Bob Musa

cornish game hens wrapped in banana leaves with cilantro/ginger/mint and roasted peppers stuffed with curried potatoes. these were so so good and will become one of our new standards. (mommy !!! banana chicken !!! banana chicken !!!) notice the bandaid on my wife's finger courtesy of my new edge-pro knife sharpener. she didn't merely cut her finger; she "shaved it". (she was using the claw).

congratulations on finishing it up sujit. a few more and we can have a tandoor cookoff right here on eG.

rice biryani. tumeric to give the rice a nice yellow color. throw in some peas and slivered almonds for crunch. or sauteed red and yellow bell peppers with mushrooms.

sorry. didn't mean to offend. i was referring to my trailer park...

i've read that there has never been a famine in a democracy. anyone know if this is true?

i just got a report on it from my lead programmer (you can always count on programmers for taco bell reviews). he says its basically a tostada you can eat in the car... without beans.

reminds me of the burns and allen gag where gracie freezes boiling water so if she ever needed hot water she'd just defrost it.

can't ... help ... self ... must ... respond .... to ... topic ... with ... rant ... (disclaimer: the comments which follow do not apply to those who are poor thru physical disability and do not apply to all poor people.) ok, just so people know where i'm coming from, here's a picture of my dad while moving into of one of our spacious homes ( i was about 6 at the time). to be fair, we did later graduate to a 10 by 50 foot trailer (the largest in the park). i lived in better and i lived in worse while growing up and for a while had no place to live at all. i've received food stamps and i've been hungry. (food stamps were great because they allowed me to divert an additional portion of my household budget to mcdonalds.) after i left home for college i was living largly on hotdogs my girlfriend would steal from the USC cafeteria and reheat for me in the electric coffe pot in her dorm room. i was working 50 hours per week for minimum wage and 30 pounds underweight (6 foot 4 with a 28 inch waist). but most of all, i was deleriously happy to be out of the environment of poverty and not worried anymore about someone kicking the shit out of me just for the thrill of it. i remained poor and ate a lot of hamburger helper for about the next 5 years but compared to what had gone before, i didn't mind a bit. decades after the fact, i still get warm fuzzies just because i've arrived at a safe place. i realize that good people desperately want to believe that the problems of the poor can be solved by money. but i'm sorry, they can't. good people want to believe that the poor are simply versions of themselves with empty pockets. i'm sorry, they're not. you could have keller cooking for the whole trailer park for the rest of his life and the park would still have the same number of belligerant wife beating racists. (please forgive me for being blunt). there are immature and irresponsible people in all economic groups but (in my experience) in the u.s. the distribution of immature and irresponsible people is skewed towards the poor. no one is forced to have babies out of wedlock. no one is forced to marry a wife beater. no one is forced to drop out of high school. i've known a lot of people who have climbed out of that pit and they all share some common characteristics. first of all, most (but not all) had fathers living at home. second, they had a long term view of their lives. they could see years ahead instead of just looking at next weekend. finally, they CHOSE early in their lives not to stay poor. you want to really help a poor child? f#@k the nutrition. give him or her a scholarship to a private school. support school vouchers or anything else that gives a child the opportunity to be surrounded by responsible mature adults and the children of responsible mature adults. get the kid out of the trailer park. everything else will probably sort itself out. tbarton hits the nail on the head. you cannot end poverty by giving people money. based on my experiences, you can only end poverty by changing the behavior of the poor. end of off topic rant.

point and match to busboy ...

plug it in and press pulse ...

strange... just as most women i know who came up from poverty now have a closet full of shoes, so do i have a love of food from being hungry as a child. spam, baloney and lettuce fried in bacon grease, lima beans, lots of sundays featuring fried chicken and pork chops loom large on my childhood food memories. and then of course we had to hold our hands up to the sky when it rained to keep dry .... editied because i forgot to mention S.O.S. which was often served...

by god, i'm going to get the Maillard reaction if i have to leave this on the grill all day !!!

you are absolutely spot on. just yesterday my wife and i had a discussion about the cover and concluded that it had to be the ugliest ever to grace a food magazine. her comment was "what's so appetizing about that?". i can't believe that that picture was chosen without the involvement of some sort of nepotism. it certainly wasn't on merit.

