Chris Amirault

Food stamps can also be used at all RI farmers markets; trips to the Broad St market (in South Providence, a poorer section of town and my neighborhood) suggest that a majority of purchases are made with food stamps. I also know several families in my school that fit the bill above: making lots of food from scratch, quality ingredients.

Perhaps I'm not understanding. What do you mean by "char"? I take that to mean cooking until the food has black spots or areas, like a steak with a crosshatch pattern of char from the grill. The majority of Chinese food cooked in a well-seasoned wok lacks char but has wok hei.

That seems bizarre to me. I regularly buy jalapeños, serranos, habañeros, et al at Whole Foods (and other area markets) and haven't noticed this. I can't really see the upside for WF in any consumer conspiracy, since anyone buying those items isn't looking for a crunchy sweet bell.

Empty, hot wok. Oil. Tilt and flame. Aromatics. Flame goes out.

Yes, the chef tilted the wok so that it ignited the oil.

The chef most certainly lit the oil on fire intentionally. The question is whether it was merely flair, or whether it has any culinary purpose. Increasingly I suspect the latter.

Strange it was.

What I've been doing is creating csv files with recipes from Wondrich, Thomas, DeGroff, Duffy, et al on my laptop and then uploading them to the Droid. You can enter them directly into the Droid too, but since I can touchtype this is easier for me. ETA: Someone asked specifics, so: When I edited the Recipe library, I: 1. renamed the library to "Cocktails" 2. Left the Name and Ingredients entry fields unchanged 3. Edited the Category field to include the values that you want to use. (I have Sours, Punches, Old Fashioneds, Martinezes/Manhattans, Flips/Noggs/Milk Punches, Syrups, Infusions, Fizzes/Sodas/Champagne, Hot Drinks, Misfits.) Of course, the categorization in 3 is eminently debatable (use Embury? Regan? DeGroff?). I went with simple, since I mainly search on ingredients or look for a specific drink by name. YMMV.

Had this big idea that the tangy, deep flavor of the Dalmatian fig jam we found on superdiscount would be a great foil for bourbon, so tried it out in an Improved (Figgy) Whiskey Cocktail: 2 1/2 oz bourbon 2 t fig jam 1 t Maraschino 1 t gum syrup 1/2 t absinthe dash Fee's OF bitters So, so right in my head. So, so, so very wrong in the mouth.

Wow.... Three years and nothing going on. Here are a few thoughts to make up for lost time. I have really enjoyed the Prado, a Stan Jones drink which Paul Clarke wrote about a few years back: 1 1/2 oz tequila 3/4 oz lime 1/2 oz Maraschino 1/2 egg white I've made and enjoyed that a few times, and tonight I started wondering what would happen if you crossed a Prado with jmfangio's Marguerita and started tinkering. Given the flowery nose, here's the working title: Flor de Agave Azul 1 1/2 oz blanco tequila (I'm using up Patron and eager to get Chinaco) 3/4 oz lime 1/2 oz St. Germain dash Fee's orange scant 1/2 oz simple small egg white (or two drinks with a large egg white) Hard shake; shake again with lots of ice; strain. Orange twist -- or try 2-3 drops of orange flower water.

Papaya King hot dogs. New Green Bo dumplings. Half a Katz's pastrami sandwich.

I haven't had a chance to try this yet -- it's still lousy weather here and I can't flame oil in the house -- but to jsager01's point, I think that most people don't actually have seasoned woks, either. High heat is important, but a seasoned walk is critical to wok hei.

OK, so I'm cheating a little. Ever since I made this Baltimore Egg Nog for the Dizzy Dairy MxMo, I've been hung up on it and on milk punches and noggs in general. Baltimore Egg Nog, which appears in Jerry Thomas's 1862 bible, combines egg, milk, rum and/or brandy, and madeira. As the Professor puts it, "It makes an excellent drink for debilitated persons, and a nourishing diet for consumptives." As it turns out, I've been working on some menu items for a bartending gig at Cook & Brown Public House, and when I read that, I thought, "Something along these lines sounds like the perfect brunch drink to me!" So I present the South of Medford Milk Punch: 2 oz dark rum (I've used Inner Circle Green, Chairman's Reserve, and Appleton V/X) 1 oz madeira (I'm using HM Borge reserva dolce) 3 oz milk (Rhody Fresh whole or 2%) 1/2 oz demerara 2:1 syrup dash cinnamon tincture Preparation: Shake hard; you want the milk to foam. Strain into glass with fresh cracked ice. Garnish: Twist a small piece of orange peel over the surface of the drink and rub it on the rim; discard. Grate a dusting of nutmeg on the foam. Glass: 12 oz highball or double Old Fashioned. The name references Medford (MA, home of early American rum production) and points south to rum source St. Lucia (or Jamaica or Australia or...), Baltimore, and, of course, Our Little Town of Providence RI. I think that the double garnish works really well to lighten up the nose of an otherwise rich drink, though there should be only the barest hint of orange oil or you lose the nutmeg. On the tongue it leads with the rum and then gives way to the cinnamon and raisin-y madeira. I tried it with Fee's OF bitters instead of the cinnamon tincture, but I think the bitter note isn't needed because of the dryish madeira finish. It's on the sweeter side, as I think our patrons will find Milk Punch more approachable that way, but it's easy to use a scant 1/2 oz of the demerara if need be.

