gknl

Here's what I did yesterday. I think I'm still tired. I agonized for days over which flavor themes to go with, either southeast Asian or vaguely Mediterranean, but ended up going with the latter. The menu was: napa cabbage leaves stuffed with tuna confit and napa slaw with two-lemon dressing; Chicken Wilfrid (seared and bunged in the oven to finish); lentils braised in red wine with garlic mushrooms; potato puree; and kobacha squash puree. My cheats were using regular mushrooms instead of criminis and Idaho potatoes instead of Yukon gold (I bought some yukons, but realized the Idahos were getting old and needed to be used up. Frugality, right?) I'm not sure if this is cheating or not too, but I also used some preserved lemon in addition to fresh. Hey, it's in the refrigerator, right? I made a couple of mistakes: forgot the pecans which I was going to put on the squash puree and I forgot some parsley for the mushrooms and lentils. Didn't miss either though. And I need to work on my timing, towards the end, things got chaotic, but it all came together and tasted pretty good, if I do say so myself. The ingredients for each dish are listed below. This was a lot of work, but pretty fun! Napa cabbage stuffed with tuna confit and two-lemon napa slaw Tuna Confit (preserved tuna from Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook) Tuna, salted, cut in chunks and gently poached in evoo, lemon zest, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic, bay leaf Napa cabbage slaw with two lemon dressing 1 carrot, grated inner leaves cabbage cut in ribbons 1 shallot 1 jalapeno pepper, minced 1 green onion thinly sliced on the bias dressing: juice from one lemon 1/2 preserved lemon, rinsed and minced 1 garlic clove, crushed evoo pepper Broiled Napa Cabbage leaves outer cabbage leaves evoo salt Lentils braised in red wine and chicken stock 3 slices bacon, diced 1 carrot, diced 1 celery rib, diced 1 onion, diced 1 1/4 cups lentils thyme 1 cup red wine 2 1/2 cups chicken stock evoo Garlic mushrooms 3 slices bacon, cut in chunks 2 shallots, sliced 4 cloves garlic, sliced 1 lb mushrooms evoo Roast Kobacha Squash puree 1 squash, quartered and roasted butter dried ginger powdered clove potato puree potatoes, cut in chunks and boiled butter half and half Chicken Wilfrid (seared and bunged) chicken thighs marinade: evoo lemon juice from 1 lemon 2 garlic cloves herbs de provence salt pepper ediot: get the damn tags right

Have you seen Chicago yet?

Thanks for the salsa recipe. I make something similar, but it's nice to have proportions to work from instead of just throwing stuff together like I usually do. I never thought to use celery salt though. That's interesting.

I was looking for something else and stumbled across this article from March 1999 SF Chronicle. Just to be difficult. One thing though, in the article they say that brown sugar is white sugar plus molassas. Where did you find out that it's not molassas, but just carmelized sugar that makes it brown? http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...7.DTL&type=food SUGAR, SUGAR Cane and beet share the same chemistry but act differently in the kitchen Miriam Morgan, Chronicle Assistant Food Editor Carolyn Weil and her crew at The Bake Shop in Berkeley were hard at work one morning, boiling down large pots of sugar syrup to make buttercream for the day's buns, cakes and confections. It was a task the staff had done hundreds of times. But this morning the normally silky syrup crystallized into large, chunky granules. Weil tossed it, along with plans for most of the baked goods she wanted to sell that day. Not happy with a day's work and income wasted, Weil investigated, checking her equipment and ingredients and determining the one variable. Sugar. Weil's supplier had substituted another brand and, as it turns out, another type of sugar altogether. Weil thought she was getting cane sugar, but instead she got beet.

I understand completely! All the stuff I like best is like that too. And baked goods, forget it. I don't make it as often as I'd like to eat it for much the same reason. I was curious because I let my father make it this year. He definitely tested the recipe's resiliency! But despite his best efforts, it came out edible, tasty even. Much better than his penultimate effort which resulted in corn kernals mixed in with eggs curds and a thick layer of oil floating on top. But I'm still making it from now on. So when I try carnitas, I think I'm gonna wimp out and go with the shoulder ribs. If there's bone, is it important to remove them or does cooking the bone in the liquid add flavor? Plus they'd be something to gnaw on? Do the leftovers (ha ha as if there will be any leftovers, but in case there are) freeze well? I work from 2-9:30 and buying dinner at the expensive gourmet market is defeating the purpose of having a job so I'm looking for stuff I can cook at home and nuke later on.

