Chris Amirault

Photo please. Actually, photo demanded!

3:30: a red delicious apple that was red but not in my opinion delicious, and a bag of Sun Chips, kiddie sized (140 cals), from the kind folks at Frito-Lay. I think that did it....

Try as I might, the "big glasses of water" strategy has not cut down on the cravings, though it has cut down on the number of consecutive minutes I can sit still behind this computer....

It's 1 pm, and I'm about to eat my Nongshim Shin Cup for lunch (I also enjoy their spicy shrimp bowl). On other days, I'm might have one of the lunches we serve at my preschool, or a Clif bar -- black cherry almond, usually. I'll grab a piece of hard candy or a mint so that I don't make visitors faint when I open my mouth, but I'm usually happy just to have that. At least, until 3ish.... And then the evil craving begins. Basically, I blow any semblance of eating carefully in the midafternoon, and instead I turn to bad, to very bad things. Oatmeal cookies at 70 calories a pop, one, then three, then eighteen of the damned things -- that's my worst vice. Thank god there's only one case of them here each month. I don't want to go home ravenous ("Cooking while Hungry" will have to be another thread), so I ask you, dear friend. What do you do midafternoon at work to quell your snack jones? Any healthy, bulky, reasonable alternatives? High points for flavor intensity, I'll add. If you refer to a specific product, do include a link so that we can see what folks across our lands and ponds eat. (Oh, and if you're wondering about the difference between high and low tea, clickety click.)

Take two. Once again, due to a complaint from another member, I had to delete two posts on this thread that violated the eGullet Society User Agreement's prohibition against "mean-spirited insults or other disruptive posts." Basic rule of thumb: if you're writing a post that centrally refers to someone else, chances are pretty good that you're not talking about food, eating, or cooking. If you don't have thoughts to add to this discussion about rotating FOH and BOH, don't post to the thread.

Hunting around for a good way to render lard, I found Linda's (fifi's) great recipe in RecipeGullet. Click here for it! I'll be taking those first steps this weekend, I think.... edited to grumble: Just called Whole Paycheck, and they told me that they don't carry white pork fat, or fatback, or kidney fat, or anything like that. "We get it all prepackaged," the man said. Sigh.... I need me a real butcher....

Hmm. By not stunning, do you mean they don't do a good version of Portugese, or that the food is objectively not very good, or something else? If it's one of the first two, I'll skip them, I guess. But I was hoping to try something I couldn't get in Philadelphia: Portugese is one of those things. ← Andrew, I wish I could be more useful, but I think that I'm a poor judge of good Portuguese restaurants or something. I have had meals at those two restaurants that others have enjoyed; I however found the food uninteresting, overcooked, and generally not worth it. That's not to say that I don't like some Portuguese food. There used to be a great place here in Providence, the Blue Point, that had a great Portuguese kale, littleneck, and chorice stew, but they're long gone. But I haven't found dishes at the two places you mention here that were up to that standard. If I were you, I'd drive down to Flo's clam shack on the Portsmouth/Newport line and get fried clams!

Susan, I think that I agree with much of what you say here. I definitely cook because I like to please people and myself, and because I enjoy getting compliments. But I also cook because I enjoy the experience of cooking itself; the process is as important as the product. I like being in my kitchen, where I can feel a very strong sense of knowledge, skill, curiosity, pride, and pleasure. I can trace my adult life through the making of, say, some fried chicken, reviewing the ups and downs of that dish as I learned it. I can experience my ability to transform a pile of raw materials into something quite magical, something as simple as a tomato sauce: I still love that moment when I return to the pot and see that the tomatoes, onions, garlic, oil, and so on have suddenly become gravy. In that sense, I suppose some would say that I'm "showing off," if that means that I'm cooking in order to feel that sense of pride and pleasure. But maybe this gets at some of the things you're raising....

