Chris Amirault

This would do it for me. I've got great reusable bags but rarely think to bring them into the damned store. Three times of sitting there with $150 of groceries and another $12 tab for bags would change those habits pronto.

Sorry! I omitted the fried tofu wrapped shrimp and chives, which Laura mentioned above. The worchestershire sauce lurking behind a few dishes was served with those.

Ten of us are waddling about the southern New England area right now after a wonderful feast at Lucky Garden in N Providence RI to celebrate the Lunar New Year. We were Steve, Julie, Catherine, Ted (Catherine's cousin -- apologies if the name is wrong!), Paul, Keith, Shelley, Laura, and Christopher. We ordered a lot of items from the usual dim sum menu as well as several from the New Years menu. We started off with these tasty little char siu and puff pastry items that none of us had seen before: Swell har gao: Char siu bao: Conpoy congee: Fried baby squid: Shu mai: Rice noodles with dried beef: Soup dumplings: Pork ton bor: They had fresh whole bass, so we had to get that, of course, and it was excellent: Vegetables included pea pod leaves: Garlic chives: Then we dug into the New Years dishes. First, a fine version of shrimp with sea moss and Chinese broccoli. I've found that sea moss has tasted a bit off when I've had it in the past, but not this time. It was great: Broccoli with egg white and crab, which I adored: An amazing braised pork dish described as "foot" on the menu and "head" by the waitress, which was served on lightly braised lettuce, which I also adored: Shrimp with duck feet, the cartilage which had been removed and placed under the shrimp to steam: Turnip cake: The New Years cake, with sweet red beans, coconut, and egg. This is our house's favorite part of New Year! We finished up with some sesame balls and dan tarts, which I didn't snap. Here's the gang: Thanks to everyone for making this event such a success, and for supporting the eGullet Society!

Moderator's note: discussion of the chocolate course in Aalst, Belgium can be found here. Discussion of food and dining in Aalst, Belgium has been split off into this topic.

This just in from the International Herald Tribune: "By 'bagging it,' Ireland rids itself of a plastic nuisance."

I have to freeze meat on a regular basis for a variety of reasons, so I'm interested to know: Are these claims true for all meats frozen to all temperatures in all environments? I've noticed, for example, that freezing chicken is almost always a terrible idea but that whole muscles (pork loins, lamb shoulders) that have been cryovaced and frozen in my new supercold freezer turn out pretty well, with much less degradation of quality and loss of liquid.

Some of that makes sense to me. Bistro food derives from many bourgeois French cuisines and relies on less expensive ingredients prepared in less refined ways. But as Paula Wolfert's treatises on daube indicate, complication has nothing to do with it. Oh. I must have misread "dumbed down" as derogation.

Bistros may not deserve Michelin stars, but it's simply wrong from every perspective to call it "dumbed down uncomplicated French food."

I couldn't give up the idea that apple brandy or applejack would somehow work with this, so I hit the books and found the Whist Cocktail, which the Craddock makes with calvados in the Savoy and PG Duffy suggests with that or apple brandy. Given Averna's sweetness, I gave it a try with Laird's bonded. It needed a higher note at the top, so I added a lemon twist. It's a thick, layered drink, a friendlier Negroni. After much searching, I decided to go with the name the Squadra Azzurra, after a famous team of Italian bridge players. (Whist, bridge, Italian.... Yeah, I know, a bit forced; at least the drink isn't blue.) It works. I give you entry number three. The Squadra Azzurra 1 1/2 oz apple brandy (Laird's bonded) 3/4 oz Averna 3/4 oz white rum (Flor de Caña) Stir, cook, strain into a cocktail glass. Edge the rim with a twist of lemon peel and drop it into the glass.

I'm sure that some Society members have succeeded to determine appropriately moral relationships to meat. How they've done that, I do not know, but I do know that explaining it to me isn't going to help much. Here's why. I'd like to stipulate that the majority of Society members, in which I count myself: 1. prefer cows, pigs, and chickens to lead happy lives; 2. prefer people across the globe to eat adequately and nutritionally; 3. prefer the planet to be cool and the environment healthy; 4. are very familiar with anti-meat statistics, arguments, projections, and rhetoric; 5. really enjoy their steak, ribs, or chicken satay. There are lots of possible explanations for why individuals can sustain this seeming incongruity, including but not limited to commodity fetishism, denial, meat lobby marketing, false consciousness, the plastic wrap and styrofoam objectification of animal flesh, first world capitalism, the erasure of nature and animals from lived human experience, and McDonalds. However, arguments citing statistics or relying upon those explanations often ignore the fact that many of us have found ways to live relatively happily for decades with that incongruity. Some could care less about that incongruity, of course. To the extent that I'm aware, I'm in that camp; purity of motive and action has always seemed suspicious to me. As a result, I'm not going to be moved to epiphany no matter how articulate Michael Pollan is (and I genuinely find him to be very moving indeed). In the grand scheme of things, I made my decisions about where to apply my sense of morality a long while ago, and the incongruity is one of many. Others live with that incongruity by acknowledging their ambivalence and then mitigating their pleasure in a classic American practice, consumption with guilt. The entire contraption has an expiatory feel to it: sit down to the table, reference "Fast Food Nation" or Alice Waters's manifesto, feel bad for a few seconds, then dig into the chili (with chuck purchased thoughtfully from Whole Foods). I'd venture to guess that a lot more of us run through this exercise than we'd care to admit. If a lot of folks fall into either of these camps, then delineating ever more arguments in support of stipulations 1-4 above would have no or precisely the opposite effect. "Forgive me please for I have sinned -- and pass the bacon 'round agin."

