markemorse

hey Pontormo... what i liked about this recipe was the pureeing of the capers and raisins...instead of, "oh, there's another caper in my mouth, yay"....a very different alchemy occurs when it's all just "sauce". mark

Not sure if it's sacreligious or not (it's certainly not something to do with a spectacular cheese), but I use these firm Dutch goat cheeses in my EuroMexican cooking, typically with black beans, chipotle, and mint: a modest amount grated on top of a hot scoop o' beans, or in a quesadilla or enchilada with a member of the squash family. Looks like you've just got a nice eating cheese there. I'd try Chufi's cheese biscuit recipe, though, if you're kinda done with eating it by itself...them're some good eatin'. mark

Cutting out refined flours and sugars will make you hungry less often... Drinking more water than you usually do will help too, just always keep some cold in the fridge... I've become semi-addicted to a thin salted yogurt drink called ayran (it's Turkish, at least mine is, but other surrounding countries have their own versions), I frequently have some of that when I'm hungry between meals. But the biggest thing you can do to avoid hunger is avoid bullshit foods with HFCS as well as avoiding refined flours/sugars. Eat plenty of fiber... There's a related thread going on right now here, it's unpromisingly titled (the thread), but many of these questions are being talked about.

I feel compelled to share the recipe that got me hooked on another method of cooking cauliflower that yields similar results: Jean-Georges' Scallops and Cauliflower with Caper-Raisin Sauce. I hope it hasn't been discussed on this thread already, I didn't see it. Either way, the sauce works beautifully with this thread's cauliflower method as well. You don't even need the scallops. And how often can you say that? mark

Thanks ecr, I knew someone was going to sweep my leg on the dill-coconut thing. Would love to see the recipe if you can find it. Wanted to add Laksa's foodblog to the list of resources here.

hey ducks, sounds like a good one....was this the philadelphia branch or one of the amsterdam branches?

Good one judiu: that was one last thing I was going to say to jay: if you're not already a user of top-notch oils and vinegars that you love tasting by themselves...upgrade, it's worth every penny. Just this year I started using an olive oil that I'm happy to sip neat (after just kind of using default EVOO), and it makes all the difference in the world. When you're on a restricted diet, everything that's not restricted has to be as enjoyable as possible, right? I also am onto an awesome sherry vinegar that's worth every penny for what it does to everyday dishes. Obvs this extends to walnut and hazelnut oils and whatever else you're cooking with..... ok mark

hey litho7, don't know how i missed your post...but chufi missed it too so something weird must've transpired... sorry, hoor! welcome nonetheless... i should have a favorite weeknight spot in the jordaan, but i don't. I do, however, have a rather selfish and endless list of places I wonder about, but I'm not sure any of them would become "regulars".... I won't subject you to that, but here's a couple.... I've been hearing good things about Burger's Patio for a few years now, but I've never been. I seem to be on restaurant hiatus and I've got not one idea why. I've read a couple of good things about Uyt, too... I wonder about Lof on the Haarlemmerstraat. Roserijn is a nice little eetcafe on the Haarlemmerstraat...nothing at all fancy but friendly and good atmosphere. And have you been to Yam Yam yet? Are you looking for a slightly cool place with a nice big bar to hang out at before you eat? Or maybe you can even choose to eat at the bar? Me too. We do that at Van Kerkwijk (see this thread), but it's totally not the same thing. Anyway, this is so much more Chufi's department than mine. We'll see what she has to say. mark

Well shit, Amsterdam is NOT the place to avoid dirty hippies spilling their sauce all over anything (and our hippies are way dirtier than yours). The thing is, the guy behind the counter has to be vigilant with the wiper... A couple of things: their quality of food is never less than awesome here; there are always fries ready to go (this IS amsterdam); and they ALWAYS put the lettuce at the bottom of your pita and put the falafel on top. If that's a problem for you, you better let 'em know first. I am willing to bet good big money that no Dutch customer has ever asked for three separate containers for a falafel before, and so it's just not in the rule book. Welcome to 'merica, boys! If you're building it there, the trick is to take the falafel back out again and tuck them between the pita and the plastic wrapper you're holding it in so you can then build the fkn St. Peter's of Falafel in there. That wimpy lettuce is just some kind of bad habit they have, it's just iceberg anyway, just forget it's down there. Lastly: no Maoz has ever been laid out efficiently. Also not in the rule book, I'm sure. That's just the way they are, the line to order is right in front of the place where the hippies are spilling tahina into the beets. Think of Maoz as a poorly-engineered but beautiful and useful creature, possibly doomed. EDIT: Readability enhanced, degree of hippie dirt embellished, missing Fs inserted (my F key is gone).

