Toby

Slow-roasted pork shoulder (with black pepper, dried red pepper, sage and garlic rub), sauteed spinach, smashed la ratte potatoes.

And waiting and waiting Sorry, I've been out all day. It's a sort of complicated recipe and I don't remember it that well -- haven't made it in a few years. Will have to go and dig it up, and will post it in a couple of days. Well, I searched through all my notebooks and it looks like I never wrote the recipe down in its finished stages. I think I started with combining recipes for andouille smoked sausage dressing and cornbread dressing from Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen cookbook, and then changing them. I used 1/2 loaf buttermilk cornbread mixed with 1/2 batch sweet milk (not buttermilk) biscuits. I just put the biscuit dough into a small cake pan and baked it as one big biscuit at 375-400 degrees for about 25-30 minutes until it was browning on top. I did this the day before and then let it sit out overnight. For the stuffing, I melted 4 tablespoons butter (maybe more??) in a big pan and sauted 1 cup chopped onion, 2 stalks chopped celery, 3 chopped scallions, chopped garlic, some fresh thyme and bay leaves until the onion was translucent. I think I added chopped green pepper as well. Then I added 1 lb. of the smoked pheasant sausage (spicy version from Quattro), sliced into rounds and continued to saute for about 5 minutes. Instead of the pheasant sausage, you can use andouille. Then I added a seasoning mix of salt, white pepper, black pepper, and very hot African cayenne pepper and sauteed for a few more minutes. I crumbled the half loaf of cornbread and half loaf of biscuit into a big bowl and added the vegetable-smoked sausages, tabasco (I like hot food), about 1 cup chicken or turkey stock, some chopped up hard-boiled eggs, a 13-oz. can of evaporated milk, 2 raw eggs and some chopped up parsley and mixed it all together with my hands. (The amount of stock, evaporated milk, and raw eggs are approximate -- I remember I added it in stages until it felt right.) I put it in a big pyrex round baking dish (deeper than wide), basted it with a little more broth if it was too dry and dotted it with butter and baked it for about 35 minutes at 375 degrees. For a less rustic, cooked inside, stuffing, Alice Waters has a great recipe for cornbread and wild mushroom stuffing in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (meant to be cooked inside a duck, but could probably be revised for turkey).

Three visits to NY Noodletown in the last few weeks -- the first was late at night and they were out of baby pig, so ordered the baked pig, which had nice crunchy crisp skin but rather dry meat. Went back a week later in the afternoon for the baby pig. It was wonderful -- moist, juicy meat and paper-thin very crisp skin. Went back again the next week and again it was delicious, although I thought the skin this last time was slightly thicker with more fat underneath and not as wonderful, although I was making a lot of very satisfied sounds while eating. Lxt is right, the roasted duck is chopped and brought back to the kitchen where it's stir-fried along with the chives. One time some excellent very thin-fleshed mushrooms were added to the dish. I've been obsessed with finding excellent salt and pepper squid in New York for the past five years, after having become completely addicted to the preparation in Yuet Lee in San Francisco. Yuet Lee's salt and pepper squid is fried to a beautiful brown color and is quite peppery and impossible to stop eating. All the salt and pepper squid (and combinations of squid, shrimp and scallop) I've eaten in New York have been a very pale color and not particularly spicy. The seafood itself at NY Noodletown was good, but the coating was too pale, not enough salt and pepper, and the scallops got soggy very fast. I feel that I'm doomed to be disappointed, although now I have a place to satisfy my new addiction for baby pig. I liked the chicken and sausage casserole, although I would have preferred it if the chicken had been chopped through the bone and the bone included. Has anyone tried any of the noodle soups at NY Noodletown?

And waiting and waiting Sorry, I've been out all day. It's a sort of complicated recipe and I don't remember it that well -- haven't made it in a few years. Will have to go and dig it up, and will post it in a couple of days.

Wilfrid, that was "caramel salt butter sauce" from Anne Willan's From My Chateau Kitchen. Maybe I'll start a thread about caramel sauces in a few days.

If the tin is the kind I'm familiar with, although flat, it's quite big and has a zillion dried anchovies in it. I clean off a big handful at a time -- rinse off the salt, pat dry, filet them, discarding bones, tail, stuff, and then pack them into a jar with good olive oil -- refrigerate, and use within a month. The ones I don't clean and put in olive oil, I put into a plastic container packed down with the salt they came with, and keep in refrigerator.

