David Ross

You might try Whole Foods. I was at one in Portland just last Friday and they had a nice display of poultry all the way from Cornish Game Hens, to Poussins, Fryers, Roasters, Stewing Hens and Capons. A size of chicken for anyone.

Since Kim Chee can be very strong, and hot/spicy, I would only add a few tablespoons for each cup of rice. I would keep it a rice dish with mainly rice and only a bit of Kim Chee for added flavor and texture. You will have the rich/sweet beef on top of a base of mild rice studded with spicy, crunchy Kim Chee. You could also try a Chinese style rice. I like to add diced Chinese sausage and some reconstituted dried Chinese black mushrooms to short grain sticky rice. That would be a take on steamed Chinese sticky rice wrapped in lotus or banana leaf-and your dish would be Korean style Beef on Chinese Sticky Rice.

Its fun following your progress Dr. J.. I really enjoy watching your ideas for plating and you definitely are on the verge of creating your own style.. What is a creme fraiche cheese sauce? What kind of cheese? Also when you say vegetables cooked with brown sugar and dill? how is it cooked.. There doesnt appear to me much carmelization on the vegetables.. Also, you should get a smaller ring mold or mold for the rice.. It looks like a lot of rice and its not bringing to much color or brightness to the plate. What kind of rice is that, looks very short grain? A polenta would certainly brighten the plate up. Also for the radish and capers, though pretty, I dont think it added much a complimentary flavor to the dish.. Maybe a sauce complimenting the korean marinade or dots of a sweet potato puree around the plate would look nice. I dont mean to be critical, I feel like you are looking for a discussion on your food.. ← Dr. J. all of your photos have looked really good and it's obvious you have a love of food and cooking, which is a love we all share. And I agree with Daniel's comments about presentation and plating. We'll all be better cooks learning from each other. I always try to use a garnish that accents a flavor or ingredient in the main dish. For example, if I did a lamb dish with rosemary in the sauce or in the marinade, I'd garnish the finished lamb meat with a sprig of rosemary. I probably wouldn't just put a sprig of rosemary on a lamb chop for color if I didn't use rosemary somewhere else in the dish. Following on my idea of using garnishes within your dish of Korean style steak (which by the way looks delicious with that nice dark outer crust and perfectly cooked interior), if you didn't use capers in the dish, I would leave them out of the garnish. However, radishes are certainly appropriate as a garnish because they would give that dish a crisp, clean, peppery flavor accent. You might want to take the radishes a step further and try pickling them with some Rice Wine Vinegar and a bit of ginger-sort of like making your own pickled red onions. That would give an Asian flavor to the radishes and act as a cool counterpart to the rich beef which probably has a sweet note in the glaze on the beef. An idea on your bed of rice would be to add some Korean style vegetables (maybe some kimchi), which would give the rice a bit of color and certainly some more flavor. I agree with Daniel that a ring mold is very helpful when creating a base on the plate. Keep your photos coming.

That is a beautiful salad! ← Thanks, it is really easy to make. I left the skin on the pear, took out the core and then sliced it on a mandoline. You don't need to poach quail eggs-regular chicken eggs are fine. I just saw the quail eggs and thought they'd be fun to use for presentation. I poached them about 2 minutes. I think the thing that took the longest was simply frying the bacon and then cutting it up. Easy salad but great taste. Thanks.

