Eden

And yet as far back as the 14th c. in Tuscany fegatelli was the name of a caul wrapped liver sausage. Meanwhile per the Oxford English Dictionary the word faggot was used for wood as far back as 1300, but I dont see any culinary references in English pre 1700 and that's for a "faggot of orange peel", so I would guess there's a relationship here... What a great photo. I've read about the dish, but never seen it, and now I really want to try one!

I'm jealous - We also had the Salumi Primo last night, and unlike my first try a week ago, which was perfect, this pie was undercooked and as greasy as described above Sad that there's such a variation in quality control from pie to pie on this. I love the flavor combo...

Girl Chow has some great resources listed. you might also check out New England Cheese Making Supply Co if you can't find stuff locally. They're who I got all my stuff from initially. Oh and look into "goat sharing" if you want to find unprocessed milk.

Brasa has had excellent meals for the 25/$25 in the past, as has Earth & Ocean (although E&O is WAY smoky while Brasa is only mildly so) I also discovered Andaluca through this promotion & love them. I find the food at Cascadia contrived, but have friends who love it so YMMV.

tomato beef chow mein! but only from this one "greasy chopstick" truck back in California that probably went out of business 15 years ago. Nothing to do with Chinese food, everything to do with tomatoey rich not quite spaghetti flavor... And I have a deep and abiding fondness for layer cakes, you know the big fluffy southern ones, lemon layer cake, coconut cake, red velvet cake, etc. bake me a fluffy cake with lots of frosting & I'm putty in your hands

As always great pics wendy! And now that I'm back from my exhausting filial-duty visit to Calif I can pull our leftover gumbo out of the freezer & have more tomorrow, Yay! A good friend from Louissiana chastened me while I was down visiting: He avers that what I made might have been lovely & tasty, but lacking Okra I had no business calling it Gumbo For round 4 of the cook-off I would vote for a tagine, prefferably one that calls for preserved lemons!

Drove by again yesterday & they have a name up now Kasbah Authentic Morrocan Restaurant "opening soon" so if a restaurant specifies "authentic" in their name is that a dig at other similar restaurants, or what? Eden With apologies for posting my original question in the wrong place.

OK here goes: The Gumbo Report Using the Gumbo Goddess' recipe as a base I made my gumbo this afternoon/evening. Yumm! I have totally been missing out! Took about 6 hours total, so I won't be making it on a regular basis, but what a wonderful rich, warm-you-up, spicy, absolutely uniquely flavored dish! Recipe variations/notes: 1) used a combo of duck/pork fat left over from making cassoulet for the roux 2) used a pork/chicken/bean stock (well filtered) left over from making cassoulet 3) used the spice recipe hwilson41 provided above for my Cajun seasoning 4) used Aidell's andouille, which is sold in packets just under 1 lb for some reason 5) chix meat was a leg&thigh combo as the butcher at Whole Foods was out of regular boneless/skinless thighs, and I didn't feel like deboning, but I have to recommend against this, as the leg meat was very tendony. (Yes this is the same guy who sold me the "smoked" andouille that needed to be cooked ) I took Fifi's advice re not leaving the stove to heart, so I had my phone, digital camera & a glass of tonic water near to hand along with my trinity, and set my "kitchen mix" playlist to run music continuously so I would not get bored... Note to future gumbo-ers: Do not stir your roux to Mettalica's cover of "Whiskey in the Jar" or you will get too enthusiastic & splatter some of your roux. Nat King Cole's "Girl from Ipenema" is much better And more seriously, when doing a long long stirring operation like this, I try to rotate the actual pot every once in a while so that if there's a corner I'm missing in my stirring pattern it gets moved around. Also, if, like me, you have wrist problems it's WAY important to switch off stirring from hand to hand, especially in the early stages so your dominant hand is still available when you get to the fussier final stages. Also if you grind your Cajun powder yourself, clean it out of the spice grinder ASAP. If you let it sit for 3 hours while you cook, it will stain any white plasticky bits orange! Filé powder is not optional. It adds a wonderful top note to the flavor of the gumbo, which surprised us immensely since when you sniff/taste the sassafras powder on it's own you think "dried grass: why would you want this in food?" Thank you all for the tons of advice & giving me the confidence to cook that roux nice & dark! Roux at 20 minutes, beginning to wonder if it will ever even reach the darkness of peanut butter... T minus 3 minutes! i.e. roux at 40 mins, slightly before adding trinity: the color of cocoa. It did darken slightly from here, but I was too busy to take another photo... I can't tell you how scared I was when after adding the trinity it got even darker, I thought I'd ruined it somehow! Final gumbo. There was a slight sheen on top of the gumbo as it simmered, but no fat separation occurred. Yay! More pics in the Gumbo album And one last thing: For some strange reason I've had this song running through my head all week, so I'm gonna share the joy... Jambalay' crawfish pie, filé gumbo, 'Cause tonight I'm gonna see my cher amio. Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o Son of a gun, gonna have big fun on the bayou

So Bill wants to know, since our Gumbo is about 20 minutes away from the table, what one traditionally drinks with Gumbo? And if the answer is beer, Eden wants to know what type of wine to drink instead Pics & notes to be posted later... edited for typo

A friend down in Olympia originally told me about this in fact, I just didn't have time to drive down there before this evening, but thanks! Happily, thanks to a mention on egullet , I discovered that Bottleworks, of all places, carries Leonidas, one of our favorite brands of chocolate so we got a box of those to share instead & will do the chocolate tasting another time...

