mizducky

Cool! I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Filipino menudo is a very different creature from Mexican menudo, but it's still fascinating to compare and contrast.

Now see--that's exactly where I got my familial reflex against sweet things in savory dishes. My family was Litvak (Jews from Lithuania), and thus grew up with savory rather than sweet cooking. My mom especially had a thing against the sweeter cooking from Galicia. I can still see her, after sampling a piece of overly-sweet pickled herring, making a face and muttering about "galitziana herring" as if it were a swear word. "If my mother bought a herring like that," my mom would say, "she'd throw it away out of spite." So, even though my family didn't know from gourmet, I guess they surely did know from foodie-wars! I've seen recipes in which a roughly cabbage-sized oven-proof bowl is lined with cabbage leaves; the entirety of the stuffing in put in the bowl, and then the leaves are folded over the top to enclose the stuffing. Then the whole thing is baked, kinda like a cabbage-wrapped meat loaf. I also think I saw a preparation in which the center of a cabbage head is scooped out and all the stuffing piled in the resulting cavity. I guess there's all kinds of strategies one can take with this cabbage/stuffing thang. The number of different names for stuffed cabbage, among other Eastern European dishes, has often intrigued me. There's so many cultures that hail from that area, and they often have overlap in cuisines and food names, only with variations in ingredients and pronunciation/spelling respectively. Some of my friends and family called stuffed cabbage holishkes, others call it holupches (spelling an approximation of the phonetic pronunciation), which latter sounds like it's halfway to the Polish pronunciation you give, monavano. I was doing a little more Googling, and found this recipe for a milchig (vegetarian/dairy) version of stuffed cabbage which looks pretty promising--lots and lots of mushrooms, which is always a Good Thing as far as I'm concerned, though I'm not sure why they bother with the jarred mushrooms along with the dried and fresh ones. And--surprise, surprise! No tomato products of any sort involved! (Note also that here the dish is called "holuptsi" -- I wonder if that's not the correct spelling of what some of my family was pronouncing as "holupches".)

Mmmmmmmm, monster shrimp ...

Nope. I'm not even all that thrilled with the presence of brown sugar in the recipe I quoted above. If I were making it myself, I'd probably cut the sweetener way back to the bare minimum needed to counteract the tomatoes' acidity, and then add just enough vinegar/sourness to make things tangy. But then I do like sour and savory rather more than sweet. For that matter, I'd probably get a lot more inventive with the seasonings altogether. There's *no* garlic in my mom's cookbook's recipe! I'd fix that, just for starters. I could get into the ginger snaps thing as mentioned in some recipes ... but only if they were really strongly gingery, not-overly-sweet ginger snaps.

Okay, I must have hallucinated that the braised romaine recipe came out of the Victory Garden cookbook, but there are a bunch of other recipes for cooked lettuces in there. Where I got the braised romaine recipe from, I now have no clue--perhaps I started with something else from Victory Garden and morphed it somehow.

Heh. Yeah, I think part of the secret also is, while my mother and grandmother knew from good cooking, they didn't know from "gourmet". I can't think of any holishkes I've ever eaten that didn't include tomato products of one sort or another. I can't even find a recipe on the Web that doesn't include tomato products. Now that you point it out, I dunno how tomatoes snuck their way into an Eastern European dish, but there they are. I suppose one could fresh things up a bit by using a good from-scratch tomato sauce, or fresh chopped tomatoes along with some water or broth.

Oops--meant to say: welcome to eGullet, Chezbeann, from a former Nyacker! How long have you been living there?

Heh. I am convinced that the Karma Fairy waited until I had graduated from Nyack High School and totally left town before allowing Nyack to be "discovered." That was back in the mid-1970s, and they've been juicing up the downtown ever since, renovating all those charming old buildings and putting in all kinds of shops and cafes and whatnot. I very seldom get back to visit as I have no family living there anymore, but whenever I do it kind of blows my mind, because the Nyack of my childhood was a combination of sleepy and going out of business.

Oh dear. I did the "bad" Chinese food ("bad"="greasy steam-table joint takeout") two days ago. I snarfed Fearless Housemate's leftover Eye-talian takeout yesterday. And now that I've seen this thread rear its ugly head again, I may have to do some other Eeeeeeeevil Takeout today.

Here's the recipe for Holishkes from the venerable Jewish cookbook I inherited from my mother: 1 lb. ground beef 1/4 cup uncooked rice 1 egg 1 onion, grated 1 carrot, grated 1/4 tsp. salt 10 or 12 cabbage leaves 1/4 cup lemon juice or vinegar, OR 1/8 tsp. citric acid crystals A.K.A. sour salt 1/2 cup brown sugar 1 cup canned tomato sauce Water to cover Combine ground beef, rice, egg, onion, carrot, and salt. Blanch and drain cabbage leaves. Stuff leaves with the ground beef mixture, place in a deep ovenproof skillet with a lid, one just big enough to hold all the rolls in a single layer. Combine your souring agent of choice, the brown sugar, and the tomato sauce; pour over cabbage rolls; add just enough water so that the rolls are covered. Simmer tightly covered over moderate heat for 40-50 minutes, then bake uncovered in moderate oven 20 minutes to brown. [Note: my mother never finished her holishkes in the oven--she cooked them on the stovetop start to finish.]

