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Beef shin or shank is like poor mans osso bucco. You can treat it like you would osso bucco and braise it. Unlike osso bucco, the full grown beef shin has some serious connective tissue on the outside that needs to be cut through prior to cooking. If you don't, this tissue will shrink as it cooks and it will push the meat right off of the bone. Once you cut through this tissue you will want to tie the shin with string to keep it together as it cooks.

There were seven and a half of us and as it is Thanksgiving made enough for fifteen. Spread the work load out over the entire week: Simple cheese plate NV-NoName Rose Champagne Brined, barbequed (Weber rotisserie) Turkey Roasted parsnips Roasted carrots (red and yellow) Brussels sprouts with guanciale and walnuts Mashed potatoes Cranberry sauce made with fresh and dried cranberries and cognac Stuffing made with Sullivan Street Bakery bread, pheasant and wild boar sausage, dried fruits and nuts Shallot gravy 2007 Marcel Lapierre Morgon 2005 Domaine Rene Leclerc Bourgogne 2006 Clos Roche Blanche Touraine Cuvée Cot Chocolate truffles Apple tart tatin 2006 Julien Frémont Cidre Pays d'Auge "Greniers" Made the dark turkey stock on Monday night, roasted all of the vegetables, made the cranberry sauce and made the deserts on Wednesday. Up at 6:30 am on Thursday to run the Turkey Trot and had the turkey on the barbeque by 11:00 am. We sat down to eat the main meal at about 4:00 pm. Finished up with a turkey sandwich at about 10:30 pm. Made everything myself save for the dressing. As always, everything for me tastes better the next day.

I picked some fresh, frozen - not dried, tarbais beans at my local farmers market recently. I plan on using them in our annual News Years Eve cassoulet. Besides not having to soak them overnight, is there anything else I should be doing and or expecting with the fresh beans vs. dried beans?

The bottom is so low this season. It would be great to break with tradition and dump more than one cheftestant per show and possibly not cutting someone on other shows. I am really tempted to skip the show for a couple of weeks as the dead wood is pruned.

This show is either PBS's venture into the sub-prime mortgage market or their version of Heaven's Gate. Can someone stop the bleeding? On another note, did anyone catch Chateau Monty on the BBC4?

My DVR finally picked this one up and I watched episode #105 last night. First let me say that the show was bad enough to make me stop contributing to PBS. Before I go on a long winded rant I'll distill it to a few bullet points - GP should go back home (take SP with you) to her kids. This person brings nothing to the table (no pun intended) with her vegetarianism, slights against France and the French and condemning Bittman for working at the NY Times begs the question, "Why is she here?" -Batali knows nothing about wine. Can someone please explain to him what brett (Brettanomyces) is? -Mark Bittman, Mark, Mark, what has happened? Do they have you pumped full of thorazine? -PBS, you must have your own doubts about this show as I can't receive it in HD in the NYC market. Enough said.

Yup hot sauce, cheap vinegar based hot sauce. Forget the mayo too - just real butter on both sides of the gooshy roll. YUM!

Try The French Laundry way which basically amounts to pushing the marrow out of a well chilled/frozen bone, dusting it with flour and frying it in oil. Compared to the zillion steps usually involved in a FL recipe, this one was quick, easy and the results absolutely sublime.

I have made the quiche in both a springform pan and the ring mold and both times the quiche and the crust came out perfectly. The only problem I had with the springform pan is not having enough dough to reach the top of the pan. I do make one change to the dough recipe, I use 1/3 part rendered pork leaf lard and 2/3 butter ILO all butter. The lard makes for a lovely rich crust that goes well with the savory quiche. The one comment that Rulhman makes which I follow is to have everything ready to go when the blind baked crust comes out of the oven so that the crust can be filled while it is still hot - it helps to have the custard at room temperature or warmer. The quicker the custard can set the less likely a leak will develop.

