gknl

But the fruit sinks... There are many pancake and batter recipes that do not need eggs: Very low fat pancakes or indian jalebi (sweet pancake spirals) or tempura batter (flour + fizzy water) or yeast-raised pancakes or chinese pancakes and wrappers or tortillas... These so-called pancakes without eggs -- now you're really reaching! I doubt that the Larousse definition of "clafoutis" that you originally cited uses the term "pancake" in a sense that includes all these eggless batters and wrappers that you now cite. Why not stop trying so hard to limit the definition of cobbler? Let's not begrudge people of various regions in the U.S. the privilege (perhaps the right?) of calling their concoctions "cobblers." Face it: there ARE regional variations of the American cobbler. Could we, in an expansive spirit, show some tolerance for, even celebrate, our regional differences? Is it proper use of the word "irony" to note that an expanded definition of "pancake" is being used to restrict the definition of "cobbler?"

What is your authority for that? The original Limousin dish may have been cherries in a flan custard (with or without a pastry base), but modern usage (e.g. Larousse 1984) defines it as "[fruit] arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a fairly thick pancake batter". No mention of eggs, and I submit fairly close to Larousse goes on to say " The Academie Francaise, who had defined clafoutis as a "sort of fruit flan" were faced with protests from the inhabitants of Limoges and changed their definition to "cake with black cherries". Never the less there are numerous variations using cherries or other fruits. The word comes from the provincial dialect word clafir (to fill)" Yorkshire puddings always have egg in the batter - that is what gives the rise. Maybe the pudding described would be even better with an eggy batter... Do you have a pancake recipe that doesn't call for eggs? And anyway, in the clafoutis, the batter is poured over the fruit, in the Central Texas Cobbler, the fruit is placed over the batter. So it's the complete opposite. hehehe

It's not, clafoutis use eggs and the batter is poured over the fruit so it's almost custard like. ediot:

It's risky to generalize about Texas since it's so large and varied. It's like the blind men and the elephant. Part of Texas is definitely in the South. The dividing line runs somewhere between Houston and Beaumont. I lived in that part of Texas and it's very Southern in character. This area includes Jasper. The thingie is a "wink" meaning "it's a joke." But, since you brought it up, if people are going to argue about what "real cobbler" is topped with, why not argue about what's "really the South" too? After all, one person's cobbler is another person's pieclafoutipandowdybucklegruntslurpcrispcrunch etc. Just wait a month when we start talking about football.

There was an earlier post that mentioned a school cafeteria offering two lunches, the "nutritious" school lunch served mostly to poor kids and largely discarded, and a la carte food served to and eaten by non-poor kids. So is it enough to offer "nutritious" food knowing it's not going to be eaten? That seems more to assuage the school board's guilt than anything else. An empty political gesture. I think it was last year, or maybe the year before, Berkeley High School, at the behest of a small but vocal activist group (it's Berkeley, what do you expect?), offered a healthy, organic lunch menu in addition to the usual fast-food type fare. The healthy stuff went largely uneaten except by a select few. Berkeley is a much more diverse town that one might think, but still, this is telling. Fast food is prevalent because people like it. It's easy: it's cheap, it's convenient, and it tastes good enough for the people who like it.

Food's entered popular culture in a big way. It's porn for the new millennium. They're trying to appeal to the yuppie-left boomer and post-boomer demographic, the people who 20 years ago would have driven Volvos but now drive Subaru wagons and mini-SUvs. Think NY Times magazine. People affluent enough to buy quality food and take exotic vacations, but have a "social conscious" too. Best of both worlds.

We're not worthy, we're not worthy. . . . Not that Thomas Keller has anything on our Jinmyo, but I have an article by him about tomato water if anyone wants it. Maybe I should buy extra tomatoes this week. . . . . .

Tomato confit (from Chez Panisse). Slow roast the tomatoes in extra-virgin olive oil until soft. They say to roast with fresh basil, but usually don't do that. sometimes I throw in some garlic cloves too. It makes a great pasta sauce and freezes well too. Another thing I've wanted to try but have had neither the patience nor volume to do is make tomato water. That's where you let tomatoes drain for a while collecting only the clear liquid which is supposed to be intensely flavored.

I had a load of peaches dumped on me this week, so I made another cobbler and some ice cream. The girlfriend's back in Alabama, so I thought I'd make it her way. I sort of followed the methodology from Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook: butter the pan, layer of fruit, sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and cornstarch, top with pie dough, bake at 450 for 15 minutes until lightly browned, remove from ove, add another layer of fruit, sugar, cinnamon, cornstarch, top with more pie dough, bake for 30 more minutes until top crust is done. I used my favorite pie dough recipe from Chez Panisse Fruit. It worked! Different than with a biscuit topping and different than a pie. I'm not sure which I like better, really. The middle layer of dough was soft, but not in a disgusting way, more like a dumpling. And the top crust was nice and crisp. I can see this sucking with mediocre pie dough, but with the good crust, this was really quite enjoyable. The disappointing thing was the mediocrity of the fruit itself. Just didn't compare to the farmer's market peaches I bought before.

The same director, Bill Forsythe, made the movie COMFORT AND JOY about a mob war over ice cream fritter (fried ice cream) trucks. It's like most of his movies, quirky characters, slow but intricate plot, and a great sense of place.

