Dianabanana

I found it. Page 36. Have you used the basil leaf substitution? And if so, do you stir them into the hot oil as if they were curry leaves? Even though the author frequently says substitute basil for a completely different but equally interesting flavor, I wish I could get my hands on some curry leaves. Until that happy day, I'll be giving the recipes a try with basil leaves. pat w. ← Hi Pat, no, I'm lucky to have access to curry leaves, so I haven't tried the basil version. Hopefully an Indian restaurant will help you out, but if not, you should see if you can't find someone to send some to you in a package with a freezer pack. Or if you don't mind spending the money, I bet it would work to just pop them in a FedEx envelope and overnight them even without a freezer pack. They are very dry, leathery leaves and they don't so much wilt as just sort of curl up and dry out. My mom sometimes brings them to me when she comes to visit, which means they are in her suitcase for about 10 hours, and they're always perfectly fine. Get a bunch and then keep them in your freezer. They keep for ages.

Try the karhi recipe (sorry I don't have the book with me for the page number--it's a vegetable stew made with chickpea flour)! One of my favorite things ever.

WHOA! The Japanese tea set! That is amazing! Lots of other beautiful cakes, too, but I'm particularly taken with this one.

I never--meaning not ever, no matter what--put an already-cut onion in the refrigerator. I put it cut-side down on a saucer and leave it on the counter; if it hasn't gotten used by the next day, then I toss it. Yes, it is galling to throw out half of a perfectly good onion, but not nearly as galling as it is to toss out half of the food in the refrigerator because a forgotten onion went toxic in there.

I had not heard of toban jian before your note. I was at the M&T Oriental Supermarket in Austin yesterday and I found something similar. It is Pixian Bean Sauce. Its a more brown color than red like chile garlic sauce. Definately a chile and bean mixture, but very thick almost a paste. ← I'm sure that's the same thing, if it is made with broad beans. According to my Googling, Pixian is the place in Sichuan Province where toban jian originated. It's good, isn't it? One of my desperation dinners (you know, where you stagger in the door at 10 pm and haven't eaten since noon, and have next to nothing in the kitchen) is to put rice on, then while it's cooking, stir fry tofu until the tofu is golden, remove, then stir fry garlic and napa cabbage, add the tofu back in, and add toban jian thinned with a little water.Toban jian is not really a sauce, though, in that I think you always use it in cooking, and never as a condiment. But I'm no expert in Chinese cooking.

But isn't that fun to do?

Up until about 7 years ago, we were lucky enough in our rural Idaho town to have home delivery of fresh organic milk in glass bottles. The cream was thick enough to stand a spoon in. People use that expression all the time but it was literally true. That stuff ruined me for dairy products. I always feel disgusted by the greasy shaving-cream texture I get from whipped storebought heavy cream, and I'm never happy with the flavor of the milk I get. It all tastes dead by comparison.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned toban jian, although maybe that doesn't quite qualify as a "sauce"? If it does count as a sauce, though, it pretty much stands alone. A lot of the other sauces mentioned can sub for one another (Tabasco, Crystal, etc.) but the fermented beans in toban jian add a unique depth of flavor. I wouldn't be without it. Also, I second Tapatio, and agree with whoever said that Tabasco has too much bite and not enough flavor. It's always immediately identifiable to me in whatever it's in. The flavor just sits there on top saying, "Hey! I'm Tabasco!"

Oh, speaking of gingerbread . . . there was the time the teenage me spent all evening making templates, baking gingerbread, and assembling a gingerbread house. As I was getting ready to decorate it, I was muttering out loud that the gingerbread was a little too soft and I wished the walls were firmer. Dad (whose only foray into the kitchen that I ever remember involved a trip to the emergency room to salvage a thumb nearly lost in a fish-scaling mishap) helpfully suggested that I just pop it back into the oven to "dry out." Dubious about my source but not having any better ideas myself, I did, and thus was born the world's first Salvador Dali gingerbread house.

I love it!

The Whole Foods in Belltown has it, in bulk on the far left of the fish case.

