mizducky

The all-vegetable version of "Better Than Boullion" is pretty damn tasty too. I go through jars and jars of that stuff. They also have a mushroom version that I've been meaning to try.

I LOVE the concept.will hold off on the evaluation until you report back ! If done well, I think it is what most restaurants should be, with a little bit of "This isn't your everyday food, indulge a little !" too. however, I think healthy desserts are the wrong idea. People might be health conscious on their entree' but I think they go crazy with dessert ! ← I love the concept too. There are occasions when I do allow for a "splurge" meal out ... but then there are many other times when I want or need a place to dine out but don't want to make that particular meal a huge hit to my food plan. Now when I'm on my own, I meet this need with Asian restaurants of various sorts--but having additional options is always welcome. So a restaurant that was really good at the format these folks propose would definitely be cool by me. I gotta say it's an interesting-looking menu--lots of promising-sounding choices. And Melissa, your report indicates they are fulfilling their mission--at least at the Atlanta location. I'll be interested to see how the concept holds up if/when they continue to franchise further and further afield. (Is each location locally sourcing those fresh ingredients? Couldn't find any info on their site.) With the desserts, I appreciate the freedom of choice. At the price of each of those little dessert shooters, you could have three or four of them if you wanted to treat yourself (and what terrific solution to dessert-ordering dilemma syndrome!). I'm pleased to see a fresh fruit option too. Regarding a worry expressed upstream somewhere about small portions--welcome to my world, pal! (Said the woman living on 8-10 ounces of animal protein daily. As in, like, for the entire day.) A restaurant that dished up meat portions in the sizes these folks do would be absolutely on the mark for me.

On Thanksgiving Day itself, I will be participating in a free community dinner at my church. While this is an incredibly cool event in terms of all that good warm-fuzzy community stuff, I can't say that I find it satisfying from a food-geekery standpoint--the cooking is all done by a caterer who is donating his services, and while it's pretty nice for what it is, he does tend to take shortcuts (*cough* commercial pre-packaged turkey breast *cough*). So I'm contemplating doing a smaller dinner for friends a little later in the Thanksgiving weekend, so I can at least get my full-fledged roast bird skin fix. Depending on the size of the gathering I wind up with, I might either roast a turkey or else some other smaller bird. Other sentimental must-haves on my list: --stuffing--and the stuffing's going ***inside*** the turkey, dagnabbit! The fact that it'll get drenched in fatty turkey juices is IMO not a defect but the whole point of the exercise! My family recipe is a basic sausage/mushroom combo, based on an assortment of wholegrain breads. --giblet gravy, made from the pan drippings. --brussels sprouts--I have a recipe for sprouts in a maple/mustard vinaigrette--so simple and sooooooo good! --winter squash, in a decidedly ***not*** sweet preparation; I might even try to re-create the incredibly yummy stuffed kabocha served by my favorite Szechuan restaurant. --cranberry/orange relish, ground through one of those hand-cranked meat grinders (I found the box where I stashed my grinder! Hurrah!) Other dishes will probably show up too, depending on whim--mine and that of my guests. For instance, I'm really not much of a fan of the standard pumpkin pie, but if one of my guests brought one I wouldn't mind a bit. For my own dessert offering, I'm thinking of maybe doing some kind of poached pears dish--I've been really getting into pears recently. And I think I need one more vegetable--thinking about some roasted fennel or cauliflower or something along those lines. Plus I know somebody's going to want mashed potatoes. Oy--this dinner is already growing like topsy and I haven't even started inviting people yet!

However, after looking around the Z Trim site, I could not find any citations to any published, peer-reviewed studies substantiating these claims, which makes me wonder if there has actually been any independent consumer preference testing of this product. If they are true -- if for instance Z Trim replacement actually increases subjective liking in some cases -- this would be very interesting. ← I also did a fairly thorough Google search for independent reviews, studies, critiques, etc. of this product--and came up with nothing that wasn't either connected with the makers of Z-Trim or the already-convinced fans of the product. I confess this gave me some pause--especially because of those bold statements on the Z-Trim site. Now, I personally am extremely leery of the concept of just randomly subbing in "free foods" with the idea that they're a free ticket to keep on eating with as little restraint as previously. There just ain't no such thing as a nutritionally healthy dietary "free lunch"--just because one's subbed out half the fat from an otherwise nutritionally-dense food item doesn't mean the remaining nutritional content ain't gonna show up on your hips sooner or later ... unless one also does the real, hard work of portion control, nutritionally balanced eating, and accompanying exercise necessary for lasting weight management results. However, I can--and do!--see the moderate use of lower-calorie foods as a useful tool when employed as part of a reasonable, well-structured weight management regimen. And this Z-Trim does seem to bear at least a passing resemblance to konnyaku, another low-calorie gelatinous fiber product derived from natural sources that I like to use on an occasional basis (although to the best of my knowledge, konnyaku has not been marketed anywhere as a fat substitute--anyone know different?). Still, I'd feel a lot better about the idea of Z-Trim as one of those useful food-tools if I could find some independent reviews of the product ***somewhere*** out there on the Net. P.S. My personal nutrition/weight management research has led me to understand that, while a certain amount of fat (both saturated and unsaturated) is indeed necessary to human health, the average American does consume way more than that necessary amount, which is what makes fatty foods a key piece in the weight-management puzzle. So I'm not at all interested in any kind of "fat-free diet" ... but I would potentially be interested in a product that allowed me to create lower-fat versions of dishes for everyday (as opposed to special-occasion) consumption.

