Chris Amirault

Do you have coordinates for #50 NY Cocktail bar? I can't find it on google. Surely you jest.

Anyone else want to weigh in on Urban Tacos? It's on the DART and thus easy access from our hotel. Do they take reservations on weeknights?

Still askin'. Close to downtown would be spiffy.

Colicchio gets his steaks custom-aged from DeBragga & Spitler in the Meatpacking District in NYC. When I attended the Food TV Food & Wine Festival last month, I was fortunate to learn all about their operation. Read about it starting here.

Now that's one of the all-time great names. Yesterday I enjoyed a Rochester Cocktail for the first time. It's listed in the back of Imbibe! as a creation of Robert Hess, but oddly enough it's not available on the drinkboy.com website. 2 oz rye (Rittenhouse BIB) 1 oz Dubonnet Rouge ½ oz Licor 43 (scant -- CA) ¼ oz absinthe (Kubler) 2 dashes Angostura bitters Stir, up, lemon twist. It's a great way to use two tricky ingredients (Dubonnet and Licor 43) in a classic formula that's sort of a quasi-Improved Manhattan thingy. I think that you have to hold back a bit on the Licor 43, but, boy, it's a lovely drink.

How are they prepared?

Great report, Ron. Eliot, can you say a few things about how those huckleberries are pickled?

I think that I'll be making mafé Sunday for dinner. I'm planning to serve it with plain white rice, but I'm also wondering about sides. Does anyone have any ideas? I'd be particularly interested to know about any pickles or other acidic elements I can add.

Getting cooler here, and I've been thinking more and more about potato pancakes to go with the hanks of sausages in the freezer. Anyone else getting out the grater?

Just got mine and have to wait a week or so before I start playing around. I'm struck by the number of doable recipes; I think that quite a few elements could be used in other dishes as well. Has anyone tried anything else?

Thanks -- those both sound great. I think that I'll go for Chris's sauce, in which I'll toss the already-cooked lamb in chunks. Should go well with rice & peas.

I've got two pounds of jerk lamb defrosting. The flavor should be solid, but it's likely to be dry, and would therefore benefit from some sauced or sauteed treatment. Ideas? I'm stumped.

Boy, do I identify with that.

After a long day and looking toward another, I made a double Biffy Cocktail tonight. Normally, preparing a single drink, I would have strained it into a cocktail glass and served it up. However, I was going to nurse it for a while, so I chose rocks. (Specifically, I prepared the drink by shaking with ice and straining it into a frozen rocks glass with crushed ice in it.) It got me to thinking: what criteria do people use for serving drinks up or on the rocks? I often find myself violating certain directions: I think that the Art of Choke, for example, should be served up, along with several tiki drinks that lose their complexity as ice melts; like Gary Regan, I always build my Negronis over rocks. However, trying to figure out why I do what gets confusing fast. What rules are there? What rules do you follow? When does whim grab you?

Just a quick report that Aidell's hunter sausage is a keeper: 2# pork and 1# bacon plus spices, ginger, garlic, mustard. I do think that it would have benefited from more fat -- it's quite lean even with the bacon ground in. Indeed, I'm finding consistently that I should be adding more fat than I get from a typical Coleman shoulder or butt. They trim off too much....

I had considered some other punches but didn't think that they met the "off-the-shelf" and "fairly straightforward" criteria above. However, if you can recruit the kinder to muddle and mix, that could help out plenty.

Freeze water in two hemispherical bowls. Pour a little hot water across the surface of one and immediately lay the other directly atop it, then refreeze a bit. When you're ready, remove the ice from the bowls with a little hot water on each.

Mightily. But fresh OJ could be the one good ingredient here and you could probably get away with the rest being just ok. ET clarify -- ca

Boy, this is up my alley. I'd make a straightforward punch along the lines of Wondrich's Brandy Punch from the Esquire database and perhaps doll it up a bit with some fall spices. And, for names, I definitely think that it should be the Hab the Builder Punch.

Reduced shrimp stock is also an excellent addition to curries that use shrimp.

But for many people that's the flexible portion of their monthly expenses. True for us, at any rate.

I'm now sold on loose leaf. I got a finum tea brewing basket that I've been using to great effect. I also find that brewing a cup of tea with this basket is only slightly more work than using a bag, and the result is utterly superior.

I'm seeing way more wire service dreck, often pushed by a food industry association or another. It's too bad, as the food editor our local paper, the Providence Journal's Gail Ciampa, has been doing a pretty great series called "Taste of the Neighborhoods." Here's one of two parts focused on Broad Street (1/2 block from my house). Not sure how much longer labor-intensive series like that will last.

Current topics on lower dessert sales and eating out in the UK got me to thinking about the changes I've made to my own eating habits in the last few weeks. Some are pretty typical: making larger batches of easily leftoverable meals; eating out only at the tried-and-true favorites and avoiding costly risks; being more cautious about using stuff that's about to go bad instead of just tossing it. Others are more quirky, and even counterintuitive. For example, I've been having more and more tea at work instead of grabbing a cuppa in the car on the way. (The option of making coffee at work is out; I have a Rancilio Silvia and Rocky grinder combo at home that makes most work options untenably unsatisfying.) Since I'm not spending a couple of bucks each morning, I realize that I have greater flexibility about quality options for tea, and I'm slowly replacing my existing bag tea collection at the office, moving from single servings of Tazo, Ahmad, Twinings, and Republic of Tea to whole leaf teas. I've just gotten started, but I'm realizing that my "cost-cutting measure" is also resulting in a far higher quality brew and experience. (This is obvious, I'm sure, to regular tea drinkers.) For example, each cup of Tealuxe Blue Flower Earl Grey I make costs somewhere around a quarter or so, and the preparation fetish involving my morning beverage is nearly as satisfying as the preparation fetish involving my evening beverage. I feel both frugal and sated. What about you? What sorts of changes are you making to your eating and drinking habits to keep costs down?

More crowing about the Weeski Cocktail. Made it with Power's and the new Angostura orange bitters -- and I tossed in a few drops of Fee's Whiskey-barrel aged bitters. Lemon horse's neck rind to boot. This is a great drink to show off the Angostura bitters, to get non-whiskey drinkers to drink whiskey, to teach about flavor layering, and to crack wise about smart-ass drink names. Seriously, it's poifeck.