Tonight was a Northwest menu with French accents. To start, a classic French bistro dish: Frisee Salad. I added some daikon sprouts to the salad and dressed it with an apple cider vinaigrette. I added applewood smoked bacon and these cute little quail eggs I found in the Asian market. I poached the quail eggs just for a few minutes so the yolks would still be soft and ooze into the salad. I normally make this type of salad with bleu cheese, but the cheesemonger at Whole Foods recommended I try some ricotta salata. She was spot on-the ricotta was salty and tangy, yet milder than a bleu cheese so it didn't overpower the other flavors in the salad. I sliced some Bosc pear for a sweet and crisp note to the salad. The main dish was a roasted rack of pork with a rub made from juniper berries, black pepper, sage, thyme and garlic. I'm partial to juniper, not only because I like gin but because our family ranch in Central Oregon had a number of juniper trees. The scent of juniper is something you never forget, and I think a perfect accent to pork. I served the pork with roasted fingerling potatoes, broccoli rabe and these huge, fresh chanterelles from Oregon. The sauce was a bit over the top-mustard cream-but the mustard was a nice tangy counter balance to the other rich flavors. Had a nice 2005 Oregon Pinot Noir from Maysara Vineyards of McMinnville, Oregon. Enjoy.

Marlene-I just turned 50. I should have hired you to fly out West to prepare this EXACT meal for my birthday dinner. Wonderful.

This is my favorite photo of the year on eGullet. A child, a smile and the joy of cooking. How wonderful. I am sure you are a very proud parent. Thanks for posting.

What a wonderful topic and so appropriate to this time of year-Fruitcake! Aside from my Mother and Father and long gone Grandparents and Great Aunt Bertie, I'm alone among other family members and friends in terms of my love for fruitcake. I guess I knew I would find comfort in knowing other eGullet friends would share my passion for fruitcake and I wouldn't hide my fruitcake addiction from the outside world. I prefer the traditional, dark-style fruitcake. I use a recipe that was used for many years by the chefs aboard the Great Northern passenger trains. Here is a link to a piece I wrote for fun a few years back about my love of fruitcake, the tradition of fruitcake on the Great Northern and the special memories that fruitcake holds for my family. There is a link at the bottom of the page to click that will take you to a page with the Great Northern Railroad's famous fruitcake recipe: Great Northern Recipe I'm going to show you some photos of the fruitcake I'll be enjoying this year. But I won't start with photos showing you how I mix the batter and bake the fruitcake-I'm going to show the photos in 'reverse' order. In other words, we'll start with what the fruitcake looks like when it is ready to serve, and work backwards by showing the prep photos in coming days when I make a new fruitcake that will be ready for Christmas 2010. Why show the finished product first? Well, I'm a traditionalist and when that comes to fruitcake that means you bake your cake years in advance of serving it. You let it sit, or 'stew' as Aunt Bertie would say, wrapped in layers of cheesecloth and placed in a airtight container stored in a deep, dark, cool recess of the pantry. Every few months you douse the fruitcake with a good slog of booze. And that is my key to memorable fruitcake-letting the cake age and steep in liquor for at least a couple of years before cutting it into thick slices. In fact, Aunt Bertie was said to serve fruitcakes that were often 10 years old. Now don't wince at the thought of eating cake that is older than your toddler. My opinion is anything soaked in more booze than goes in the party punch bowl won't spoil. Mold just doesn't grow on my fruitcake-not when it's liquored up with a bottle of brandy and a few slugs of Kirsch or Grand Marnier. I hope you enjoy the fruitcake story and these photos. I am sure it doesn't look appetizing to a fruitcake hater. But I am sure that fruitcake afficianados will enjoy the photos:

One of my favorite fall apple desserts-Apple Charlotte. I use a classic French recipe from Julia Child. Instead of regular creme anglaise, I added some pumpkin puree-voila-Pumpkin Creme Anglaise.

I have some ideas for you-and you can catch some photos of the cannelloni I did last week by clicking the link below over to the Dinner thread. I myself also am doing a dish with braised beef tonight-in a lasagna style dish. But for your cannelloni, I would suggest buying wonton wrappers from the cold case at your market. They work fine for cannelloni. If you do want to make fresh pasta I would not go all the way to the final notch on your pasta machine because that might make the pasta sheets too thin. I'd maybe go to the second to last notch. Layer some Italian style tomato sauce in the bottom of a baking dish. Spoon the braised beef on the sheet of pasta/wonton wrapper and roll up. Place the rolled up cannelloni on top of the tomato sauce. Spoon some besciamella (white sauce), on top of the cannelloni. Dot the top with more tomato sauce, some grated parmesan and butter. Bake until bubbly, then broil for 5 minutes to crisp the top. You can see my step by step photos on the Dinner thread. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but I think you'd be pleased with the results.

