Kent Wang

I think this is one of those spirits some people will order straight. Wouldn't it be awkward to serve it at refrigerator temperature?

Is Bangalore dim sum any different from Hong Kong? Best of luck with your endeavor. Dim sum is one of those things that very few people in China actually cook; they just go out to restaurants. So I think you might have a hard time finding information on how to make it yourself. And so much of it is hands-on technique, like how to fold the wrappers and work the dough, that would be hard to learn through a book or website. Perhaps you could just offer to work for free at your favorite restaurant during prep time, maybe even offer to pay to have them teach you.

While looking for information on how to care for my kaffir lime tree, I found Kasma Loha-unchit's website where she also offers culinary tours to Thailand, along with tons of information about Thai food and cooking. Just from her articles on kaffir lime tree care, I can tell she is extremely knowledgeable. She offers four different trip, the cheapest one being Trip B to northern and central Thailand for 19 days, costing $3350. The price is all inclusive including airfare from San Francisco, food, transport, and lodging while in Thailand. It seems quite reasonably priced. You could do it yourself for less money, but then you wouldn't know where to go nearly as well as she does. I'd like to try this myself in the next few years. Has anyone tried this or other similar culinary tours to Thailand?

Erin, I'm basically looking for the same places, with just one trip to a western place like Whampoa Club. There look to be some good recommendations in this thread. I come home on 3 October so I promise to report back and let you know around 30 September.

I board prep most of the time and use bowls if I need to. But... I use five identical boards. If I run out of space on a board I'll just pull out another one. I also never have to wash a board while I'm cooking; I just toss them all in the dishwasher at the end. I have big steel mixing bowls but for smaller uses I just use Chinese porcelain rice bowls, which are about the same size as the small steel prep bowls I see most people use. They're more versatile because you can serve food and prep in a rice bowl but you can only prep in a prep bowl.

I'm going to be in Shanghai for two weeks in late-September. Whampoa Club looks to be the most interesting Western-ish restaurant because it has a lot of Asian influences. Is it still good? How expensive is it? I believe the prices people have posted are pretty reasonable considering there's no tax and tip like in the US. I went to Nanxiang in City God Temple (Chéng Huáng Miào) which is connected to Yuyuan Garden back in 2006. This is the one place everybody has been posting about above. These xiao long bao were some of the worst I've had. They were way too small, the skin was too thick and lacked any transparency whatsoever and most importantly the meat was way too dry with no soup in them! That's not a xiao long bao, that's just a steamed dumpling. Tour buses dump a hundred tourists off at a time to line up at this place. It's a real travesty that they are passing off these terrible dumplings to millions of tourists who now think this is the epitome of xiao long bao. They bring shame to themselves, the city of Shanghai, our illustrious cuisine, and the glorious soup dumpling. The government cultural ministry should shut this place down and make the proprietors denounce themselves.

Agave syrup would be much easier to import than alcohol, red-tape-wise. Maybe you should give it a shot. Hell, just bring over a couple bottles and I'll buy a few from you. My guy at Spec's says Smith & Cross (the Jamaica rum) and Cocchi Americano should be arriving in about a month. I'd imagine New York and California would get it even earlier.

Wow, I think I'll try out the SV Magic with my current small rice cooker. I'll need to buy a bigger one for bigger cuts, but that's like $100 at the most I believe. Plus $150 (shipped to the US) for the SV Magic and you have a solution for around $250? That sounds almost too good to be true.

Why don't we have 19th century themed bars? Maybe Clover Club is more along those lines with their copper roof that was lifted from a bar in a mining town turned ghost town (which was probably late 19th century). They do exist. Probably the NYC bar most evocative of the late 19th Century with respect to decor, equipment (hand-chipped block ice, etc.) and mixology (although they do make drinks from later eras) would be Dutch Kills in Long Island City. Ah, yes, I loved that place. The bartender I had even had a waxed mustache like the dude from There Will Be Blood.

