of white corn. there was an interesting study a few years ago that tracked regional preferences in corn varieties and reflected how one variety could become dominant in a certain area but remain practically unknown in an adjacent one. Southern Maine, for example, is Silver Queen territory, but Northern Maine prefers a bi-color variety called Butter & Sugar. another study blind-tasted varieties of sweet corn among people who considered themselves corn connoisseurs and found that most of them really did prefer the new se and sh2 varieties to silver queen.

not to be contentious (who me? and what the f*** do you mean you don't read the la times?), but that's not exactly what i said. i said it was very difficult to do balance the two. i do believe it can be done--you can write about food in a way that will appeal to the sophisticated cook, but won't be daunting to the novice. in fact, i think those are the stories the novices like the most (they feel like they're being addressed as equals).

this will be interesting to watch. more than any other publication/editor relationship, i think saveur WAS colman (just as the look of it WAS christopher hersheimer). it was sophisticated, well-traveled and always had an interesting take on the stories they tackled. this is not to say it was a perfect magazine. i frequently found myself wishing the stories had been a little more rigorously edited. but as a writer, i'm much more partial to interesting misses than boring hits.

i visited the hatchery where they start the little baby geoducks. they're actually cute. a whole tray full of them waving their probiscises in the air. it's funny: i remember going through chinatown in the early '80s and they were practically giving geoducks away. now, they're a very pricey ingredient.