Afterburner

Again, I dunno that it's courage. Just a willingness to experiment. I do the same thing when I brew beer. Some folks get into homebrewing so they can recreate the classic styles. Me, I got into homebrewing so I could brew weird shit that I can't get in a store. Like the beer I make with molasses, coffee, and chocolate syrup...

I'm not even sure I'd go that far. Your mileage may, of course, vary, but I thought the carob was quite ass-tastic, personally. We ended up using the resulting rye-and-carob-chip cookies for dog treats. The dog thought they were fantastic, of course. Well, my "cookie jar" is actually one of those large plastic Ziploc containers that are all the rage with these kids today. Not a zip-top bag, but a molded plastic thing with a lid that seals up pretty tightly. The cookies stay pretty moist for several days in those things, which is about how long it takes to go through a batch. Pretty good, actually. One of my first batches was with Dark Creme de Cacao.

My wife made dinner tonight, and it was Darned Tasty. She put a pot roast in the crock pot this AM, around the time I was leaving for work. Along with it she added a bunch of baby carrots, some onion, and some leftover sundried tomatoes she'd used for a dip last week. The roast was, additionally, seasoned with salt, pepper, rosemary, and no telling what else. When I got home tonight, she had had taken out the roast, some of the carrots, and some of the onions, and put them in a serving dish. And was busy going after the remaining carrots, onions, and sundried tomatos with an immersion blender, right in the crock pot. So the sauce for the roast was the roast juices along with the aforementioned veggies, all in a pureé sort of affair. Biscuits were also served. Mmm.

My wife and I have been to the one in Reston several times, and have always found it a highly enjoyable experience. They have package deals which provide a cheese fondue course, a salad, and a main fondue course, designed for 2 people. There's also a "Big Night Out" selection which adds a chocolate fondue. Or you can order each individually and pick and choose as you like. There are 4 different cheese fondues to choose from, 4 different main-course fondue styles (Court boullion, coq au vin, and fondue bourguignonne, and "mojo fondue"), and 9 different chocolate fondues. The cheese fondues come with a variety of breads, apples, and veggies. The main dishes come with a variety of mixed meats and/or veggies, along with sauces to complement the selection. An example would be the "Pacific Rim," which is what my wife and I usually get when we go there (it's one of the "Dinner for Two" options). It comes with: Teriyaki marinated choice sirloin, shrimp, peppered pork tenderloin, marinated breast of duck, boneless breast of chicken, and potstickers. Sauces: Thai Peanut, Teriyaki Glaze, Ginger Plum. The chocolate fondues come with fruits, marshmallows, and crackers. The ingredients are always high quality, the service is friendly and efficient, and we always have a good time when we go. My only real complaint with the place is that they, like most upscale restaurants, have obviously put a lot of thought into their wine selection, but their beer selection is ass. Their California salad (mixed baby greens with gorgonzola, walnuts, and rasberry vinagrette dressing) ALMOST makes up for the paltry selection of beers, though. Almost. (It's a damn good salad.)

Shoulda seen 'em. They were greenish-brown, with large, noticable grits. My friends were dubious, at least until they tried 'em. But you wound up picking grits out of your teeth for a good 10-15 minutes afterwards. I dunno about "guts." I think it's really more just "ignorance" combined with an unchecked sense of adventure. Yep. My first batch of cookies with a new bag of flour is made with 100% of that flour, whatever it is. The second batch is made with 1 1/4 cup of the new flour and 1 cup of all-purpose flour. The mixture produces cookies that are remarkably similar. The rye, barley, and oat cookies made with 1 cup of all-purpose flour and 1 1/4 cup of the other flour were pretty indistinguishable to my palate. The blue corn meal and the white rice flour were pretty noticeably different due to the gritty texture, and the corn meal still provided a nice amount of "sweet corn muffin" flavor. The quinoa flour also made for a different cookie when mixed with 1 cup of all-purpose flour -- they were still puffy and still had that nutty flavor. Haven't tried the buckwheat/all-purpose flour mix, as I just got the buckwheat flour last week. But soon. Very soon...

