GordonD

My wife's doctor has instructed her to abstain from salt for the remainder of her pregnancy. As I am of the persuasion that considers unsalted meat an abomination, this has caused no small amount of tension in the household. I'm looking for saltless cooking techniques and recipes (my wife insists I call them "salternatives" -- as she is pregnant, I find it advisable to humor her as much as I can) that don't leave food bland and only vaguely edible. Any suggestions?

I'm not sure I'd know the difference, but given where I got it, I'm assuming French.

I've got tons of recipes involving boudin noir, but I can't find a single one for all the boudin blanc cluttering up my freezer. I bought it on a trip to Montreal -- it was right next to the boudin noir and I figured what the heck. The problem is, I haven't the first idea what to do with it. I can't even remember ever seeing it in a dish, unless Irish Breakfast counts. So, what do I do? Substitute it for boudin noir in one of those recipes with the sauteed apples? Toss it into a risotto? Use it to flavor white beans? Wrap it in pie dough and throw it in the oven?

Y'know, I have been kicking around an idea for buffalo chicken pie. I was just going to mix cooked meat with Frank's Read Hot buffalo wing sauce, top it with blue cheese, top that with pie dough and throw the whole thing in the oven. This sounds even cooler, though. I sense an experiment coming on!

It's the chilies that worry me, but I suppose that what little is left after the wings are good and gnawed on shouldn't be too overpowering, especially since these weren't atomic-level wings to begin with.

Does anybody here use the pile of stripped bones left over after an evening of beer and chicken wings to make stock? I was planning on tossing them into the bag of chicken bones we keep in the freezer, but I'm worried how the spices involved might affect the stock.

I like to braise them until they hit the falling off the bone point, but Tim's probably right that they can reach done in 20 minutes. If you have any dried chili peppers around, you can toss a whole one in with the braising liquid. It should give the liquid a nice, warm quality.

I once accidentally oversalted a pot of chili I was making for the office potluck. It was within tolerance range (barely) and I didn't know what else to do, so I brought it in anyway. Our then-food editor told me I should have tossed a potato into the pot, as it would have absorbed the extra salt and brought the chili back to where it should have been. I've been trying to find a reference to this somewhere, to no avail. Does anybody know if this works? How long does the potato need? Peeled or unpeeled? Depending on what kind of broth you are working with and what you are using it for, might starch from the potato cause issues down the line?

Most of the places around here are open year-round, though some on the mountain will close for a month or two in the summer. Did you wind up going to the Panda?

I live just down the road, and the Inn at Long Trail could cover either the stay or the restaurant. The dining room there has an oatmeal-crusted chicken with a maple-lemon cream sauce that is fabulous, and the Guinness stew served in the bar has been written up in Gourmet. There's also a place a little further down the mountain called Heli's that does pretty good German/central European food. I've had some really great veal there.

So, I was out in my garden, picking herbs for tonights dinner -- coeur de porc a l'armangac from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook -- when I notice that the thyme smells wrong. I did not realize it was lemon thyme when I planted it last year. In fact, until I did some Googling to find out why the heck my thyme smelled so citrusy, I didn't even know there was such a thing as lemon thyme. I'm rather emberassed to admit that this probably means we never actually tried the stuff from the garden last year. Anyway, now I've got all this thyme that doesn't smell or taste like actual thyme. What should I be using it for?

I want to speak up in front of Joe American Average. Joe American Average knows a good burger, a good pizza and a good steak when he finds one. All other factors being equal, he'll take a hand-ground burger cooked over the grill rather than a Big Mac, or a wood-fired oven pizza made from fresh ingredients rather than some frozen nonsense. However, Joe American Average does not fetishize food the way some of us -- and I'm one of them -- tend to. All other things frequently are not equal, so issues of time and money mean Joe American Average is willing to settle for the lesser product, which he does not think is bad just because it isn't great. I do not feel I am in any position to criticize his priorities.