I don't eat it much anymore, but when i do I need the crispy bits. Seems like i usually do some sort of jerk thing to it.... Much more often if I'm in the mood for this kind of fish, the aforementioned Pangasius character is very popular frozen in Amsterdam grocery stores, and to me it's much more useful than tilapia in every way. It is sort of like American catfish, and does well in those preparations, but also Thai, Vietnamese as well unsurprisingly. mark

Just FYI...Maoz in Amsterdam is still fantastic even if their plan for global domination didn't work out. Really just one of the best falafel salad bars in town, and obsessively clean (except for the Central Station branch, where I will never eat again). I still go in and get a salad to go, no falafel.

couple other things: 1) if you're looking for more ways to liven up your yoghurt, we used fruit purees and nuts in yogurt a lot: fig/almond, pear/hazelnut, apple/walnut, etc. tamarind puree is very nice too, maybe with mint and pine nuts. also dill, garlic and any nut. don't be afraid of the prune, either. 2) there are some non-obvious seeds that can replace some wheat starches and liven things up in general: quinoa holds up well to both savory and fruit-sweetened preps; wild rice is actually a seed, and if you learn to cook it ahead of time (it takes an hour) and make salads with it, it's great to just have in the fridge; don't forget the pumpkinseed....toast them and eat them with anything. 3) raw sweet onions are amazingly helpful in the excitement department if you like them. i've got a bunch of tuna recipes that really make for great non-mayo based tuna salad that you can eat every day without getting sick of. my biggest tip: have plenty of interesting things cooked ahead of time so that you never get desperate and fk it up b/c you're blind with hunger. and buy claudia roden's new book of middle eastern food (the laptop im typing on is resting on it right now). mark EDITS: I keep thinking of things to do with yoghurt. and tuna. i'll stop soon. and when I say tuna, I mean good canned tuna.

hi jay, congratulations on your new diet. if you can stick with it for a few more weeks, you'll never go back to eating the way you did. or at least not all the way my wife has had a couple of auto-immune diseases in a row and the last one really affected her metabolism dramatically. She grew up in an Italian-American family that lived to eat and she herself is a great cook. She was used to eating pretty much constantly and staying very thin. When she suddenly put on 30 lbs in six months or so, after a while she was just in tears every time she got dressed. so: i basically became an amateur dietician and did scads of research and cooking experiments to try to find things that were interesting to eat but adhered to this kind of diet. a couple of suggestions just in general: 1) never go into a chinese restaurant no matter what. it's just not worth the temptation, and the likelihood that you'll end up in one who doesn't use store-bought chili bean sauce, hoisin sauce, and brown sauce (all full of sugar) in their ma po tofu is incredibly small (ah leung's recipe for reference). 2) what are you drinking? it's so hard to find a non-dairy drink that doesn't have sugar or HFCS in it that, again, for me i just stopped buying them. you can do a lot of nice things with refrigerating herbal teas, i know how boring that sounds, but mint is a good one to start with. more in a bit if this is helping......

I was also going to mention Mark Miller and tamales...Stephan Pyles as well, his tamale tarts are nice dinner ideas that aren't formless on the plate.

For nicer dinners I often ended up turning to Middle Eastern food because of the complexity of the palette (maybe palate as well) and variety of cool presentation ideas. So many ways to stuff so many different things with wildly different stuffings....it helped with the variety problem too.

Ah! I should hasten to add...I had nothing to do with any of the IMBB recipes. IMBB = Is My Blog Burning, it's a monthly foodblog event where everyone cooks to a theme.

Hey Carlovski. I went vegetarian for awhile a couple years ago, and am still primarily a non meat-eater. I did it because I moved to a new city and most of the people I ended up socializing with and eating dinners with and having parties with didn't eat meat. Since I was eating with them a lot, i ended up cooking a lot of vegetarian and vegan food, and I did it so often that I just started eating that way at home. Initially, one of the biggest buzzkills about it for me was trying to cook vegetarian food that was texturally varied and elegantly presentable...something that didn't look like food you'd serve a touring band who was crashing at your place for the night. Also, there was the problem of bacon: how to not to miss it. I ended up experimenting a lot with caramelization, as well as with using smoked elements that weren't meat: not only pretty common players like smoked paprika (pimenton) and chipotles, and smoked cheeses, but also finding sources for things like smoked tomatoes. I don't have a smoker, but if I was going to seriously go hardcore vegetarian I'd get one. Anyway, lots more to be said about recommendations...for now, you miight want to check out IMBB#19, "I Can't Believe I Ate Vegan" for some interesting ideas: Part 1, 2, and 3. I realize these are vegan, but better to start there and be able to add animal products than the other way around. mark

Great-looking resource. An interesting mention of the use of dill in northeastern Thai cooking (I do realize where Thailand is in relation to Malaysia). But it's interesting that their cuisine uses much less coconut milk than central and southern Thai (and Indonesian and Malay) cooking, which is the first thing I thought of when Pan first mentioned dill: the fact that dill and coconut aren't really ever friends in the kitchen, are they? But it looks like a very interesting book....thanks!