Wow. Thank you so much. It's a great compliment to know that you just took my photo of the pumpkin soup and created your own delicious looking dish. Great job.

Like others, I use salt cod in a traditional Brandade, but after that recipe is done, I let the brandade cool and then add stiff mashed potato to make a salt cod/mashed potato cake. You can dip the cake in some beaten egg and dredge in panko crumbs and then fry it in oil and clarified butter until it gets nice and golden. I use the salt cod cake as a base for seared/roasted fish like Halibut. It's rich just like that so I wouldn't serve it with a rich sauce, maybe something like a parsley oil.

I'll send you the recipe, it's pretty lengthy. There are instructions for 1) making the pasta sheets, 2) the tomato sauce, 3) the filling and 4) assembling the cannelloni and baking. It's all worth the effort as it's one of those memorable dishes that once you have it, you'll add it into your 'classic' recipe file. I'm not a fan of chicken livers and so I wondered about adding them to the recipe the first time I made the cannelloni. Most people eating the dish wouldn't even recognize the flavor of chicken liver in the filling. But the chicken livers add a creaminess and rich flavor that the recipe wouldn't be the same without.

I cheated a bit and used fresh wonton wrappers out of the dairy case from the supermarket. The traditional recipe in the Time-Life book calls for making fresh pasta sheets with a traditional pasta recipe using egg and semolina flour. I've used that recipe in the past, but it takes a long time and since I don't think I'm good at pasta, I sometimes cheat and use the wonton wrappers. I don't boil the sheets ahead of time-they soften and cook in the sauce as the cannelloni bake. The wonton wrappers aren't my first choice-they can taste a bit sticky and gluey in the finished cannelloni. I don't have a local source for fresh pasta sheets, but sometimes I use dried, flat lasgna noodles (not lasagna noodles with the frilled edges). If I'm using dried pasta sheets I would boil the pasta to soften it before using it to roll the cannelloni.

Yes, single man eating rich Cannelloni in the far reaches of chilly Eastern Washington. Now that I think of it, that would probably be my post on a dating site for foodies. And now that I think of that, what a concept, a dating site for foodies.

Tonight I started with a Roasted Pumpkin Soup. I roasted pumpkin and garlic together, then pureed it along with some currants and spices. Wish I had actually had a bit of black truffle to shave into the soup-I think it would have added depth and a more woodsy note to this Fall soup. I garnished it with smoked bacon and some yogurt that I spiked with cayenne pepper. Then one of my favorite Fall pasta dishes-"Cannelloni" from the Time-Life world cuisine series. The recipe is out of "The Cooking of Italy" published in 1968. I've amassed all of the cookbooks in the series through garage sales and trips to a local used bookstore. It is quite interesting to read through cookbooks that are 40 years old. The photos are as delicious as the reading and the recipes. Here are the steps to making the traditional, savory Cannelloni: Filling the pasta sheets with a mixture of ground beef, chicken livers, spinach, egg, cream and parmesan: Next is the laying of the cannelloni in a heavy baking dish on top of a thin layer of homemade tomato sauce: This shows the cannelloni topped with a traditional bechamel sauce-butter, flour, both cream and whole milk, white pepper and nutmeg: Next, to be more decadent, (remember this was a recipe 40 years ago), you top the cannelloni with parmesan and yes, butter: The cannelloni are baked for 20 minutes and then kept under the broiler for about 5 minutes: Finally, two photos of the plated, traditional Cannelloni. The second photo shows the filling. As you can imagine this is an incredibly rich dish so I usually can only eat two of the Cannelloni. I think I may be looking forward to my lunches at work this coming week:

Great blog and as others have commented, you are in an envious position for a food lover. You company website is very good.

