SuzySushi

Often: Canned tomatoes. Canned beans. Canned corn (the vacuum-pack kind). Canned mushrooms, not as a substitute for fresh, but as a different ingredient in their own right. Canned reduced-sodium chicken and beef broths. Canned Asian vegetables like baby corn, straw mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts. Canned lychees and mandarin oranges. Jackfruit, too, when we stop by an Asian market. Canned evaporated skim milk to use in my mock Vietnamese iced coffee. Canned sweetened condensed milk for the real thing, or dessert-making. Canned coconut milk for cooking. Occasionally: Canned tuna. Canned white meat chicken (Costco's Kirkland brand). There's one brand of canned clams I like. Canned soups, for a fast "emergency meal" (and my daughter likes canned chicken noodle soup). Canned chili, likewise. We always keep a few cans in the pantry. My husband likes tins of sardines and smoked oysters. Inexplicably, he likes canned green beans (I can't stand the stuff!).

There's a great Buddhist tradition of "fake meats." I'd order these foods any day in Buddhist vegetarian restaurants. In Honolulu, there's also a small shop that sells some of these fake meats, frozen, mostly made in Taiwan (I've forgotten the brand name). Some of these products are truly amazing -- including mock char shu (Chinese roast "pork") that looks and tastes as good as the real thing, and a fake salmon steak (complete with "skin" made from seaweed) that tasted so "fishy" it was almost unbearable.

Let me weigh in with a couple of more anecdotes about rural romanticism. My grandmother owned a Civil War-era farm in a small village in the Catskills, NY. She turned it into a chicken farm (selling eggs), and sometimes took in boarders during summer vacations. By the time I was a young child, the chickens were gone -- there wasn't anyone left to work the farm. Before then, my grandmother had fresh eggs, and would go out to the backyard whenever she wanted a chicken. They had fruit from the apple trees in the fall, and vegetables from the small kitchen garden, which my grandmother "put up" for the winter. I don't know where they got their milk and butter... maybe from neighboring farms? Or maybe from the the grocery store. My grandmother made good, homestyle cooking (and the best pies I've ever tasted), but nothing exotic. I'm pretty sure she'd never seen a mango in her life, and the pineapple juice came from a can. Flash forward to rural France. We have a friend who lives in a hamlet in central Bretagne (Brittany). The average age of the people around there is probably in their 60s. There aren't any working farms in the area because young folks have left for the better-paying city life. ("How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?") Her mom's a good cook, but the food comes from the supermarket in the closest large town; there's even a hypermarché a 15 minute drive away. There's a pretty decent crêperie in a neighboring town, but that's about it for restaurants in the area. No one's in production making or growing any other foodstuffs because there isn't any demand for them. Why does our friend live there? Because her aging mother grew up in Bretagne, because they have a lot of privacy, and and because housing is dirt cheap. But they travel every chance they can, driving to other parts of Europe because they get cabin fever.

Merci beaucoup!

Yup. Or Indian food expert Madhur Jaffrey swears by wrapping the mangoes in several layers of newspaper and leaving them in a warm-room-temperature spot.

Congratulations on your new home! Before you go the custom route, check out the furniture stores around you. We have an L-shaped tall kitchen counter and were looking for bar stools to go around it. In our search, we came across lots of bar stools in two different heights (kitchen table height and bar height), and saw some very nice tables to match. Never had a custom-made kitchen table, but when I lived in NYC I had a custom-made buffet-height side table and kitchen shelving. The side table was a Parsons style made of matte black Formica to my size specs, and held up very well for 15+ years. The kitchen shelving was pine, finished with several coats of clear (shellac???) so it could be washed down (but I wouldn't use it as a cutting surface). Both were made by local firms that are no longer in business -- I found them by just walking in and inspecting the samples they already had on the floor.

I'm really surprised that more eGulleteers don't seem to have a preference for the more expensive pasta or rice, as there's definitely a difference in quality from the cheap stuff. Also, sugar, there's a definite difference in baking performance between cheaper beet sugar (often listed just as "sugar" on packages) and cane sugar. After making that mistake once, I now always make sure I'm buying cane sugar!

Other non-alcoholic liquids include apple juice (my usual sub. for alcohol in recipes calling for wine, sake, or sherry). I'd use that or white grape juice for rehydrating the raisins, and apple juice or cranberry juice for the cranberries. Brandy is always nice with prunes. I'd use that with the blueberries, cherries, and apricots, too. Or you could use a fruit brandy or eau de vie of the same flavor as the fruit. Figs... I'll have to think about. I don't usually use them in cooking/baking. Rum tastes best to my mind's palate, but maybe someone else has more ideas.

Ice cream or sorbet!!!

Another old one is Chinese Regional Cooking by Deh-Ta Hsiung (1979).

try adding blue colouring, and see what they say? only kidding!! ← Hey, this is getting off-topic, but did you see the article the other day about the Colored Rice that's being marketed in Taiwan to entice teenagers back to eating rice instead of hamburger buns?

Hmmmn.... Get someone to go with you and just try them! Sushi is (usually) served just two pieces per portion, anyway! I've never tasted sayori or shako. Katsuo is usually flash-grilled (so it's cooked on the outside but still raw inside) before slicing, and served topped with a bit of ginger and scallions instead of wasabi. Think of it as the "roast beef" of tuna! And yes, those orange clams really are clams.

No cooking tonight. One of the supermarkets here has just redone the front of the store as a gourmet food destination, with a cheese counter where cheese is sliced to order. So, dinner tonight was a European & American deli feast: Hazelsauer (sunflower kernel) bread from Germany Cheese platter: a ripe Taleggio (Italy), Zamorano (Spain), aged Gouda (Holland), blue Cabrales (Spain). There would've been goat cheese, too, but my son polished that off. Sliced pastrami (USA), each slice rolled-up. Spinach, cilantro, and grape tomato salad with Kalamata olives (Greece) and vinaigrette dressing. Now if we could only score a couple of Rocamadour cheeses...

