sus

I am moving to Pitt to start my PhD in history this coming fall. Now, if I had to choose a neighborhood based on food options, quality, general food allure, what would it be? I am shamelessly trying to decide where to live and I always think good food=worthy neighborhood. Thanks thanks! Sus

I love TJ's. The food happens to be really good. The produce, so so. Go there for ready made creams, pastas, etc that taste homemade. Their wine selections are also amazingly good (for what you pay.) The Chuck Souvignon Blanc is yummy if very simple. I am dying to try the Il Primitivo. They also have some wonderful sales on fancy and /yes/ tasty chocolates. And for all those bakers out there, and this is the kicker for me---PLUGRA butter. I have been trying to get my hands on some Plugra for a while now and to me its worth it just for that. They also had this wonderful cranberry sauce for TGiving that made me almost not want to make my own. So there you go. Ok so I still made mine but it was a very very close call. I think that's all I have to report about this place. Oh yes, hello. New to the board. Have been living in Madison for two years and at this point am very frustrated with the food selection--No Latin food other than Mexican? The nice Cuban restaurant closed and has been replaced by a so so Costa Rican place. And there is not a single Puerto Rican restaurant to quench my cravings. Normally I enjoy dining in madtown but the lack of New York, New Haven, Cambridge stable Hispanic cuisine is leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

ChefJ, I am not an instructor but started a post yesterday begging this person to take longer than 5 months to make their decision. I just finished an MA as well. By the end of it I was so burnt out that I wanted to get my hands at anything, specially something creative. I grew up cooking and loved to cook. I went to cooking camp when i was 14! What I really do enjoy are pastries. SO I decided to work first in cake decorating at a bakery. I visited the French Pastry School in Chicago, and was ready to apply. It took me 6 months to figure out I did not want to get a pastry degree as I had thought. The funny thing is that this did not occur to me until that 6th month. The first 5 months were bliss. Because I was so convinced I wanted to go to a pastry school, before getting experience, I declined acceptance into some of the best PhD programs in the US. Well, now I miss academia terribly. The story is not a bad ending one because I would not have been able to figure out what I wanted to do without this time away from school. So now I am getting ready to start school next fall and am happy for the hiatus. It truly showed me what I wanted to do…but it was not pastry school. LOL.

This is a wonderful thread and am bumping it a bit for some more suggestions. Thanks!

Aww the Nutella pancakes sound wonderful. The honey dripping little flaps? Delish. Also interesting because whenever I ask for honey for my pancakes in the states (I grew up using honey for pancakes) people look at me strangely. Ahh have been validated. Love the picture. I have also tried making pancakes at home but with no avail. Yesterday I was thinking of doing a batter that comes closer to a crepe...but that too would not make for the best pancake. Crepes are wonderful but they lack the fluffyness that I would want in a pancake. Suset

This past year my soon to be roommate (who later became my “can’t wait until she is gone roommate) decided to cook a meal for me and my boyfriend. We were thrilled since she said she was going to cook for us a nice Italian meal like the kind she had when she went on her trip to Italy. This woman sweats Italy. She speaks Italian most of the day, has a million fancy ingredients from Italy. The meal came. Everything tasted like cardboard! There was absolutely no change in taste between the pasta, pasta sauce. She also made some pork which I am more than used to eat. Dry, tasteless, bland. The best part of the evening was the wine I brought, the panna cotta she made (that came from a box!) and strawberries. However, this experience pales in comparison to the horrible sandwich I had while doing research in Cuba during 2005. I was ravenous that day and ran to one of the many many many carts around the city selling small sandwiches for 10 cents. I decided to buy a pork sandwich because I was also homesick for Puerto Rican pork. I ran back to the archives to munch on my sandwich and when I opened it I notice a very thick layer of a whitish substance that just looked like a very transparent cheese. I was excited to find this sandwich had cheese also. I bit into it with gusto until the greasy, gagging substance of pure pork fat dawned on me. It felt like I had just tried licking the Crisco can clean. The experience was awful but no more than the days that followed with a nasty stomach ailment.

I had to revive this thread. As a native Puerto Rican, I find that food in PR has always been top notch (after traveling the states, around Europe, Mexico, Cuba I still say this) Home cooked, dining, etc. As an added plus, for some reason the immigrants seem to stay truer to their traditional dishes, perhaps because there is not the insecurity about cooking with Latin influences (I still laugh when I think of my Cuban friend who had a restaurant in Madison, WI and HAD to prepare this hot sauce that she labeled "for the americans") . We have wonderful Mexican and Cuban (Metropol is one of these) as well as Argentinian. Also, I feel compelled to make some clarifications. Cubans do not use chiles in their cooking. The food of the Spanish speaking Caribbean happens to be very similar and still very different due to the fact that we share similar historical roots based in the Canary islands. Chile not being one of them. Oregano, cilantro, Culantro are more up our alley. Finally, I agree that Cuban food is wonderful. Only Cuban food tasted outside of the island, however. If you go to the island you will be hard pressed to go into a good restaurant as food is very limited (not scarce). Most of the places we ate we found two options: pizza or spaghetti. It’s just easy to make, accessible and feeds many. Oddly enough when I visited Cuba (once for 10 days, other for a month to do research) the best food I tasted came from local houses---an experience that few tourists get to have unless they have specific ties to families in the island. This too is hard given the restrictions and warnings the government has placed on locals relationships to tourists. It's a shame because in the black market they do sell wonderful meats, everything fresh and mostly from sustainable agriculture, that middle class Cubans (yes they have hierarchies in Cuba too) buy. I had these wonderful manioc fritters prepared by a former revolutionary woman, I tasted the best okra stu prepared by one of my hosts. I do have to admit that there are some wonderful places to eat called “club houses/benevolent organizations” that have been in place for ages and untouched by the government. They do not really have food restrictions from the government and get to purchase very good quality food. I tried four that I really liked. The main one and most famous is Club Asturiano right by the capitol, the other were another two Asturian Clubs in the San Rafael and San Miguel area, one of them specialized in Pizza (I caution that this is not a neighborhood you want to find yourself in if you have difficulty passing as a Cuban) and another in Cuba’s Chinatown. If you venture into this area of the capitol I suggest you ask a reliable source because of the situation in the country it is very easy to get duped here. Best bet for everyone would be the Asturian Club in front of the Capitol. It’s the best food anyways. Ok I’m off to a plane for Cuba or Puerto Rico.

Hello! new writing here but not to lurking on the board. Have been looking for some nonthreatening topic to post. Breakfast it is. I did not MAKE any food this morning, I MADE myself get off bed for a yet another day trying to find the perfect chocolate chip pancake in my current city--Madison, Wi. The search has been going on for a year and a half now. After living in mostly metropolitan areas my whole life (San Juan--Yes this Puerto Rican city is actually more metropolitan than most might think, NYC, Cambridge-Mass), I am still trying to define my faves in Madtown. Have yet to find the perfect chocolate chip pancake (comfort food for me)---soft and flat, more like a crepe, thin and fluffy with chocolate chunks that slowly melt in your mouth with every bite. Went to Original Pancake House (after trying many) and have yet to find THE perfect pancake. Alas, perhaps next weekend.