Chris Amirault

Not if you let the meat cool to room temp in the liquid and then separate.

I admit it: what with Julie & Julia, a freezer-full of lamb shoulders and pork butts, oohs and aahs for the trio on the finale of "Top Chef Master" (Chiarello's short ribs, Keller's Alsatian stew, and Bayless's mole), enough stock ready to submerge my house, and two weeks of hot, humid weather, I wanna braise. I'm sick of summer; I'm sick of sweating through dinner prep; I'm sick of leafy greens served with "the bounty of the season"; I'm sick of meals that I have to make in 20 minutes or less. I want to fill my kitchen for hours with the warm aromas of slowly simmering meats, vegetables, and the like. Tops on my list: daube, pozole, brisket, massaman curry, lamb vindaloo, and chili. (Money's tight, otherwise I'd add osso bucco.) How about you? Are you sick of caprese salad with blighted tomatoes and tired basil like me? What're you already eager to braise?

Technique, perhaps merely style, question: when using your julep strainer, is the concave interior facing up out of the glass or down toward the ice? Any logic here to share?

Yard sale. All the best stuff I have is from thrift stores, yard sales, you name it. Meanwhile, I'm tempted to dump a quadruple Test Pilot into that bowl, knock the whole thing back myself, and see if Vic visits. I'd like to talk to the guy about his current distribution limitations....

I've had Havana Club a few times in Montreal, Riyadh (yes, that's right), and Barcelona, and I don't get what the fuss is about. It's better than Bacardi, but shatter your world? Not.

No people, but the concept of edible food was pronounced dead on the spot.

I feel like the whole is more harmonious at the proportions I gave, and thus the Pernod binds everything instead of singing a solo. My wife "hates" Pernod but this is one of her two favorite drinks (Pisco Sour is the other).

A French Pearl question. I've seen this recipe around the internet quite a bit: From its ubiquity, I'm thinking that this is Audrey's original recipe, but I certainly don't know. The reason I ask is that my version brings the Plymouth up front a bit by dialing back on the lime and simple (to 1/2 oz each) and halves the Pernod (to 1/8 oz, my barspoon). Are there others out there making these consistently? What version do you use? Why?

Indeed: burning doilies of Saveur pages, discussing the ratings of food we cannot taste, bathing in polenta, losing your "mole virginity": all exceptionally silly!

IIRC, that one star was the difference between a win and a dead heat with Bayless in the finale. Oseland gave him 3 1/2 stars, whereas Greene and Rayner gave him 4 1/2.

Most people make their Daiquiris and Mojitos with white rum, though, and given the dominance of Bacardi white there are thousands of recipes for using it around. However, quality stuff is more than mediocre stuff, so I'd start with the best bottle of rum you can get. From that list, I'd grab one of the aged Appleton Estate products (12 year or V/X).

Boston's own Misty Kalkofen (of LUPEC and Green Street fame) created the 1820, a mezcal and genever sour that gave me the stones to try something I've been wondering about: Cocktail Tradicional y Holandés (Mexi-Dutch Old Fashioned) 1 1/2 oz genever (Genevieve) 1 oz mezcal (Real de Magueyes Añejo) barspoon simple syrup dash Angostura Stir; strain into Old Fashioned glass with three large cubes; garnish with small lemon twist. I'm a nut for Genevieve, and thus perhaps not objective, but I think that this one is just about perfect. Strangely enough, it also goes remarkably well with Steve Sando's Rancho Gordo eye of the goat beans.

Doh! What idiot wrote that...

Thanks, kismet59. That cycle of restaurant life makes me all the more appreciative of the great years I had with Al Forno -- and those with several other places I've been grateful to dine at all these years.

Those look great. Do you know a good substitute for marifax beans? Would soldier beans work?

Thanks, Katie. Bfishback, yes, I did, and yes, it was. The question was also about drinking, though, and not merely tasting (e.g., should there be a drink upon participants' arrival?), and the relationship between the two throughout the session.

Expanding on David's ideas, I've decided to write up a card for each of the three (or so) drinks I'll be making in each session. The idea is to fold the interesting content into the drinks themselves, so that people can buy a bottle or three, make a few drinks at home, and figure out things as they go. Here's the one I'm working on tonight: The plan is to do this for the other two drinks as well, which right now are a Sidecar and a French Pearl.

I always have several quarts of used fry oil in the basement, never refrigerated. We're all still here.

Ouch. That's a hard shake, Sam.

What a great, simple exercise -- which any cook could do at home whenever he or she makes any given item. In addition to wine, salt, pepper lemon, you could have cayenne, sugar, vinegar, a few drops of olive oil... the list is practically endless. Janet has some similar experiments in her terrific eGCI course on taste, and David Thompson introduces the concept of balance in his seminal Thai Food with a step-by-step layering experiment.

Daniel Zwerdling debunked the wine glass effect in a scathing piece about Reidel in Gourmet back in 2004. Not on line as far as I can tell....

I think that we are in general agreement: on the whole, drink (especially wine and beer) has a more developed literature of description than food, and the few food outliers that approach the level of depth used to describe cabernet are in no way indicative of the broader sweep of food vocabulary. But people do have specific, deep comparative vocabularies to describe say, corn-fed, dry-aged beef relative to grass-fed, wet-aged beef. Even if the literature on beef, compared to wine, is peanuts, it's more complex than that for, say, peanuts. I think it's worth learning those vocabularies if one wants an educated palate in the manner Chris H describes.

Not so sure.... Depends on the food, I think: chocolate, steak, butter....

Texture would feature more prominently, along with a broader range of salty and savory flavors. But I'd think that many of the basic principles would be similar.

Looks incredible, Kerry. While I'd go for a charcuterie room, I'm very envious! How big is the room? What lighting have you chosen for it?