I went to Costco today and they had country style loin ribs and country style shoulder ribs and whole shoulders. Am I correct in thinking the shoulder ribs would give me the same kind of meat as the whole shoulder but be easier to deal with because they're partially cut up already? And the loin ribs would be drier and thus not as tasty? Both of the ribs looked to have a good amount of fat on them though. The whole ones were $0.89 a pound, the shoulder ribs $1.29 a pound, and the loin ribs were $1.49 a pound. I think one of the ribs had bone attached, probably the loin ribs. It seems worth the extra money for the easier processing, but are the results going to be the same? And since the meat is cooked for so long, is there a significant difference between fresh and frozen meat in the end results?

I'm staying out of the fray, but thought I'd throw this quote into the mix and add a link to an article I posted that's being ignored ``It's easy to cook a filet mignon, or to saute a piece of trout, serve it with browned butter à la meunière, and call yourself a chef. But that's not really cooking. That's heating,'' Keller writes in ``The French Laundry Cookbook.'' http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...f=2&t=15834&hl= ediot: link to the article the quote is from, duh

How's that work? I've never seen this magazine in any store or heard of it. Is it a freebie to doctor's offices or something? Word of mouth, mostly. Pretty amazing, huh? My non-foodie cousin who likes to cook gave me a subscription once. Not my aesthetic, but I can see the attraction. My non-almost-anti-foodie girlfriend who likes to eat discovered them and loves their stuff so now I have the 1996-2000 and 2002 recipe annuals. I have a free subscription to Food and Wine which I enjoy flipping through, but I doubt I'll continue it if I have to pay for it. I really dislike Gourmet now. The content is okay, but I hate the fashion-mag layout and having to fight through all the ads to read the articles. I think I like Bon Appetite the best, but it's nothing I'm passionate about. Besides, who has time to read anything besides egullet?

I'll try for both in one post: So did the corn pudding work? Anyway, now that I've got carnitas on the brain and am desperately procrastinating on the market basket challenge I see both shoulder and country style spare ribs used in this thread. The spare ribs seem easier to process, does it really matter which you use? I've never dealt with pork shoulder before so maybe I should give that a try. Decisions, decisions. . . . Maybe I should just go to the Taqueria and get a burrito instead. You're welcome about the link.

Hey, we're having a get-together here in SF in a week and a half. The weather's kind of sucky right now though. and don't think I didn't consider going . The COPIA Food as Strength Symposium is occuring that weekend also. The Masters of Food and Wine is also going to take place during my time off. But I have a rather important dinner function on the Staurday and a wdding to attend on the Sunday. I wish i could clone me and attend everything. Nick Bummer. But I hope the food's good there at least. I had to go to a wedding in December in Alabama. Never knew plaid workshirts and jeans were formal attire (No, it wasn't the wedding party ). They did have a NASCAR cake though (and a regular wedding cake too). The girlfriend caught the bouquet too, or rather it bounced off of two people and landed straight in her hands. Did you make it to Copia when you were out here?

There was a short article in today's SF Chronicle about carnitas. Their recipe calls for orange zest which I thought was unusual. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...22/FD226304.DTL

Hey, we're having a get-together here in SF in a week and a half. The weather's kind of sucky right now though.

Savory: Go fishing and catch a 8-10 lb chinook salmon. Make sure you take care of it; bleed it and keep it cold until cooking. Grill whole over moderate coals, stuffing it with lemon, garlic, and parsley and a little evoo drizzled over. I like to cover the Weber to get some smokiness on the fish. Striped bass, lingcod (neither a ling nor a cod), and California halibut are acceptable substitutions, angling and culinary-wise. Sweet: The double layer dark chocolate-pumpkin cheesecake from Marcel Desaulnier's Death by Chocolate. The two layers are separated by chocolate ganache so the presentation is stunning. And the pumpkin-chocolate combination is killer even though it may sound weird. For serious choco-philes only though. It is way worky but way worth it. http://recipe-chocolate.com/07/047906.shtml

I did have an amusing few minutes earlier today reflecting on how stuffing a chicken with tuna, or indeed a tuna with chicken, would rise to Beckettian levels of pointlessness. Did Derrida write a cookbook? But maybe that could be a side contest. . . . Improbable dishes, the descriptions of which would be good enough, one wouldn't have actually to cook them.