Possibly. On the other hand (and this is meant simply as a datapoint for your consideration, rather than a rebuttal, since you could write what I know about baking on the back of a postage stamp and still have room left over for the National Anthem), when I first began baking these cookies and monkeying about with the recipe, I tried several different types of hooch to replace the vanilla extract, and I used a lot more than the recipe called for. What I found was that 3 tablespoons of any kind of hooch produced a strong, very noticable flavor of that hooch in the finished cookie. One of the cookies I made had 3 tablespoons of 151 rum in it, and hoo boy, you could smell the rum from across the room whenever someone opened the cookie jar. Which is perfectly fine if that's yer bag and all, but I was looking for a more subtle flavor. Especially since I was monkeying about with the flours and wanted to be able to taste the flour and not just the hooch. (This is one of the reasons I can't really say how the rye flour tasted in the cookies. The first batch was overpowered by the rum, the second batch fell victim to an unfortunate decision to try carob chips instead of chocolate chips, and the rest of the flour was used in half-and-half batches where the rye was cut with all-purpose flour.)

Can't say that I have. Vanilla extract is alcoholic. Irish creme is alcoholic. So I'm just using one type of alcohol-based flavoring for another. St. Brendan's, actually. It's richer to my tastebuds, and also cheaper.

The Greater DC Metroplex trades places with the Greater San Francisco Metroplex every year or two for the #2 and #3 spots on the "Worst Traffic In The US" list. #1 is, of course, Los Angeles.

My sweet tooth is really geared towards a short list of foodstuffs. Although I like cakes well enough, I suppose, they don't really turn my crank. Same for pies. Same for fudge. Same for most mass-produced candy. But cookies...ah, there's what calls to my sweet tooth. And not just any cookies, either. None of these dry, dusty things they serve at Christmas -- so flavorless and dessicated that they have to be frosted with cake icing to give 'em taste and moisture. No, what compels me the most are variants of our old friend, the Chocolate Chip Cookie. Moreover, what I really like are chewy, gooey chocolate chip cookies, preferably eaten shortly after removing them from the oven. But even a day or two later, I still want them to be chewy and somewhat gooey. With this in mind, I looked around the Internet for a "chewy" cookie recipe. The one I found and began using was Alton Brown's "The Chewy" recipe, which I have slightly modified to my own purposes. My modified recipe is at the bottom of this post. In any case, once I had the recipe in hand, I travelled to my nearby Whole Foods to purchase the ingredients. The recipe called for (iirc) cake flour. I did not see cake flour. What I did see, on the other hand, was a bunch of non-wheat flours, like quinoa flour, millet flour, rye flour, barley flour, and so on, and so forth. And my brain said "HRM!" So I grabbed a bag of barley flour and went home to bake the cookies. Understand that, at this point in my life (which was back sometime in the summer), I had not the first clue about baking. I didn't know that monkeying about with baking recipes can sometimes produce disastrous results. I had no concept of "agglutinators." I had no idea what made one flour different from another. All I knew was that the recipe called for a type of flour that I couldn't find, so why not just get some funky, weird-ass flour instead and see what happened? Alton Brown's original recipe called for 13-15 minutes in the oven at 350F. First time I baked these cookies, following that recipe exactly, my first batch came out as little carbonized hockey pucks unfit for human consumption. After some trial and error, I got the cookies to stop coming out burnt. And they were pretty tasty. The texture was different, of course, since I was using barley flour instead of cake flour (or even regular flour). But they weren't bad. This started me down my current path of cookie experimentation. So far, the flours I've used have been: Barley - An okay cookie. Not fantastic, but not bad. However, these were my first, and I hadn't standardized my recipe at this stage, so I need to revisit them. Rye - Like the barley, an okay cookie. Also one I need to revisit because my memories are nebulous about this one. Oat - Cookies made with 100% oat flour are mighty freakin' tasty. The higher oil content of oats gives the dough a silky texture that's simply amazing. However, they don't hang together well, so it's best to let 'em cool down a bit before trying to scrape 'em off the baking sheet. Blue Corn Meal - Yep, you read that right. I made cookies with blue corn meal. My first batch, I made without doing anything to the corn meal prior to making the dough. Consequently, the cookies were VERY crumbly and VERY gritty. Nice flavor, though. Tasted like a sweet corn muffin with chocolate chips in it. Second batch, I soaked the corn meal in with the melted butter for 20 minutes on low heat to soften it up. This helped noticiably, though the cookies were still grittier than I would prefer. These cookies also fall apart when warm, and so need some cooling time before attempting to take them off the cookie sheet. White Rice Flour - Another gritty flour. I didn't like these much at all. The texture was like eating fine-grained sand, and the flavor didn't provide much of an incentive to put up with the texture. I also tried soaking this flour in with the melted butter for 20 minutes prior to cooking, and it helped a little, but not enough to make me wanna finish off the bag of the rice flour. Quinoa - I was a little dubious about this flour at first, because the smell REEKS of freshly hulled beans, and that smell continued unabated even after the dough was made. However, the cookies were fantastic. They have a faintly nutty flavor that would make you think the cookies had been made with some amount of peanut butter. They also hang together really well. Oddly, they don't flatten out like the other doughs, and instead tend to puff up a little. Buckwheat - Very strong nutty flavor. Very dark cookie. Very good. Left to try (at least, this is all that's on the Whole Foods shelves that I haven't tried yet): Whole wheat, Millet, Amaranth, and Kamut. I'll let you know how it goes... ---------------------------------- Alton Brown's "The Chewy" chocolate chip cookie recipe, with modifications by Yours Truly. 2 1/4 cups flour 1 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoons baking soda 2 sticks unsalted butter 1 1/4 cups brown sugar 1/4 cup sugar 2 tablespoons milk 1 1/2 teaspoons irish creme (original recipe called for 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract) 1 whole egg 1 egg yolk 1 regular bag of chocolate chips 1) Mix flour, salt, baking soda. Set aside. 2) Melt butter, sugar, and brown sugar together. (Original recipe called for simply melting the butter and not the sugar or brown sugar.) 3) When butter, sugar, and brown sugar are melted, pour into mixing bowl and mix with electric hand mixer (or stand mixer, if that's your bag) until butter is no longer seperated. Takes a minute or two. Doesn't hurt to mix a little longer, either, in order to cool down the mixture so the chocolate chips won't melt when you add 'em later. 4) Add milk, irish creme, egg, and egg yolk, then mix with mixer until mixture is smooth. (Add the egg and egg yolk last, otherwise they'll get slightly cooked by the (still warm) butter/sugar mixture as you add in the other ingredients.) 5) While mixing, pour in the flour and mix until smooth. You'll probably need to scrape the bowl a time or two. 6) Add chocolate chips and fold in with a spatula. 7) Stick dough in fridge and chill for a few hours. 8) After a few hours have passed and you're ready to bake the cookies, pre-heat oven to 350F. 9) Once oven is fully heated, spoon dough onto baking sheets. Put cookies in oven, and set your timer for 7 minutes. They may be done in 7 minutes. Or they may not. But 7 minutes is a good time to check 'em and see how they're doing.

