Behemoth

Was craving Korean food, so decided to test drive the bulgogi recipe out of my new cookbook. Clockwise from top left: Perilla & red lettuce leaves, bulgogi, gochujang with vinegar dipping sauce, doraji (bellflower) kimchee that I can get fresh at my local Korean grocery, and finally a quick cucumber salad with ground roasted sesame seeds. (Sorry the pic is a little big, I realized it after uploading so now I can't edit...moderators?) With a couple more side dishes, some soup and noodles, this would be great for a dinner party. The bulgogi marinade was phenomenal. Yum.

not much to add except 1) Thank you for clearing up the mystery of Insomnia Cookies. They seem to be opening a store nearby and I couldn't figure out what it might be. (I thought maybe a "wacky" name for a pot paraphenalia typa place...) 2) I don't know what the dorm food situation is at UIUC but the surrounding area has some pretty good dining options these days, even on a student budget and meal card. Nothing like UPenn's food trucks though, sigh.

I could use some Jalapeno poppers right about now. So far my semester has been a b****. Barely any time to cook. Two nights ago it was quite cold, we had chickpea & pasta soup, an easy M. Hazan recipe I just plain love. We also had slices of spanish chorizo fried in white wine but the spouse stole the plate before I could get a photo: Last night I was stuck in Urbana so I had two tacos from the little taqueria next to the department. And the rest of the can of peanuts I bought last week. And several hours of grading. Feh. Tonight I feel the need to make something with my celeriac. It is all of a sudden too warm for soup, so maybe a lighter version of a remoulade with yogurt instead of mayo, more of that chorizo or something -- dunno, frankly now I want a jalapeno popper.

You can use the broth for stuff where smokiness isn't a liability, like tortilla or other mexican soups. (You need to broil the tomatoes and chilis anyway, so the smokiness works.)

Some people leave room in their luggage for wine. I bring back Gummi Bears. Rote Greutze on the front, cream on the back, and cute! (Click here to see the many wonders of baeren-treff.de.)

Yesterday was the first real day of fall for us. Root vegetables at the farmer's market! We had a dinner party last night: Serrano ham, oil-cured black olives and soprasetta salami with ice cold martini bianco vermouth. local organic mixed greens salad with a creamy & lavender-scented goat cheese & walnuts. Walnut oil in the vinaigrette, too... Lamb stew with red wine, tomatoes and white beans, with a dash of vinegar at the end to wake it up. Served with turnips & potatoes that were steamed, then mashed with buttermilk. Unfortunately, it seems like the only cut of lamb available in the midwest is shank end of leg; woulda preferred a cut with more bones. (there were too many people to use my CSA lamb...). Anyway, I carved the bone out and cooked it with the stew, then attacked it in the late afternoon with a pairing knife as "cook's reward" Oh, the wine was a La Crema pinot noir, which went really well with the lamb and didn't break the bank. Which was good because I think we had a little more than a bottle per person. Assorted cheeses sliced pears sauteed in butter, lemon peels and brandy, served over vanilla custard ice cream (didn't make the ice cream.) espresso with 70% chocolate Shots of Ransom gewurtztraminner grappa More wine. Party ended at 4am, so I guess it was a success...

Great, thanks for the info. The shanklish sounds like it might be worth a shot. That with some chopped tomato, onion and olive oil? Stinky stinky heaven. I wonder if a very slow oven would work instead of sun-dried, so my neighbors don't stage an uprising.

I remember seeing that -- it was basically because it is the equivalent of brining. I think organic tastes better, the texture just seems less mealy to me, though that is totally subjective, obviously. Interesting about the coloring, my chicken is never as bone white as what you'd get in an american restaurant, even when the internal temp reads safe. I just stopped worrying about it, though I do feel a little weird serving it to American guests. There was a thread about this at some point I think...

Any first person accounts on the OXO? I like most of their other stuff and I mandoline is next on the list (er, among other things...).

My favorite kind of dinner... Do you make your own shanklish? Someone told me its just yogurt drained very very dry with chili mixed in. Is that right? It always tasted a little more goat-cheesy to me. Actually, I like to approximate it by mixing goat cheese with stuff. Also, the stuffed chilis -- that really reminds me of makdous, with eggplants. My local indian gorcery has these little eggplants that would be perfect for it -- is it basically the same recipe? Do you need to cook the eggplants first? Boy am I full o'questions. BTW my grandmother always had the rice pudding in the fridge for me when she knew I was coming. I still get a little wistful whenever I have it Tonight I got home late. I boiled some organic choy sum & topped with oyster sauce, and steamed some dumplings I had in the freezer. It was nice and quick and even reasonably healthy, considering.