Ohhh, I can't believe it took me until now to remember this one! This one's not mine, as you will see. I was 19 years old, at my boyfriend's beach house with his brother and his brother's friend, all stoned and starting to get hungry, and me seriously starting to think of breaking up with the boyfriend. A few days before, the boyfriend had firmly asserted that you needed a popcorn popper to make popcorn, until I proceeded to make it in a pan in front of his disbelieving eyes. On this night, he proudly volunteered to make popcorn in a pan, adding that he would pop it in butter instead of oil. I told him the butter would burn, he said I was stupid. We reiterated our positions. I sat back on the sofa to watch. First smoke. Then lots of smoke. Then, to my extreme satisfaction, as he took the lid off the pot, great leaping flames. Then the boyfriend running to the bedroom, grabbing a blanket, throwing it over the flaming pot, the blanket bursting into great leaping flames, the smoke detector going off, the boyfriend flapping the flaming blanket in the air, the brother and his friend throwing another blanket on the already flaming one, the second blanket bursting into flames, the brother and his friend pouring beer on the conflagration, and finally the soft hiss of beer on molten polyester fleece. I'm assuming he never did that again--I wouldn't know, we broke up shortly afterward!

I especially notice this problem in the Southeast. What is it with people down there? It's especially miserable to be so cold when you're already all damp from the wretched humidity. I remember a couple of years ago sitting in a restaurant on Lake Ponchartrain in NO shivering, covered with goosebumps, and my teeth literally chattering. Middle of summer and I'm there eating a big bowl of gumbo (not that that's a bad thing) just to try to warm up.

Well, duh. Having never seen a tamagoyaki pan that wasn't nonstick, it didn't occur to me to look for a regular one. But of course tamagoyaki has been around since before the advent of nonstick coatings! I do think I'd like to find a nonstick pan if possible, and I like the look of the ridged one in the link Fugu provided. That's not the one you have, though, Fugu? Has anyone used a ridge pan before?

The year:1979. The place: My aunt's house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The occasion (cue scary suspenseful music): Thanksgiving. My aunt's children, my cousins, had all gone in together to buy my aunt a Radarange as an early Christmas present. For you young whippersnappers, the Radarange was the first popular home microwave oven, a monster the size of a bank vault. It came with a thick instruction book enthusiastically explaining how you could cook absolutely everything in a microwave in a fraction of the normal time and with delicious, foolproof results. We all gathered round excitedly as the Radarange was unwrapped and marveled over its shiny controls. Now, to give you an idea of my aunt's cooking skills, she had exactly one dish in her repertoire (chicken marsala, made with canned cream of mushroom soup), and otherwise never darkened the kitchen. Literally every single night at dinnertime she fed her family of five by making a run for either pizza, McDonald's, Burger King, ribs, Roy Rogers, subs, or cold cuts and Kaiser rolls for do-it-yourself sandwiches. Literally. Every night. So, you can imagine how, faced with having to cook Thanksgiving dinner for a house full of guests, the promise of the Radarange shone brightly indeed. She started cooking the meal by peeling and slicing the potatoes for the scalloped potatoes. And then letting them sit on the counter for two hours, not in water, while she made the Stovetop Stuffing and stuffed the enormous turkey. I remember watching in fascination as they slowly turned pink, then a sort of ashes-of-roses color, then finally black. Meanwhile she confidently shut the Radarange door on the turkey, consulted the instruction book, and entered the cooking time on the big-ass keypad. She turned her attention to the only non-nuked dish of the night, a salad of chopped fresh cranberries with mini-marshmallows in Miracle Whip. Then she nuked a can of Frenched green beans, nuked the scalloped potatoes, and dinner was served. My poor aunt. Dinner was eaten in stunned silence as we hacked our way through the gray, vulcanized turkey, the black scalloped potatoes, the olive shreds of green beans. I was so thankful for the presence of that cranberry salad that I ate practically the whole bowl myself, a strategy I came to regret along about midnight when the vomiting started. Violently red vomit. Everywhere. All night long. How I wish I could say I've never been back.

I would just get up and speak to the maitre d' or waiter privately (out of earshot of the other couple) and ask to be moved. I'm not sure that you even need to offer a reason, but you can always say there's a draft. I wouldn't worry one bit about what the other couple think, either. I doubt they would conclude it's their proximity that's bothering you, as it could be any one of a hundred things. Maybe there was a glare in your eyes. Maybe you wanted a different view. Maybe the seat was bothering your hemmorhoids. Well, maybe not. But you get the idea. Edited to say that I am very sensitive to many perfumes/colognes/other scented products, so I have often had to ask to be moved. It's awkward when it might be apparent that you're moving to get away from someone, but it's better than suffering.