When referring to the Northern Virginia area, I call it "driver's Hell."

More bold strides forward tonight, both for me as a cook and my wife as a diner. As I diplomatically try to explain it, my wife has well-defined culinary comfort zones, outside of which she is reluctant to venture. Usually when I explain it this way, she follows up with "I'm a fussy eater." And so she is. Last week, however, she mentioned that she wanted to try to start eating fish, for health reasons. After I recovered, we discussed what she didn't like about fish, and what she wanted to avoid. The answer? "That fishy taste and smell." Right. So today I went to Whole Foods and dropped $25 and change on two tuna steaks. Tonight's menu: --Pan-grilled tuna steaks, seasoned with salt, freshly ground pepper, and rosemary. --Fresh green beans sauteéd in butter and salt --Green salad with red Bibb lettuce, dandelion, and escarole, tossed with a toasted walnut oil and champagne vinegar vinagrette. --Beer/cheese bread made with Gouden Carolus Ambrio and some chipotle cheddar. I also tried roasting some garlic, but they got burnt. We live and learn. The verdict: She liked the tuna, and would eat it again. And there was much rejoicing. The vinagrette was a little vinegary, however (prolly 'cause I added extra because I thought the toasted walnut oil was a smidge overpowering).

If I had to guess, I would say that this program was prompted by the fact that many Americans cited "morality" as the prime motivator for their candidate choice this past presidential election. TV production companies are nothing if not experts at wetting their finger and sticking it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

Beats me. All I know is that The Joy of Cooking sez to lightly dust meat with flour prior to searing 'em, and Alton Brown sez the same thing in I'm Just Here For The Food. If I had to guess at a reason why the chops were moist this time, it'd be because I didn't cook 'em to death.

This pales in comparison with some of the offerings I've seen posted in this thread, but I've only just started taking baby steps down the road to being a home cook, so this was a big deal: --Pork tenderloin chops, rubbed lightly with salt and pepper (freshly ground peppercorn medley), lightly dusted with buckwheat flour, and then seared until medium. --Stove-top stuffing (yeah yeah), made with my "sweep the kitchen" stock that I made last week. Gave it a hearty flavor, especially after I burnt it slightly due to not reading the directions properly. While I say that I am just now starting to cook food, that's actually a smidge misleading. I've cooked before. I just (A) didn't know what I was doing; (B) didn't really enjoy the process, and © didn't do it but maybe once every couple of months. So I've seared pork tenderloin before. And it's always come out well done, dry, and chewy. These pork chops were cooked wonderfully well. They were moist, tender, juicy, and flavorful. It's amazing what a little knowledge can do...