I'm fascinated by how often, and in how many ways, curries have been reinterpreted in other Asian cuisines. (Not to mention the many different styles of dishes that could be called "curries" in the various regions of India.) It really is a very versatile food-concept.

Y'know, Sandy, we're both carrying a bit more, erm, padding than back in our college days, but I'd still recognize that whimsical smile anywhere. (Or at least I'd like to think so. ) Oh yeah--and I also recall you mentioning that cheese was perhaps your most major nemesis in your efforts to eat more healthily. So I, a fellow cheese freak who had been despairing of ever finding a lowfat cheese that did not taste like crap, would like to heartily recommend one of my little dairy salvations: Laughing Cow Light cheese. These little things taste remarkably good (probably because they're a French product--I don't think the French would tolerate crappy "diet" cheese for an instant). Obviously they're no replacement for a super-gourmet chevre or such, but for an everyday snacking cheese they do pretty damn well.

I am shocked and saddened to hear this news. I only really knew Bill from his presence here on eGullet--especially haunting to lose someone one never got to meet in real life. But that foodblog of his, and the entire little world he shared in that blog, are going to stay with me for a long time. When I finally follow my pipe dream and do the Charles Kuralt thing cross-country in an RV, I will definitely make a stop in Moab in his honor.

Okay, but just remember: "Don't let your meat loaf (heh heh heh)" -- Frank Zappa, "The Blue Light"

Happy birthday, bro! I'm coming up fast on my 50th ... and I'm feeling pretty damn good about it, actually. I'm totally looking forward to hearing about your culinary roots. We should gossip offline about GLBT chorus stuff sometime--PM me?

And I'm not a baker at all, but I am a fan of carrot cake, so I think I might be a useful data point for consumer carrot cake preferences. I can tell you one of the biggest reasons I prefer carrot cake to conventional bakery cakes is specifically because of the heavy, rich texture. Maybe I'm a Philistine contrarian that way, but the light fluffy texture that many bakers seem to strive for in their cakes just doesn't do a thing for me (except as a vehicle for frosting ... ) But I don't think of that standard heavy, dense, moist carrot cake texture as "greasy." Still ... I have tasted a number of carrot cakes from American commercial bakeries over the years, and if those are the types you experience as greasy-tasting, well, I guess then I do like 'em "greasy!" I do have a question: the veg-cakes you find too greasy, are they just that way in comparison to your professional/personal preferences in cake texture, but you might find them pleasant enough as long as you thought of them as a dessert in an entirely other category than "cake"? Or are they just too greasy for you to find palatable, period? I mean, tastes do differ, and That's Okay. I too think that if your client is expecting standard-texture carrot cake, you might not want to mess with their expectations without checking first ... hey, for all we know, they might welcome a cake that's a lower fat-intake than otherwise. Not that one should be worrying about that when eating cake, but, you know how things go ...

A batch of homemade caponata is a thing of beauty, especially as an antipasto. There are a bazillion recipes out there; this one looks pretty typical.

