CharityCase

Jamie "Gaping" Maw has a couple of good suggestions but I might make wine an option among other alcoholic and non-alcoholic bevvies because it's really quite a tough thing to match with Indian. Funnily enough we had a bottle of the Réserve Perrrin with our meal the other night. It seemed like a nice fit with Lamb Dhansak which is creamier and slightly sweet and not dry. I had a highly-prized Dogfish Head IPA with the tandoori and with spicier drier dishes and it was definitely a great match.

When left to preheat for 30 minutes set to 500 my electric oven can reach 525 or so, but it's so horribly inefficient that when I open the door to put the pie in it immediately drops 50 degrees and takes as long to heat up as the pie takes to cook: 12 minutes or so. I've yet to get a proper dark crust anywhere but the outside edges...the rest cooks but the inside areas of the crust are only off-white. I'll have to try moving the stone lower, as up until now I'd been using the centre rack of the oven.

Whether a home chef, a cordon bleu chef or a non-chef, everyone can taste when there's too much caraway in the succotash, and it doesn't particularly matter that one says "I use a teaspoon", another says "Escoffier derides the use of caraway PERIOD" and the last says "this is gross!" I truly don't believe a knowledge of cooking is a requirement, it may just shed a different light on what makes a certain meal so great. I'm reminded of a dinner at the Beaver Club in Montreal with a large group of friends. Some of us are very into food, others aren't. So during various courses you'd hear half the table dissecting their plate, wondering what THAT flavour is. The other half was saying "This is awesome!" or just a simple "wow!" and yet we all drew similiar positive experiences from the meal..jsut retold in different ways. Many of us eGulleteers might agree that there's such a thing as knowing TOO much about food, finding your standards shrinking and perhaps like any one who obsesses over their hobby find it harder and harder to enjoy some of the simpler aspects of cooking and food because we're so heavily engaged in the complexities.

I used Alton Brown's method for seared Rib Eye the other night: Put a cast iron skillet in an oven and turn to 500. Once the oven reaches temperature put skillet on stovetop on high, sear 30 seconds per side then 2 minutes per side in the oven for medium-rare. The finished product was great but you've got to be mindful of the following: 1. Use a fricking glove pulling the 500-degree skillet out of the oven, and keep it there to remind yourself that it's blisteringly hot 2. Adding some finishing butter to the skillet will cause it to burn quickly, and may sour the steak's flavour. As an alternative drop some room temperature compound butter on the steak just before resting.

On the practical side, the restaurant discussions by region have been immensely helpful on two trips to London, various trips to the States, etc. I've made great use of the eGCI courses (stocks, braising, etc) and I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've been given advice on preparation of something I know nothing about. On the philosophical side, eGullet is the ONLY place where I can feel safe knowing there won't be a shortage of food topics to absorb, and occasionally contribute to. The definition of "foodie" is sometimes negative, like we're people who only cares about the best of the best, and won't eat anything below that which is ridiculously expensive. And that's why I like coming here and reading threads on stall food in Malaysia, fried chicken recipes and "I have tonnes of leftover _____....what do I do with it?" threads. Even the recent Regrettable Foods thread is there to reinforce the idea that we're actually reasonable people, who may love food but just as often screw something right up and start it over.

I know it's self-serving of me to resurrect a thread I created. Get over it. I wanted to put in a good word for the 222 Lyon Tapas bar, and for Suisha Gardens. Both have a few years under their belt (Suisha I imagine moreso) and both did not disappoint. If you haven't been to either before or in a long time, do yourself a favourl

Jeezus that show sucked. But it was the pilot and I'm sure it will get better. And as has been said I'm happy for Tony.

I think pho would be a fun one but since you've just done a pasta maybe jerk chicken? What about hot sauce or spice pastes? Many of us have tons of chillies being harvested now, and our indian eGulleters have them throughout the year.

Solid white tuna, capers, pickles, celery, dijon, olive oil, parsley, s&p, multigrain loaf, toasted, buttered and topped with mix, and grated emmentaler cheese Toaster oven mm...good.

Had a dinner party on Saturday and subsequently have roasted garlic and red pepper mashed potatoes up the yingyang. They're tasty on their own but I'm thinking I'd like to do something with them. Can you help?

I put my comments in the relevant eGCI Course on braising (as most of my advice came from there) but in short (rib): I braised beef short ribs for three hours in a low oven, flavoureds the stock with rosemary, and flavoured the reduction with bay, peppercorns and oregano. It was fantastic and I'm more than happy to have lots of sauce remaining.

