Toby

The cart basically supplied my "brownie-a-day diet." I also had various lemonades. The prices were very reasonable -- I think the brownies were about $1.75 each; the hotdogs (which looked good) were $2.25 or something like that. The park is beautiful now that the never-ending renovations are done, and it's nice to sit there and snack.

Thanks for posting that, cabrales. I love the cart. I thought they had discontinued it. They had brownies with coconut in them.

Jodi, thanks for the recipe. That's pretty close to how I make it, especially the salt and lime and caramelizing the sugar. Sometimes I use scotch bonnet, but other times I use seasoning peppers -- we grow some from Grenada that have a great flavor but not too much heat. I like to cook rice and peas with a whole green scotch bonnet buried in the rice and peas and pulled out at the end, for the flavor. I never used potato, that sounds good. Do you make rum cake?

ShawtyCat, do you have a recipe for stewed chicken? I would so appreciate it -- I eat the Jamaican version as often as I can and cook it sometimes, but I've never been so happy with the way mine comes out.

Oops.

Jinmyo, sorry for not answering sooner. We've started bringing tomatoes to the farmers' market and I was there all day and just got home. Smothered chicken (or smothered pork chops) is American southern. You first brown the seasoned chicken (or pork) in some kind of fat. (I also added sliced smoked spicy venison sausage.) You can dredge the chicken in flour or breading or leave it plain. You then add a small amount of liquid (water, broth), cover the pan and cook at very low heat until the chicken is very tender, about to fall off bone. For this chicken, once the meat was tender, I took it out of the pan along with about half the juices and let the rest of the liquid cook down; then added very thin slices of a great big walla walla onion (which my nephew grows in Pennsylvania) and let that brown some and then returned the chicken and let it all cook together for a few minutes. Blue Heron, thank you for supplying the walla walla information.

Raspberries and real heavy cream.

Smothered chicken, smoked hot venison sausage and big walla walla onion over rice with sauteed summer squash. (Everything but rice from farmers' market; that Regina Schrambling article was very annoying.)

Sandra, have you been to Dim Sum Go Go? In their vegetarian dim sum platter, they have something I think they call white sea fungus that is this amazing spongy thing, quite beautiful, that's almost all texture.

Suvir, here's one that doesn't use any tahini. It was printed in September 2001 Food and Wine (the same one you had recipes in). Process cooked chickpeas with toasted and ground cumin seeds, lemon juice, pimenton (or other hot paprika) and cayenne, plus just enough olive oil so that the puree is very smooth. Season with salt, scrape into bowl, and drizzle with a little more olive oil and sprinkle with chopped cilantro.

How do you make frozen yogurt?

I just could never bring myself to eat gefilte fish; I think it was the sound of the name. I make this Tunisian version for Passover. Fish Dumplings in Turmeric Sauce 2 lbs. cod or tilefish fillets (ask for heads and bones to make the 4 cups stock) 1 small onion, quartered 3 cloves garlic, sliced 2 tsp. ground cumin 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper 1 egg salt and pepper 1 cup matzoh meal oil for deep frying 4 cups fish stock 2 tbsp. lemon juice 1/2 tsp. turmeric 3 tbsp. tomato paste Italian parsley for garnish Cut fish into 1" cubes. Process until smooth in food processor along with onion, garlic, cumin, cayenne, egg, salt and pepper. Add matzoh meal and process until incorporated. Shape fish mixture into plump ovals about 3" long. Heat oil for deep frying to 375 degrees in deep fryer, saucepan or wok. Fry fish rolls until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Bring stock to boil in 1 or 2 large saucepans, add lemon juice, turmeric and tomato paste. Bring to slow simmer. Drop drained fish rolls into simmering broth and cook slowly, uncovered. Rolls should be single layer. Simmer until broth has reduced and thickened, about 40 minutes. Serve warm, garnished with parsley.

Some people (and I'm assuming it's all of us here) have a passion for food, where the idea of food consumes us as much as we consume food. Where does this passion come from? I don't know. I woke up one morning when I was 16 and wanted to know everything about food. Other people, for whatever reasons, don't. People who are passionate about food are going to be much more open about trying everything, because it's exciting. (I think the passion would usually comes first, and then the curiosity (cerebral).) For people who don't have that feeling, new foods or new preparations can be scary. Actually, too much passion can be scary. MFK Fisher has a wonderful story of wandering into an out-of-the-way country restaurant in France where she's the only diner. The server, a young woman, is so passionate about the chef's cooking, that she keeps on piling on dish after dish, until you begin to fear that MFK Fisher will never escape.

I like Think Like a Chef a lot; different from most chef cookbooks. Has anyone had the pork belly both at Cafe Boulud and at Gramercy, and would you compare them?

Thanks, everyone, for this interesting conversation. I think the reason I never got very deeply into Indian food is because of that lack of soul and sensuality in all the cookbooks I've read about it. I don't like to travel (because I can't take my things with me, isn't that pathetic?), so cooking other cuisines for me is all about imagination. If a book excites my imagination, through some sort of alchemy I don't understand, I can cook the food as if I've lived in that country and cooked there. (Good recipes and explanations of techniques helps, of course, but there's something else.) Suvir, what you do is make the food come alive by giving us so much of the life that's lived with that food. Food is a physical pleasure (sensory, sensual) and none of the Indian cookbooks I have really express that. This is so odd since the first thing anyone I know who's been there says about India is that it's almost an overload on the senses in terms of color, smells, texture, multiplicity, climate, terrain.

