mizducky

You could easily convert the remainder into carnitas--shred it, moisten it just a bit with a little broth and/or a drizzle of oil, roast just until it gets some crispy bits, then serve in warmed soft corn tortillas topped with chopped cilantro, salsa fresca, plus lime wedges on the side.

Oh dear. It looks like your Thanksgiving giblet gravy boiled over onto the floor of your oven.

Y'know, I can't find anything that definitively says they're related, but I did get the general impression that the one in the Viejas casino is a branch of the Fat City location.

I should start by saying I've yet to find any espresso drinks in San Diego that knock my socks off the way Seattle's Vivace did (that's a reference to the general quality of the beverage, not the effects of the caffeine, although that happens too. ). But having gotten that out of the way, I've had decent lattes--and excellent coffee-house atmosphere--at Lestat's. (Great walking neighborhood too.)

Hi, Kirk--Forgive me for forgetting to mention in my original post that it was in fact your blog that helped clue me in on Ba Ren. Many thanks!

Home-cooking day (Fearless Housemate is out of town so I can use all the garlic I want). Made big pots of ratatouille and of beans and rice. The ratatouille--I've taken to roasting the onions, peppers, garlic, and eggplant before adding it to the tomatoes etc. in the pot, and it intensifies the flavors nicely. The beans and rice: black beans and brown rice, first pressure-cooked separately, then simmered a bit with canned tomatoes, a bunch of chopped cilantro, garlic, and green onions, and several shots of hot sauce. A nice meatless dinner to balance out the carnivore extravaganza I had the other night at Ba Ren ... and I've got leftovers for well into the week.

Welcome to eGullet, Timmaay! This may be too late for your query, but if I were confronted with a pork roast with no usable drippings for gravy making, I too would be tempted to take the sauce/gravy in a whole different direction. Some of my favorite flavors to match with a pork roast are mustard and horseradish. Like perhaps a very thick mustard vinaigrette ... or a horseradish aioli ... or something like that. (My other favorite flavors to match with pork roast are Asian -- soy/ginger/five-spice/etc. -- but that wouldn't really go with the garlic and rosemary you've already got happening.)

Kristin, did those start off life as strips of some kind of mushroom? Like a portobello? Otherwise, I'm clueless.

Especially if you do a lot of bean dishes, a pressure-cooker is a great tool to add to your new kitchen arsenal at some point--also great for soups and braised dishes when you don't have the time to do it the slow way. High-end cookers can cost a mint, but you can get a totally decent and useful one for cheap ($30-ish or less, depending on sales) at your typical big-box discount store like Target etc. (While I'm a big fan of equipping one's kitchen from yard sales and second-hand stores, a pressure cooker is one gizmo I would buy new; you don't want to be messing with a cooker with a worn-out locking mechanism or whatever.)

I haven't tried the buffet at the Viejas Casino, but I have had some lovely food at the branch of China Camp they have there. The menu is mostly Chinese-American standards, but with a few more "authentic" items slipped in here and there (for instance, they have a whole section of congees, including with thousand-year egg). I had a dish of chow fun there that was excellent. If I recall correctly, the restaurant itself was smoke-free. There are the usual assortment of other eateries in the casino (high-end joint, buffet, coffee shop/deli, etc.), plus a food court in the outlet mall across the street. And unlike a number of other casinos, Viejas is relatively easy to get to--a straight shot east out of San Diego on the I-8. (I've never been to the Valley View, but I have been out to the Harrah's in that same general direction, and man, it does feel you're driving to the end of the world, especially at night.)

I run into a lot of my fellow American Caucasians who are squeamish about any hint of pink in cooked chicken. Even when it has nothing to do with the chickens being "undercooked" -- i.e. the bones of younger chickens often leak a little red out of the marrow -- I've seen some people just refuse to touch it, no matter how much I explain that the chicken's perfectly safe. Myself, I confess I find their fears a bit over-the-top, but hey, I guess that just leaves more "dangerous" chicken for me.