Thanks so much to everyone for this extensive braising course. I wish I had the pictures to document things, but I braised about 4 pounds of short ribs on Saturday. Pulling various bits of advice and info from the courses here, I first seared them in a cast iron skillet with some clarified butter. In went mirepoix which were cooked fairly quickly (i.e. translucent onions) and then deglazed with a 1/4c of a Niagara Merlot/Cabernet that was kicking around. I was able to fit the cast iron skillet and a large stainless steel dutch oven onto one rack in the oven. As the pieces varied in size I grouped meaty and not-so-meaty and loaded them into their respective vessles along with mirepoix and a 3:1 beef stock/wine combo (thanks to someone's suggestion about trying that earlier in the thread) and, as per suggestions added about a half-inch to the pans. Both went into a pre-heated 325 degree oven, the cast iron covered in foil and the dutch oven with lid intact. They were left alone for the first hour then checked every half hour, for doneness and to skim off some of the larger portions of fat and replace with a bit of liquid. After 170 minutes they were pulled and all liquid was put onto an ice bath, then into the fridge. Sure enough tere was a very large layer of fat that was removed, leaving plenty of tasty, beefy liquid which I reduced and flavoured with S&P, and a bouquet garni of rosemary, bay, oregano and flat-leaf parsley. Everything was truly fantastic, almost as much as the shockingly-low cost of the meat ($21 CDN) that fed 8 people! This was a great course and I'm glad to have found such helpful advice before attempting what, really, is quite a simple but pleasing preparation of beef. Incidentally I found that the unglazed cast iron gave a better appearance to the finished product, while taste differences between it and stainless were very slight. With different types of vessels I did have to fiddle a bit with temperature and rack palcement to ensure the two were cooking evenly and at the same pace. Thanks to all (and in the words of my dinner guests: "Who knew something with a bone could taste this good!")

If you take this recipe and add a teaspoon of jaggery or palm sugar you'd have my Tom Yum recipe too. I'm not a Thai expert but some versions of Tom Yum include a small portion of coconut milk too don't they?

I love the tuna melt but I've always had a problem with the hot cheese/cold tuna thing. In the open-faced configuration I've tried broiling as most do, I've tried low oven then broiling which is better, and I've tried a full on bake at 375 which seems to work best because the tuna doesn't get any drier. I also favour the italian canned tuna in oil, as it holds up to the sustained heat better.

You know you're in the twilight zone when you're reading about people eating wagyu steaks for lunch!!

Just to balance things: She complains that I use too many dishes She puts feta cheese in damn near everything She says I intimidate her when she wants to cook She says "do you need me to do anything?" to which I say "yes" to which she says "I'm tired, can you do it?" and now me: I give advice when it's not "needed": I know I do this, and I'm trying to stop but it's really hard. and I refuse to stop saying "Why are we having Feta cheese with roast turkey?" The needed is in quotes because sometimes it's just better to let her do something her way rather than the right way. I "take over" and do not relinquish control in the kitchen easily Yes. Hmm, it seems I might be contradicting my complaints about her? I use alot of dishes Tony Bourdain should be hung for encouraging mise en place in a tiny two-bedroom galley kitchen with nary enough counterspace for the odd ramekin or five. In fairness we've gotten alot better at sharing cooking over the years, and while I do most of it I think we're making headway in the "you do this, I'll do that" part.

Yes, I should've been clearer about that. But they are worthy of a sniff or preferably a sample before hitting the checkout.

Good lord! I'm a no-egg fan because I'm usually eating potato salad with something equally rich, such as sausages or a big beefy burger. My heart can live without even more fat. Secondly the taste difference IMO is negligible. And dijon or a hot mustard is requisite, as is chopped up dill pickle, capers and a bit of pickle juice.

Delicious Cheese. Me and the missus have..umm...struggled our way through a number of the Quebec Raw milk cheeses that are becoming more available on the Ontario side. I used to say I'd never met a cheese I didn't like but I had to draw the line at cheese that smells like a mortuary, and usually tastes like what I think a cadaver would taste like. That said, they are interesting and stupefying in their popularity with certain people more hardcore than us. One such cheese was labelled as "mountain cheese", another had a cute logo of a dairy girl and a cow, and both tasted pretty much as described above. But isn't that the true fun of cheese? So many different flavours and just as many people loving the taste of rotting flesh as those who like Kraft shredded jack cheese. I AM a big fan of truely smoked gouda (i.e. not flavoured artifically), the manchego, near any brie or camambert, and old cheddars such as Balderson's 5 year. My budget usually allows for a few hundred grams of something we've never tried before, and Ottawa has great cheese in different locations. This thread makes me hungry.

Must throw in the Beaver Club (see my post about it) as the meal was exceptional, although the prices made sense for the exceptional meal...$100 a person probably if you do the set menu with a bottle or two of wine. It's in the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth on Rene-Levesque. Jacket and tie.