These look & sound interesting. Was there enough tea to give them a distinct green tea flavor?

Cheap: Milk (always!), apple juice, oatmeal, canned tomatoes, canned beans, hamburger buns (on the few occasions I buy them), frozen vegetables, frozen fruits. Store Brands when store brand is often better than name brands: Safeway Select ice cream, pasta sauce, pasta (when I'm not buyin DeCecco or Barilla), olive oil, chocolate chips (when I'm not getting Ghirardelli); Costco's Kirkland coffee and smoked salmon; Japanese store brand soba. Expensive brands: Rice, butter, artisan cheese, artisan breads.

BBQ at a friend's: I brought two kinds of chicken kabobs -- chicken marinated in the Korean sauce that's normally used for bulgoki (soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, sesame seeds, garlic, scallions) and Middle Eastern chicken marinated in a sauce made from lemon juice, chopped fresh mint, garlic, and olive oil, seasoned with ground cumin, ground coriander, and turmeric. There were no leftovers! Also brought fresh pineapple cubes and watermelon cubes. My friend made assemble-your-own burgers with all the trimmings. A great, relaxed time was had by all.

The Marukai stores in Hawaii are taking orders for air-flown Hokkaido Furano Melons, for $37.00 each (3.5 lb./1.6kg size). What are those? We also get quite a few Fuji apples from Japan in Hawaii. They're usually sold by the piece instead of by weight, and have pale red skins rather than the red-blushed greenish yellow skins characteristic of Fuji apples from Washington State or New Zealand. They're larger, too. Japanese pears are also brought in on a regular basis, probably to cater to the Japanese market here. I wish someone would import kyohou grapes!

I'd add to these a couple of my frequent-reference books: A Dictionary of American Food & Drink by John Mariani The Lett's Companion to Asian Food & Cooking by Jacki Passmore

Yes, indeed. Besides my memories of dining there, I lost a friend who was there for a conference on 9/11.

Thanks for the tip! I now have a nice stash of fresh curry leaves in my freezer! Now to go back through my cookbooks for all the recipes I've been meaning to try. This little market is a gem, BTW. I'd never been there before (though the owner says it's been open a year) and they have all sorts of Indian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern ingredients. Another source to place on my "frequent shopper" list!

So, what do we do for the 100,000 celebration?

I keep both sesame oil AND tahini in the fridge. The sesame oil gets cloudy at cold temperatures, but will return to its normal appearance when it returns to room temperature. Stir the tahini before using. (I like a Lebanese brand I get at the health food store.) My method for making hummus is: Throw the drained chick peas into the food processor and process until ground. Add tahini until the consistency is a thick paste. Add lemon juice until you like the flavor balance. Keep tasting as you process. You can thin it with a little water or plain yogurt. Add seasonings & other ingredients to taste. I also go easy on the garlic because it seems to become more powerful as it stands. Leftover hummus keeps well in the fridge (I've never stord it more than a few days, though... it always seems to get eaten up!).

We had a strange dinner tonight that was completely un-photogenic but surprisingly delicious: bagels and lox with..... grilled portobello mushrooms! Bagels were split, toasted, and stacked with lox, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, capers, onion slices for my husband, and topped with a humongous grilled mushroom as the other half of the sandwich! (No cheese as the goat cheese in the fridge had turned funny.) My husband had to work late and wasn't sure when he'd be home... and I had a package of portobellos marked down by the supermarket, so... Hey, necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes serendipity!

Just discovered this thread. It's been a few years since I've been in NYC, so I don't know the recent departures, but... Like many others, I feel pangs of nostalgia when I hear the words "Horn & Hardart." (And does anyone remember Dubrow's Cafeteria? We used to go to the one on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, but they also had one near the Garment District.) And oh, the old Russian Tea Room! Does anyone remember the name of the Chinese restaurant on East Broadway that was used in a scene in a Woody Allen film? It had the best Cold Sesame Noodles, a recipe I'm still trying to duplicate from memory. And there were all those cheap French restaurants in the West 50s, where I got my first taste of French food, and the Greek places further west near 8th-9th Avenues. One was upstairs, I remember. And my first Moroccan restaurant somewhere in the East Village. The interior was draped with a fabric ceiling, and they served incredible green olive oil as a dip with bread. And a kitschy Italian restaurant in the West Village called, I believe, Vesuvio, where the waiters made Zabiglione at the table. And a wonderful little Italian pastry shop on 2nd Avenue around 40th Street, with wrought iron chairs and tiny black & white tiles on the floor... Damn! I'm getting hungry!

This called Paste Cacio e Burro. Alfredo adds a little cream. ← Yes, annanstee, that is the familiar current usage of "Alfredo," in the Americas anyway. But per earlier in this thread, there are some indications that the dish has changed, under that name; that was the question. Just as, for instance, "French" salad dressing in the US no longer means what it did until the 1970s or so (and still does in other English-speaking countries.) When you see "French dressing" in a US cookbook from about the 1960s or earlier, it normally meant some kind of vinaigrette, not something sweetened and flavored with tomato. The term was appropriated. ← Mario Batali's fettucine Alfredo recipe in his new book is pasta, butter, cheese, and a little of the pasta cooking water. No cream. That pretty much settles it as far as I'm concerned. As to "French dressing": This certainly meant the sweet orange goop back in my 1960s childhood, at least in my part of the US. Maybe not in cookbooks, but in restaurants and supermarkets. I would speculate that it already meant that in the 1950s. ← Excerpted from The Dictionary of American Food & Drink by John Mariani: (Edited because I can't type.)