mizducky

All the worthy things previously said about proper handling of BSCBs are definitely true. Still, once grocery stores started stocking boneless skinless chicken thighs in quantity, I happily switched over to them for most of my quick utility-protein needs, and have never once looked back. But then, I always have preferred the dark meat on all my poultry, whether chicken, turkey, you name it. Still, boneless-skinless thighs do tend to be on the relatively smallish side. If you're going to be doing one of those dishes requiring a larger hunk of protein to wrap around a filling or something (i.e. the chicken Kievs etc. of the world), you almost need the larger real estate of a properly-pounded BS breast. Unless you want to make a larger quantity of little tiny rolls, of course ... There's also the strategy of buying skin-on parts, cooking them with skin intact to enrich the meat, and then skinning them after cooking. Physically much easier to do--although, if you're skinning primarily for health reasons, a much more profound test of one's willpower! (sez She Who Is Powerless Against The Lure Of Roasted Poultry Skin )

I should add that many vegetarian foodies of my personal acquaintaince do not care for those modern mock-hamburgers and mock-hotdogs etc. one bit, but find themselves using them--or worse, having them thrust upon them by well-meaning but clueless non-vegetarians!--at events like barbecues, where all the omnivores are chowing on beef burgers and the harried (non-vegetarian) host decided to put no real creative effort into providing a non-meat alternative. The portobello mushroom strategy is another one majorly overused by non-vegetarians to cope with vegetarian dinner guests. I've in fact heard at least one vegetarian friend fume that if they were served one more grilled portobello mushroom by a non-vegetarian host thinking they had come up with a cleverly original non-meat main, they were going to scream. I'll also reiterate the point made upstream, that the "fake meats" that have been perfected over centuries of tradition in the Chinese Buddhist vegetarian tradition are an entirely different--and IMO an entirely superior--category from the modern Boca Burgers etc. of western convenience-food culture. That said, of the several examples of vegetarian cookbooks on my shelf, some are much more successful than others. Moosewood, for all its early-hippiedom naivete, does have some very charming concepts and ideas (I too think its idea of using bulghur, rather than TVP or some other godforsaken crap, as the texture component in its vegetarian chili an extremely successful idea--and matched with the beans in that chili, voila: complete protein in one dish!). And Madhur Jaffrey, with her first-hand knowledge of many of the cuisines she writes about, produces some extremely reliable veg cookbooks (all the more remarkable because she herself is apparently an omnivore, having written many meat-and-seafood-laden cookbooks too). On the other hand, I once bought this monstrosity called something like "1001 low-fat vegetarian recipes" that turned out to represent every nightmare cliche about bad imitative-of-omnivore-food vegetarian cookery I've ever heard of--sadly, also sporting every nightmare cliche about lowfat cookery as well (i.e. heavy use of diet-industry nonfat and/or low-cal substitute products). This cookbook I can enthusiastically dis-recommend for anything other than a doorstop--fortunately I picked it up in a used bookstore so it didn't cost me all that much. Bear in mind that there are also plenty of totally-sucky omnivore cookbooks out there as well--bad cookbooks are not the exclusive province of vegetarian cookery, but rather a universal plague, so one shouldn't be blaming vegetarianism as such for this problem.

Hmmm. I usually roast in a metal pan rather than a Pyrex one. Admittedly this is a wild speculation, but I can't help wondering if the burning/sticking problem is less with metal than with glass. I'd certainly feel a whole lot more fearless about scouring the hell out of a metal pan than a glass one, if it came to that. Also, I'd often be deglazing the pan and making gravy or something with the drippings; I wouldn't want to do that in a glass pan, because I'm paranoid about putting Pyrex on a range-top burner, even if the manufacturer might say it's a variety of Pyrex that could take such direct heat. But if you want to stay with the Pyrex, maybe try giving the pan a spritz with non-stick cooking spray before putting it in the oven.

Oh yeah--I'm too lazy to read back up-thread, but I recall a couple of folks wondering about Chef #1's dessert in terms of whether curry, mint, and sweet would play well together. So happens that just yesterday I lunched at a recently-opened Indian buffet restaurant in my neighborhood, where I sampled several different curries of differing flavor profiles along with a classic spicy mint chutney. So I'm here to report that mint and curry, with sweet notes, do play together quite nicely.

Heh. In most parts of the US, and indeed in many outlying parts of the greater Puget Sound area, a grocery sign with an expletive would still be considered, well, blasphemy. But in liberal Seattle itself, especially in the character-drenched Pike Place Market, I bet it only gets a few raised eyebrows and a bunch of giggles--especially when it freaks the tourists.