Good news. The Beaver Club was wonderful. It was also the best meal I and many of my fellow diners had ever experienced. There were 9 of us dining together on Wednesday night, and the restaurant was quite full even at 9:00 when we sat down. Having a Fairmont staff member doing the booking was advantageous and we were greeted with our first amuse bouche of the evening: Terrine of smoked duck breast topped with a mousseline of foie gras. Many of us opted for the $78 prix fixe menu ("Royal Selection" I beleive) which included a cold and hot appetizer, main, dessert and coffee. I started with Bay Scallops on the half shell, which arrived on a bed of rock salt and with six different preparations: I can't remember all of them but caviar, roe, another roe, shaved black truffle, tequila and cream and one other. Those who hadn't had scallops chose either a raw fish plate (tuna carpaccio, salmon, scallop) or a cold foie gras. Our sommelier had paired an alsatian riesling with the first course and it worked well with the scallops...crisp and a bit spicy but not so much so that it interfered witht he range of flavours in the dish. Our second amuse bouche missed the mark a bit but was interesting nonetheless: a warm cube of melon, a seared scallop and balsamic reduction. We moved onto the warm appetizers, where again there was a scallop entree but most chose the foie gras, seared and presented with a wafer of burnt sugar and atop green tomatoes and strawberries. I suppose those of you more experienced might say that there's nary a bad foie gras preparation to be had but this course was exquisite, perfectly cooked and well presented, the foie gras itself having a salty and smoky first bite followed by a velvety almost custard-like richness. At my end of the table we went on and on about the thing, and at the other end our friends sat speechless...or mostly speechless except for the occasional "wow". For the main course I chose the veal scallopini served with a boulangere of jerusalem artichoke and freshly shucked green pea and lardons puree. The veal was beautifully pink, the sauce perfect with it (not sure what it was but it was built with rich veal stock to be sure) and the artichokes just mindblowing. Others had the more classic chateaubriand served tableside with a bernaise sauce, roasted sea bass, roasted lobster tail and so on. Following our main course was another amuse bouche: a rich chocolate mousse with something white perched atop it...could've been a mint foam, could've been something else but of course by this point we'd essentially lost our minds in the magnificence of the night and I stopped paying attention. On that note the dessert course was more of a novelty but the few bites I could manage were good: Apple and mango chutney with avocado sherbet and two sauces (sorry, no idea what they were but one was likely sour cherry or cranberry). Coffee was served in a vacuum pot contraption which I'd never experienced before..quite unique and definitely worth the wait. Last but not least we were offered a tray of sugared grapes, gooseberries and a couple of small cookies. Both the meal and service were excellent, and while the price might be somewhat high for a frequent visit (with six bottles of wine our bill was around $120 p.p) but I know I'll go back again for another special occasion such as this.

Amazing thread, and I'd read it before but as I now have a serrano and lime infusion on the go: 1. I'm using fresh chiles from the garden, washed and dried them thoroughly, scored them and tossed them in. Someone has said the stalk left a strong..well..stalky taste? So I'm wondering whether the small amount of green stalk still left on the peppers will have this effect or whether the poster was referring to a larger gren section? 2. citrus and peppers would seem to have different infusion periods. I will undoubtedly taste this along the way and try for more heat and less lime (just my preference) but what do y'all think would be a good time to pull the fruit? What about the peppers?These peppers are fairly hot so I was thinking one week would be enough. Oh, and I'm using Stoli that I bought in duty free the other day Thanks!

With many thanks, here's the places I hit based on a few of your recommendations: Atlas Pub - Everything you said was true, great atmosphere and some fine food and drink options Ifield - nice Tournament - the fish wasn't bad. I've still been unable to find a good fish and chips but methinks I'm looking in the wrong places for it. Taiwan Village - So-so, I was with a large group but I found the food sub-par and way too heavy on cornstarch (so much so that I felt I was eating Hunan marmelade). Horrendously overpriced too. I DID have to go back to Talad Thai one day for lunch, and it's as excellent as I can remember. On this side of the pond I've yet to have thai that holds a candle to this place. One night we ate at a Pizza place on Old Brompton Road called La Papardella. Pretty good, but only one italian beer available? Troubadour's next to it looked more interesting. I didn't have time to get to Ma Goa but did pass it and it sounded nice. On on a non-putney note I was expecting something more interesting from Brick lane than what I found, mind you I probably needed to know a specific place to try rather than my random guessing strastegy. Thanks again everyone.

We tried a palestinian restaurant last week and loved their hummus. I asked for his secret and he insisted that the best hummus is made with dried chickpeas, because canned chickpeas aren't cooked to the right level of doneness. And sometimes they impart that wierd metallic taste. He also insisted that you take the chickpea skins out in order for it to be smooth. And he said to only use lebanese tahini, and then we had a lighthearted argument about that, since my father is Israeli, but all in good fun of course.

Another Liberty fan but good lord is it expensive when compared to other brands. I think many Canadian items have been cited but to the question of chcoloate bars I can confirm that in my brief stint with Nestlé there existed an entire room of Nesquick bottles and their respective formulas, all with slight variations in makeup, packaging and so on. it was amazing to see the different labels...some shhowed it being used on ice cream, otehrs showed it being mixed with milk.. There was a similiar room for chocolate bars with noticeable differences in fat, milk and sugar content. I seem to recall the UK version that we produced for export was the best tasting because it had a higher percentage of sugar and butter fat.