I'm hardly an expert at beef roasting, but I think there's a few different things you could look into: 1. The cut of meat: the rule of thumb is that muscles the steer exercises a whole lot are tougher than those it doesn't. Tougher cuts are generally not suitable for dry-heat methods like roasting, though they are really tasty when cooked by moist-heat methods like braising/pot-roasting. Here's a typical beef cuts chart with some verbiage about different cuts and their suitability for different cooking methods. Note where they say that: "The chuck, brisket, round and shank are the most exercised muscles and hence, the toughest." 2. Roasting technique: my mom always did her roasts in a 350 deg. F oven, but you'll find lots of folks, including many on this board, recommending various formulas for lower and slower roasting. As to timing: most folks here, including myself, cook to a target internal temperature (using either a probe thermometer or instant read thermometer) rather than by the clock. Here's just one description of doing a roast low-and-slow by internal temperature. 3. Resting the meat after it comes out of the oven: not only keeps all the internal juices from draining out prematurely, but I find it also improves tenderness. 4. Carving the meat: carving across the grain rather than with it, can make an amazing amount of difference in tenderness of the cut slices, as I've discovered to my chagrin (sometimes I can be really dense when trying to figure out which way the grain goes--must be hereditary, as my dad had this same problem, and always had to take an experimental slice or two before he figured out which side of the roast was the "right" one ). I'm sure a bunch of other meat mavens will chime in, and correct anything I've got wrong here, but there's my two cents.

Well put, indeed, when you "honor" the pot! I "honor" not only pots but pans, mixing bowls, spoons, you-name-it ... It is those unseen calories which don't make it into the final, formal dish, which taste oh-so-sweet! Thanks for the thread, Fifi! ← Hey, by my rules, pot-lickings don't contain any calories. Just like the broken cookies at the bottom of the box--y'know, the process of cookie breakage causes the calories to leak out. (Sez she who has licked a whole lotta pots, and bowls, and beaters, and etc. in her time...)

I have enjoyed rutabagas too, both raw and cooked. But I find peeling and cutting them a major chore. At least here in the US, they show up in the market with a thick coating of wax (presumably to keep them from drying out?), and they're so dense and hard to cut when raw, I swear it's like sawing through a log sometimes. Is this just a peculiarity of rutabagas commercially produced in the US? Does anybody have any hints on how to make chopping them up easier? I'd use them more often if I knew that. I have never had rampions (mentioned on the Dutch website), but their mention in my childhood collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales always fascinated me as a kid. (They turn up in the story of Rapunzel).

Finally went to Ba Ren Szechuan and had me a little carnivore feast. The entree I got was pretty fine: braised duck with taro. The taro turned out to be slices of that gray-speckled type of konnyaku (I'm not remembering the Chinese term for konnyaku at the moment...). Is the tuber-like vegetable from which they make konnyaku the same thing as or related to taro? I confess I'm ignorant here. Anyway, the konnyaku turned out to be a nice contrast with the chunks of duck meat and a nice soother against the heat of the sauce. And there was a whole bunch of freshly chopped cilantro and scallion greens on top, that kept changing the dish as they fell into and got cooked in it. A really comforting and tasty dish. But the stars of the show were the cold appetizers. I'm tempted next time to get a bunch of the appetizers for takeout and make a meal out of just them. I got a sampling of three: smoked tongue, dried beef, and tripe. What a terrific assortment of different meat textures, different levels of spiciness--different kinds of spiciness too. Terrific meal. (Edited to add: erm, this is a place in San Diego, I forgot to say ... Diane Street just north of Clairemont Mesa Blvd.)

As long as we're pursuing this tangent of mail-order holiday candy, I'd like to enthusiastically recommend the offerings from The Vermont Country Store. They really have some charming goodies, both holiday and otherwise, including lots of retro sweets. (Although the only disadvantage of ordering from them over the Internet is that you don't get to browse through their wonderfully funky little paper catalog...)