I used to make musbacha, a type of hummus made with kala channa (smaller, thick-skinned chickpeas). Only some of the chickpeas are processed with the tahini, garlic, salt and lemon juice. A lot of chopped parsley is folded in, and the mixture is left for awhile to develop flavor and is then added to the rest of the cooked whole chickpeas along with chopped up jalapeno, more chopped garlic and lemon juice and olive oil. I like the textural variation in this version and the kala channa are delicious. (You can also make this with regular chickpeas.)

Would you please give name of book(s) and full name of author, please? Thanks.

Everything I've ever cooked from Joanne Weir's From Tapas to Meze has been delicious and the recipes are very straightforward. Also, I think you mentioned you'd just gotten a copy of Mediteranean Street Food by Anissa Helou -- lots of those recipes could be served indoors. I really love this book; can't wait to have time to start cooking from it. And A Mediterranean Feast by Clifford A. Wright has lots of recipes and is fascinating reading.

I used Patna rice to make "Rice with whole spices" from Invitation to Indian Cooking the other day. I guess I could have used any long grain rice, but I had some Patna rice in the house, and it held a slightly firmer shape than the American long grain rice I usually use (Canela brand) and had a very non-sticky quality to it.

Is the pork belly at Gramercy the same as the braised fresh "bacon" recipe in Colicchio's Think Like a Chef? I would guess it is -- he says, "GQ magazine voted it their favorite meat dish of the year, after strenuous debate over whether I should call it 'fresh bacon' or 'pork belly.'"

Calamari soup (made with very small calamari) with Calabrian dried chile peppers, lots of garlic, and white wine. Added cherry tomatoes (sungold and tiny red currants) and some bush basil leaves for last few minutes of cooking, and then stirred in some fregola just at the end. Microgreen salad. (And everything but the wine, peppers and fregola was from the farmers' market.)

I found just the opposite in my father. He claimed to be salt intolerant and never used it and never ate spicy foods, but as he got into his late 80s and on into his 90s, he ate food I cooked that had reasonable amounts of salt and lots of chiles and gobbled it up. I don't think he could taste any of it, and I don't know if this was something going on in his taste buds or brain or both. In any event, the prospects sound dismal.

Suvir, that was a wonderful introduction to rice. Some questions -- Is rice generally washed or soaked in India before cooking? Is it cooked in some oil before adding water or stock? Also, what is Patna rice and when is it used?

Thank you everyone for your considered responses to all my questions; also thanks, Jim Dixon, for the link to the article (too technical for me but I think I got the main idea; I want to read the other linked articles as well). The relation of interrelated taste activity in the brain to color vision was fascinating; it's as if the brain is already deconstructing and recombining what was cooked. When I was in high school they taught us some very simplified Wittgenstein -- "how do I know that your green is my green?" -- and that was in my mind when I began thinking about palates. If how we taste what we taste is conditioned first by brain activity, then I'd think there'd be broad based consensus in identifying salt, sweet, bitter, sour, umami, but what about flavor (which would be that it tastes good or not?)? Why did certain foods my mother cooked when I was growing up still taste so satisfying to me as an adult even though my mother was a bad cook and I could tell that the food was prepared badly and seasoned not at all? From what you've all said, it seems like some likes/dislikes are culturally conditioned; others may come from unfamiliarity or from having eaten that food prepared badly or with negative attachments to it. It sounds like you all agreed that these can be overcome with education and exploration, but that for a final answer as to why we just favor or dislike some things, we don't have one. (I once made a prune galette for a Christmas dinner; the guests included several children and several picky adult eaters. The galette was lovely -- a layered prune pie, in which prunes simmered in sugared water are used as a filling between 3 layers of thinly rolled out egg-butter crust flavored with brandy rolled out very thin, and then topped with a 4th round of the dough. As I was serving it I realized that "prune pie" wasn't going to go over too well, so I announced we were having "dried plum pie" and everyone ate it happily.) I was a heavy smoker for a long time. Two things happened about 10 days after I quit. I had a dream that I was walking on a beach along the Pacific Ocean. The beach was covered with tiny wildflowers and I could smell them all. I'd never dreamt about a smell before. The second thing was that I'd cooked a roast beef very rare, with sauteed potatoes with garlic and parsley and grilled red and yellow peppers left to steep in olive oil with some thyme. When I bit into the meat, the juices just exploded in my mouth. I was astonished. I'd been smoking since I was 14 and realized I'd never really tasted, as an adult, anything I'd eaten. This intense taste sensation lasted for a few months and then I think I got used to it.

There's a recipe for Oxtail and Pig's Ear Stew served with a garnish of garlic cloves (from 2 heads), and boiled potatoes in Richard Olney's Ten Vineyard Lunches that's both sticky and unctuous, and delicious in cool weather.