FWIW, Chinese liquor stores sell Chinese liquor. If you're making, say, quality lop yuk, you want quality shaoxing. If you don't want quality shaoxing, well, that's just fine, but those of us who do ogle Chinese liquor stores. As I think Steven and Mitch's exchange points out, it's a question of relative value, and I'm growing convinced that NJ is indeed a place where some of my particular culinary values would be better served. Not to say you should have them, too, of course.

We certainly eat less meat in my house now than we did when I was a kid growing up in a lower-middle class home in suburban Boston, but I'd be lying if I said that there were any consciously moral reasons related to meat consumption. We rarely have meals in which the main course involves a slab of meat, and with the exception of chicken, we don't roast meat very often. The fact that the house cook likes to prepare dishes from many cuisines, with proteins serving as flavoring and textural agents in curries, pasta sauces, soups, and so on, is probably the main reason (along with our budget). But we like pulled pork piled high with lots of sauce and without apologies. So, having firmly established my own culpability in this particular morality play, I'd like to suggest that immorality isn't so easily assigned to a slab of meat -- or, perhaps, that people assign different moral meanings to a slab of meat. In my family growing up, slabs of meat were good -- and by that I don't mean tasty. Big steaks were special rewards for hard work or the paycheck that hard work produced; fat roasts were components of important family celebrations. There was a moral system at work, but it wasn't global and didn't involve calculating required amounts of protein or the amount of corn required to raise a steer. Advocates for the global moral argument ignore this local morality at their peril. Every adult I know can comprehend the macroenvironmental and -economic arguments behind the global argument (they are, after all, pretty simple), and several have hashed out Pollan or Berry over a meal at my table. Those same people are often praising the pulled pork as they do so, and that meal is a good thing for reasons that have nothing to do with that global argument. Despite Pollan's assertion, it's not much of a dilemma for us as a result.

I'll be trying the 1:1:1 ratios soon, as I adore Chartreuse, Carpano Antica, gin, and Negronis, too. It was just a bit too late to have a drink that required the use of a knife.

Those Hess house bitters make for a fine daiquiri variation: 2 Flor de Cana white 1/2 lime 1/2 lemon 1/2 demerara 2 dashes Hess house

A bit late to this party: Despite Andy's warning to the contrary, I went with Erik's suggestion and made a 2:1:1 version, changed and upped the bitters (1 Regan's, 1 Fee's), but kept all other ingredients as he listed. I can see the possibilities of Boodle's here, but, boy, this is a remarkably great drink. Edited to fix Andy's name (sorry!) -- CA

I can't speak for Boston, but there are several fine restaurants in Providence that would be great starts, and I know that many of them are always on the lookout for eager new folks. (Sadly, the reputation for Johnson and Wales grads here in town is not very strong.) I can't name names, but I'd encourage him to cold call some of the top places in town to set up interviews, demos, and stages.

Where can one find Claytons kola tonic?

Thanks Steven. I don't think we did at all! ← I certainly didn't: budgetary constraints are the only reason we don't eat out three or four times a week. I'd expect that, if we did so, we'd certainly find the more routine experience less special.

In the same direction as Charles's post, I'd urge you to make sure that if you "use it" you really use it. A year ago, while the in-laws were in town, we had a huge, fine Indonesian meal twice, once at the dining room table and then the next day backed up through our basement drains. The culprit was pretty obvious: instead of grinding stuff up when it went into the sink, it sat down there and some washed into the pipes. Let me tell you, cleaning up water dirty with lemon grass splinters, beef fat, and coconut oil really sucks.

And for me, not cooking dinner at home is a special occasion. That makes good sense until you take into account the challenges of cooking at home for a family. If I'm cooking at home on a workday, that means I get home around 5:45p (or a bit later if I stop at a store), usually with two kids in tow, and try to juggle them, the dog, and dinner preparation to have comestibles on the table by 7:00 or, latest, 7:30. (One kid is three, and if she isn't fed in time, watch out.) I very rarely serve anything that I didn't make, so unless there's decent leftovers in the fridge, it's a crazed hour or two. So, eating out is a special occasion because it ain't that.

In "A Celebration Unto Itself," the NYT's Alex Witchel ruminates on the celebratory nature of dining out, prompted by the oft-heard reservationist query, “Is this a special occasion? Are you celebrating something?” Reflecting on a fine arctic char that couldn't be prepared at home, he writes, I think that Witchel just skims the surface of an interesting question. For some Society members, eating out at a nice restaurant is a routine part of their week, and only a trip to Per Se or el Bulli is a special occasion. For me, eating out happens precisely once a week, according to our budget, and as the cook in the house I can say that it's always a special occasion. Of course, for many, dining out at a sit-down restaurant is a very rare occurrence. What's your take?

Simmering shouldn't screw up the flavors at all. I just grabbed the book and there's nothing in there that would lessen with an additional hour. Even if that were so, you could just toss it in later in the cooking process. Ah, Alford and Duguid. I read "hard simmer" and grow concerned.

An hour simmering pretty much any cut of beef may well be insufficient time for a decent braise -- unless you were boiling it, in which case you'd have other problems.

Abra, what sort of options do you want your guest to have? I think Sat is February 2, btw!

I got a KD-600 a long way back and didn't run into any limitations until I started doing lots of charcuterie (especially dry-cured stuff) and bitters. So I just grabbed one of those DealExtreme scales with the 0.1 gram scale. Cheap, too: $11 and free shipping. I'll report back when it arrives.