David Ross

Here are a couple of photos of the delicious crust--

My friends in food all know how much I cherish these cookbooks and yet again they haven't disappointed. I've been on a search for a good, no great, pizza dough recipe for about 3 years. In fact, this past weekend I made 3 different recipes, all with marginal results. A Batali recipe was too gooey, a recipe from "Extra Virgin" on Cooking Channel was too gummy. Then on a lark I went into my library to turn to a trusted source--The Foods of Italiy. Success! Pizza dough that gifted me with a thin, chewy, crispy crust full of mountains of bubbles. And imagine, these books debuted some 60 years ago. If only the "artisanal" pizza crafters today knew that a great recipe could be found in a Time-Life book.

Wow, thanks for posting. I didn't realize there was this edition so now I'll be on the lookout.

More wonderful fresh asparagus from Walla Walla. This time stir-fried with black bean garlic sauce-

beautiful, (and I am sure delicious), dishes......and fresh radishes and butter are one of best...........thanks for posting

Looks delicious and obviously using the old-fashioned method of mixing gave you a cake with plenty of volume.

One of my favorites--"Chicken Pie with Biscuits" based on a church supper recipe that appeared in Saveur years ago. You start with making chicken stock--the best chicken stock ever and very easy--a whole chicken in a deep pot filled with water, aromatics and vegetables. Simmer the chicken for about 3 hours, then strain off the liquid into another pot. Pull the meat off the chicken and reserve, but put all the bones back in the second pot with the strained liquid. Now reduce, reduce, reduce. I don't skim any muck off the top like other recipes because there isn't any mucky foam. Talk about concentrated chicken flavor. The next day add a slurry of cream and flour to some of the chicken stock to make a gravy, then add the chicken meat, vegetables of your choosing, (I always add chopped celery, carrots and peas), then some chopped fresh sage, thyme, salt and lots of black pepper. Bake in a casserole for about 45 minutes. Use your favorite biscuit recipe or frozen store-bought biscuits, (yes, they are quite good and convenient), put the biscuits on top of the chicken pie, bake another 15 minutes or so. Brush the biscuit tops with melted butter and there you have it.

Nicely done. I shall take slabs of thick-cut bacon any time of day.

Along with the asparagus I prepared fresh Alaskan halibut--slow-poached in olive oil in a 250 oven for 1 1/2 hours. It's a Batali recipe and it's always delicious. The olive oil is seasoned with chopped capers, parsley and sliced lemon. The fish stays moist yet firm. Served on a bed of thick spaghetti and dressed with some of the olive oil poaching liquid. This recipe also works quite well with cod, sablefish and salmon.

Fresh Washington asparagus from Walla Walla, about a two hour drive from my home. This year the season started a bit early in mid-April and is projected to last into the first week of June or so. These fat buggars were full of rich asparagus flavor. I prepare them simply--peeled below the tip, steamed for about 5 minutes and dressed with hollandaise and a twist of the pepper mill. Sometimes I'll garnish the asparagus with buttered bread crumbs or crisp threads of prosciutto.

I typically store duck confit in pork lard. Even if your confit was cured using duck or goose fat, the pork lard won't change the flavor drastically while it's being stored--and a big tub of lard is cheap. Just slowly melt the lard, pour into a tupperware container, put in your duck confit, seal with a tight lid and refrigerate. Put each leg in it's own container if you prefer. Then keep it in the fridge. You could also vacuum seal the legs, but since it's already been cured as confit, you don't need to add any oil to the bag. I'd avoid freezing the confit because, even vacuum-sealed, small ice crystals can form in the bag and that can break down the texture of the meat when you thaw it.

Thanks for the details on each element of the dish--it really gives us more insight of the characteristics of the ingredients and how they all came together in the dish. You've got some wonderful textures and sweet/sour/salty flavors going on. (And I think we need some sour/pickle tastes when we sup on a rich pork belly). Do you find the Benton's lardons overly salty? And following on that thought, did you add much salt to season the finished dish? I always think it's a bit tricky to give pork enough salt so it's not bland, but go too far and all you taste is salt, not the subtle taste of the pork meat.

Yes, indeed, using the method you describe for pork shoulder would certainly work for pork belly. You could take it a step further and add curing salt to the dry rub, let it sit for a week or two and then put it in your smoker---you'll end up with bacon with meat that has that characteristic rosy hue. But if you just do a dry rub, let it sit overnight and then smoke it you'll still have delicious results. When I make it this way I like to cut the smoked belly into chunks then saute it, fat side down, to crisp the skin. Experiment with the dry rub. I've done rubs with zatar spices and aleppo pepper and it gave the pork a whisper of more exotic flavors than the typical Cajun mix I use.

That is one good looking "Pork n'Bean" stew.

Raku is very good, as is Raku Sweets in the same complex. But I wouldn't really say that Raku is low-end in terms of price. Yes, it's far cheaper than say Nobu at Caesar's Palace, but still fairly expensive compared to other great Asian restaurants in Las Vegas. Hopefully you'll have a car and a good GPS system, (Vegas cabs are terribly expensive), so I'd recommend a trip out to Spring Mountain Road and the large Asian shopping and dining malls. You'll come across some hidden gems that don't look like much on the outside but serve very good food at low prices. A few I'd recommend: Yunan Gardens District One-Vietnamese Ping Pang Pong-in the decrepit Gold Coast Casino but fabulous dim sum served old-style from carts Las Vegas has a growing community of pizza restaurants. My friends who live down there say these three are very good: Dom Demarco's Due Forni Novecento Pizzeria 900 There are many a good restaurant in Las Vegas at decent prices with decent service. Unfortunately, the focus is always on the over-priced frou-frou on the Strip which sometimes falls short of one's expectations.