If you care to drive further afield than Arlington/Alexandria, you can find: Jaipur Royale Indian Cuisine: As mentioned in another thread, this is the best Indian food offered in the Fairfax/Merrifield area -- which is saying a lot since I can name off the top of my head 5 Indian restaurants in that area that I've tried, and have seen a couple more that I haven't bothered trying. Natta Thai: This is a small, hole-in-the-wall 10-table restaurant in Vienna. They offer fantastic Thai food, including a delectable chili duck (battered and deep fried boneless duck meat in a chili-basil sauce). Ask for it extra spicy and they will gladly comply. I grew up in Louisiana and Texas, eating cajun and tex-mex. I like spicy food a lot, and it takes a considerable amount of heat to get my attention. The extra spicy chili duck got my attention. Their rather ugly website is here: http://www.nattathai.com/HomePage.html That's Amore: Also in Vienna. This is a small regional chain, but they make excellent Italian food and they serve it family style if you want. 2941: Serious upscale dining in the outer reaches of Merrifield. http://www.2941restaurant.com/ is their website.

Not so much a question, but more of a suggestion for Producer Bruce Siedel. Two challengers that he should try to get on the show are: 1) Ron Siegel, the only American chef to ever win as a challenger in the original Iron Chef series. (Bobby Flay won in a special show a year or three after the original show went off the air.) Chef Siegel apparently works at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton at the present time, but has worked at Nob Hill and Masa's. 2) Bill Hufnagle, aka Biker Billy. What could be more American than a Harley-ridin' barbecuer? I'd pay good money to see Biker Billy compete against Morimoto.

Various comments in response to several portions of the thread so far: -- Takeshi Kaga is an actor who was chosen for the role of the flamboyant Chairman Kaga in the original Iron Chef. Among his other credits, he played Jesus in the first Japanese stage adaption of Jesus Christ, Superstar. -- Contrary to the image they try to present in the original show, the producers usually decided who the Challenger would compete against. When the Challenger chose an Iron Chef, most of the time he/she was simply parroting back what the producers had told them. (Sometimes the Challengers could decide who they wanted to compete against, but even then it was ironed out before they actually started filming the episode.) -- The judges usually consisted of a rotating stable of regular judges, most of whom were famous for non-food stuff, but were also amateur foodies. These were the folks that sat on either end of the judging table, like photographer Tenmei Kanoh and that guy in the bow tie who used to be in the Japanese Parliament. In addition to these semi-regular judges, there were also one or two (depending on the year) celebrity judges. -- The original Iron Chefs all point out that, as the show progressed, they gained two very important edges over the Challengers. (A) They developed a lot of experience cranking out a variety of dishes in under an hour; and (B) they knew the personal tastes and preferences of the semi-regular judges, and could adjust their dishes accordingly. -- The competition of the original series was very, very serious. Reading the Iron Chef book reveals that the chefs -- living under the Japanese notion of "losing face" -- were VERY upset when they lost. Chen Kenichi said that whenever he lost a battle, he would go home and his wife often wouldn't speak to him for a day or two. -- The original announcer, Fukui Kenji (aka "Fukui-san"), was not from the food world. He was a baseball announcer for Fuji Productions, the company that produced Iron Chef. -- The company that did the English translations for the original show were a bunch of Canadians living in Tokyo. Dr. Hattori's translator, in particular, has a noticable Canadian accent. -- The original show used to feature a lengthy intro of each challenger, describing their history and their cooking specialty. Something like that would be welcome in the new Iron Chef America. -- Kevin Brauch was indeed the floor reporter for the earlier Iron Chef America specials. However, the Iron Chef USA specials, which featured William Shatner as the Chairman, and which had the annoying-as-hell non-stop cheering of the studio audience (prompted by the producers of the show, who urged them to cheer with signs and instruction cards), had a female floor reporter whose name I don't recall. -- I would be very surprised to learn that the Iron Chef America shows are actually rigged with a pre-determined outcome.

