SuzySushi

Pan, The closest "other" vegetable to salsify is burdock root (gobo in Japanese). Salsify has a somewhat more delicate flavor. It's sometimes called "oyster plant" because of its flavor. Both salsify and burdock are crunchy, but dense rather than watery or juicy.

My sister sometimes uses lard in baking as she is allergic to dairy products. She's on vacation for a week but I can email her your questions when she gets back.

My favorites (to make and to eat) are Crêpes Sarrasin made of buckwheat flour, as served in Brittany. And my very favorite filling is seafood in cream sauce, but I'll even eat them plain! The other week, I made ham & cheese crepes for dinner for ourselves and two 8 year olds, followed by crepes filled with ice cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup for dessert. There weren't any leftovers....

Every major holiday and often in-between, we get together with two other families that have kids (none of us has extended family in Hawaii) for an everybody-bring-a-dish foodfest in not-strictly-rotating locations -- my house, my friend C's house, the park for a picnic, or the beach for a picnic. Once we had a picnic for Thanksgiving! Easter last year was at my house, this year it's at C's house. She's doing a ham and her famous German potato salad. I'm bringing veggies -- roast asparagus and something with carrots (I'll look through my recipes to decide what) -- and egg salad or deviled eggs. The third family will provide dessert. We'll have an Easter egg hunt for the kids -- with plastic eggs filled with trinkets as last time, they didn't find some of the real eggs! The dogs can have fun, too -- we bring our dog to visit our friend's dogs. And we can all kick back, sharing the work and sharing the fun. The best part is, beyond the sit-down meal, the youngest kids are now of an age that we don't have to keep an eye on them all the time, so the adults can engage in conversation while the kids go off and play, and the teenagers go off in another room.

Wow, that Bo Kho is now on my list of "things I have to make very soon". It looks delicious. You say in your recipe to use coconut juice. Could I use a can of coconut milk? Or should I dilute that with water? What's the pretty orange drink that you're serving with it? ← "Coconut juice" is the almost-clear liquid that's inside a fresh coconut when you open it. Coconut milk is pressed from the meat of the coconut (with water). Asian stores carry "young coconut juice" in cans in their soft-drinks aisle. It can be used for cooking but is most often drunk straight out of the can (delicious!!!).

Brief corporate profile of Barilla from Hoover's (a Dun & Bradstreet subsidiary). Barilla has had a lot of corporate changes in its history, but it's currently run by the fourth generation of the Barilla family.

To add to what babka said about Barilla, the company built its Iowa plant as a virtual duplicate of its most modern state-of-the-art plant in Italy. It uses the same recipes and durum wheat as it does in Italy. One possible difference in flavor (although I haven't noticed any difference) might be due to different water. Barilla actually buys American and Canadian-grown wheat to make the pasta it produces in Italy. One reason it built the US plant was that the US government has been slapping imported pasta with huge duties -- which Barilla felt were ridiculous because its pasta was produced with American-grown ingredients! Barilla does make different pasta shapes for the US market, based on consumer preferences. I don't know if the company has changed its pasta sauces.

The Bo Kho looks & sounds lovely! I'm more familiar with Vietnamese beef curry, but will have to try this!

Pork & Corned Beef Stir-Fry, made with the corned beef leftover from St. Patrick's Day. I added a sirloin pork chop because there wouldn't be enough meat for all of us otherwise, and I cleaned out the refrigerator of odds & ends of veggies. This was seasoned with oyster sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil, and served over white rice. This is the kind of food I whip up on an "ordinary" day without following any recipe.

I usually cook dinner 6 or 7 nights a week. Sometimes it's something really simple -- just a bowl of Asian noodles with leftover meat & veggies thrown in; sometimes it's leftovers from the freezer. This week was unusual because we ate out twice (because we were out on errands around dinnertime and everyone was hungry). So: Monday: Steak with Sauce Chateau, served with Chevre Mashed Potatoes Tuesday: Homemade Pate (an experiment in French cuisine) served with salad and homemade potato salad Wednesday: Mexican food, ate out. Thursday: Corned Beef & Cabbage in Ale (including potatoes and carrots) Friday: Thai food, ate out. Tonight: I'm not sure what! I'm on my way to the greenmarket and will decide when I get there! Edited to add: Well, by the time I didn't make it to the greenmarket, I had just $3 cash left in my wallet -- my daughter cleaned me out asking for her allowance! -- so no point in going. Besides, I knew there were a lot of odds and ends sitting in the vegetable bin. So tinight's dinner was a stir-fry using up the rest of the corned beef from Thursday, plus a pork chop and all those veggies. See my post in the "Dinner" thread for a picture.

Regional cookbooks are definitely needed in English. With lots of photographs of the finished dishes and (if possible) cooking techniques.

I hope it tasted better than my mother's infamous unintentional all-white dinners of fillet of sole, boiled cauliflower (no sauce), and mashed potatoes (no gravy)! An all-white dinner could be quite amusing, but it just brings back bad memories for me.

Congratulations Chris, Andrea, & Bebe! Wishing you joy (and some sleep!).

What else? Corned Beef & Cabbage in Ale. Happy St. Patrick's Day! My local supermarket was (gasp!) out of regular cabbage, so rather than search the city, I bought Chinese cabbage... then continued with the Asian twist by serving the dish with Wasabi Mustard. The leftovers will make nice sandwiches.