We used to make olives when I was a kid. You can just use brine. And you can rinse off the scum. If you like, I can email my dad for the actual process since my job was (ugh, tedious & smelly) smashing the olives so the pit would be exposed. But we did it at home, and didn't use any lye as far as I know. Spanish olives are done a little differently from middle eastern ones, so that would account for the difference in taste. (Personally, I've never been crazy about the Spanish style, but then again I have a strong cultural bias when it comes to olives...) Oh, if you decide to use brine, its really nice to stick a few wild fennel stalks and lemon slices in there. Yummy. Edited to add: That second recipe you posted is almost identical to what we used to do, with fennel instead of the cumin, and wild oregano instead of dried (mainly because both grew wild by the side of the road and well, you gotta do something with them.)

Yeah! I stirfry a tbsp of mole paste with the onion, garlic and cumin at the start, and add beer along with tomatoes as the liquid. I usually have chipotles around too, so I throw those in as well, to make it nice and red and smoky. Vinegar at the end to give it a sour edge. I do like to add pink kidney beans to mine, otherwise my spouse is very likely to consume an entire pound of beef in one sitting, and I would rather have him last me through retirement. Plus I like beans.

Oops -- I thought I read that piece of info in last week's Buzz. Maybe I confused the interviewee with someone else. It was the owner of a place with a European bread oven, who was related to ArtMart. Would be nice if there are two good bakeries in town. Either way, Mirabelle is definitely worth the trip. Edited to add -- People have really been pushing us to go to the Bayern Stube ever since we moved here. If its worth the drive I guess October would be the time to go.

This might brand me as completely uncool, but I have to admit the Joy of Cooking pancake recipe is the one I always use. Very fluffy, very good.

Helen, it looks like Japan may be yielding on this issue? From what I've read it is probably not so much the cattle ranchers who are anti-reform...it is the fact that all the beef in this country is distributed by only four meatpacking companies -- Tyson/IBP, National, I forget the other two, it is in the article. Even if there is no active price collusion (though after the ADM scandal, who knows...), the control they have over the market forces prices down to the point that farmers have to use lousy cheap feed and hormones just to break even. Essentially, if with all the cost cutting you are still making about $27 per head profit in the best of times and possibly $3 a head in worse times, you are more sharecropper than cattle rancher. IMO regulators need to step in because this is a clear market failure, but until they do I can only protest with my wallet. Grass fed beef may not be as heavily-marbled and tender as industrial beef, but we have a thousand years of culinary history that was built to address precisely these issues. The mark of a good cook is not what they do with a well-marbled filet, but what they can do with the tougher cuts. Now I am really craving short ribs, dammit...

I think the article she is referring to is "Power Steer" by Michael Pollan (New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2002). The article is no longer free on the Times website, but I found a SFGate interview with the author on this subject, here. Edited to add: farther down the google page, I found a website where two of Pollan's beef articles are reproduced. ("Power Steer" is further down the page.) link Pollan has been one of my favorite journalists for a long time.

My grandmother was at your wine tasting? Seriously though, doesn't it depend mostly on what you're having with the wine?

The highdive is pretty much right near all the action in "downtown" Champaign. Bacaro gets the highest accolades, I still haven't had a chance to eat there but my colleagues love it. It might be a little pricey though. Radio Maria is casual and reasonable, also very popular. The Bacaro guy opened his little italian grocery, Persimmon, next door -- though if you are coming from Chicago it might not be very impressive I always like to wander in and see what he has (morels, once, o some really great fresh figs...). They also have good sandwiches, oh and be sure to check out their slicer. I really love Cafe Kopi a few doors down, and they have the most accurate bagels I've eaten since moving to the midwest. I am often in the corner grading a stack of freshman homework. Circles next door has some nice clothes. On the Neil street side there is a big used bookstore whose name I am forgetting now, lots of cookbooks! If you drive down to Urbana, definitely check out ArtMart. Also, I really like the Corkscrew wine store on Vine Street, they carry almost nothing I have ever seen anywhere else, with lots of personal comments & very helpful staff. Oh, and there is also a nice bakery -- Mirabelle Fine Pastry-- on Main street in Urbana that is worth checking out. Apparently the owner is the daughter of the people who own ArtMart -- how cute is that?

It is a very nice website.

