HungryC

My go-to recipe for cut-out, decorated cookies is King Arthur Flour's holiday butter cookie. The posted recipe shows a nice, clear photo of sharp-edged, fairly intricate cookies. One baking tip: if your cookie sheets are warm (like for the second & subsequent batches), cookies will spread excessively. A few minutes in the freezer or a quick run under cold tap water to cool the sheets before you bake additional batches will help to retain shapes. Or get a whole bunch of baking sheets so you don't have to reuse.

I agree wholeheartedly. I made a big batch using Meyer lemons and everclear: after dilution and two years' aging, it still borders on the undrinkable. I'm planning to try again soon using a lower-proof spirit. I had an absolutely divine homemade limoncello on the Amalfi Coast late last winter, and the maker used ordinary vodka and those incredibly aromatic sfusato lemons. She also suggested that I probably steeped my peel/zest far too long. I brought a bottle home, and it's just as fragrant and fresh seven months later.

I'm a big fan of posted calorie counts, precisely because they help consumers understand that the marketing veneer of "healthy" places is just a facade. Americans are (blissfully? woefully?) uninformed about the contents & calories in mass-produced food...we've scarfed down cheap, subsidized calories for decades now. If calorie counts cause menus to shift toward less caloric foods, then YAY. What I'd really like: for portion sizes to return to normalcy. Just try to buy an ordinary sort of lunch that isn't ridiculously oversized....I routinely throw away more than I eat. Such a waste...

In the kitchen, I have vintage food labels from LA products, as well as a screen print (given to me by a former student) depicting the work of New Orleans sign artist Lester Carey. His hand-painted advertising signs adorn many NOLA corner groceries, bars, etc. (Read more about him here & see examples of his work: http://nonotes.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/the-story-of-a-new-orleans-sign-painter-artist-lester-carey/ ) The image depicted in my print can be seen here: My favorite piece hangs in the dining room: a Fonville Winans photo of the kitchen staff of the Oleander Hotel, Grand Isle, LA, circa 1930. See it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fonville/2241913044/in/set-72157603965073245/

What I want in an AM cup of coffee: a perfectly made Roman cappucino, of the sort churned out inexpensively by the bazillions at tiny coffee bars all over the Eternal City, like at Bar del Cappucino on via Arenula (it's Danesi coffee and fresh milk, but it's the technique & machine that matter most). Sadly, I'm a long, long way from the endless perfect capuchos of Roma, so I have to make do. What I get in a typical AM cup of coffee: whatever my better half feels like making; usually espresso, sometimes moka pot, sometimes french press. He insists that the milk be at least scalded if not steamed, usually adds more sugar than I like, but the important part is he makes it for me! Beans less than a week old, freshly ground every AM, burr grinder. Less frequently, cafe au lait with coffee & chicory--this usually goes with a big breakfast, as the bitter chicory somehow complements salty brekkie foods. Afternoon or evening coffee is a different story: a macchiato (a real one, not a silly Starbucks version) at 3, or cold-drip iced coffee w/lots of milk if the weather is warm, or a cafe sua da for courage. A long latte if I'm feeling the need for extra vitamin D.

My last meal at the cafe (early '08) was certainly tasty, but it was much as Carolyn Tillie describes: perhaps revolutionary two (or more) decades ago, but not exactly exciting or new in the 21st century. An herbed chicken paillard, a pizette, two gorgeous salads, some other food I can no longer recall...the dessert, nothing more than tangerines in a hammered brass bowl, actually made me laugh out loud. I have tangerines in my backyard--I flew to Cali to get a bowl of tangerines? Frankly, I was more impressed by the sourdough pizza at the Cheese Board down the street.

Found the photo of naan on the Egg: Flatbreads are made for Egging; I use Anissa Helou's Savory Mediterranean Baking and Alford & Duguid's Flatbreads & Flavors all the time. One last Egg photo--hasselback potatoes:

Saw a few BGE cooking questions upthread and wanted to throw my 2 cents in: --bread doesn't need any steam in the BGE, in my experience. If you're having problems with browning, increase the temp and raise the grid higher in the dome. Additionally, you can flip a mostly-cooked loaf over to even out the upper & lower browning. See these pretty loaves... --naan cooked directly on a preheated stone is the way to go. the walls of my egg are pretty filthy/sooty, I wouldn't want to eat anything cooked on 'em. Use a half-moon stone and you can do bread & a protein at the same time; this photo shows pita cooking, but I do naan the same way. The Egg is a great tool for stir-frying; the grid-raising ring sold by the Ceramic Grill Store inverts to hold a wok perfectly: Finally, char-grilled oysters might be the best thing to cook on an Egg, bar none:

Can't say I care one way or another about restaurant criticism....I am happy that other food-related outlets seem to be flourishing. Edible New Orleans is a nice publication, New Orleans magazine has pretty darn good food coverage, and we now have several radio food programs (besides Fitzmorris) and an ever-multiplying number of food-centric blogs. So I'd wager more food-related content is available these days, though the newspaper is no longer the dominant platform for such content.

Did the TP's dining section ever have reviews? In my memory, reviews always appeared in the Friday entertainment supplement (Lagniappe). Dining section still has interesting features from time to time, but nothing like the old days when it was an entire section of the paper on Thursdays. Such is the state of newspapers today, I guess. At least the Dining content is longer than Monday's Metro section--that fish wrapper is downright embarrassing. AND my monthly subscription just went up, AGAIN.

I use hardwood lump (certainly not Whole Foods, just Royal Oak from WalMart), mainly because it produces far, far less ash than briquettes. The excessive ash produced by briquettes clogs my Big Green Egg.

