mkayahara

You have to have pheasant! (Possibly with raisins.) From Danny the Champion of the World.

Really, any of those spirits should make a fine substitute for the brandy. Just think about the flavours of each, and decide what you want in the final product. If you want something a little sweet, go with the rum; if you want it a little smoky, go with the Scotch. If you were cooking game, I'd definitely recommend the gin, as I think juniper goes well with gamier meats.

Wow, sorry to hear you had such a disappointing experience! When I was there, I ordered the whitefish fritters with pickled spruce tip remoulade, which I really enjoyed. Crispy exterior, soft interior, good flavour. I also had the special that night of roast partridge on lentils. The lentils were slightly overseasoned, but still tasty. To share with the table, I also ordered the brussels sprouts and apples, which were very good (though the presentation was a bit weird), and the mashed potatoes. We were told the mash had been overseasoned and couldn't be served - I'm sensing a theme here - so they comped us the frites instead. I thought the mayo/aioli/whatever that came with the frites was incredibly delicious. Desserts were good, but not memorable. My companions had a variety of other dishes, and the standout of the evening was the squid salad. Definitely something I'd order if I get a chance to return. Personally, I found the service to be good: friendly and unobtrusive. But we never had any reason to flag down our server, which certainly could have affected my perspective.

How long are you letting the cardamom infuse in the cream?

If you've never read anything in the genre before, I can recommend Near A Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. It's a relatively serious pop history that should give you an idea as to whether you want to delve deeper.

I'm looking to buy a FoodSaver (finally!), but the company's website isn't very clear on the differences between the various models, and a phone call didn't provide much more information. I'm looking to package meats like homemade sausages and bacon for the freezer, as well as getting into sous vide cooking. (And yes, I recognize the limitations of an edge-based sealer versus a chamber sealer.) Can anyone offer any guidance on the differences between current models? Thanks!

Well, I guess I'll add lime cordial to the list of homemade syrups to make, right after orgeat and falernum! (BTW, and I hope this isn't too pedantic, but "fleur" is a feminine noun in French, so it should be La Fleur Rouge.)

The most unusual pie recipe I've ever made is watermelon chiffon pie. Not something you'd want to do often, but tasty and really interesting!

Katie, that sounds great. Good thing my bottle of Appleton V/X is almost empty! Would I be able to sub Rose's for your homemade lime cordial?

In the interests of comprehensiveness, I'll point out Heston Blumenthal's Sound of the Sea dish, where he provides diners with an iPod cued up with seaside sounds for them to listen to as they eat the dish. One question that comes to mind is, what do you consider to be "technology"? Is servingware technology if it's sufficiently innovative? Are the pillows of scented air that Alinea uses a type of technology? Or are you restricting it to the narrower sense of electronics?

Finally got around to trying this out last night: 2 oz. Appleton V/X 3/4 oz. amaretto 1/2 oz. lime juice 1/2 oz. hibiscus tea (1/4 cup dried hibiscus flowers and 2 Tbsp. brown sugar in 2 cups of water, brought to a simmer and steeped for about 3 hours, then strained and chilled) I quite liked it, and my guests seemed to as well. The flavours all married very nicely.

I've been thinking about jamaica in cocktails recently, too. I was first turned on to the idea by this video from Alberta Straub, but she doesn't give any specific drink recipes to use it. I imagine it mixes well with rum, gin and tequila? I've made a drink a few times with Appleton V/X, lime juice, amaretto and cranberry juice, but you need to use *real* cranberry juice (not the stuff that's been cut with apple juice) for the flavour to come through. I wonder how it would work with agua de jamaica...

Glad it worked out for you, Rob. It sounds like you liked the traditional version better than the savory one. How did the sweetness play out in each of them?

I don't know why I didn't think of this. There's a recipe for pine nut marshmallows in A Day at El Bulli that have no sugar in them at all, just milk, gelatin and pine nut oil. I'm sure the actual El Bulli cookbooks could offer similar inspiration.

From what I've read, it's supposed to be sometime in June.

I passed this place yesterday as I was heading through town; it does appear to still be open. Curious about this phenomenon of restaurants in ex-churches (cf. the Church restaurant in Stratford), I checked out their website. The menu struck me as being a little conservative, but if it's well-executed, it could be good.

You might consider Mildred's Temple Kitchen; I had a really enjoyable meal there last week.

I'm always baffled when people assert that nouvelle cuisine had no lasting effect on culinary culture. It's not like we've all taken a reactionary stance against nouvelle cuisine by eliminating reduced sauces from our repertoire and returning to the wisdom of roux-thickened sauces! Edit: Uh, that was a little off-topic, I guess. Anyway, the commercial's funny, and I agree with paulraphael that "good parody shows affection, not just scorn". I'm curious to know who the target audience is, though.

I love gastriques! I've seen a wide range of ratios, and I've seen gastriques that use both caramelized and plain sugar. I'm not sure if there's a specific ratio that makes for a proper gastrique, so if you found it a little sweet, I think you could raise the amount of vinegar and still call it a gastrique. I prefer mine a little on the tart side, too. Last week, for Valentine's Day, I made duck breasts with a sour cherry/red wine gastrique as follows: 1/2 cup red wine (I used a Cabernet Franc/Merlot blend) 1/2 cup red wine vinegar (Cab Franc varietal vinegar) 2/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup sour cherries (frozen back in the summer) Put it all in a pot and reduce until syrupy. I found this to be a little sweet, so I'd cut the sugar next time. I also once made a sour apple gastrique by caramelizing some sugar then adding cider vinegar along with some Granny Smith apple peels, reducing then straining. It was a lovely accompaniment to the pork belly confit from Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie book. I don't remember the ratio of sugar to vinegar I used in that one, though.

What do you view as the defining features of a marshmallow? I'm trying to think of whether marshmallows mean anything but spongy + sweet to me. Once you take out the sweet, you're just left with spongy. I wonder whether you could just make a smoked salmon gelee (with gelatin), whipping it as it cools, and produce a similar texture. The only real problem I see with that is that you'd have to serve it cold, but with fish in there, you'd probably want to serve it cold anyway. Edit: This is sort of what I had in mind, but of course I'd forgotten that it would simply melt in your mouth, so it probably wouldn't give you the sponginess you'd need. Sorry 'bout that!

Not if you make it in a sheet pan!

Horseradish sauce sounds good to me, and I've never seen a recipe for it before. So I checked a couple of my cookbooks, and found two recipes in The Cook's Book. The first is simply a Bearnaise variation with an addition of horseradish. The other involves soaking breadcrumbs in milk, squeezing out the excess, and adding them to a mixture of freshly grated horseradish, vinegar and mustard. That mixture is then folded into lightly whipped cream. If you want the exact proportions, PM me and I can send them along.

If you're just muddling them and fine straining anyway, couldn't you use frozen blueberries?

Cans of pureed chestnuts are usually available both sweetened and unsweetened, so just make sure you read the label. I think that the sweetened version is usually called "chestnut paste" and the unsweetened one "chestnut puree," but I'm not 100% sure about that. The other option would be to try an Italian market, since they often have chestnuts in various forms. I use vacuum-sealed ones to make soup, but I'm not sure how well they would slice.

When I've made banana chips in my dehydrator, I dip them in a 1:1 honey:water syrup before dehydrating. Of course, I also find that they're still a little chewy even after 12 hours at 135F. They're not really the same thing as commercial banana chips, though they're still terribly addictive!