Dianabanana

If you've ever gone morel hunting, you know that they are particularly susceptible to becoming buggy. The hollow core can be a welcoming home to hundreds of creepy little worms (maggots?). A couple of years ago I accidentally discovered the ideal method of de-worming morels. I had read that it is better for future crops if you use a basket or some other perforated container when gathering wild mushrooms, so that the spores can fall to the forest floor as you're walking along. Whether this is true or not I can't say, but I decided to use a nylon mesh lingerie bag to hold my morels. It works great--very gentle to the mushrooms. I got home late and didn't have the energy to deal with cleaning the morels, so I hung the lingerie on a mug hook mounted on the underside of a kitchen cabinet and went to bed. In the morning I walked into the kitchen and discovered that the kitchen counter under the bag was a revolting, writhing mass of tiny worms. I don't know what exactly would have caused them to jump ship en masse, but the fact remains that they did. The morels were absolutely clean.

I wrote to them and got a form reply thanking me for my feedback and offering me a case of cherry yogurt. I turned it down. The only thing more depressing than a container of chalky, watery Fage would be a case of it. I wrote back and said no thanks, but that I would like to hear from quality control regarding whether they are working on improving the US product and whether we will still be able to obtain the Greek product in the US. I never received a reply.

Twice in the past week we've gone out for dim sum at Jade Garden (Seattle), and now I'm wondering if everything was made from scratch or if some items are coming from a factory in Taiwan or something. Does anyone know what would be typical? The egg tarts in particular struck me as something that could probably be bought frozen. Just curious.

Well if that's not one of the best things I've ever read on eGullet! Carry on.

I did, right before I posted here!

Thank you so much for posting this. I have been a vegetarian for many, many years and am now beginning to edge back into eating meat. I only want to eat meat that has been humanely raised and slaughtered. Plenty of producers have web sites full of pictures of their animals grazing in sunny pastures, etc., but I have been unable to find a single one willing to disclose the details of their slaughtering process. I have even e-mailed a few of them to ask them for information, and have received no reply. I find this really confusing. They are in the business of selling to people who care about how the animals are treated--providing that information is the thing they have that differentiates them, so why be so withholding? Anyway, I really appreciated your taking the time to document this experience.

The flavored yogurts come in two separate compartments--one of plain yogurt and one of the fruit/honey--then you mix them together. The plain yogurt has always been the same plain yogurt as you get in the big tubs. No, sadly, this seems to be a matter of both lower-quality yogurt and lower-quality cherries. It may be that the milk in NY is good but that something is going awry elsewhere in the production process. Well, I'm glad I ate so much of it while it lasted.

For many years my husband and I have been utterly devoted to Fage Total Greek Yogurt. The other night he was eating a cherry yogurt and said "Have you noticed these cherries aren't as good lately?" I said, "Yes! I was just thinking that--they used to have a wild taste sort of like amarena cherries, but they don't anymore." This morning I was eating another cherry yogurt and the yogurt itself was really grainy and watery. It seemed almost as if it had powdered milk mixed in, and had kind of a slight cheesy smell. I threw it out, thinking it was just a bad batch. This evening--just now--I was eating a honey yogurt and noticed the same thing. As I was telling my husband how bad it was, I looked at the back of the carton and suddenly realized what it was--Fage has begun manufacturing the yogurt at its new facility in New York! I had read that they were going to be doing this and had a feeling of foreboding about it, but this is worse than I ever imagined. This new yogurt is worse than almost any other yogurt I've ever had. Has anyone else noticed this? I really am so upset. What in the world were they thinking?