Boudro's is on Commerce, not too far from the Hyatt. Haven't been in a couple of years, but it used to be reliably good: http://www.boudros.com/boudros/

Ick, no mayo for me, thanks. But jam (esp raspberry) is a different story...and I do like pickle brine.

Direct from the shrimper @ the farmer's market in south Louisiana, I'm paying about $1/lb more than pre-spill. Still, this is sub-$5 per lb (for "medium", generally 20-25 count), and not out of line for late summer/early fall prices.

My office (on a college campus) has a full-size fridge & freezer, a mini fridge, two microwaves, a slot toaster, a toaster oven, and a hot-water dispenser (you'd be surprised how many things can be made with just hot water)...but I do have a full-size Weber charcoal pit in my office closet for serious outdoor cooking, and we have a Smokey Joe for weenie roasts. I wish we had a stove...I've toyed with the idea of buying an inexpensive induction burner. For a long time, lack of hot water limited our cooking, but we recently got a tankless hot water heater, so washing up is so much easier.

Sometimes I eat it, sometimes I don't. On weekdays, it is not more than cafe au lait and fruit, or toast (w/nut butter or ricotta), or a Kashi TLC bar, or a carton of Fage 0% yogurt w/fruit or honey. Some days, it's just a (homemade) latte. BUT I have a "second breakfast" type snack around 10:30. I'm not so hungry first thing in the AM...on slower weekend mornings, I eat a bit more, but also generally have a later lunch.

Hey, I made it into the NOLA episode, eating a lemongrass chix taco in the rain. Cool.

I'm thinking of dishes like stracotto, where the beef's so-called "stringiness" is a desirable outcome. Heck, modern Americanized stracotto recipes tell you to shred the beef with two forks, should you be too impatient to allow the cooking to achieve the desired texture. Not all stews seek to achieve your previously stated ideal of texture. Many peasant dishes from other cultures do indeed cook the meat into a consistency you might find unacceptable--but I've eaten many a delicious stew fashioned from ingredients that are far below "choice".

I don't bother with an electric starter (an oiled paper towel works just fine). The plate setter, a pizza stone, and a raised grid are the must-haves, to me. Check out www.ceramicgrillstore.com for nice raised grid setups...I bought the one that allows you to elevate the cooking surface, or flip it over and use it as a wok ring. Stir-fry on the Egg is a damn fine thing.

The best institutional food item all over Louisiana: Monday's red beans & rice. Traditional slow cooked red beans still appear in school, workplace, & hospital cafeterias, and RB&R are reliably better than edible. It helps that beans are cheap, lend themselves to unattended cooking & a speck of smoked pork can flavor an entire pot of beans. All you need is a little hot sauce, and even school cafeterias usually have a couple kinds of hot sauce hanging around. A few drops of Crystal, and voila...

It's not the cut of the beef....even the toughest, gnarliest beef will soften with enough cooking. The culprit was the deep frying...which is definitely not accomplishing the same thing as a browning in a small amount of fat. Foods long-fried in lots of fat will definitely toughen (ever had rubbery fried chicken? even fried shrimp and oysters get unpleasantly hard & chewy if deep-fried too long). The whole point of pan-browning is to caramelize the meat--you want some of the liquid (blood, frankly) to seep out a bit and brown on the outside of the meat cubes. You're not trying to cook the beef--just trying to get some flavor (and color) that will provide depth of flavor to your stew. A faster frying in lots of fat just doesn't achieve the same thing. Check out some stew recipes: well-written ones specify that the meat is browned first, and the instructions are usually pretty explicit about not crowding the pan, even going so far as to suggest you brown the meat in batches. A deeper-fat frying also won't allow any sort of good "crust" to build up on the bottom of the pot...another source of flavor and color--the fond will cook into the stew once liquid is added.

The ribs look wonderfully delicious, but I must admit that the "after" photo makes my scoliotic spine hurt something awful. RE: cooking time + baby backs, the cooking time varies and can be wonderfully short. I cook to texture & temp, rather than arbitrary time--a most important bbq axiom.

Let's not forget that the very concept of protected intellectual property has a specific cultural basis, yet food is the great cross-cultural universal. We all eat, and frequently the table is the initial point of cultural understanding and curiosity. Some cultures don't recognize the ownership of music, and I think (historically) food & drink have a similar function in Western culture....an area of material culture where riffing, copying, and reproduction is the very essence of the craft. The ease of finding info in a digital world means that "sampling" will continue to spread (just try to talk sense to undergraduates about plagiarism).

Sorry to break your heart, but I can't think of a single place with good jambalaya or gumbo that fits your picturesque ideal of "shack" and would be interested in someone filming in the kitchen. Why does it have to be a "shack" for pete's sake? Pardon me while I wash the deep south & backward Louisiana cliches out of my eyes. Good jambalaya is hard enough to find in a restaurant kitchen. Cafe Reconcile's picturesque, isn't it? It has good gumbo, too.

Can't cook without 'em. Always have at least one bell pepper plant growing in my garden, from last freeze to first freeze; many years when we don't get a freeze, the bushes will overwinter happily, producing peppers year round. Colored ones are fine, but the deep, mineral, vegetal bright tang of green bell pepper is part of my native seasoning..the trinity is the beginning of damn near everything savory in south Louisiana (gumbo, jambalaya, etouffee, stews, soups, cornbread dressing, etc). In fact, the trinity is sold, pre-chopped, in frozen & refrigerated tubs at most supermarkets. Various brands exist, varying the proportions of bell pepper-celery-onions slightly from one to the next. I'd have to give up cooking if I couldn't have green peppers. Stuffed bell peppers are a regular "lunch special" at ordinary cafes & neighborhood restaurants 'round these parts, filled with everything from dirty rice to pork sausage to shrimp & pork, breadcrumbs, crabmeat, etc.