Do you cook your stuffing inside the turkey or separately in a baking dish (then called dressing)? I like it cooked separately -- find it doesn't get mushy that way.

I wasn't allowed to critique my own cooking at the party, but no one can stop me now. I made four different fillings and four different crusts. The quince tarte tatin was not too interesting to me -- the quinces were slightly overdone, and the crust was too thick and underdone -- it was a pate brisee with an egg yolk added to it (which would make it a pate what???). I didn't roll the pastry out thin enough, and didn't like it at all. One pear tarte was made with pear halves cut 10 times almost up to the top, but still in one piece, with the half pressed down to fan out, and cooked very gently in butter, brown sugar and lime juice on top of the stove for 3 hours, before being topped with the crust and baked off. I thought this was the prettiest and best tasting of the fillings, but the crust which was made up of 2 cups flour, almost 2 sticks of butter and 1/2 cup sour cream was sort of soggy. The other pear tarte tatin was the recipe from Patricia Wells' Bistro cookbook that I;ve made a lot in the past; the filling was good although I had to skimp on the pears because I used ones that should have gone in this tarte in the other pear tarte and was too lazy to go out and get more. The apple tarte tatin inexplicably turned into applesauce tarte tatin, even though I used appropriate baking apples, but the crust on this was the best crust -- it was made with flour, butter, sugar and a whole egg. The results, then, of this sort of vertical tasting, to make the "best" tarte tatin would be the fan-shaped pears filling combined with the crust on the apple tarte tatin. I had a wonderful time and enjoyed all the food; I was especially happy to taste all the Italian jarred tunas in olive oil. Many thanks to Cathy for opening her home and kitchen to all of us. Where are the pictures?

I use half cornbread, half biscuits, both made with buttermilk and butter; this makes it very light while maintaining a consistency of flavoring . And I add hot smoked pheasant sausage from Quattro's at the Union Square Saturday greenmarket, chopped hard-boiled eggs, evaporated milk, green peppers, onions....

There's a recipe for mascarpone in Bugialli's Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking. He says that mascarpone is a type of solidified cream; it originated not far from Milan, earliest written reference to it is in 1168, although it may be much older. Bugialli recommends making it at home; he says the texture changes during shipping, even when refrigerated. His ingredients are 1 qt. heavy cream (not the ultra-homogenized stuff) and 1/4 tsp. tartaric acid (similar to cream of tartar but more acidic, available in pharmacies and he gives Caswell-Massey as a source). He pours the cream into a Pyrex saucepan and improvises a bain marie which he places over moderate heat and brings cream to 180 degrees. Removes from heat and adds the tartaric acid, stirs with wooden spoon for 30 seconds, removes pyrex pan from bain marie and continues to stir for 2 more minutes. Then he lines a basket with cheesecloth and pours in the cream mixture, and lets mascarpone stand for 12 hours in a cool place or on the bottom shelf of refrigerator. After 12 hours, he transfers the mascarpone in fourths to the center of four 9" squares of cheesecloth, folds the cheesecloth around the mascarpone to make four nice rectangular bundles and refrigerates the packets for another 12 hours. The book has step-by-step pictures as well.

My dad once read about putting live lobsters in cold water and bringing them to a boil as a humane way of killing them. It was horrible. The lobsters banged against the pot for a long, long time. When we finally ate them the flesh was totally waterlogged.

I once combined a number of recipes for tortilla soup/Mexican lime soup into something like this; instead of tortilla strips added at the end, you make dumplings with blue corn flour. Cook a lot of very thinly sliced onions in corn oil slowly until they just started to brown. Add chopped garlic and chopped serrano peppers and cook under medium heat for a few minutes. Add a tomato, seeded and chopped and cook for a minute more. Add stock, a skinned chicken breast, salt and pepper and simmer for a while. (When I made the stock, I added some corn cobs (corn kernels cut off) to the stock to increase the corn flavor.) When chicken is just cooked, remove it, pull meat off bone into shreds, put back in soup. Add a lot of lime juice. Meanwhile, make the dumplings by combining 1 cup blue corn flour, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. salt; then cut in 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening as for pastry dough. Beat together 1 egg and 1/2 cup milk and add some chopped cilantro. Stir egg-milk mixture into the flour mix; add only enough to moisten the dough. Once you've shredded the chicken and added it and the lime juice back to the soup, drop the dumplings by tablespoons into the simmering broth. Cover pot and steam for about 15 minutes. Add more lime juice and chopped cilantro at table. As I remember, it looked a little weird -- the blue corn turns sort of grey and cement-like in appearance, but it had a more delicate texture and flavor than tortillas, and the dumplings were very light.