"Fanmail from some flounder" -- Rocky and Bullwinkle. So ... is my prize an MRE brownie? A wee bottle of Tabasco? A warm fuzzy feeling?

Not a Rosh Hashanah challah as such, but back in the 1980s when I was hanging with a hippy-dippy Havurah, I used to make whole-wheat braided challah from a recipe I got out of one of the Vegetarian Epicure books. It would come out pretty danged good, if I do say so myself--good eggy flavor, *relatively* light texture for a bread with whole-wheat flour in it, and boy did it ever look purty.

My mom never bought the Eight O'Clock, but I remember always seeing it in the A&P when I was a kid, and thinking how exotic it was to buy whole bean coffee and have it ground to order. Ah yes, the proverbial "Florida room" ... or at least my dad's generation used to call screened-in porches by that name ... Totally looking forward to your blog, Susan! (And also to the duck and risotto--two of my fave foods too!)

A friend of mine who'd been in the service told me that, even though the MREs are pretty decent for what they are, they've also become known by the "alternate" name Meals Rejected by Ethiopia.

Hi, yoso--welcome to the board! Nope, the one I was talking about was down on Ashford Street, rather closer to K's. I've seen that Kabul Market on Convoy, though--I'll have to drop in on that one too. Ah! If memory serves me right, this one's in the same little strip mall as Arirang House--another to add to my list of places to try. Heh. East Buffet goes on the list too. I've tried Sunrise several times, and liked it pretty well.

You could make some really interesting nouvelle knishes.

This is, I believe, exactly what one will get in most UK bars. It's simply a regional difference, much the same way that an order for a "milkshake" in Boston will get you a glass of whipped milk with syrup (the drink with ice cream is called a "frappe"). I believe this UK understanding of "Martini" comes from the popularity of Martini & Rossi vermouth, and that many UK bartenders interpret an order for a "Martini" to simply be shorthand for "Martini & Rossi" (i.e., a glass of white vermouth). ← Which of course raises the question: so how does one order the gin-and-vermouth concoction from a UK bartender? Does saying "martini cocktail" work? (Hey, I don't recall James Bond having this problem when he ordered martinis! )

Dunno about cooking with iceberg lettuce specifically, but Italian escarole soup is a mighty tasty thing. And the Victory Garden Cookbook has a bunch of recipes for cooked lettuces of various sorts. I tried that book's suggestion for braised romaine once, when I had a huge amount on hand that needed to be used up fast. You basically halve the heads lengthwise and braise in butter and/or broth, seasoning gently, as the finished lettuce flavor is pretty gentle and mellow itself. I suspect quartered cored heads of iceberg might also work in this recipe. In fact, I would think one could cook lettuce using any cooking method for delicate-textured greens (think spinach or chard, only milder in flavor).

There are a number of other Filipino dining spots around town, most of them clustered in the National City area, which is not on my end of town so I haven't checked them out yet. This place, Conching's Cafe, looks pretty promising, and from the description it sounds like they do have a buffet upstairs in addition to a more informal fast-food setup downstairs. Seconded on Great Moon Buffet. (I'm neither afraid of nor ashamed to be seen eating at a buffet--as long as it's a good one. ).

I have never met a mustard I didn't like. For me, it shares a quality with melted cheese in that you slather it on just about anything (within reason) and I will devour it. Having said that, I do have a preference for the more pungent prepared mustards, like a good Dijon, or one with some horseradish in the mix. I totally the Plochman's Stoneground--all those rustic little seeds. I think I mentioned over in the Reimagining Thanksgiving thread that one of my T-day (or any day) discoveries was a recipe for brussels sprouts in a maple-mustard vinaigrette. The recipe's dirt-simple--mix up a typical vinaigrette, going heavy on the mustard, and add just enough maple syrup (preferably Grade B/dark) so you can taste it, but not enough to make the vinaigrette excessively sweet. Trim and halve your sprouts, steam them until just barely tender, pour on the vinaigrette while sprouts are still hot, let marinate for a goodly while. Serve chilled or at room temp. Yum. The mustard plays really well with the cabbage-y sprout flavor, I think.

I'm guilty of this too but now I've started doing it on purpose, making a mental note of another weird veggie that's less expensive by weight. So if they're holding up my raddichio and asking if it's endive, I say "uh, no, red cabbage I think." I think that probably makes me a bad person, doesn't it? ← I don't go out of my way to do it deliberately, and most of the time I do break down and tell the poor clueless cashier what the item is, but sometimes, well, I don't. My understanding is that the supermarkets are supposed to train their cashiers on identifying all the produce items on sight--I can understand when the item is something really obscure so that the learning doesn't get reinforced very often, but when it's what I would think of as a fairly common item and they can't ID it, I'm rather less understanding. (In other words--oh c'mon, I can't be the only customer who ever bought collard greens from you, can I?)

