Suzanne F

As long as you have a basic vanilla version down, you can do just about any flavor. Instead of infusing the liquid with vanilla bean, add the lavender, or basil, or crushed lemongrass, or star anise -- whatever, to the milk/cream. Infuse, strain, proceed with the custard base. You can alway add in solids just as you churn, like chunks of crystallized ginger, etc. When I was doing pastry, ice creams and sorbets were my favorite thing to make. I started working on things like a Beaujolais not-so-nouveau ice cream (I found a stash of unsold BN in the liquor room), and a tomato sorbet (for a contest). Come to think of it, this was the ONLY thing I liked about doing pastry! I've got all sorts of bizarre recipes, but I guess we'd have to talk privately for me to give you any -- © issues and all that -- but I'd be more than happy to do so.

Jaymes, I think I love you. You too, Sladeums. ::slobber::

TMTM, in every case you mentioned, it was the other folks who had the problem. Why waste time worrying about those idiots? Sorry for the bad grammar, but: I and Paul (hubby) both LOVE to be seated with strangers at communal tables. If the general ethos is for talking and sharing, boy, do we ever. If it isn't (e.g., at Le Pain Quotidien), we won't go beyond "Would you please pass the butter." We love being seated at large round table when we go for dim sum, even though the table might become all round-eyes -- we can see what other peoople eat and ask them about it. On our recent vacation, we stayed and ate dinner at a place where most guests were seated with others. By our second night we learned: if you want wine with dinner, buy a bottle and offer some to your tablemates. "Man is a social animal" -- Spinoza

MeinBuddha -- I think I recognize your style. Weren't you a winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize a few years ago? I have absolutely no pretenses to your level of gourmenity, but I do have some questions for you about the meal, its ingredients, and its staging: 1. Where near Edison can the Space Shuttle land? 2. Are "Cinghale" like wild boar, but with the aitch-bone removed? 3. Did His Holiness end up splashing holy water all over the plane? 4. Since Wedgewood works in clay, and platinum is a metal, did the groom pay for new smelters/ovens? 5. If bride and groom were perfect, why would they not just be cloned? Surely much engineering is required to join ovum and sperm, even in vitro? 6. What music does this "Coltraine" play? Is s/he perhaps a distant scion of the same family as the great John, but whose branch changed the spelling of their name out of shame of some black sheep? 7. is "castrati eunuchs" not repetitively redundant? (this is why I think you were a B-L winner.) 8. If you are a true United Statesian, have you informed the CIA of the location of the landing place near LiJiang? Surely they cannot find it on their own. 9. Why was a knish "palette cleanser" necessary? What sort of servant is that, anyway? I would have thought that guests would have been provided cushions, in any case, and not forced to sit on bare palettes. 10. When did Chef Fleming have a sex (or name) change? How shocking to learn about it from you! Well, I have many more questions, and a great need for enlightment, but I daresay you will not have time to answer, as I expect you are off tunnelling to the core of the earth in search of the best way to heat your tea-water. But I beg of you, please grant me the great honor of at least one answer.

Another way to get coffee flavor in is to add the ground coffee to the milk/cream when you scald it, then let it infuse for a while (as long as it takes to give you the strength you like). Then strain the grounds out, reheat the liquid, and proceed with the recipe as usual. I am a very big fan of infusing the liquid with whatever flavor and then straining it. I've done it with toasted coconut in the milk/cream/coconut milk for coconut ice cream, and it works quite well. Wouldn't it be divine to have a Pacojet, though?

Peter is definitely my kind of kid! I'll bet the others are pretty cool, too. Go back and have a look at the thread about dips for vegetables, to bring to the office for lunch. (Sorry -- I'd post a link but it's too late in the cocktail hour.) That might work really well for kids -- highly participatory, high-fiber, fun, and easy to prep ahead of time. Also, if you give them sandwiches, load them up with vegs along with the other filling. I love to put alfalfa sprouts, cucumber slices, grated carrot, etc. on instead of or along with the lettuce. One of my favorite sandwiches is chopped veg in blue cheese dressing plus chickpeas plus tiny cubes of cheese -- how perfect is that? Just remember to spread a thin layer of butter on the bread first as a barrier against the moisture in the filling. It's easy to mix up fillings and wash/cut veg the night before, then just slap the whole thing together in the morning. Or give them the components, as Steverino suggests, so they can put it together themselves. Gee, I hope this all sounds reasonable to you; I never had kids and never had to make school lunches

You bet! Just remember to let it rest a bit before carving (so enervated from the heat!) and of course to pour the juices that run off back into the veg. There's a truc for every problem.