How about some Thai street food specialties? If you get an authentic som tam (green papaya salad) going on, I'll bet cash money you'll have people lining up around the block. (And if your establishment has an open kitchen arrangement, the diners will get to hear a great percussion performance with every som tam order. )

I have had both good and bad experiences with both oven mitts and potholders. Relatively few of either, in my experience, are thick enough to provide good heat insulation. Right now I have a couple of good ones and a couple of crappy ones each (actually, the crappy ones are my roommate's). I prefer the mitts for handling bigger awkward things like casseroles that are harder to get a good handhold on with potholder; what I lose in hand dexterity due to the clumsy mitten shape I more than make up for in fuller hand protection. And I also try real hard to be focused, not distracted, whenever shuffling things in and out of the oven, regardless of what protection I'm using. (sez she who as a child made a bazillion of those jersey-loop woven potholders, which sat unused in a spare drawer in the kitchen because my mother knew they were worse than useless but hadn't the heart to tell me. )

I continue to be very happy with my inexpensive no-frills Manttra PC. The only downside to it, as I discovered the hard way, is that you can't put the lid in the dishwasher. One of its safety mechanisms is a little valve-plug with a heat-sensitive core, designed to melt and release pressure if the cooker starts to overheat. Well, the water in a dishwasher apparently gets plenty hot enough to melt that valve's innards--when I tried to cook some beans in my cooker right after the washing, the darn thing just would *not* get up to pressure nohow, mystifying me until I figured out what happened. (Manttra shipped me a new valve in a couple of days for a couple of bux.) This incident did prove to me all over again that, with the safety releases built into today's modern pressure cookers, it is pretty damn near impossible to get one to blow up on you. As long as you're a good do-bee about making sure the mechanism on your cooker is in good working order and all valve-bits clean and unobstructed by gunk, it's totally safe. Oh yeah--don't fear the hissing sound! That sound is actually your assurance that all is well and the thing *won't* blow up, because it's the sound of excess pressure escaping as it's supposed to. Now if, for some reason, the cooker's been hissing along just fine, but then the sound mysteriously stops, that's when you might need to observe some caution, because a blockage may have developed preventing excess pressure from escaping; that's why manufacturers tell you not to overfill your cooker, so that the contents are low enough that they can't splash up and clog a valve. Of course, the steam sound stopping can also signal that you've boiled off all the liquid and your food is going to scorch; that's why the manufacturers recommend putting in sufficient liquid, and keeping the heat just high enough to produce a little quiet hissing, not a Vesuvius of steam. Or perhaps the heat's fallen too low to maintain minimum pressure, which is not hazardous, but inefficient, as your food is then just simmering along at conventional pressure/temp. By the way, I use my pressure cooker to cook brown rice frequently, putting the rice and some water in a metal bowl on a trivet over about another inch or so of water (and sometimes I cook beans simultaneously, in that water in the bottom of the cooker). The rice steams in about half the time of conventional cooking (ie 30 minutes instead of 60). I don't own a rice cooker--no more counter space to put another gizmo--but with the cooker I don't feel the need anyway. My cooker is an 8-quart model. This is plenty of volume for my purposes, but then I'm usually just cooking for myself.

I like to cut the meat from a rotisserie chicken and make wraps on the fly, using either tortillas, other flat breads, or lettuce leaves as the wrappers, with a variety of shredded veggies, raw and/or cooked, as add-ins, plus condiments/dipping sauces as desired. Depending on the choice of wrapper, veg, and condiment, you can take this in a number of directions--Mexican, Vietnamese, Middle-Eastern, etc. Depending on diner's preference (and the cook's/mom's patience! ), you can pre-wrap these, or let diners build their own.

Hi! Sorry I'm late. Terrific blog. I've only been in Chicago once for a weekend about 15 years ago, so I don't have much to offer in the way of food observations about that city. So I'll certainly look forward to learning more about it. And about Korean food, too--I know a little, but not as much as I'd like to know.

I haven't been, but I think the Szechuan restaurant your family loves might be Chung King in Monterey Park (in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley Chinese community). The former chef of Chung King is the current chef of my favorite Szechuan restaurant here in San Diego, Ba Ren. My dining buddy and fellow eGullet member mmm-yoso mentions Chung King in his writeup on Ba Ren in his blog. Extrapolating from the menu and food at Ba Ren, I would expect Chung King to be similarly excellent, with no "dumbing down" of the menu for non-Asian tastes whatsoever. I keep meaning to hunt Chung King down on one of my sporadic trips up to LA, but alas, so many restaurants, so little time ...

I currently live just a few blocks from Tacos Fiesta. Its carnitas plate is pretty darn decent--generous portion, especially for the price, and the meat was nice and moist. Though once the guys there gave me an order of carne asada instead (I didn't discover their mistake until I got home with my takeout)--though the portion was once again generous, the meat was IMO overcooked and unremarkable in flavor. Hold forth about Fillippi's if you so desire (hey, it's cheap compared to many other joints in town ... ).

