ivan

My plan worked perfectly!

My goodness, it's brutal out there. Reminds me why I choose dining venues that preclude public mastication, irrelevant commentary and copious menu choices. Having said that, it annoys the hell out of me when the guy in front of me in the drive-through orders a Big Mac with no cheese.

Speaking of which, the Hass avocado -- La Habra Heights, California. And it rhymes with "pass", not with "toss". Edit: oops -- as megc already noted. Where's the "delete" button?

I wish there were a word for the inside of a watermellon besides "flesh".

Paging Mr. Nugent.

Well, between McDonald's and Alice Waters, I'd say California has pretty much layed down the law.

The Black Mountain is Rex Stout's manifesto, a testament to love, dignity, honor and humanity. It should not be the only, or the first Nero Wolfe book you read, because familiarity with Wolfe's and Archie's characters is necessary to understand Stout's message. The part where Wolfe impresses Archie by whipping together a puttanesca using the contents of a rustic Italian cupboard is one of my all-time favorite scenes.

As Mr. Camp pointed out, barring very high or very low temperatures, the rapidity of the swings is more significant than the actual range. But unless you hand-carried each bottle from the winery yourself, you really don't know what they've been subjected to prior to purchase. Of course, if a great majority of the bottles in your cellar prove to be bad, then we'll all know that 78 degrees is an intollerable extreme. I would be happy to assist you in making a bottle-by-bottle judgement.

Dang! For a brief, glorious moment there, I thought bourdain wrote "commies". But I want to read it anyway.

Food-related terms for nationality or ethnicity do not so much link national character to cuisine as underscore the otherness of the target group. It also does the opposite of acknowledging that group's cuisine: it reduces their cuisine to the one unpallatable food referenced in the insult. Thus, Mexicans are reduced to eating only beans, Germans eat nothing but pickled cabage, the French eat mostly frogs, and the English do unspeakable things to their beef. The first three are clearly not true.

One would hope so.

Fish roe is ikra in Russian. I suspect the Japanese adopted this word, inserting the customary u (as in isukurimu). So, in Japan, is ikura fish roe in general (as it is in Russian), or is it used only for salmon eggs?

English is a quiltwork tounge With endless variation. We borrow words from everyone Without discrimination. But there are certain words that, when Pronounced the way the Frenchmen do, Our sensibilities offend As most decidedly non-U. And so for God's sake don't forget The 't' in ballet and gourmet.

Liza: Ser... err... Napkin quantity is not necessarily a function of belly size. For me it's a function of how loud I speak with my mouth full.

Just the other day I was at a banh mi shop where the menu on the wall is in Vietnamese, and I grapped a paper bag and jotted down all the selections, intending to have a Vietnamese co-worker translate for me later. One of the ladies behind the counter asked me (in perfect English) what I was writing. I told her it was an American custom to transcribe menus, commonly known as "Menu Spotting". She said don't bother because the menu on the wall rarely corresponds to the food actually being served that day. Later, I showed my notes to my Vietnamese co-worker, and, after studying it for some time, she said "you have very bad hand-writing."

If you ever care for some company, I'll be happy to join you. Together, we can drink twice as much wine, and have a lovely chat, besides.

Now there's a worthwhile goal: Only drink wines whose Parker score meets or excedes your body temp. Steve, Stone asked, above, and you indirectly answered him: So the score is often not so much a score as a prediction. Have you ever had a wine that you felt fell short of a high score awarded years prior? In other words, just how reliable are Parker's and others' predictions?

Yes, well, the wine I drink goes to 101. It's one higher.

When the first cases of these $2 wines appeared at TJ, they were quite impressive, and we bought and drank quite a bit. A few weeks later, the supply became spotty at our local stores, and buyers were saying that the Charles Shaw was a one-time bulk purchase and was now petering out. Then, all of a sudden, there was more in the stores than ever before, cases stacked to the ceiling! And no end in sight. Problem is, it no longer tasted as good. Still not bad for two bucks, but not so good that I'd choose them over wines in TJ's next price point ($2.99). In other words, they started to taste like $2 wines. At first I thought I was just tired of drinking the same wine for weeks. But Bobaloo's post (above) explains it: it's not the same wine at all, but a hodge-podge of cheap gallonage bought all over the state! So the quality will veer dramatically from bottle to bottle. Of the last few that I tasted, the Merlot was a better Merlot than the Cabernet as a Cabernet, if you get my drift. Same goes for the Chardonay and the Sauvignon Blanc. But who knows where they were from, and where the next bottle will come from? The current monster bargain at TJ in CA is 2000 Cline Zinfandel for $5.99. Cline is an actual vineyard, so the quality is consistent. This wine normally costs $7.99 at TJ, and tastes like it costs $12.99.

Yes.

While we're on the subject of Mr. Lewis' indiscriminate, if not downright promiscuous use of apostrophes, allow me to point out that "a thread of its own" would have been a trifle less incorrect. Thank you. I'll be in my glass house if anyone needs me. Oh, yes, I have a solution to the Starbucks problem: in order to prevent them from profiting by giving millions of people exactly what they want we must pass laws repealing capitalism and prohibiting the use of milk products in coffee beverages. They did that in Lithuania in the 50s, and sales of double-grande decaff cocoanut espressos skyrocketed.