I have used, or perhaps more accurately, done battle with MS Project a few times back when I actually worked for The Big Soft. Admittedly a powerful tool once you succeed in beating it into submission, but not one of their more user-friendly interfaces (and that's saying a lot--especially from a former Microsoftie! ) Excel is definitely an easier tool, with a much less savage learning curve. IMO and all that, of course.

Heh. I should also put another caveat on my pickle rant--as a child of New York, I already have demonstrated prejudices about the New York versions of certain food items--pizza, bagels, etc. My prejudices about pickles should probably be read in that context. (Plus there are certain pickle styles, like sweet mixed pickles and hot giardiniara, where I consider all bets regarding the "brine" ingredients to be decidedly *off*. )

What malarky said. Right down the line. I give the same scoring--#1 gets 9 points, #2 gets 8 (yep, I'm one of those annoying people who almost never gives out perfect 10s, because, well, just because. ). I give #1 the win because I find the presentations all have the slight edge in the attractiveness department--though #2 gets major inventiveness strokes not only for the faux foie but also for the deconstructed bellini. Chef #1's main, however, IMO has the edge on #2's main--I just love the colors! And the peach lambic braise sounds really lovely. Plus overall, while I'm sure I'd enjoy both meals, I think I'd enjoy #1's meal slightly more. And I too guess that #1 is Lorna (look at that lovely tart!), and #2 is Henry (who, from his blog, I would expect to be more likely to do inventive-chef touches like the peach foie and the bellini).

Wow. That's quite a combination. And I could imagine it being very very good. But I confess my brain is really stuck on one particular food item mentioned in Rick Nelson's article you linked to earlier: namely, the Red Bull push-ups. The whole concept gives me The Fear.

← Amen. I have long had a love/hate relationship with regular non-refrigerated supermarket pickles, specifically because they depend so heavily on vinegar for their sourness. I was raised to believe that *real* pickles--the kind you used to be able to get at any authentic New York Jewish-style deli--were the kind that had no vinegar in them whatsoever and solely depended on salt, spices, and natural fermentation for their voodoo. I will eat, and sometimes even sorta-kinda enjoy, a good-quality vinegar-based pickle, but to my taste they are far inferior to those pickles made without any vinegar at all. The taste, texture, just everything is totally different--and are what I think, in my admittedly heavily-prejudiced opinion, a truly good pickle should be.

WHOA! How the mighty are fallen! So what in hell happened to Larry's that it's died off like this? When I left Seattle in 2002, they seemed to be totally unstoppable ... and this is the first I've heard about this crash-and-burn. Not to wander too far off-topic, but did they just expand too fast, or get bitten by competition from TJ's and Whole Paycheck, or what?

Hi, I'm Ellen and I'm an Excel addict. Seriously. I use Excel for keeping track of all kinds of random detail-y crap in my life, including food stuff. Not necessarily Thanksgiving--when I used to do a big meal regularly, I had the routine of what goes on when so ingrained from my childhood (I often was the one who wound up stuffing the turkey and sewing it shut at oh-dark-thirty) that I don't really need any kind of list for that. But I have often used a sheet for working out the budget, shopping lists, and process for other large food extravaganzas I've been involved in. For extended camping trips it's especially helpful--there's nothing like the massive bummer of having to make an early return back to civilization because you miscalculated and bought too little of some necessity for your full week out in a particularly remote corner of the great outdoors. And most recently, I have been spreadsheeting my entire healthy-eating regimen. I have Excel files tracking my daily food intake for the past six months, plus another sheet recording my weekly and cumulative weight loss, complete with a graph of my progress. I also have occasionally used Excel for non-food-related health data such as tracking blood pressure readings and etc. (And I do also use it heavily for my work--tracking contract hours and activities, expenses, etc etc etc.)

Oh. My. God. What a killer finale that party was. I think they almost *had* to get somebody like Patti LaBelle to be the musical guest just to stand up to the food. This blog has featured a few of my favorite things in the universe (the food and the special feel of the Cape; and as a budding eccentric auntie to the world, I confess to shamelessly flirting with happy small children in restaurants every chance I get). And sir, your observation of these events was top-notch. I will long remember that whole tale of PJ discovering the joys of feeding Momo--I'm still trying to hear in my head the "quacking" sound your son made (and not just because of my nickname), and pondering the wisdom of Momo to so perfectly understand what PJ had to say. The only thing tempering my now-raging nostalgia for the Northeast is strenuously reminding myself of what the weather's usually like back there. Bravo!

Wow, take an overly-long nap and look what happens! Actually, it must have been a reeeeeeelly long nap--I totally missed the whole start of youze guys' relationship, let alone the start of this blog. Needless to say, I'm totally delighted--and very entertained--by both. If I'm not too late to vote for an Iron Chef ingredient ... well, my brain is too tired to come up with any amusing ways to game the system by my choice, so I'm just gonna go with my gut and vote for the obvious: BACON!