This is what Trading Places was about. Buy! Buy! Buy!

The rating is 8.9, which puts it around the #20 restaurant in the Austin-area. My thoughts exactly.

Thanks for the recipe, Sam. I'll definitely try it out. Some day, I'd like to just have a taste of your grenadine so I can calibrate mine against it. Which vanilla do you use? Which pomegranate juice? POM? Do you think they're all the same?

Did the price of bacon go up because of the trend? I rarely buy bacon, so I don't have a handle on the prices.

Why don't we have 19th century themed bars? Maybe Clover Club is more along those lines with their copper roof that was lifted from a bar in a mining town turned ghost town (which was probably late 19th century). Scofflaw, too. Drinkboy:

I've been making my own lately from the Cortas brand molasses. This stuff has quite a bit of sediment, so I fine mesh strain the end product a few times. There's another brand that I bought in New York, can't remember the name, but it had a bit of burlap on the bottle top, that doesn't have sediment but also seemed quite a bit more expensive. For what it's worth, I highly recommend going to a good bar and asking to try their grenadine so you can get the taste down. My first batch ended up being much sweeter and syrupy-er than the one I had Dutch Kills (BTW, they make from syrup, not juice). Has anyone tried the Routin grenadine? There's some praise for it online: Comment by Courgette on Cocktail Chronicles: Science of Drink: Their orgeat is awesome, so I have high hopes for this. But it might be all moot because it's not on their website, though there's a Cocktail Pomegranate which might be the same thing. Sonoma Syrup is recommended by Dr. Cocktail and Art of Drink: The ingredients don't look that great to me, with all the ascorbic and citric acid: Their website says it's only 30% juice. Why mess with that when the homemade I make is about 70% molasses?

The experiments are very interesting. Excellent post as well from Sam. Another matter which should be obvious is making a highball and filling it with KD cubes. This will obviously dilute much slower than with smaller ice.

Truly, St. Germaine is the best. Domaine de Canton is cool, very unique, but I feel a bit overwrought, like a premium vodka bottle. The Luxardo Maraschino is annoyingly tall; I can't fit in my liquor cabinet. Though not quite as bad as Galliano -- who uses that stuff anyway?

Raw. The livers were a huge soggy mess and would have been a real pain to remove any thing like a gallbladder.

I agree.

I recently bought some chicken livers from the farmers market and it tasted great: sweet, hardly any bitterness. Today I bought chicken livers from Chinatown and they were wretched: bitter, with an array of unusual off-flavors. I threw them away. Do livers vary so much in quality? It would make sense to me considering the function of the liver in the body. Where do most restaurants get the livers for chicken liver mousse or pate? Do they have to seek out special chicken? I've certainly never had a chicken liver dish at a restaurant that tasted like the Chinatown livers.

That tiki cup is great. Where did you get it?

If the store has Flor de Cana, it's so cheap they're practically giving it away at $13 a bottle or $20 for a 1.75L (the equivalent of $8.50 a bottle). I think I'm gonna buy a couple handles and take a bath in it.

Countryside Farms is selling feral hog at the Austin Farmers Market for something like $3.50 - $4.50 a pound, any cut, including ribs, shoulder and ground. It's so delicious, the absolute best porcine meat I've ever had, even better than the other farmer with the Berkshire pigs. Juicy, very flavorful, a slightly darker color. Does anyone have more solid stats to back this up? Certainly I believe they're more likely to have it than domestic pigs but the CDC reports that "From 1997 to 2001, an annual average of 12 cases per year were reported in the United States."

Pigeon is served all over the place in China. On my last month-long trip, I think we had more pigeon than chicken. I'm hoping those were farmed, but knowing China, I wouldn't doubt that some were urban and shot. Do you have problems getting the bullet or pellets out? I don't know much about shooting. Could you use a BB rifle?

1:1 bourbon and lemon? That's crazy! I tried it anyway and it was way too tart. I had to pour some more bourbon and sugar in there to balance it out.