Hi alligande, It was me who asked for a European opinion....thanks! One of the things I was interested in was: cultures where "the table is yours for the night" (I was specifically thinking of places I've lived (or live), Italy and Holland). Unless you're at a very touristy restaurant, there's usually no expectation on the diners' part that they'll be pressed into leaving before they're ready, and there's no expectation on the server's part that the meal has to end at a certain time. And I was wondering about the effect of these expectations on "how service matters". Among other things. Is it generally like this in the UK? mark EDIT: spelling corrected, absolutes softened, foreshadowing added. I even edited this EDIT sentence a couple of times.

Well, the first book that got me started on this a long time ago was Anya von Bremzen's Terrific Pacific, which is still a nostalgic favorite because it was one of my first cookbooks (it's now barely usable...I need a new one). No photos, but it talks about Nyonya and regional cooking in some detail and has lots of other good background, and the recipes are really pretty authentic (AFAIK). Ha, get this: I just went out to Amazon to see if I've used the Sri Owen books before, and the very first Amazon customer review said "There are, however, ingredients listed not unique to Indonesia cooking. For example flat leaf parsley as garnish. I think Sri should also provide the garnish that the parsley substitutes for, in this case." See? Bleepin' peterselie! I've been doing most of my Indonesian cooking from online sources lately, but nothing that's so good I can recommend it unconditionally. I'll scour my bookmarks to see if there's anything worth recommending here. Oh, and I also just got Linda Roodenburg's Rotterdams Kookboek, which explains much of the Indo/Surinam/Malay/Chinese/Indian evolution of what you and I eat here in Holland. It's 512 pages, about 50% explanatory text and 50% recipes. It's in Dutch and pretty dense, so it's slow going for me but I'm getting there.

Wow, Pan...I need your brain! At least the linguistic part. Thanks tons for the ejaan baru info, that's good stuff. Well those ones were not so inaccurate because they're the ones I've been able to understand! The ones where there's wildly different Dutch-Indonesian-Malay-English words are the hardest to detect. For example, candlenuts are called kemiri in Indonesian, but buah keras in Malay, right? Peterselie: I wish I hadn't even brought this one up, because it looks like it will take some unraveling that does more to illustrate my point than it does to help us cook Malaysian food more easily. Well, according to the (perhaps not all that accurate) Malaysian Food Glossary, peterseli is cilantro. But I'm pretty sure you'd know it if it was, right?. That's okay, in Dutch it's not really cilantro anyway. I'm not a botanist, so someone please feel free to chime in with mo' betta info, but...in Dutch it refers to both curly parsley and flat-leaf parsley (which I believe may be what is also known as Italian parsley). Your local market seller will normally determine which one you want by asking if you want to use it for garnish or to cook with. Anyway, I certainly don't want this thread to get bogged down in my Dutch-Indonesian-Malay-English translation issues, so I'll just say...that's what I'm talking about.

I posted this on the 3am grub thread, but Chufi suggested (maybe even seriously) that I share it here as well, and I will...only because I've seen the look on my wife's face as "the medicine" is working, and I want you all to have that same opportunity: 1 good onion, sliced 1/2 lemon 1 tbsp butter 1 good poppyseed kaiser roll 1-2 slices Emmenthaler, Gruyere, or Gouda 2 tbsp mayonnaise freshly ground pepper Melt butter, saute onion briefly, squeeze the half lemon into the pan, arrange onions into something that might fit on the bottom half of a Kaiser roll, place the cheese on top of that pile until it really melts. Put the mayo on the top half of the roll, put the onion-cheese pile on the bottom half, grind pepper, close, eat, feel better for awhile. There's also a prosciutto option that seems to work pretty well.... best wishes, mark EDIT: Ack! I didn't see the "No Boyz Allowed" rule when I posted...I guess that's why Chufi said "she" could post it over here. sorry sorry (backs out of room, closes door).

1) Rodenbach Grand Cru 2) Grimbergen Dubbel 3) Leffe Blonde 4) La Chouffe 5) 't IJ Struis (from NL, but in the Belgian Strong Ale style) mark

That fresh Asian herbs thread is excellent, and your food looked beautiful. I didn't even look at the thread initially because the title seemed too general...maybe "fresh Southeast Asian herbs"? Great that you're cooking so much Malaysian (and finding fresh ingredients!). Is that Ayam Limau Purut recipe too closely from the book to RecipeGullet it? And that FoodTV recommendation hasn't worked for me in the past either. I was buying this solidified, ghee-like coconut oil that worked perfectly but the aroma wasn't as coconutty. mark

Sorry, totally missed the semolina mention in your original description....Thanks!