Most of the taquerias will serve non-spicey food, just ask for mild or no salsa. In Berkeley, the Sun Hong Kong on Shattuck near University has a nice menu of rice plates and noodle dishes for about $5. They're open late too, which is a big plus for me. There's a restaurant by the same name (more or less) on Broadway in SF, but I haven't been there so I don't know if the menu's the same. Le Cheval in Oakland offers fare similar to the vaunted Slanted Door, but at half the price. Entrees run $7-9. There's an off-shoot (I think) called Le Petit Cheval in Berkeley on Bowditch and Bancroft that has a great 3 items and rice for $5. It's buffet-steam table stuff, but good. They also have a cook to order menu. Tuk Tuk Thai has the cheapest prices I've seen at a Thai place and the food is really good. It's on Shattuck near Haste, maybe further south. I misplaced my menu so I don't have exact figures, but I remember the entrees being a dollar or two less than most Thai places. Ediot: Add Mifune's in Japantown to the list. It's upstairs on the west building near the bookstore. Burma Superstar on Clement and 4th.

When I lived in lower Rockridge, on Belgrave, back in the mid-late 60s, the Village Market wasn't anything special and there was a hamburger stand next door called "Smart's" that had bad french fries. There was a variety store across Broadway called "Top Val-u" or something like that and I got in trouble when I was 5 for going there by myself to buy baseball cards. Ah, nostalgia!

MOSTLY MARTHA and yes, it's very good! Everything comes together beautifully in the movie. And the restaurant scenes are hilarious. It was one of my favorite films from last year. I'm glad it's finally out on dvd.

I still haven't made it down to the berkeley farmers market, which market is best down there? Congrats on your first post, welcome to eGullet. The best one is the one you can go to, of course. Welcome to egullet too. Go Bears!

Everything's more expensive there! It makes Whole Foods seem almost reasonable. It sure is a nice shop though.

Oh brother. I give up. Have fun manning the pits.

I don't think most of America uses barbecue as a noun, but rather as an adjective or a verb. So they'd call the ribs and chicken barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken. And to most of America barbecue is considered synonymous with grilling over direct heat outdoors. Barbecue as a noun was distinctly southern in my experience (although Kansas City and Oklahoma might be exceptions to that) but it is spreading and becoming more commonly used. I think it is possible for a dish to be called barbecue (the noun) without having been technically barbecued (the verb) because the things that define the dish (shredded meat, sauce, etc.) are different than the things that define the cooking technique (slow cooking at low temperatures with some sort of smoke) even if the dish itself was originally cooked a certain way. Trying to define something that's as old and widespread as barbecue is pointless, really. Regional variations and customs trump linguistic precision every time. So you may sneer at the NC gas cooked pork and say it's not real barbecue, but the people buying it couldn't care less.

Whose tradition? Capitalizing something doesn't necessarily make it true. As I wrote above, many of my Southern cookbooks call for pie or pie-like dough. Are all those authors wrong or inauthentic or untraditional? I've been told from a reliable source that Texas isn't really part of the South anyway. She grew up in Florence, Alabama, a couple of hours south of Nashville, so maybe it's a sub-regional variation of which I'm sure there are many. I was hoping to read about the various kinds when I started the thread. Anyway, the one I made Sunday was a success: two kinds of peaches from the Farmer's Market, over-ripe yellows and slightly under-ripe white. Roughly equal amounts of each so it ended up being slices of white peach in a chunky yellow peach sauce. It was too hot to deal with pie dough, so much to the girlfriend's dismay ( ) I topped it with biscuit dough. Since the fruit was so sweet, I didn't add much sugar to the dough but topped it with vanilla ice cream. I added lemon juice, small amount of sugar, cornstarch, and cinnamon to the fruit. 1 lb each yellow and white peaches, peeled and sliced 1/2 cup sugar juice of 1 lemon 2 tbs cornstarch 1/2 tsp cinnamon 2 1/2 cups flour 4 tbs butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 1/2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp salt buttermilk powder for 1 cup buttermilk (it was in a package, so I don't have the exact measurement) 3/4 cup milk sugar and cinnamon to sprinkle on top buttered 9x13 pyrex baking dish set on a foil lined baking sheet and baked at 375 (convection) for 45 minutes.

For me, cobblers mean fruit topped by some sort of biscuit dough, but to my girlfriend, it's fruit on the bottom, layer of pie dough, more fruit, then more pie dough on top. She claims it's a Southern thing (she's from Alabama, I'm from California) and looking through my Southern cookbooks, it seems to be almost evenly split between the two types. I prefer the biscuit topping. If I have to make a pie dough and roll it out, why not just make a pie (confession: I suck at rolling out pie crusts; need more practice, I know)? The biscuit is so much easier. I don't even bother to roll out the dough, but scoop out spoonfuls and drop it on top of the fruit. Which do you prefer and why?

People buy sports teams sweaters and jerseys and caps, why not chef's coats too?

So when are you going to test drive it?

Yes, it was. He done did good. He has lots of nice friends too. Was that really Amanda Peete? Guess I should have talked to her myself. When's the next one? ediot: Forgot the "Thanks!"

In this month's "Food and Wine," Paula Wolfert meets Madrid chef Carlos Posadas (El Amparo) who cooks asparagus in a "modern Basque" way: coat with olive oil, season with salt, sugar and tarragon, wrap in parchment paper, and bake at 175 degrees Farenheit for 2 hours. They say that cooking at the low temperature means the asparagus doesn't generate enough steam to turn mushy. Next time I think about cooking dinner more than 2 hours in advance, I might give it a try. I probably won't deal with the salted caper, mayo and cream sauce though.

Get a sun tea jar (glass jar with a spigot on the bottom), dump the wine in and instead of the lid, cover it with cheesecloth and a rubber band. Wait longer than you think it should take and you'll have really great red wine vinegar.

What's that place in the Mission on 16th St. across from the Roxie Theater? Next to the crepe place (Ti Couz?)? It used to be a divey cafe hang out, Picaro? I forget what it's called now, but it if it didn't serve tapas, it served tapas-like food. Pretty good too, the one time I was there. But then, it might not even be there anymore since I don't remember how long ago I ate there. I just don't make it to that neighborhood as often as I used to.