Shalmanese

Pagliacci is a definite miss. It's decent pizza but it's not anything you're going to remember. If you're set on pizza, I would reccomend Delancey's although they don't take reservations & the wait can be pretty brutal on a weekend. If you're spending the morning in Pike Place, I reccomend Matt's in the Market for lunch.

Stuart, congrats on your first dinner challenge. Trust me when I say it gets easier with experience which just means you start planning even larger & more ambitious events. You're at an inherent disadvantage with the pros when it comes to plating & presentation since you only ever get to make a dish once or twice whereas they can tweak the plating over many iterations. Any time you do one of these, there will always be 2 or 3 dishes that turn out pedestrian (hopefully no out & out disasters). Choose to focus on the high points instead.

The cooking world already has a term for reputation makers, they're called "signature dishes". I'm almost embarrassed to put mine down since I usually cook complex, layered dishes but my signature dishes tend to be far more simple & pedestrian. Spaghetti & Peas So deceptively simple and yet it still astounds me how much flavor can be coaxed out of such pedestrian ingredients. Corn & Black Bean Salsa This is what I bring to parties all the time. When made incorrectly, it's a giant bowl of blah but when you hit the seasoning balance just right, it emerges as a complex & engaging dish. 1 package frozen corn (fire roasted from Trader Joe's if you can get it), defrosted 1 can of black beans, drained & washed 2 avocados, diced jalapeno spring onion garlic cilantro olive oil cumin sugar salt lime juice keep on adjusting until the flavors mesh. Let it stand for an hour to fully integrate. Be careful not to overseason or the entire dish is ruined. I've never been able to recover from an excess of any of these ingredients. Pork Neck Noodle Soup A new one which I've only made the second time tonight but most definitely a signature dish marinate 3 lbs of pork neck bones in dark soy & miso paste (this cannot be made with any other cut of pork) Roast in the oven until just slightly browned. In a large pot, add: 1 whole bunch of spring onions 3 1/2 inch slices of ginger 6 crushed garlic cloves 5 star anise 12 dried chillis 1 stick of cinnamon 1 tbsp szechuan pepper corn 1 tbsp of black pepper 12 dried shitake mushrooms roasted pork & drippings Cover with water & cook at a gentle simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours. What emerges is the most soulful, delicately scented pork broth I've ever tasted which is now an amazing canvas for any sort of noodle soup. Take out the pork & mushrooms and strain out the rest of the solids. This is enough to make ~10 cups of broth.

One request for something that I think would be cool to try: Have the students squeeze some lemon juice at the beginning of class and put them in some squeeze bottles. Compare them to pre-prepared bottles that have been squeezed 6 hours, 24 hours, 3 days & bottled in advance as well as some freshly squeezed to see how flavor degrades with time. Similarly, if you can, get some old vermouth (ask for a volunteer to bring a bottle that's been knocking around the back of their bar) vs a 1 week old vs a freshly opened bottle of vermouth.

One way you could think of them is as "chinese capers". Use where ever you want that little hit of salt & piquancy.

Quite often in the course of cooking, I'm left over with significant amounts of rendered animal fat, whether it's from frying off some bacon or searing some chicken thighs or roasting a pork shoulder. If it was fairly neutral, I would sometimes save it and use it as a base for a later dish but sometimes the fat would be heavily spiced or flavored and I generally never figured out what to do with it so I threw it away. Recently, I came into the possession of a cuisinart miniprep and, tonight, I came up with the idea of doing a "quick mayo" with the leftover fat from a five spice rubbed rack of ribs. The result was rich, subtly spiced and deeply meaty mayo that has me curious about the possibilities. The miniprep turns mayo making from a 10 minute affair to a 30 second one and it makes it possible to make a dazzling array of unique mayos from what I previously would have thrown away. I'm dying to try making a mayo from roast chicken fat and using it in a cold roast chicken sandwich the next day or making a potato salad with a bacon mayo. Does anyone else do this? Have you had any stunning successes or failures?

I'm seeking ideas for a cocktail to be named "diamonds are forever" for a cocktail party this weekend. It can't be a martini or an aviation. My biggest hurdle is finding something that doesn't contain lemon or line juice as either of those would cloud it up.

I cooked a wagyu brisket for my 21st birthday. I let it sit overnight in a dry rub, then roasted it low & slow in an oven for 6+ hours. A smoker would also be great. Wagyu brisket has even more fat & "beefiness" than a normal brisket but, apart from that, they're largely the same, don't cook it to medium rare unless you like chewing on rubber bands. I would serve a smaller portion than a normal brisket as it's much richer. Sous vide is also a popular approach if you have the equipment.

I've never known wine to grow mold or, for that matter beer. Then again, I haven't ever left beer unopened for a few months. Can anyone report as to whether beer does indeed get moldy?

After accidentally leaving a bottle of elderflower syrup out and having mold grow on the top of it, I was wondering if there's any reference for what proportions of sugar, water & ethanol prevent mold growth. I tried doing a quick google search but didn't find anything that seemed relevant.