We've really been working the ID lately! Green Leaf: This is one of my favorites but we hadn't been since they opened the upstairs. When we walked in we were met with the usual cheerfully crowded dining room, and then our waitress led us upstairs to be seated. I was pretty excited to see what they had done up there. I guess I was expecting the same creative but low-budget use of bamboo that they have downstairs, but boy was I wrong. It was horrifying. I felt like I had suddenly been transported to some steak-and-foil-wrapped-baked-potato place in Pocatello, Idaho, because the room is absolutely crammed full of dark varnished wagon wheel furniture. Wagon wheels on the chairs. Wagon wheels on the tables. I guess they must have gotten a great deal on it but honestly someone should have paid them to take it. There was loud, horrible Muzak blaring from the speakers, and the only other diners up there were a few other white people. We begged our waitress to find room for us downstairs. What a relief it was to get back down there! Vegetarian Bistro: For years I've driven past this place and assumed it must be awful, but I recently read the reviews at msg150 (scroll way down) was intrigued. We were looking for a place to regroup after an assault on Home Depot this afternoon and decided to give it a try. It's really good! It's very clean and has cute green and white dishes, right down to apple green chopsticks. Our waitress was hilariously gruff but great at her job--we had eaten at Brasa the night before for eight times the cost and wish we had gotten service half as good as what this woman provided. We had scallion pancakes, salt and pepper tofu, and asparagus with "chicken" and black bean sauce, and despite my extreme suspicion of any food that comes in quotation marks, everything was truly delicious. We're definitely going back soon. Jade Garden: We'd never had dim sum here and finally got it together to go this morning. We shared a table with a guy from Hong Kong and a group of California Chinese who had just gotten back from a cruise to Alaska, very convivial, but it was that table in the faaarrrr corner from the kitchen so we were getting last crack at everything and nothing was very hot. Still, it was all quite good and we left utterly stuffed and with enough food left over for lunch, all for $23. Tamarind Tree: I just love Tamarind Tree, and now that it's warm enough to sit outside I love it even more. Why? Sitting by a waterfall in the early evening sun, drinking young coconut juice served by a handsome waiter wearing a white linen jacket. If you need more, and I honestly don't, there are super-lemongrassy lemongrass beef salad rolls, teeny-tiny clams with pineapple-anchovy sauce and a squeeze of lime served with rice cracker, and shrimp on top of little rice cakes to wrap with basil in lettuce leaves. We are finally getting a grip on our insane over-ordering at this place. I really think we would be perfectly satisfied splitting three appetizers between us, but that menu is huge and I will never get through it all before I die at that rate.

A couple of months ago I bought a rather pricey jar of Stonewall Kitchen sour cherry jam. It would have been delicious but for the fact that it was basically sour cherry jelly, having only about six cherries floating at the top of the jar. I e-mailed customer service and they very graciously sent me out a new jar of jam (not a coupon but an actual jar). Then last month I bought a jar of Stonewall Kitchen lemon curd, which turned out to be utterly spoiled--horrid, stinky, rotten lemon cheese. I e-mailed them again with the details and told them that I didn't want them to think I was scamming them, so please don't send me a replacement, but do look into your quality control. They promptly replied with a very kind offer to send a new jar anyway, but to tell you the truth I'm off Stonewall Kitchen now so I declined. Their customer service is top notch, though. Twenty-two years ago my now-husband and I were carrying a paper bag of Safeway groceries up to our apartment when the bag split and everything came crashing to the ground with a mighty smashing of glass bottles and spilling of liquids. This was in the days before automatic double bagging. He angrily dashed off a note to corporate headquarters. The next day we hear a knocking at the door and there stood the bag boy holding two full bags full of groceries, including fruit, vegetables, eggs, two steaks, and a personalized cake!

Dorie, if you're out there, I'm having an issue with the sour cream in the Nutty Chocolatey Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake. The first time I made it, I used Nancy's organic sour cream, which is a very thick sour cream with nothing but cream in it. The cake was fantastically delicious but too dense and dry. The second time I made it I used Tillamook sour cream, which is much thinner and has the usual array of other ingredients added to it (guar gum, etc.). This time the texture was perfect, but the taste was not as delicious, plus it collapsed a little in the center as it cooled (same cooking time as the other one, all other ingredients the same). I would like to get the taste of the first cake with the texture of the second one. Do you think it would work to thin the Nancy's with milk? What kind of sour cream do you use? Do you think the stabilizers and whatnot in the mainstream sour cream benefit the texture of the cake? Thanks in advance for your help. I absolutely adore this book.