Thanks for the nice comment. The vinaigrette is very simple. I added the sugar to the original recipe and instead of only olive oil, I used half walnut oil and half olive oil. Again, kudos for the recipe go to Chef Larry Forgione: Pumpkin/Pepita Vinaigrette: 1/2 cup pepitas (green pumpkin seeds) 1/3 cup canned pumpkin 1/2 clove garlic, minced 1/2 tsp. tumeric 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar 1 tbsp. sugar 1/4 cup walnut oil 1/4 cup olive oil Salt and freshly ground black pepper Blend the pepitas, pumpkin, garlic, tumeric, vinegar, and sugar in a blender. Add the oils with the blender running to combine the vinaigrette. Season to taste. Additional whole pepitas for garnish

Tonight I did a Salmon with a Pumpkin-Pepita (Green Pumpkin Seed) Vinaigrette. This is a great dish for the weeknights because it's so simple. You can make the vinaigrette ahead of time and then all you do is sear some salmon, add some greens, spoon on the vinaigrette and garnish with whole pepitas. It's also delicious with chicken breast or pork chops. The vinaigrette is more like a thick, chunky sauce. It's out of Larry Forgione's "An American Place" cookbook. You don't hear much about Chef Forgione these days since there are so many young 'celebrity' chefs out there that have taken over the spotlight, but he was a leader in bringing out the idea of an 'American' cuisine. I don't know if he's still cooking or the restaurant is still open in New York. All of his recipes are simple and delicious if you want to try this cookbook.

Greystreet-you're off to a great start with the list of restaurants you've composed. A side note-avoid Bouchon, even for breakfast. You'll find a lot of us who are Las Vegas dining regulars have seen Bouchon slip in the past few years. Personally, I think the breakfast buffet at both Wynn and Bellagio is better than the ala Carte breakfast at Bouchon. I always tell people looking for advice on Las Vegas restaurants to start by answering the question of how much you are willing to spend. Based on the list you've compiled and the fact you've read a lot of the posts on eGullet, my guess is that you don't mind spending a lot for dining? Be prepared for spending around $35 and up for entrees at the restaurants you've listed. Appetizers will be in the $15-$25 range, more for caviar and foie gras. Desserts will be in the $10-15 range. On the top end, the Crispy Sea Bass with Delicate Spices that is often found on the menu at Guy Savoy was priced at $70 in May. That's just the entree. Their tasting menu was $350 with wines. That's the high end of the spectrum. The $48 3-course menu at Boulud that you mentioned is a steal of a deal. If you saw a tasting menu at Picasso priced at $105, yes that's also a great deal. Wine pairings would probably add another $100 or so. I have heard Chef Julian Serrano lives in Las Vegas and is in the kitchen nightly. I'll be able to affirm that when I dine there in November with my fellow Las Vegas foodie-rjwong. The second set of questions I ask people are exactly the questions that rj posed to you: "What kind of dining experience are you looking for? Is this guys' night out? girls' night out? Mixed group? "Ready for Halloween" people? "Nice & quiet place thank you" group? Please let us know." One of the worst experiences that can happen is when someone who is serious about spending a lot of money for a great dining experience in Las Vegas drags along a group of friends who don't share their passion about food. I use the comparison of people who maybe would feel more comfortable at a hip, loud, trendy place like Fix at Bellagio as opposed to a more sedate, quiet, serious food restaurant like Picasso downstairs at Bellagio. Fix has decent food-it's just not at the level of Picasso. But if you're serious about food and dining, any of the places you list should be more than worth the expense. The one exception would be David Burke. I'd avoid it. I haven't been there so I'm not qualified to deny you the experience-but based on the comments from my friend-John Curtas, local restaurant critic and host of shows about local dining on radio and tv-I'd avoid Burke's new place at The Venetian. John excoriated the place on a review he did for John Mariani. The chef is now gone, replaced with a new guy, so John recommends giving the new kitchen staff a few months to settle in before taking on another dinner at Burke. It's really wonderful to be faced with choosing only two out of 12 places that you listed. It's sort of like picking two of twelve flavors of cotton candy. This would be my two choices: Alex: Really exceptional food. I'd call it American cuisine using French techniques. A beautiful setting and just as the brochures say, you do in fact descend a staircase out of "Hello Dolly" to enter the dining room. I was there in May at a private winemaker's lunch and Chef Alex Stratta was in the kitchen. Chef Stratta and the staff make you feel comfortable and relaxed-it didn't seem pretentious or stuffy at all. I'm looking forward to their Tasting Menu when I go in November. Picasso: I haven't been yet-one month and counting before I get there. If you really can get the tasting menu for $105, that's a very good deal. I read their menu often and just based on the dishes the chef presents and the comments I read, I think your party would have a wonderful dinner.