In previous places I have lived, what I kept on top of the fridge always had to include at least one cat. Seemingly every cat I've ever had in my life loved to get on top of the fridge or other elevated horizontal surface so it could properly survey its domain, like a panther on a tree-limb waiting to leap upon a hapless antelope or whatever. Fortunately, none of the cats I ever lived with ever actually developed the habit of leaping upon its human friends from such perches. If they had, I fear some unamused housemate might have turned them into an instant fur rug. Alas, no cats in the current abode due to landlord restrictions (and Fearless Housemate's allergies). But it's a good thing, because the poor critter would have no perching space atop the fridge here. It's taken up with a whole pile of phone books, plus several packages of paper bowls and plates of various sizes.

Stumbled upon a new find: KER/Little India/Gateway to India Buffet. This is on Black Mountain Road in the block just north of Miramar Blvd. I was originally chasing down some other Indian restaurant (Ashoka the Great), only to discover that the entire strip mall in which it resided was an enclave of Indian businesses of various sorts (restaurants, groceries, clothing shops, DVD emporium, etc.). KER had a fierce number of banners up touting their vegetarian buffet, so I decided to check them out instead. I found the KER operation to be endearingly eccentric--they have a big warehouse building, about 3/5 of which is taken up by an intriguing looking Indian grocery/supermarket, and the other 2/5s dedicated to the restaurant. In the latter cavernous space are a large number of long tables, arranged in a setup I'd more associate with a bingo parlor than a restaurant, with a wide-screen TV against one wall tuned to a cable station showing Bollywood-style music videos. The place only had a handful of customers, and was very casual. You basically find a cashier in the grocery side of the operation to pay in advance for your food, then amble over to the restaurant side, grab either a paper plate or a big metal thali tray, help yourself to the buffet, and sit wherever. A nearby table bore several jumbo 3-liter bottles of pop sitting in a big bowl of ice, with a sign indicating the pop was for buffet customers only (I guess they also have menu service, but it might take awhile to locate someone to wait on you.) Among the large variety of dishes in the buffet: a wonderfully firey lime pickle, a couple different raitas, a couple different potato dishes, a couple different chickpea dishes, a nice zucchini dish, and what I thought was a really awesome mattar paneer. They also had a separate table of sweets--these were a little on the dry side, but still pleasant. Best of all, while I was dining an older turbanned gentleman appeared from the depths of the kitchen with a basket of freshly-made still-piping-hot parathas and made the rounds of the small number of diners--I happily took a paratha and found it excellent, wonderfully flaky. If I'd know they did this, I would have saved room for more parathas. Oh yeah--all you can eat for $6.99. So now I have to visit this joint again when I have more time and am a little less famished, so I can check out the grocery side of the operation in greater depth before I go stuff myself at the buffet.

It's been ages since I last saw the movie version of "Funny Girl," but I distinctly remember a scene in which a still-new-to-stardom Fannie Brice (played, of course, by Barbra Steisand) surveys some fancy spread of unfamiliar foods, samples what I figure must have been a canape spread with liver pate, and muses that it tastes just like chopped liver. While my family liked its chopped liver with a relatively coarse texture (achieved with the trusty ol' hand-cranked meat grinder), I know other families who prefered their with a much finer, creamier consistency, almost like a mousse ... and verging on the French pate territory. And while I know much, much less about French pates, I've gotten the impression that the traditional home-cook versions vary a great deal too. And IMO that's the beauty of home/folk cooking--lots of local familial variation.