Hey, that reminds me: no one commented on my excruciatingly esoteric Dean Reed joke. Actually, on second thought, Chicken Kiev and Dean Reed have nothing in common. I was just showing off about how I know about this guy Dean Reed who nobody in the world no longer cares about. Poor Dean.

Wilfrid, I spent a wonderful evening at the Firebird a few years ago. I had various fruits, vegetables and herbs -- all consumed in the form of infused vodka. What a splendid way to absorb nutrients. Vanessa, you're right about Russian varenie. I'll only add that Russians use it to sweeten tea instead of sugar. Well, ok: often in addition to sugar. The syrup part of the jam dissolves in the tea, and the berries sink to the bottom and have to be eaten with a spoon after the tea is drunk. Cherry varenie was my favorite. Very addictive. I'm not familiar with moiva or kharius (or maybe I've forgotten), but vobla is iconic. Vobla is a fish of the carp family caught in great quantities in the Caspian sea and shipped all over Russia in salted form. For many Russians, it signified hunger and poverty, because often that's all a family would have to eat. In better times, it is the standard accompaniement to vodka and beer, especially beer. It was a common sight to see a Russian belly up to a table in a beer hall, pull a Vobla out of his pocket, and rapidly whack it against the table to soften it up and remove the scales. Then the dry, stringy, salty flesh is peeled off in strips using the fingers. Ironically, there was a time in Moscow a few years ago when Vobla couldn't be bought for love or money. It was catapulted from the lowly status of a beggar's dinner to a sought-after delicacy. I suppose I should mention that I barely tolerated Vobla when I was young. Nonetheless, I couldn't help getting excited along with my friends when one of us would whip the fish out of his pocket and start whacking it. Of course, the value we place on food is only in part based on what it tastes like. A popular Soviet film, "White Sun of the Desert", about a Russian soldier caught in limbo at a lonely southern outpost at the time of the revolution, has a marvelous anecdote involving caviar. Supply lines had been cut off, so the hapless soldier had to become self-sufficient in his little oasis, which contained a pool stocked with sturgeon. As the weeks drag on, we see him choking down large bowlfulls of caviar in order to survive, his disgust for the taste of it growing with every day. On a similar note, I have a friend who cannot eat caviar at all. When he was a child living in near-poverty in Khruschev's Moscow, his mother worked at a theater restaurant, and she would bring home dozens of little open-faced caviar sandwiches. He says he overdosed on the stuff, and he associates the smell of caviar with hunger, poverty and hardship.

Here is a helpful site. I can't vouch for Polish or Ukrainian, but here are some Russian definitions: Pirog: pie. Pirogi: pies. Pirozhok: litterally, a small pie. Baked or deep-fried dough stuffed with filling. Pirozhki: plural of pirozhok. Pelmeni: Siberian form of gioza or pot-stickers. They are made in a similar fashion -- rolled out pasta is cut in circles, filled with a dollop of savory filling, then pinched into a crescent or tortellini-style shape. Siberian Pelmeni are immediately frozen, usually simply by setting them outside the kitchen door on trays. If you're not in Siberia, put the trays in the freezer. They are kept frozen until it's time to cook, at which time they are boiled. When done, they are removed from the water and served with a lot, a LOT of sour cream. In my family, we would also add vinegar and soy sauce. In the Ukraine, Pelmeni are called varenniki (litterally, boilers), and the filling is often sweet. Apparently, in Poland they are called pirogi. Imagine that. I hope Helena shines light on this thread. Until then, I'll do my best to confuse matters even more: It's very difficult to define a Russian cuisine because it has always been a melting pot, even in antiquity. Russia traded with and, in turn, conquered and was conquered by countries from the far east to the middle east to eastern Europe to the Baltic Sea, and in the process assimilated a wide variety of dishes. Where do you draw the line? Siberian pelmeni are called gioza in Japan, shu-mai in China, varenniki in the Ukrain, pirogi in Poland, and tortellini in Italy (yes, I know there are subtle differences, but you get my point). Chicken Tabaka is Georgian. Borshch and golubtsi are Ukrainian (I think many "Russian" dishes are actually Ukrainian in origin). To further confuse matters, the Tsar's court imported their own cuisines: Beef Stroganoff was created by a French chef working for Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, a Russian diplomat. Or what about this: Chicken Kiev is actually an old French dish renamed by New York restaurants to please Russian immigrants. Now it's proudly claimed by Russian and Ukrainian Restaurants back in the motherland, making Chicken Kiev the Dean Reed of chicken dishes. Please, Helena, help us out here.

With the passing years one sheds one’s impressionability, thankfully, and becomes less distracted to that which is designed to attract attention and more drawn to that which has integrity. With language, even when grammar is obeyed, lexical permutations are limitless. And so, with ingredients and technique culinary possibilities seem boundless. However, only a very small part of what is possible makes sense, gastronomic or otherwise. Maybe it’s through this realization that we realize that there is far more probability in rubbing shoulders with perfection amongst the commonplace than beneath a bevy of outlandish, but novel, garnishing. I should add that I am still only nineteen. (Shouldn’t this thread be in the Symposium?) "...it's through this realization that we realize..." You're not a day over 16, are you?