No worries--you're still talking about an area well within the boundaries of San Diego County. I wouldn't at all mind expanding this topic to be "San Diego and environs" ... especially since, with a few exceptions, I know rather less about food (and other) attractions in the North and East County areas, and would like to learn more.

Heh. I don't actually share any cooking with Fearless Housemate, nor his girlfriend who recently moved in, but I have long ago let go of anything FH does with regard to the kitchen. He basically does not cook, with the sole exceptions of boiling some pasta, nuking frozen dinners, or once in a blue moon making some Rice-a-roni (accompanied by a humongous mess). He very seldom cleans anything either--I often walk into the kitchen in the morning and find bowls, counters, etc. encrusted with remains of meals made groggily at 4am (musicians keep bizarre hours, plus he has insomnia). FH is the Absent-minded Professor of the Universe, so all sorts of kitchen items mysteriously vanish (a half-decent knife of mine turned up in a box of random tools and stuff somewhere in his studio). Also, all sorts of non-kitchen stuff crops up on the kitchen counters (mail; bits of non-functioning electronics and musical instruments; weird souvenirs he picked up at out-of-town gigs). Sometimes he tries to be helpful by loading or unloading the dishwasher, but I always have to re-load it because everything would smash to splinters if it were run as-is, and after he unloads I have to re-stack things in the cupboards so things don't either fall on my head or take up so much space that I can't fit anything else in there. And sometimes when he unloads the dishwasher, I can't find a favorite kitchen implement without hours of searching. Oh, and he's an absent-minded professor with regard to grocery-shopping too. At any given moment there will be four different cartons/bottles of milk in the fridge, all started. He also forgets leftovers in there until they've gone hazmat--but at the same time, he'll chuck bottles of milk that he swears have gone off but in which I can't detect even the faintest whiff of offness. Oh, and he has this weird thing about jarred spaghetti sauce. The cheapo Ragu is the only stuff he likes--and only when the jar is freshly opened. He'll cap the started jar and put it in the fridge, but then never use it because it doesn't taste right to him. He's asked me to keep my eye peeled in the supermarket for the little tiny jars of Ragu, so that he doesn't have the leftover Ragu problem anymore. Oh, and then there are the various times he's set fire to things in the microwave. But as I've said, I've pretty much let go of all this stuff. It helps that I actually don't have very much fancy-shmancy kitchen gear, and the little I do have, I keep carefully put away where he can't find it. And if there's stuff of his in the way on the counter, I just pile it on one of his other piles of random crap. I pretty much wind up doing all the dishes and running the dishwasher, but as I'm just a little too disabled to do any other cleaning around the house, I consider that my fair contribution to the household. As we've established he really doesn't care for leftovers, we've also established they're all fair game for my snacks and lunches. And that missing knife: it turned up after I gently but firmly told him it had gone missing; he knows he randomly misplaces things, so he was a good sport about looking for--and finding!--the darn thing. And it was none the worse for wear. However, if I should ever volunteer to do a food blog for eGullet, he might have a thing or two to say about any photos that show what a collossal disaster-area his absent-minded professor routine has made of the entire house!

Where I grew up (suburbs of New York City), I never encountered apple pie with cheese. But somehow we got on the mailing list for the Vermont Country Store catalog, which, among many other homey charms, always suggested using their cheddar cheese to top apple pie. In fact, I just checked the online version of the catalog, and they still mention serving it with apple pie--lookie here.

Heh. This topic has taken over my brain, too. Now I'm wracking my brains, trying to think of casseroles my mom made. Definitely tuna noodle ... think she also made it substituting leftover chicken for tuna ... that damned green-bean casserole for Thanksgiving ... oh, and she was all about the canned cream soups--she had some of every flavor then going--mushroom, chicken, celery, I dunno what-all else. It got to the point where I started humorously calling the stuff "cream of mumble soup," because they were all so interchangeable. Nowadays I avoid that stuff like the plague, because the sodium makes my feet swell up like dirigibles. But I still have a weird soft spot for the flavor. Mmmmmmm... sodium! I don't think this quite counts as a casserole as the ingredients are not chopped bitesize and mixed together but layered in rather big chunks, but my mom did sort of invent/evolve a baked fish dish that has many casserole-like elements, including the cream of mumble. In a greased oblong baking dish, preferably glass/pyrex/etc., lay down a layer of sliced raw potatoes, then a layer of sliced raw onions, then a layer of fish fillets (my mom typically used thawed frozen turbot), seasoning each layer with salt and generous amounts of pepper. Thin your canned cream-of-mumble soup with a little milk, and then cover the contents of baking dish with same, shaking the dish a little bit to work the soup down into all the layers. Top with a liberal coating of corn flake crumbs and bake in a medium oven until contents are done and sauce is bubbling (first covered with foil, then uncovered for the last ten minutes or so to brown the top). If I were doing this dish these days, of course, I'd substitute a home-made roux-thickened sauce of some sort for the cream-of-mumble.