I think the point is to use them both, but not necessarily in the same dish. Anyone else lie awake in bed mentally running through various combinations and permutations of the ingredients last night?

I for one am getting very sick of all the remakes. From what I've read, the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is supposed to be VERY different, because one of the producers (Michael Bay) is on some sort of anti-violence committee. I think I'll go remake a sandwich without using bread. Michael Bay on an anti-violence committee? Is he donating his personal fortune to charity?

Oh, don't get me wrong, TCM is art. It might even be art. But it's not Art. Before you get all pomo on me about those distinctions having been obliterated, I was jokingly (sort of) comparing TCM, a cult classic if there ever was one, with the exalted status of David Lynch's oeuvre (I hope I spelled that right) among the cinemati. Which isn't to say I consider TCM a hack job. It's not. It suffers from the scores of cheap slasher flick imitations and the insipid sequel which followed it, but what they was able to do with little money and surprisingly little on-screen gore is amazing. Anyway, here's a more on-topic aside: when I took a food writing class, one of our assignments was to pitch a book idea. Mine was to do a coffee table book about food in movies. Lots of photographs of food scenes along with recipes either for the actual dishes in the movies or for dishes inspired by the movies. A sort of combination film history/light criticism and cookbook. The teacher somewhat blythly dismissed the idea as having been done before, but I haven't been able to find any books that weren't just about specific movies. Does anyone know of any books like this one? Ideas aren't copyrightable and I don't have the whatever to do this book anyway, so feel free to steal this idea. I might even buy a copy.

I think one of the creepiest dinner scenes is in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not that it's Art though. About Eraserhead, I would be more worried if you did get it, impaired or not.

Only an hour? We were stuck there for 14.5 hours on the way to Alabama last month. Damn American Airlines. Now y'all have me thinking about a certain white nectarine I had two summers ago at the farmer's market in Marin Co. Last summer they were good, but not that good. The peaches were good too, but they weren't that one batch of nectarine. But still, peach/nectarine and fresh blueberry gallettes. . . . How many more months 'til summer? I don't think I can choose just one favorite fruit. Are you sure you won't reconsider organizing tours for egullet?

Here's Oreochromis mossambicus: http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSum...ame=mossambicus

Here's the Oreochromis niloticus (damn taxonomic revisions, can't keep up with them): http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSum...cus%20niloticus ediot: spell the genus right

They used to be fairly common aquarium fish, but I don't think I'd want to eat one that came out of a tank. Water quality isn't the same as in a pond.

http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/seafo...g0102/0001.html According to this post, it's probably Pangasius bourcourti which is a species of catfish farmed in SE Asia but it's not in the same family as American catfish so it can't be marketed as such here. There was a thread about that controversy a few weeks ago. If you've ever been to a tropical fish store and seen something called either Pangasius or Irridescent Shark, it's a similar species. more info here: http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSum...ry.cfm?ID=14112 How did it compare to regular American catfish? edited to remove bad nomenclature and add the picture and additional link.

I ate tilapia for the first time a couple of weeks ago in Alabama, at Ruby Tuesday's no less. The menu said "white fish." Anyway, it was good. Very mild taste, soft almost delicate texture, kind of like perch or sunfish. They grilled it (not quite blackened) with cajun seasoning which may have over-powered the fish since there didn't seem to be a distinct flavor. I would eat it again for sure. From my limited understanding, they're farmed to avoid the muddy taste these days, kind of like what catfish went through a few years ago. I think you could treat them like you would any other white-fleshed fish (except something sturdier like cod or halibut) and be okay.

I had the same experience in Alabama a couple of years ago. Tough and tender on the same plate, but I thought overall it wasn't any big deal one way or the other. Not sure if I would go out of my way to have it again, but I wouldn't not eat it either. I thought perhaps the difference in texture was due to the pieces being from different parts of the tail. I wonder what isn't edible deep-fried though.