This blog is turning into sweet torture. I am now filled with so much nostalgia for Cape Cod that I'm like to burst with longing. (And I'm in no shape right now to go driving around in search of fried seafood to even partially assuage my condition. Maybe, though, I can convince a minion to fetch me some ... )

Many moons ago, one of my acquaintances who had hosted a Tupperware party sometime in the past owned these adorable teensy Tupperware containers that were the size and shape of shot glasses. Complete with wee lids. Not only were they terminally cute, but that size was amazingly useful for all sorts of little bits of things. I recall asking how I could order some, and being told that I couldn't--at the time they were available only as premiums to Tupperware sales people or party hosts or some such. I didn't feel like joining the Tupperware MLM thang, so no cute shotglass containers for moi! But if anyone's a Tupperware rep now, and can tell me that these things are now available for general order, drop me a PM, okay? Meanwhile, I find myself using the smallest of my set of lidded stainless steel bowls all the time. It's the perfect size for the remains of a piece of produce when you just needed one slice/wedge/etc. for whatever you're doing--say, the remains of a lime after I cut one wedge for my drink.

I'm thinking the Eastern European Jewish classic variously known as stuffed kishke or stuffed derma would qualify. Especially some of the studlier recipes I've seen out there that have included liver and lungs in the mix, such as this one -- though I think it's rather more common for the intestines/kosher casing/etc. to be stuffed with a simpler mix of just shmaltz and matzoh meal. And one of the classic serving methods--slices pan-fried till GBD--really points up the culinary family resemblance.

Amen, preach it brothah! {Pulp Fiction Quote Mode}I said God Damn... God Damn!!!{/PFQM} Edited to add: And dang, now I'm craving fried clams like a mofo. Wondering if my stamina (and stomach) are sufficiently recovered for a foray in search of a seafood plate even one-tenth as bodacious as that one ...

There's a lot to be said for that strategy, yes. I guess my other concern here is about those potatoes. I've never tried to do anywhere near that quantitiy in coals--more like maybe only a couple for a family picnic. But I did once have a memorable almost-disaster with doing a baked potato bar, indoors, for about a 60-something person crowd. Warming up that huge a mass of taters to cooking temp took a loooooooooong time, much longer than I had expected even with the commercial-grade ovens I had available for the task. It was only because I'd gotten to the site early anyway, recognized the problem in time, and cranked the ovens to the max that I just *barely* got the potatoes baked off in time to start the dinner only five or so minutes late. YIKES. So I'd suggest caution: make sure you have a huge enough supply of hot coals to handle the mass of potatoes you'll be baking, get them rolling early, and work out some way that, say, one of your volunteers could be prepared to tend them for the good few hours that they might need to get properly baked. (Or seek out somebody with more direct experience than I of mass campfire-potato baking, for real-life timing tips.) Best of luck!

I think you still have a massive task ahead of you to feed 65 omnivores, even for one dinner, and still keep the per-plate cost down to $5.50 (let alone your brain and stomach lining intact). Rather than do all that shlepping back and forth with the lamb, you might still find it more sane to just make a couple of huge vats of chili/stew/jambalaya/etc. plus a vat of salad/coleslaw/etc., and then dude it up with relatively low-impact frills and sides and acoutrements. I know--not as glamorous as the lamb, but you can still get some gourmet mileage out of the chile/stew/whatever--plus dishes like that can really take advantage of your unskilled volunteer help to do all the mise en place.

Good luck! In the past, I've tried and failed several times to go vegetarian--just way too ferocious a carnivore/meat addict, I just wasn't feeling satiated. But then I had my first gout attack, and suddenly I had some extremely strong (OW!!!) motivation to cut way down on my meat intake. I'm still not a vegetarian, nor planning to be, but I do eat numerous meatless meals--and also went to some lengths to try and analyze what qualities of meat really turned me on, so that I could imbue my meatless meals with those qualities for better food satisfaction. For me, it was a combination of the chewy mouthfeel, the savory "umami" flavor, and the richness due to the fat content. So I set about coming up with non-meat foods that captured one or more of those qualities. Several people, including yourself, have already mentioned a number of the go-to foods I lit upon: high-umami foods like mushrooms, tomatoes, fermented condiments (soy sauce, Worcester sauce, etc.), sea vegetables, parmesan cheese, etc.; foods with naturally meatlike texture, especially mushrooms both fresh and dried. Certain cooking methods also really bring out the more savory, "meatlike" qualities of vegetables--premier among these is roasting, but braising, especially of veggies in big chunks, and grilling/broiling also work great. Other things that have already been mentioned, that have worked very well for me: making something other than the protein item the main focus of the meal--especially the vegetables, which even these days still tend to get relegated to side-dish status in European-influenced cuisines; and reliance on ethnic cuisines with long-established traditions of low/no-meat cooking. And if you've got access to a reasonably well-equipped Asian grocery, I strenuously want to recommend fermented bean curd as a great boon to former animal-protein consumers. If you've not played with it before, it's kind of the super-stinky-blue-cheese of the tofu world. It's sold as small cubes in *extremely* fragrant brine in jars, and a couple of cubes of it in a rice porridge is enough to provide tons of complex umami-rich flavor, enough to keep this former meat-addict pretty well sated! Our resident Chinese food pictorial maestro, Ah Leung, has at least a couple of recipes using the stuff in his cooking pictorials--I'm just too lazy right at this moment to hunt down links to the specific recipes.