I love tarte tatin. Fell in love with it the first time I had it. I have made it in a 10" cast iron frying pan (makes a BIG tart) and now with a proper Tatin pan. I have followed Keller's and others recipes for sugar to butter ratio and number of apples, etc. They are all delicious. With that said I have two tips I have to offer. 1. Run the knife around the crust prior to flipping over of course, but flip the tarte over earlier rather than later. The only time I have ever had all of the apples come out of the pan is when I waited like 5 minutes. Now it all depends on how cool your kitchen is, how caramelized your sugar is and how heat conductive the pan is. I have had nothing come out and had to gently reheat on the stove at one time, so as they say, your mileage may vary. 2. One of the best tarte tatins I ever had was in a little bistro in Paris (yeah, yeah, everything is better in a "little bistro in Paris"). In a kitchen about the size of an average American refrigerator I watched the chef prepare his tarte tatin. He cooked the tarte in what appeared to be an aluminum pan about the size of a 10" CI frying pan. The tarte was filled with sliced green apples the way you would load up the traditional American apple pie. There was no careful placement of nice neat apple halves or quarters, just slices - I even spied some skin. As the tarte begins to cook down the chef added more apples until the tarte was heaped a good 3 inches above the pan. As the tarte cooked down, the apple slices were pushed down to make a dense filling. The tarte was finished off in the oven and served with a nice tart crème fraiche. I continue to experiment with both ways of making the tart and enjoy every one. Along with the crème fraiche one of the best accompaniments I have enjoyed is an apple ice wine, delicious. Jason

FROZEN PIZZA in Brooklyn? Shame on you! Frozen turkey? Really, if you limit those two items you will probably have more than enough room in the freezer. I should talk, my freezer is full of duck fat, pork skin, chicken carcasses and other things which I can't identify anymore. Let us know how it works out. Jason ← Well, the pizza is actually for my teenaged nephew who visits and likes to midnight snack on pizza and the turkey I get free about twice a year from the local supermarket at the holidays. Mostly, my freezer is filled with lots of unsalted butter bought on sale and homemade puff pastry leaves for emergency hors d'oeuvres and of course ICE CREAM. I have to place my appliance orders soon and will keep y'all posted. Does anyone have a Liebherr fridge? A sub-zero would be a perfect fit w/ a full size range but the price, to me, is insanely high and I always hear that they (sub-zero)have a lot of service problems. If only I had another inch of wall space... ← of course, now i'll have to buy fancy european cabinets to accomodate the cooktop and oven. i wonder why none of the appliances manufacturers make a stainless rack that would hold both 24" components. kuppersbusch actually makes a rack to hold a 36" oven and cooktop but not for their smaller components. ← Two items to comment on "If only I had another inch of wall space..." ...and "now I'll have to buy fancy european cabinets..." What type of building do you live in? Do you have a Contractor yet? Carving out that other inch is not unheard of and solutions can get pretty creative. If you have a Contractor, have them do the necessary due diligence to see if a little demolition and reframing may get you your inch. The other item to consider is the cabinets. For the price of Poggenpohl cabinets you can have your cabinets custom made by someone local. Custom cabinets may allow you to pick up that extra inch or accommodate whatever may be in the way that doesn't allow you to pick up that inch.

FROZEN PIZZA in Brooklyn? Shame on you! Frozen turkey? Really, if you limit those two items you will probably have more than enough room in the freezer. I should talk, my freezer is full of duck fat, pork skin, chicken carcasses and other things which I can't identify anymore. Let us know how it works out. Jason

Interesting dilemma. I have been living with a 24" KitchenAid gas oven for the past 20 years, ironically paired with a 42" KitchenAid cooktop, and a 36" wide built-in refrigerator. The original refrigerator, whose name escapes me but the company was taken over by Northland that is making the same refrigerator, was tremendous inside. The current refrigerator is a GE - fits in the same space, but has about half as much usable space but then again makes about half as much noise. The 24" KitchenAid oven is very small inside and I have trouble fitting roasting pans and even standard jellyroll pans are a tight fit. That being said, I too do a fair amount of baking, and have been able to make do. Your point about the amount of room in the Kuppersbusch is what is important. You really need to take along with you your favorite cookware to the showroom and see if it really fits - the same goes with refrigerator My other point, which I have been trying to around get to, is where you live and for that matter where I live, I am in Brooklyn, is how we shop and cook. Living in one of the few metropolitan locations in this country that allows one to live like a European begs the question, how large a kitchen and how much storage do we really need? All philosophy aside, check out the real usable room in the Liebherr refrigerator (stay away form the Sub-Zero - literally nothing more than a façade with no room inside) and consider going with a 24" oven and cooktop and a 24" refrigerator with the pay off being more countertop.

Confit of pork, or for that matter confit of anything, brings one simple and fantastic use to mind - rillietts