CathyL

Many years ago, I regularly bought mutton chops at Oppenheimer's, an excellent NYC butcher shop at 97th & Broadway. (Harry O., the now-retired proprietor, was a former OSS operative and a major character.) All I ever did was broil them, and they were superb. I've been lightly smoking leg of lamb - I'll bet the same treatment would work even better with mutton. Time for a pilgrimage uptown...

Geoduck is a sushi standby, a/k/a mirugai.

Scallion frites...omigod. Nick, your foie gras app sounds luscious. Is the caramel a sauce, glaze, crackle? One of the amuses at Jean Georges Friday night was seared duck foie set on a sliver of marinated peach, with a dab of caramel foam alongside.

Fresh garlic. Early fall apples. Pomegranates.

Brita at home, Vintage Mandarin Orange at work, Pellegrino in restaurants, Badoit when I'm in France and it's cheap enough to chug. I dislike Evian - that 'silky' effect Soba mentioned doesn't work for me. Deer Park is my favorite bottled flat; I used to lug home the 2-gallon dispenser before I discovered Brita.

On the PBS website there's a video of Soltner making the tart and a transcript of him talking through the recipe. Click here. Watching him made me nostalgic for the days when TV food programming featured real chefs cooking real food...

John Thorne, especially 'Serious Pig' and 'Pot on the Fire.'

Nina, thanks for posting the cucumber salad - it took me right back to my grandmother's kitchen.

No web site for Food Arts. Of Shanken's publications, only Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado are online, I believe. The magazine isn't easy to find on newsstands, but it's well worth the $40 annual subscription.

Sandra, we should start a thread about favorite serving bowls/platters (although it sounds a bit too Martha, I suppose). I love choosing what to serve on which! Rachel, I make a salad very similar to the one you describe: young green beans (or sugar snaps), blanched, dressed with a fig balsamic vinaigrette, wreathed with strips of roasted red & yellow pepper. For visual appeal, it's hard to beat a platter (rectangular & sky blue, in my case) of sliced heirloom tomatoes of different colors and sizes, scattered with chopped garlic, scallions and leaves of basil.

Jaybee, do you mean the Anne Willan book? In the regional French category I also love Madeleine Kamman's 'When French Women Cook' - it's very personal, which deepens the sense of place.

Chicken, butterflied, brushed with a mix of Dijon mustard, Damson plum jam, soy and olive oil, slow-grilled with a chunk each of mulberry and pecan for smoke Salad of baby romaine, endive, raw mushrooms and sweet onion New potatoes and spring onions, oven-roasted Sugar snap peas, blanched briefly and tossed with a bit of dark sesame oil and black sesame seeds

Beautiful baby backs, Tommy! I also like chipotle (powdered - I use it so often it has no time to get stale). But I put it in my rib rub and keep the slaw cool. To enliven the dressing, add some sour cream. A clove of garlic, minced fine. Celery seed. More mustard.

Steve, absolutely the Jasper White. Please add Joyce's "Kitchen Conversations" to the list. And Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art.

In addition to the above: Claudia Roden's Books of Middle Eastern and Jewish Food Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone Julia's The Way to Cook Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book Pastry: Rose Berenbaum's The Cake Bible anything by Maida Heatter Paula Peck's The Art of Fine Baking

Mark, you beat me to it!

Liza, you can do omakase and ask your server to include some of the signature dishes Steve mentioned (all of which I agree with). One advantage is specifying the price per person at the outset - omakase starts at $80 for dinner - so you don't have to worry about a credit-crunching surprise at the end. I also like riesling with the food, but usually end up drinking cold sake instead.

My most dramatic cooking disaster involved a heavy-duty drip pan for my smoker, sent by a Suthrun friend who had his village smithy fashion one for each of us. I half-filled the pan with water, set it over the coals, plopped a chicken on the grill, and wandered off. When I came back two hours later, the smoker thermometer said 450 and when I popped the lid to see if the water had boiled away I looked straight down into flaming coals. The drip pan had melted. Completely. After everything had cooled and I stopped laughing, I picked a number of metal blobs out of the charcoal. My friend told the village smithy, who claimed it was impossible to melt the pan and muttered several obscenities about dumb Yankee girls. I had three of the most interesting blobs encased in a cube of lucite, and sent it to my friend as a paperweight.

Smoked trout pate with pumpernickel ficelle rounds, and raw veggies - French breakfast radishes, season's first (for me, anyway) sugar snaps, baby cucumbers. Leg of lamb, slathered with a paste of garlic, mustard, rosemary, soy, olive oil, lightly smoked over rosemary sprigs & sugar maple. Grilled asparagus, oven-roasted potato & sweet potato spears. Walnut cake layers sandwiched with fig preserves and a mix of fresh goat cheese/mascarpone. Very nice Alsatian pinot gris to start, and a 2000 Coturri Zinfandel (don't drink this standing up) with the lamb.

I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have the book here, but in 'Simple French Food' Richard Olney dismissed the notion that high-end cooking requires high-end batterie de cuisine: when one's stove is an old friend, ambrosia can be concocted in tin cans.

How about a cold noodle dish dressed with dark sesame oil,rice vinegar & other Asian stuff?

Jinmyo, I thought ramps were wild leeks. Sweetmom, they have the pungency of garlic without the bite - or the acridness (acridity??) that older garlic develops. They're pretty too.

Echo on the sigh, Liza. I cook outdoors in any weather, but I want to EAT out there too! Sunday I went ramp-happy. Used them in lieu of garlic to marinate shrimp (along with olive oil & parsley & bread crumbs), which were grilled. The ramps turned the bread crumbs to paste, no surprise, but the flavor was excellent and the shrimp had a crunchy crust anyway. I also slivered ramp leaves into a wilted cabbage salad, and roasted a few whole ones along with some Greenmarket asparagus. Might as well enjoy them while they last. I am in awe of the amazing fare you all turn out on weeknights. I expect to be worshipped as a goddess if I broil a chicken! Maybe if I were more organized...

I have never brined baby backs, although I have no philosophical objection to doing so. My smoker is designed like a Japanese kamado. I put the ribs in a rib rack, thick end down to start, and put the rack directly over the coals. They usually take 4 to 4.5 hours at a grill temp of 225-240. Midway through I check them, and usually switch the slabs around and flip them end to end so they cook evenly. The goal for me is NOT fall-off-the-bone. I want the meat to pull away cleanly with a tug of the teeth, and still have some bite to it. I don't sauce, but I use a rub/paste from John Thorne's 'Serious Pig' that everyone loves: it's posted here. Among my barbeque buds these are informally known as Cat's Ribs, which makes them sound far less appetizing than they are.