Just to be clear, carbon monoxide and "gas smell" are two different things. You can't smell CO... [/pedant] Have you contacted your gas company? Most utilities offer a free check-up service, and will adjust burners, check for leaks, and so on (at least SoCal Gas does it all for free). ← Yes, I'm well aware they are different, but, as I understand it, they are correlated in this instance because the gas is being insufficiently combusted. The insufficient combustion is causing the high CO, and the gas that is being insufficiently combusted is doctored with mercaptan so you can smell it. Not sure if that is even correct. My point actually was just that I knew there was way too much "gas smell," and later my contention that something was wrong was confirmed by the CO reading. And yes, as I stated originally, I have had the guy from the gas company out here repeatedly. He's the one who did the CO reading. He also checked the pressure at the meter, checked for leaks, etc.

I have to say I agree with Penny Lane that "How is your food tasting?" sounds overly specific (perfect way to put it!). In fact I believe I have groused about that very thing in another thread here, maybe one on server pet peeves. It sounds like an inappropriate inquiry into my bodily functions, and makes me feel somehow manipulated--you know how they have these sales techniques that force you to say something positive about the product and it makes you actually feel more positive about it. Also, it almost seems to foreclose discussion of all the other functions a server is supposed to provide--making sure you have everything you need to enjoy your meal. I'm not sure what the perfect server inquiry is. Perhaps something along the lines of "Is there anything I can do for you?" The you could say "yes, please move us to one of the empty tables overlooking the water" or whatever. But yeah--corn fed steak. Don't see why you'd go out of your way to eat meat from an animal that was raised on a grain that nature never intended to eat and then massively dosed with antibiotics to keep it alive on that diet until we're ready to kill it. Yum.

Well, I had the repair guy out on this issue while it was still under warranty, but then my life kind of blew up with a serious illness and some other things, and I just didn't have time to pursue it. I didn't know until just recently that the CO was so high--my husband and father-in-law were telling me it was normal to have a gas smell, even though I KNEW that this was way too much. Then by the time I was able to pursue it, it was out of warranty. Would I still be able to make a warranty claim? Complicating the issue is that I live in a small town with *one* appliance repair guy, and it turns out that he and the dealer I bought the range from are not speaking to one another. Like, they literally refuse to communicate. It's incredibly frustrating. Only once in my life have I shouted at a service person, and it was to the appliance repair guy's wife when she refused to make a necessary phone call to the dealer.

After pining away for years for a gas range, I finally got a GE Profile dual fuel two years ago, and it has been a disaster. For some reason that no one has been able to diagnose (and I've had both appliance repair guys and guys from the gas company out repeatedly), the burners "roar" and put out a tremendous amount of carbon monoxide. We have replaced several different parts with no improvement. The mercaptan smell is overwhelming and it makes me ill to cook with it. Now we are ready to kiss goodbye the $2K we paid for it and buy another. I'm reluctant to get another gas range for fear it will have the same problem. So I guess I'm looking for 1) somebody to comfort me by saying that gas isn't that much better than electric (even though I believe in my heart of hearts that it really is), and 2) advice as to what I should look for in an electric range. Is it remotely possible to do a decent stir-fry on an electric range? The answer is no, isn't it? Going off to have a good cry now . . .