I will occasionally use a cold burner as a landing pad for a bowl into which I'm spooning something out of a cookpot warming on an adjacent burner. But otherwise, the stovetop is the horizontal workspace of last resort--and I only leave stuff resting there temporarily, and can get a bit OCD about triple-checking that all burners are off off OFF!!! This even though I think I've only had one or two accidents over many years, and those only resulting in, say, a singed corner of a potholder or something. Now, this is not counting the perennially-dwelling-on-stovetop items such as the teakettle on one of the back burners, and the spoon rest on the metal strip between the burners. Those I feel are fairly bullet-proof WRT any random accidental heating (and I did mention about my being OCD about triple-checking the burner knobs, right? )

Definitely looking forward to this blog, FG--you're cruising through a bunch of my old stomping grounds as well. I have spent a number of memorable vacations on Cape Cod, both as a child and a young adult, including several stints at a friend's vacation home just outside of Wellfleet. Passage of a few decades makes it hard for me to remember the names of places I've dined out there--assuming they still exist--but I do have wonderfully intense memories of a lobster shack somewhere in the Wellfleet area, where we sat at outdoor picnic tables and made as much mess as was needed to get every particle of goodness out of the crustaceans. So I'm hoping you guys can track down something similar while you're out there. I'm also hoping you can maybe make a daytrip up to Provincetown for my vicarious viewing/nostalgia pleasure--yeah, it'll be crowded, but a weekday might not be quite so fierce, while still high on the people-watching entertainment scale. Not to mention the good eats to be obtained in that town... enjoy!

Well, the bad news WRT my hospital-food experience was that it was classic hospital food at its, well, whatever-est: lime Jello, bland boiled chicken, flavorless boiled vegetables, the whole magilla. The good news--besides the fact that the procedure I went in for was a 100% success--is that, when your stomach is upset from said procedures, jello and boiled chicken is actually not such a bad thing at all. Oh yeah--one more good bit of news: I was let out early for good behavior, so to speak, and so did not have to confront the classic hospital-cuisine baked fish entree scheduled for that evening. One other food vignette: my hospital roommate, when contemplating her dinner choices, was told by the aide that the stir-fry was really good. I had my doubts, but she ordered it anyway. Needless to say, it was not very good at all. "Not what I think of as a stir-fry," was my roommate's verdict.

Well, it's come to be my turn to have an up-close and personal experience with hospital food, as I check into the local Kaiser Permanente establishment this coming Monday for a 4 to 5 day stay. I already have volunteers lined up to smuggle in sushi, pho, and fruit smoothies. I'll be sure to report back on my experiences with hospital "cuisine" as soon as I'm together enough to sit up at a keyboard and type (which might be up to a week or more after I get home ... hard to tell these things in advance ... ) What I've found challenging in its own way is trying to anticipate what kinds of foods to have waiting for me at home once I'm discharged. Again, I've got friends lined up to help me out with grocery shopping and food prep ... but that means coming up with really simple stuff to tell folks to get for me, when I'm bound and determined (with my doctors' blessing) to keep up my healthy eating regimen. That means the usual mainstays of visitors feeding convalescents, i.e. casseroles heavy in cream sauces and white-flour noodles, are kind of OUT. Maybe I can get somebody to make me a nice pot of chicken soup ... I've loaded up the freezer with frozen vegetables and boneless/skinless chicken thighs (easy to throw on the Foreman Grill), and bought a bunch of canned lowfat chicken broth and pineapple in its own juice (the only canned fruit I really care for). And I've emailed a list of my food preferences/needs to the church staffer who's playing point-person for me while I'm out of it. Heh. I never used to think of myself as a picky eater, but when I wrote those food preferences up, I realize that's just what I've become. Finally, the instructions the docs have given me for my food intake, or lack of same, for the 24 hours before my operation are kind of, erm, *special* in their own right. I haven't made jello in so many years, the last time I did try I actually managed to screw it up!