I tend to forget and leave my beverages lying around (absentminded nerd) so I often drink my black tea at room temp. I may be a little too familiar with what tannins are. Exactly what I like about them. I think wine acts the way bitter greens act in some cuisines, it cuts through the grease and makes you want to eat more. I doubt I could get through my SIL's wonderful christmas venison without the cabarnet chaser -- it's just too rich otherwise.

I buy my meat from a local farming family that raises the cows on grass. I'm in the rural midwest so that is the closest option for me. If I were in a city I would buy organic from Whole Foods, I guess. It is more expensive, so we just eat a little less of it, and try to waste as little as possible. According to most of what I've read, a lot of the risks of eating beef come from the large processing plants and icky diets. So, I am hopeful that I am reducing the risk a little. But to be honest, the main reasons are a) to cause as little suffering to the animals as possible and b) to support local small farms.

Since I started the last thread and was just there in July, I can try to give you some general info. Have you been to Seoul before? People were telling me it would be hard to figure out restaurant names (when and if they have them) and I found this was true even though I could read Hangul. Also, according to my lonely planet guide (which was really useful) it is almost impossible to figure out where a place is based on their street address as all house numbers are assigned according to when the place was built! Apparently you need to fax the place and they send you a map There are a couple things you can do. A) you can wing it, we had no bad meals while we were there, and the "merely good" ones were had in places we wouldn't have really chosen by their looks had it not been past 10pm on a weekday. All places that looked good turned out to be great. We had some picky eaters with us and they were very impressed with the food. For a Bulgogi place, choose one where they have the charcoal grills rather than the gas ones, though we had the gas one once and it was fine too. B) Check out that Fat Man Seoul page (there are links from the "Seoulville" thread.) This guy keeps a blog of his meals in Seoul, with photos and directions so it would be easier to find the places. While authentic chinese, indian and some traditional formal restaurants were somewhat expensive (by local standards), we found most regular Korean places in Seoul to be very nicely priced. You could easily get away with a nice Bulgogi dinner for under 20,000W. Bibimbap shouldn't cost more than 5,000W, even in nicer places. Since we were staying at the Lotte hotel, we tended mostly to eat somewhere between there and Insadong. Definitely check out Insadong street, even though it is a little touristy, it also has lots of neat galleries and the tea shops are very cute and eccentric, and there are lots of places to eat. (Be sure to check out the little side streets.) I didn't go far off the beaten path, granted, but it was a lot to see for a first time Seoul visitor like myself. I really want to go back. Oh, also, while the restaurants in the lotte hotel itself are a total ripoff, the basement of the attached Lotte department store had some great cheap food, and is very popular with the locals. Great place to try street food if the stalls look too scary for your friend

DoverCanyon, thanks so much for writing up all this information. I am really just starting out in terms of getting serious about what I drink, and tannins have been a topic I have found confounding. When I read wine reviews, "tannic" seems to be a negative property, the opposite of "fruity", say. But fruity oaky (not sweet mind you) wines I don't like all that much, whereas, while I don't like to pucker when I drink, I do kind of like at least some tannin in there. I gather there is supposed to be a balance of the two -- but how much of one? Is there an industry standard or rule of thumb to these things? Or do I just have lousy taste in wine? Or maybe I need to be spending more to really see the fruity oaky stuff done right? (I tend to spend in the $10-$20 range, sometimes a little more, from a store with enthusiastic owners, and I'd rather stay in this range until I know what I'm doing).

How odd, we had almost the same meal last Friday night. Mussels with white wine, garlic, shallots and tarragon to start (with french bread to sop up the sauce), seared tuna steaks with black pepper, prosciutto fried in butter & finished with bianco vermouth as a sauce, steamed ozette fingerling potatoes, and blanched green beans w/ vinaigrette. For dessert we had raspberries in Grand Marnier with some whipped cream, since I am not much of a pastry person. We had even planned a duplicate of your menu's cheese component, but were completely full by then. I rarely make that much food for just the two of us, but it was a pretty relaxed meal and we had it over several hours. We drank ice cold martini bianco while hanging around the kitchen waiting for the mussels, then a decidedly non-fancy white Rhone which I really like with the rest of the meal: 2002 Chateau Grande Cassagne Hippolyte Costieres de Nimes. I find that Rhone wines go really well with the type of food I tend to make, so I tend keep a lot of it on hand. I would guess Zinfandel is your favorite for the same sort of reason, so probably anything you like to make would go with it (certainly salad nicoise...).

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!