Freeze the leftovers; reheat briefly in the microwave or wrap in foil and reheat in the oven. Leftover crumbled cornbread is great in stuffing!

Thanks, Lesa!

It was completely over the top, IMHO. Several other people, including designchick88 and Farns, have expanded on why bringing raw crabcakes to a customer's table is construed as making a scene. Was the chef's purpose to prove he was right? Embarrass the customer? No, good customer service doesn't mean not accepting blame -- quite the opposite, it means expressing horror and apologies, and opening an immediate investigation. That's called crisis management, for which every business should have a plan. See How Jack Turned Crisis into an Opportunity, an analysis of how Jack In The Box handled and snapped back from the e.Coli incident where several customers actually died from food poisoning.

Hahaha! Those sound like typical Hawaii directions... the other day, I actually found myself giving someone directions on the phone that began, "You know the corner on University where Burger King used to be...." I'll be sure to find it! (I think that's the same large shop where I buy Vietnamese mint.)

When we visited NYC with our daughter (now 8, then age 6 months or 3-1/2 years) we took her out all the time. Generally we chose Chinatown or neighborhood eateries (on one trip, we stayed at a friend's apartment on the Upper East Side, so we did Mocca Hungarian restaurant twice), but we also dined with friends in Greenwich Village at Trois Canards (French) and Alfalma (Portuguese). Everyplace we went was child-friendly, to us, anyway. One tip is to dine slightly earlier than the usual "dinner rush" time -- try to be the first seating, which varies by restaurant -- so the restaurant is not crowded. Another is to phone ahead (even if the restaurant does not require reservations) and ask if your child would be welcome. If you get a brush off on the phone, definitely dine elsewhere! And by the way, you didn't ask, but to help with the air pressure changes during your airplane flights (bad before landing, not so bad on take-off), bring along a bottle or sippy-cup to give your son when the plane begins its descent. (Fill with milk, juice, or even water.) It prevents screaming from discomfort. You and your seatmates will be glad.

Any particular market or location that's best to try?

Just a thought (a little late, perhaps, but I just saw your plea for help). Have you tried dipping the bottom of the cupcake tin in a basin of hot water for a few moments? That's the unmolding method for metal gelatin molds (because the heat is enough to make the metal expand without melting the contents). I've seen antique chocolate molds made of metal -- don't know how they unmolded them! Hooray for plastics and silicone!

How about: Zucchini and prosciutto Caramelized onions and prosciutto Roasted asparagus

Ohhhhhhhhhh.... you're making me hungry!!!

Nope. Only thing I'll say is that both restaurants are in Waikiki.

Okay... I'm in the food industry but have never worked in a restaurant. I do know a lot about food and a lot about customer service (my husband used to own a tour business, which I helped him with). To me the rules of good customer service are simple: The customer is almost always right. Even if the customer is totally in the wrong, as the business owner, restaurateur, etc., don't make a scene. That causes more trouble than it's worth because the customer will later badmouth your business to others and may place vindictive complaints with the authorities (Better Business Bureau, health department, whomever). Handle the complaint quietly -- offer to make amends, comp them the dish or the next meal, offer a refund. You'll have a satisfied -- or at least placated -- customer, and if you're still churning inside, go in the back and throw darts. I'll add a couple of examples of great versus lousy customer service. The great: For a special occasion, my husband took me to lunch at one of Honolulu's most exclusive French restaurants, where the chef prides himself on being a perfectionist. It's early and we're among the first customers of the day. We order one entree to share, and two appetizers -- mine a seafood bisque. The appetizers arrive. My husband's is delicious, but the soup is so thick and rich that I can take only a few spoonfuls. I push it aside. The waiter comes by and enquires, "You didn't like the bisque?" I respond that it's too rich for me. He removes it and offers to bring a different appetizer. I say no thank you, I'm ready for the main course. The entree arrives, beautifully divided onto two dinner plates, and it's perfection. A palate-cleansing sorbet arrives, along with the manager, who in a quiet tone apologizes for the bisque, explaining explains that someone (whose head has rolled in the kitchen, I'm sure) forgot to dilute the soup base, so I was served just the base! We are not charged for the bisque, and he comps us an additional dessert. We find the mistake amusing and we're very happy campers. The lousy: A new national chain restaurant opens in Honolulu with great fanfare. A few weeks after the opening, we go there and I order a main course that's served with a side dish of rice. The rice arrives and it's watery, not drained properly. (Now, if there's one thing I know, it's rice... Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, etc.... Rice is a big household staple in Hawaii and most families buy it in 20-pound sacks.) I call over the waiter and tell him that the rice is inedible and I'd like something else instead. He sends over the manager. I tell the her that my rice is too watery and that I'd like something else instead. She gives me a look of distain and announces, "It's supposed to be that way. That's how our customers like it." (What, I'm not a customer?) She does not exchange it for anything else or deduct it from the bill. I write to the company's headquarters with my credentials and relate the incident, offering to teach their chefs (staff recruited and sent over from the mainland) how to cook rice properly and adding, by the way, their customer service leaves a lot to be desired. I get back a "thank you for your comments" form letter. I have never gone back to that restaurant chain again.