Moi? I can't take credit for the idea. Went to a T-Day dinner in Boston with college friends (1967) and just about EVERY dish had some sort of, um, substance in it.

Yup, your bird got steamed. (You would too, if someone stuck you in a hot oven, right?) Anyway, if your Le Creuset is a "French oven" (Dutch to the rest of us) or casserole with high sides, you might not even want to use it You want the hot air to circulate around the chicken -- that's what will help crisp it. Makes your oven an ungodly mess to do it in a shallow pan, but what's an hour of scrubbing compared to the prospect of perfect chicken?

Col Klink -- try adding it to the stuffing of the Thanksgiving turkey. (No, I don't mean hops) Yum.

I did mine with Meyer lemons, half salt, half sugar, no spices. I usually find the all-salt kind too salty and I hate to rinse them. Just cut, pack in jar, add salt and sugar, plus some extra lemon juice to keep them covered. BTW, I hope CC gets a fee everytime he mentions his favorite brand of vodka!

Just noticed this after posting about orange-flower water.

But you get better control with a blowtorch

Great minds think alike.

Hebrew National are edible when you cook the same way as Nathan's (pan or grill); but they will be a little tough no matter what. HN lost their "knock" (pronounced as k-nock) some years ago. They used to really spurt and snap when you bit into them; no more. And they don't taste as good, either. How the mighty are fallen.

Lamb tagine with dried fruit, preserved lemon, and chickpeas. Faro (boiled in veg stock). Mixed green salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Seghesio 1999 Zinfandel. Wilfrid -- I'm interested in your ragù. I always have trouble finding new ways to use chix livers.

Mike: you can always try this truc. After you brown the chicken, remove the skin and set it aside. Complete the recipe with the now-skinless chicken. Before serving, run the skin under the broiler to re-heat and recrisp it. Then serve a "leaf" of nice crisp skin on top of the portion of chicken. Or you can just remove the skin after cooking as you've done (serve the chicken skinless), and later crisp it up and make the chicken-skin po' boys that John Thorn writes about. They really are GOOD. But I agree with Wilfrid: the skin isn't expected to be crisp; the browning is for flavor, not looks. edited to remove that nasty word, "cheat"

Great question! Intuitively, I'd guess yes, but I have nothing to back that up. Also, makes me wonder: is there a point at which the water becomes fully "saturated" and cannot accept any more flavor/essences. (Kind of the way it can only hold so much dissolved sugar and the sugar has to recrystalize) And thanks for the stockpot recommendation. It's been a few weeks since I bought any cookware or cookbooks, and I'm getting antsy. Mine is an 8-inch tall, 14-quart aluminum pot. Okay, but not quite big enough.

Just found the recipe from Mi (the directions are mine): 200 gr carrots, peeled and cut in large dice 75 gr ginger, peeled and cut in 1/4-inch coins 45 gr shallots, peeled and cut in large dice 125 gr rice vinegar 50 gr mirin 50 gr honey 50 gr soy sauce 1 tsp. cayenne 1 T. kosher salt 200 gr canola oil 50 gr sesame oil Process carrots, ginger, and shallots in food processor until finely chopped. With machine going, add slowly: rice vinegar, mirin, honey, soy sauce, cayenne, and salt. Process until very finely chopped. (It should still have some texture.) With machine going, very slowly drizzle in canola oil to form an emulsion. Remove dressing to a storage container, and stir in sesame oil. This dressing will separate as it stands. Stir vigorously before using. Makes about 1 1/2 Quarts. Note: I have not tried using a blender; that will give you a smoother texture. To do so cut carrots, ginger, and shallots into smaller pieces, and add the vinegar and soy sauce at the beginning. Then proceed with the other ingredients in the same way.