It's rare that I get truly blindingly hot Thai food in New York, but when I do, it's too hot for me to really notice anything else much, even though other tastes are present. ← Having made a rather obsessive commitment to using only fresh ingredients for the Thai food that I make at home pretty often, I'm increasingly convinced that the flavors of aromatics in Thai food are very dependent on freshness and quality. Specifically, new galangal, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, shallots, basils, cilantro and cilantro root make a huge difference in the flavor profile of curries, larbs, soups, and so on. While this is a truism for most cuisine, I think that it's particularly true in Thai food. As I mentioned above, I haven't really found a Thai restaurant around here that I like. However, my experience this past November at Thai Nakorn in Anaheim CA suggests that there are titanic differences between even family-style Thai restaurants. When I eat Thai around RI, the soups are underseasoned and based on weak stocks, the curries are suspiciously smooth and just this side of bland, and everything tastes tired. Thai Nakorn had dishes that exploded in my mouth, and the aromatics, textures, and flavors combined in magical ways. I'll bet that their very busy restaurant has massive turnover, sources and uses fresher ingredients, and does a lot more in house than the places around here.

maybe it (sopranos book, show) helped spread the word, but 3 generations of my italian-american family have been using those pronunciations (though yes, never thinking it is "hip"). we're from baltimore, northern jersey, and ny. i don't think anyone in my family who uses those words thinks they are speaknig italian. i sure don't. but it's part of my heritage. it's part of the way we speak. and i'm quite proud of my heritage. also, i don't think we're knuckleheads. ← Tommy, I certainly didn't want to imply, nor do I believe, that your family are knuckleheads! The thread above was talking specifically about people who are using these food terms to be cool, not because the terms or the food are part of their linguistic heritage. I would never imply or state that people who use those terms as part of their heritage are knuckleheads. However, I do think that non-Italian Sopranos fans who think that this is the way that all "Italians" talk about food -- who would go to an expensive, touristy shop here in Providence and try to impress the locals with language they heard on HBO -- are indeed knuckleheads. It was that sort of person at whom I was poking fun. Sorry not to be clearer!

Kellytree, you MUST tell us about this oven!! Amazing snaps!

chromedome makes a good point here about exceptions. I'm a huge fan of many of the things on this list, including and especially salty licorice (and their Chinese soul mates, salted dried plums -- yee-umm), and I ain't got a Dutch or Chinese bone in my body. I love intense flavors, as do, I bet, lots of folks here.

I agree with David Thompson that Thai food comprises one of the world's great cuisines. (In case you don't own it, I urge you click here and order his Thai Food -- and give the eGullet Society a little pat on the back while you do it! His chapter on rice is worth the price of the book alone.) Unfortunately, I can't get excellent Thai here in restaurants, but we live in a very vibrant Southeast Asian expat community, so I can get nearly any ingredient to make things at home. So every third or fourth weekend, I hit the markets, get out my mortar and pestle and my amazing coconut meat grater (scroll to the bottom), Thompson's book and Jeffrey Alford's Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (again, clickety), pluck a few leaves off of my kaffir lime tree, and go a bit nuts. I'm not alone: check out the Larb, Laab, Larp thread and the Thai Cooking at Home thread, and you'll find some other Thai home cooking fanatics.

Oh, I know -- I was just saying that the hipster doofus crowd has started using that lingo thanks to Tony & Co.!

I think that the "hipness" of "pasta fazool," "gabagool," "moozadell," "manicott," and so on can be traced directly to the cuisine described in this particular cookbook, involving a certain fictional northern NJ family of great notoriety. Meanwhile, if you tried to order some "gabagool" at Tony's Colonial on Atwells Ave here in Providence, they'd look at you like the knucklehead you are.

As you can well imagine, threads about annoying restaurant food and service have a long, storied history here. If memory serves, the last was the Crimes Against Food thread, in which I chose to whine righteously about inedible garnishes, "When the first thing you do to your plate is remove inedible ugly food, you know there's a problem."