Are you on a gas stove? If so, the problem might be you're using too big a burner for your pot. The flames are licking up the side and heating up the oil splattered on the sides of the pot, causing it to discolor. Try moving to a smaller flame or using a flame tamer to prevent the problem.

Any kind of nuts but most especially Chacheers sunflower seeds.

I think this challenge really demonstrated how far ahead Jen, Michael I, Michael V & Bryan (and possibly Kevin) are ahead of the rest of the field. Did anyone notice that Bryan was just casually making some freaking Pommes Souffle as a garnish for the trout. That's not something you see every day.

I was reading an old eGullet thread on pizza toppings when I was suddenly struck by slkinsey's post: I realized there are two very different philosophies on what is considered "good food" which I'm going to term quality relativism, embodied by slkinsey and quality absolutism, embodied by me. To slkinsey, what makes a pizza worth eating is that it's better relative to other pizzas. Thus, what you see is a focus on creating a sublime crust topped with great ingredients and focusing on eking out the best flavor and texture possible from the given parameters. I'm of the opposite school of thought. When I decide what I consider to be "good food", I compare it against every other thing I could be eating. As a result, what slkinsey would consider a sublime Neapolitan pizza, I would yawn at. Sure, it's good bread, cheese & tomatoes. But, at the end of the day, bread, cheese & tomatoes just aren't too exciting to me compared to the much more delicious things you could be putting on a pizza. I'm very much of a pile em high with toppings guy because there's a hundred different things that taste better than even the best bread, cheese & tomatoes. I love roast chicken and I love a good steak but, all else being equal, if I had the choice between the most organic, free range, biodynamic, chickeny chicken cooked by Thomas Keller himself compared to a decently marbled, inch thick, supermarket ribeye basted in butter, I'd choose the ribeye every time. To me, no matter how good chicken is, it just can't aspire to the same heights as a steak. If you're a quality absolutist, this choice makes perfect sense but must be baffling to a quality relativist and I think this is the crux of the difference. So, are you a quality relativist, a quality absolutist or some complex mix of the two?

Calling it a slew is pushing it. I count a total of 3 recipes and 5 pages devoted to Chinese sauces in a 700 page book! In Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, there's a recipe for Spinach in Charred Garlic Sauce (pg 305). It involves first charring the garlic in peanut oil before adding spinach, salt & sugar and that's it. I suspect, whatever the recipe of your mystery sauce is, the secret ingredient is MSG.

Regina Schrambling of Slate reccomends:

They're excellent in a cold noodle salad. Mix with shredded carrot, cucumber, spring onion, cilantro, chillis, maybe a bit of shredded chicken or dried tofu for protein. The dressing consists of chinese black vinegar, soy sauce, sugar & sesame oil.

Banrock Station from Australia is pretty drinkable for $3.99.

I'm only at 25. I got a lot of drinking to do.

I'm guessing nobody ever cooked Chinese/Italian food at home, it was strictly a restaurant thing. I'm fine with scaling down main dishes to a canape size. Right now I'm thinking: Steamed Wontons Fried Wontons Meatballs in marinara sauce Ceaser salad Pineapple Upside Down Cake

It seems like the ice I buy from the supermarket is fairly fragile and easy to crush with a muddler whereas the ice I freeze for myself in the fridge is as hard as a rock. Is there any secret to making softer ice? I don't think it's got anything to do with temperature or size, could shape be a factor?

Very cool! I was a big fan of Fire & Knives in it's original, blog form. Will it be available in the US in some sort of affordable fashion? Or as an online version?

Also: What beers & wines would be appropriate for that era?

This Thursday is exactly 80 years from when the Dow Jones peaked before the Great Depression and I want to throw a retro-ironic party celebrating the completely unfounded optimism of the time. We're going to be doing cocktails & canapes that a period specific and I was wondering what great suggestions people have. 1929 was in the middle of the prohibition so we're going with a speakeasy theme. I've got gin, absinthe, rye whiskey as well as a pretty well stocked liquor cabinet (vodka, rum, whiskey, maraschino, campari, vermouth, bitters etc.) Off the top of my head, cocktails would include: Martini Manhatten Sazerac Aviation Old Fashioned Negroni Is it too early for punches and rum fruit drinks? In terms of foods, what sorts of stuff was popular? Doing some reading, I know that's when Chinese & Italian food became popular so what sorts of retro-ethnic canapes can I make? I also know that was when the ceaser salad took off so that will definitely be on the menu. For dessert, I'm thinking pineapple upside down cake. Other than that, I'm completely open to suggestions.

OK, eGullet, I need your help. I have steak strips marinating in soy, oyster sauce, sesame oil & pepper in the fridge, from the farmers market: broccoli, green beans, thai basil, mint, a profusion of asian chillis & the usual assortment of kitchen staples which I want to turn into a stir fry tomorrow night. Can anyone point me to a recipe packed with flavor? Everything I'm finding on the web looks kind of insipid.