It's never too late for cassoulet great photos. I have a question. with the duck confit it looks like you just pull it from the pot fat & all? I have always brought mine up to a melting point for the fat so I could shake of the majority of the duck fat before adding the duck bits to the cassoulet.

They must have sold it. I spoke with the manager? back in December & she was definately closing up, doing the going out of business sale, a little nostalgic etc. I will have to go check it out - darn, I HAVE to go to a kitchen store, poor me

Thanks folks! I grabbed some aidell's andouille this morning, since I don't have time to get down to Uli's.

I came across this last night at a wine tasting & almost fell over laughing. In fact we even bought a box as a joke gift for a friend. She's going to have a cow Is it great champagne? No. Is it perfectly drinkable on the level of other sparklers in the price range? Absolutely. (at least when transfered to a glass...)

If you want more fennel flavor, put the leftover pizza in the frigde for 36 hours & reheat it for say breakfast The fennel flavor definitely has had time to develop, but the peppers haven't gone insane so it's quite tasty. Pizza = breakfast of champions! Eden

My favorite wine shop proprietor recently described a champagne as "quadrilateral"

Ok so now I'm just confused by the whole smoked andouille thing. I went to Whole Foods & asked specifically for "smoked andouille". The meat guy gave me a snotty toned "anything that's called andouille has to be smoked by definition" line, and it even mentions smoke in the ingredients list, but what I got is a raw sausage that still needs to be cooked!?! nothing like the pretty photos shown above. I'm assuming "this is not the sausage you are looking for" but if it is please tell me... If I'm right I'll just toss this stuff in the freezer to use as "mock chorizo" later on, and go visit a real sausage store in the morning...

Anyone know where I can buy a chocolate tasting kit like this in the Seattle area? I have pulled together my own smaller tasting with random little bars from various chocolatiers but I like the idea of the 24 different varieties all from one source so the the variations are about the chocolate not about the brand... This is our Valentines Day plan thanks for any leads, Eden

Any idea on the return policies/quality of the ceramics from Viet Wah? I bought some rice bowls from a hole in the wall up in Vancouver's chinatown about a year ago & they must have been fired wrong because they would mildew like crazy. you'd wash them & put them in the oven to dry out to be sure they were really dry & they'd still mildew anyway it's made me gun-shy of asian ceramics but I'd like to get over that...

I've switched to using mostly organic produce, dairy & meat. Growing up in the late 60s/early 70's I learned that organic produce was "nasty". It had spots, it was wrinkly, etc, so I decided that chemicals were my friend and I didn't have to eat that icky stuff. About 8 or so years ago I discovered (at a friends house?) that organic non-fat milk had a better "mouth-feel" than Darigold and from there I just started comparison tasting & slowly switching over my cream, eggs, meat etc as I found that the organic products just tasted better, and finally I put my fussy little nose in the produce aisle and discovered that not only wasn't organic produce "icky" anymore, it had switched roles, and was now the better quality stuff (Nobody told me!) I'm not hard-core about it (that cheap mexican asparagus is making me very happy right now while I wait for the good local stuff to be available) but it has made a big difference in what I buy, especially with the mass produced foods getting more & more flavorless in favor of durability. Well and of course the series of French cooking lessons around the same time didn't hurt anything. Eden

Looking to join the Gumbo Ya-Ya gang this weekend, I need to know where to find smoked andouille sausage for my Gumbo. Anyone know a good source here in the seattle area? I can't remember for sure because I wasn't paying attention, but I think most of what I've seen has been fresh rather than smoked, and I'm told smoked andouille is essential to make my Gumbo taste right...

Re "cajun seasoning" The "Gumbo Goddess" recipe above just says add your favorite, but i've never played with any, so what are some good mixes that aren't so hot they'll kill me? (think 2 star in the Thai range) I don't want my epitaph to read "gunned down by Gumbo" but I do want it to taste good...

We're in Ballard so I assume our pizza comes from the Pagliacci's on 85th near 10th or so. thanks for the brand name of those pepperoncini, they're quite tasty.

We had the Salumi Primo last night, and they must have been hearing comments through the grapevine because it was not at all greasy. Quite tasty, and I was happily surprised that it was not too fennel-y. I love the finocchiona salami, but was worried that the actual fennel would send the pie off into overly liquorish land. Not at all, it was lovely. Now I just want them to do a Salumi pizza with a red-sauce base because "white pizza" is good, but it's not really pizza

so would a mix of rendered duck & pork fat that happened to be lying around after cassoulet work well, or would the ducky flavor be wrong? I have never had gumbo. The only places I ever saw it growing up included seafood (which I can't have) so I assumed that fishy-bits were integral to the dish and I never re-visited the possibility till now. I'm really looking forward to exploring something new here, but my complete lack of gumbo experience means I don't have a sense of what I can & can't substitute flavor wise so I'm really appreciating all the tips & comments. Eden