Great snaps, Jason and Rachel. I'm very envious. Someone once told me that, when his days are done and he's walking toward St. Peter, he hopes Pete'll reach out his hand and give him an oyster po' boy. Then he'll know right away that everything's gonna be just fine.

As many food historians have documented, working- and middle-class Americans coming back from the Pacific and European theatres in WWII brought with them a greater sense of risk and experimentation around food. I'd like to hear some about people's experiences with that food growing up. For example, many people first tasted "Italian" food thanks to Chef Boyardee (who really existed, apparently). I certainly know that my first "Chinese" food came in two cans -- crispy noodles and chop suey -- from the folks at La Choy (now owned by ConAgra), the company that could (sing along if you can) "make Chinese food [drum roll] swing A-merican!" Apparently, "swinging American" meant forbidding all garlic, ginger, and chili, cooking every vegetable until grey, using lots of celery, and suspending the whole mess in a glutinous substance primarily made from corn starch. That make-at-home food is pretty interesting, to be sure, but I'd also like to hear about people's experiences eating out in places that served this sort of food. As car culture exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, so too did a new interest in "ethnic" restaurants; I grew up outside of Boston, near Route 1, and in Saugus MA there were many of these places. My family was working middle class, and we often spent bits of our small discretionary income at restaurants like the Kowloon (scroll down halfway) and the Diamond Head, for egg foo young, duck sauce, and moo goo gai pan, and at the Leaning Tower of Pizza, complete with the actual leaning tower of Pisa attached to the restaurant. At least, that's what my dad told me.... I went back to the Kowloon a couple of years ago, and it was a hoot to see the audacious volcano-and-hula-skirt decor from my youth. But I also started thinking that these restaurants were the first places in which I had sweet and sour paired in a main dish, unusual (to me) ingredients, spicy food of any kind (the hot mustard with the "BBQ pork slices" in our pupu platter, the ground red pepper on our pizzas), and meals that didn't consist of meat and two veg. Moreso than in my New England Yankee home, I probably developed my curious palate in these dimly lit faux food joints, and so they hold a special place in my heart (and mouth ). What about you? Sure, you may scoff at it when you're sitting down to Per Se, but what role did this legendarily bad food play in the development of the foodie that you've now become? Fess up, pardner!

Them bastids!! Thanks. Now I know what to say to the fishmonger when my scallops are sliding around in frothy muck....

Two possible things to try. First, scrape both sides of the tuna with a knife to squeegee off all of the moisture and then place the tuna on a paper towel or something else dry (not back on the wet plate whence it came). Second, be sure to blast the heat, put the pan on until it's blazingly hot, and only then pour in your oil. When you put those steaks in, it's going to make a hell of a mess and odor, but that's your best chance at getting the seared sides. I agree with Tracey that the marinade may well "cook" the tuna overnight, btw.

Treated? Treated how, exactly? Poorly, I imagine....

From the recipe never tried: Those six simple sentences describe a process whose complexity is beyond my ability to fathom. I admire so profoundly the chefs that make hand-pulled noodles; I simply cannot imagine it. If anyone on eG does this, he or she will earn my undying awe.

That is, I believe, the traditional way to serve the turkey, too. Too sick this weekend to cook, but next weekend, or perhaps Memorial Day, you will be joined!

Welcome, mukbo! Click here for a madeleine recipe from the RecipeGullet files. If you're in the US, you'll need to translate C to F, as it's from Le Cordon Bleu, n'cest pas?

Dave, can you say more about this? One of our staple dishes here is scallops seared in brown butter with white pepper, salt, lemon, and EVOO. My anecdotal evidence over many years of making this dish is that never-frozen scallops do not give off very much liquid on the high heat, whereas frozen ones that have been defrosted give off quite a bit -- so much, in fact, that the scallops never properly sear. And, since I know you're all wondering, they're properly (that is, New-Englanderly) called "SKAWL-ops." Ahem.