I don't know about that at all. There was one bar I went to in Philly for no other reason than they had the best -- and cheapest -- cheesesteak in the neighborhood, and there was another I frequented largely on the strength of its chicken wings. My favorite local watering hole is renowned for its stew, and I don't know if I'd devote quite so large a portion of my visits to NYC to McSorley's if they didn't have one of the best $5 lunches I've ever eaten. Many bars use food to distinguish themselves from every other establishment in the neighborhood that has the same selection of beer. Get yourself a reputation for the best burgers or wings or chili in town, you have a leg in terms of attracting people who maybe eat a little more discriminatingly than they drink.

It could be post-production corrections aren't in their budget. I suppose that's still a black mark, but it's a black mark against Food Network's higher ups rather than the staff of an individual show. The USA Today thing is pretty lame.

In the case of the crabs, it seems fairly likely the mistake was that of a film editor or producer rather than Rachel Ray, and for all we know the responsible party may well have been disciplined if the mistake was brought to the attention of his or her superiors.

They look like they're all, or at least mostly, fat and skin. No meat was evident from what I could see through the packaging.

Some people from UVM and the Vermont Fresh Network are studying that -- there was a piece in the New York Times a while back -- but the notion is a bit controversial.

I've been working my way through Fergus Henderson's "The Whole Beast" and one of several ingredients that has been eluding me is the central ingredient for his crispy pig's tails. I'd seen packages of them in Asian food marts, but these were all far from home in places I wasn't doing any cooking. Nobody had them at home. Recently, I finally found a farmer at a local farmers market who offered them as part of a special order. They were cheap, so I ordered two packages. Now, the packages I'd seen in the Asian grocery stores had a half-dozen or so tails in them, so that's what I was expecting. The packages I got each had one tail, still attached to a decent-sized hunk of the pig's hindquarters. I figure I can get a few more of these to amass enough tails to make the recipe. It seems really wasteful to toss out the non-tail portion, but I don't have the first clue what to do with the bloody things. Make stock? Render for the fat? Any suggestions?

So, as near as I can tell, chorizo is sometimes a salami-like sausage from Europe with a lot of paprika and a bit of a zing to it that happens to go really well with dried apples, and other times an incredibly spicy Mexican sausage, also with paprika that needs to be cooked but makes a mean taco. I have also been led to believe liguica (or linguica -- it seems to go both ways) is a milder version of chorico, but I'm hazy on what relationship, if any, chorico has with either chorizo. Is it more or less the same thing as the Mexican one?

I'm in the process of putting together a wedding registry at Amazon. My fiance and I are already pretty well-equipped in terms of household gear, so we thought we'd round it out with gourmet ingredients we'd rarely buy on our own, like blocks of foie gras and jars of black truffles. I've had some incredible olive oils and aged balsamic vinegars, but I can't for the life of me remember any brands to look up. Does anyone have any suggestions?

There's an incredible old-world bakery in Middletown Springs, which is a half-hour or so to the north. They usually have a table at the Manchester Winter Farmer's Market, but I don't think that will still be operating in April. Stay away from Lainey's -- a rib place in Manchester. My former roommate was a cook there, and you couldn't pay me to eat in a kitchen that would employ him.

I've used heart in combo with brisket for chili with good results. I also smoked a heart over hickory once and was quite happy with the outcome.

It is a moral imperative that you use it to make an omelette. I recommend smoked gouda for the cheese. It will be one of those "where have you been all my life" moments. Also, cook potato latkes in it. Take some artichoke hearts, briefly sautee them in it and then toss them with pasta and a little olive oil.

I'm seeing somebody who is big into Brazilian jazz and folk music, so I thought maybe it was time to add Brazilian food to my cooking repertoire. I'm interested in something informative about the cuisine in general. Is there a Brazilian equivalent to Madhur Jaffrey?

So, does anybody know if marble or slate fits that bill? My chemistry/physics knowledge is a bit lacking.