I use fresh dungeness crab, cooked, then plucked out of the shell. But I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm not sure fresh dungeness crabs are available much outside of the West Coast. A couple of "tricks" I use that I think make my crab cakes very moist--I add thick, homemade mayonnaise, fresh white bread crumbs and fry the crab cakes only in clarified butter. The dungess is a really rich crab so combined with eggy mayo and fried in pure butter it's pretty decadent.

Thanks,this is all good feedback and, I think, calls for me to do about 4 different tests- -Dried malt vinegar powder added to the batter. -Malt vinegar as a replacement for water in the batter. -Fried fish seasoned with malt vinegar powder after it comes out of the fryer. -Fried fish tossed in a glaze made with malt vinegar powder. Should be interesting. I think for test purposed I'll start with a mild fish like cod. If one of these methods works, then I'll try it with halibut that we're getting fresh out of Alaska right now.

So if I mixed the dry malt vinegar powder in with flour, cornstarch, other spices and water do you think the batter would end up having a bit of malt vinegar flavor? Of course the description on the Great American Spice page says so, but I'm wondering what a cook would say?

I recently saw a Chef on a TV show use "malt vinegar powder." It was one of the ingredients in a dry seasoning mix for deep-fried chicken cutlets. Apparently it has a unique flavor and it sounds intriguing. I was thinking of using it in a batter for deep-fried fish. Anyone ever use malt vinegar powder and if so, do you have a good online source?

This morning I ordered a "City Ham" from Meachams Hams of Sturgis, Kentucky- http://www.meachamhams.com/ I also ordered a whole "Country Ham," Sausage and Country Bacon from Father's Country Hams of Bremen, Kentucky http://www.fatherscountryhams.com/ Probably won't have my Country vs. City ham challenge ready for a bit, but I'll keep posting photos of my progress.

I like the suggestion of a "Country vs. City" ham meal. But I just realized that Easter is on April 20 and I'll still be in a no-weight bearing status from my recent ankle surgery. It's pretty hard to hobble around the kitchen on my scooter right now, but I'll get a ham pictorial going soon.

Thanks for the tips. This may be an Easter where we have both City and Country ham dishes.

Every Spring I consider whether or not I should buy a "Country" style ham to serve for Easter dinner or if I should stick with the old standard "City" style ham. It's a personal struggle between going with something quite different as the showcase of a meal that is very traditional. Sort of like serving pheasant in mushroom cream sauce rather than roasted turkey for Thanksgiving. Well, every year the rush of new ideas fades as we get closer to Easter and I end up with the less risky choice of a "City" style ham. You know the hams I'm talking about--typically cured in a sweet brine, smoked (or "smoke flavor" added), in a fairly quick, factory-style production--the "City" ham is often spiral-sliced, wrapped in purple foil and accompanied by a packet of stuff they label "brown-sugar glaze." These are decent hams that appeal to the masses. Easy to heat, easy to pull off slices and the leftover ham provides for scores of ham sandwiches. You can chuck the ham into scalloped potatoes, ham and bean soup, chopped ham salad, any number of mild ham dishes. But there's another choice out there that I'm going with this year, the vaunted "Country" style ham. (The ham that to this day my Mother claims is "too salty".) Ham made the natural way for generations--salted and sugared, hung, cured, smoked in an old tobacco barn and aged to the point where just one sliver leaves you with indelible memories of how ham should taste-salty, smokey, rich, slick and porcine. Being a product of the Pacific Northwest, I never acquired a taste for country ham when I was young. In fact, I never knew that there was such a thing as "Country" ham until our family started making annual treks to Kentucky horse country every August. It was in Kentucky, that I had my first taste of country ham. A small slice of ham blanketed between two buttermilk biscuit pillows. From that point on, I was hooked on country ham. Sort of. I know that a 14 pound haunch of country ham wouldn't be accepted for Easter dinner. Even after hours and hours of soaking the ham and baking it in a brown paper bag, my friends and family would agree with Mother-"It's too salty." But what about soaking the ham slices to leach out some of the salt, then frying them up and serving a side of red eye gravy? A country style Easter? Forget those tepid dishes using "City" ham, what about slow-cooked beans with country ham? Can we go chi-chi and wrap paper-thin shards of country ham around a luscious slice of cantalope and serve it with a honeydew sorbet? A "Country" ham certainly inspires any number of dishes that would be welcome in dining rooms in any city. Well, this week I push the button on the computer and order a fine country ham from some folks down in Kentucky, along with some sausage and bacon. What say you? "Country" or "City" ham for Easter?

The glutinous rice adds a sweet note to the pork belly is that correct?

I dined at Westward in Seattle and if you read Alan's review of the place, he doesn't really endorse it as the "Best" new restaurant in Seattle. He gives it basically a B+ which is exactly what I'd give it. As Alan writes, "In truth, it’s a little more diversity than the modest kitchen is able to handle," a fitting description of a lot of the trendy, funky places in both Seattle and Portland. They try a little hard to fuse organic, artisanal, local, Moroccan, Asian, French, Italian and that silly thing called "New American" cuisine. You know, small plates of this and that. When you live in the Northwest, it's hard to muck up a pristine oyster harvested an hour ago--but it's easy to muck up dishes with too many influences.