Thanks. Except that it made me so hungry. I notice you mentioned Macellaria. I ate there a few times when I worked nearby, and thought the food excellent. The service was, alas, quite another story. It had so much less hype than the other places nearby (Pastis, the late Chinghalle, Rhone, Menu, etc.), but to my taste served better food. Is it still extant?

Yes, thanks for a great review. I haven't been there is a few years, so it's nice to know what they're up to. Do you happen to know if the monkfish was cooked on slate? Just a note: I did my externship there in 1996, and to this day I have trouble eating anybody else's fried calamari. I must have cleaned and diced thousands of those guys. The key is simple freshness: calamari comes in in the morning, gets cleaned; at night, a dip in milk, a dip in flour, into the clean fryer, and out onto the plate. Nothing fancy, just fresh.

Don't I wish I could!! But not all of us live where we can cook outside. I know, a grill pan is a poor substitute for the real thing, but it's all some of us have.

Frying would just be wrong for a steak. Too much fat in the pan (unless you're talking about "chicken-fried steak," which I suspect you're not). I guess what you're doing when you "pan-fry" or "pan-broil" a steak is first searing it (browning the outside over high heat), and then "sauteeing" it to finish. But for me, sauté (from the French word meaning "jump") connotes too much movement. And this is going to be confusing: when you cook filet mignon or a similar cut, you just sauté them QUICKLY, usually in clarified butter. Never use whole butter; it will burn. (You can always add whole butter to the pan sauce afterward. In fact, you SHOULD. Yum) I prefer a nice heavy-ish All-Clad or really heavy cast iron. Since it will get very hot, you want a pan that won't warp. And that has even heat dispersion throughout the cooking surface. I can tell you what works for me: When I want a nice brown surface on the whole piece of meat, I use either a sauté pan (sloping sides) or a frying pan (straight sides) -- doesn't matter which. Obviously, the cooking surface of the pan has to be somewhat bigger than the meat to be cooked. I pour in a little oil (canola or olive) -- no more than 1 tablespoon in a 12-inch pan. You don't need much, because the fat in the meat will melt. Bring the oil up to barely smoking over medium-high to high heat (forgive me, oh gods of All-Clad!), gently lay the (seasoned) meat in the pan, make sure the exhaust fan is on, and wait a few minutes. Give the pan a shake to make sure the meat isn't sticking. Season the uncooked side, not done already. Turn the meat over with my fingers or with tongs (NEVER a fork). Let it sit again. When it's a little underdone, take it out and let it rest. If it were a particularly thick piece of meat, like a 3-inch porterhouse, I'd probably stick it in a very hot oven right after turning it. Otherwise it would be well-done too far in from the surface, but raw in the middle. But this worked perfectly the other night for a 1-inch thick london broil (about 4 minutes per side; we like it rare). If I had a cast iron skillet, that would work fine, too -- and no oil needed to start. Although if I wanted to make a pan sauce after cooking the meat, I'd prefer the regular pan -- easier to hold when hot, easier for me to work with. When I want nice grill marks, I use a Lodge cast-iron grill pan. No oil. High heat (again, forgive me!). The only difference would be rotating the meat halfway through cooking each side, to get nice marks ("quadrillage").

Wow, that's the fanciest remoullage I ever heard of! That must be great! (Usually "remoullage" means adding new water to the already-cooked bones, to make a second, thinner stock. You combine that with the first one and reduce the whole.) FG: when you say "commercial freestanding stockpot" I assume you mean a steam-jacket kettle. It works sort of like a giant crockpot: double-walled, with the steam surrounding the inside cooking pot. It's incredible how fast those things can bring a full pot of liquid to the boil. And yeah, they can be BIG -- I think 50 gallons might be the largest? To give others an idea of the size: on the last work-night of a particularly hated waiter, we filled one with water and ice and dropped him in. And that wasn't even the largest available kettle!

Feet also provide more collagen, which gives a lovely rich mouthfeel and makes the stock jelly very well. My mother always put feet in her chicken soup, and I now get them in Chinatown when I want a really strong broth. Just strain out the toenails VERY carefully.