For a good while now, Paul Clarke over at Cocktail Chronicles has been organizing a monthly online cocktail event he calls Mixology Mondays: The next MxMo takes place Monday, March 22, and Mike over at Hobson's Choice has chosen Punch as the theme: I'll email everything posted here by Monday, March 22 at midnight to Mike. So, ladies and gents, get out yer bowls and cups, rub up some oleo saccharum, and party like its 1699 (or 1799, or 1899 or...).

I couldn't figure out the tofu either and left it out, thinning the sauce a tad with water.

I'm finding myself increasingly interested in the vagaries of classic cocktail recipes, and the Ward Eight is a good case in point. (It's also a good case in point for illustrating the vagaries of classic cocktail histories, but I'm not going there.) cocktaildb.com lists four of them: 1. 1 1/2 oz bourbon or rye 1 oz lemon 1 tsp sugar 1/4 oz grenadine 2. 3/4 oz bourbon 3/4 oz lemon juice 1/2 oz orange juice 1/2 oz grenadine 3. 2 oz bourbon 1/2 oz grenadine 4. 1 3/4 oz bourbon 1/2 oz grenadine 1/4 oz white creme de menthe 1 dash orange bitters Meanwhile, over on Esquire.comDave Wondrich goes for 5. 2 ounces rye 3/4 ounce lemon 3/4 ounce orange 1 teaspoon grenadine Paul Clarke also has the same recipe on Serious Eats. It's sort of a variation of #2 above but with much more booze -- a needed adjustment, I'd think, given the OJ. Way back in 1962, Gourmet dialed the citrus way back: 6. 1 1/2 ounces bourbon 2 teaspoons lemon 1 teaspoon orange juice 1 teaspoon grenadine Finally, Lauren Clark at drinkboston.com has a video devoted to the drink using this recipe: 7. 2 oz rye or bourbon 3/4 lemon 1/2 oz grenadine You can see the dilemma: orange juice or no? 1 oz lemon or 2 t or none? 3/4 or 2 ounces of booze? creme de menthe?!? I'm convinced it's a drink I'd like in my repertoire but I'm not interested in a month of trial versions. What are people's preferred Ward Eight recipes? Why? What is it supposed to do or be? What kinds of booze help it along?

They're fantastic. Glass or crystal? And how many ounces?

Works as a kimchi fridge, too.

Click here for information on co-founder Jason Perlow's resignation.

Just made a big kalbi ssam meal last night and this ssamjang recipe from Saveur was really good.

Bump. Since the past exercises in frustration noted above, I've kept a google document listing ~100 of the drinks I'm most likely to turn to, updating and printing it out monthly. If I care to do so, I can pull out my laptop, search on a string, and slog through all of the "gin" or "egg white" selections one by one. It wasn't ideal, but I figured what the heck. A few months ago, I got a Droid, and I started snooping around at cocktail apps that use the Android OS. The big boy on the block is 10001 Cocktails, which has thousands of horrifying drinks, a bad interface, ads, and a lot of other problems. I haven't snooped through the entire Android Market, but most of the choices there seem extremely limited. Meanwhile, recipe apps are designed for mains, baked goods, and so on, and don't have the simplicity and search functionality I wanted for cocktails. So I started trying to see if I could find simple db software that I could tweak for cocktail use. Turns out that an app called Memento, which is being marketed as personal database software and has stuff preloaded for CDs, lecture notes, and recipes, does the trick. With just a bit of time editing the Recipe library by changing the library name to "Cocktails," tweaking entry fields (including drop-down menu selections for drink categories), and figuring out basic .csv protocols and transfers, I had uploaded all of the google recipes onto the Droid. Now they're all sortable, searchable, and groupable by any field or text string. I'm very happy with my little kludgy app, which does just what I need it to do.

That's pretty speedy, so the tendons are still adhering to the muscle. Can't up the time or else you lose your sous vide advantages. How about pulling the tendon after SV instead of before?

This is all really helpful, especially the stuff about KISS and noting contextual information. In particular, I've really come to believe that the food I'm eating -- or the fact that I'm not eating -- plays the essential role, and since I'm doing this for matching with food, it'll be a key element.

Hm. I don't have that problem, so it makes me ask: for how long are you cooking the lobsters?

I love my LamsonSharp fish spatula -- and like me it's left handed.