La ratte potatoes, available in NY greenmarket, definitely have a yellow flesh, and a pale yellow skin. Joel Petraker in his greenmarket cookbook, says they have a "waxy, smooth textxure; rich flavor with overtones of chestnut and almond"; (I think he's quoting Rick Bishop, the potato farmer). I've always served them either boiled or roasted and then smashed slightly. They're a smallish fingerling, heirloom variety, grown in France since the late 1800s.

Your meal sounded lovely. I'd like to read more excerpts from Britchky’s review if you could post them.

Room for me on the 18th?

Brining turns the taste and texture of turkey from boring to elegant. The first time I ate a turkey that had been brined, I could hardly believe it was turkey. Also, get the best turkey you can find -- organic, free range.

Sorry, Toby, that was many posts ago... I was thinking of several varieties of apples for tasting raw. And/or dipped in hot caramel/peanut butter, a lowbrow treat I'd be embarrassed to serve if it weren't so scrumptious. Overnight in the oven apple dessert? Wow. Tell, please. It's the apple gateau on the cover of Anne Willan's From My Chateau Kitchen. I've always wanted to make it, but I've just read the recipe carefully and am having second thoughts. It bakes for 12-14 hours and only feeds 6. Apples are sliced very thinly and arranged flower-like in a souffle dish, in layers interspersed with sprinklings of crushed sugar cubes flavored with orange zest. There are recipes for 2 caramel sauces to serve with it -- a caramel salt butter sauce and a honey caramel sauce. I once baked a New York Times recipe "Forget About It Meringue Torte" -- something that got left overnight in the oven, and a big mishap happened -- I guess the oven never started out hot enough, but when I went to remember it in the morning my kitchen floor was covered with very wet sticky syrup of egg white and sugar. But this sounds different.

Actually, teenage girls and Sam Phillips first perceived Elvis's "potential."

I was planning to do a pear tarte tatin, quince tarte tatin, and if I'm together enough, an overnight in the oven apple dessert.

Southeast Asian dinner -- Chicken soup with cilantro, scallions, onion, shallots and garlic (Laos). Grilled eggplant braised with ground beef (Vietnamese). Country-style pork ribs, first marinated in hoisin and fish sauce, then grilled (Vietnamese). Stir-fried Savoy cabbage with pork, dried chiles and ginger (Yunnan). Sticky rice (Laos). Butter-rum tart served with ricotta cheese flavored with rum and sugar (not Southeast Asian). (The recipes are great, but Hot Sour Salty Sweet has to be the most physically unwieldy cookbook ever printed.)

Nina, I'll bring dessert wine, too. OK?

Instead of "exhausted," why not look at it that if these cuisines, or more specifically Italian, aim for a different end than does haute cuisine as you've defined it, they are still on the road to full realization as they would like it? Gee, and I was determined not to post on this thread.

Too lazy to look at link -- the most delicious roasted potatoes I ever ate were Idaho potatoes, parboiled in salted water for 3 minutes, and then slowly (300 degrees) roasted in goose (or duck) fat for 2 hours, turning from time to time, until crusty and brown. Then the oven was turned up to 375 for 15 minutes. Served sprinkled with salt, and chopped parsley and garlic. Recipe from Paula Wolfert's Cooking of Southwest France, Potatoes in the Style of Quercy. And, as she writes in the headnote to the recipe, when the potatoes are done, you can drain off almost the exact amount of the fat that you started with, and yet the potatoes are imbued with the flavor of the fat.

Verge's Cooking with Fruit is also very beautiful. Looking at it, the full realization that summer is over has hit me -- too late for all the summer fruits, but pears and apples and blood oranges and papayas and pineapples.

Roger Verge's Entertaining in the French Style is absolutely beautiful, with recipes that work. I used to cook from this all the time. Anne Willan's recent book, From My Chateau Kitchen, focuses on the food cooked at (and in restaurants near) her chateau/cooking school in Burgundy. Willan's recipes are always simply written and straightforward; they come out even more beautifully than they sound. Amanda Hesser was the cook for the chateau for a year and wrote a cookbook, The Cook and the Gardener, about the experience. It's funny to see the same characters pop up in this book.