I think I benefitted more from the way I perceived my mother's cooking than from the way she actually cooked. By that I mean that I thought she was a tremendously enthusiastic and adventurous cook, and I adopted that attitude for myself. She was fairly adventurous for that era, but now I realize that she has a lot of food prejudices that I never noticed. For instance, she recently asked me to make a lot of fish during her visit to me so she could get over her "fear of fish." That was the first time I realized that she never cooked fish the whole time I was growing up (except for salmon cakes). How could I not have noticed? But by far the greatest gift she gave me was a childhood free of junk food. I never developed a taste for it, and I imagine it's one of the main reasons I've never struggled with my weight or had other dietary-related illnesses. Thanks, mom!

Hummingbirdkiss makes a really good point. What if we all ate only what we needed? I would love to see an analysis of what the environmental impact would be if everyone in the world who is overweight due to overeating (see how I nimbly sidestepped that issue?) stopped overeating. Going to an even further extreme, what would be the impact if we stopped wasting so much food? One professional society I belong to meets for monthly dinners. The meal is usually a mediocre buffet at a local hotel, and the amount of food that gets thrown out every time is absolutely staggering. Probably about 50 pounds of food each time. (We've recently started hauling as much of it as we can to the homeless shelter, to the consternation of the catering manager.) I know this scenario is repeated millions of times around the globe every day. All the resources used to grow, package, transport, and prepare that food . . .straight into the Dumpster. I personally find the prospect of eating less and wasting less a lot more feasible than completely giving up my coconut milk and orange juice and all the hundreds of other products that are not produced locally. How about you?

It's perfectly idiotic. What, the restaurant can afford only one pepper mill? Pepper is so tricky to grind that we need skilled labor to do it for us? And why the ever-increasing size? Pretty soon they'll need two waiters to carry it out on their shoulders like pallbearers. Sadly, I suppose the reason for not putting individual grinders on tables is that people would steal them, but that doesn't explain the enormity of the "house" pepper grinder in some places. I bet they only have to refill those things once in a decade.

Went to brunch at Veil this morning. A sad experience. We waited many long minutes for anyone to notice we were there before being brusquely seated. My simplest questions were answered by our waiter reading my husband's menu over his shoulder. My black tea was so astringent as to be undrinkable, having been prepared with over 1/4 cup of tea leaves to a small pot of water. Although delicious, my husband's ricotta pancakes with blueberry anise compote were insanely overpriced at $13 for four silver-dollar sized pancakes, a tablespoon of compote, a tablespoon of butter, and a tiny pitcher of syrup. Meanwhile, for only $15, I got a perfectly prepared crab and artichoke omelet and smashed potatoes that was more than enough for two, and made with a generous amount of lump crab meat. Bizarre. Finally, the hushed, minimalist atmosphere just feels dreary at brunch, and not only to us, apparently. Although there were lots of families with small children and mixed groups of friends, there was no cheerful bustle, no laughter and clink of cutlery--just somber conversation in the gray light.

I was at a Norooz celebration in Edmonds the other night, and Caspian Grill got the thumbs up from the Persian families at my table. Hope to try it soon.

Yes, this is the big glaring omission at the market, if you ask me. I've never been able to understand it.

I've been meaning to make Hiroyuki's magic furikake for ages and finally did this afternoon. It was only a moment's work to make and was quite tasty. Thanks, Hiroyuki!

I've never used a chinois. Would it be as good as cheesecloth at straining something like ghee?

Interesting you should say this. Our big Asian grocery in Seattle has Korean Week once a year, during which they have specials on all kinds of Korean foods, plus--mysteriously to me--Lock & Locks. They have a big display of them with a sign over the top saying simply "Korean Week." After puzzling over this for a while I concluded that Lock & Locks must be especially great for Korean food since the cuisine features so many, um, pungent foods, and Lock & Locks are airtight so the smells don't get out. Do you think that's it? Anyway, I'm a total Lock & Lock fanatic. Every time I come home from that store my husband says "More Lock & Locks?"

I read once that people who have lost their sense of smell (and therefore taste) have a really high rate of suicide. I'm pretty sure I read this in Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, a fascinating book about the perfume industry and other related topics.