So last night, I had a couple friends over for dinner. They're both foodies (one posts to this forum under the monniker of "fimbul"), and both have been a source of inspiration to me as I've started down the path to being a foodie myself. Since they don't have cable, I thought it would be entertaining to invite them over to watch the premiere of the new Iron Chef series, and also to serve them dinner while they were here. Now, the last time I cooked for anyone that I wasn't related to by blood or marriage was...never. So I was (with the help of my wife) forging bold new trails along the lifepath of my existence. The evening's dinner menu: Smoked lobster Mixed green salad Louisiana Wild Pecan rice (which is not wild and contains no pecans) Black rice cooked in my "sweep the kitchen" stock Since fimbul is a foodie, and since he'd expressed interest in my spiffy new Meco electric water smoker, and since lobster only takes 45 minutes to go from "raw" to "fully cooked and smoked," I decided to hold off on starting the cooking process until fimbul and his girlfriend got there. The lobster tails were 4oz rock lobster tails. Two a piece for each diner, removed entirely from the shell (and I saved the shells to make lobster stock). There was much ooh-ing and aah-ing about my smoker as I placed the tails on the grate and put the little packet of orange wood pellets on the heating element. For hors d'ouerves prior to dinner, we had some lovely cheeses that I'd purchased at the Whole Foods store down the road from Chez AB. One was a 4-year-old aged cheddar, another was a very mild and buttery Blue Castello, the third was a mild chipotle cheddar, and the fourth was a wonderfully subtle and complex goat's milk cheese from Spain called "Vare". Also on deck was a small loaf of homemade beer and cheese bread, made with the beer bread recipe from The Joy of Cooking. Despite the fact that the recipe said "1 1/2 cups of beer (not stout)", I went ahead and used a 1 1/2 cups of Dominion Oak Barrel Stout, a stout that attempts to capture the flavor of stout aged in old bourbon barrels by adding oak chips and vanilla to the beer as it ages. The vanilla flavor showed up nicely in the bread, I thought. This was my first time ever to bake a loaf of bread,and as it sat cooling on the rack I would wander by occasionally and just look at it and say "Neat! I made that! Kick ass!" Also available pre-dinner was a "pesto cheese blossom" made by my wife. This is basically a layered dip, using cream cheese, pesto, and sundried tomatoes as the layers, all encased in a shell of provolone slices. So we chatted while the lobster smoked, and there was more ooh-ing and aah-ing about 10 minutes into the smoking process, when the smoker was belching out tons of smoke. As the timer counted down, I got the rice going on the stove. When the timer went off, the Louisiana Wild Pecan rice (which is not wild and contains no pecans) was done and was delectable, as usual. The black rice...wasn't. It had not absorbed much of the stock and was still hard and uncooked. So I left it to cook a bit longer while I fetched the lobster out of the smoker. Smoked lobster has a lovely orange color to it, and smells like a seaside campfire. If you like smoked foods and you like lobster, and you've never tried to pair the two, you oughtta give it a whirl. Sadly, my timing was off and the lobster had cooled by the time I had finished melting the butter (a lack of cookware meant that I had to melt the butter in the pot I'd used to cook the wild pecan rice) and the table was fully assembled. And the black rice still wasn't done. Dammit. So we forged ahead with the wild pecan rice and the salad. And, of course, the lobster. And it was marvelous. I mean, really, it was fantastic. And all throughout the meal I kept thinking "Holy poot, I made this! How in the hell did I manage to cook something that tastes like high-dollar restaurant food?" Not bad for a guy who, a month and a half ago, couldn't have told you the difference between a sauciér and a saucy bee. Anyhow, just wanted to share.

I grew up in the Deep South, and no, the cornbread I grew up with wasn't sweet. Having had sweet cornbread since moving to the Eastern Seaboard back in '96, however, I can't really say I don't like it. In fact, it's actually pretty good.

Since many people have used this thread to sound off about restaurant behaviors in addition to ingredient abuse, allow me to add my own pet peeve: Restaurants who have obviously given a great deal of thought to their wine selection, but then only offer Budweiser, Miller, Coors, and maybe Sam Adams and Pete's Wicked as their beer selection. Here's a newsflash for you chefs and restaurant managers: Good beer goes great with good food. And there's beer out there that's brewed with the same exacting standards of artisanal quality that underlies the best wines. Do yourself a favor, and buy a copy of Garrett Oliver's The Brewmaster's Table. And don't skimp on your beer selection.

Comparatively speaking, very few decisions in life are reached via pure logic and a thorough cost/benefit analysis. Personally, I like the little scrubby scoury pad bits on the sponges I use. These would be the sponges that I keep for months at a time before throwing away and which I have only recently (as in, within the last week) begun to microwave. Of course, I dunno why I bother with the microwave, since 99.9% of the time, my sponges are used for either (A) clearing off the large chunks of food from plates and bowls and casserole dishes and what-not prior to running them through the dishwasher (where any bacteria from the sponge will get kilt); or (B) cleaning my pots and pans, which will be exposed to critter-killing heat levels the next time I cook in any case.