And if you read the article I posted just above, you'll also discover that cattle may be Typhoid Marys in this scenario (the article's choice of metaphor) -- the E. coli O157:H7 toxin has absolutely no effect on cattle, but the bug is quite hardy enough to survive the trip through the steer's/cow's gut and thrive in its manure (and then percolate via runoff into the water supply). Plus, again according to that article, as few as 10 cells of this bacterium are sufficient to multiply into a significant infestation. These are prolific little buggers.

Shifting focus a little ... In the course of researching an article on the recent E. coli O157:H7 outbreak (you'll see why I'm emphasizing the exact strain of E. coli shortly) I got especially deep into how a normally harmless--and even, according to some authorities, beneficial--gut bacterium had this propensity for turning deadly. In the course of that research, I came across this excellent New York Times article from 1998: click - Detective Work and Science Reveal a New Lethal Bacteria Now, it's not just the science geek in me that's fascinated by this stuff. The fact that the culprit of these contamination outbreaks is a rare but deadly mutation of a beneficial bacterium (while some sources merely call E. coli harmless, other reputable sources point out that its normal form aids significantly in digestion) means that we can't just go wiping out all sources of E. coli in the environment without negative consequences. And managing the food chain so that only the nasty O157:H7 (and a couple other deadly mutations) get wiped is a significantly more challenging task. And it doesn't even start to address the possibility of other such mutations arising. They're bacteria, after all--they reproduce fast and mutate fairly easily.

I hadn't been to Kono's before, but today I was in the area and dropped by. It's actually a classic of its type--SoCal beachfront surfer-grub joint. Surfboards hanging on the walls, and a menu full of tasty cheap filling stuff. I ordered what they called a cobb salad and got a dinnerplate-sized paper plate of very fresh iceberg lettuce, topped with mild ranch dressing, bits of real bacon, shredded cheese, hard-boiled egg, chopped tomatoes ... and what seemed like about two breasts worth of grilled chicken, in chunks. They also do their breakfast menu all day, including three more breakfast burritos besides the one HungryChris fell in love with. And yeah, you can't beat the location with a stick. Nice one, Chris. I usually avoid PB because of the crowds, but now that it's the off-season and one can actually find parking I'm going to see what else I've been missing down there.

I have had reflux (GERD) for several years now. It can get better, eventually, if you give your GI tract time to heal, and take appropriate meds. At first I was on Protonix; then when my insurance changed and no longer covered Protonix, I switched to prescription Pepcid with no difficulties. When the GERD was first diagnosed, I cut way the hell back on all the suspected irritants per your list. As my GI tract settled down, I decided to deal with the food aspect by eating mild most of the time so that I could enjoy occasional potential-irritant foods as treats. So far, this approach seems to work pretty well. These days I find I tolerate tomato products with hardly any problems at all, and fatty foods in moderation (not a big issue these days, as I'm on a low-fat food regimen for other reasons). I have to be very careful with spicy foods--one night of firey Szechuan can sometimes cause a few warning flares in the tummy, even through my regular meds. But I only really run into trouble if I have irritating foods a few too many days in a row. My favorite go-to foods whenever I'm feeling poorly, including and especially when my stomach is upset, are congee and other grain porridges. Made with chicken broth and spiked with fermented bean curd and other seasonings, congee has nice flavor and comfort-food quality, and really soothes my stomach. I also tend to make Japanese-style simmered stew/soups (nabe) full of sea vegetables, garlic, and ginger--very nourishing, and ginger root is known for its stomach-soothing properties. I have to say, while I still adore spicy foods, the necessity of eating milder a lot of the time has given me a new appreciation of more subtly-flavored foods. I get a lot of gentle-on-stomach flavor mileage out of onions and garlic, simmered or roasted to mildness; broths and stocks; fresh herbs; and Asian condiments such as soy sauces and sesame oil.

Yikes! Do be careful with the shrooms of uncertain identity, okay? As the old saying goes: "there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old bold mushroom hunters." /signed, a child of suburbia who stuck to picking wild raspberries

I really enjoy goat meat too, but I still have lots to learn about cooking it. I bought some chivo, in bone-in stewing-size chunks, from a local Mexican market during my last foodblog and did a pretty decent job of cooking it, at least for a newbie, but it still came out a little tougher than I would have preferred. I think I need to really braise the dickens out of the stuff the next time I try that.

I have never worked with fondant in my life so I don't know how much stiffer it is than cookie dough. But if you want to do a thinking-outside-the-box experiment, how about trying one of those Play-Doh Fun Factory extruder toys? Instead of that click/trigger mechanism on cookie presses, the toy has a simple lever that you press; it comes with several die shapes; and the price is so low that, hey, if it doesn't work out, you're not out a lot of, erm, dough.