Interesting that there hasn't been as many advocates for the Granny Smith than I would have anticipated for a discussion on apple pie. I'm lucky to live not far from the heart of apple country in Washington State-and we tend to use the Granny Smith in our pies. We like to say that Washington is the number one producer of apples in the country. I don't know if that is factually true, but I know we're right up there. I would rate the Granny Smith as my number one apple for pies-mainly because it is tart and holds its shape well while cooking. I also like a combination of Fuji's and Granny Smith for other cooked apple dishes. The Fuji is sweeter than the Granny Smith and still holds its shape while cooking. Right now I have a Dutch Apple Pie in the oven. I used a combination of Granny Smith, Fuji and Honeycrisp. I've never used the Honeycrisp apple so we'll see how that turns out. I'm hoping the Honeycrisp will cook down almost to a applesauce type of consistency while the other apples hold their shape. If it turns out I'll snap a photo and post later.

I love my "Showtime" Rotisserie Grill. It's about 5 years old and almost ready for an upgrade! I use it a lot-especially for roast chicken. It actually makes better roast chickens than I get at the supermarket. I cook them a bit longer than the recipe booklet recommends-I 'set it and forget it' for about 1 1/2 hours. You never have to worry about dry chicken-the fat and juices self-baste the chicken as it rotates-and I always get a crispy skin. I also use it for prime rib and game hens-although with game hens you have to jerry-rig the spit a bit since it is designed for larger poultry. It would be a cheap and wise investment. I think I paid around $185 for it 5 years ago. I suppose a lot of people would turn their nose up at the Showtime, but it really is just a small, home version of the basic rotisserie that you may find in really upscale restaurant kitchens-the industrial units that cost thousands!

David, Do you think I could substitute fennel for the parsnip? Recipe for the cider vinaigrette? Is the vinaigrette a little sweet? ← You could definately substitute fennel for the parsnip. I have also done this salad with sweet potato. I cut the apple and pears raw, leaving the skin on. I soak the cut fruit in a bit of chilled lemon water so it doesn't brown while I cut the vegetables. If I am using parsnip, turnip, rutabaga or sweet potato, I might blanch it in boiling water for a minute just to soften it up a bit, then chill in ice water to retain its crunch The vinaigrette is simple. Sorry, I don't have measurements but I know you've all got the expertise to make the vinaigrette to your own tastes. Dijon mustard Walnut Oil Apple Cider Vinegar Apple Cider Sugar Salt Pepper Fresh thyme I like using walnut oil in this dish to accent the flavor of the toasted walnuts sprinkled on the salad. Yes, it is a vinaigrette on the sweet side.

I don't go to Costco much, but when I do, I always stock up on meat. Their NY Strip steaks are very good-thick cut, choice grade. They always have rack of lamb at around $11 a pound-an incredibly low price for rack of lamb in my area. And you normally can't find rack of lamb in the regular stores. I especially like the Costco 'Seafood Extravaganza' specials that they offer about every 6 weeks. The extravaganze usually includes huge diver scallops, king crab, dungeness crab, mussels, clams, oysters and my favorites when in season-fresh Alaskan halibut and fresh Alaskan spot prawns.