we're heading off to maui in a few weeks for the first time in several years and wonder if any members have any restaurant recommendations for us. we are especially looking for holes in the walls on this trip. on previous trips we've tried: general store - 4 times total (2 times great 2 times merely very good) joes - very good and great service nicks - good Humuhumunukunukuapua'a - disadisadisadisappointing (mediocre $500 meal for 4) roy's (in the safeway parking lot) - very good and great service mama's fish house - best fish ever in my life and we are always trying to duplicate. here's a picture of our effort from last night

oh the irony ... for a final moment the pig once again has corn inside of it ... why cook? because my meal will be exactly the way I like it.

the plebian once more, sigh ... i'm ashamed but i'll admit it. we love dona maria mole sauce out of the jar. (ok, its a little heavy on the chocolate but the kids request it a couple time a month). kind of like chicken helper. it is soooo quick and easy. (i've found that placing thinly sliced raw onions on top of the chicken and mole cuts the chocolate flavor). if you can't find the ingredients and just want to try some quick mole i would recommend this alternative. for the cookoff we'll get out the grinder though. i always order mole poblano when i can find it, but its damn difficult to find it on a restaurant menu even here in california. however, the chili pepper in anaheim used to have good mole (i'm not sure the place exists anymore) and if you are ever in cabo san lucas, the moles at mi casa are excellent.

We ate at Thai Thani on I drive (near sea world in a strip mall) this january. excellent thai food. also, the informal place at the ritz (can't remember the name) was very good. you can sit in the bar at the ritz (live piano while we were there) and if you ask they will give you the full menu from the restaurant and you can both eat and people watch while listening to music. one advantage to going south of the convention center is that the traffic is less congested.

by gawd, i think its "made in america", but amazon says the book has a copyright of 1994 and for the life of me i swear i read the book in the eighties. it looks like it covers the same material however, as there is a chapter on "manners" and one on "cuisine". i'm 90% certain its the same book. many many thanks grub, i've spend hours searching for this.

if memory serves me correct, somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago there was a book (ostensibly a history of the "american" language) which devoted nearly a chapter to the issue of why americans hold their fork in their right hand. the reason had something to do with the fact that, on the frontier, people were too poor to afford forks (sounds like a monty python skit). if anyone recalls the name of this book i would be eternally grateful as i have been searching for it for the last 10 years.

my wife uses a modified veal picata or veal marsala recipe and substitutes the skate for veal.

question: does anyone know where i can get seekhs (in excess of 30 inches in length)? i've googled this and am coming up blank for a source. grub, recipes are from a tandoor cookbook. i need to get modifications from my wife. will post.

let me rain on the kaffir lime parade. (puts armor on). my wife and i purchased a kaffir lime tree (bush is more like it) and used it for several years in our thai cooking before it died of neglect this winter. maybe its just the california climate but: 1. i found that the leaves were no more aromatic than my 'normal' lime bushes, 2. i found that i really didn't even care for the taste of lime leaves that much. to my taste, it imparts a slightly 'soapy' flavor to food 3. and worst of all, the limes were useless for margaritas anyone else have this experience or am i just a barbarian?

hard to say this without sounding arrogant, but i have found that as one's home cooking skills increase, it becomes more and more difficult to find decent restaurants (could there be a connection ? hmmm ...) one striking thing i've noticed, based on my experience eating in the western hemisphere, (and excluding chains and fast food joints) is that there is no correlation whatsoever, between the price of a meal and the "taste experience" of a meal.

first meal accomplished !!! oven was up to 600 F with no cracks (yet). i'm going to have to work at heat management however. flareups were a problem.

amen to that. for that last three years, my wife and i haven't hesitated to take our children (now ages 8 and 13) to any restaurant. they order off the adult menu (the 8 year old's favorite is always oysters and the 13 year old cannot get enough raw tuna). often other diners approach us with a comment on how well behaved our children are. our secret .... (drum roll please) ... we talk with our children throughout the meal. parents need to recognize that if you go out to dinner with your children then that implies that its dinner WITH your children. of course, other than that, we're awful parents