Are tamagoyaki pans ever made in the same thickness and quality as, say, a Calphalon nonstick skillet? And if so, how would I go about getting one in the U.S.? I bought the one I have at Seattle's Uwajimaya. There were three to choose from. Two were small, rectangular pans, made in China of very thin metal with an obviously cheap nonstick coating. The one I bought was a larger square pan, made in Japan of thicker (but still pretty darn thin) metal, with a nicer (but still pretty darn cheap) nonstick coating. Despite my assiduous swabbing with an oily paper towel between layers, my tamagoyaki still sticks like crazy. Half the time I give up and start over using my 8" Calphalon nonstick skillet. It comes out beautifully in that (but in a weird shape, of course), so I know I'm not completely inept. I'm wondering if it would be possible to purchase a tamagoyaki pan of the same quality. What brand should I look for? Can anyone point me to a site that would sell such an item?

This isn't embarrassing! Or at least not to me. Molly Katzen's hand-lettered cookbooks (this and the Moosewood Cookbook) were objects of fascination to me as a young teen and really got me interested in cooking. My mom gave me my own copies for my 19th birthday and I still have them, although I admit I don't cook from them.

You all don't know from embarrassing. I'm the owner of the 2003 Miss Idaho Cookbook--and as anyone who knows me knows, I am definitely not the Miss Anything type. A friend of mine somehow found herself on the organizing committee of the Miss Idaho pageant and got a trunkload of these babies as a perk. The recipes were all contributed by the contestants. Scary. And not even in a funny kitschy way. Just plain scary.

So what is the consensus on how a guest should handle their special dietary needs? Reading through these posts, I see complaints about 1) people who have special dietary needs and let their hosts know beforehand, 2) people who have special dietary needs and don't let their hosts know beforehand but simply decline to eat the things they oughtn't, and 3) people who have special dietary needs and bring food that meets their needs. My own approach is to tell my host beforehand that I have a special need, but then I say "but please just go ahead and make whatever you had planned to make, I'll be perfectly happy eating the other items and am quite used to it--just didn't want you to be surprised, that's all." Is this the right way to handle it? Any suggestions for a better approach?

Hi everyone, I'm fairly new to eGullet and actually have not spent any time on the India board at all, so this is like barging into a party where you don't know any of the other guests, and I apologize if this has all been discussed a million times before, but I'm so excited that I have to tell someone: I used lump asafoetida for the first time last night and I CANNOT believe the difference! Lump asafoetida must be to powdered asafoetida as parmigiano reggiano is to Kraft parmesan cheese in the green can. There is a wonderful herbal, almost citrus note to it, and that weird asafoetida funk is almost nonexistent. Also, maybe I was just starving anyway, but the odor seems to have a stimulating effect on the appetite. Even my husband, who normally just benignly tolerates my use of powdered asafoetida, was amazed at the pleasant citrusy smell. I feel sorry for myself having used the powdered stuff all these years and I'm never going back! However: What a PITA. I wasn't sure how to proceed, so I just whacked the resin lump with the back of a ladle until some cracked off, then I ground it up in a suribachi. Is there a better way? Diane

Ugh. If I can offer some unsolicited advice, even if you're not putting dryer sheets in with your kitchen towels--if you are drying them in a dryer in which those sheets have been used--that scented, oily residue is getting all over them and will be very noticeable to anyone who doesn't use dryer sheets and isn't numbed to their smell. After hiking in the rain with my friend, she asked to dry her jeans in my dryer before driving home. My next batch of laundry was some kitchen towels, and they came out reeking of Bounce. It was just from the residue on her clothes that came off on my dryer. Took me three washes before I couldn't smell it anymore.

Ah, the giant pepper mill! The utter absurdity--are pepper mills so precious that each restaurant can afford only one? And the ever increasing size--I would love to draw a cartoon for the New Yorker of two waiters carrying a cannon-sized pepper mill on their shoulders, pallbearer style.

YES!! Nobody who works with food or sick people (e.g., nurses) should be wearing perfume.

I admit that I'm a bit of a curmudgeon on this topic, but it irks me no end to be asked "Is everything tasting okay?" The topics that I might need to address with a server extend to so much more than just the taste of the food, and this question seems to almost intentionally try to preempt me from broaching them.