I'm not much of a Christmas celebrator, but I have a certain fondness for seeing that Christmas ribbon candy in the stores. I don't even necessarily care to eat it--usually it just tastes of sugar and an overly agressive amount of clove extract or something like that--but I just like the way the stuff looks. Ditto candy canes. Seldom do they taste as good as they look, although sometimes you happen upon some retro canes whose makers go to the trouble of flavoring them interestingly, going multi-color with the stripes, etc. But they sure can look purty. (At the risk of sounding like a preternaturally old Old Fart, I think of those Folgers and M&Ms holiday commercials as relatively recent additions to the holiday TV pantheon. I'm hard-pressed, however, to think of any earlier food-related holiday commercial that has wedged itself in my memory.)

Oh dear. I could riff off of this opening simile for days ... except that it would not only go way the hell off-topic, but way the hell off-color (erm, fear and danger in oral sex? No wait, I said I wasn't going to go there, didn't I? Dang ... ) What I really meant to say: an an ex-resident of the Greater Pacific Northwest (south-of-the-border contingent, with frequent visits north), I am mightily looking forward to enjoying this blog. I've even visited the Okanagan Valley once, but it was over a decade ago, and I didn't get a chance on that all-too-brief visit to check out any of the local agriculture--so thanks, Jamie, for filling me in on everything I missed.

Heh. Well, I congratulate you on your onions-and-potatoes good fortune. In case anyone thinks this is an old wives' tale, a Googling found several mentions of the same issue. Here's one example -- scroll down to second paragraph under the subheading "Storage".

Heh. This topic is very apropos, as I just came back from picking up some Chinese takeout for my household and me. Now Fearless Housemate's idea of good Chinese food is P.F. Chang's. He insists that most "traditional" Chinese restaurant food tastes too heavy and greasy to him. Me, I much prefer the more "authentic" Chinese restaurants in the nearby enclave of Asian restaurants about a mile from our house on Convoy Street. But I know that a lot of local Chinese food fans, both of Chinese and of European background, point out that some of those restaurants are more authentic than others, and that virtually all of them have made at least some adaptations to Western tastes and ingredients. No surprises there; we've discussed the ins and outs of Chinese restaurants in the US before in other topics. But while I do tease Fearless Housemate about his P.F. Chang's fetish, I also remember not to tease him too fiercely, given that my preferred places are not necessarily the "real deal" either. Still, as a Caucasian fan of Chinese food, I know that when I'm wanting said food, I am most certainly *not* looking for a steak with some oyster sauce smeared on it! On the other hand, people like my housemate might find that just his cup of tea (so to speak). I guess in my mind there's a difference between deliberately dumbing down the food in a way that breaks drastically with the continuity of the cuisine's tradition; vs. evolving the tradition to incorporate new ingredients, tastes, and environments, in a way that maintains some kind of organic continuity with said tradition. Guess which approach I prefer? P.S. We wound up getting takeout *not* from P.F. Chang's, thenkyewverrymuch, but instead from a local Szechuan joint that IMO represents a reasonable compromise between Americanized Chinese and, well, less Americanized Chinese.

Hmmmm ... I'm afraid there might be a few problems with your storage plans: 1. The bin pictured in the link you gave has openings in the bin doors--yep, the openings are screened, but it looks like light can get through easily. Potatoes need to be stored in complete darkness, or else their skins will turn green, signifying that they're forming a toxin called solanine. 2. It's not a good idea to store onions and potatoes together, because onions produce that ethylene gas that hastens ripening and/or decay. I'm not certain that the bin as pictured provides enough separation between the onions and potatoes to prevent that, especially with the screened openings. I do know that when I tried to store onions in the same under-the-counter cabinet, even though they were on entirely different shelves they still managed to funkify each other pretty thoroughly. 3. Apples are pretty fierce ethylene-producers too, so I'd have the same concern with putting apples in with the potatoes and onions in the three-drawer bin setup. Anyway, just my opinion.

Cool! Welcome, Jacqui! I bet you're going to get *lots* of questions all about Jamaican cuisine. I know I for one would love to learn lots more about it. For instance, I know that curry spices are popular in Jamaican dishes, but I don't know much more than that, and would love to know more.